by Anne Enright
‘Ya ya ya yah,’ said Rosaleen, and the baby laughed.
She was delighted. And the baby was delightful. Hanna tried to hold all that, so she could remember it the next time the baby screamed, the picture of her mother, handing the baby back to her saying, ‘Oh, how I envy you now.’
As if life was always worth having, worth reproducing, and everything always turned out well in the end.
Emmet saw what he had not seen in many years: his mother being wonderful. She regaled them all with descriptions of the ambulance, the doctor’s cold hands, the cow on the other side of the wall when she fell asleep on the mountain.
‘It was like a plane taking off in your ear,’ she said.
When Dan came in, the pair of them laughed at everything and Emmet was not jealous. He watched Rosaleen for deterioration of some kind but her brain was fine – or what the world called her brain: short term, long term, the current Pope, the days of the week. It was just her mood that changed. It was just her life that had changed.
She looked on her children as though we were a wonder to her, and indeed we were a bit of a wonder to ourselves. We had been, for those hours on the dark mountainside, a force. A family.
There followed a time of great kindness and generosity, not just from neighbours and from strangers, but among the Madigans. There was no talk of bringing Rosaleen home to Ardeevin, ‘That cold house,’ said Constance. She had the room all made up, she said, and Rosaleen’s things brought over, so she could stay as long as she needed to, out in Aughavanna.
A Face in the Crowd
DAN FLEW BACK to Toronto and found that Ludo had posted an alert for Rosaleen on his social media page, saying, ‘If anyone has anybody in Ireland, especially on the west coast, then please spread the word about this missing woman.’
‘That was a bit previous,’ he said, scrolling through the responses and best wishes, including one from a psychic in Leitrim offering his dowsing skills. He paused at a line from a guy called Gregory Savalas and clicked through to his homepage, which showed mountains and lemon groves. Dan thought it must be in California, but his address was listed as Deya, Mallorca, and there were pictures of a dog, another guy, a small pool, and ‘Greg’ himself in a faded denim baseball cap and cutoff jeans, a blue neckerchief, boots, his face sticking a little strangely on to his bones. He also had a little paunch and a glitter in his eye, to tell you he was not clear – how could he be clear – but he was damn well alive, he was inhaling, exhaling, swimming, drinking Rioja and looking at the lemon grove, enjoying the lemon grove. He was inhabiting a life and he was living the hell out of it, because it was his life to enjoy.
Greg.
Dan checked the photograph again. There he was: that sardonic, slow-moving, slightly fey guy who had died, Dan was sure of it, in the mid nineties. Greg who was once dead, and was now alive.
The page was quite the lifestyle statement. There was very little you might call ‘real’ – a slight intensity to his expression perhaps, in a world of aged stonework, bowls of lemons, stunned blue skies. But there, under a photograph of an under-lit palm tree, with a comet streaking across the Milky Way were the lines: ‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/Enwrought with golden and silver light,’ which was Dan’s party piece, all those years ago when he played at being ‘Irish’ for them all.
Dan checked the friends list: some of them were linked to Ludo but there were none that he recognised from the old days, not even Arthur who seemed destined not to die. He searched and searched, remembering Billy, remembering Massimo and Alex, the loft on Broome Street. His heart was busy with the cohort of the dead: men he should have loved and had not loved. Men he had hated for being sexy, beautiful, out, dying, free. It was not his fault. He had forgiven himself, as he told Scott-in-his-head, or he had tried to forgive himself, years before. But now – look – Gregory Savalas.
The relief he felt was close to love. The fact that this human being, among so many human beings, should have survived.
Hi Greg,
You won’t remember me, but I remember you from way back in the day, when you had that tiny gallery on the Lower East Side with, like, one perfect thing on the wall. I was a friend of Billy Walker before he went – you know I still turn a corner and see him and have to give myself a shake, he was such a beautiful boy, a beautiful person really. Anyway, this is Irish Dan. I am still alive. I see that you are still alive. Enjoy the lemon groves. Enjoy. Enjoy. Just sending you a little wave.
The Eyes of the Buddha
EMMET WAS EXHAUSTED when he got back to Verschoyle Gardens. Again. He was not burnt out, he just needed to talk to someone. He needed to read. He meditated for an hour each morning and, when he was done, stretched his hands out, giving thanks for the people sleeping in the rooms on either side of him, Saar on one hand and Denholm on the other. This was the way relationships went for him now. The sex with Saar was important, of course it was, the sex with Saar was an intimate thing. But he also knew it was something other than sex that moved him along his life’s course. It was a kind of tension and it was here, in this configuration.
Emmet would never fall in love. He would ‘love’, he would, that is to say ‘tend’. He would cure and guide, but he did not have the helplessness in him that love required.
Denholm slapped his shoulder and said he should have children. Every man should have children.
‘You think?’ said Emmet.
‘No question,’ said Denholm. This was a guy who had been educated in a mud room to speak convent English, write in Victorian copperplate: Denholm could, at eight, recite the Kings and Queens of England and the life cycle of the tsetse fly. Back in Kenya, he would often hold hands with his male friends, and here in Ireland he did so too, once, walking home with Emmet after a few drinks in Saggart. He had forgotten where he was and who he was with, and Emmet went to sleep that night, smiling like a fool.
