The Green Road

Hanna, Ardeevin, Co. Clare, 1980

LATER, AFTER HANNA made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the big kettle on the range.

‘Go on up to your uncle’s for me, will you?’ she said. ‘Get me some Solpadeine.’

‘You think?’

‘My head’s a fog,’ she said. ‘And ask your uncle for amoxicillin, will I spell that for you? I have a chest coming on.’

‘All right,’ said Hanna.

‘Try anyway,’ she said, coaxingly, taking the hot water bottle to her chest. ‘You will.’

The Madigans lived in a house that had a little river in the garden and its own name on the gate: ARDEEVIN. But it was not far to walk, up over the humpy bridge, past the garage and into town.

Hanna passed the two petrol pumps standing sentry on the forecourt, with the big doors open and Pat Doran in there somewhere, reading the Almanac, or lying in the pit below a car. There was an oil drum by the swinging Castrol sign with the bare fork of a tree sticking out of it, and Pat Doran had dressed it in a pair of old trousers with two shoes stuck on the ends of the branches, so it looked like a man’s legs waving around in a panic after him falling into the barrel. It was very lifelike. Their mother said it was too near to the bridge, it would cause an accident, but Hanna loved it. And she liked Pat Doran, who they were told to avoid. He took them for rides in fast cars, up over the bridge, bang, down on the other side.

After Doran’s was a terraced row of little houses, and each of the windows had its own decoration and its own version of curtains or blinds: a sailboat made of polished horn, a cream tureen with plastic flowers in it, a pink felted plastic cat. Hanna liked each of them, as she passed, and she liked the way one followed the other in an order that was always the same. At the corner of the Main Street was the doctor’s, and the little hallway had a picture done out of nails and metallic string. The shape twisted over itself and twisted back again and Hanna loved the way it seemed to be moving but stayed still, it looked very scientific. After that were the shops: the draper’s, with a big window lined in yellow cellophane, the butcher’s, his trays of meat fenced around by bloodstained plastic grass, and after the butcher’s, her uncle’s shop — and her grandfather’s shop before him — Considine’s Medical Hall.

KODACHROME COLOUR FILM was written on a plastic strip stuck along the top of the window with Kodak FILM in bold letters in the middle of it and KODACHROME COLOUR FILM repeated on the far side. The window display was cream pegboard, with little shelves holding cardboard boxes faded by the sun. ‘Just right for the constipated child,’ said a sign, in groovy red letters, ‘SENOKOT the natural choice for constipation.’

Hanna pushed the door open, and the bell rang. She looked up at it: the coil of metal was filthy with dust while, many times an hour, the bell shook itself clean.

‘Come in,’ said her uncle Bart. ‘Come in or go out.’

And Hanna went inside. Bart was on his own out front, while a woman in a white coat moved around the dispensary, where Hanna was never allowed to go. Hanna’s sister, Constance, used to work the counter, but she had a job up in Dublin now, so they were a girl short and there was a testing irritation to the look her uncle gave Hanna.

‘What does she want?’ he said.

‘Em. I can’t remember,’ said Hanna. ‘Her chest. And Solpadeine.’

Bart winked. He had one of those winks that happen free of the surrounding face. Hard to prove it ever happened.

‘Have a cachou.’

‘Don’t mind if I do-hoo,’ said Hanna. She fingered a little tin of Parma Violets from in front of the cash register and sat in the prescriptions chair.

‘Solpadeine,’ he said.

Her uncle Bart was good-looking like her mother, they had the long Considine bones. Bart was a bachelor and a heartbreaker for all the years of Hanna’s girlhood, but now he had a wife who never put her foot in the door of the shop. He was proud of it, Constance said. There he was, paying shop-girls and assistants, and his wife banned from the premises in case she laughed at the parish priest’s impacted stools. Bart had a perfectly useless wife. She had no children and beautiful shoes in a range of colours, and each pair had its own matching bag. The way Bart looked at her, Hanna thought he might hate her, but her sister Constance said she was on the pill, because they had access to the pill. She said they were doing it twice a night.

‘How are they all?’ Bart was opening a pack of Solpadeine and taking the contents out.

‘Good,’ she said.

He tapped around the counter top looking for something and said, ‘Have you the scissors, Mary?’

There was a new stand in the middle of the shop of perfumes, shampoos and conditioners. There were other things on the lower shelves and Hanna realised she had been looking at them when her uncle came out of the back room with the scissors. But he did not pretend to notice: he did not even wink.

He cut the card of tablets in half.

‘Give her this,’ he said, handing over a set of four tablets. ‘Tell her to take a rain check on the chest.’

That was a joke, of some sort.

‘I will so.’

Hanna knew she was supposed to go then, but she was distracted by the new shelves. There were bottles of 4711 and Imperial Leather bath sets in cream and dark red cardboard boxes. There were a couple of bottles of Tweed and a cluster of other perfumes that were new to her. ‘Tramp’, said one bottle, with a bold slash for the crossbar of the T. On the middle shelf were shampoos that weren’t about dandruff, they were about sunshine and tossing your head from side to side — Silvikrin, Sunsilk, Clairol Herbal Essences. On the bottom shelf were puffy plastic packages and Hanna could not think what they were, she thought they must be cotton wool. She picked up Cachet by Prince Matchabelli, in a twisted oblong bottle, and inhaled where the cap met the cold glass.

She could feel her uncle’s eyes resting on her, and in them something like pity. Or joy.

‘Bart,’ she said. ‘Do you think Mammy’s all right?’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Bart said. ‘What?’

Hanna’s mother had taken to the bed. She had been there for two weeks, nearly. She had not dressed herself or done her hair since the Sunday before Easter, when Dan told them all that he was going to be a priest.

Dan was in his first year of college up in Galway. They would let him finish his degree, he said, but he would do it from the seminary. So in two years he would be finished in ordinary college and in seven years he would be a priest, and after that he would be off on the missions. It was all decided. He announced all this when he came home for the Easter holidays and their mother went upstairs and did not come down. She said she had a pain in her elbow. Dan said he had little enough to pack and then he would be gone.

‘Go up to the shops,’ said her father, to Hanna. But he didn’t give her any money, and there was nothing she wanted to buy. Besides, she was afraid that something would happen if she left, there would be shouting. Dan would not be there when she got back. His name would never be mentioned again.

But Dan did not leave the house, not even to go for a walk. He hung around the place, sitting in one chair and then moving to another, avoiding the kitchen, accepting the offer of tea or turning it down. Hanna carried the cup to Dan’s room, with something to eat tucked in on the saucer; a ham sandwich or a piece of cake. Sometimes he only took a bite of the food and Hanna finished it as she took it back to the kitchen, and the stale edge to the bread made her even more fond of her brother, in his confinement.

Dan was so unhappy. Hanna was only twelve and it was terrible for her to see her brother so pent up — all that belief, and the struggle to make sense of it. When Dan was still at school, he used to make her listen to poems off his English course, and they talked about them afterwards and about all kinds of other things, too. This is what her mother also said, later. She said, ‘I told him things that I told to no one else.’ And this statement was very teasing to Hanna, because there was very little of herself that their mother held back. Her children were never what you might call ‘spared’.

Hanna blamed the Pope. He came to Ireland just after Dan left for college and it was like he flew in specially, because Galway was where the big Youth Mass was held, out on the racecourse at Ballybrit. Hanna went to the Limerick Mass, which was just like standing in a field with your parents for six hours, but her brother Emmet was let go to Galway too, even though he was only fourteen and you were supposed to be sixteen for the Youth Mass. He left in a minibus from the local church. The priest brought a banjo and when Emmet came back he had learned how to smoke. He did not see Dan in the crowd. He saw two people having sex in a sleeping bag, he said, but that was the night before, when they all camped in a field somewhere — he could not tell his parents what was the place.

‘And where was the field?’ said their father.

‘I don’t know,’ said Emmet. He did not mention the sex.

‘Was it a school?’ said their mother.

‘I think so,’ said Emmet.

‘Was it beyond Oranmore?’

They slept in tents, or pretended to sleep, because at four in the morning they all had to pack up and troop through the pitch black to the racecourse. Everyone walked in silence, it was like the end of a war, Emmet said, it was hard to explain — just the sound of feet, the sight of a cigarette glowing at someone’s face before it was whipped away. We were walking into history, the priest said, and when the dawn came, there were men with yellow armbands in their good suits, standing under the trees. That was it, as far as Emmet was concerned. They sang ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ and he came back with his voice gone and the dirtiest clothes his mother had ever seen; she had to put them through the wash twice.

‘Was it on the road to Athenry?’ their father said. ‘The field?’

The location of the field outside Galway was one abiding mystery in the Madigan family, another was what had happened to Dan, after he went to college. He came back for Christmas and fought with his granny about taking precautions, and his granny was all in favour of taking precautions, that was the joke of it, her sister Constance said, because ‘precautions’ were actually condoms. Later, after the pudding was lit, Dan passed Hanna in the hall and he took took her to him, saying, ‘Save me, Hanna. Save me from these ghastly people.’ He folded her in his arms.

On New Year’s Day a priest called to the house and Hanna saw him sitting in the front room with both her parents. The priest’s hair had the mark of the comb in it, as though it was still wet, and his coat, hanging under the stairs, was very black and soft.

After this, Dan went back to Galway and nothing happened until the Easter break, when he said he wanted to be a priest. He made the big announcement at Sunday dinner, which the Madigans always did with a tablecloth and proper napkins, no matter what. On that Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, they had bacon and cabbage with white sauce and carrots — green, white and orange, like the Irish flag. There was a little glass of parsley sitting on the tablecloth, and the shadow of the water trembled in the sunshine. Their father folded his large hands and said grace, after which there was silence. Apart from the general sound of chewing, that is, and their father clearing his throat, as he tended to do, every minute or so.

‘Hchm-hchmm.’

The parents sat at either end of the table, the children along the sides. Girls facing the window, boys facing the room: Constance-and-Hanna, Emmet-and-Dan.

There was a fire in the grate and the sun also shone, now and then, so they were as warm as winter and warm as summer for five minutes at a time. They were twice as warm.

Dan said, ‘I have been speaking again with Father Fawl.’

It was nearly April. A dappled kind of day. The clean light caught the drops on the windowpane in all their multiplicity while, outside, a thousand baby leaves unfurled against branches black with rain.

Inside, their mother had a tissue trapped in the palm of her hand. She lifted it against her forehead.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, turning away, and her mouth sagged open so you could see the carrots.

‘He says I must ask you to think again. That it is hard for a man who does not have his family behind him. It is a big decision I am making, and he says I must ask you — I must plead with you — not to spoil it, with your own feelings and concerns.’

Dan spoke as though they were in private. Or he spoke as though they were in a great hall. But it was a family meal, which was not the same as either of these things. You could see their mother had an impulse to rise from the table but would not allow herself to flee.

‘He says I am to ask your forgiveness, for the life you had hoped for me, and the grandchildren you will not have.’

Emmet snorted into his dinner. Dan pressed his hands down on to the tabletop before swiping at his little brother, fast and hard. Their mother blanked for the blow, like a horse jumping a ditch, but Emmet ducked and, after a long second, she landed on the other side. Then she put her head down, as though to gather speed. A moan came out of her, small and unformed. The sound of it seemed to please as well as surprise her so she tried again. This next moan started soft and went long, and there was a kind of speaking to its last rise and fall.

‘Oh God,’ she said.

She threw her head back and blinked at the ceiling, once, twice.

‘Oh dear God.’

The tears started to run, one on top of the last, down to her hairline; one, two-three, four. She stayed like that for a moment, while the children watched and pretended not to be watching and her husband cleared his throat into the silence, ‘Hchm-hchmm.’

Their mother lifted her hands and shook them free of their sleeves. She wiped her wet temples with the heels of her hands and used her delicate, crooked fingers to fix the back of her hair, which she always wore in a chignon. Then she sat up again and looked, very carefully, at nothing. She picked up a fork and stuck it into a piece of bacon and she brought it to her mouth, but the touch of meat to her tongue undid her; the fork swung back down towards her plate and the bacon fell. Her lips made that wailing shape — touching in the middle and open at the sides — what Dan called her ‘wide mouth frog’ look, then she took a sharp inhale and went: ‘Aggh-aahh. Aggh-aahh.’

It seemed to Hanna her mother might stop eating or, if she was that hungry, she might take her plate and go into another room in order to cry, but this did not occur to her mother, clearly, and she sat there, eating and crying at the same time.

Much crying, little eating. There was more work with the tissue, which was now in shreds. It was awful. The pain was awful. Her mother juddering and sputtering, with the carrots falling from her mouth in little lumps and piles.

Constance, who was the eldest, bossed them all quietly about and they carried plates and cups past their mother, as she dripped, one way or the other, into her own food.

‘Oh, Mammy,’ said Constance, leaning in, with her arm around her, to slip the plate neatly away.

Dan was the eldest boy, so it was his job to cut the apple tart, which he stood to do, dark against the window light, with the silver triangle of the cake slice in his hand.

‘You can count me out,’ said their father, who had been playing, in a tiny way, with the handle of his teacup. He got up and left the room and Dan said, ‘Five, so. How am I going to do five?’

There were six Madigans. Five was a whole new angle, as he moved the cake slice through the ghost of a cross and then swung it eighteen degrees to the side. It was a prising open of the relations between them. It was a different story, altogether. As though there might be any number of Madigans and, out in the wide world, any number of apple tarts.

Their mother’s crying turned to funny, staggered inhalations ‘phwhh phwwhh phwhh’, as she dug into her dessert with a small spoon and the children, too, were comforted by the pastry and by the woody sweetness of the old apples. Still, there was no ice cream on offer that Sunday, and none of them asked for it, though they all knew there was some; it was jammed into the icebox at the top right hand corner of the fridge.

After that, their mother went to bed and Constance had to stay at home instead of getting the bus back to Dublin and she was furious with Dan: she bashed about doing the dishes while he went up to his room and read his books and their mother lay behind her closed door, and on Monday their father went out to Boolavaun and came back home in the evening, and had no opinions that anyone could discern.

This was not the first time their mother took the horizontal solution, as Dan liked to call it, but it was the longest that Hanna could remember. The bed creaked from time to time. The toilet flushed and the door of her room closed again. They got off school early on Spy Wednesday and she was still ensconced. Hanna and Emmet lurked about the house, that was so large and silent without her. It all looked strange and unconnected: the turn of the bannisters at the top of the stairs, the small study with its light bulb gone, the line of damp on the dining room wallpaper inching up through a grove of bamboo.

Then Constance came up and whacked them, and it became clear — too late — that they had been noisy and wrong-headed when they had meant to be cheerful and full of fun. A cup hit the floor, a lick of cold tea spread towards the library book on the kitchen table, a white, patent leather belt turned out to be plastic when Emmet put a bridle on Hanna and rode her out the front door. After each disaster the children dispersed and acted as though nothing had happened. And nothing did happen. She was asleep up there, she was dead. The silence became more urgent and corpselike, the silence became fully tragic, until the door handle hit the wall and their mother burst out of there. She came flying down the stairs at them, hair undone, the shadows of her breasts moving under the cotton of her nightgown, her mouth open, hand raised.

She might throw another cup, or upset the whole teapot, or fling the broken belt into the flowerbed through the open door.

‘There,’ she said.

‘Happy now?’

‘Two can play at that game,’ she said.

‘What do you think of that?’

She would stare for a moment, as though wondering who these strange children were. After which brief confusion, she would swivel and slam back up to bed. Ten minutes later, or twenty minutes, or half an hour, the door would creak open and her small voice come out of it saying, ‘Constance?’

There was something comical about these displays. Dan pulled a wry face as he went back to his book, Constance might make tea and Emmet would do something very noble and pure — a single flower brought from the garden, a serious kiss. Hanna would not know what to do except maybe go in and be loved.

‘My baby. How’s my little girl?’

Much later, when all this had been forgotten, with the TV on and cheese on toast made for tea, their father came back from the land at Boolavaun. Up the stairs he went, one stair at a time then, after knocking twice, into the room.

‘So?’ he might say, before the door closed on their talk.

After a long time, he came back down to the kitchen to ask for tea. He dozed in silence for an hour or so and woke with a start for the nine o’clock news. Then he switched off the telly and said, ‘Which one of you broke your mother’s belt? Tell me now,’ and Emmet said, ‘It was my fault, Daddy.’

He stood forward with his head down and his hands by his sides. Emmet would drive you mad for being good.

Their father pulled the ruler from under the TV set, and Emmet lifted his hand, and their father held the fingertips until the last millisecond, as he dealt the blow. Then he turned and sighed as he slid the ruler back home.

‘Up to bed,’ he said.

Emmet walked out with his cheeks flaring, and Hanna got her goodnight beardie, which was a scrape of the stubble from her father’s cheek, as he turned, for a joke, from her kiss. Her father smelt of the day’s work: fresh air, diesel, hay, with the memory of cattle in there somewhere, and beyond that again, the memory of milk. He took his dinner out in Boolavaun, where his own mother still lived.

‘Your granny says goodnight,’ he said, which was another kind of joke with him. And he tilted his head.

‘Will you come out with me, tomorrow? You will, so.’

The next day, which was Holy Thursday, he brought Hanna out in the orange Cortina, with the door that gave a great crack when you opened it. A few miles out, he started to hum, and you could feel the sky getting whiter as they travelled towards the sea.

Hanna loved the little house at Boolavaun: four rooms, a porch full of geraniums, a mountain out the back and, out the front, a sky full of weather. If you crossed the long meadow, you came to a boreen which brought you up over a small rise to a view of the Aran Islands out in Galway Bay, and the Cliffs of Moher, which were also famous, far away to the south. This road turned into the green road that went across the Burren, high above the beach at Fanore, and this was the most beautiful road in the world, bar none, her granny said — famed in song and story — the rocks gathering briefly into walls before lapsing back into field, the little stony pastures whose flowers were sweet and rare.

And if you lifted your eyes from the difficulties of the path, it was always different again, the islands sleeping out in the bay, the clouds running their shadows across the water, the Atlantic surging up the distant cliffs in a tranced, silent plume of spray.

Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.

And Hanna loved her Granny Madigan, a woman who looked like she had a lot to say, and wasn’t saying any of it.

But it was a long day out there when the rain came in: her granny always moving from place to place, clearing things, wiping them, and a lot of it useless pother; feeding cats that would not come to her call, or losing something she had just let out of her hand that very minute. There was nothing much to talk about.

‘How’s school?’

‘Good.’

And not much Hanna was allowed to touch. A cabinet in the good room held a selection of china. Other surfaces were set with geraniums in various stages of blooming and decline: there was a whole shelf of amputees on a back sill, their truncated stems bulbous to the tips. The walls were bare, except for a picture of the Killarney Lakes in the good room, and a plain black crucifix over her granny’s bed. There was no Sacred Heart, or holy water, or little statue of the Virgin. Their Granny Madigan went to Mass with a neighbour, if she went to Mass at all, and she cycled in all weathers five miles to the nearest shop. If she got sick — and she was never sick — she was in trouble, because she never set foot inside Considine’s Medical Hall.

Never had and never would.

The reasons for this were of some interest to Hanna, because, as soon as her father was out with the cattle, her granny took her aside — as though there were crowds to observe them — and pressed a pound note into her hand.

‘Go in to your uncle’s for me,’ she said. ‘And ask for some of that last cream.’

The cream was for something old-lady and horrible.

‘What’ll I say?’ said Hanna.

‘Oh no need, no need,’ said her granny. ‘He’ll know.’

Constance used to be in charge of this, clearly, and now it was Hanna’s turn.

‘OK,’ said Hanna.

The pound note her granny pressed into her hand was folded in half and rolled up again. Hanna did not know where to put it so she stuck it down her sock for safe keeping, sliding it down along the ankle bone. She looked out one window at the hard sea light, and out the other at the road towards town.

They did not get along, the Considines and the Madigans.

When Hanna’s father came in the door for his cup of tea, he filled the doorframe so he had to stoop, and Hanna wished her granny could ask her own son for the cream, whatever it was, though she sensed it had something to do with the bright blood she saw in her granny’s commode, which was a chair with a hole cut into it, and the potty slotted in beneath.

There were four rooms in the house at Boolavaun. Hanna went into each of them and listened to the different sounds of the rain. She stood in the back bedroom her father used to share with his two younger brothers, who were in America now. She looked at the three beds where they once slept.

Out in the kitchen, her father sat over his tea, and her granny read the newspaper that he brought to her from town, each day. Bertie, the house cat, was straining against her granny’s old feet, and the radio wandered off-station. On the range, a big pot of water was coming, with epic slowness, to the boil.

After the rain, they went out to look for eggs. Her granny carried a white enamel bowl with a thin blue rim, that was chipped, here and there, to black. She walked in a quick crouch beyond the hen-house to the hedge that divided the yard from the haggart. She scrabbled along the bushes, peering down between the branches.

‘Oho,’ she said. ‘I have you now.’

Hanna crawled in by her granny’s bunioned feet to retrieve the egg that was laid under the hedge. The egg was brown and streaked with hen-do. Granny held it up to admire before putting it in the empty dish where it rolled about with a hollow, dangerous sound.

‘Get down there for me,’ she said to Hanna, ‘and check the holes in the wall.’

Hanna got right down. The walls, which were everywhere on the land, were forbidden to her and to Emmet for fear they’d knock the stones on top of themselves. The walls were older than the house, her granny said; thousands of years old, they were the oldest walls in Ireland. Up close, the stones were dappled with white and scattered with coins of yellow lichen, like money in the sunlight. And there was a white egg, not even dirty, tucked into a crevice where the ragwort grew.

‘Aha,’ said her granny.

Hanna placed the egg in the bowl and her granny put her fingers in there to stop the two eggs banging off each other. Hanna dipped into the wooden hen-house to collect the rest of them, in the rancid smell of old straw and feathers, while her granny stood out in the doorway and lowered the bowl for each new egg she found. As they turned back to the house, the old woman reached down and lifted one of the scratching birds — so easily — she didn’t even set the eggs aside. If Hanna ever tried tried to catch a hen, they jinked away so fast she was afraid she might give them a heart attack, but her granny just picked one up, and there it was, tucked under the crook of her arm, its red-brown feathers shining in the sun. A young cock, by the stubby black in his tail that would be, when he was grown, a proud array, shimmering with green.

As they walked across the back yard, Hanna’s father came out of the car house, which was an open-sided outhouse between the cowshed and the little alcove for turf. Her granny stood on tiptoe to shrug the bird over to him and it swung down from her father’s hand as he turned away. He was holding the bird by the feet and in his other hand was a hatchet, held close to the blade. He got the heft of this as he went to a broken bench Hanna had never noticed, which lived under the shelter of the car house roof. He slung the bird’s head on to the wood, so the beak strained forwards, and he chopped it off.

It was done as easy as her granny picking the bird up off the ground, it was done all in one go. He held the slaughtered thing up and away from him as the blood pumped and dribbled on to the cobblestones.

‘Oh.’ Her granny gave a little cry, as though some goodness had been lost, and the cats were suddenly there, lifting up on to their hind feet, under the bird’s open neck.

‘Go ’way,’ said her father, shoving one aside with his boot, then he handed the bird, still flapping, over to Hanna to hold.

Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken’s feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat’s teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that — at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock’s outraged eye — but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting out from under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood.

Her father came out of the kitchen with the big pot of water, which he set on the cobbles.

‘Still going,’ he said.

‘Dada!’ said Hanna.

‘It’s just reflexes,’ he said. But Hanna knew he was laughing at her, because as soon as it was all over, the thing gave another jerk and her granny gave a sound Hanna had not heard before, a delighted crowing she felt on the skin of her neck. The old woman turned back into the kitchen to leave the eggs on the dresser, and came out fumbling a piece of twine out of her apron pocket as Hanna’s father took the chicken from her, finally, and dunked the thing in the vat of steaming water.

Even then, the body twitched, and the wings banged strongly, twice, against the sides of the pot.

In and out the carcass went. And then it was still.

‘That’s you now,’ he said to his mother, as he held a leg out for her to tie with her piece of twine.

After this, Hanna watched her granny string the chicken up by one leg on to a hook in the car house and pull the feathers off the bird with a loud ripping sound. The wet feathers stuck to her fingers in clumps: she had to slap her hands together and wipe them on the apron.

‘Come here now and I’ll show you how it’s done,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Hanna, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘Ah now,’ said her granny.

‘I will not,’ said Hanna, who was crying.

‘Ah darling.’

And Hanna turned her face away in shame.

Hanna was always crying — that was the thing about Hanna. She was always ‘snottering’, as Emmet put it. Oh, your bladder’s very close to your eyes, her mother used to say, or Your waterworks, Constance called it, and that was another phrase they all used, Here come the waterworks, even though it was her brothers and sister who made her cry. Emmet especially, who won her tears from her, pulled them out of her face, hot and sore, and ran off with them, exulting.

‘Hanna’s crying!’

But Emmet wasn’t even here now. And Hanna was crying over a chicken. Because that’s what was under the dirty feathers: goose-bumped, white, calling out for roast potatoes.

A Sunday chicken.

And her granny was hugging her now, from the side. She squeezed Hanna’s upper arm.

‘Ah now,’ she said.

While Hanna’s father came across from the cowshed with a can of milk to be taken back home.

‘Will you live?’ he said.

When she got into the car, her father set the milk can between Hanna’s feet to keep it safe. The chicken was on the back seat, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, its insides empty, and the giblets beside it in a plastic bag. Her father shut the car door and Hanna sat in silence while he walked around to the driver’s side.

Hanna was mad about her father’s hands, they were huge, and the sight of them on the steering wheel made the car seem like a toy car, and her own feelings like baby feelings she could grow out of some day. The milk sloshing in the can was still warm. She could feel the pound note down there too, snug against her ankle bone.

‘I have to go to the chemist’s for Granny,’ she said.

But her father made no answer to this. Hanna wondered, briefly, if he had heard the words, or if she had not uttered them out loud at all.

Her grandfather, John Considine, shouted at a woman once because she came into the Medical Hall and asked for something unmentionable. Hanna never knew what it was — you could die of the shame — it was said he manhandled the woman out into the street. Though other people said he was a saint — a saint, they said — to the townspeople who knocked him up at all hours for a child with whooping cough or an old lady crazed by the pain of her kidney stones. There were men from Gort to Lahinch who would talk to no one else if their hens were gaping or the sheep had scour. They brought their dogs in to him on a length of baling twine — wild men from the back of beyond — and he went into the dispensary to mix and hum; with camphor and peppermint oil, with tincture of opium and extract of male fern. As far as Hanna could tell, old John Considine was a saint to everyone except the people who did not like him, which was half the town — the other half — the ones who went to Moore’s, the chemist’s on the other side of the river, instead.

And she did not know why that might be.

Pat Doran, the garageman, said Moore’s was much more understanding of matters ‘under the bonnet’, but Considine’s was a superior proposition altogether when it came to the boot. So maybe that was the reason.

Or it might be something else, altogether.

Her mother saying: They never liked us.

Her mother pulling her past a couple of old sisters on the street, with her ‘keep walking’ smile.

Emmet said their Grandfather Madigan was shot during the Civil War and their Grandfather Considine refused to help. The men ran to the Medical Hall looking for ointment and bandages and he just pulled down the blind, he said. But nobody believed Emmet. Their Grandfather Madigan died of diabetes years ago, they had to take off his foot.

Whatever the story, Hanna walked down to the Medical Hall that evening feeling marked, singled out by destiny to be the purveyor of old lady’s bottom cream, while Emmet was not to know their granny had a bottom, because Emmet was a boy. Emmet was interested in things and he was interested in facts and none of these facts were small and stupid, they were all about Ireland, and people getting shot.

