The Green Road

Toronto

LUDO SAID HE had to do it, it was the last chance he would get.

‘For what?’ said Dan.

‘To be in the house. To see your mother while she is still your mother,’ Ludo said. He paused in his chopping and dicing and looked out at the yard. The snow outside was high to the windowsill, and the flat under-light made everything in the kitchen look drab and momentous. The blue of it took the money out of everything, Dan thought — all Ludo’s cosy objects, and his middle-aged skin. The bell peppers on the chopping board, meanwhile, were a more thrilling shade of red.

‘She is always my mother,’ said Dan.

Which was Ludo’s point exactly.

‘Well make up your mind.’

‘I rejoice in my contradictions,’ said Ludo and he lifted the big knife, waving it high.

‘Yeah well,’ said Dan. ‘I am not saying I came out of some other woman, I am just saying it was a long time ago.’

‘This is not a lucky way to talk,’ said Ludo.

‘Lucky?’ said Dan, as he opened the fridge, its interior green as a hanging garden with lettuces and leeks, the default champagne in the rack and imported gin in its earthen bottle, keeping cold. Ludo was, among other things, a rich man while Dan, for reasons that were never entirely clear to him, was not rich. Not even slightly.

‘What do you mean, lucky?’

‘Life is too full of regrets,’ said Ludo.

A big-featured man with eyes of serious blue, Ludo favoured pinstriped waistcoats and leather jackets, with buttonhole and umbrella, and his house was full of stuff. This was new for Dan, who had woken up in a lot of beautiful white rooms in his day. A nice brick-colonial in Rosedale, Toronto, it had antique cotton quilts and a rocking chair in the bay window: there were three different kinds of maple in the front yard and behind the up and over garage door was a wide shovel for snow.

Ludo was interested in early American landscapes and Dan was surprised to find he was interested in them too. At least a little. They first met in New York over a sincere view of a river gorge that Dan was offloading for a friend. One thing led to another, of course. When Dan flew up with the piece they ended up in bed again, after which they discussed Ludo’s growing collection, as Dan had hoped to do.

Sexually, Ludo was frankly masochistic and this appealed to Dan’s chillier side. But you can never do these things twice. Besides, masochists were always boring in the end. Also — perhaps inescapably — in the middle. And Dan was slightly bored with being bored, though he still craved that little jolt of empathetic pain.

So perhaps it was lucky that, in Toronto, Ludo was off script; too baggy minded and curious to stay in role. Dan felt his age as he realised this was, in fact, what he had flown up for — for the chat, for Ludo’s easy, good company. It did not take them long to hang up the leathers and settle into something else: mostly in Brooklyn, when Ludo was down lawyering in New York, then some skiing near Montreal, a winter break in Harbour Island, until Dan ended up in Toronto for six months because cash was so short, and Ludo so easy. He let out his place in Brooklyn and gave it a go.

Easy like a fox. Ludo handed Dan a credit card for household expenses with a rueful look that must have been useful to him in court. If Dan wanted to fuck him over, he seemed to say, then this would be a good way to do it, too. But Dan did not fuck him over. Or not much. And five years later, there they were, like a pair of sweater queens, sniping at each other about Dan’s mother, because ‘mother’ was one of those words for Ludo, She’s your mother.

Ludo’s mother Raizie was back in Montreal. Eighty-three years old, she was on a kaffeeklatsch circuit with the escaped matrons of Mile End, over in leafy Saint-Laurent, where no one, it seemed, could believe their good luck, or their bad luck, because if their son wasn’t buying a country place, he was in the middle of a terrible divorce. The daughters lost weight or they found a lump and one grandchild outshone the next. There were also disasters, of course. Men died. Women got depressed. Sons were seldom gay, it had to be said, but life was good enough for the escaped matrons of Mile End to leave some room even for this sad surprise and they were able to enjoy them both, Ludo and Dan, when they showed up. Dan was not the first man Ludo brought home but, as Raizie said, cupping his face with her dry old hand, ‘You are the nicest!’ There were no doubts. They went over to Montreal, twice, maybe three times a year, and Ludo came home each time more contented and capacious.

Dan liked to watch Ludo about his mother’s house, a big man in a small space, the dinkyness of his hands as he washed her china cups, the unembarrassed way he sat in the old recliner, the way he said, ‘Raizie, Raizie,’ when she fretted about the past and all the things that could not be put right. It seemed to Dan that Ludo spoke many languages — even his body spoke them — while he, Dan, spoke only one. They went over to his sister’s house, and her teenage children gazed at Ludo like they knew he was something belonging to them, but they weren’t sure what, exactly. Or not yet.

Meanwhile, he, Dan, had not been home to Ardeevin for three years, maybe five. Donal, Rory and — what was her name? — Shauna — they were different people already. Those boys of piercing purity, with their beautiful country accents if they ever brought themselves to speak, and the mottled blush when they did because their uncle was a queer: no one told them that he was gay, they just figured it out for themselves. In this day and age. And he, Dan, maddened by the shame of it, carried a boner with him all the way back to Dublin and, one time, fucked a guy until he yelped in the washroom on the train.