One evening in February, he got an email from Alice in Sri Lanka:
You know when they are making a new statue of the Buddha, they do the eyes last. They use a mirror to paint by, and afterwards the artist is blindfolded and led outside where he washes his face in milk. They call it Opening the Eyes of the Buddha – wood into flesh, or at least, presence. I go every morning to the Temple of the Tooth and then work until dusk, living by the light, have not woken in proper darkness for months. From here back to the UK in March and then, who knows. If you hear of anything coming up, let me know.
Emmet sat and meditated, but it did not help. He shifted on his sit bones, and did not know what to do with this holy hard-on he had for a woman he had failed to love some years before. He let all the psychic rubbish of sex clatter through his mind, to enter and leave at its own chosen speed – which was pretty fast, as it happened: flashes of breast and cock, the movement of pink tongue behind (a surprise this) Denholm’s (but that’s all right, that’s fine) white teeth. He let it all barge through him and when it was gone, there he was, back with Alice.
Dear Alice
Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking of you just recently, at the malaria forum we are setting up here, and actually that’s not a bad place to consider if we ever get to the stage of looking for applications. Hopefully in the next three months. Rainy Ireland, eh? But you’d be in the field a fair amount. Malawi, mostly. I’ll let you know, if you like. Don’t want to blather on. Hope you and Sven (??) are thriving. Lots of love, xEmmet.
He sent this and regretted it. Wrote another one, that was also, in its way, a bit of an untruth.
I think about you all the time.
He sent this too, and listened to his life opening.
Property
HUGH WAS BETWEEN jobs and he came back with Hanna in the New Year to help sort and pack and get Ardeevin on the market. He brought an old Polaroid camera and some last rolls of film and Hanna heard him about the place the first day they were there, silently looking, then the click-whirr-click as the photograph was extruded, another silence as he shook the thing dry a
nd a little piece of her childhood rose to view. She looked through them later: the spiral at the bottom of the bannister, the squat taps in the upstairs bathroom, the vivid ghost, on the wallpaper, where a wardrobe had shielded its own shape from the sun.
‘Research,’ he said.
When the baby took a nap, they went upstairs and made love in her childhood bed, releasing all her scattered selves into the room: Hanna at twelve, at twenty, Hanna here, now.
The baby was walking, and into everything, Hanna followed him around that afternoon and it was all murderous: the broken greenhouse, the stream at the side of the garden, where he might drown. But it was simple too: the pleasure of the door knocker she hoisted him up to lift and drop, the textured granite stoop and the door that gave under his pushing hands to expose the vastness of the hall.
They ordered a skip, bought paint. In the evening, she washed and went over to Aughavanna with the baby, leaving Hugh in his painter’s overalls, blanking out the bamboo grove on the dining room wall.
Hanna thought that once the house was gone her thirst might go too, but the house was not gone yet. And neither was her mother, who made such a fuss of the baby – Hello, you. Yes. Hello! – from a slight distance, of course, because of the baby’s sticky hands but loving him, nonetheless, and getting all his smiles.
It was a long day. Back in Ardeevin, Hanna succumbed to a bottle or two of white from the garage shop, and there was such a bad fight, Hugh threw her out of the house. Physically. He pushed her into the garden and closed the door. Hanna bashed the knocker and yowled. She stumbled back and around to the kitchen window where she saw Hugh pouring the last of the wine down the sink. He went from room to room, turning out the lights and he left her there for a very long time, looking up at the blank house, weeping in the cold.
The next morning, after they had kissed, made up and all the rest of it, Hanna lay and looked at the ceiling and remembered looking at the same ceiling, as a child. She wondered what it was she had wanted, before she wanted a drink.
A life. She had wanted a life. She lay in this bed as a child and she thirsted after the great unknown.
The baby slept and woke and rolled off the mattress they had set for him on the floor. Then he was off again, pulling books on top of himself from off the shelves and laughing.
‘Ben, stop it, Ben, no!’ But she did not really mind. He could break the Belleek for all she cared, in a couple of weeks it would all be gone.
Over in Aughavanna she said to Constance that maybe Dublin was the problem, the baby was in much better form.
‘Boys!’ Constance said.
Her own screamed for the first year, there was no consoling them. Then once they got on their feet, that was it, they never cried again.
‘Run them and feed them,’ she said. ‘That’s all you have to do with boys.’
‘And what do you do with girls?’ said Hanna. ‘Drown them at birth?’
‘Yeah well,’ said Constance. ‘There’s a rain barrel round the back.’
They both glanced over to Rosaleen, but she had not heard, or pretended not to hear.
With all the running around supermarkets and cold mountainsides and overheated hospital corridors, Constance actually lost weight over the Christmas. When she looked at herself in the mirror, the ghost of a former self looked back at her and Constance thought it was trying to tell her something, even as she turned to the side and smoothed her stomach with a smile. Something terrible would happen, she was sure of it, because her mother had courted chaos and found it up on the green road. She had made some deal with death, and Constance did not yet know when it would fall due.