Hanna walked down Curtin Street, past the window with its horn-sailed boat, past the cream tureen and the pink, felted cat. It was dusk and the lights of the Medical Hall shone yellow into the blue of the street. She went down on one knee in front of the counter, to get the pound note out of her sock.

‘It’s for my Granny Madigan,’ she said to Bart. ‘She says you’ll know what.’

Bart flapped a quick eyelid down and up again, then started to wrap a small box in brown paper. There was a shriek of Sellotape from the dispenser as he stuck the paper down.

‘How is she anyway?’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Hanna.

‘Same as ever?’

Some part of Hanna had hoped she would be allowed to keep the pound note but Bart put out his hand and she was obliged to hand the money over, pathetic as it looked, and soft with much handling.

‘I suppose,’ she said.

Bart straightened the note out, saying, ‘It’s beautiful out there all right. The little gentians in flower, maybe already. A little bright blue thing, you know it? A little star, blooming among the rocks?’

He put the old note on top of the pile of one pound notes stacked up in his till, and he let the clip slap down.

‘Yeah,’ said Hanna. Who was fed up of people talking about some tiny flower like it was amazing. And fed up of people talking about the view of the Aran Islands and the Flaggy fucking Shore. She looked at the soiled little note on top of the pile of crisp new notes, and she thought about her granny’s handbag, with nothing inside it.

‘All right?’ said Bart, because Hanna was stuck there for a moment, her skin was alive with the shame of it. Her father came from poor people. Handsome he might be and tall, but the bit of land he had was only rock and he did his business behind a hedge, like the rest of the Madigans before him.

Poor, stupid, dirty and poor.

That was entirely the problem between the Considines and the Madigans. That was the reason they did not get along.

‘Mind her change now,’ said Bart, sliding a ten pence and a five pence piece out along the curving plastic of the till.

‘Keep it, sure,’ said Hanna, airily, and she picked up the packet and walked out of the shop.

Later, in the church, she sat beside her father who knelt forward with his rosary beads hanging down over the rail in front of him. The beads were white. When he was finished praying, he lifted them high and dangled them into their little leather pouch, and they slid into it like water. The Madigans always went to Mass even though you didn’t have to go to Mass on Holy Thursday. Dan used to be an altar boy but this year he was in a white alb tied with a silken rope, with his own trousers underneath. And over that was a dress of sorts, in rough cream cloth. He was kneeling beside Father Banjo, helping him to wash people’s feet.

There were five people in chairs in front of the altar and the priest went along the row with a silver basin and splashed the feet of each one; young and old, with their bunions and verrucas and their thick yellow nails. Then he turned to Dan to take the white cloth, and he passed it along the top of each foot.

It was just symbolic. The people all had their feet well washed before they came out of the house, of course they had. And the priest didn’t really dry them properly either, so they had trouble getting their socks back on, afterwards. Dan inched along, trying not to get his knees trapped in the folds of his dress, looking holy.

On Good Friday there was nothing on telly all day except classical music. Hanna looked at the calendar that was hanging in the kitchen, with pictures of shiny black children sticking their tummies out under print dresses, and the priests beside them were robed in white. Above their vestments were ordinary, Irish faces, and they looked very happy with themselves and with the black children whose shoulders they touched, with big, careful hands.

Finally, at eight o’clock, Tomorrow’s World came on RTÉ 2 and they were watching this when they heard Dan go in to their mother. He stayed in the bedroom for hours, their two voices a passionate murmur. Their father sat pretending to doze by the range, and Constance dragged the listening children away from the foot of the stairs. After a long time Dan came down — sorted. Pleased with himself.

Their brother, a priest: it was, said Emmet, ‘Such a fucking joke.’ But Hanna felt momentous and sad. There were no flights home from the missions. Dan would leave Ireland for ever. And besides, he might die.

Later, that evening, Emmet sneered at him.

‘You don’t actually believe,’ he said. ‘You just think you do.’

And Dan gave his new, priestly smile.

‘And what is the difference again?’ he said.

And so it became real. Dan would leave them to save the black babies. Their mother had no power to stop him, anymore.

Meanwhile, there was the small matter of Dan’s girlfriend, who had yet to be informed. This Hanna realised after the Easter dinner, with the chicken sitting, dead and very much unresurrected, in the centre of the table; half a lemon in its chest or bottom, Hanna could never tell which. Her mother did not come down to eat with them, she was still in bed. She would never get up, she declared. Hanna sat on the landing outside her bedroom and played cards on the floor and when her mother pulled open the door all the cards got mixed up and Hanna cried, then her mother slapped her for crying, and Hanna cried louder and her mother reeled and wailed. On Tuesday, Dan took Hanna back to Galway with him for a few days. He said it was to get her away from all the fuss, but there was fuss of a different kind waiting for them in Eyre Square.

‘This is Hanna,’ her brother said, pushing her forward.

‘Hello,’ said the woman, holding out her hand, which was covered in a dark green leather glove. The woman looked very nice. The glove went up her wrist, with a line of covered buttons along the side.

‘Go on,’ said Dan, and Hanna, who had no manners yet, reached out to shake the woman’s hand.

‘Fancy a scoop?’ she said.

Hanna walked alongside them, trying to make sense of the traffic and the people who passed, but the city was so busy, there was not enough time to take it all in. A couple of students stopped to talk to them. The girl’s check jacket was hanging open over a woolly jumper and the man had big glasses and a scraggy beard. They held hands, even while they were standing there, and the girl shifted and took glimpses at Dan from under her messy hair, like she was waiting for him to say something hilarious. And then he did say something, he said:

‘What fresh hell is this?’ and the girl fell about laughing.

They parted, a little uncomfortably, from this pair and Dan’s girlfriend led them in through a pub door. She said, ‘You must be starving. Would you like a ham sandwich?’ and Hanna did not know what to say.

The pub was very dark, inside.

‘She would,’ said Dan.

‘And what? Do you want a pint?’

‘Maybe she’ll have a fizzy orange.’

And so it had appeared, in a glass that flared out at the top, and the surface of it a hush of bubbles that rose and were lost to the air.

‘So are you in big school?’ said Dan’s girlfriend, as she threw three packets of crisps on the table, and sat in. ‘Have they killed you yet, the nuns?’

‘Doing their best,’ said Hanna.

‘No bother to you.’

She busied herself with gloves and bag. She wore a clasp in her hair made of polished wood, and she took this out and settled it back in again. Then she held up her glass.

‘Gaudete!’ she said. Which was Latin, and a joke.

Hanna was mad about Dan’s girlfriend. She was so fine. There was no other word for it. Her voice had layers, she had sentiment and irony, she had no idea — Hanna realised, with an odd, crumpled feeling — what the future had in store.

Dan was going to be a priest! You wouldn’t think it as he set down the pint in front of him, and hooked his lower lip over the top to clear it of foam. You wouldn’t think it as he looked at this young woman beside him with her cascade of light-brown hair.

‘So what’s the story?’

‘She’s well up to it,’ she said.

‘You think?’ he said.

Dan’s girlfriend was a tragedy waiting to happen. And yet, those green gloves spoke of a life that would be lovely. She would study in Paris. She would have three children, teach them beautiful Irish and perfect French. She would always mourn for Dan.

‘Sorry, what’s your name?’ said Hanna.

‘My name?’ she said, and laughed for no reason. ‘Oh, I am sorry. My name is Isabelle.’

Of course. She had a name that came out of a book.

After the pub they ran down a lane and were suddenly in a place where everyone smelt of the rain. Dan pulled the coat off Hanna even though she was well able to take off her own coat and when Isabelle came back she had the tickets in her hand. They were going to see a play.

The room they went into did not look like a theatre, there was no curtain or red plush, there were long benches with padded backs and when they found the right row, there were two priests in their way. Actual priests. One of them was old, the other was young and they were dealing, in great slow motion, with programmes and scarves. Isabelle had to push past them, finally, and the priests let them through and then sat down in an insulted sort of way. They stuck their holy backsides out a little, and dipped them on to the leatherette. It was the kind of thing Dan would have laughed at once, but now he said, ‘Evening, Fathers,’ and Isabelle sat in thoughtful silence, until the metal lights cracked and began to dim.

The darkness of the theatre was a new kind of darkness for Hanna. It was not the darkness of the city outside, or of the bedroom she shared with Constance at home in Ardeevin. It was not the black country darkness of Boolavaun. It was the darkness between people: between Isabelle and Dan, between Dan and the priests. It was the darkness of sleep, just before the dream.

The play moved so fast, Hanna could not tell you, after, how it was done. The music thundered and the actors ran around, and Hanna didn’t fancy any of them except the youngest one. He had eyebrows that went up in the middle and when he ran past, she could see everything about his bare feet, the pattern of hair and the comparative length of each toe. He was very real, he was as real as the spittle that flew from his mouth, though the words that came out of him were not real — perhaps that was why she could not follow them.

The story was about Granuaile the pirate queen, who turned, in the middle of it all, into the other queen, Elizabeth the First. The actress lifted a mask, and her voice changed, and her body changed, and it felt like the bubbles rising in Hanna’s fizzy orange, except the bubbles were in her head. Dust moved in the hot lights, the lamps creaked in the rafters. The woman turned, and the mask turned slowly, and suddenly it was all happening inside Hanna and she could feel it spread through the audience like a blush, whatever it was — the play — every word made sense. Then the actors ran off and the ordinary lights came on, and the two priests sat still for a moment, as though trying to recollect where they were.

‘Well now,’ said the older one. And when it was time for the second half, they did not come back.

In the crowded little room outside, Isabelle said, ‘Would you like an ice cream?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and Isabelle went into the pack of people and came back with a Twist Cup.

During the second half, the nice actor spoke to Hanna. He stopped on stage and levelled his head to say something very quiet, and he was looking at her bang in the eye. Even though he could not see her. Or probably could not see her. And Hanna had a sharp urge to step through to the other side and be with him there — his look an invitation to her, as ghosts are invited in from the dark.

After the play was over, Hanna went to find the toilets, where the women were talking with such carelessness to each other, as they splashed their hands beneath the tap, or pulled some fresh towel down from the roll. Hanna didn’t want real life to start again yet. She tried to hold on to the play as they walked through the rainy streets and turned down by a big river; even though the river was exciting in the night-time, she tried to hold the play safe in her mind.

In the middle of the bridge, sitting against the balustrade, was a beggar woman who asked Hanna if she had any spare change, but Hanna didn’t have any money at all. She turned to tell her this, then stopped, because the woman had a baby — this old, dirty woman had a real, live baby — under the plaid blanket she used for a shawl. Dan took Hanna’s arm to steer her forward, and Isabelle smiled.

‘Hold on a minute,’ she said, and she went back to drop a coin.

Dan’s flat was above a hardware shop. They stopped at a little door and went up the narrow staircase to the first floor, where there was a large room with a kitchenette and a sofa for Hanna to sleep on. The sofa had square steel legs and nubbly brown cushions. Hanna rolled out her sleeping bag and took off her shoes, then she climbed into it, and took off her trousers inside, extracting them up out of the mouth of the bag. She reached down again to get her socks, but it was a bit tight in there, and she ended up just pushing them off with her toes. It was the same sleeping bag of dark blue nylon that Emmet brought to the Pope’s Mass and Hanna thought she could smell the cigarettes he had smoked that night. She imagined how jealous he would be of all she had to tell, now.

Hanna got off the bus and made her way down Curtin Street, up over the humpy bridge home. The house looked very empty and she went around the back where Emmet had a den out in the garage, but he wasn’t there. He was in the broken greenhouse with a new batch of kittens, the mother cat stiff with fury outside the door.

Hanna told him about the girlfriend.

‘So much for that,’ he said, getting to his feet.

‘It’s not like it used to be,’ she said. ‘They encourage you to date girls, until you take your final vows.’

‘Date,’ said Emmet.

‘What?’

‘Date?’

He took her ear and twisted it.

‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Emmet.’

Emmet liked to watch her face when he hurt her, to see what it might do. He was more curious than cruel, really.

‘Did she stay?’

‘Who?’

‘The girlfriend?’

‘No, she did not stay. What do you mean, “stay”?’

‘Did she sleep with him?’

‘God almighty, Emmet. Of course not. I was in the next room.’

She did not tell him how beautiful Isabelle was: how Dan sat after she was gone and took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

Hanna went into the house through the back door, along the passage, with its washing machine and coal store and apple store, into the big kitchen, where the heat was dying in the range. She went through to the hall, glanced into the little study, where papers fell out of their piles to make yellowed fans on the floor. There was a shaft of cold air twisting in front of the cracked hearth in the front room that was actually someone’s ghost, she thought. The house was its weirdly empty self, with their mother ‘sequestered’, as Dan used to call it. Horizontal. With her mother dead.

So Hanna went upstairs to tell her dead mother she was home, to ask if she wanted tea and to sit beside her on the bed, and then lie down, while her mother — who was warm and actually, beautifully alive — lifted the eiderdown so Hanna could spoon back into her, with her shoes stuck out over the edge of the mattress. Because Hanna was her baby girl, and she would never make her mother cry, and it was enough to lie there, and let her arm hang over the edge of the bed to stir the books piled up on the floor.

Rain on the Wind

‘Not that one,’ said her mother. ‘It’s a bit old for you.’

The cover was a girl with pale lipstick flirting with a man. ‘Drama, excitement and romance amid the terrible beauty of Galway’s Atlantic seaboard.’

‘He has a girlfriend,’ said Hanna.

‘Does he now,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Hanna.

‘Are you telling me?’ said her mother.

‘She’s really nice,’ said Hanna.

And before Hanna knew it, her mother had the covers pulled back and was off out the other side of the bed. She took off her little jacket of turquoise quilted polyester and sailed it across the bedroom on to Hanna’s lap.

‘Go on. Out!’ she said, but Hanna just slid down between the sheets, while her mother walked around the room doing things she could only guess at. It was so nice, lying there in the darkness as the hairbrush clacked on the dresser top and hair clips made their tiny, light clatter. Hanna heard the shush of a hoisted skirt and, as her mother left the room, the dull sound of something tripped against. A shoe belonging to her father, perhaps. When she was gone, Hanna rose into the bedroom light and checked by the end of the bed. There it was, kicked astray; black and polished, ready for Mass.

‘Come on now, Hanna!’

Downstairs, her mother filled the rooms again. There was housework. There was chat: ‘Tell me all about Galway, you went to see a play?’

Hanna told her about the pirate queen and about the beggar on the bridge, and her mother had the tea towel for a headscarf, and she was hobbling along saying: ‘O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all’! Hanna joined in with the poem which they had not done together since she was a little girl. Her mother told her the story about the day war was declared and she went to see Anew McMaster play Othello. She was only ten and it was in Ennis, maybe, and he was in blackface, with big hoop earrings and armlets, naked to the waist. You could feel his voice like something pushing against you in the darkness. After this, she looked at the tea towel in her hand and had it suddenly thrown into a corner by the sink, saying, ‘God, that was in my hair,’ and she wrestled out the big saucepan to boil all the kitchen cloths on the range. Before long, the whole house smelt of cooked carbolic and hot, dirty cotton. Hanna came back into the steamed up kitchen, looking for something to eat, but Constance was back up working in Dublin and the only thing cooking was dirty dish-rags. Hanna lifted the lid and looked at the grey water, with its scum of soap. Her mother was sitting at the table, looking straight ahead.

‘I thought I could do some cheese on toast,’ said Hanna and her mother said, ‘I made him. I made him the way he is. And I don’t like the way he is. He is my son and I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me either. And there’s no getting out of all that, because it’s a vicious circle and I have only myself to blame.’

This all seemed, to Hanna, either true or beside the point. But instead of telling her mother this, she said the thing she was supposed to say:

‘But you like me, Mammy.’

‘I like you now,’ said her mother.

Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the big kettle on the range.

‘Go on up to your uncle’s for me, will you?’ she said. ‘Get me some Solpadeine.’

‘You think?’

‘My head’s a fog,’ she said. And when Hanna went down to her uncle Bart’s there were new perfumes in the Medical Hall.

Dan, New York, 1991

WE ALL THOUGHT Billy was with Greg, though the truth was they had both moved on months before — if they had ever been together. It was hard to put a name on things in the East Village in those days, when everyone was dying or afraid to die, and so many were already gone — the pages of your address book scored through, your dreams surprised by the sweet and impossible faces of the dead.

But if the question was whether Billy was still sleeping with Gregory Savalas, then the answer was that they had barely slept together in the first place. Billy was a blond boy, on the sturdy side, with a thug/angel thing going, so there was a line of sad bastards queueing at his door; half of them married, most of them in suits. And Billy hated the closet. What Billy wanted was big, shouty unafraid sex with someone who did not cry, or get complicated, or hang around after the orange juice and the croissant. Billy was across the threshold and cheerfully out and he wanted men who were basically like him; sweet guys, who lifted weights and fucked large, and slapped you on the shoulder when it was time to swap around. He did not want someone like Greg — blanked out by the fear of death, neurotic, stalled. There were a lot of neurotic guys in the East Village in those months and years, there were a lot of magnificent guys, and the different personalities that they had are all gone now too.

Greg was the kind of guy who had a hand mirror in the bathroom cabinet so he could check the skin of his back for marks and lesions, and he used this hand mirror, once, twice, six times a day. On two occasions he had to leave the restaurant just before a lunch engagement and run back to work and lock himself in the washroom to strip and check himself over and then dress again and run five blocks so he could arrive at his table on time, sliding along the banquette with a smile while, on his back, the prickle of sweat became the itch of cancer pushing up under the skin.

Of all the signs, the purple bruise of Kaposi’s was the one we hated most because there was no doubting it and, after the first mother snatches her child from the seat beside you on the subway, it gets hard to leave the house. Sex is also hard to find. Even a hug, when you are speckled by death, is a complicated thing. And the people who would sleep with you now — what kind of people are they?

We did not want to be loved when we got sick, because that would be unbearable, and love was all we looked for, in our last days.

So Gregory Savalas, art hustler, dealer, executor, smiles and sweats through two courses and coffee, and when he is back in his tiny gallery downtown and nothing new is coming in — except the imagined lesions on his back — he picks up the phone and he dials.

The people who are at home are mostly sick too, and the people who are not sick do not like being called up during work hours, because these are long and aimless calls full of hints and silences and it is hard to take the solid tension that Greg pushes down the line at you. He used to ring Max who worked in his studio all day, but Max was just so arrogant, and then he died. He used to ring a lot of people. His girlfriend Jessie has abandonment issues — or whatever — she is mad as a snake, these days, so Greg rings Billy up because although Billy is a bit normal, sometimes normal is what you need.

‘Graphics.’

‘Hello, cubicle man.’

‘As I live and breathe.’

And Greg is away. First up he tells Billy that Massimo spent the afternoon in Oscar’s talking over the lighting for his autumn show and this woman came in with four hundred bags and a boy to carry them, turns out she is the Maharani of Jaipur, which is, like, the Jackie O of all India and she has an emerald on her chest that is bigger than your left eye. The bag boy, it turns out, is an actual prince — as in, turban with a plume at the front — and Massimo has bagged him for dinner Thursday night. Greg says he has offered to do a risotto but he can’t find the one everyone liked the last time, the one with the red wine. He says his mother called from Tampa, with an earrings-plus-tracksuit dilemma, and did not mention his father, not once. And when he pointed this out to her she said, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Gregory!’

This is all dangerous talk. Words like ‘risotto’ pull at Billy like he is back in his boyhood bedroom in Elk County, Pennsylvania: there are years of loneliness in a word like ‘risotto’. Billy is working on the news today, writing ‘New York Fire Chief in Mattress Hazard Warning’ on his Quantel Paintbox. He uhuh’s and ahah’s and dabs about with his stylus until the risotto effect wanes, while Greg talks and talks and doesn’t ever really get there. Finally, after a small silence, Billy heaves it out.

‘So, how are you?’ and Greg says, ‘I have a kind of pain in my lung.’

‘Oh?’

‘Just, you know, when I inhale.’

‘OK.’

‘Like a stitch.’

‘Well maybe it is a stitch,’ says Billy, knowing that this is the wrong thing to say as well as the only thing to say, waiting for Greg to untangle the silence enough to reply.

‘Maybe.’

You couldn’t put the phone down on a dying man, but in those days we were putting the phone down on each other all over New York, gently, we were extricating ourselves.

‘You need an X-ray, maybe?’

We were letting each other go, back to the various rooms and beds in which we would die — but not yet. Not until we put the phone down. Because nobody ever died on the phone.

‘Maybe. It’s just a kind of catch. Like. . there.’

‘There?’

‘You probably can’t hear — there! — you hear that? You probably can’t hear it over the phone.’

‘You want me to come round?’ says Billy. And because Greg is so difficult these days, he says, ‘Not tonight. I am really behind.’

‘Or go out, maybe?’

‘I can’t go out.’

Of course he can’t go out, Greg has lost his looks. How could Billy ask him to come out?

‘All right. I’m coming round.’

When he was nineteen years old, fresh in from New Jersey, Gregory Savalas fell in love with a gallerist called Christian whose eyes were the colour of ice when it is blue. Christian was an actual Dane who tested as soon as there was a test to take, after which he kept trying to kill himself in a deliberate, very Danish sort of way. Greg never knew what he would find when he opened the door to the apartment. Blood everywhere — Christian bleeding into the bathwater, or bleeding into the Brazilian linen sheets; Christian shaking on the bed, the floor beneath him littered with empty paracetamol bottles, his chin gleaming with bile. Ironically, it took him for ever to die from the disease itself. He wasted and wasted. He trembled under the sponge when Greg gave him a bath and his eyes were stone-crazy chips of blue.

They were in St Vincent’s, on the seventh floor, with the staff in space suits and six different tubes coming out of Christian, when his mother finally showed. Handsome, of course, her blonde hair shading into silver, she hurried over to her unrecognisable son and leaned over his hospital bed.

‘Hey.’

They looked at each other, ice to ice, and whispered in Danish and something happened to Christian. He became human again. He became pure. They gazed at each other for three days straight and then he died.

Greg could recognise, as much as the next person, a moment of grace, but he still thought that death was a big surprise for being the most horrible fuck-up possible. Beyond anything known. Christian was dead and the sight of the living filled Greg with contempt. This was 1986 and the horror was everywhere: your neighbours used a Kleenex to press the elevator button, and strangers shouted ‘I hope you die, faggot!’ when they passed you in the street. Greg found it hard to remember his lover as a person. He spent a lot of time thinking about the sex they’d had and about all the blood he’d mopped up and touched, but the truth was, it was ages before he’d let Christian inside him, it wasn’t really his thing.

That was back in the day, when Gregory the Greek was plump and smooth as a Caravaggio boy. By the time Billy came to town, some years later, on a mission to eat risotto and much cock, Greg was gymmed up and slimmed down, he was almost ‘mature’. They hooked up between the shelves of the bookshop on Christopher Street and tricked in the staff toilet. Then they went for coffee, which was sort of the wrong way around, really. A few weeks later, they spotted each other watching some guys make out at the back of Meat on 14th and Billy nodded to say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Which Greg immediately did. Of course.

‘What were we thinking?’ Billy said, when they hit the open air, and he took Greg by the lapels of his jacket and gave him a big, muscular kiss. He was so sexy, Billy. He was as sexy as Greg used to be, when he first came to town. Greg could feel the magic leaving him, flowing, almost, into Billy, so golden and easy against his dark grey sheets. Because Greg used to be the one that everyone wanted; now he was the one who did the wanting. He would be, for the rest of his life, a guy more cruising than cruised. He was twenty-nine years old.

At twenty-nine, Greg had gone to Meat because he was so desperate for a blow job, he thought if he didn’t get one he would lie down like an old dog and whine. A bad knee had put a stop to his morning jog and the pain was moving into his hip — also downwards. By the time he and Billy had spun out their last kiss, some six weeks after their first, Greg walked as though there was something trapped under his foot, almost like a limp.

In January 1991, Greg slipped on fresh snow on Third Avenue and he rolled on to his back and just lay there for a moment. It was four in the morning, and his collarbone was broken: he had actually heard the snap. Greg looked up at the falling snow, trying to figure out which flakes would end up on his face and which would not. A surprising number of them missed, then one drifted on to his forehead in a tiny, delayed flare of cold. This was followed by two more — one on his top lip, another on the side of his nose. The pain in his shoulder was intense and Greg could taste fur on his tongue, but he stayed where he was, second-guessing the snow, knowing that as soon as he walked into the hospital his dying would begin.

Max and Arthur came to St Vincent’s with him for his HIV results. They talked about David Wojnarowicz who was really fading, and Max shouted about Rothko while they waited on the stackable plastic chairs. Because Max was unflinching, you might say remorseless in the face of the disease; the freaked-out staff were a satisfaction to him. Pity just made him impatient.

‘Fuck Rothko,’ he said. ‘Fuck Rothko.’

‘You can’t say that,’ said Greg.

‘I just said it.’

‘You can’t just say fuck Mark Rothko.’

Arthur said, ‘I think Max is uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of the work.’

‘Fuck that. I am uncomfortable with the way he owns a colour.’

‘You can’t own a colour, you just make a colour.’

Max had a narrow shaved head, like a weasel, and small, surprisingly child-like hands. He sat in a green military trench and jackboots with his elbows on his knees.

‘There is nothing but owning. That’s all he does. He says, This colour is mine. He says, I am as important as this colour. This is how important I am.’

‘You’re ruthless,’ Greg said.

‘How can I be ruthless?’ said Max. ‘I’m dying.’

‘You are dying in a ruthless fashion,’ said Greg, but he was really thinking about Christian, remembering Christian’s eyes looking at him from the chair as he moved about the room — not attracted any more, not even jealous. Just crossing him off the list. His young body. His hips. His hands.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Gregory Savalas was about to die himself, now. And he was not sure he would do it well.

And there was Dr Torres, calling him in to the consulting room. Such a hero, Gabriel Torres, so thrilling and kind. We talked about him endlessly, about how he smiled and what he wore, whether he was happy with our bloods, our retinas, our lungs.

When Greg came back outside, Arthur said, ‘How is Gabriel? What did he say?’

It was not Billy’s fault he did not know Greg’s test results, because Greg did not tell him his results. But Greg managed to resent him for it anyway. They went to a thing at the Fawbush and so many of the men were fading, there was this terrible, dark courage in the room, Greg lost all respect for Billy for being so fucking normal, and it was through gritted teeth he said, ‘Well there is a reason I haven’t been, you know, fun, recently. There is a reason why I haven’t been picking up the phone.’

This was when they were walking back uptown.

‘Is there something wrong?’ Billy said.

‘What do you mean, something wrong? I can’t walk that fast, any more.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I am not asking for you to be sorry, I am asking for you to slow down.’

Billy did slow down and then he stopped.

‘Greg?’

Greg turned.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Oh my God.’

Billy, to Greg’s great surprise, was devastated. He twisted around, and around again, as though looking for a missing chair. He stood in the street and looked at Greg, then he lifted his hands to cover his eyes. He started to cry.

‘Oh my God, Greg. Oh my God.’

‘Well, what did you expect?’ said Greg.

‘I don’t know,’ said Billy. ‘I just didn’t. I didn’t expect.’

They went to one bar, and then another and they got very drunk. At one point, Billy wept and Greg comforted him, looking up at the ceiling as he rocked him briefly in his arms, thinking, ‘But I am the one. I am the one who is going to die.’