The ground rushing under them in the crescent-shaped gap at the bottom of the bowl; a thousand flickering railway sleepers and the cold earth of Ireland.

Now that’s what I call gay.

No, Dan could not go home. Or if he did go, it was not Dan who walked in the door to them all.

‘Well, hello!’

It was someone else. A terrible version of himself. One he really did not admire. He might bring them out to Toronto, but they would not know where to put themselves or what to say. And their wretched mother, Constance, who disbelieved everything he said and did — every single thing. Dan could not eat his lunch without her doubting him.

‘Oh my god that is so good.’

‘What, the bread?’

Disbelieving the contents of his own mouth.

‘Yes the bread, Constance.’

Anything other than ‘white’ or ‘brown’ was an affront to Constance. Food itself was an affront. She lived on bad biscuits, because there was no harm in a biscuit, and she had fat in places Dan had never seen before. That time in Brooklyn, she wore a sleeveless top in the heat and the flesh popped out in a globule between breast and armpit, which was a whole new place for Dan. It was like a new breed of arm. And now it was everywhere he looked. Walking down the street. Everywhere.

‘I’m sure she’s perfectly fine,’ said Ludo, getting into bed beside him after dinner of stuffed peppers followed by a pomegranate and apple salad and a long evening talking about the Madigans.

‘It’s family,’ he said.

And of course Ludo would love Constance, with her deliberate stupidity and her supermarket hair. That was not the problem. The problem, Dan realised, was that Constance would not love Ludo, as he loved Ludo. She just couldn’t. She would not have the room.

‘You have no idea,’ said Dan.

‘Go!’ said Ludo,

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘Stop off in New York on the way.’

Dan did not answer.

He loved Ludo. When did that happen?

Dan liked Ludo. He liked the familiar things they did in bed and he also found Ludo useful. As Ludo found Dan — useful. They made a good couple. Dan could put people together in three or four different towns, he knew how to make things beautiful and easy: everyone upped their game for Dan. So of course Ludo found all this wonderful and enhancing — as he liked to say — to be around.

And Ludo loved Dan, of course he did. From the very beginning Ludo had loved him. Totally. Abjectly.

Dear God I love you.

But that was four or five years ago. These days, Dan did not know if Ludo still loved him, or if Ludo was just nice to him all the time. What was the difference? The difference was the yearning he felt for a man who was within arm’s reach. The difference lay in the fantasies of death and abandonment that happened in hypnagogic flashes as he turned to sleep by his side. If Ludo got sick, he thought, he would lie the length of his hospital bed, like Ryan O’Neal beside Ali MacGraw. Without him he was nothing. With him, everything. Wherever they were, the smell of Ludo’s skin was the smell of home.

This was terrible, of course.

Dan did not believe in romantic love — why should he? — it had never believed in him. After Isabelle, he had pined for various beautiful and unavailable young men, but the word ‘love’, for Dan, was so much wrapped up in the impossible and the ideal, it was a wrench to apply it to the guy who was sitting up in the bed beside him, reading legal briefs in the nude. The half-moon glasses didn’t help.

I love you, he wanted to say, instead of which: ‘My fucking family. You have no idea how they go on at me. You have no idea what I have to put up with over there.’

Ludo said that getting insulted was a full-time job. He said he’d love to do it himself, but he didn’t have a gap in his schedule, he needed his sleep, he loved his sleep, he did not want to spend the delicious hours of the night lying there, hating.

‘It keeps me sharp,’ said Dan. ‘It gives me flair.’

‘You hit forty, my love, these things are no longer attractive,’ said Ludo, looking at him over the rim of his glasses. ‘After forty, it’s give, give, give.’

And the next morning, a FedEx guy called to the door with an envelope that had Dan’s name on it, and inside was a ticket for the front of the plane.

Dan put the envelope on the kitchen table and looked at it while he drank his coffee and planned his day. He did not have a whole lot on. Ludo had stuck him in therapy once a week with Scott, a completely blank Canadian guy with a sweet and open smile. Now Dan talked to Scott in his head about being in love with Ludo, the unbearability of it. Scott seemed to indicate that unbearability was a good thing.

‘Stay with it,’ he said.

In fact he had been, for an anguished, tear-streaked fortnight, in love with Scott. He knew it wasn’t real, of course, but now the damn stuff was out of the bottle, it seemed to be moving around.

Love.

Dan traced it around the house, a sweetness coating everything Ludo possessed, his gee-gaws and tchotchkes, the hideous paintings and the ones that weren’t so bad. Everything full of meaning, throbbing with it: the little sherry glass of toothpicks in the middle of the table, Ludo’s tube of shaving cream for a morning ritual that only stopped at the collar line.

‘You know what this means,’ he said to Scott-in-his-head.

‘Yes?’

‘It means I am going to die.’

