The Green Road: A Novel

by Anne Enright

  Fuh fuh fuh fuh

  If she bared her teeth, they clattered against each other like a pair of joke dentures, so she tried to press her lips together, to stop them cracking and breaking in her skull. The expense of it.

  Fuh fuh fuh fuh

  Her husband Pat Madigan was a little bit cross with Rosaleen now because Pat Madigan was a saint but he could be cranky enough, betimes. He wanted Rosaleen to crawl over the hungry grass and get in out of the cold.

  ‘Would you stop your romancing,’ he said. ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘Hup!’

  And Rosaleen swung her arm up and put her hand down, and then the other, and she dragged her old legs through the ruined doorway of the little stone house. No roof, but a gable wall to protect her against the slice of the cold. Two little rooms, the first had something in it – she could see the pink of it in the darkness and it was toilet paper. Rosaleen backed away in fright and then crawled carefully to the left, into a second tiny room, where she turned about slowly and keeled over, curled up on the ground. She lifted her top knee a little, and put her hands between her thighs.

  The ground was fine.

  There was no sign of Pat Madigan. He was gone now.

  After a while, she felt very good. Her brain cleared in a way that was marvellous. There were pains in her wet knees, but they did not matter. The cold was hard in her left hip and she was shaking in a way that was new to her. But the stars were lovely, she could see a piece of the heavens out of the corner of her eye, framed by the stones of the cottage wall.

  If she slept now, she thought, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

  There was a medicine her father used to spoon into her when she was a child. Very pink, whatever it was. And as soon as she swallowed it – out like a light. Asleep. She often wondered what that medicine was.

  Her father gave her Kaolin and Morphine for her stomach. There was great company in morphine, he used to say, it is hard to pull yourself away from it. They put Pat on it, at the end – Fentanyl patches that she stuck on his thigh. It made him happy. The morphine made him love her again, and then it made him constipated and cross. And then he died.

  Rosaleen was shivering. Her body was shaking her loose, she was just holding on. She had to remember as much as possible, now, she had to be sensible. There was no such thing as hungry grass. And Pat Madigan was long dead. She had to remember everything. The names of the tablets and the names of the diseases, the names of the parts of the body that was trying to leave her now. But she had no intention of going, or of letting it go. She had no intention.

  Rosaleen saw a satellite moving through a delicacy of stars above her, and it was as though she could sense the earth’s turning. She felt fine. She was out of the worst of the cold. She would have a small sleep and make her way home before morning.

  She was woken by a wrenching and a ripping sound, the end of the world. The thump of something. A huge noise like a plane taking off in her ear. The plane reversed, and then it went forward again. Reversed. There was a cow on the other side of the wall, breathing, tearing a few mouthfuls of midnight grass. The jolt of it lasted a long time in her blood.

  I’m awake, she said. I am alive.

  FERDY MCGRATH WAS driving along a back road on his way to the sea when Hanna said, ‘Stop!’

  It was the house at Boolavaun.

  ‘Did you see something?’ said Ferdy. ‘Did you see a car?’

  ‘No, just,’ said Hanna. ‘I just need to check the old place.’

  He looked over to her.

  ‘I don’t know. My father’s house. I just think we should.’

  He got out of the car and followed her over to the black mass of the house. She shone the light of her phone on the door and he added the light of the big yellow torch, a useless tub of a thing, with a wide, weak beam.

  Hanna peered in at the window, that still had a half curtain of white net. She did not see anything inside. The door showed all its colours in flakes and blisters, bright red, a blue that was bright and profound – azure or gentian blue – it reminded her so strongly of her Granny Madigan she went to touch it; and over all of these an ordinary green.

  ‘She might have gone in the back door,’ she said.

  ‘We should be looking for the car.’

  The bottom of the door was rotted away and covered with boards of thin plywood. Hanna bent down and pulled one away and, ‘Hold your horses,’ he said, but she was already crawling through it, into the little porch, across lino that was multicoloured, like a scattering of sweets. This was the floor she remembered from her childhood. She stood up in the little space and opened the door into the kitchen.