Through all those years, whenever Greg looked into the mirror at his changing face, he thought about Christian and wondered if his lover would be proud of him now. After he and Billy had finished their mercy fuck (drunk — yes — but careful, so careful) he went into the bathroom and checked his skin for black marks and looked into his own eyes and he remembered just how dead Christian was, after he died. There was no one looking at him in the mirror, except himself.

It was hard to cry when there was no one watching, he thought, then he brushed his teeth and went back to bed.

In the months that followed, they were often on the phone. When Greg lost weight, Billy took him out shopping for smaller jeans. He brought up wine and treats from the local deli which quite quickly turned into ordinary bags of food.

‘Just the heavy stuff,’ he said, smiling at Greg’s door that was three flights up — not even breathless after the climb.

‘You shouldn’t have.’

‘I want to.’

And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.

Which did not mean that Greg was easy. The groceries were always wrong, for a start. Billy could never tell what was fun trashy food — like Oreos, say — and what was just trash.

‘You call this stuff cheese?’

In fact, there was no Indian prince at Massimo’s on Thursday evening. There was a very nice risotto, which Billy personally found a bit disappointing.

‘It’s a bit like. . rice?’ he said.

Massimo’s boyfriend Alex was in from the west coast and he brought a rather grizzled Ellen Derrick, who stuck to gin and smoked throughout. Jessie was there, of course, as was Greg. There was a wonderful Dominican boy who said very little and, as Jessie later pointed out, only ate three grains of rice all night. There was Arthur, who had aged so much since Max died. And there was an Irish guy, called Dan, who had sandy hair you might flatter to red and beautiful, pale skin.

Massimo’s place on Broome Street was an old sweatshop and its floor was made from two foot wide hardwood boards. He had factory windows that kept nothing in or out — not the heat, the cold, nor the noise of the printworks two floors below — but were beautiful nonetheless, each one of them dividing the dusk into thirty rectangles of fading light. Inside, he had many candles and a table so long and monastic that eight people felt like few. The place had cast-iron columns, Marsalis was on the stereo and a long scribbled piece by Helen Frankenthaler took up an entire cross-wall. After the risotto came noisettes of lamb with roast garlic and a mint-pea purée, which Massimo served with a Saumur-Champigny that was like an elevator in a glass, as Greg said, it brought you to a whole new level. Massimo, with his slow gestures and careful, sing-song voice, was alert to everyone’s smallest need; unpushy, prepared.

Greg glanced at Billy, as if to say, ‘Watch and learn.’

They tried not to talk about the disease. They went through Twin Peaks, they talked about the art scene, what Larry was showing next, how money was wrecking the East Village now, and whatever happened to that guy who used to walk a tightrope and piss, beautifully, in an arc, perfectly balanced, into the East River? No, he pissed on the floor down in that club on 48th Street. Should have been the river. Whatever happened to him? Every name they spoke dragged its own tiny silence after it.

Gone. Gone silent. Alive.

Arthur was positive for six years and he hadn’t a thing wrong with him, people wanted to touch him, he was so old now. Arthur remembered things no else remembered. Who could keep all that? Who could hold on to it? His head was a museum. And when he died the museum would be empty. The museum would fall down.

Greg read nothing but the classics now, tender of his eyesight and of his time, he talked about Achilles’ dream of dead Patroclus, how the dead man would not touch him but only boss him about, when all Achilles wanted was to feel the guy in his arms. Why is that? That the dead have voices in our dreams but no density. It’s just this huge sense of themness, it is all meaning and no words. Because words are also physical, don’t you think? The way they touch you.

‘Sometimes they do. Use words, I mean,’ said Arthur. ‘“My tree is all hibiscus”. Someone said that to me, once.’

No one asked who.

‘It’s a war,’ Massimo said.

Greg said fuck that he never signed up for any damn war. He wanted a civilian’s death, he said. A personal death. He wanted a death he could call his own.

Massimo said Gabriel Torres was working out in the Y on West 23rd and the stir as he wiped down one machine and went to the next. Gabriel Torres was the most beautiful man you have ever seen.

‘Where he gets the time?’ said Arthur.

‘You know,’ said Greg, ‘Sometimes I think we’d all be better off with a woman in sensible shoes.’

Dan’s face, through all of this, was a thing of quiet attention. His pale skin soaked up the candlelight and he listened so well, it seemed the whole table was talking just for him. Greg lifted his glass and said, ‘Look at those cheekbones,’ and Dan gave a smile.

‘The poet. That Irish poet.’

‘Yeats?’ said Arthur.

On which, to everyone’s amazement and delight, Dan opened his mouth and a ream of poetry fell out. Line after line — it was like a scroll unfurling along the tabletop, a carpet unrolled. And each of us, as we heard it, realised where we were, and who was with us. We saw our shadows shifting on the back wall, the office cleaner across the way in trembling fluorescent tinged with green, the dark city brown of the sky.

Dan finished, placed a hand to his chest and inclined his head. There was applause. Alex told him he had a voice like wild honey. And a face, said Massimo, like some portrait with a red hat, what was that one? In the Palazzo Pitti. Some cardinal, anyway, in a red hat.

Dan said, ‘Don’t fucking cardinal me. Whatever else you do.’ And we all laughed. And then we looked at him. That mixture of shyness and blurting arrogance: he was quite the thing, we thought. And we also thought about his freckled white skin, with the blue veins under it, and about his uncut Irish cock.

‘You are so wrong,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m thinking Dutch. Something direct and entirely austere. Like that wonderful sandy-haired boy in the Met.’

And in fact, Arthur walked up to the museum a couple of days later, going through the rooms until he stood in front of it again, a sixteenth-century boy in velvet black against a green background; oil on wood. It was the honesty of the wood that did it, because the full-lipped young man did not, himself, look especially truthful or sincere. The picture was full of integrity, the boy might be anything at all.

After the lamb they had figs poached in marsala with a mascarpone mousse. Alex took off his jacket to help with the plates, and he and Massimo moved with such synchronous ease, you knew they loved each other still.

Greg lit up a cigarette and contemplated Dan through half-closed eyes.

‘So. Ireland,’ he said. ‘Are you from, like, a farm?’

Dan refused the question with a smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Greg. He was flirting now.

‘Actually, yes,’ said Dan, relenting. ‘Yes. We have a farm.’

‘Billy grew up in Elk County, Pennsylvania but he’s not reciting Whitman. Are you, Billy?’

‘Why not?’ said Dan, looking to Billy. ‘Why not?!’

‘Just,’ said Billy.

‘He’s wonderful.’

‘Is he?’

‘I sing the body electric,’ said Dan, raising his preacher’s hands, and we looked at them; the square bones of his knuckles, the tiny tremble in his fingertips, held open that moment too long.

And we looked at Billy, who blushed in the candlelight.

‘What’s the next line, Billy?’ said Greg. ‘You see how dumbass the American education system can be? What’s the next line?’

But Billy was too busy falling in love to think about the next line so Alex quietly filled it in. ‘The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,’ as Massimo set down some glasses for port, and reached to the counter for the platter of cheese.

Later, Greg wondered, if he had not needled Billy then Billy would not have turned to Dan and to all that Dan offered him, there at the table: the guilt and the glory; the pomp and cruelty of his love. And he wondered also if it could have played out in any other way. They made such a handsome couple. It was meant, we all knew it. Dan and Billy, Billy and Dan. It had to be.

After cheese, and more cigarettes, and the offer of whiskey, tequila, more wine, Massimo went over to the window to throw down a key, and a whole bunch of people came up on their way out clubbing: Jerry from the Fawbush Gallery, that landscape gardener who did white plantings all over the Hamptons, Estella who was an outrageous queen and this guy in a Weimar-type leather thing — call it a corset — with a German accent no one believed for an instant and considerable quantities of cocaine. Jessie’s archrival Mandy was also in the mix, with her glossy trustafarian hair and mid-Atlantic drawl and, years later when Jessie was truly fat and Mandy still wonderfully slim, they met and remembered that evening which went on till dawn, and all the hard work they put in, years of it, helping, loving, mourning these men.

A few weeks after this dinner Greg was admitted to St Vincent’s for the first time. It was just a thing, he told Billy, they would blitz him with anti-fungals and let him go. Jessie brought him in a cab, with six pairs of ironed pyjamas and a cotton kimono with beautiful cross-hatchings of indigo blue. Greg had a problem with his mouth and tongue. He also had a haemorrhoid that obsessed him more than it deserved, though Jessie told him her father had a real bunch of grapes hanging out there for a while, and she went off to find ice. She also found a bag of doughnuts to fatten him up, then ate most of them herself, but she sat there for another hour and laughed at every small thing.

Arthur arrived with champagne and they pretended to drink it. He said when Max was first up here in the sevens, just two rooms down, the staff slid his food tray across the floor, and he had to change his own sheets. He said it was so much better now, thank you Dr Torres — how was he, by the way? And Greg said, ‘I think he’s just exhausted, he’s just working so hard.’

The drip went in. Billy did not come and, after a while, the visitors went home.

Three hours later, Greg started shaking. He was cold in places that were new to him, and sweat pooled at the base of his neck. A nurse came in to switch on a bedside fan and fold down his sheet. An ordinary white woman in her fifties, she looked at his terror and acknowledged it, eye to eye. Then she left.

Greg could not catch a breath. He pulled the air into him in tiny, shallow draughts, on and on, his body panicking until his mind snapped free and started to wander around the room — also around the thoughts that were in the room, and the memories that were hiding in the corners and under the bed. There was the occasional hallucination: a woman — who looked like his mother but was not his mother — sat in the chair sewing a long grey smock for him to wear when he was dead. Dr Torres, who might really be there, leaned over him and smiled. There was a panting cat draped across the top of his skull and he was terrified of its claws. This went on all night, until a tray startled him and he realised it was only supper time. The night was yet to come.

Two men died towards dawn: at least Greg was pretty sure that men died. He could hear praying in Spanish, then people weeping and helping each other away. In the morning, a man covered in Kaposi’s stood in his doorway and said, ‘I just need enough to do it. Don’t you think?’

The fever was less on this second day. Greg was able to swallow some Xanax, a big tub of which a tranny nurse called Celeste slapped down on his locker.

‘You want a cigarette, honey? You want some tea?’

All day, Greg drifted in and out of sleep, watching the sunlight cross the room, and the shadow following it. He smiled and thought about Billy and Dan, trying to imagine how they were together: he just couldn’t see it.

And this was strange, because no one else had any trouble seeing it. They were two beautiful young men up in the big city. One was pale and interesting, the other easy and tan, and Billy flung a friendly arm over Dan’s shoulder as they took the ferry over to Fire Island while, back in St Vincent’s, the Xanax kicked in.

It was a long, hot weekend.

On Monday morning, Greg woke to see Billy standing in his hospital room.

‘Hello.’

There are hours and days that change people, and they both had been changed. They were different people now. After a moment, Billy stepped up to kiss Greg briefly on the mouth. And this was such a nice gesture in that place of death, it was as though Greg’s fever had never happened and Fire Island was just a dream — though it was not a dream. Billy and Dan had taken several and various substances, they had danced till dawn: we all saw them, and we liked the way Dan kept his shirt on when everyone else stripped down; the two top buttons undone and his sternum gleaming in there, white as the inside of a seashell.

‘Where were you?’ said Greg.

‘I got a house-share in the Pines,’ said Billy. ‘Didn’t I say?’

‘Gold dust,’ said Greg.

‘I know.’

When Billy came back in to the hospital the next day, Greg was sitting on the edge of the bed, very weak but determined to go home. Billy had to find his pants, and push each leg up over Greg’s knees. Then he leaned in for an awkward hug, to lift him up off the bed and slip them up the rest of the way.

‘Oh God,’ said Greg.

‘That’s it,’ Billy said.

‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

‘Good luck with that bitch,’ said Billy. ‘Is this your shirt? Arm. Shush.’

Greg had started to moan. He moaned incontinently. He dribbled noise.

‘Hush, now.’

Billy got Greg’s shirt on and struggled with buttons and cuffs. He pulled his belt tight, attempted and abandoned the zipper, then he turned to sit beside Greg and for a moment they were both slumped on the edge of the bed.

‘Quiet down, will you? Come on.’

The legs he had just handled were the same legs Billy had once hauled up on either side of himself, while Greg’s dark and dreamy eyes looked up from the pillow. They were the same legs, except they were half the circumference. They were the same bones.

After he got Greg downstairs and into a cab and up the three flights to his walkup in the East Village, Billy didn’t have the energy to settle him in. He phoned Jessie and left a message on her answering service. Then he turned to Greg, who was collapsed in a chair with his coat still on.

‘I think it’s working,’ said Greg. ‘I can feel it lifting.’

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ said Billy, setting a hand on his back. Then he left.

Greg sat in the silence after the door had closed and realised it was true. His blood was singing; some weight was gone. So he did not care that Billy was off to see Irish Dan, that they would spend the night together, and the morning also. He did not mind that Dan would twist Billy’s love, somehow, and make him sad, because Greg had survived a course of amphotericin B, that bastard. He was still alive.

Dan did not shrink from Billy’s arm, thrown over his shoulder on the ferry, but he did not seem to want sex when they arrived at the Pines, or he did not want the sex to be good, or interesting or slow. And this was surprising because no one went to Fire Island just to walk along the beach. The only move Dan made, when they were finally in the house that Billy had organised, all tubular chairs and walnut floors, with its white linen curtains and Billy attractively arranged on the bed, was to unzip his fly. He did not let Billy near his ass, which was a pity, because Billy really wanted his ass. He turned away (which was fine) from Billy’s kiss. He might as well have folded his arms. For someone else, this would have been a challenge and a delight — a whole weekend to drag this Irish boy out of the closet, kicking and screaming with raw pleasure and afterthrob. But this was not Billy’s style. Billy wanted to talk to Dan. He wanted to put his tongue on the salt corner of Dan’s eye, where his eyelid trembled shut. He wanted to make him happy.

He also, personally, wanted to come. But Dan had no manners in that regard and, when Billy ended up doing the honours himself, he seemed to sneer a little, looking down at him from a height. Which was also fine. If sneering turned out to be Dan’s thing, there were plenty of guys who liked that too.

You could not say that Fire Island was entirely happy in the summer of 1991, but it was defiant, and happiness was there on the horizon, if you lifted your eyes to the sea. Dan did not seem to notice the sea. He watched the Friday night crowd at the Botel from behind a beer, followed by another beer, while Billy smiled and deflected offers of various kinds of fun.

Dan said, ‘They all look sort of identical.’

‘I know,’ said Billy. Though he was wearing the same short shorts and lace-up ankle boots as two hundred other men out on the dance floor.

Billy, meanwhile, was worried about the house-share, which was through a friend-of-a-friend with no mention of the cost. The beers were outrageously expensive and Dan drank steadily then looked for more. In the middle of his, maybe, third bottle, he turned to Billy and said, ‘Tell me. What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’

This was such a strange question, there in the middle of two hundred bare torsos, all holding the scent of the day’s lost sunshine, that Billy got a bit distracted and had to say it again: ‘What do I want?’

Later, Dan relaxed a little in the darkness of their room. He did not complain about the double bed and allowed Billy to touch him down his back and legs. But he stayed curled over an undoubtedly steaming erection, and Billy woke early and so horny he had to slip out before Dan knew that he was gone.

‘Where were you?’ Dan was in the kitchen when Billy came back, he was opening and closing cupboard doors.

‘Just took a walk,’ said Billy, not mentioning the remnants of the night’s dancing he found wandering the dawn; a very pink blond boy who knelt in front of him, and a massive, tripping Blatino he leaned against, who jabbed a finger at his ass, and then got it right in.

‘A walk?’

‘Just in the woods.’

‘Right.’

They went down to the harbour for breakfast, and then walked far up the beach to find a quiet spot. Dan undressed under a little towel, he wriggled into his swimming trunks before he let the towel fall, and Billy thought this was the sweetest thing he had seen in a very long time. It was already hot. The sea was big and languid, dropping slow waves on the sand. They waded right in. Billy splashed about a bit and ran back up to the bags while Dan floated on the swell, watching his toes. Then he reached over into a lazy crawl. A bunch of guys ran out of a beachfront property, shedding flip-flops and shorts and they ploughed into the water, all brown backs and white glutes. Billy could feel their skinny-dipping pleasure as the sea swirled higher, and two of them turned to kiss in the waves. He watched them for a while, then squinted after Dan who was quite far out now, his silhouette made uncertain by sunlight on the water.

Minutes passed. Dan was so small in the distance that Billy could not tell if he was heading out or coming home. He sat there, suncream in hand, waiting for Dan to turn back in and, after a long while, it seemed that he had — definitely, Billy thought — Dan was definitely closer now. The figure switched from overarm to breaststroke; Billy could make out his pale features and his water-darkened hair. It was Dan, of course it was. He was right there, just beyond the breaking waves. He dived under, with a curving bob and scissor kick of his long white shins, then surfaced and lay on his back for a while. Each swell that lifted him set him down closer to shore until he turned to catch a breaking wave, scrabbling as he rode the surf, with his mouth pulled down. He ended up on his hands and knees on the sand and he considered this for a moment, before standing heavily to his full height and walking on to dry land.

Billy shifted on the stripy towel, trying to look indifferent.

‘What took you so long?’

Dan, when he sat down beside him, was wet, cold and very solid.

‘I was swimming home.’

‘Oh my.’

‘Just over there — see? Three thousand miles thattaway, that’s where I am from.’

‘You miss it,’ said Billy.

‘Fuck no.’

Dan eased his goose-bumped legs straight, then lay down carefully in the sun. His muscles jolted and relaxed and after a while he was still. The wind was warm. The waves arrived one by one on the shore. Dan picked himself up a little and set his heavy, wet head on Billy’s chest. Then he moved down to settle his ear in the soft arch beneath Billy’s ribs.

Billy lay there looking up at the blue of July. He wondered if he should put a hand on Dan’s drying hair and then decided against it. For some reason, he remembered a boy at high school — not good looking as Dan was good looking — a boy called Carl Medson.

‘I knew this guy once,’ he said. ‘Like when I was sixteen.’

‘And?’

Carl Medson’s sister was slick with lip gloss and his mother flirted with Billy in a truly disturbing manner. She was kind of mad. There was a paper seat on the toilet, and when you opened the refrigerator, everything in there was covered in Saran Wrap, even the cartons and jars. Carl Medson moped after Billy for, like, a year though they never did anything except sprawl around in his bedroom listening to music, until Billy couldn’t take the suspense any longer. One day he let his hand drift — joke! — on to Carl’s package and the next thing you know — pause, move, pause again — he had Carl Medson out of there and in his hand. And Carl has one of those dicks where the foreskin doesn’t roll back — Billy’s never seen it before — a little tight ring, like the mouth of a string bag, and tucked in, down there, a sad, locked-in dick. You know? Let me out!! Like you are supposed to stretch it, as a kid, but he had never touched himself, not ever. And Carl just turns away from him, and zips up, and they don’t really hang out after that. Married now, and moved to Phoenix.

‘So he must have got that much sorted out.’

‘Huh,’ said Dan.

A little bit later, Dan said, ‘I am going to get married,’ and he sat up, alert to the sea.

‘Oh?’ said Billy.

‘I am.’ Dan kicked the end of the towel and pulled it square on the sand.

‘Anyone in mind?’

‘Yep.’

He studied the horizon. ‘I love her,’ he said. ‘And I love the look of her and the shape of her, and I love the way her body is, and I just think it feels right. All of that. You know?’

‘Great.’

‘We have sex,’ said Dan.

‘I know,’ said Billy, who had a queue of sad bastard married men and did not need another one, though this, clearly, was what had washed up, one more time, at his door.

They went back to have lunch at the house, with the other housemates fresh off the ferry, and the friend-of-a-friend was just great; very upfront with them both about the bill. Dan did not say, ‘Oh, I don’t have to pay because I am not actually gay, you know.’ In fact, now they were agreed on the subject of his essential and future straightness, Dan chatted, drank wine and trailed after Billy to their room, where he spent a salty, sunny few hours on the bed with him, and in the shower, and in the chair, followed by a little, last eking out against the cedar-scented wall. He kissed Billy as though he loved him, all afternoon.

Dinner was a giddy occasion, with a couple of high performance housemates and their quiet host, who had carried steak and salad all the way from Chelsea. After which, they all washed and changed, downed a ritual martini in the living room and sailed off down the boardwalk. It was a big party weekend on Fire Island and temptation was everywhere but Billy and Dan danced only with each other; they laughed and even smooched a bit out there on the floor, and when Billy went off to queue for the toilet he came back with a couple of pills. He took one and let Dan lick out the other from the crease of his palm.

Bliss.

We can assume, of course, that Dan went back to his melancholy little apartment and his brave wife-to-be, and held all the beautiful men of Fire Island in great contempt for being helpless to their faggotry when his was so clearly under control. But tripping on Ecstasy under a July moon, he was the happiest queer in New York State. And of course we all knew he wasn’t really queer, he was just queer for Billy, because who wouldn’t be? It wasn’t like he wanted to go down on — I don’t know — Gore Vidal. Dan loved Billy because it was impossible not to love Billy, and so we sang that same old sad song, as they touched each other in the trees’ moon shadow; as they paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

We met the brave little wife-to-be later, when she came back from Boston, where she had been doing some kind of MFA. She was nice. Skinny, as they often are. Slightly maverick and intense and above all ethical. She had long hair, a lovely accent, and she was writing a book, of course, about — we could never remember what the book was about — something very Irish. As beards went, she was a classic beard. A woman of rare quality — because it takes a quality woman to keep a guy like Dan straight — throwing her heart away.

Or not.

Who is to judge, meine Damen und Herrrren? At least she had a heart to throw.

This was Dan’s fifth year in New York City — he had only intended staying for one. He arrived in the summer of 1986, and moved in with Isabelle, who had been there since May. A friend got him some evening shifts in a bar over on Avenue A and he spent the days stacking and retrieving shoeboxes in a basement on Fifth. After a few months down in the dark, they allowed him up on to the shop floor and Dan pretended to be good at selling shoes in order to cover the fact that he was really very good at selling shoes. He was a beautiful young man with a cute accent and a terrific eye. By Christmastime, he was dashing over to photo shoots with emergency Manolos, he was bringing boxes to clients in their homes. Some of these clients tried to sleep with him. All of them were rich, and most of them were men.

The first time it happened, Dan was kneeling at the feet of a sixty-year-old multimillionaire in a penthouse just around the corner on Central Park South. He was lacing up a pair of chocolate brown brogues over his skinny ankles and grey silk socks, when the guy said, ‘Ireland, eh?’

‘That’s right,’ said Dan, as the multimillionaire settled his crotch an inch or two higher in the large white chair.

‘I had a wonderful young friend once who was Irish. Where are you from?’

‘I’m from County Clare.’

‘Well, that’s where he was from. Isn’t that a coincidence?’

‘Yes, that is a coincidence,’ said Dan.

‘He was a marvellous young man.’

The picture windows looked over Central Park and Sixth Avenue. The floor was white, the furniture was white, and the old man’s dick, in the middle of this great panorama, seemed both intriguing and sad. This is the flesh, Dan thought as he pulled the laces tight, in which such money is contained.

And Dan forgot for a moment that he was a spoilt priest and English literature graduate with plans to go home, after his year abroad, to do a master’s in librarianship. He forgot that he was a shoe salesman, or a barman, or even an immigrant. For a moment Dan was an open space, surrounded by a different future to the one he had brought in through the door.

He said, ‘I think this is your size. I think this is you.’

Dan joked with Isabelle about the multimillionaire, but mostly he did not mention the men who caught his eye or gave him things, in the bar or on the street. He told her he was desperate to get out of shoe sales, but he did not tell her he had sensed some new ambition in himself while she trudged on, teaching English as a foreign language, not writing her novel. Isabelle wondered if postgraduate work was the answer to the feeling she had of getting nowhere — not in this town, but with herself. Dan wanted to tell her that herself was not the project any more. This was New York: the answer was all around her, for God’s sake, not inside her head.

Dan kept his eyes open, now. He noticed people’s desire. He got a job with a fashion photographer, humping gear around Manhattan. He spent his days carting tripods and bags, getting yelled at, getting cold, running for miso soup, running for hard boiled eggs, black coffee, Tabasco, very dry champagne. The pay was less, but you would not think it to look at Dan, who attracted sample size jackets and many invitations by being very open and a little bit wry. Dan was always surprised by things, but never shocked. And he never put out.

This was the man that Billy fell for, four years later, by which time, Dan was moving into the fine art scene. Billy fell for a man who was discarding his former self before he had found a new one, a man who dabbled in guy sex but who still loved his girlfriend. He fell for a liar and a believer, though what Dan believed in was always hard to say.

So pale and ethereal when he arrived, by the end of the summer we thought there was something freakish about Dan: this very ascetic head, with proud — savage, almost — cheekbones. He looked liked the wrath of God, Billy told him once, when the light was right. And Dan laughed and said, ‘You have no idea.’

If Fire Island was an aberration, then it would be his last because Isabelle was about to finish up in Boston, she would be back in New York at the end of July. When the boys came back to the city they had ten days to kiss and part, which should have been enough, because Billy liked to keep moving and Dan wasn’t gay, he was just very visual. In those ten days, they did it all: they found a perfect coffee place off Christopher Street, and a wine bar on Bleecker. They bought Billy a pair of art deco bedside lockers in this beautiful yellow wood that turned out to be English yew. They saw The Double Life of Véronique and The Commitments, they went to the Frick where Dan stood in front of Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap for the first time. And, when they went back to Billy’s place, they had conversations that lasted till dawn. They had bitterness and blame and pointless sex. They had sudden sex. They had sex-while-weeping, and tender sex, and rough sex, and leave-taking sex. And then Isabelle came back to town.

But it was not Isabelle that did for Billy in the summer of 1991, it was the way he could not reach Dan, no matter how deep he fucked him, as though all the gestures of their love were beautiful and untrue. It was not as if Billy was looking for anything long term, but he was looking for something in that moment. Recognition. The feeling that what they were doing was real to Dan too.

Oh Danny Boy.

Of course he was charming. Of course he was beautiful. Of course.

When Isabelle came back, she and Dan took a flight to California, where some friends were staging a wedding in Big Sur. Billy had another offer for Fire Island, but he could not face Fire Island, and he did not go back on the scene. He did have sex with a guy on Saturday night, but coming made him feel like he was reaching for something that melted in his hands. So he visited with Greg, who would not venture too far from his air-con, and they sat around and did not mention where Billy had been for the past few weeks, while Jessie wiped down the counters in the kitchenette and glared at him, for being too easily forgiven when he arrived — so hunky in his wife-beater vest — at the door.

Greg had gained some weight. He didn’t do that smacking thing with his mouth any more, as though tasting some residue. He sat in his big lounge chair with a careless leg hooked over the arm, and was enthusiastic now, even about his disease.

‘Oh God,’ he said, when Billy told him he looked great. Greg said he was so anxious now, all the time, he was tossing down the Xanax, and there was a drug called Demerol, this opiate they doled out, that made him feel just wonderful. He felt as though we were all connected.

It was enough, said Greg, to make you want to go back in there, all you had to do was make it into the elevator and then up to Sister Patricia who enfolded you with love, and then there would be the Demerol to fill you up with love on the inside. He said he had switched allegiances, Dr Torres was a prince but Sister Patricia was the person into whose eyes.

He paused and tried again.

Into whose eyes.

Billy leaned in as though to show his own eyes, faithful unto death, but Greg twitched away and said he was thinking about getting some therapy, though — and he chewed down on the words as he quoted Celeste the tranny nurse saying. ‘Nothing makes a girl look more relaxed than a few pints of embalming fluid.’