And Scott-in-his-head smiled a sweet, Canadian smile.

In the event, Dan was sidetracked, in that week’s session, by the memory of his father in absurd, high-waisted swimming trunks. High also on the leg, they were the exact shape of the pelvic section of a plastic, jointed doll. Black, of course. It must have been on the yellow beach at Fanore. His father would join them there after a day working the land, the only swimming farmer in the County Clare. And one time Dan flung himself at his father’s wet legs as he made his way up the beach and his father shrugged him off. That was all. Dan, who was weeping for some reason, hurled himself at the wet woollen trunks and was pushed back on to the sand. His shoulder was grazed by a rock which is why, perhaps, he remembered it, this utterly usual thing — his father moving past him to reach for a scrap of towel.

‘I’m foundered.’ That is what his father used to say, when he came in from the freezing Atlantic, shrunken, his muscles tight to the bone.

And Dan wept for his father. He could not believe this man was gone and his body — which must have been a beautiful body — destroyed in death. Because his father never felt dead, to Dan, not in all the years: he just felt cold.

Scott sat across from Dan, his careful face flushed with the effort of staying with him in his sorrow, while Dan threw one Kleenex after the other into the wooden wastepaper basket at his feet. He thought about all the discarded tears that ended up in it, from all the people who took their turn to weep, sitting in that chair. Many people, many times a day. The bin was made of pale wood, with a faint and open grain. It was always empty when he arrived. Expectant. The wastepaper basket was far too beautiful. The air inside it was the saddest air.

Dan told Scott about an afternoon in the desert, many years before — it was the first time he’d made a move on a guy, really wanted him, in this amazing place outside Phoenix. The house was built of rammed earth and set flat to the landscape, and there was no pool, just walls of glass in room after room built aslant to the sun and always in shade. Outside, the Sonoran Desert looked just the way it was supposed to look, the saguaro cactus standing with his arms held up, a bird flying in and out of a hole in his neck. The heat of the day was translated into night with a sunset of Kool-Aid orange, giving way, in streaks, to pink and milky blue. And Dan was stilled by the desert light that washed his lover’s body with dusk and turned it into such an untouchable, touchable thing.

‘Yes,’ said Scott — who was, at a guess, straight as the Trans Canada Highway. And he followed the ‘yes’ with a silence that grew very long.

‘It’s just. I don’t know if I am losing all that, with Ludo. I don’t know if I am losing it, or if it’s all, finally, coming good.’

‘I see.’

Scatter cushions and oak dressers — in Toronto, Dan thought. Here we go.

The night before he left for Ireland, Dan told Ludo that he loved him. He told him because it was true and because he thought that, this time, the plane might fall out of the sky. Or he might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983, with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. He would never make it back to Rosedale, Toronto and to this man he had loved for some time.

This was why he had decided to go home, he said. Because he loved Ludo and Ludo was right, it was time to sort out his past, deal with himself. Time to become a fucking human being.

It was a mistake to tell Ludo all this, because Ludo immediately wanted to open the last bottle of Pommery and suck him off and get married. Dan had a flight the next day, but Ludo brought the champagne to bed and marriage would be a blast, he said. He found the sheer legality of it incredibly erotic. And very tax effective. If he worked it right, there was no telling how much they could save.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’ said Ludo.

‘I just.’ He was talking about Ludo’s money.

‘Oh toughen up,’ said Ludo. ‘Talk to a woman, they’ve been doing it for years.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dan, who did nothing but talk to the wives of rich men. He talked to them about their husbands’ paintings and their husbands’ ghastly wallpaper. (Take it down! was his cry. All of it. Down!) Dan loved these women; their woundedness and their style; he admired the way they rose to their lives. But he did not want to be one. That would be a convergence too far.

‘Don’t be too proud for me,’ said Ludo. ‘Don’t be too proud, is all.’

‘Proud?’ said Dan.

‘Defensive,’ said Ludo. ‘OK?’

‘OK,’ said Dan. And he put his head on Ludo’s chest, where it met the ball of his shoulder; in that dent.

‘OK.’

‘All you ever do is take!’ This from his mother, some time, from the black and white movie of their relationship, Whatever Happened to Baby Rosaleen. ‘All you ever do is take!’

Isabelle sending him a postcard, the year she moved upstate: ‘I was going to send back all the presents you gave me over the years, then I realised — you didn’t.’

And it was true that Dan stalled in the shop if he was ever obliged to buy a gift. Stalled, refused, could not calculate, drew a blank, was a blank. Walked away, as though from something terrible and, by the skin of his teeth, survived.

Another postcard, the next summer, from Dublin, a vintage thing with green buses going down O’Connell Street. And on the back:

‘I am still alive.’