It was a good thing Hugh painted the place because half of County Clare trooped through the house on the first Saturday, it was busier than a wake. The house sold in three weeks, closed in eight. By the first of March the Madigans had shut the door for the last time. Whoever bought it did not move in – a developer, by all accounts – so the place stayed empty while Rosaleen’s bank account filled up with money. Pucks of it. No one took her Christmas promise all that seriously: she had always been very private in these matters and never exactly open-handed, so it was a great surprise to each of her children to find themselves so much the richer. They had money, a significant amount of money, and that felt fine.
Rosaleen did not bother going over to Ardeevin. ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said and Constance did not pressure her. It was an emotional time. They looked at smaller houses in the newspaper and Rosaleen said, ‘Lovely,’ but it was a bit of a reach after all she had been through. When they went to view, she drifted from living room to kitchen to bathroom.
‘Oh Mammy, look at the insulation on that hot water tank.’
The new houses in their neat estates seemed only to confuse her, and indeed it was difficult to imagine her there. Constance set her heart on a little gate lodge, a sweet house with high ceilings and big Georgian windows, but the garden was far too small and it was slap bang up against the main road.
‘What about this one, Mammy? You just need to put a kitchen in.’
‘A kitchen?’
Besides, the market was turning. According to Dessie, the market was in a massive state of denial. Better to wait than to buy.
But the price came plummeting down on a place in town; an old stone house covered in Virginia creeper, tucked in behind the church, refurbished inside, everything to hand.
‘Is that limestone or granite?’ said Rosaleen. ‘It’s a very dark grey.’
Then she saw something rustling through the foliage. A rat, she said later. Or she thought it was a rat. She fumbled her car keys and dropped them in a bed of hydrangeas, she pulled at the collar of her blouse, and took a turn. Constance got her checked out, over and back to the hospital again, it took three weeks for tests and waiting for tests, and by the time she was given the all-clear, the little house was gone.
Constance drove her home one last time from Limerick Regional and their path took them up over the humpy bridge, past Ardeevin. The front windows were boarded up and the gate hanging open, but Rosaleen did not seem to notice the house, it was as though the place had never been. That evening, Constance went to pick a few roses from the wreck of the garden and she came back hugely tired and alone.
There would be no perfect house, how could there be? Because Rosaleen was impossible to please. The world was queuing up to satisfy her, and the world always failed.
It was a trick she had learned early, in the front room of Ardeevin, perhaps, when one suitor or another would be sent off with a flea in his ear for thinking he might be good enough for the daughter of John Considine. Or earlier than that – it was hard to tell. Rosaleen was difficult to psychologise, a woman who never spoke of her childhood until she was in her sixties, and then in a way that made you wonder if she had ever been a child at all.
The remarkable thing was the way Rosaleen’s children spent such enormous amounts of energy getting themselves, in one way or another, turned down by her too. Even the money she gave them felt like a coldness, once the house was gone.
Emmet, who had seen so much injustice in the world, had to remind himself as he checked his bank account – and then pulled back from the screen to check it again – that his mother never killed anyone. And yet, her children thought she was ‘terrible’. Her eldest daughter, especially, felt, as she tended her, supplicatory, rejected.
‘Mammy would you like a biscuit with that?’
‘A biscuit? Oh no.’
Rosaleen, who was so needy, was always telling you to go away. So when she was, for those few wonderful months after the green road, easy to love, her children were utterly beguiled.
Paying Attention
EMMET WALKED IN to the house on Verschoyle Gardens one Saturday afternoon in November, to find his mother sitting in the kitchen with Denholm.
‘How are you, Emmet?’ said Denholm. ‘Your mother has arrived. I made a cup of tea.’
‘Mam,’ he said.
‘You wo
uldn’t believe the traffic on the N7,’ she said. ‘I thought I would run out of petrol.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘Evidently,’ she said. ‘Would you check the handbrake? I am always afraid that thing will roll away on me.’
‘You drove,’ he said. Her car was in the driveway. Emmet had seen it, he realised. He had noted it in passing: There’s Rosaleen’s car.
‘Yes! My goodness. And the fields flooded everywhere. I saw two swans paddling into a barn outside Saggart. But the roads are all very different these days. You know I haven’t done that journey in so many years, I can’t think when I did it last.’
She laughed, towards Denholm, a light little trill of hilarity.
Emmet put his bags of shopping down on the counter and took his phone out of his pocket. Right enough, the thing was jammed with missed calls and text messages: Hanna, Dessie, Dessie, Dessie, Hanna.
Nothing from Constance.
‘I should have been up before, you know, I have been very remiss.’
‘Rosaleen,’ he said.
His mother turned to Denholm.
‘I never liked Dublin.’
‘Really?’
‘It was always so dirty. Dear dirty Dublin, that’s what we used to say. But Hanna too, you know,’ she said to Emmet. ‘I should have been up here, for the baby. I do love that baby.’
‘You are the grandmother,’ said Denholm.
‘Well indeed,’ she said. And the little laugh was back again, her body light and tiny in the chair as she rocked forward to touch Denholm on the forearm.