  She cried out. ‘Ferdy!’

  She called out for his help, even though she did not like the man much.

  ‘Ferdy!’

  His wide torch flashed at the window and the place was weakly illuminated. An old table, cupboard doors hanging open, the rusted hulk of the range. Hanna saw it all in shapes and shadows, the floor crackling with grit beneath her feet. So many things had happened in this place, and nothing much happened. People grew up and moved away. Her granny died.

  Passions. Impossibilities.

  The push of it.

  ‘Are you right?’ The torch left the window and she heard Ferdy walk along by the wall of the house. A long silence then the loud jiggle of the latch on the back door.

  ‘She’s not here,’ she said, and she backed slowly out, hunkering down. ‘She’s not here.’

  When they got back in the car and Ferdy looked across at her in the passenger seat.

  ‘You have her eyes,’ he said. ‘You know that. She was a powerful woman, a great woman, your grandmother. She was a cousin of my mother’s – but you know that too, sure.’

  Hanna thought he might touch her then, but something queered the impulse and he shoved up the lever beside the steering wheel instead, indicating to no one his intention to pull back out on the road.

  A mile further on, they saw Rosaleen’s car, beached on the ditch, with the front door hanging open and the inside light still on.

  The call came into Ardeevin, just before midnight. The car was found.

  Hanna was calling for her mother. Emmet could hear her down the line, a tiny pathetic sound.

  Mama, Mama.

  Ferdy put a muffling hand over the phone, in order to shout, ‘Hang on!’

  ‘Don’t let her go,’ Emmet said, thinking Hanna would be the next one lost.

  Constance drove the rest of them up there, the expensive car tight to the bends of the road and when she reached the spot, she pulled in behind Rosaleen’s little Citroën with sad precision. Emmet jumped out to walk around it, he pulled open the front door and checked, for no reason, under the front seats. Then he switched on the headlights and the hazard lights, and they stayed in the blinking urgency of all that, willing their mother to appear.

  Rosaleen’s children stood peering and calling into the black air. She was somewhere out there, and it was unbearable. Their concern was also a concern for themselves, of course. Some infant self, beyond tears. Dan felt it like a whiteness inside his chest. A searing want.

  ‘Rosaleen!’

  Even Emmet was surprised by the force of it, this huge need for a woman he did not think he liked, any more.

  ‘Mam! Mam!’

  Constance ran to the nearest wall and looked over it, as though her mother was a dropped wallet or a set of keys.

  ‘Mammy?’ she said.

  The comedy of it was not lost on them, the fact that each of her children was calling out to a different woman. They did not know who she was – their mother, Rosaleen Madigan – and they did not have to know. She was an elderly woman in desperate need of their assistance and even as her absence grew to fill the cold mountainside, she shrank into a human being – any human being – frail, mortal, old.

  They stood, facing north, north-west, west, their shadows swapping on the road in front of them while Hanna’s voice came, in a wisp of sound, across the land. />
  ‘Mama!’

  There were headlights making their way up the valley from the turn-off at Ballinalackin. The cars took a long time. They drew up, and parked, or failed to find a space, blocking each other and doing three-point turns on the narrow road. Emmet knew this well, the provisional feel to large events, even when – especially when – lives were at stake. This time, however, the life was something like his own: this was the disaster he had been avoiding, in the midst of all the disasters he had sought out. This was real.

  John Fairleigh walked up, glued to the phone, one arm beckoning everyone together.

  ‘No need for the lifeboat, now,’ he said, and the vertigo dropped through them again; their mother falling down the massive cliff face.

  ‘Lifeboat?’ said Constance.

  ‘Listen, lads,’ said John Fairleigh, generally. ‘I am going to hold you here, for a minute, all right? I don’t want anyone falling into a bog-hole, or what have you. All right? You’re going to check the road and the sides of the road. You do not go off the road. That’s what we are doing at this particular point. We are all staying on the road.’