This was from an exhibition they saw together in Dublin, himself and Isabelle, when they were, maybe, eighteen. A book of telegrams by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara, sent over the course of a decade to the same address and all saying the same thing: ‘I am still alive.’ The exhibition was a moment of complete excitement for Dan — it was a shaft of light that told him he had been living, all his life, underground. This was long before New York, long before he found conceptual work tiresome and even longer before he met the man, or thought he had, at a Starbucks around the corner from the Guggenheim, where the server called ‘Kawara!’ and Dan felt his knees weaken in his chinos. I am still alive.

Isabelle’s last card was from Barcelona.

‘Gaudete!’ it said, and on the front those curvy balconies by Gaudi.

And after that, none.

There were tears in his eyes. Dan never cried until he started with Scott; now he was weeping full time, he was leaking into the slackening skin of his lover’s arms.

‘There, there,’ said Ludo, who had a breakfast meeting at eight.

‘It’s not the money,’ Dan said. ‘I mean.’

‘Fuck the money,’ said Ludo.

‘It’s not the money,’ he said.

And it wasn’t. Dan thought of himself as more cat than dog. He did not need much, he could do as well without. So it was not the money that made Dan weep in the arms of Ludovic Linetsky, as he decided to marry him, for richer for poorer, all the days of his life. It was the sound of Ludo’s wonderful heart, deep in his chest. Because Dan might make a good cat but he was a raging blank of a human being and he knew he would fuck this good thing up, just like he fucked up all the rest of them. He would look at Ludo some day — he could do it now if he liked — and just not care.

And where would that leave Dan?

Alone.

Useless and alone.

Normal life was a problem for Dan. He was beginning to see that now. Small things upset him. He would have a petulant old age.

‘I’m not. I’m not,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ludo. ‘You’re straight.’

He was out of the bed and rummaging in a drawer now and he came back with a small hinged box of brown lizard skin and, inside, a pair of cufflinks: silver, inset with a fat little piece of amber. Dan took them out. They were lovely, and worth very little; the amber worn small and smooth as a butterscotch sweet in your mouth.

‘Marry me,’ said Ludo.

The cufflinks were his great-grandfather’s, he said, all the way from Odessa. Dan rose to his knees on the bed and held the little box in his hand. He had no shirt to try them against. He was naked and shivering. He was getting married.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘For what?’ said Ludo. ‘For nothing.’

They made love all night — two men, no longer young — and they talked it all out. He would grow old with Ludo, in a big house on the wrong side of a leafy street in Rosedale, Toronto. Dan stuck the tip of his tongue into Ludo’s mouth, all night, into the chaos and mass of him. He took the malty sweetness of Ludo’s body as a memory and a talisman, to keep him company on the journey home.

Dublin

IF ONLY SHE could keep it in a box, Hanna thought, or a jug, or a thermos, something sealed, to stop it crusting over where the liquid met the air. A Tupperware box might do. What she really needed was one of those plastic bags that they used in hospitals, vacuum sealed, the ones they hung from a drip stand. A bag of blood. She could put it in her new fridge — God knows, it looked like something you would find in a morgue — she could put her blood in a bag, any sort of bag, and squeeze down until the air was out of it and then just tie a knot in the top. Hang it from the wine rack. Close the door.

Hanna tried to lift her head, but her cheek was stuck to the floor. The blood was eye level, it was spreading and congealing at the same time. It was a race to standstill. But even though it stopped as it went, Hanna could not see the extent of it, because her eye was flush with the ground. The edges turned hazy as the blood oozed away from her, across the white floor tiles.

There were plastic bags in the high cupboard — which wasn’t much use to her, down here. Hanna had put the bags up high so the baby couldn’t smother himself. And there were safety catches on all the bottom presses, which is why she would not be able to kick one open, so there you go — sometimes safety was not what you needed most. Sometimes what you needed was a little plastic bag to put the blood in, so when the men came they would be able to put it back into you again. Or see, at least, that you had not meant to die.

She had slipped.

Hanna thought she had slipped on the blood, but actually the blood had come after. And she was still holding something in her right hand. A bottle. Or the neck of a bottle. The body of the bottle was no longer there.

Hanna didn’t know how anyone could break a bottle and fall on it at the same time, unless they were very fucking drunk. Maybe she had been hit from behind. Maybe the attacker was going up now to the room where the baby slept, and he would do things to the baby. Nameless things. He would steal the baby or damage the baby and leave no mark, so no one could tell that he had been and gone.

The bottle broke, and then she sat down on the bottle and, after that, she was lying on the floor, looking at the spreading blood. Which must be coming from her leg. In which case, she was going to die.

The blood was dark, which was possibly a good thing. It was getting darker. It came quietly and then it stopped.

It was probably time to call Hugh though she did not want to call Hugh, she did not think she could. So unless the baby cried and woke him, he would not notice she was gone. And the baby was not crying, for once. They never did what you wanted them to. A little opposite thing, that is what came out of her. A fight they wrapped in a cloth. Push it, grab it, knock it away: she was feeding him once, and the spoon skittered away so she had to duck to retrieve it and the look he gave as she rose from the floor was one of pure contempt. It was as though he had been possessed — possibly by himself, by the man he would some day become — looking at her as if to say, Who the fuck are you, with your pathetic fucking spoon?