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘She said that?’

‘Oh, you got to love Celeste,’ said Greg, and Billy glanced over at Jessie, who forbore.

Billy’s heart did not start to break until the day he knew that Dan was back in town after the wedding in California, and that he would not be in touch. And Billy’s heart did not break properly for a week or two after that when he realised it was not disappointment he had been feeling, but hope, and that this hope was fading with the turning weather. Soon, soon it would be true. Dan would not have called. Besides, if Dan missed him, then he could just go out and find a guy who looked a bit like Billy, and pull his damn zipper down. And that was supposed to be fine. Because if Dan came out, he would be happy, and every gay man in New York would be happy, and the world would be, by so much authenticity, improved.

But Billy did not care if Dan was out or in, any more. All he felt was the weight of Dan’s head on his solar plexus, there on the beach, the waves dumping their heavy load of water, and the sea pulling it back, over and over. And he wanted Dan to meet Greg again, before he died.

But September passed and Dan did not call.

Various things happened. Massimo went off with Mandy to her family bolt-hole in the Caribbean, Billy held a dinner party which was a qualified success. Arthur published his book on Bonnard and wept for Max (who had detested Bonnard: who spat at the mention of Bonnard) at the launch. Then Emily von Raabs came to town and she hosted a large and informal supper in her wonderfully ramshackle house on East 10th. Emily had loved Christian, back in the day, so Greg brought Billy along as a kind of protection from all that, but the Countess had a new favourite young man now, an Irish dealer called Corban, who was the most charming man you could hope to meet. And Corban brought his old friend Isabelle, and Isabelle brought her interesting boyfriend Dan.

Emily Gräfin von Raabs (originally from Ohio, now from everywhere) sat sixteen around an old oval table and kept everything simple. A main course was set, buffet style on a sideboard at the top of the room, salad was passed from left to right; it was very homely and hands-on with just one server topping up the wine.

She had Richard Serra next to her, and he was incredibly handsome and, dare one say, monumental. And Kiki Smith was there, which always improved things. Artists, Greg said, are like wild animals in a room like that; it is like being in a a forest, suddenly, instead of a zoo.

As for the rest of us, the wine went down and the volume went up and the question that idled around the table was: Who has slept with whom? And of course it does not matter, because past sex is not as exciting as future sex, it is just a low hum under the melody of what is yet to come. Billy looked Isabelle over, when they moved through the double doors for coffee: the unreliable little ribcage, with a pair of those flat little triangular breasts like flesh origami: also lumpy bits from waist to hip where her underwear was a bit too pragmatic — she would look better without, he thought, though Isabelle was not the sort of girl who would ever go without. The most surprising thing about her were the shoes, which were black to match the rest of the outfit, but with fabulous, bloody red soles. She walked in them like a child playing dress-up.

Well, each to his own, Billy thought and he met Dan’s eye with the easy lack of interest he had learned all his life to show. He said, ‘You know Gregory Savalas? Greg does the Clements’ estate. And now Max Ehring’s, am I right?’

They might as well have never met, never kissed. That was the code.

‘Oh no,’ said Greg. ‘That’s legally all very. That will take a while. I’m just, literally, collating what’s there.’

‘So sad,’ said Dan. ‘I am one of Ehring’s biggest fans.’

‘You are? That’s nice to hear.’

‘I am. I just think the work has such vitality, you know? So hard to believe he is gone.’

‘Yes,’ said Greg. ‘He was a dear friend.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dan.

They stood there. Greg who loved Billy Walker and Billy who loved Dan Madigan and Dan who loved Isabelle McBride. He really did.

And Isabelle, who felt self-conscious for some reason she could not identify, took another slug of wine.

‘You know he left hundreds of uncatalogued pieces, just thrown about,’ said Greg. ‘Of course we left the main studio just exactly as it was.’

‘That’s amazing,’ said Dan.

Billy couldn’t stand it. He had slept with both these men, and they were talking horse-shit: they were speaking some kind of non-language to each other.

‘I can’t help wondering,’ he said, ‘if dying wasn’t the best thing to happen to Max. As an artist, I mean. Is that a terrible thing to say?’

Greg blinked, slowly. He turned to Dan. ‘You know, sometimes I think I am in the wrong business,’ he said. ‘Because I would prefer if Max painted nothing and was still here. Alive, I mean. I would prefer him to be alive. Even if he was just, you know, serving the wine.’

‘You do? I mean, you would?’ Dan seemed genuinely surprised.

Isabelle, as though used to this slight gap between her boyfriend and the world, reached over and pressed Greg’s hand.

‘You are so right,’ she said.

‘Is he?’ said Dan, persisting.

‘Yes he is,’ she said.

And Greg turned aside, briefly, to hide his tears.

It was two days after this encounter that Irish Dan turned up at young Billy’s door — ashamed of himself, clearly. They had sex but didn’t like each other for it, and afterwards Dan went home.

‘Everybody dies.’

This is what he had said in Emily von Raab’s drawing room, after Greg had pinched the tears back with finger and thumb.

‘You die of something,’ said Dan. ‘You die young, you die old, it is not the fact that you die that matters. It is what you do that matters. What you make.’

It was not clear who he was trying to convince.

‘I didn’t know you liked his work so much,’ said Isabelle.

And Greg thought about the corpse, laid out on a trestle table in the studio, in his working overalls and boots, how it looked nothing like Max, because Max was all movement and annoyance. Max was a constant pain in the ass.

‘I respect the work,’ said Dan. ‘The work is not beautiful, and I would prefer if it were beautiful. The work is violent and garish and he put everything he had into it, and I respect that.’

‘Right,’ Isabelle said.

‘Also, you know, the work is of the moment. This moment. I like that. I need that. I think if we don’t have that we are just travelling blind.’

Dan’s hands were in the air, he was making the big gestures, and there he was again, the priest, offering it all, demanding it all: truth, beauty, everlasting life.

Or six months on a wall at MOMA, Greg thought, followed by a thousand years in storage, somewhere undisclosed.

Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what he got. At midnight, he was back out on the street and heading home.

That was the 5th of November. Eight days later, he came back for more. Then a short two days after that. He managed to stay away for another week. On the 21st of November, Billy picked up the intercom and said, ‘Fuck you, Dan.’ But he buzzed him in anyway. Three nights later, he came down the stairs to the front door, and said, ‘Let’s walk.’

The streets were wet and the air clear after rain. The boys’ winter coats were both open to the mild night, their long scarves hung down, blue and green. Dan said he was fighting with Isabelle. That was one of the reasons she had gone to Boston, they had been fighting for maybe two years. Also she had met someone up there, a guy, who was, incidentally, as queer as all get out, which was not the outcome he had wanted for Isabelle, but it was her choice, so maybe it had been a terrific waste of time, his feeling guilty all those years.

‘Have you told her?’

‘Told her what?’ said Dan. ‘I love her. I have always loved her. And I fucked her willingly. And none of that is a lie.’

They ended up kissing up against a chain link fence, in a deserted lot by the East River, hands sliding in each other’s come, waiting to be knifed by a passer-by.

So that was it. Dan went home at Christmas a new man and he came back to New York ready for more. He found Billy laid low with a cold and made him a hot whiskey to the Irish recipe with lemon and cloves, and he beefed on about his family, his mother who was the usual nightmare, his sister who was pregnant again and developing a martyred air.

‘When do you grow out of it?’ he said. ‘When is all that done?’

Billy sat up in a pair of pyjamas with a stripe of powder blue, his blond hair tousled with sweat and a thermometer sticking out of his mouth. He had been over at Massimo’s with Greg the day after Christmas, he said, and Mandy brought one of the Kennedys up — the really handsome one? — they had talked about Castro all afternoon, because, you know, Castro knew.

‘Huh,’ said Dan, jealous as hell.

Billy said he went to this enormous party on one of the piers for New Year’s Eve and met so many people, half of them in drag.

‘Drag?’ said Dan.

‘I was not in drag,’ said Billy. ‘Though I did — briefly, mind you — sport a fetching white tutu. No I was in my faithful 501s.’

‘Well that’s good to hear,’ said Dan.

‘Are you checking up on me?’ said Billy, and both of them paused right there. They were not ready for cutesie domesticity. Not yet.

‘No,’ said Dan.

‘Though I did catch this cold,’ said Billy. ‘So maybe you have a point.’

When Greg rang the next day, Billy was still feeling unwell — which was the wrong way around for them, really: they did not prolong the call. It was the offer of happiness, perhaps, that kept Dan away. For whatever reason, no one saw Billy for another seventy-two hours, when a passing neighbour heard his door open, and looked back to see him sliding down the side of it, before falling out behind her, into the hall.

In St Vincent’s, they took one look at him and sent him up to the seventh floor.

The news spread fast. Massimo rang Greg. He said Mandy was in with that dancer who used to be with Pina Bausch, and she could not believe it, she was walking down the corridor and there was a guy pulling at his breathing tube and trying to sit up and he was making quite a noise. And it was Billy.

‘Billy?’ said Greg. ‘No. Are you sure?’

Mandy had actually gone in to him, he was so agitated, and she you know pushed him back down, tried to soothe him a little, and it was Billy. Full-blown PCP.

‘I don’t think it could be Billy,’ said Greg, who was going through his kitchen cupboard, looking for something.

‘Oh Greg, I’m so sorry,’ said Massimo, and Greg stopped looking in the cupboard and said, ‘Billy?’

He grabbed a coat and took a cab over there and he walked the corridor thinking nothing could be worse than this: beyond the disease, this was the worst thing life could throw at him. He checked one bed after the other, and then he stopped in the middle of the corridor and he thought, It wasn’t me — we were careful. It wasn’t me. After a moment he walked on again, and his mind told him that his own dying would be easier now. Because death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Everyone dies.

It’s the timing that matters. The first and second of it. The order in which we go.

And there was Billy’s blond head, and there was his chest, pushed evenly up and let mechanically down again, his mouth crammed with the breathing tube so he could not speak, though the wild look he gave to Greg was more vivid than words. Greg could not let his gaze go, he held on to it as he pulled a chair under himself and sat in by the bed.

Arthur arrived next, and Jessie an hour later — redoubtable, she had somehow gained access to Billy’s apartment and brought a bag of stuff for him, his address book was there, thick with Wite-Out, like everyone’s address book in those days, and there, surrounded by dancing shamrocks, was the listing: DAN!!

‘I’ll call him,’ she said. Billy understood that too, and he blinked in gratitude, and then he checked back for Greg’s eyes and settled into his gaze, after which, he did not look away.

Ten minutes later, she was back in the room.

‘You all right?’ said Arthur, and Jessie, floating on some new sadness, said, ‘He’s on his way.’

They sat in silence, broken only by the sad crinkle of a packet of Chee-tos that Jessie found in her bag, and time went by.

Jessie never spoke about the call she made to Dan, how polite he was, and unsurprised. It took her years to figure it out. The feeling she had talking to him, as though Dan knew, had known all along, that there was nothing remarkable — in fact there was something almost satisfying — in the fact that Billy was dying. How did he fool her out of the news, make her feel as though she was forming sounds rather than actual words? How long before she could say the obvious thing?

‘I think you should come in.’

‘When is visiting time?’ said Dan and she said, ‘Any time. There’s no set time on the sevens.’

‘Right,’ said Dan. ‘I just have to wrap up here,’ at which point Jessie was tempted to slam down the phone. The whole conversation was so flat and strange, Jessie put it out of her mind as they sat with Billy for the next hour and another hour after that, all the way past midnight. Greg did not leave the bedside. He did not let go of Billy’s hand. He refused food, ignored everyone around him. At ten past three in the morning he started to sing, very quietly, and when Billy recognised the tune he tried to smile up at him, and died.

After that, no one saw Dan for years. We did not blame him. At least, we tried not to blame him. These things are very hard.

Constance, Co. Limerick, 1997

CONSTANCE STILL COULD not believe the new section of road, after years of bad corners and blind spots, you just pointed the car and went — it was as though the fields unzipped, to let you straight through.

It used to be so epic, the four children in the back of the old Cortina, watching for a sign the journey was nearly done: a big plane lowering into the marshland at Shannon, then the castle at Bunratty, full of Americans in their broad plaid pants, and Durty Nelly’s, the yellow pub, squatting by the bridge.

Now Constance was past it all in a moment. The castle was still beautiful but it looked very exposed to the dual carriageway, and she missed the thrill of the old bridge. Her friend Lauren used to sing at the medieval banquets in Bunratty. It wasn’t just her voice, they used to audition the girls to fit the velvet dresses, at least that’s what Lauren said, who had to double as a serving wench between bouts of ‘Danny Boy’.

‘The sight of them’, she used to say, because Americans had no table manners, but they tipped like crazy, and all the men made passes, never mind the rotated dress. Her last summer there, Lauren worked on French tours in the Folk Park and now she was in Strasbourg for the EU, she was going to work in Prada trousers. Though maybe they hired the translators to fit the trousers — who knew?

It was a bitter thought, but the blouse she put on that morning was her last good blouse and Constance had to add a scarf to hide the place where the buttons gaped over breasts that had done their time.

They’ve done their time, she thought, closing the mirror on the wardrobe door.

She would do.

Constance used to be pleased with the body that had given her so many surprises, over the years. There were evenings she lay on the sofa with one child paddling her stomach, another pushing, in a tranced sort of way against the fatty side of her chest. Shauna, her youngest, liked to sit on the floor and pluck at her calf, making it wobble from side to side. And, ‘No! Not the belly button!’ Their little fingers pouncing, Constance shrieking and wriggling away. Fun for all the family, she thought, her body was a fabulous object, even Dessie her husband seemed to relish it. But Constance was fed up with herself. And fat, she knew, was a toxic thing.

The traffic snarled up on the approach into Limerick. Constance saw the broad river to the left of her and remembered, of a sudden, that she had forgotten to take the salmon out of the freezer.

‘Damn,’ she said, and switched off the radio. She would have to buy something else for dinner, on the way home.

But she was on the right side of the city for Dooradoyle, and the traffic was easy all the way to the hospital. Constance found a parking space not far from Outpatients, and brushed the crumbs from off her last good blouse. Then she gathered her bag and her coat and pulled herself out of the car into the heaviness of the walking world.

Inside the hospital building, she set her feet to follow the nice yellow arrows on the floor, one after the other, as though she would get marks, somehow, for being on time and good. But,You eejit, she thought, as she arrived to find the queue already stretching down the corridor. They called a batch of women for ten o’clock, but they all turned up at half past nine because they knew something Constance had forgotten about Outpatients. This was the price she paid for a healthy life, Constance thought — she had been lucky. The woman after her had come in from Adare and the traffic was beyond belief. Roadworks, she said.

Their files were stacked on a trolley in two slanting rows and the nurse in charge was working hard, keeping up the banter as she passed with folders and X-rays.

‘Oh I love the glitter! We’re not allowed nail polish, would you believe. I miss it!’

There was no way of telling how long each woman would spend in the room across the corridor. A few came out and headed straight for the exit, but if a woman in a white coat came out first, then they followed the big brown envelope she held to join a new queue on a banquette further down the way. These women wore hospital gowns that gaped at the back and carried their tops and coats in a plastic shopping basket which they set on the ground in front of them. Some of them were quite young. Constance wasn’t the youngest there that morning, not by any means.

The woman sitting beside her had very big thighs, one of which pressed against Constance, as it overspilt the narrow confines of the orange stackable chair. The fat was a little cooler than you might expect, but it contained a secret warmth, and was surprisingly pleasant for being so soft. Constance started to doze in the thick hospital air. That smell — whatever they used to clean the floors. Some sweetness in it, like the smell of your own body, after a child is born.

She was back on the road at Bunratty, cutting through the fields — the impossible ease of it — and she remembered the undoing of her own bones as the children were born. Her pelvis opening — there was a pleasure in it, like the top of a yawn — as the baby twisted out of her. It was all so simply done. And the baby was such a force, each time. Donal, with a grumpy look on him, Shauna who came out in a blaze of red hair, and her sweet-natured middle son, Rory, who turned his mother into a bit of dual carriageway herself, at the last, with such a bad tear. He took both exits, as she said to Dessie, at the same time.

‘How is all that?’ said Dessie a couple of years later. And Constance just laughed.

‘How is all that?’ she mocked. And then, ‘It’s all fine.’

Because it was true. It was fine. Her body had been so clever and self-healing. It had been so good to her, and willing to go again.

Or stupid, perhaps. Her body was a stupid thing.

The woman beside reached down into a plastic bag, and found a bottle of water. She was wearing boots with no laces under a large cheesecloth skirt and when she took off the too-tight cardigan you saw that the cuffs of her blouse didn’t go around her wrists. She pushed the sleeves up in the hospital heat and unscrewed the bottle of water and, as she did so, Constance noticed some stripes on her forearm: silvery, like the negative of a tattoo, with a faint flush of red along the edges. They were all going across the way and the effect was not unattractive until you realised the stripes were scars and that they were self-inflicted. Some of them were very old and very wide — you could date the things, like the rings in a tree — they spread as she grew. One of these ancient scars had been freshly recut, and Constance felt her own skin tighten at the thought of it. A pain shot the length of her thighs — or not a pain so much as a weakness, a sympathetic jolt. Sudden, and then over. She stirred in the plastic chair and it was gone.

The woman lifted the water bottle, then looked her way.

‘One fifty,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Constance, trying to look back at her.

‘For water!’

She avoided the woman’s neck and chest, hovered along her hairline, before settling on her eyes. It was a lived-in face, ordinary enough. Unmarked.

‘They have you every way,’ said Constance.

The woman was trying to lose a bit, she said. She had a wedding coming up in England and she had a great outfit she found in Marks and Spencers and she just had to lose a bit to get into the skirt. She could get into it all right, she just had to zip it up. The thing was, she had terrible bloat.

She looked across the corridor as she talked about the weight, her head swaying slightly from side to side like a boxer’s.

‘What you need is, you know, a Playtex thing,’ said Constance.

‘Huh.’

‘Some kind of elastic knickers, anyway. Pull you right in.’

The woman glanced round at her, suspicious.

‘You know the ones,’ said Constance.

‘Oh yeah right.’

The woman did not have breast cancer, Constance thought. Clearly not. Or if she had it would just be coincidence. A double tragedy. The woman was a hypochondriac, she was someone who liked to queue. You could not cure her because there was nothing wrong with her. Apart from everything, of course. Everything was wrong with her. And then, what do you do?

Her own hand was on her breast now, before she was even aware of it, at the place where it merged with her armpit; she could feel the lace of her bra, and under that a softness, and under that again vague knots.

But she really wanted the woman to enjoy her day out. She thought she deserved that much. Not to look stupid in a stupid skirt that she should not have bought in the first place, because it did not fit.

‘Have you got a hat?’ she said.

‘You know, I don’t?’ she said. ‘I am that desperate.’

‘What colour?’

‘I wanted red,’ she said. ‘With the spotty netting and the feathers? But they don’t do red.’

‘No,’ said Constance, thinking there was a good reason for that. ‘Have you considered black?’

But before she could dismiss the idea out of hand, the nurse called: ‘Margaret Dolan!’ and with much rummaging and bag gathering the woman collected herself and got up out of the chair. At the grey door, she turned back to say, ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck,’ said Constance. And the woman looked suddenly passionate, destined, before she turned again and was gone.

‘She has a wedding coming up,’ Constance said to the woman from Adare. And they both settled back in for the wait.

The women were in there two at a time, one with the radiologist, one getting undressed in the changing room outside, so Constance did not know how Margaret Dolan had fared by the time she was called through the door. She faced the back wall of the little curtained cubicle and took off her cardigan, then her blouse. She put them in the basket with her coat and bag and she inserted her arms into the sleeves of the hospital gown, then she sat on the little bench and waited again, facing the curtain. Now that she was private, she lifted the gown and felt her breast properly, looking for the spot. The thing moved like it was full of liquid, or gel, with odd densities in its depths, most of them anchored to her chest wall. She did not, the GP told her, have especially lumpy breasts, but Constance did think it was a bit porridgy in there, and though she liked the look of breasts — even her own, indeed — although she saw something elegant in the orb of them, she wondered what men wanted when they wanted to push a woman’s chest around. Her fingertips tested each little lump, checking for sensation, and then they found the place: a small, slippery mass like a piece of gristle, that moved around and did not answer her touch. This was the thing to look for: a part of you that could not feel. Just a tiny part. And the reason it could not feel was that it was not you.

Constance did not have cancer. It was just a cyst or duct, some change since the children. She was thirty-seven, for God’s sake. She had three children and a husband to look after, not to mention her widowed mother. Constance did not have the time for cancer.

She would be fine.

But it was hard to keep steady, all the same. She was about to blurt something to the nurse who pulled the curtain back; something mad. Who will look after the children if I die? But of course she said nothing.

The nurse invited her out on to a chair and went over her details: Constance McGrath, address, date of birth, next of kin.

‘Dessie McGrath,’ she said. ‘Same address.’

‘Contact number?’

Constance gave her Dessie’s mobile number, which felt like an oddly intimate thing to do. ‘But don’t call him, all right? This kind of stuff gives him the flu.’

‘Ah,’ said the nurse.

Constance felt a twinge of betrayal, though it was true that Dessie went a bit peculiar whenever she was sick. There was no escaping it: he spent all night checking his pulse and ended up with multiple sclerosis. Which was just funny, really. She knew it was because he cared.

‘Any medications?’ said the nurse.

Constance was on a little something that was nobody’s business but her own. ‘No,’ she said.

Then the nurse made a few more marks on her file, and left. She came back to call Constance through the final door, where a woman waited beside a big white machine. It was the radiologist, and she gave Constance a smile: a woman in her thirties with beautiful highlights and lowlights, she seemed kind. The hair was expensive, mind you; about a hundred and fifty quid, right there, growing out of her head.

‘You can slip off the gown for me,’ she said, because people were always ‘slipping’ in and out of things in hospitals, no one ever just took off their clothes. But the cotton felt light as it left her: Constance put it on a chair and turned around.

There was no trace of the scarred woman in the room, but the recent fact of her made Constance grateful, as she walked up to the machine, for the lesser disaster of her bare torso at thirty-seven, thinking, This is the chest my husband loves and my children will love for a few years yet, and I never loved it, not much, why should I?

Not that she would wish them gone.

‘And where is the area of concern?’ said the radiologist as she scooped a breast up on to the glass-covered platform.

The radiologist did not wear gloves but her little hand was so easy and expert that Constance felt almost soothed by it. The last person she had touched was the woman with all the scars and Constance tried to imagine what all that looked like, or felt like, up close. She wanted to know about the cutting and where, on her body, did it stop. So many different people, and the stories their bodies held. She wondered how many times a day the radiologist lifted this part of a woman on to the ledge of her machine, and pressed the top plate down to the point of pain. She judged it well, at any rate. At just the moment Constance drew in a sharp breath, she disappeared behind the control panel and its protective window; there was a buzzing, then a beep, and the machine, as though shocked at its own behaviour, let her go.

All the time, there was chat, which would annoy you, if you were the type to be annoyed.

‘Oh I love the Aran Islands,’ she said, as she lifted Constance’s arm up over the top of the machine.

‘Now I know that feels a little too high, but just bear with me. No, I went there on a school trip, would you believe, and I loved it. At sixteen.’

The Perspex descended as the radiologist worked Constance into position and she was gone behind the desk before Constance could say how much she too loved the Aran Islands, their peaceable flatness that made them at one with the weather.

‘If you like it wet,’ she said, as the machine beeped, and took fright, and let her go.

‘Oh indeed.’

‘I’ll just put a little biro mark on, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Just to say.’ Though say what she did not clarify and, when Constance looked down, she saw four dots in a neat square marking the place where she thought the lump might be.

Everything seemed to happen very fast.

Before she knew it, the radiologist was looking up at a screen, and pressing buttons in a definitive way.

‘Can you see anything?’ Constance said.

‘Em. The doctor will have a look for you. That could be. It could be the kind of thing you could just work out. I could just work it out for you.’

This made no sense at all to Constance, who said, ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face, some days, when the mist comes in.’

‘You can slip on your gown for me now,’ said the radiologist, and she checked that Constance was decently covered before opening a door to a side room.

‘Bríd will bring you up to the ultrasound, all righty?’

And there was the technician in the white coat, holding the envelope. At least Constance assumed she was a technician because the coat was not the cleanest and she was a little unkempt, but she could be head of the department for all Constance knew.

‘I wish I was there now. Don’t you?’ said the radiologist. She was talking about the Aran Islands.

‘Anywhere but here,’ said Constance. It was supposed to be a joke but her voice sounded a bit sudden and aggressive, and both the hospital women seemed saddened by this. It was not their fault that people got cancer. If anything, the opposite was the case. It was hard to be so misunderstood.

Constance followed the technician, her eyes on the big brown envelope, her gown barely fastened at the back, and she sat beside Margaret Dolan on the banquette.

‘My God,’ she said.

‘Well that’s that bit done,’ said Constance.

‘Dear Jesus God almighty,’ she said. ‘I thought I was in for my womb.’ Then she talked about her bloat again. There was no stopping her. Something had been unleashed by their shared experience of the big white machine.

‘Oh dear,’ said Constance. ‘Oh dear,’ sneaking her fingers under her sleeve, to check her little wristwatch. Half past twelve.

No one knew she was here. Not Dessie, who had clearly forgotten what day it was. Not her mother. Not her friends who were were all scattered now. Eileen in America, Martha Hingerty in London, and Lauren in Strasbourg — the last to go. They were so rarely home. By the time Constance caught up with them, all her news had gone stale.

And what was her news?

She had cancer. Or, she did not have cancer.

But that wasn’t the point, exactly. Constance realised it was for the girls she had been saving the details: the radiologist’s highlights, the unhygienic look of the technician’s coat, the woman who thought she was in for her womb. There was no use telling Dessie, who would not see the connection between the cost of a haircut and the lump in your breast. Only the girls could run with the ironies, the ‘Oh my God’ of it all. They had been a gang since school.

Eileen Foley, Martha Hingerty, Lauren O’Dea. When they finished their Leaving cert they all went up to Dublin together, while Constance stayed back a year to repeat her exams and work behind the counter in the Medical Hall. And it was the loneliest year of her life. Constance was supposed to study Pharmacy, but she couldn’t get into Pharmacy, and when she failed for a second time there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth in Ardeevin. Her uncle Bart finally took pity on her and swung her a job in a big chemist’s on Grafton Street so she should learn about the business side of things before coming back home. But Constance had no intention of coming back to the Medical Hall. Eileen Foley was saving for New York and, at nineteen, Constance was going there too.

She arrived at the flat in Baggot Street with a huge and tatty suitcase and, after all the shouty, funny letters, she discovered the place was indeed a kip and the others were rarely around. Constance suffered much tension about the rent which her friends did not seem to share; Lauren turning up one Saturday morning with a stained cheque saying, ‘Did you not get this?’ as though it was Constance who had let things slide. But it was worth it for the wildness of being with the girls unleashed — Lauren especially, who went through the men they met like the world was on sale and they were a rail of clothes.

Awful!

Hmmm.

Nothing was right.

Look, oh he’s gorgeous, Oh no! He doesn’t fit.

Constance could never figure out what the problem was — either they were too keen or they didn’t call — but there was no persuading people about such things, you can’t order someone to fall in love.

Constance wasn’t sure what she liked herself, when it came to men, though she knew what she wanted. She wanted to have sex on Irish soil. Her virginity, she declared, was not getting on the plane with her to JFK. Constance was working in Dublin city centre and every customer who walked in the door came in with a look on their face and a prescription for condoms folded four times. They came in to town so their local chemist would not know. It was like working in a porn shop, she said. They bought hundreds of the things. Ribbed for extra pleasure. They bought lubricant from behind the counter, where it sat between suppositories and steroidal creams. Some of it was flavoured.