  They moved away from the frantic lights of her car, a clutch of heroically recovering alcoholics and the children of Rosaleen Madigan, while more car headlights made their slow way up from the valley. The gate was closed behind them – everyone minding their country manners, though you could barely see the surrounding countryside, you might as well have been on the moon, for all the fabled beauty of the green road.

  They walked together, torch beams criss-crossing. People tripped and cursed in low voices, or they blinded each other with the glare of the lights.

  ‘Keep them low, lads. Give your eyes a chance.’

  Constance stopped and turned off her torch, to let her sight adjust, and in a while, she could see everything. A haze of light gathered in the sky above Galway, in the far distance, but Knockauns was dark and the night above her open to an endless depth of stars.

  She had been left behind, now. She was alone – Constance, who was never alone, whose mind was always full of people – and after the first pang of it, she allowed the darkness to have sway. She lifted her hands a little to test the air.

  A call came through to Emmet’s phone from Ferdy McGrath, and when the line broke up they all heard him hallooing in the distance, and saw the signalling light of his torch. They picked up the pace, saw after a while the little ruined house where she must be.

  Hanna was already there.

  She went in through the doorway and stumbled in the rocks and rubbish in the small main room, before she looked into the smaller second room and saw the dark heap that was her mother lying on the ground.

  Afterwards, neither of them could remember what they had said, except that Rosaleen kept apologising and Hanna kept reassuring.

  ‘Oh I am sorry.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh I am sorry.’

  ‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

  And so the two of them continued, in a kind of bliss, as Hanna opened her coat and spread it on her mother, then laid herself down beside her, drawing Rosaleen’s hands in under her own clothes to get the heat of her bare skin, rubbing along her arms and back, and they stayed like that heedless of everything that happened around them.

  Outside the house Ferdy McGrath gave the cry, while inside, Rosaleen whimpered at the pain in her hands, that were burning in the heat of Hanna’s skin.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said.

  Hanna should have been more careful, she thought later, she might have done the wrong thing entirely, but the only thing that was on her mind was to stop the rattling in her mother’s body, so she pushed Rosaleen’s legs straight with her knees and lay alongside her, lifting her shoulders to complete the embrace and pressing her close, holding tight and then tighter as she tried to still the trembling.

  ‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

  They stayed like that for a long time. Hanna used everything she had. She used her breath, hawing it out on Rosaleen’s neck, sighing on to her closed eyes. She did not notice Ferdy run his coat up under her mother’s legs and wrap them in it, she did not notice the others, stumbling in the litter and overgrown rubbish of the house floor, or the foil blanket that was put over them both by John Fairleigh. She noticed nothing until he cradled her mother’s head from the other side, ran a mat under her shoulders, and brought a flask of tea to her lips.

  ‘Good woman,’ he said. ‘Good woman.’

  It was the kind of phrase their mother hated.

  Hanna had the comical idea that Rosaleen would be cross, she was far from cross. She looked at John Fairleigh with unblinking eyes. The tea slopped out of her mouth, and she just kept looking, as though nothing but John Farleigh existed in the wide world.

  Outside, people stood around for a while, waiting for the ambulance, wondering if it would not be better to lift her down the mountain and drive her out of there. They felt the cold. Everything took a long time. A few went back to open the gate and give directions. Another man with a head torch arrived. ‘Anyone with a car down there, can you move the car?’ And it was like a fleadh or a gymkhana for a while, with a guy in a hi-vis jacket directing cars into a field. No one went home, though they knew she was found. People sat into their cars and waited, they switched the radios on and listened to Christmas carols, broadcast from deserted studios, until – a long time later, it seemed – they saw the far distant blue light turn up the road from Ballinalackin.

  ‘She only went for a walk,’ Constance said to Dessie, as though objecting to all the fuss.

  Dan, who had stayed by the little famine house, lingered in the doorway of the inner room and did what Rosaleen loved him doing best. He talked to her.

  He said, ‘You know you left the light on inside the car?’

  He said, ‘I think it’s time to hang your Ecco boots up, darling, don’t you?’