Good question.

Oh the baby. The baby. Hanna loved the baby and did not want to doubt him even now, drunk as she was and dying on the kitchen floor. But she did sort of think that, if she did die, it would be the baby who had killed her. It would be that fat, strong boy, with his father’s ears and his father’s smile, and nothing of Hanna in him that she or anybody else could see.

Hanna rested her head, and did not try to move it again. She was happy enough where she was. There was no need to get up, just yet. She would stay, for just a few minutes more, between things.

There was a tickling in her hair, a cooling unpleasantness at the back of her neck. The blood was coming from her head.

Hanna didn’t sit down on the breaking bottle so much as crack her skull off something — the door of the press, perhaps — then break the bottle as she fell. If she put a hand to her head, she would feel an opening in her scalp, and inside it, her skull. The raw bone.

Hanna closed her eyes.

The kitchen floor tiles were new and she said to Hugh they were too shiny and too hard so everything would smash as soon as touch them, but Hugh wanted a kitchen that looked like an operating theatre or like a butcher’s shop, with steel and concrete and metal hooks hanging off metal bars. In a tiny little semi-detached. Hugh wanted a man kitchen. A serial murderer’s kitchen, with a row of knives pinned to a magnetic strip along the wall. Hugh cooked twice a year, that was the height of it. Every bowl and dish dragged out, the place covered in flour. The rest of the time he heated something up in the microwave or got in takeaway. Hugh was annoying and Hanna could not leave him. Not after she had died in the new kitchen, with the baby asleep upstairs.

But she was so cold, now, she got up to put something around her shoulders and she saw, as she rose, her body lying behind her on the floor, with blood browning on the tiles and then loosening around the broken bottle, where it was diluted with wine.

She would have to change her life. Again.

Hanna put her hand to her temple and felt the wound crusting under her hair. So much fucking blood. It did not seem possible. She felt light — gone, almost. She pawed her way along the counter, and lobbed the dishcloth on to the floor, then shoved the cloth about with her toe. Her life would have to change. Again.

Her life. Her life.

Upstairs the baby gave a strange, waking shout and Hanna stopped, waiting for the wails. But the baby didn’t cry. The dishcloth made a streak like a brushstroke across the floor: it looked like she was cleaning up blood. Then she remembered that it was blood. It was her blood. She looked over and Hugh was there, standing in the doorway, holding the baby.

‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’ said Hugh.

‘What’s the time?’

And the nice thing — she could not forget it. The nice thing, or the horrible thing, was the way the baby took one look at her and struggled to be in her arms.

She would not go to Casualty, Hanna said, and she would not go to bed, she would sleep sitting upright in an armchair, she would get the blood off her face, and it would be fine. This is what she told Hugh. She headed out past her boyfriend and her baby, and sat down on the stairs.

‘I am just going to the bathroom,’ she said, and she leaned her head against the bannister.

There were coloured lights outside the door, and before she knew it, the place was full of men. Ambulance men, huge and bizarrely light on their feet.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

The paramedic was pretty relaxed. He crouched below her on the stair.

‘What have we here,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Hanna.

‘Scalp,’ he said. ‘Oh, the scalp’s a fright.’

‘You are such a dick,’ Hanna said over his shoulder, to Hugh. ‘Why do you have to be such a fucking dick?’

‘Look at yourself,’ said Hugh, and he meant it literally. So Hanna looked down. She saw her T-shirt slicked on to her torso, the outline of her left breast perfectly stiff, like a sculpture of herself in dried blood.

The baby smiled.

And before she could refuse, they had her sitting up on a gurney, belted in. Before she could say, ‘Where’s my baby?’ the guy said, ‘He’ll be in first thing,’ and Hanna felt herself loosen and be relieved. Happiness slipped into her as she was pulled backwards up the ramp, and happiness tugged at her insides as the ambulance pulled silently away. All she lacked was a siren, to shout it. She was happy.

‘It’s a bit late for that, sweetheart,’ said the paramedic. ‘They’re all asleep in their beds.’

In Casualty, they cleaned her up and put her in a gown, and though they snipped and shaved her hair back from the wound, Hanna did not even need stitches in the end. She was left on the trolley to sleep and woke with a filthy headache, and no offer of pain relief. The trolley was in a corridor. The woman who came along to check and discharge her did not ask about post-natal depression and this was almost disappointing. (‘No, I’ve always had it,’ Hanna wanted to say, ‘I had it pre-natally. I think I had it in the womb.’) All the woman wanted to talk about was drinking — which Hanna thought was a bit obvious, given the circumstances. She was also quite condescending. But Hugh was calm by the time he arrived in with clean clothes and the baby, who had stopped smiling now and defaulted to his usual screams.

‘I think it’s a tooth.’

‘Did he sleep after? Did you put him down?’

In the car, they fought about the baby, and fell silent.