‘Stop!’

‘Oh no!’

Lauren said that lubricant was a sign of an old or a frigid wife. Though the girls all took a tube, when Constance offered them around, along with many illegal packets of Durex, both plain and multicoloured.

Despite the fact that Constance was living in sex central, the men who came up to her till ran away from her. It wasn’t just that they would not flirt, they wouldn’t even look her in the eye. It was all so unthrilling. She went out for a couple of weeks with a Malaysian guy from the College of Surgeons she met at a medical do. Constance would have done anything he asked, but he didn’t ask, and then, somehow, he was gone. To cheer her up, the girls went for cocktails in the Coconut Grove with some suburban rugby types who were all chasing Lauren. They ordered from a drinks menu and the men paid and they clinked glasses and laughed before Constance was roughly deflowered in the back seat of a car by a man whose big fingers had grown around the signet on his pinkie and also around his wedding ring. When Constance threw up afterwards, it came out blue. The guy, whose manners were impeccable, put her in a taxi home.

‘Make sure she gets in safe,’ he said, and pressed some notes into her hand to cover the fare. He even rang a few days later to ask if he might see her again. Constance, standing by the payphone in the hall in Baggot Street, suffered a moment of absolute confusion. Like maybe she was in some sort of parallel universe, and this guy was in the real world. He certainly sounded real.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Lovely. Where?’

In the end she stood him up. She lay face down on her bed and hung on to the mattress, as though it might start to spin and throw her off. She imagined him under Bewley’s clock in his sheepskin jacket, standing in the rain.

It was rape, she thought now, or it would have been, if she had known how to say no. Not a word she was ever reared to use, let’s face it: What do you mean, ‘No’? And the men who bought lots of KY but no condoms were probably gay, that was another thing Constance realised, many years later. And it seemed to her a raw business, penetration — at least in those days, when the body was such a stupid place: when her skin was the most intelligent thing about her, for knowing how to blush, and she could not even name herself below the waist.

‘I’d say that one’s got bad news.’

‘Sorry?’

‘She’s been in there for ages,’ said Margaret Dolan. ‘She’s in a very long time.

‘Has she?’

Constance listened for tears or wails from the ultrasound room.

‘Maybe they’re on a coffee break.’

‘Huh.’ Margaret reached behind her and put a scratching hand in through the gap in the gown.

‘They saw us coming,’ she said.

Constance still liked Ireland, the way you could talk to anyone. It would not be the same in America, she thought, and tried to remember why she failed to get on the plane. Mostly it was the price. The ticket cost maybe £200, which was a huge sum of money in those days. And though Constance saved like crazy, it was hard to save much when you were out having a good time — even when it wasn’t such a good time, because the guy in the sheepskin jacket knocked something out of her, too, some carelessness. Constance lost her taste for adventure for a while, after the Coconut Grove.

If she had gone to New York she would not be worried about cancer now. She would have been jogging for years, living on wheatgrass, she would have a yoga ‘practice’, maybe even a personal trainer, and her children would be — she could not imagine what her New York children would have been like — whiny, at a guess, that mixture of anxiety and entitlement you saw in city kids. Her children would be fewer. Her children would not exist. Their souls would call to her from the eyes of strangers, as though they’d found some other way into the world. She would turn in the street to look at them twice: who are you?

She went last year with Dessie. On a shopping trip, no less. Constance told everyone about it — her hairdresser, the man who delivered eggs, the other mothers at the school gate. ‘We’re going on a shopping trip. To New York’, and they got on the plane at Shannon as though it was a perfectly simple thing to do. This was the place you went to get a whole new life, and all she got was a couple of Eileen Fisher cardigans in lilac and grey. Not that this was a terrible thing. They were really useful cardigans. She and Dessie stayed with her brother Dan on a fold-out bed in his apartment in Brooklyn, and it was quite a large apartment, apparently (Dessie did not mention the 4,000 square feet he was building out in Aughavanna). It was also just around the corner from ‘the best ever cherry ice cream’, Dan said, because for Dan, in his New York mode, things were always ‘amazing’ or ‘just the best’. The ice cream confused Constance slightly, the cherries were delicious but the full fat cream left a greasy coating in her mouth.

‘Isn’t it the best?’ said Dan. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Lovely,’ she said. Thinking, Is it for this you left?

Was it for the ice cream?

She thought that Dan was a bit of a hypocrite for liking things so wildly, or pretending to like them. And she started to feel inadequate to the menu in her hand. They went to a kind of brasserie that served a modern take on Jewish food, all gefilte fish and matzo balls, and that was supposed to be ‘amazing’ too. But it was just food. It was a long way to travel, she thought, for dumplings. Her enjoyment was soured, Constance knew, by the years she had spent yearning to go, and not going, selling condoms to men who did not want to sleep with her — the Baggot Street years, time she spent pretending to be a student, when she really wasn’t a student, she was a shop-girl, which was to say, a girl who was waiting to get married. Four years out of school the waiting (which had been dreadful) was over. Constance was courted by Dessie McGrath every time she went down home and she ended up going down home more often, just to feel his arms about her.

And she still liked the feel of them. Balding, blunt-spoken Dessie McGrath. Three children on, he had moved sex to the mornings — even this morning, indeed — because it set him up for the day, he said. Constance would sleep again afterwards while he went down to his little office and some time later, whistling in the afterglow, he might get the children up and out for school. Constance liked stretching between the sheets to the sound of their chatter, only to pause and remember what she and Dessie had been up to, a couple of hours before. She kept the memory of him inside her all day. It was there now, if she wanted to think about it, washed as she was, with her underarms scraped for the doctor, and naked to the waist under her hospital gown. Who would have thought? Constance was not a fabulous looking woman, and Dessie was not a fabulous looking man, and that was the laugh of it, really. They were lucky. Because what was the point of looking sexy if you never got any sex, as happened often enough. Even to Lauren, who was always turning men down.

Constance remembered telling her about Dessie, the way she sort of hooted.

‘Dessie? Dessie McGrath?’ Then later she said, ‘He’s really nice.’ And she meant it. And she sounded sad.

On the other side of the corridor, the technician in the white coat came out carrying an envelope and the woman who followed her ducked her head as she turned towards the next queue on the banquette. She lifted her fingers to her breastbone, with her head inclined, like some painting of the Virgin Mary that Constance remembered. She tipped herself lightly there as though to say, My life is not my own.

‘So who’s getting married?’ Constance said to Margaret Dolan.

‘Sorry?’

‘The wedding.’

‘Oh, the wedding. My daughter.’

‘My goodness,’ said Constance. ‘Mother of the bride.’

‘Hah,’ she said. She leaned forward, so her bare back swelled out of the open gown and she rubbed her hurt hands together.

‘I have a girl,’ said Constance.

But the woman did not hear. She was talking about the bridesmaids, who would be in lilac to match the bride’s black hair. She was worried about her daughter’s asthma, the way her sinuses blew up on her whenever she was stressed.

‘Oh dear,’ said Constance.

Other people’s children can be very dull, her own mother liked to say. And it was sort of true. Constance remembered Lauren the year she moved to Strasbourg, sitting in the kitchen with a big glass of white, talking about ski trips and restaurants and skinny French women with their horror of plastic surgery. One child teething and the other going behind the sofa for a quiet poo, and Lauren sort of elaborately unsympathetic to all this, talking about the difference between a pink tinted foundation and one that was a bit more yellow.

‘What age is Rory, again? Three?’

Even her own mother listened without listening.

‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she would say, when there was some little problem. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

But it was not a long time ago for Constance, who was still in it. Whose children were coming up to teenagers now, with no gap — or none that she could discern — between breast-feeding and breast cancer, between tending and dying. Who did not know what else she could do.

‘Do something!’ said her mother.

Rosaleen believed a woman should be interesting. She should keep her figure, and always listen to the news.

‘Like what?’

‘Take up horse riding.’

‘Right,’ said Constance. Her mother had always wanted a daughter who looked good on a pony, or a daughter who did ballet, like a daughter in a book. Rosaleen always had a paperback on the go, opera on the radio, cuttings rooting in pots on the windowsills and overflowing on to the floor. Which was hardly the McGrath style — living, as they did, in bungalow bliss down the road.

‘You are so lucky,’ she used to say. Meaning something else entirely.

But she was also right. Constance was lucky. Trips to New York were just the tip of the iceberg, Constance was spoilt with tickets to Bruce Springsteen and the Galway Races, a leg of lamb brought home on Friday, chocolates if she wanted them or No chocolates! As soon as they could afford it Dessie found a girl to help with the housework, and if one sister-in-law went to Prague, the other went to Paris, because in the years she had known them the McGraths did well and then better yet. There was no stopping them. If Constance got her chairs reupholstered, some other Mrs McGrath would discover minimalism, and a third would be into shabby chic and, somehow, she would have to start all over again.

‘They are driving me nuts,’ she would say to her mother and the pair of them would laugh at the jumped-upness of the McGrath clan, the auctioneer, the quantity surveyor, the builder and even Dessie himself, who made pergolas and fences for gardens all the way to Galway.

‘So pretty,’ said Rosaleen.

Constance had not told her mother about the mammogram. And that was fine. There was no need. But it was on days like this she missed her girlfriends, who had their own lives and their own troubles in distant towns. Because Constance had two sons who told her nothing and a husband who told her nothing and a father who told her nothing and then died. And, of course, Dessie had forgotten about the lump. Incredible as that might seem. He forgot she was in for tests this morning, because he always forgot about things like that. They made him too anxious. At 5 a.m. they slipped into the bathroom and then got back into bed — and this would be the last time they made love, Constance thought, before she was diagnosed with cancer or told she was in the clear. It was particularly tender, life and death sex: it was very fine. Then, while she was stuffing lunches into the children’s schoolbags and he was pulling his keys off the hook, he said, ‘What are you up to?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Today?’

‘Why?’ She kept her voice careful, just to be sure.

‘No reason. I’m away to Aughavanna, is all, to check things over this afternoon, so I might be back a bit late, if that’s OK.’

‘Off you go,’ she said, and he kissed her, and goosed her, and was out the door.

A couple of years ago, Constance got her wisdom teeth out, and she must have said it a hundred times, she needed a lift home because they wouldn’t let you drive after the sedation. When the day came Dessie said, ‘What?’ He said he would rearrange everything, he would do it right away, and he started panicking and going through bits of paper until Constance told him not to bother. She just drove herself over there, and got the teeth out without the drugs. It was painful all right, but not exactly a disaster.

‘I like to know where I am,’ she said to the dentist, who promised to stuff her with local anaesthetic. Then she got up out of the chair, her jaw banging like a gong, and she got into the car, and drove back home.

Her mother was outraged.

‘You should have called me,’ she said. But Rosaleen liked to say things like that, when the opportunity to help was gone.

‘He cares too much,’ Constance said. ‘That’s the problem. He loves me too much,’ listening to her mother’s silence on the other end of the phone.

There was, of course, a fair amount of boasting in the complaints she made to her mother. Dessie’s caring was legendary, and Constance herself was indestructible: those two things were well known.

‘God you are indestructible,’ said Rosaleen. She made it sound like an insult.

Because Rosaleen was actually depressed, Constance thought, there was no other word for it. She was two years a widow and Constance felt her mother leaving, now, all the time.

‘So smug,’ she said, when Constance rattled on about the kids — which admittedly, she did non-stop.

‘So smug.’

Her own grandchildren.

Oh all your geese are swans.

And why not? Why not have children who were wonderful?

Everyone was so disappointed, these days, Constance thought, it was like an epidemic. Lauren was clearly disappointed with her life in Strasbourg, her Prada trousers notwithstanding. And Dessie viewed his fortieth birthday as a personal insult, he couldn’t understand it was happening to him — never mind the trips to New York and the Galway Races, and the house he was finishing now, out in Aughavanna with more space than Constance wanted or could fill. He had one of those little cherry blossoms already planted; big, solid pink pompoms on this little sapling in the middle of the lawn. Horrible. Her mother clearly thought it was all vulgarity rampant.

‘How lovely,’ she said to Dessie. Driving him up the wall.

When Constance told her mother she was getting married, Rosaleen said Dessie was ‘an eccentric choice’, which was an odd thing to say, because Dessie was just the opposite, really. Twelve years on, they were very thick.

‘Have you had enough, Desmond?’

Sometimes Constance felt she was actually in the way.

‘Cut him another slice of that cake, Constance. Will you have another slice of cake?’

Her mother would put her hand lightly to Dessie’s forearm, she would glance over her shoulder at him, with some backward-flung piece of charm. It was a hoot to watch the pair of them. Two drinks and they’d be off laughing in a corner: Dessie buttered up, plumped up, lifting the jacket on to her shoulders from the back of the chair, ‘You have to hand it to her’, as though Rosaleen was an opponent worth considering, for a man like Dessie. Then, as soon as he was through his own front door, saying, ‘That woman’, because she had played him, yet again.

Though she managed it less and less, it had to be said, since her own husband died.

Constance was very worried about Rosaleen. She was still out in the old house in Ardeevin and it was still letting in the rain, she had a hundred small things wrong with her, none of which you could name. This had always been the way with Rosaleen, but she went to some new quack in Ennis who told her not to eat broccoli, or to eat lots of broccoli, Constance could never remember which. The GP, meanwhile, said her bloods were coming back fine, so Rosaleen was fighting with the GP whom she had never liked — nor his father before him, she said. Everything was off. She was tired all the time.

The stupid thing was that if you agreed that there was, clearly, something wrong with her, Rosaleen would snap that she was perfectly fine. Or if, in the middle of some intense medical discussion, you suggested she get a scan of the offending organ, whichever one it was, then Rosaleen would look quietly affronted, because of course the thing that was wrong with her was not the sort of thing you could just see with a machine.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she would say, turning to look out the window, and a small smile would come, as though she enjoyed being so misunderstood.

Constance did not think there was a cure for grief, but she did think an anti-depressant might cut the worst of it. She was on a little Seroxat herself, since her father got sick and she wouldn’t be without it, but it was not something you could ever suggest to your mother.

Daddy said he felt fine.

‘I feel absolutely fine,’ he had said. Twelve months and two courses of chemo later, he was dead. So a healthy man was in the ground, and a woman who felt mysteriously unwell was driving about the countryside, switching on the windscreen wipers every time she wanted to turn left. Coming home, then, to a house that was falling down around her ears.

Dessie wanted to develop a site out at Boolavaun, that was one of the things Rosaleen teased him about, he had some scheme. He would get the cash to her, and Rosaleen would sign the land over — he would buy it, in effect — and the money would plug the holes in her roof and keep her in nice skin cream. But Rosaleen seemed to like the holes in her roof. She seemed to like saying, ‘What will I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She liked panicking with pots and buckets and having them all run around for her, calling Constance every time it rained. Calling Constance when the mousetrap went off, saying, ‘I think it’s a rat.’

Constance who had cancer. Or who did not have cancer.

What was the word she was looking for?

‘No.’

What do you mean, ‘No’?

‘No, I am busy. No, I have more important things on. No, I will not do this for you now. No.’

‘Margaret Dolan!’

The woman beside Constance lunged towards the floor to gather her basket and her bag and her empty water bottle, and her gown opened to show her back, which was creamy and huge. Constance had the urge to touch it. She wanted to lay her head on the expanse of it, say, ‘Stop. Hush.’ And when Margaret Dolan paused, she would reach down to take her scarred and pudgy hand, and feel her own hand squeezed in return.

‘OK,’ said Margaret Dolan and she heaved herself, with some difficulty, up off the seat.

‘Well,’ she said, turning slightly to Constance. ‘Here goes nothin’!’

‘Take it easy now,’ said Constance.

The empty space she left behind was still occupied by the sharp, peculiar smell of her sweat.

‘Keep drinking the water!’ said Constance, at the last minute, just before the door closed, and the woman from Adare shot a small glance her way.

It was true.

All Constance wanted to do was to make people happy. Why was it her job to fix them? Not one of the people she cared so much about knew where she was, right now. There wasn’t a sinner to remember that she had a mammogram today, or enquire how it had gone, and a terrible sharp desire came over Constance to be told the lump was malignant, so she could say to Dessie, ‘You know where I was this morning?’ and tell her mother, ‘Yes Mammy, cancer, they saw it on the scan’, then wait for the news to filter, finally, through to Lauren, Eileen, Martha Hingerty: who would then be obliged to call, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I just heard.’

There it was.

She was in the room and there it was: a picture of her breast was pinned on to a light-box on the wall and, on her breast, which was a network of white lines and intersections, was a lump: it looked like a knot, a snarl of light. And everything around it — the exterior line of the breast, the map of ducts, or veins, perhaps — was very beautiful, like a landscape seen from space, one of those pictures of the earth taken at night.

But there might have been an arrow pointing to the thing. There might as well have been a big stick-on piece of cardboard with the word CANCER written on it in red marker, because even Constance could see it, there was no doubt it was there. It was a while before she could look away from it and listen to what the doctor was saying.

‘You’re a bit old for one and a bit young for the other, if you know what I mean.’

Was that good?

Constance was lying on the couch. The doctor, who was a woman, had the sonic pen Constance remembered from her pregnancies, and she thought she heard the liquid boom of a baby’s heart through the Doppler machine. Then she realised it was the sound of her own blood, rushing in the flesh of her ears.

The doctor looked to the picture on the light-box, and felt — unerring — for the lump. She moved her index finger around it, while her other hand brought the pen into play and the screen beside Constance jumped into life. The picture was in black and white, and this time the inside of her breast looked like marble, it was mottled in exactly the same way. It was marbled the way a steak was marbled, she thought, because what she was looking at was fat. Before she knew what was happening, the woman had a needle in there — too fine, almost, to hurt, she could see it on the screen reaching into a blob of darkness, and she looked down in real life as it was taken out, and she realised a nurse was holding her by the shoulders so she would not make any sudden movement. As soon as the needle was gone she wanted to sit up and take a breath, and this is what she did. She was wiping the jelly off her skin with some rough green paper towel, she was reaching for the basket of clothes as the doctor said, ‘Hang on.’ Then the doctor repeated what she had just said. Some word like ‘adenoids’ or ‘carcinoma’ and then: ‘I think — hang on — So I am ninety-five per cent — OK? — ninety-five per cent sure this is what it is. And you are a bit old for it, but you’re a bit young for the other, all right? With your history, and what I am seeing here on the screen.’

Constance still couldn’t understand a word of it. This is why everyone took so long in this room. It was because everyone was stupid, like her.

But the doctor didn’t say the word ‘stupid’. She rubbed her hand along Constance’s arm.

‘All right?’

The arm thing was a gesture she had decided on; she did it a hundred times a day. But it felt nice, all the same.

‘All right,’ said Constance, and she shuffled out of the room: her gown flapping open at the back and the plastic grocery basket that held her clothes clutched in both hands.

She was guided up a set of back stairs into a proper hospital ward.

‘Mr Murtagh will be along to you soon.’

This time, the women waited on beds, and each bed was surrounded by curtains, so Constance could not tell where Margaret Dolan was, or if she had already left. Some time later, she heard the woman from Adare go to another stall — she could tell who it was by the sound of her shoes. And while she waited — it must have been the stress — she drifted against the softness of Rory’s skin and the thickness of his unwashed curls. She was like some sea creature among the kelp, grazing the side of her face against his older brother, the moving, small bones of his white shoulder, the sweaty insides of his hands paddling against her as she turned and passed, and pulled herself down into the perfumed depths of Shauna’s red hair. When she woke — minutes later, or half an hour — she was panicking about the salmon in the freezer, thinking, What will I buy for the dinner, if I have cancer?, and then, Fuck. Fuck. Fuck it. How am I even going to drive myself home?

Out on the other side of the screen, Margaret Dolan was saying, ‘I can’t do it next week, I have a wedding,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘Who’s getting married?’

‘My daughter. I have a daughter.’

‘A daughter?’ The man was a fool. There was no need to sound so surprised.

‘Adopted,’ said Margaret, by way of apology, then rallied with, ‘She found me. She was adopted and she found me last year.’

‘Right,’ and his voice had an extra ‘oh shit’ in there. ‘OK. And when is the wedding again?’

‘It’s in Birmingham.’

‘OK.’

‘Doctor, do I not have it in my womb?’

And Constance started to cry for Margaret Dolan, quietly, in her cubicle: the tears ran down. Crying too for her own selfishness — how utterly, utterly selfish she was. Constance McGrath sat on the bed where the starched sheet was folded over, feeling abandoned and small. Because she had everything, more than everything, her life was overflowing and Margaret Dolan had so little to call her own. Constance wanted to put her head through the curtain and look her in the eye — to say what? ‘I’m so sorry for your trouble. Would you like a lift home?’

But the nurse was already leading her to another room.

‘Now Margaret,’ she was saying. ‘Good woman. You’re all right. Good woman.’

They arrived through the curtains in a team: the folder nurse and the ultrasound woman and two children in white coats who must be students, all of them following a small man with very piercing eyes. This was Mr Murtagh.

Mr Murtagh placed his hand on her breast briefly, but he wasn’t much interested. He sort of shoved it away. The way his eyes scanned her, Constance had a sudden panic that she had not shaved under her arms.

‘We are very happy with you,’ said Mr Murtagh.

He did not seem happy, he seemed a bit impatient but, That is because I am well, Constance thought, I have been wasting his time with my robust good health, I have been wasting everyone’s time! Her clever body had been doing a great job. Complex. Microscopic. Quiet. The map of light that was her left breast was not frightful but beautiful, and the marbled black and white of its sonic depths was lovely too.

‘I’m clear,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Clear.

‘You can slip your clothes back on for me now,’ said the nurse, as though Constance might run out to the car park in her gown, jumping up and banging her heels together in the rain. Constance dressed to her overcoat and pushed the curtain back, exposing the bed to an empty ward.

‘Thank you for everything,’ Constance said to the nurse who liked glitter nail polish but was not allowed to wear it. She was finishing Constance’s notes on a steel clipboard at the end of the bed.

‘Now you heard what Mr Murtagh said. You know where we are. Any worry at all.’

‘Thank you so much.’

‘Safe home, now.’

The air outside the hospital doors was amazing, so packed full of oxygen and weather. Constance could not remember where she had parked the car but she did not mind walking through the spottings of rain, pulling the sky into her lungs. Sipping at the world.

Constance put on the windscreen wipers as the rain set in. She held and turned the wheel with care and the darkness under her left arm flowered and began to fade. A few miles from home, the sun came out. She passed the latest McGrath house — Dessie’s brother the auctioneer, who had built a bungalow, high off the road. The slope of raw clay had been ablaze, when her father’s hearse passed along that way, with red poppies and with those yellow flowers that love broken ground. Less of them came the next year, and this year fewer again, as grass took over and the cut land healed.

She remembered Emmet, helping him down the stairs in Ardeevin. He wasn’t in great shape himself, Emmet. He was back from Africa, or wherever, with a scraggy beard and a hundred yard stare. But he kept his father company through his last months and they were silent and easy with each other, as though dying was like having a glass of stout or watching the news on telly. It was a funny romance, Constance thought — father and son. The chat about politics or scientific advances, because women were fine but prone to foolishness, and why fuss when you could sit on a spring evening and solve the problems of the whole, wide world? Before you die.

The same way her own boys chatted to Dessie, coming up the path, back from hurling on a Saturday. The light clear voice of Donal, who was the spit of his father, he was his father all over again:

‘What happens to gravity in the middle of the earth, Daddy?’

‘Good question.’

‘I mean, if you went through the earth, and you were in the middle of the earth, you wouldn’t weigh anything.’

‘I don’t know. You might weigh even more.’

‘Or you might just get very small.’

‘Certainly. Certainly. That too.’

It was June. In a few weeks’ time she would bring the children down to the sea when the turf at Fanore was fragrant with clover. She could lie down on it — the low aromatic carpet of green that covered the land behind the dunes — and this year she would learn all the names. Sand pansies she knew and, further inland, the meadowsweet and woodbine, but there was a tiny yellow thing like broom that was also scented, and even the tough little succulents behind the marram called the bees through the salt air by their surprising, sweet perfume. This year she would bring a book of names and instead of sitting on the sand while the children played she would walk the turf with her head bowed. That is what she would do.

‘How did it go?’ said Dessie.

‘How did what go?’

‘The thingy.’

‘You knew?’

‘Of course I knew. I mean, I remembered. Sorry.’

‘Oh you remembered.’

‘Sorry. I’m really sorry.’

‘So you should be.’

‘What thingy?’ said Rory, who was her middle child and the most considerate of the three.

‘It was fine,’ she said.

‘Of course it was fine,’ said Dessie.

‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ said Constance, who was starting to rattle the pots and pans now.

‘What thingy?’ said Rory again.

‘Nothing. Everything’s fine.’

‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ said Dessie. ‘That’s what the GP said.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yeah. He did. Remember, he said the way it moved around, that was the good thing. I mean, you’re a bit young.’

‘Am I?’ said Constance.

‘Well. That’s what he said.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ said Constance. ‘Oh dear Lord give me patience,’ and Rory slipped out of the room.

‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘No really. Fuck you! The lot of you.’

And they let her blow and stomp, they let her weep and rail, and stagger, weeping, off to the bedroom, after which Dessie went out and got fish and chips for dinner from the takeaway in town.

Later, Donal came in to read her his comic, and Rory lay behind her and stroked her hair. When they left, Dessie came in with a cup of tea and Constance said, ‘Did you save me some chips?’

‘Oh, sorry. Did you want any?’

‘Chips!?’

‘Did you want some? I can get some more.’

‘You’re all right,’ she said.

Dessie stood looking at her from the end of the bed.

‘There was a woman in front of me,’ she said. ‘And she had it.’

‘Right,’ he said, and showed willing by sitting on the edge of the mattress. But it was no use.

‘She was very big,’ said Constance. ‘I mean, big.’

‘She was probably on the medical card,’ said Dessie.

So Constance abandoned one version of her day, and told Dessie instead about the pain she had felt when she had looked at the woman’s scars, the feeling that shot down the length of her thighs. She did not know if other people felt this kind of thing; it was not something she had ever heard discussed. She said, ‘Do you ever get that? You know if you see something terrible, if one of the kids is hurt, or that time your man nearly lost the finger, with the knuckle sticking out of it — you remember? — and the whole thing dangling by a piece of skin.’

‘Run that by me again?’

‘Do you ever get that pain in your legs? Quite a sharp pain. Like, Oh no!’

‘Em. I get that, you know. That scrotum-tightening thing.’

‘Sympathy.’

‘Protection maybe. Like, hang on to your lad.’

‘Great,’ she said.

‘Or sympathy. Yeah. Maybe that’s what it is.’

And he kissed her.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

When she got up later, she hugged the boys and went to look for Shauna and found her outside, lying on the trampoline, looking at the stars. Constance clambered up there to join her, the pair of them in each other’s arms. Constance said sorry for shouting and Shauna said, ‘It’s not that. It’s not that.’ Then she had a little cry: some friend being mean to her, they could be very bitchy already, at eight and nine.

‘Never mind,’ said Constance. ‘Never mind.’

The cold webbing of the trampoline dipped and rose under them, Shauna’s hair flung back across it, fanned out by the static.

‘She’s just horrible,’ said Shauna. ‘She’s thinks she’s like the bee’s knees.’

The wind drifted up through the mesh and cooled them from below. They lay on the black expanse that rocked them lightly as they moved, and her daughter was comforted. Constance could do that much, at least. She could still do that much. And Constance was also comforted, lying on the trampoline under the stars, with her daughter in her arms.