  He said, ‘Honestly Rosaleen, you have no idea. Half the O’Briens are down there in the kitchen with buckets of coleslaw and left-over potato salad, and Imelda McGrath came over with real coffee, because real coffee is where the McGraths are at these days. You know what Dessie had in the boot? He had Bollinger in the boot. I kid you not. Where will it end, that’s what I say.’

  He said, ‘Oh. The moon.’

  Because the moon was rising in the north-east over Knockauns mountain. A sliver of a thing, the pale light lifted the landscape to his eyes, and there it was, the most beautiful road in the world, bar none. Where else would you go?

  ‘You know?’ he said. ‘You could be anywhere.’

  He watched the slow progress of the paramedics as they wrestled the gurney over the rocks and grass: the chrome glinting and the business of it clanking as it dipped and rose.

  She had never gone very far, he thought. A week in Rome. A fortnight in the Algarve. Another time, Sorrento, and The road! she said. It was taking your life in your hands. But oh! the coast was very beautiful coming down into Amalfi, she would never forget it, and the little restaurant right out over the ocean, where she had a glass of limoncello, free at the end of the meal.

  Waking Up

  SHE SOLD THE house anyway. This was a surprise, but it was not the biggest surprise. Rosaleen woke up in Limerick hospital on St Stephen’s Day and she looked around her, at the buff coloured walls and the handmade decorations, and she smiled.

  There was no problem getting a bed, she said. She wondered at that; the things you hear on the news about people on trolleys for days.

  ‘They’re all home for the Christmas,’ said the nurse, who was Tamil at a guess, with a name so long she had an extra inch on her plastic tag. Rosaleen looked closely at her face and eyes.

  ‘So pretty,’ she said.

  The nurse took no offence.

  ‘I feel, I don’t know how to describe it, I feel much better.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I didn’t feel well at all,’ she said. ‘But now I f
eel much better.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emmet, who was sitting in his conscientious way at her bedside, saw all this and did not quite believe it.

  ‘You were up a mountain,’ he said.

  Rosaleen turned her head and rested her gaze on him. She looked a little puzzled and then she smiled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Oh, I remember the mountain, all right,’ as though this was not what she was talking about at all. ‘Oh yes, the mountain.’

  She was looking at him very intently.

  ‘You rest now, Rosaleen,’ said the nurse.

  ‘I mean before the mountain.’

  She nestled her cheek into the hospital pillow and looked at her son.

  ‘Oh darling,’ she said.

  Emmet did not know how to reply to her, but she did not seem to want a reply.

  ‘Oh darling. I am sorry.’

  ‘No need,’ he said.

  ‘I put you through it.’

  ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘I put you through the wringer.’

  She closed her eyes, slowly, gazing at him all the while, and when she was asleep Emmet went down to the metal clipboard at the end of the bed.

  ‘What’s she on?’ he said.

  ‘Drip,’ said the nurse. And then, after a moment’s thought, ‘She is happy.’

  And indeed, Rosaleen was happy. She continued happy for some time. Not just happy at the fuss that was made of her – the visits, the journalist spurned at the door, the priest sounding his thanks for her deliverance at morning Mass, Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – she was happy with other small things, the light as it thickened on the hospital floor, the clever controls for lifting the bed, the flowers Pat Doran the garageman brought in to her, though they were – to coin a phrase, she said – petrol station flowers.

  ‘What lovely colours, Pat. You shouldn’t have.’

  Rosaleen was delighted to be alive. This is such an obvious thing to be, Hanna wondered why everyone was not delighted, all the time. She brought the baby in to see her, and they sat, her mother and Hugh and the puddin, as Rosaleen called him, ‘Oh the puddin!’ insisting they hoist the baby on the bed for her to hold. Rosaleen loved babies, she said, and it was, for a while, easy to believe her. She wanted to eat him, she said. Hugh took pictures on his phone and they admired them as they happened: Rosaleen thin and the baby fat in front of her, the baby putting his hand into Rosaleen’s mouth and pulling her jaw down.