And that was it. For weeks, it was just, ‘Hanna cut her head,’ and once, when the buttons wouldn’t fasten on the babygro and Hanna thought she might actually throw the baby away from her, she might hit the baby against the wall, Hugh took over the buttoning and said, ‘See someone. Take a fucking pill.’

Meanwhile, he slept with her — he fell asleep in a normal way. And he also had sex with her — his erection was unaffected, that is, by the memory of Hanna encrusted in two pints of her own blackening ooze, and once he fuzzed his finger along the fine stubble around her wound and said, ‘Oh, my love.’ He reminded her to buy milk before he went out in the morning, and he mopped his butcher’s counters last thing at night. He looked after the baby all the hours that he was home, although he wasn’t home much. You could not accuse him of neglect.

Hugh was out at RTÉ working on a soap, which was brilliant — the work was brilliant, the soap was just a soap — but he was there all hours, talking to lighting and props, getting the right Ikea sideboard to set against a side wall. Once all that was settled in, he would be home at a regular time, but he was also doing drawings for a pocket Romeo and Juliet and hustling for a thing about Irish Mammies in the Olympia called Don’t Mind Me I’ll Sit In The Dark. Retro was where Hugh was at. Normal with an edge. ‘Just give me a litre of Magnolia matt emulsion,’ he liked to say. ‘And a place to stand.’

So Hugh was flat out. There was a mortgage to pay. Hanna pushed the buggy up to the Phoenix Park or along the quays into town and then she pushed it back to their little house in Mount Brown. Five kilometres to Stephen’s Green and back, ten kilometres the long way around the Park. Seven months after the birth, she was back in her skinny jeans, but what was the point of looking good, when no one cared? She went to an opening night at the Abbey and flirted like crazy, but it was as though no one found that relevant any more. Hanna drank, that evening, until she could not feel her arse sliding off the high stool. No one noticed that either. Not even her.

It was true that Hanna got pissed as soon as she left the baby, but it was also true that she never left the baby, or hardly ever. She mixed up vodka in a fruit juice bottle to bring on a girls’ night out and it was supposed to be a joke — the label said ‘Innocent’ — but she finished it on the way into town and didn’t tell them about it, when the moment came. Hanna could not face the girls and their talk of diets and auditions, bitching about the state of Irish theatre and the many shortcomings of their men. The girls did not have babies, or not yet. They were really jealous. They thought having a baby would solve something fundamental in their lives.

The Innocent bottle was interesting. Hanna tried it in front of Hugh and he didn’t notice it, either. It wasn’t within his range.

Hugh was a very tidy person. He got upset if there was a scratch on something, or a mark, if there were used tea bags on the kitchen counter or a damp towel on the floor. Living with him put Hanna semi-permanently in the wrong. He told her to pick her knickers up off the stairs, in a tone of great disgust. Or he wanted to shag her on the stairs. One or the other. Sometimes both. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind.

They had, in the early days, enormous amounts of sex. It was not high-quality sex, but it was terrifically frequent. Then it just got terrific. Nothing outrageous, Hugh was a straight-up kind of guy — unless he plucked one of his cooking hatchets off the magnetic strip on the kitchen wall and stuck it in her, one fine day. There was no sign, anyway, of murderous intent. There was just this massive, penetrative intent that felt like murder, at least to Hanna. Not that she minded, being killed. And it was in the course of one of their happy little fuck-fests, tender, savage and prolonged — well done, us! — that the baby happened.

Happened.

The baby arrived.

Hugh made a baby in Hanna because he loved Hanna. In the middle of all that fury, a baby.

Hanna did not realise, of course. She thought her beer had gone off, the wine was corked, she got a pain in her back and there was a density to her coming that was muscular and new. She woke one morning utterly abandoned, wrecked. And, after a couple of weeks of this, she said, ‘Oh.’

Hugh was delighted, ecstatic. He loved the baby both inside and outside of Hanna, and he loved the baby’s clever mother. But he did not have sex with the baby’s mother, after the baby came. He fought with her instead.

‘What the fuck is this doing here?’

‘What?’

‘My script is under there.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘My script. I’ve been looking for my script and now its covered in. . Jesus.’

Hanna shoved the buggy down the quays into town replaying the fights in her head. Push. Push. Shove. Shove. She was so lonely, she was horny all the time now. And it was a bit like sex, she thought — the fighting — but it really wasn’t sex. Throwing Hugh’s phone into a gorse bush up the mountains, or her own stupid cheap clutch bag into the River Liffey. There were long and impossible silences on the hard shoulder, there was the time she walked back down the motorway leaving the baby in the car seat, eating his crinkly toy. There was the broken front light and the deep scrape along the passenger door — Hugh really hated it when she pranged his precious car, because Hugh claimed to be calm but he really wasn’t calm, Hugh was stony and white with rage.

The baby, meanwhile, turned red and shat. The baby opened his round, red mouth, and screamed.