Emmet, Ségou, Mali, 2002

THREE MONTHS AFTER Emmet moved in with her, Alice found a dog in the marketplace, or the dog found her and followed her home. It was a short-haired street dog with a dirty white pelt and a blunt face, and there was a dry, pink cyst growing from the corner of its left eye. She must have encouraged it. Emmet imagined her smiling over at the dog, then flinching when it turned to look at her. Or starting forward, her hands pressing into her cotton skirt as she crouched to talk to the dog; then reaching out to touch it, pulling back its ear to examine the bad eye.

Alice was drawn to suffering, which is why she lived near the marketplace and not on the edge of town. Emmet, too, was drawn to suffering — it was, after all, his job — and he was drawn to Alice. He did not ask why she had spoken to a dumb animal in a language that was foreign, even to the passers-by. It was her nature. And it was the dog’s nature to follow her, with one dog-brown eye more pathetic than the other.

It was the dry season and Emmet was often on the road, so he did not know how long it took him to notice the creature lying in the street outside the house, or to realise that it was always there when he opened the front gate. He seemed to forget the dog each time, and when he stepped around the stretched and panting thing it was with the sense of something he had left unsaid.

‘Stop by the dog,’ Emmet would say to his driver, meaning, ‘Don’t run over the dog.’ He assumed — if he ever gave the thing a thought — that the dog belonged to the street vendor on the corner, or that the vendor tolerated it: because street dogs don’t belong to anyone, they just desperately want to belong. So there it was — each time Emmet came back, dusty and hot, and hoping that Alice had sourced a decent Dutch beer. The dog lay on the ground like a dead dog, with its legs straight down, and its nose straight out, and only when you came close could you see the quick motion of its belly’s rise and fall. The creature did not belong in the heat, Emmet thought, any more than they did themselves: the flabby corners of its mouth pulsing pink inside black lips, the eyes squeezing painfully shut against the dust and — one of them — around the slowly expanding balloon of the cyst. Wincing, winking, squeezing tight. This difficulty gave the dog a salty air.

‘Eh, yeah,’ it seemed to say every time he passed. ‘Eh, yeah, I dunno about that.’

One day, Emmet kicked something on the way in through the gate. He looked down to see a china bowl with a pattern of roses, like something you might use back home. What was that doing there? He said it to Ibrahim, when the front door was opened.

‘What is the crockery doing in the street?’

Ibrahim never answered a direct question, and you had to respect that. Even so, there was a kind of yearning, in their talk, for the thing that could not be said.

‘Mister Emmet, sir?’

His eyes rested, liquid and compassionate, on Emmet’s passing sleeve.

‘The bowl outside the gate.’

Emmet dumped his bag on the hall table and turned to look, as the watchman ducked out and then back in through the gate under Ibrahim’s contemptuous eye. And there was something about this scene that kept Emmet in the doorway for a moment too long. It stayed with him as Alice came from the darkness of the living room to kiss him and recoil a little from the sweat. Something was wrong. He had seen this a hundred times before. The trick was not to ignore it. Or, when you dismissed something — and there was always something tugging at the corner of your eye — to notice your dismissal. You took note.

‘What’s the shouting for?’

‘What shouting?’

‘Ib.’

‘Is he?’

There were a couple of Tuaregs about the place. Emmet could never tell them apart, their faces were wound about with turbans of white cloth, but they were a proud people and handy in a fight, so he was surprised to see Ibrahim actually push the guy away from the front door to send him round the back of the house. Emmet had sensed it a hundred times before. Something was wrong.

‘Which one of them is that?’ he said.

But Alice just widened her eyes.

‘How are you anyway?’ he said. ‘Any beer?’

Most of the time it was nothing: the thing that was wrong. It was a clan thing or a sum of money, some mark of respect that had been denied.

‘Fridge is down,’ said Alice.

‘You in long?’

He started to undress, passing her on his way through to the shower, which was just a baffle of low walls, tacked on to the side of the house. The sun blazed into it, and the showerhead was rusted shut. Emmet filled a bucket and slung his clothes over the dividing wall, while Alice turned towards him in the gloom.

‘Mozzies!’ she said, and he pushed the door shut, imagining how he looked to her eyes — sunlit — his narrow white shanks, the tractor tan. Emmet was so long in the heat, the exposed skin was a different age to the hidden parts of him; he had sixty-year-old knees and the belly of a young man. He scraped the water off with the thin towel and bared his gums in the scrap of mirror. He pushed his nose one way and then another to check for cancers, then he reached, still naked, for his hat. The top half of his forehead was white.

There was a fresh sarong waiting for him on a low stool, though he had not seen Ib open the door to leave it there and, when he went inside, the house was deserted. He made his way upstairs and found Alice lying under the mosquito net, thinking.

‘All clean?’ she said, which was all the invitation he needed to get in beside her, and spoon until his hat fell off, and make love, the sweat breaking out, first on him and then on Alice, so the pat-pat of his body against hers turned to slipping and silence.

Afterwards, his thoughts turned to the bowl and the scene at the gate. Emmet hated problems with the staff. You could be saving lives all day and be undone at the end of it by a plate of beans and bad lard. Literally saving lives. Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.

The swamp cooler in the window came to and Emmet rolled towards its blessed tedium. The electricity was back. There was a shift in the night air, the sound of voices outside, the smell of woodsmoke and cooking. Alice, dozing in the tangle of thin sheets, gave a faint smile as Emmet bent to kiss her before swinging his legs off the bed. He went back down to the shower stall where he filled another bucket and threw it over himself one more time, and scraped his skin with the same meagre towel, now completely dry.

Ibrahim was busy with the dinner, so he got his own beer from the recently revived fridge. A squat, yellowing thing with a pull handle you don’t see at home any more. There was nothing but beer in it. Emmet was earning good money that year but there wasn’t a whole heap to buy unless you went to the Western supermarket — which Alice was loath to do. Besides, he was too busy to need much. And Alice was always busy. And it was always hot.

She came down from the bedroom, clean and dressed in white.

‘Well now,’ she said.

There was a burr in Alice’s voice that made her sound teasing and drunk, on the permanent brink of a joke. She was from Newcastle. ‘Oh that explains it,’ Emmet said, when they first met. He was not a natural flirt. But there was something easy and terrific about the light in her eye, and it was with some new sense of difficulty that he walked away from her that evening. Her first year in the field, with her corkscrew curls going mad in the heat, it was two months before she cracked, necking rum babas at a UNICEF do, giving out about the photocopier blinking in the corner. ‘How much did that fucking cost?’ she said.

She had just broken up, she told him, with a Swedish guy in Bamako, who was too busy saving the world to save poor Alice. The affair wasn’t so much brief as ‘very very brief’, she said. She was fabulously drunk. Emmet did not complain. He didn’t, in fact, say very much as he walked her back to her guesthouse under a sky thick with stars, while the locals slept or listened in tactful silence to her white woman’s carry-on. Halfway home, she sat down on a stone and wept. She was, she said, deeply disillusioned. Deeply, deeply disillusioned. With herself, really. The idea that she could help anyone, change anything, get the smallest thing done.

Emmet pulled her back to her feet, and hummed that she was doing fine, just fine, she would be fine. And she kissed him as soon as they got inside her door, lifting her foot up behind her, like a girl in a romantic comedy.

She was good at all that.

Unlike other women he had known (and, in fairness, there weren’t that many), Alice did not excel at the preliminaries and then freak out in the bedroom. Or freak out in the morning. Or freak out, two days later, for no reason he could fathom. The dramatics were not a diversion. Alice followed through.

She was a talented lover.

Emmet did not suppose he was — not particularly — though he did have his moments, and Alice was most certainly one of them. He lay awake, that first time, considering his wild good fortune and the sadness that came with it. He worried about his heart, took comfort in the fact that affairs in the field were not built to last.

A week later, he found Alice an old colonial house that she loved but couldn’t quite afford. Then he moved in with her.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s only temporary.’ Which was not, he thought, a lie.

‘Here’s to you,’ he said, and lifted, in her direction, the dregs of his bottled beer.

‘Mud in your eye,’ said Alice.

Alice had decorated the house with hangings from the market: she hung wind chimes in the doorframes, and a ritual mask on the bedroom wall. They sat on cushions and she ate Ibrahim’s plate of fried fish without cutlery, taking the bones out a little awkwardly with her right hand and balling up the rice. Emmet still liked a fork, if there was a fork to be had. Newbies did nothing but talk about the squitters, like it was a joke. Emmet did not think diarrhoea was a joke. He had seen too many people die of it.

Not, in fairness, that any of them had been white.

So he plied his fork like an old man and remembered the leaky corpses he had seen in one place or another, then he put the corpses out of his mind while Alice clinked her elegant bangles over her plate.

The computers had finally arrived, she said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Two of them.’

‘No shit.’

‘Telling you.’

‘Do they work?’

‘Up to a point,’ she said. They were mains powered, so they couldn’t switch them on until the generator was sorted, and when this happened, some time in the middle of the afternoon, they had discovered one of them was Windows 97 and the other was Windows 95. It was not that they were antiques, it was that they were differently antique. You could move stuff from the older to the newer software but not the other way around. And there was no modem.

‘I mean, what’s the fucking point?’

‘Training?’ he said, but Alice had already started to cry.

‘It’s not just the computers,’ she said.

She cried the way she always cried in the evening: vague tears. Her face was simply wet.

‘I know.’

Alice was working on child mortality. Children were hard.

‘You should stay in the office more,’ he said.

It sounded like a joke, but he meant it. She should focus on delivery of mosquito nets and stop gazing at malarial babies, while they died.

‘Maybe,’ she said.

Good, sweet, kind-hearted Alice. Endlessly sweet. Endlessly kind. Emmet had to oblige himself to stay seated and to continue eating and to smile back at her. He was thirty-eight years old, beyond confusion. He was lucky to have her. But he was not yet sure that you could call it love.

The next trip took him beyond Mopti. They drove along the wide Niger, then east along a scratch in the dust that was the road inland. Seven hours out, they saw the shadow where locusts had stripped the land, the edge of it faint but cruelly precise, a secret map that shifted across the paper map, like the landscape’s own weather. This was the line they travelled for the next ten days, with wind-up radios and pesticide packs. When he arrived back at the house Alice washed him, and he washed Alice, and this tenderness was as much as either of them could muster. Alice sat cross-legged inside the mosquito net while he lay behind her on the bed. She said, ‘I have fifteen bites.’

‘Fifteen?’

She said, ‘Active bites. I have five fading. I can, you know, sense them. I find each one, with my eyes closed. I find it, and then I breathe slowly, letting it go. Letting the itch go.’

There was silence.

‘And how is that working out for you?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said. And then, ‘How was the road?’

‘Good. Fine.’

‘And what did you see?’

‘You know.’

‘Did you have some meetings?’

‘I did.’

‘And were these meetings held under a convenient tree?’

‘They were,’ he said.

He asked her did she ever, when she was a child, break the top off a fuchsia and suck the nectar out, just where the skirts of the flower began.

‘Oh dear me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. No.’

He noticed the bowl again, when they went out that evening. This time it was inside the house, on the hall floor. He was going to mention it to Ibrahim but it was a Thursday and Ibrahim was anxious to be gone. He let the driver go too. Emmet could not get back into the Land Cruiser, he was tired of Hassan driving like a bastard, shaving past some old woman so the pot wobbled on her head. So many women unkilled by so many white four-wheel-drives in the various countries where he had been driven by men like Hassan, a little more crazy, or less.

‘Mind the pot!’

Thousands of miles on dust roads, and gravel roads, and potholed tarmac: roads that turned into rivers, or forest, or crowded marketplaces; roads you drove beside because the road was so bad.

Total kill, he told Alice, as they walked along the river, one goat, a few chickens, something that flew like a pheasant and shattered the windscreen in Bangladesh, and many small bumps that felt, when you thought about it, a bit soft. The biggest was a tiny antelope in the Sudan, suspended mid leap for an endless moment in front of them, before a rear hoof caught the bonnet, and it was upended under their front fender.

‘Bam! Back broken.’

They were walking over to a party, slapping themselves idly, or waving the mosquitoes away with a bit of palm leaf.

‘Oh no,’ she said.

‘Somebody got dinner,’ he said.

‘For sure.’

He didn’t mention the small child in Mozambique, who cracked off the side of the car, sailed in an arc, and seemed to bounce off the ground, he was up so fast and running — also smiling — the little bag of peanuts he was trying to sell still held high. Bit of a limp. They wanted to stop, but the driver threw some coins out the window and put the foot down. And:

‘No, no!’ said the nice aid workers. ‘Stop the car!’

‘So what was it like?’ said Alice.

‘What?’

‘The Sudan.’

People always wanted to know about the Sudan.

Two thousand people sucking water from the same patch of mud. Thirty water pumps stuck at the airport, and every piece of paper shuffled and lost by the bastards in Khartoum. What did she want to hear?

‘There was a lot of paperwork,’ he said.

He wanted to tell her that starvation does not smell sweet, the way death smells sweet. There’s a chemical edge to it, like walking past the hairdresser’s at home.

Alice took his arm in the silence.

The streets were very quiet: a few scooters, the distant sound of trucks coming up from the riverside. Through open doorways, families could be seen, murmuring and eating or sitting against the wall. There was no metal cutlery to bang or clatter, the children did not shout, and no baby was crying, anywhere. From an open window, they heard the pop-pop-popping sound of a paraffin lamp that was newly lit. The woman tending the flame wore a green headscarf, elaborately wrapped, and the light, as it grew, seemed to pull her face out of its own beautiful shadows. Emmet could hear the squeak of the little screw, as they passed.

The party was a desultory thing; with one bottle pretending to be Johnnie Walker and a fetid punch. The next morning they woke to the sound of the muezzin and the relief of a house that was empty of everyone except themselves. They spent the morning catching up on work then packed their togs for an afternoon swim in the tiny pool at the Lebanese hotel. Emmet heated the lunch that Ibrahim had left for them. He was just about to serve up, when he heard Alice open the front door.

‘Come on!’ she said.

There was a noise on the tiles like a scattering of small beads and Emmet thought something had spilt — her necklace, perhaps, had broken. But when she came into the dining room her necklace was intact, and the small noise continued.

‘Lunch,’ he said, a little foolishly, with the pot of stew — it was goat — held in both hands. As he set it down on the low table, he saw the dog.

It was the whiteness of the dog that disturbed him first and, after that, the wan look in its good eye.

‘Oh Christ,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Things are bad enough.’

‘No they’re not. Are they?’

‘I mean in Africa. Things are bad enough in Africa, without bringing a dog into the house.’

‘It’s only a dog,’ she said.

‘Eat your lunch,’ he said, ladling the stew on to her plate. But Alice took the plate and scraped half of it into the bowl — which he now realised was the dog’s bowl — on the floor. It had been the dog’s bowl for some time.

‘Eat your lunch,’ he said again.

‘What are you, my mother?’

Emmet took the pot back out to the kitchen and came back in and sat down and started to eat in what he hoped was a companionable silence. The stew was excellent. The dog liked it, too. Alice said, ‘Good boy, Mitch. Good boy.’

The dog ate, then clicked across the tiles to offer its nervous love to Alice, feinting and fawning as her hand found the top of its head.

‘Poor guy,’ she said. ‘There you go.’

A whine of pure emotion escaped the dog as it plonked its chin on Alice’s thigh, and looked up into her eyes. Alice ate with one hand, while the other hand scratched under and around its head until the dog collapsed on to the floor and rolled over, paws dangling, back legs agape and her hand worked its way down its ribs and on to the hairless belly.

Every piece of shit in town was stuck to the dog’s undercarriage, a fact that did not seem to bother Alice despite the hand-washing campaign she ran for the new mothers of Ségou. Because hand washing — there was no doubt about it — saves lives. On the plus side, Emmet decided, the dog did not have rabies. And if he did, Emmet was up to date on his shots.

He said: ‘You know, Ibrahim has first dibs on the leftovers. Usually.’

Alice paused and then scratched on.

‘Poor Mitch,’ she said.

He said, ‘It’s just a pain, when they start to pilfer. The staff.’

She looked up. ‘Ib is stealing stuff?’

‘That’s not what I said. No.’

But she was back to cooing at the dog. And Emmet needed to think, so he just shut up for a while.

They walked over to the hotel. On the last stretch of road, Emmet saw a woman afflicted with tiny lumps. They covered her from head to toe. Even her eyelids were lumpy, even the insides of her ears. Emmet had seen her before, and she always greeted him with the sweet, sad smile of a woman who is happy you have not thrown a stone at her. It was hard to know what the problem was. The lumps were under the skin, so they weren’t warts, and there was no sign of infection so you couldn’t — even in your own mind — dose her with antibiotics and sleep contented. It was a parasite, perhaps, though not one he had ever encountered. It was a syndrome. An autoimmune thing. It was a biblical plague of boils. It was something genetic, because poverty wasn’t enough of a curse, clearly, you had to have your own extra, personal curse, just to make you feel special.

And the street was a medical textbook, suddenly. People with bits missing. The bulge of a tumour about to split the skin. The village idiot was a paranoid schizophrenic. A man with glaucous eyes was sweating out a fever in a beautiful carved chair, his head tipped back against the wall.

Emmet fell into the cool of the hotel foyer.

‘Good to see you Mister Emmet,’ said Paul the receptionist. ‘Ms Alice. Very happy.’

‘Yes,’ said Emmet. ‘Hot enough out there!’

The small pool was so warm, it was like swimming in a bowl of soup. Emmet did a few short lengths, keeping his face dry and clear, then he hauled himself out beside the sun loungers where Alice had set their bags.

He ordered a mojito.

‘Local?’ said the waiter, meaning the alcohol, and Emmet said, ‘Imported.’

Alice looked at him. The drink was obscenely expensive and, when it arrived, full of sugar.

‘Mud in your eye,’ he said, remembering his manners after the first gulp and lifting the glass.

‘Here’s to you,’ said Alice, who was taking the ice out of her cola with doggy hands, and throwing it in to melt in the pool.

The next morning, Emmet woke into the tender hour before the hangover hit and he sat to meditate for the first time since he had moved in with Alice. He crossed his legs and shifted a cushion under the bones of his backside and sighed his way through each breath. Sadly the air entered him and sadly it left as he counted to three on each inhale, and then to four, and then stopped counting. The town was quietly awake. The drinker’s morning dread came to tap him on the shoulder. And then it left. Emmet watched his thoughts, which were all, for the moment, about dying. A man falling out of a Portaloo in Juba, half cooked. The used tissues on his father’s bedside. A girl in Cambodia with her ribs showing and her little pubic bones jutting out. Then, after a while, his thoughts were not about dying. He was swimming in Lahinch. He was walking the land in Boolavaun. He remembered the taste of fuchsia, when you suck the nectar out. He remembered the taste of Alice.

Just before sunrise, she opened her eyes.

She said, ‘I was dreaming about the river.’

There was a noise downstairs, as Ibrahim opened the front door and their eyes locked. Where was the dog?

Emmet was halfway down the stairs when he remembered letting the creature out of the house before making his way to bed the night before. Which meant that only the watchman knew what company they had kept the previous evening. In which case, everyone knew: Emmet and Alice had a dog.

Sort of.

Dogs are unclean to Muslims, as Alice well knew — she had done that course at college — so she also knew not to bring him inside when the help was around.

Still.

‘Look at him,’ she had said, when they arrived back from their hotel swim and the dog met them in the yard. Emmet looked. The dog’s tail was hooked under a shivering rump, that dabbed low and began to swing.

‘Hello! Hello!’ said Alice, and her fingers kneaded the loose hide of his neck.

‘Look into those eyes,’ she said to Emmet, and her own eyes, when she turned her face up to him, were happy. Ardent.

Emmet obliged. He looked at the dog and the dog looked quickly away, then back at him. The red lump was not a cyst, he decided, it was a membrane that had popped out somehow.

‘He has an old soul,’ said Alice.

Emmet ducked around the corner of the house and retrieved a bottle of Bushmills from its hiding place under the outhouse rafters. Then they went inside — all three of them — and shut the door.

They sat and drank in the living room with the dog curled up on the tiles, snout to the floor: every shift or move they made questioned with a gather of its white brows, a forward twitch of the ears.

‘Bless,’ said Alice.

After a while, she said that Ibrahim was not the most devout Muslim you could meet. They had never seen him roll out a mat to pray, for example, and he had been known to take a beer — not in the house, but in a bar by the market. He was also very keen on mobile phones, and on ringtones that sounded like a woman having an orgasm — which was something she just had to pretend she wasn’t hearing, really; even so, she volunteered to keep the dog away from rooms where food was eaten or prepared.

Emmet poured another drink.

‘I don’t know if it is a food thing,’ he said.

‘You think?’

‘So much as a ritual thing? I mean the dog being “unclean”. It’s not a question of hygiene the way we think of hygiene, in the Western sense.’

‘Right.’

‘But of, you know, things being sacred, or defiled.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Ritual cleanliness is, I think, not so much about what you put into the body, as what comes out of the body. Shit. Semen.’

‘All right,’ said Alice. She would only bring him inside in the evening, when Ibrahim had gone home.

They sat in silence.

‘Are you coming to bed?’ she asked after a while and Emmet lifted his drink and looked down into it. He said, ‘I think I’ll just stay here for a while. With the dog.’

The next morning, he came tearing down the stairs, to find the animal, as he remembered, no longer inside the house, and Ibrahim sublimely indifferent to whatever had gone on, or not gone on, the night before.

On Sunday evening, they sat and worked in the living room listening to the World Service from the BBC, and the dog sat there too. When Alice finished her paperwork, she joined Emmet on the bamboo sofa and they lay against each other, for as long as the heat allowed. It made their relationship feel strangely normal, having a dog in the room.

Alice leaned back from him and rearranged his hair lightly with her fingers. She asked, in a lazy way, about previous girlfriends.

One or two lasted a while, he said. The rest, not so long.

‘Though they felt pretty epic at the time.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Nothing like a quiet upbringing to make you feel the thrill and the shame of it.’

The dog slept on.

‘Ah,’ she said.

In fact, the dog slept a surprising amount of the time.

‘At home, or where?’

Emmet looked at her; her head rolled on to the back of the sofa, the teasing fingertips picking at his hair. He wondered where it came from, this unreachable pain she had, that made her so sweet and wild.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

‘What?’

Later, after he had taken the discussion upstairs, so to speak, Alice told him that her mother spent every Easter in hospital. It was just her time of year. It started with the daffodils, she pulled them out of every garden on the road. Alice would come home from school to find the house shouting yellow, and welts on her mother’s hands where she had ripped the stalks out of the ground. The neighbours she robbed said nothing. And, for two or three weeks, they had the best time ever. They had so much fun. By Easter Sunday, her mother would be sitting in hospital like the bunny who ran out of battery, not able to lift the fag to her mouth, and Alice is facing the next however many weeks looking after things at home.

‘What age?’ he said.

‘Whatever. I could work the washing machine at nine.’

This was why Alice wanted to help people. This was also why she was so much fun.

‘Well I think you’re great,’ he said.

‘You think?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘The way you turned it all to the good.’

Alice, lying on her back, began to laugh: a delicious gurgle that Emmet thought might get out of hand, there was so much hurt in it. Then she stopped and said, ‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

After a long while she turned in to him like a child, with her two arms out. By the time he could see her eyelashes in the darkness they had settled in sleep.

Emmet lay there, jealous of her repose. The heat was worse at night — there was no shade, because it was all shade. In the dark, the heat was the same and everywhere, it was like drowning in your own blood-temperature blood.

He tried to remember the freshness of an April day at home, the cool inside of a chocolate Easter egg.

He remembered Geneva airport, a place where he had, after a tough sixteen months in the Sudan, experienced an overwhelming urge to lie down on the clean, perfumed floor. Shop after shop of leather goods and fluffy toys, chocolate shops and Swatch shops, Cartier, Dior. Emmet went into each one of them, trying to buy something for his mother. He looked at this beautiful obscenity of stuff, bags of fine leather and silver chains that turned out to be made of platinum. He ran fifty silk scarves through his shaking hands, trying to imagine what she might like about each one. He ended up with a box of Swiss chocolates, stuck them in his stinking canvas bag, with the red dirt of the Sudan still rimed along the seams. Through security, up into the overhead bin: his father was too sick by then to meet him at the airport, so he carried them on to the bus and walked them up over the humpy bridge home.

‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen said, because she was on a diet. ‘Oh, no! Chocolates!’

Emmet had more than his mother to forgive, of course. He had a whole planet to forgive for the excesses of Geneva airport. For the frailty of his father. For the shake in his own hands that he thought was giardiasis but turned out to be his life falling apart. His mother had a lot to answer for, but not this.

Emmet was sitting on the side of the bed now, with his feet dangling below the net. Outside the bedroom door, he heard the soft scritter-scrat of the forgotten dog. Then the sigh of a furred body sliding down the wood. Then silence.

‘Here, Mitch!’

Alice had a ‘special’ voice for the dog that annoyed Emmet no end. She put strings of beads around his neck, and held a biscuit between her lips for him to snaffle with his mouth.

Something about Emmet’s tone, meanwhile, just brought out the whipped cur in Mitch. If he lifted his hand, the dog backed away from him in a palsy of hind limbs.

‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

If he stepped any closer a shrieking yelp would come out of the dog.

‘What did you do to him?’ said Alice, the first time it happened. ‘What did you do?’

It was a tough cycle to break. The more the dog dragged its belly on the floor, the more it tried Emmet’s patience and Alice became increasingly suspicious of Emmet, as Mitch trembled against the wall. Sex was off, that much was clear. Love me, love my dog. Emmet ended up courting the creature with biscuits, which he set in a line on the floor. Every evening, the dog came a little closer, until finally he took the biscuit from Emmet’s fingers. Then he pushed his narrow skull up under Emmet’s hand and whined.

‘Bingo,’ said Alice.

After a moment’s delay, Emmet patted the dog and scratched behind his ears.

‘There you go.’

The delay interested him, for being chilly. The delay was nice.

‘You can see the temptation,’ he said. ‘To give him a kick.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Alice.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Emmet. But she really didn’t know, and called Mitch to her. ‘What’s he saying?’ she said. ‘What is he talking about?’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Emmet.

And Alice looked up at him and said, ‘No, actually. No.’

Alice wanted to get antibiotic drops for the dog’s eye, but the cyst-thing was weeping clear and Emmet did not think this was the way to go. Besides, the town was not exactly brimming over with antibiotic drops. So she boiled up some saline instead and squirted it from a blunt syringe she took from the maternity clinic and after a week the weeping stopped. Once this happened they saw how sleek the dog was getting. Its baldy, pink hide was filling in with white hair. Its tail uncurled out from between its legs and swung level, sometimes even proud.

It might have been worse. It might have been a child.

Emmet fell in love with a child in Cambodia, his first year out. He spent long nights planning her future, because the feel of her little hand in his drove him pure mad: he thought if he could save this one child, then Cambodia would make sense. These things happen. Love happens. There are things you can do, if you have the foresight and the money, but there isn’t that much you can do, and the child is left — he had seen it many times — the aid worker cries on the plane, feeling all that love, and the abandoned child cries on the ground, because they are damaged goods now, and their prospects worse than they might have been before.

Better a dog.

Ibrahim knew, by now. There was no hiding it, though it was unfortunate he discovered the dog’s stool before he discovered the dog — a dry enough turd that Mitch had deposited in a small room off the kitchen. Emmet arrived in to find all three of them looking at it, Alice and Ibrahim and Mitch. The watchman, when he thought about it, had been unusually dignified about opening the gate.

‘Bonsoir, Monsieur.’ Emmet did not even know the guy spoke French.

Ib was not at the door to take his things. At first he thought the house was empty, then he heard Alice’s voice and made his way through the kitchen to find them all crouched over the thing.

‘How was the office?’ said Alice, with a flare of the eyes to tell him that things were under control, and he said, ‘Fine.’

Emmet did not look at Ibrahim so much as feel his silence, over dinner. And his silence felt OK. The food was good, the service almost meditative. If he was angry, Emmet could not locate it, even when Alice fed the dog with her hands from her own bowl. After that, the dog slept inside, on a bed of rags pushed up against the living room wall.

‘I think they like each other,’ she said. She thought there was a genuine connection. Ib, for example, called the dog by name.

‘Which is more than you do.’

But it was clear that Alice felt herself humiliated by the scene in the pantry, and by Ibrahim’s silken looks in the days that followed. She saw the edge of his contempt, or imagined she saw it, and was ready at all times to take offence. The more careful he was, the worse it got. Water was poured so beautifully, crockery laid with such utter grace and tactfulness, that she thought she would actually give the man a slap.

‘He creeps me out,’ she said, and ‘You never know where he is in the damn house.’ She started stripping the sheets off the bed herself, after sex, and leaving them in a clump on the floor.

It was a relief to go down to the capital for a week-long traffic jam, and a bit of compound living with the government boys and the UN boys and the boys from the FAO. Bamako was not exactly Geneva airport, but still it was a shock. Sometimes, Emmet thought he wanted a nice air-conditioned office with Nespresso coffee and Skype on tap, but then he thought a nice air-conditioned office was an open invitation to his nervous breakdown. Emmet and his breakdown spent some quality time together after the Sudan, when his father was dying and Emmet sat about the house waiting for his own meds to work. How long did it take? Three months? Five? One way or another, that whole year was fucked.

He was fine now. Ten years on. He and his breakdown had kept a respectful distance in various steaming, stinking towns from Dhaka to Nampula, though he did not underestimate it, or consider it gone. Lying on the clean sheets of the Bamako Radisson, Emmet felt it in the ducts, like Legionnaires’.

On his last morning, Emmet made contact with a guy who knew a guy in Vétérinaires Sans Frontières and set up a meeting for him in the Radisson bar. The vet turned out to be a woman from Nebraska called Carol with a tough little body and a nice line in clean khakis. She listened to the problem of the dog’s eye in rapt silence, then said, ‘First off, let’s get another drink.’ When it arrived, she said, ‘OK, let’s fix this little guy,’ sending Emmet back north with the good news that the dog’s cherry eye could be massaged back into place. ‘Unless it has insurance, in which case, it’s a three-man job under full anaesthetic.’ She pushed her fingertips up under her own eye to demonstrate, and then under his, saying, ‘Hey, he has urethritis, you get to do this to his dick.’ After which, Emmet could not extricate himself until she’d had far too much to drink. But it was worth it, to bring something of value to Alice; sweet, soft-hearted Alice, with her passion for micro finance, and her body of medieval whiteness under the revolving fan.

He also brought a twelve-pack of Andrex toilet paper back with him, three boxes of Twinings tea bags, and a jar of Nutella. He entered the house, laden, and went from room to room until he found her upstairs with Mitch, both of them under the mosquito net, on the bed.

‘Well hellooooo,’ she said.

Mitch lifted his tail for a surprising wag that pushed out the netting like some vague stump. Then Alice climbed out from under it, and Emmet knew at once that something was wrong.

‘Where’s Ib?’

The house was too silent, for a start.

‘Sick.’

‘How sick? How are you? Look! Look what I got!’

‘Nutella!’

And Emmet held it high, making her fight for the jar.

Down in the kitchen, he said, ‘What’s wrong with Ib?’

‘He sick.’

‘Like what?’

‘He siiiick. Went home on Thursday.’

People here were always siiiick, always waving vaguely over bits of themselves. Pain in your back, pain in your head; it amazed Emmet that people who could barely scrape a meal together had time to notice their frozen shoulders or acid reflux, but they really did. They thought everything was about to kill them. And sometimes they were right.

‘Did someone come?’

Alice said a boy stuck his head out of the kitchen, without so much as a by your leave, put his hand out for money and said, ‘I shopping.’

‘And?’

‘And he shopped,’ she said. ‘Whoever he is.’

Later, over a cobbled-together dinner that was just an excuse for a Nutella dessert, she said, ‘I went over to see him this afternoon.’

And now Emmet thought there was something really wrong with Ibrahim, she had waited so long to mention it.

‘Is he all right?’

‘Just the malaria coming back at him.’ She had brought over some Malarone and paracetamol, found Ibrahim shaking under six blankets, the sweat pouring out of him and ‘everybody in the room’, she paused for the right word. ‘All the kids and the wife.’

‘Scat,’ she said. Mitch was mooching for food, and Alice pushed him away. He nuzzled back in and she gave him a proper shove, ‘I said, get off!’

Mitch gave Alice a hurt, sidelong look, but she did not apologise. She just watched him slope away.

‘Maybe we should turn vegetarian,’ she said. ‘You think dogs can be vegetarian?’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Something happened.’

‘It’s just stupid,’ she said. And she tried to swallow the annoying small smile, that happened in her mouth and would not go away.

After she left Ibrahim’s she was followed down the track by the usual posse of children and when she tried to wave goodbye, one of them started to make a noise. One of Ibrahim’s. A little guy with big solemn eyes. She didn’t know what he was doing and then she realised he was barking.

‘And then they all did it,’ she said. Six, maybe ten, little children all barking at her and rubbing their bellies.

A passing woman started to laugh at the white lady, who could not get free of the barking children. Open derision — like the time she had to crap out in the bush and everyone fell around the place because she got someone else’s shit on her foot, and it was like, ‘I am here to save your babies’ lives, you bastards.’ Anyway, there was much mockery and pointing from the passers-by, and she backed away from the pack of children like a bad B movie, and then she turned and fled.

‘The thing was,’ she said, ‘I thought they wanted to eat the dog.’

Emmet realised that he was allowed to laugh now.

‘I thought they wanted to eat Mitch.’

‘I really don’t think that was what they wanted,’ he said.

‘No.’

They wanted to eat the dog’s food. Alice had realised, by the time she got home, that Mitch ate more meat than Ibrahim’s children got in a week. Which wasn’t exactly news. She just hadn’t. .

‘Bang the bread,’ said Emmet.

‘What?’

‘Weevils. Bang it.’ You could tell that Ibrahim was off sick, the bread was full of moving black dots.

‘No such thing as vegetarian bread in this town,’ said Emmet. He slammed his hard bit of loaf on to the floor, shouting, ‘Die, you bastards!’ while Alice picked up hers and peered into it.

‘Ew.’

He flung the bread against the wall.

‘Out! Out!’ while Alice squealed and fumbled her piece on to the table, flapping her hands in alarm.

Emmet got up to retrieve his and was distracted by a gentle sound that became, as he noticed it, dreadful. They both listened, then looked to Mitch, to see a pool forming at the end of one shivering hind leg, the other leg nervously half cocked.

‘Oh no,’ said Alice.

The pool did not spread so much as swell, until the tension gave and a runnel of piss broke across the floor.

‘Mitch! Stop it!’

Alice said, ‘Sit down! What are you doing?’

‘What am I doing? Look what he’s doing.’

‘Why are you shouting? He is doing it because you are shouting.’ She was shouting, herself, now. ‘Why are you like this?’

Mitch was cowering against the wall, eyes locked on Emmet. When Alice moved to comfort him, a last pathetic gout of liquid came out on to the floor.

‘Jesus,’ said Emmet.

There was nothing for it but to be nice to the dog, which Alice did, and to clean up the piss, which Emmet did, using up many valuable sheets of Andrex two-ply classic white.

After which, they sat back down to finish their dinner.

‘Right,’ said Emmet.

Mitch lay in a swoon of reconciliation beside Alice, who fed him and stroked him as they ate in silence. After a while, with the slow air of a woman who doesn’t even know that she is looking for a fight, Alice said she had decided to give Ibrahim a raise.

‘Great,’ said Emmet.

‘Seriously.’

‘Sure. By all means. Let’s give Ibrahim money. Lots of money. I have no problem with that.’

‘You’re just mean,’ said Alice.

‘Check your guidelines,’ he said.

‘You are,’ said Alice. ‘You’re a cold bastard.’

They ate on.

‘Let me try something,’ he said. ‘Can I try?’

Emmet petted the dog and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to eat you, Mitch.’ He took the dog’s muzzle in both hands and glanced up at Alice. Then he applied a gentle thumb to the dog’s bad eye.

Mitch pulled back and scrambled to his feet, but Alice put her arms about the dog’s ribcage and held on while Emmet took his head in his hands again and circled his thumb round the eye’s inner corner. He pressed the balloon of flesh down into the orbital socket, closing his own eyes, the better to sense the lump beneath the dog’s trembling underlid. He could feel it flatten and go, as though the air had been let out of it, and when he released Mitch for a look, the dog blinked, clear and aggrieved. Then he blinked again. Mitch braced his front legs and turned his head from side to side. Then he shook himself, with violent precision, from top to tail. He lolloped off to his rag bed in the corner, where he turned and turned, and lay down. Then he was up again, pouncing on a cushion as if it was a small animal that had moved.

‘It might pop out again tomorrow,’ said Emmet. ‘In which case, we do it again, apparently.’

‘Good trick.’

He was a shallow creature, really — just in it for the sex, Emmet thought, as he looked at Alice’s face made hazy by delight.

‘Nutella?’ he said.

In the middle of December, Alice went home. She left like a schoolgirl, with folders of notes for head office and an implausible, chunky-knit, black and white scarf.

Emmet tried to imagine her wearing something so uncomfortable and hot. He saw her in a kitchen filled with unlikely daffodils; the mad mother, the two brothers ‘who never said much’. The colonial house was empty of tat. Alice had brought it all back with her; the mud-cloth hangings, the Dogon masks; it was all sitting in a suitcase on that seventies lino in Newcastle, smelling of camel shit. Emmet went around the stripped-down rooms like a visitor, and did not know where to sit. Ibrahim, too, was more serious now they were alone: dutiful and male, he acted as though they had an understanding. Which they had, sort of. The dog stayed outside, for a start.

He barked every evening. Confined to the space between the house and the wall, he called the sudden sunset, as though doubting the dawn.

On the 24th, Emmet went on the road, leaving instructions that Mitch should be fed in his absence, though he did not expect him to be fed much. He topped up the bowl before he left. And it was something, when he came back after a week, to be welcomed with doggy joy; a little dashing about.

‘Hiya! Hiya!’

Though, when he looked into the dog’s clear eyes and the dog looked into his, they were both thinking of Alice.

‘Back soon, boyo. She’ll be back soon.’

In the middle of January, she rang from Bamako. Emmet went out to buy beer and soap, and brought Mitch back inside.

‘Don’t tell, eh?’ It had only been a month, but the dog seemed confused. He walked from one place to another as though he did not recognise the rooms. Then he went back to the front door, and scratched to be let out. When Emmet opened the door, he sicked up on the front step.

‘Shit,’ said Emmet. He tried to tempt him in with a biscuit, but Mitch did not seem interested in biscuits and Emmet had to pull him inside, finally, to his rag bed. He called to Ibrahim.

‘Monsieur Emmet, sir?’

They looked at the dog, who was panting where he lay. Every breath was a rasp in his throat.

‘He sick,’ said Ibrahim.

‘Yes.’

They stood for a moment.

Emmet said, ‘You know, Ib, I never gave you your Christmas box.’ Then he palmed the guy ten bucks and left it at that.

By the time Alice got in that evening, the dog was bleeding from the nose. This she discovered when he left a trail across her cargo pants and her homecoming turned, on the instant, from gladness to disaster. She was barely in the door.

Mitch was bleeding from somewhere and heaving with unidentifiable pain. Alice felt around his belly, which was swollen and, as he nuzzled under her palm, he cried, like a baby gone wrong. Alice, still in her blood-smeared travelling clothes, sat beside him and lifted his head on to her lap. Ibrahim came in with newspaper and old cloths, and left quietly for home.

‘Did somebody hit him?’ she said. ‘He must have been hit by a motorbike. Or a car.’ But Emmet said — and he was pretty sure it was true — that the dog had not been beyond the gate. Alice was deep in panic. She sat beside Mitch, who cried for another while and then slept. He barked in his dreams, and that strange, uncompleted sound was like crying too. There was more blood.

Emmet tried Carol, the vet from Nebraska, but her African SIM made funny noises and the Bamako office was, naturally, closed.

‘Did you get her?’ said Alice.

‘I think she’s gone back home.’

‘Let’s see,’ she said, gesturing for the vet’s business card, stained (though Alice was not to know this) with Jack Daniel’s.

‘What time is it in America?’ she said, pushing the numbers into her little slab phone and Emmet was so angry, suddenly, he had to turn away.

An hour later, as though continuing where they had left off, Alice suddenly said, ‘What are you even here for?’

He said, ‘Come to bed.’

‘I mean, if you don’t believe in anything? Really. What are you doing here?’

He did not remind her that he was the one who fixed the dog’s bad eye; that, although he did not love the dog, he had helped the dog. He said, ‘Come on.’

And she dragged herself upstairs for an hour or two, rummaging in her bag first to find her little box alarm.

Emmet watched Alice in her sleep, the imperceptible rise and fall of her breast, the slopes of her body under the white sheet. Downstairs the dog gave a peculiar brief whistle on the top of each inhale and Alice looked indifferent to it, almost happy. Emmet thought about work. His next trip would take him out beyond the Bandiagara escarpment — one hundred and fifty kilometres of cliff, stuck with mud houses like the nests of swifts. Mankind, living in the crevices. Sometimes Emmet thought it was the landscape he loved, the way it stretched as you travelled through it and the hills unfolded. The pleasure of the mountain gap.

When he woke, Alice was back at her post downstairs, sitting against the wall beside Mitch. There was blood on the floor, in a mess of brushstrokes from his muzzle. He was almost still.

When he heard Emmet, the dog opened his eyes and looked for Alice’s eyes, and she bent down, offering her face to lick, encouraging his pale tongue to find her chin and mouth. The dog’s teeth were very dark, the gums almost white. She let the dog’s head gently down on the floor and tilted her own head sadly back against the wall. Mitch coughed. The blood that came out was scarlet, and it spattered her pale forearm. Alice looked down at herself, indifferent.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Emmet.

He went outside to the privy and looked up at the fading stars, while he stood to pee. The licking was fine. You can’t get TB from a dog and anyway, the dog did not have TB. It was the blood on her arm that disturbed him, and the dog’s dark teeth. Some feeling he could not identify. And then he did.

It happened just as he finished pissing, whatever that did to you. A darkness pouring down his spine. He had to turn and sit on the toilet, so as not to fall. Emmet’s elbows were on his knees and his hands were out in front of him, and there it was. The forgotten thing, indelibly back. A dog in Cambodia, with a woman’s arm in its mouth.

It was up near the Thai border, his first year out. The area was full of minefields and the medics did fifteen, twenty amputations a day. They threw the remains in a heap outside the hospital tent and, if she had a moment, one of the nurses shot at the scavenger dogs. They put pit teams together, but there were latrines to be dug, and the dogs were not fatal, the way diarrhoea is fatal. So it was hard to believe, but it became true, that for a fortnight at least their only defence against this desecration was a crack-shot nurse called Lisbette from the Auvergne, who took a pistol with her when she stepped outside for a fag.

Then, very quickly, it became ordinary. Not pleasant, of course. Just normal. A dog with a human arm in its mouth.

Now, sitting like a fool on a toilet in West Africa, it wasn’t normal any more.

Emmet braced his hands against the breeze-block walls, listening to his body, thinking, This is how you die.

When he finally got out of there, a wreath of dawn bites around each ankle, Alice was still in her place by the bottom of the stairs. Blood was coming out of the dog’s back end now, and he was nearly dead. She didn’t ask about her cup of tea. She just cried and cried.

Ibrahim let himself in to the house just as the sun came up. He paused at the bloody scene in the dining room then ducked into the kitchen. There was silence. Emmet imagined him in there, steadying himself against the sink.

‘It’s going to get hot, Alice.’

Alice gave a tiny answer, that sounded like ‘Yes’. She stirred herself and picked vaguely at the cloth of her trousers, where the blood had dried.

‘Have a shower.’

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She trailed upstairs and Emmet went to the kitchen where Ibrahim was standing stock still, holding his bag, ready for the market.

‘All right, Ib?’

‘I pain,’ said Ibrahim.

‘Have you? Little one?’

‘Yes. Little bit sick.’

‘Right. Well off you go. Don’t worry about the dog, Ib. I’ll sort that. N’inquiètes-pas du chien.’

‘Non, Monsieur. Merci, Monsieur.’

When he was gone, Emmet texted Hassan. He stood listening to the light, erratic footfalls in the bedroom above and looked at the dog’s little teeth, exposed in the snarl of death.

‘Oh man,’ said Hassan when he walked in. ‘So dirty this thing. Blood. Dead fucking dog. I can’t touch this thing, man, or I spew. You know? For this I spend three weeks in hell.’

‘Come on, Hassan my friend. Come on.’

‘It’s like you ask me to dirty my soul. I love you Emmet, but no way I can do that disgusting thing.’

‘How much?’

‘How much, my soul? OK. OK. Put him in something. OK. I’ll come back.’

And in surprisingly short order, he did. He brought a small, stocky-looking ‘Christian man’, who helped Emmet roll the dog into a square of hessian then shouldered the body so that the white plume of Mitch’s tail was hanging down his back. They were just about set when Alice appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Where are you taking him?’ she said.

Emmet looked at her.

‘Can you clean that up?’ he said, pointing at the blood on the floor, but Alice did not even pretend to hear.

‘Bury him,’ she said. ‘I want him properly buried.’ She looked very proud, standing there.

‘Yes, Madame,’ said Hassan.

Outside the door, Emmet said, ‘Don’t throw it in the fucking river, Hassan. People drink that stuff.’

He had his roll out. Hassan said, ‘Three bucks.’

‘Three?’

‘No commission.’

He fumbled out the notes, and they left, the Tuareg opening the gate with great ceremony. But instead of going to the Land Cruiser to put the dog in the boot, the ‘Christian man’ walked away from them, without a word, down towards the market and the river.

Emmet watched him go.

‘Give me half an hour,’ he said to Hassan.

Hassan let a big laugh out of him. ‘I love you, my man,’ he said. ‘I’ll kiss you when you’re clean.’

That night Alice said it was Ibrahim who had poisoned Mitch.

‘Rat poison. He gave him rat poison. He had internal bleeding. That was how he died.’

‘Ib’s a good guy.’

‘Is he?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘So I am supposed to live with this man. I am supposed to eat his food?’

‘Yes. Yes you are. Yes.’

She started to weep.

Emmet had a fair idea, by now, who had poisoned the dog, but he wasn’t about to get a different man fired. He said, ‘Can we draw a line under this one?’

‘Draw a line?’

Emmet steadied himself.

‘Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s only a dog.’

And that, he knew, was the end of them.

After sex that night, she lifted one short white leg and looked at it in the dim light, turning her foot this way and then the other. Stefan, the Swedish guy, said she had an ‘old-fashioned body’, which she thought just meant ‘fat’, but then he said she wasn’t fat, she was just ‘pre-war’. What about Emmet, did he think she was fat?

‘Certainly not,’ said Emmet.

‘I saw him down in Bam,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

Within a week, she had stopped speaking much, and there was nothing else for it — late one night, Emmet said, ‘I love you, Alice. I think I am in love with you.’

She paused where she was, and then walked on.

The next evening, which was Thursday, she had too much to drink and said, ‘You always leave it too late, don’t you? You wait until it’s all over and then you say you’re only starting. And then it’s like, Oh but I love you, and why are women so mean to me, and why can I never settle down?’

Emmet said nothing.

He was wrapping things up anyway. Alice, too, would be moving on. So there was no reason to hate her the way he seemed to hate her now. He wanted to yell at her. Hit her, maybe. He wanted to tell her to go home and rescue some fucking gerbils, because she was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, she would end up killing more people than she ever helped. And it was all very well, he wanted to say, it was all very nice as a feeling, but love was no use, at the end of the day, to man or beast, when there was no fucking justice in the world.

He also wanted to tell her that she was lovely and eternally right and that he, Emmet, was a failure as a human being.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She was gone when he got back. There was money on the desk, for rent, which made Emmet sad, and a note on the bed he really did not want to read. Alice had the kind of handwriting that put little circles over the i’s, and sticky-out puppy tongues where the full stop should be. Alice’s handwriting made him feel like a child-molester. The note was a single sheet of paper, inside which she had written the verse everyone quotes, by Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

Emmet did not take a shower. He shoved the hat back on his head and went downstairs, calling, ‘I’ll be back late,’ and Ibrahim, who had not emerged from the kitchen since he had arrived, called back, ‘OK, Monsieur Emmet. Bonsoir!’

The Tuareg at the gate was wearing a new cloth of indigo blue, freshly dyed; for a wedding, perhaps. Original blue. The veil across the bottom of his face had stained the man’s cheeks — what Emmet could see of them — with years of dye. It occurred to Emmet that the Tuaregs came and went, that there might have been many different men at his gate, and this was why he never knew which one he was talking to and which one had poisoned the fucking dog.

Poor Mitch. Poor bastard.

Emmet went to a shebeen on the side of the marketplace and cracked a beer, watching out for the mad, sweaty guy on his left, nodding at the young lads drinking cola at the low table, and then turning, with the heels of his boots hooked on to the cross-bar of the stool, to watch the world go by.

It was all as it should be. The market was a sea of tat that nobody seemed to buy, and the vegetables were laid out on decorative cloths, like handmade things.

After a while, the bumpy woman came by; the one who was covered in tiny lumps, from the top of her head to the underside of her heels. She turned, as she passed, to level at Emmet a smile of great sweetness and sympathy. Emmet gave her a wan smile back and she continued on, gravely smooth, as though there was a pot balanced on her head.

Rosaleen, Ardeevin, 2005

IN NOVEMBER OF 2005 Rosaleen decided to do her Christmas cards, which were few enough, and most of them local. Not, she thought, that she would be getting many back this year, as people died off, or their habits died off, through forgetfulness or the neglect of their families who would not think to go down to the post office and buy them a book of stamps.

The cards were small and square shaped with ‘Merry Christmas’ written in copperplate writing across the top. All of them were the same design: a block of red, and on it a brown dune, with little camels and kings drawn on the sand in black ink. Above them was the Christmas star, long — like a crucifix with added rays bursting out from the crux of it. The light of the star was made with the white of the paper itself. The printer just left a gap.

The cards were very simple but they were good cards. The red was very satisfying; not so much a sky as a background, like something you would see in a Matisse. Vermilion. Rosaleen closed her eyes in pleasure at a word she had not expected and at the memory of Matisse: a red room with a woman sitting in it, from a postcard or a library book, perhaps. Years since she had given it a thought, and there the woman still sat in her head, waiting to surprise her for never having left. Waiting for her moment, which was an ordinary moment — half past four on a Thursday in November, the sun about to set, sinking towards New York and, below New York as the world turned, all of America.

Straight across the ocean.

‘As the crow flies,’ said Rosaleen, only to hear an embarrassment of silence around her. The radio dead. Not even a cat, curled up in the chair.

‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn,’ she said, also out loud, and looked to the darkening window where her reflection was beginning to shadow the pane. Or someone’s shadow. An image thin and insubstantial, like something that happened in the camera once, her dog superimposed on the view of St Peter’s Square, after her mother died, when they went to Rome. And the dog, who missed them terribly, came through the photographs, running towards them on the green road beyond Boolavaun.

Rosaleen looked to the window and stood to her full height.

‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair!

Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!’

Her voice worked perfectly. Rosaleen set the cards on the table and sat down to write.

The kitchen was the easiest room in the house, with the heat of the range and two windows, one facing south and the other west. But it was November, and there were days when she filled a hot water bottle just to make it down the hall. Outside, she had a winter flowering cherry set against the silhouetted winter branches, but it would not bloom for many weeks yet. Meanwhile, she had no evergreens, for being too depressing, and every November she thought about a blue spruce, or those needle-thin Italian pines, and every November she decided against. It was an Irish garden. A broadleaf garden, except for the monkey puzzle at the front of the house. Straggly now — there were dead and half dead branches for fifty feet or more, but it was her father’s tree and nothing gave her more pleasure. The monkey puzzle was allowed, as Dan used to say.

‘That’s allowed.’

Ah. But was talking aloud allowed?

Rosaleen smiled. She picked up one of the cards and saw it again through Dan’s eyes. Because it was Dan — of course it was — who sent the postcard of the woman in the red room. It had lived on the fridge door for years. Dan, she thought, would like the little red Christmas card, that made no claims, that was innocent and tasteful enough. For an utterly pretentious boy, he was very set against pretension. Much fuss to make things simple. That was his style.

And it was also her style. Rosaleen opened the card to check. ‘Beannachtaí na Nollag’ the greeting said, in Irish, which was all lovely and just right for an American mantelpiece, whatever his mantel looked like these days. Granite, perhaps. Or none, the fireplace a simple square cut in a white wall. Rosaleen set the card flat and lifted her pen with a flourish — a special gel pen she had bought in the new supermarket.

‘My darling Dan,’ she wrote, and then she paused and looked up.

After a moment she saw what her eyes lingered upon: a shelf for the radio and for bills, and above that, a clock stopped these five years or more, the face sticky with cooking grease. The wall itself was a dusty rose, a colour which was unremarkable most of the day and then wonderful and blushing as the sun set. Like living in a shell. Under that was the 1970s terracotta, Tuscan Earth it was called, up on a chair herself, coat after coat of it, to cover the wallpaper beneath, fierce yellow repeats of geometric flowers that kept breaking through. And under the wallpaper? She could not recall. The whole place should be stripped and done properly or — better yet — the wall turned to glass, dissolved: it would be a kind of rapture, the house assumed into heaven. Like who? Our Lady of Loreto, of course. Her house flying through blue Italian skies. The patron saint of air hostesses everywhere. Because Everywhere is the place that air hostesses like to be.

There was nothing that lifted Rosaleen’s heart like the sight of a plane in the summer sky.

She looked down at the white paper on the table in front of her, and the writing on it — her own writing. ‘My darling Dan’.

Dan would love a glass wall at the back of the house. Dan would strip back the old paper, he would paint the place ‘winter lichen’ or ‘mushroom’. When he worked in a gallery they painted the place every six weeks he said. He would get professionals in to do it, so the lines would be true.

Rosaleen picked the paper up and turned it over again. It was his Christmas card and he would like it. Dan liked simple things. He would be over forty now. He would be forty-four in August. Her son was forty-three years old.

Rosaleen tried to think what he might look like, this very minute, or how he looked the last time he made the trip home, but all she could remember was his smooth eight-year-old cheek against her cheek. Her blessed boy. He was so happy up against her, never pulled away. And he smelt of nothing, not even himself. Leaves, maybe. Rust. Boys were easy, she always thought. Boys gave you no trouble.

‘I think of you often,’ she wrote. ‘And just as often I smile.’

They were another planet. Surrounded by their own sense of themselves; their faces englobed, she thought, in their boyhood beauty. They wore their maleness as a gift.

What did you do today? Nothing. Where did you go? Nowhere. Though that was more Emmet’s style. Dan told you everything except the thing you needed to know. The schoolmaster’s shoes with the secretly stacked heels, the local woman gone up to Dublin to be in the audience for The Late Late Show. Dan was a master of irrelevance.