And Hanna — of course! — ran around doing a million things for the baby: soother, spoons, blankies, books, Calpol, wipes, socks, spare everything, spare hat, lanolin cream, cream without lanolin, because Hanna loved the baby. Loved, loved, loved him. Cared, cared, cared for him. Worried and fretted and was in charge of the baby. Because oh, if the baby lost his soother, if the baby lost his spare hat, then a hole would open in the universe and Hanna would fall through this hole and be forever lost.

When she drank a couple of Innocents-with-a-twist, pushing the buggy in the sunshine, she found they could all coexist, Hanna and the spare hat and the missing hat, and the baby, who was looking at her, and also the hole in the universe. She could keep them all in different corners of her mind, and the tension between them nice. She could make it all hum.

The other great things about the plastic bottle with Innocent on the label were a) the colour, b) the amusement factor, c) it was hers.

One day in November, when the baby was ten months old, Hanna got a Christmas card from her mother with a note at the bottom to say she was going to sell the house.

She rang Constance to say, ‘What the fuck?’

‘Oh it’s you,’ said Constance, because Hanna never rang home.

‘The fuck?’ said Hanna, and Constance said, ‘Don’t ask.’

‘It’s not true, is it?’ said Hanna.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Constance. ‘It’s not true, no. She’s just getting old.’

‘Any word from Dan?’

‘Full house this year. He’s coming home.’

The Madigans were never together, on the day. The girls always made it down, but the boys were wherever, either Claridge’s or Timbuktu. So this Christmas was going to be a big one. It was going to be a doozie. And that evening, somehow, the baby got hold of her little Innocent bottle and spat the stuff out, spilling it all down his front and, never mind the hole in the fucking universe, when Hugh smelt the alcohol off the baby’s Breton striped Petit Bateau, the world as Hanna knew it came to an end. Or seemed to come to an end. It was possible, like the time she ended up in Casualty, that when you have a baby there is no such thing as the end, there is only more of the same.

The thing was through the washing machine on the instant, so Hugh had no hard evidence. But he had the baby. He was sleeping in the baby’s room. He would not fight with Hanna, he said, but he would not leave her alone with the baby. And when it came to Christmas he would take the baby home.

Hanna said, ‘That’s a relief. No, really. Childcare. At last. Fucking fantastic.’

After two weeks of Hanna sober, they had sex in the kitchen, suddenly, they ended up on the floor — the same place as the night she cut her head, with the same view, when she turned to the side, of white tiles. Hanna was so wet between the legs she thought it was some kind of incontinence and later, in the shower, she wondered if there was something actually wrong with her, with her body, not to mention her mind. She went out and bought two bottles of white in the off-licence, because she’d got the drinking thing under control now and, after she opened the second one, the shouting started all over again.

‘I need a job,’ said Hanna. ‘I just need a fucking job.’

After she left college, Hanna formed a fringe company with some like-minded souls, who failed to get funding after their second, slightly disastrous year. She broke through to the main stages with the part of a maid at the Abbey, and went straight from this to a sexy maid at the Olympia. She had a two-week break before touring a production of Hugh Leonard’s Da, in which she played the girlfriend. Well. She played the girlfriend very well. After that, another maid, but this time on the big screen. There was a showing in the Savoy on O’Connell Street, a red carpet, Hanna, sitting in the dark with Hugh, their palms wet as they held hands, then her face a mile high, and Hanna blown back in her seat by the sight of her own opening mouth.

‘I don’t know, sir. She didn’t say.’

A saucy look. Innocent. Irish. They all said, she should go to LA, she was like an Irish Vivien Leigh.

But she didn’t go to LA. It was too late for Hollywood, she was twenty-six. And besides, Hanna wanted to do proper work, real work. She wanted the thing to happen, whatever the thing was, the sudden understanding of the crowd.

She did a Feldenkrais course and a Shakespeare workshop for schools, there was a fringe production of A Long Day’s Journey that was best forgotten, and six months with a company who liked Grotowski too much ever to make it to an opening night. There was an ad for spreadable butter, a week here and there on a film; she got a whole four months on a mini series, and she was trying to break into voiceover work, for the money. Everything hustled for and flirted for. There was sexual humiliation. There was no path.

She had thought there would be a path, one that wound from the school musical all the way up to the red carpet at Cannes. But there was no path. No trajectory. No career, even. There was just Theatre, darling.

She still needed it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

At the age of thirty-seven, Hanna’s dreams were rich — as was her drinking, indeed — with applause. Or booing, more often. Missed cues, lost props, stage fright. Hanna was wearing a pyjama top with a crinoline, she was in the wrong play and even in the right play, she had forgotten to learn her lines. That evening, with Hugh blank-eyed, slumped on the sofa, she pawed her way along the living room wall. She pushed her cheek against it and dragged her face along, not sure who she was playing this time. Some madwoman. Ophelia, undone.

Undone.

‘Terrific,’ said Hugh, who hated her and slept with her anyway, even that evening, with the smear of her spit drying on the wall downstairs.