‘I miss your old chat,’ she wrote.

Dan’s eyes, Emmet’s eyes, as they looked at their mother, playful and impenetrable. Two sets of green, flecked with black. Stones under bright water.

She could still see them asleep, each in their beds as she passed their bedroom doors. Emmet under a hundred blankets. Dan sprawled, agape, a kind of push in him, even then, as though dreaming impossibilities. He slept like a shout. And as soon as he got the chance, he was gone.

The whole night long we dream of you, and waking think we’re there, —

She indulged herself a moment, pictured him sitting across the room from her, with a newspaper, perhaps, a cup of tea. It gave her a pang, just to catch the edge of it. An imagined life. Dan and herself somehow together in this house with their books and their music. The old style.

Vain dream and foolish waking, we never shall see Clare.

The world she grew up in was so different it was hard to believe she was ever in it. But she was in it, once. And she was here now.

Rosaleen Considine, six years old, seventy-six years old.

Some days, it wasn’t easy to join the dots.

She had not redecorated the bedrooms, upstairs. They were still the same. The same quilt on Dan’s bed. It was there now, if she cared to go up and look at it. The side lamp he found all by himself down in the local hardware, coming home excited, at what age? Eleven. Excited by a lamp. A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. And, in Emmet’s room, a big map of the world, the countries pink, green, orange and lilac. Yugoslavia. USSR. Rhodesia. Burma. When they grew up, Dan went everywhere, and Emmet, she liked to say, went everywhere else. But Dan always sent a message home.

‘All my love,’ she wrote. And then looked at what she had written. She underlined the word ‘All’ with a strong stroke of the pen: once, twice, a little wiggling tail on this second line, trailing down the page.

‘Your fond and foolish Mother, Rosaleen.’

The card went into its envelope. She tucked the flap in, turned it, pristine, and smoothed it down before writing ‘Mr Dan Madigan’ on the other side. Then she propped the envelope up against the little stainless steel teapot. His address was on a piece of paper in the drawer. Toronto. That was where he was. Or Tucson. One or the other. She did not know how he lived, but there were always rich people around him. At least that was the impression he liked to give. That he was thriving in some way that was beyond her understanding.

Which, indeed, it was.

‘Oh rough the rude Atlantic.’

Rosaleen spoke the poem a little out loud as she fumbled about in the drawer full of old papers, and what did she come across, only the postcard of the woman in the red room. The woman was dressed in black, and her face was carefully inclined over a stand of fruit that she set on the red table, and you could tell by the tilt of her head that she thought the fruit was beautiful. A widow, perhaps, or a housekeeper. The pattern on the tablecloth moved up on to the wall behind her and it was both antique and wild. Rosaleen turned the card over and there was Dan’s grown-up writing: ‘Hi from The Hermitage, where the security guards all look like Boris Karloff and are ruder than you can imagine. Love! Danny.’

Did he come home that time? There were trips when he flew right over the house, or might have done, and did not set foot on Irish soil.

A silver dot in the summer sky, her own flesh and blood inside it. Dan opening a magazine, or glancing out the window perhaps, while she caught at the gatepost to steady herself and squint skyward, 20,000 feet below.

Rosaleen had to close her eyes, briefly, at the thought of it. She put the postcard back in the drawer and tried to swallow, but her throat seemed to resist it and she was sitting back at the table when she realised she had not found Dan’s address, after all — Constance would have to sort it out for her. The next card was open in her hand. Rosaleen looked at the whiteness of it, that gave her no clue as to what to say.

‘My dear Emmet.’

Something was wrong. Perhaps it was the card. She turned the thing over to check the back and it was as she had suspected — the charity was one that Emmet did not like, or probably did not like — not because they fed the starving of Africa, but because they fed the starving in the wrong way. Or because feeding the starving was the wrong thing to do with them, these days. Rosaleen could not remember the particular argument — she did not care to remember it. All Emmet’s arguments were one long argument. Those babies, that you saw on the TV, the women with long and empty breasts, their eyes empty to match, and Emmet’s own eyes full of fury. Not passion — Rosaleen would not call it passion. A kind of coldness there, like it was all her fault.

Which, of all the wrongs in the world, were her fault, Rosaleen would not venture to say, but she thought that famine in Africa was not one of them, not especially. Not hers more than anyone else’s. Rosaleen had not said boo to a goose in twenty years. She didn’t get the chance. Her life was one of great harmlessness. She looked to the window, where her face was sharper now on the dark pane. She lived like an enclosed nun.

Her books, the poetry of her youth, Lyric FM. These were the scraps that sustained her. Mass every morning — and Rosaleen had no interest in Mass — for the chance of company; each parishioner more decrepit than the next and Mrs Prunty, this last twelve months, smelling of wee. If she’d had the choice, Rosaleen would have been a Protestant, but she didn’t have the choice. So this is what she was reduced to. Resisting bingo on a Saturday night. Waiting for the tiny bursts of pink on her winter flowering cherry. Deciding against yew and spruce, one more time, for the last time. And yet it seemed every child she reared was ready with one grievance or another. Emmet first in the queue, for telling her she was wrong. No matter what good she tried to do with her widow’s mite. Wrong to give it to this charity or to that charity and wrong to give it to fly-blown babies and big-bellied Africans: she’d be better off throwing it in a hedge.

‘Happy Christmas. Keep up the good work! Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’.

There would be no problem with his address this year. Emmet was home now — not that this made much difference to her routine. A phone call every week, a visit one Sunday in every month. Emmet was saving the world from a rickety little office in the middle of nowhere, and he had a girlfriend, no less. A drab looking Dutch thing, with good manners and clumpy shoes. She would do well to hang on to him, Rosaleen thought. He was a hard man to pin down.

And, not for the first time, Rosaleen wished her son some ease. The boy with so many facts at his disposal: that politeness edged with contempt, even at four, even at two. Yes Mama, whatever you say. The moment he came out of her, he opened his eyes and met her eyes and she felt herself to be, in some way, assessed.

Absurd, she knew. The power of the moment. The first baby she had seen right after birth, his eyes opening, whoosh, in the middle of the purple mess of his face, and those eyes saying, Oh. It’s you.

What did you do today? Nothing. How was school? Good.

He had a job in the civil service — a proper job — and he left it in 1993 for the elections in Cambodia, came back with stories of bodies in the paddy fields. And he was thrilled by these stories. Delighted. These dead people were much more interesting, he was at pains to point out, than his mother was, or ever could hope to be. And after Cambodia, Africa, places she had barely heard of. And then, unexpectedly, home.

He sat, for the year his father was dying, in the front room, like his own ghost. Rosaleen would come across him and get a fright at this unkempt man who had arrived one day to live in her house; a chemical tang that lingered after he used the toilet as bad or worse than the smell of chemotherapy from his father. Rosaleen thought he was taking pills of some sort. And one day, after he had cleaned up and made a new start of himself, she saw him at the desk of the old study, and it was her father all over again: the same size — Emmet had wasted to an old-fashioned weight — the same focus, and fury, and clammy sense of sanctity. It was John Considine.

A man she had always adored.

Oh Dada.

Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, Rosaleen in a green silk dress that shushed as she walked, hairband of Christmas red, black patent shoes. Rosaleen in her ringlets on the hearthrug in the good front room, saying her piece for Dada.

Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild,

the bleak, the fair!

Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers

are sweet, if rare!

Oh, rough the rude Atlantic, the thunderous,

the wide,

Whose kiss is like a soldier’s kiss which will

not be denied!

The whole night long we dream of you, and

waking think we’re there, —

Vain dream, and foolish waking, we never

shall see Clare.

Where did the time go? It was ten o’clock, and she had not eaten yet. She wasn’t even hungry, though it was now fully dark — the only thing between herself and the night was her image on the windowpane. Rosaleen straightened up. The same weight as ever. She walked. Every day she drove out in her little Citroën and she walked. She was the old woman of the roads. But she had legs like Arkle, her husband used to say, by which he meant that she was a thoroughbred. Rosaleen recognised, in her reflection, the good bones of her youth. She never lost it. From a distance, if you keep the hump out of your back, you might be any age at all.

She was doing a Christmas card for Emmet. A man who blamed her for everything, including the death of his own father. Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault. The fact that people die. It is all your fault.

Rosaleen put the card in an envelope, then took it out again to see if she had signed the thing. There it was, in handwriting that was unwavering. ‘Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’. Four words that could mean anything at all. She read them over but could not put them together, somehow. She could not put them in a proper line.

She had lost her son to the hunger of others.

She had lost her son to death itself. Because that is where your sons go — they follow their fathers into the valley of the dead, like they are going off to war.

Rosaleen sealed the envelope with a careful, triple lick, lapping the edge of the envelope so as not to get a paper cut on her tongue. She had to pause then to remember who it was for — Emmet always managed to upset her, somehow. She wrote his first name in strong letters on the envelope, and maybe that was enough for now, Constance could finish the rest.

‘To Hanna,’ the third card was started, before she even had time to consider it. ‘Happy Christmas. We will be seeing you, I hope, this year.’ She turned the last full stop into a question mark, ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year?’ but that looked too querulous, she thought, and she scribbled the question mark out. Then — of course — the thing was not fit to send.

And it was not ten o’clock, because that clock had been stopped for years, maybe five years. It stopped some time after Dan went. And by Dan she meant Pat, of course, her husband. The clock stopped some time after her own true love Pat Madigan died. It was nice to think he would have fixed it for her, if he had not died but, to be honest, death made very little difference to all that. His mother’s house was always tended and tarred, there were boxes of nails and guns full of mastic out at Boolavaun. But nothing of that nature ever got done in Ardeevin unless she begged him. Rosaleen had to nag like a housewife, she had to get down on her knees and wring her hands and even then, it might not happen — a new washer in the toilet cistern, a couple of slates on the roof — she might weep for them to no avail. The trick, of course, was not to want it. If she managed this for a year or more, if she actually, herself, forgot the tile or the slates or the stalled clock then it might get done. Or it might not. By this man she loved more than sunlight or rain. Pat Madigan. A man whose face she watched as he himself watched the weather.

And when the weather was right, off he went, to the land in Boolavaun. The few scrubby fields he had there, the little stony pastures, Rosaleen had planted them with pine trees, since, for the few thousand they brought in a year. Dessie McGrath organised it for her, the man who married Constance. Ugly dark trees in their serried ranks and rows.

Dessie wanted to build out in Boolavaun. He had an idea for a half-acre at the end of the long meadow, on the rise that looked out to sea. The sea view was everything these days, he said. The home place didn’t have one, of course, it was in a dip with its back to the cold Atlantic. Surrounded, these days, by the dark timber, it looked like a shed in comparison with the other places out that way. Popcorn houses, Rosaleen called them, because they went — pop, pop, pop — to twice the size they had been the week before. Pop! a second storey and Pop! some dormer windows and Piff! the outhouse turned into a conservatory: rooms painted Dulux peach, and, under the glass roof, a couple of dead pot plants from the supermarket, together with some cheap wicker chairs. Rosaleen knew well what Dessie McGrath had in mind with a half an acre of the long meadow, and he could whistle for it. Or he could wait for it. He could have it when she was gone. Because that is what they were waiting for. They were all waiting for Rosaleen to be dead.

‘Oh oh oh,’ she cried, and she hit her weak old fist on to the tabletop.

It was not ten o’clock. Rosaleen had no idea what the proper time was and the card on the table was spoilt. They were all gone from her, there was no one to help. ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year? ‘Typical of Hanna to make her mar the thing, she was always an accident-on-purpose sort of child. Hanna lived in mess, her life was festooned in it; her side of the bedroom was like a dirty protest, Constance said once, and she was right. The girl was a constant turbulence, she was always weeping and storming off. Constance said maybe it was pre-menstrual but Rosaleen said that child was pre-menstrual her entire life, she was pre-menstrual from the day she was born. Hanna Madigan, who seemed to require a surname at all times, because she would not do a single thing she was told.

Get in here, at once, Hanna Madigan.

No she would not start a new card for her, she had not the energy. What time was it anyway? Rosaleen looked to the clock and then to the darkness outside. She was not even hungry. Her whole life on a diet and now there was no need.

Rosaleen caught the sound of mischief upstairs and looked to the ceiling. But there were no children up there any more, she had chased them all away.

‘To Dessie and Constance, Donal, Rory and.’

Rory was her pet. The clearness of him. She would remember the little girl’s name in a minute. A little strap of a thing, with blotched red cheeks and orange, tinker’s hair. Rosaleen had no problem remembering the child’s name, but her heart failed her suddenly. Something was wrong. She felt a shadow fall through her — her blood pressure, perhaps — some shift in her internal weather.

‘Oh,’ she said again, and slapped her hand on to the tabletop, then she checked the tremor, silenced by the blow. As soon as she moved, it started again. There were days she would shake the milk out of the jug. She knew a man called Delahanty, who was fine except for a little trouble with the buttons on his shirt. Less and less he was able to do them, and one day not at all. And that was how the Parkinson’s came to him, he said. The buttons were the sign.

Rosaleen left her hand palm down on the tabletop, where it buzzed a little and came to rest. Something was wrong. The turf subsided behind the metal door of the range in a sigh of ash and Rosaleen would get up to put more turf on, if she only knew what time it was. She could go to bed, but the hall was cold and the electric blanket was on a timer. Her grandson, Rory, had set it up for her. If she went upstairs, it might be toasty. Or it might not be turned on, not for hours yet.

The hall was painted autumn yellow, and under the yellow was wallpaper, with little posies of flowers, their leaves in gilt. If she opened the door she would see it now.

But she could not open the door. Because who knew what was on the other side?

Rosaleen felt the same swooping feeling and her feet were numb, somehow, under the table. She pulled a comic, small face at her reflection in the window — if her feet were dead, then surely the rest of her could not be far behind — but it was a mistake to make a joke of it and Rosaleen lost all control as she lunged for the phone. She dropped it on the tabletop, then she picked it up again and stabbed the fast-dial with her thumb, and held it to her ear, listening to the clatter of her heart. The phone at the other end started to ring, but no one answered. Rosaleen could hear it ringing, not just in her ear, but also nearby, somehow. It was real. The thing she had imagined was really happening. It was out in the hall.

Constance was coming in the front door. The ringing stopped.

‘Hello!’ Rosaleen said — into her handset or into the hall, she didn’t know which.

Was that it? Was that the thing that was bothering her? The wrong thing?

‘Hello!’

She had expected Constance, maybe, and Constance had not come. Constance was late.

‘Mammy?’

Where she got the ‘Mammy’ from, Rosaleen did not know. When her children grew out of ‘Mama’, they had failed to grow into anything else.

‘Call me Rosaleen,’ she used to say. Until she realised that no one ever did, or would.

‘In the kitchen!’ she called.

Her grandchildren called her ‘Gran’, a word which made her skin crawl. And they called Constance ‘Mum’, which was worse, for being British as well as whiny: ‘Mu-um.’

O my Dark Rosaleen!

Do not sigh, do not weep!

‘Mammy! How are you?’

Constance was in through the kitchen door now, all girth and bustle. She had a couple of plastic bags she put down on the table. Even her bags were loud.

‘I hope they’re not for me,’ said Rosaleen.

‘Just a few bits,’ said Constance. ‘I was in Ennis.’

‘Was that you on the phone?’ said Rosaleen.

‘Me?’ Constance gave her a sharp look.

‘What time is it anyway?’ said Rosaleen, who could not keep the anger out of her voice, or the upset. Constance did not answer. She picked up the house phone from the table and made it beep, several times, checking something.

‘You got your cards?’ she said.

‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.

‘They’re not too plain?’

‘Where did you get them?’ said Rosaleen.

‘I kept the Santa ones for our house,’ said Constance who smiled and turned away from her, as though there was someone in the doorway — a child, perhaps — but there was no child there.

‘How’s my pal?’ said Rosaleen.

‘He’s good,’ said Constance. Rosaleen wanted to embrace the child that wasn’t in the doorway. She put her hand out to grip the chair.

‘How’s Rory?’

‘Good, good,’ said Constance, and then, with a deliberate sigh, ‘Actually, Mammy, he’s in his room pretending to study, and he’s on the internet. Twenty-four hours a day. I can’t get him off it.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘If it’s not on the laptop it’s the phone. So I take away the phone and you would not believe it. The temper.’

‘Rory?’ said Rosaleen.

‘He’s nineteen. I can’t be taking away his phone.’

‘And could you not.’ Rosaleen couldn’t think what Constance might do. There was discussion once about his ‘credit’.

‘Could you not take away his credit?’

Constance looked at her.

‘You know, I might,’ she said.

‘Go and give your granny a hug,’ that’s what she used to say. And Rory would walk over, very simply, and put his arms around Rosaleen, and lay the side of his head against her heart.

‘Listen,’ said Constance. ‘I won’t stay. Are you all right?’

‘Of course I am all right.’

‘Put the telly on,’ said Constance, and she had the remote already in her hand. And on the telly came. ‘All right?’

Rosaleen hated the telly. People talked such rubbish.

‘For the news,’ said Constance.

The sound came on to Angelus bells, and now Rosaleen heard them outside too, coming from the church. It was six o’clock.

‘It’s very dark,’ she said.

‘Oh, November,’ said Constance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll come up to Aughavanna tomorrow, for your tea. All right?’

She had opened the door of the kitchen and was already moving through it, and there was the hall beyond her, painted a Georgian turquoise that Rosaleen always considered a mistake. Too acidic. Rosaleen was pulled after her daughter as she turned on the lights, and opened the door to the wine-coloured study, where Rosaleen slept now, because the room was small and easy to heat — an electric radiator, an electric blanket on a timer that only Rory knew how to control, a smoke alarm. And, tucked in under the stairs, a shining, white room with sink and toilet, all tiled and watertight, like the inside of an egg.

The stairs rose up into darkness. Rosaleen did not sleep up there. Not any more.

‘See you tomorrow, Mammy,’ said Constance, and Rosaleen said, ‘You’ll have a cup of tea?’ hating, immediately, the sound of her voice.

‘I won’t,’ said Constance. ‘We’ll have tea enough tomorrow.’

She was speaking loudly, as though Rosaleen were deaf.

‘Why can’t you, sure?’ said Rosaleen.

‘Mammy,’ said Constance with a slight lift of her arms. There it was again, that stupid word.

‘Mammy,’ Rosaleen said. ‘Grow up, would you?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Constance.

And lose some weight! Rosaleen wanted to say. The woman would be dead before her. But Constance was already on her way down the hall.

It was very ageing — fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her. The coat didn’t help. It was like an anorak, almost.

‘Have a good night,’ said Constance.

‘I will,’ said Rosaleen.

Mind you, the child always liked to sneak things. Down the side of her bed, a little nest of papers. Crinkle crinkle crinkle in the middle of the night.

‘And lose some of that weight!’ she said, after the door closed in her face.

Rosaleen waited a moment, listening to the silence, then gave a little two-fisted victory dance. She heard Constance crossing the gravel outside, the bleat of the unlocking car. Even her footsteps were clear.

She might have heard.

No matter. The woman was her daughter, she could say what she liked.

Rosaleen stood in the hall of acid blue, and listened to the car engine — a purring, expensive sound. She waited for the swirl of gravel, and for the silence after it, then she turned to face back into the house. It was November. The wind was from the south-west, slicing around the landing window, and into the house. Blue Verditer, that was the colour of the hall. Through the far door was the rose-coloured light of the kitchen, and in it, the blare and nonsense of the news.

Wah Wah Wah. The telly was a series of blanks and shouts. The light thrown out by the stupid box, thin and bright. Dim. Bright. Brighter. Gone.

It was all wrong. The wrong-coloured walls. The stairs she never climbed any more, and unimaginable things up there. Unimaginable.

Rosaleen reached for the curling end of the bannisters. The wood was dark, the smell of the polish she used as a child so real she might catch it on a sharp inhale. A volute. That is the name of the curl. It unspooled and swept upwards to the landing and beyond that to the boys’ rooms.

O my Dark Rosaleen,

Do not sigh, do not weep!

The priests are on the ocean green,

They march along the deep.

The abandoned bathroom, with its porcelain like ice. The girls’ room. And the big bedroom. Untenably cold.

And Spanish ale shall give you hope,

My own Rosaleen!

And in those rooms: A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. A map on the wall of the whole world, as it used to be. And for the girls; a wall papered with posies tied with ribbons of blue. She pulled herself up the stairs, one two.

Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,

Shall give you health, and help, and hope,

My Dark Rosaleen!

And then she came down again, to stand in the middle of the hall.

The big bedroom was directly above her now, its two windows facing the morning. And in the centre of it — just over her head — the double bed where her father lay dying, and then died. It was the bed where she herself had been conceived, and it was also her marriage bed. Not deflowered. That happened somewhere else. New mattresses of course. The same mahogany headboard, inset with a medallion of rose and cherrywood, the same dark iron frame with strong planks for cross-boards, and in it, all the pomp of her family life: kisses, fevers, broken waters, the damp of their lives, the sap.

The pair of them lying still and awake all night long and Pat Madigan saying to her, some summer morning when dawn came, ‘I don’t know what I am doing here.’ By which he meant lying alongside her, John Considine’s daughter, a woman he had loved with quietness and attention for many years. Also patience, of course. And tenacity. He did not know what he was doing in this place — what he had been doing — if he had not wasted his life on her. He might have been with a different woman. A better woman. He might have been more himself.

Pat Madigan always knew who he was, of course, or who he should be.

Well good for him.

She only brought it up now to forget it. Rosaleen had married beneath her. There was no point fooling herself about that now. It was considered a mistake at the time. But she had flown in the face of public opinion, she had defied them all.

A love match. That was the phrase people used, but Rosaleen thought love had little enough to do with it, that it was an animal thing. Three weeks after her father’s death. Not that she was ashamed of it. There were things country men knew that men from the town had no clue about. These young people with their little events below the waist, thinking they were just marvellous. Whatever it was Bill Clinton said about sexual relations, she couldn’t agree more, because when they were young and in their beauty, which was considerable, Rosaleen Considine and Pat Madigan went to bed for days. That was what she called sex. Days they spent. It was a lot more than pulling down your zip while you were talking on the phone.

So what do you think of that?

‘Hah!’

In defiance of the night, she said it out loud.

‘What do you think of that?’

The bed was above her, ready to fall through the plaster, the place where her father died and her mother died, the place that later became her bed with Pat Madigan, when they moved into that room, and a kind of curse in it for the next while: no child conceived there except a few miscarried things, until Emmet was finally started and then Hanna. The bed where Pat Madigan himself finally died, his body wasted by the cancer until all that was left of him was the scaffolding. But, my goodness, he made a great ruin, for having been so well built, those big hinging bones, the joints getting larger and the cheekbones more proud, as the meat melted back and spirit of the man broke through.

He went on a Tuesday night, and they had the lid down by Wednesday afternoon: Rosaleen made sure of it. Planted on the Thursday in a terrible downpour and not one of the mourners allowed to care that they were soaked through. The days and weeks these people spent talking about the weather. Discussing it. Predicting it. The months and years.

It rained. They got wet.

How terrible.

Her father was buried in August, one hot summer, and of course John Considine was too big a man to be shoved into the earth, like a blown calf. They had to wait for priests and monsignors, not to mention his good friend, the Bishop of Clonfert. But something had gone off in her father, it spread through him in the days before he died, and it kept going off for the three or four days after, as men were summonsed from Dublin and from Liverpool; one couple, whoever they were, arriving, almost festive in their own motor car. Various nuns sat vigil by the coffin in the front room and one of them stroking her father’s forehead as she talked to Rosaleen. Vigorously. Gazing at his dead face. Stroking it. Pushing it.

‘Ah God love him,’ she said. ‘Ah, the crathur. Ah the poor man.’

Brushing his hair back, over and over. The smell of incense, of roses and lavender brought in from the garden, honeysuckle soap on Rosaleen’s hands, and her father’s nose, as the days passed, rising higher away from his own face, as though in disdain. Rosaleen thought the stroking nun was mad in the head. And she thought her own virginity was going off inside her, that her womb would rot, she had left it so long, turning one or other suitor down for reasons that were always clear at the time. A brace of young men, or wealthy men, standing in the room where her father lay now, adjusting their ties. She was much courted, John Considine’s daughter. And in the end, she gave it away to Pat Madigan in a hayrick in Boolavaun; her body, later that night, alive and tormented by tiny prickles and welts because, Pat said, the hay was new to her skin.

Forty acres of rock and bog. That is what she got. And Pat Madigan.

The door to the front room was closed now. Her father’s ghost was a cold twist of air turning on the broken hearth. Her father was a moment’s anxiety, as she passed the study, Hush hush! your father’s working. Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society, Knight of Columbanus, Irishman, scholar, John Considine of Considine’s Medical Hall. Rosaleen looked in at her own narrow bed and wondered, not for the first time, whether her father was actually important, or if these men, with their big thoughts about the world, were all equally small.

There was a dishcloth going off in the sink — she could catch the smell of it from the doorway — and the thing they put under the stairs, the new bathroom that looked so shining and so sanitary, was only another drain, really, opening into the house. The kitchen table was laden with grocery bags, the television blattering away. The evening was ahead of her, with maybe a book to pull her through it. Any book would do. She used to read while the place fell apart around her. And she still read. She liked it.

But first she went to the drawer full of papers. The guarantee form, never posted, for the washing machine before last. Old cheque-books, one end thick with accusing stubs, the rest slapping empty. Things to do with tax. Forestry stuff for the land at Boolavaun. She found the woman in the red room and then another postcard from Dan, a thing by Kandinsky with two horsemen against a background that was also red, and something about the stretch of the animals’ necks that showed the wildness and difficulty of the journey they were embarked upon.

Rosaleen held it up to the light.

Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.

The evening was just beginning. If she made a cup of tea now, she could have a little sandwich with it; something small to stop her waking in the middle of the night and wandering out into the hall, wondering where she was, though she was never anywhere else but here.

Where else would she be?

But there was something wrong with the house and Rosaleen did not know what it was. It was as though she was wearing someone else’s coat, one that was the same as hers — the exact same, down to the make and size — but it wasn’t her coat, she could tell it wasn’t. It just looked the same.

Rosaleen was living in the wrong house, with the wrong colours on the walls, and no telling any more what the right colour might be, even though she had chosen them herself and liked them and lived with them for years. And where could you put yourself: if you could not feel at home in your own home? If the world turned into a series of lines and shapes, with nothing in the pattern to remind you what it was for.

It was time. She would doze in the chair by the range, tonight, she would not lie down. And in the morning she would walk down the town, over the bridge to the auctioneer’s. She could get a price for it, apparently; the days when people were put off by the heating bills were gone. The auctioneer was a McGrath — of course — a brother of Dessie, who married her daughter. He had to wet his lips each time she passed; his mouth went so dry at the sight of her. Well he could have it. Let the McGraths pick over the carcass of the Considines, they could have Ardeevin and the site at Boolavaun, she would move in with Constance, and die in her own time.

They had all left her. They deserved no better.

The gutters falling into the flowerbeds, the dripping taps, the shut-up rooms that she had abandoned, over the years. The pity of it — an old woman.

Rosaleen took up the little stack of Christmas cards. She opened the first one:

My darling Dan,

I think of you often, and just as often I smile. I miss your old chat.

All my love,

Your fond and foolish Mother,

Rosaleen.

She was an old fool, that much was true. There was no doubt about that.

‘And by the way,’ she put at the bottom. ‘P.S Do, DO come for Christmas this year, it’s been so long!!! And I have decided to sell the house.’