Or loved her. Because he said that he loved her. It came out of him while he was fucking her.

I love, I lov, I luh.

The next morning, Hanna packed to go down home. She stood in front of the wardrobe and went through the hangers, trying to figure out what to bring. Her mother hated her in black, and Hanna had nothing but black to wear. She thought a few scarves might break it up, or some loud beads, though she could never tie a scarf, it always looked wrong. Hanna put one top against her and then another, checking in the mirror. She caught sight of her face and thought it was possible, it was more than possible that the theatre was finished for her now. Hanna had the wrong face for a grown-up woman, even if there were parts for grown-up women. The detective inspector. The mistress. No, Hanna had a girlfriend face, pretty, winsome and sad. And she was thirty-seven.

She had run out of time.

She dumped both tops in the suitcase, and threw the hangers on the bed. Hugh was standing there, against the wall of Prussian Blue, and when the baby fought for her she took him from his father. Just for a little while. As she brought him towards her, the skin of her chest seemed to sing; a clamorous want for the baby hit her everywhere the baby would be in her arms. And then she had him, and they were calm.

‘Remember when we took him down to my mother’s,’ she said. ‘That first time? Because the stupid bitch couldn’t come up to Dublin, and “how many bedrooms did you say you had?” Remember we went down there and it was sunny all the way to the other side of Ennis, and then the heavens opened just outside Islandgar, and he liked it. The rain bucketing down, and I couldn’t see through the windscreen. He didn’t like the new car seat, or there was something wrong with him, until the rain came pelting on to the roof. You said, “Pull over, pull over!” and I said I couldn’t pull over because I couldn’t see where I was going in all the rain, there was just two inches of clear windscreen, after the wiper blade, this little slice, and even that just showed you more rain. The noise of it. And inside the car so silent, and I was still driving. I said, “It’s like a dream.” Remember?’

‘Yeah,’ said Hugh. ‘Maybe.’

‘I left myself, really slowly. It happens, sometimes. I do that. But this time it was really slow. It was so slow, it was like I caught myself leaving. I mean that was the first time.’

‘Right,’ he said.

‘And I loved that. I just loved it. Going down to my mother’s with the baby in the back. And all the rain.’

Shannon Airport

IN THE ARRIVALS Hall at Shannon the glass doors pulled open and the glass door slipped shut.

Constance watched as one after another passenger was ambushed and claimed. People were crying and laughing and Constance couldn’t remember what she was looking out for, exactly. There would be some unchangeable thing about her brother to say he was her brother. Some glow. That is how she remembered Dan as a child and also, more surprisingly, from the last time they met — it must have been 2000 — a year when Constance no longer recognised her own reflection coming at her from a shop window and Dan was looking better than ever. She did not know how he managed it. Constance actually thought there might be make-up involved; or Botox, perhaps. It was as though the light had a choice, and it still chose him.

Maybe he was just fit. Though Dan never showed the effort of being fit, or unfit, she could not imagine him breaking a sweat. Handsome people did not move their faces much, that was part of the trick; her mother had it, and Dan had it too. It was the attitude, more than the fact of good looks. A sense of expectation.

Hanna was actually the prettiest of the Madigans but Hanna was all expression, all personality, and she did not photograph well — this, in an actress, was not a good thing. Constance gripped the steel rail in the Arrivals area and held her own face up like a plate for her brother to recognise, but it was, she knew, just a sad reflection of what she used to be. Her face was a shadow passing over the front of her head — like the play of light on the side of a mountain, maybe. For two seconds at a time, the old Constance was there. She inhabited the picture of herself. Everything fit.

And there was Dan — she knew him immediately — slight and alert behind his massive trolley: older than Dan should be, but looking absurdly young for his age. A gay man, as anyone might be able to discern. He checked the faces in the welcoming crowd with a nervous impeccability.

‘Hell-oooo!’ Dan threw out his hands, towards her, and stepped out from behind his luggage. More camp than she remembered. Every time a little more. It came up through him with age.

‘Look at you!’ He touched her lightly on the side of her face and then her shoulder, then leaned in, as though impulsively, for a hug. He greeted her like a friend and not a brother. He greeted her like no friend she ever had.

And he had too many bags with him. Far too many. Much of the luggage was matching. Dan noticed her noticing all this, as they walked across the concourse. They were fighting, before Constance had opened her mouth. They were doing it all over again. And Constance was utterly fed up with herself, suddenly.

I don’t care!!! she wanted to say. I don’t care who you sleep with or what you do!

Even though she did care. She checked the eyes of everyone who looked at him from the oncoming crowd.

‘How are you?’ she said to Dan.

‘Good.’

‘That overnight thing is a killer.’

Dan went to say something, but decided against it.

‘I slept,’ he said.

They were out through the main doors and in the fresh air; the beginnings of dawn to the east of them, and the lights of the airport trembling orange against the freshly blank sky.

‘Hello Ireland,’ said Dan.

He smiled, and she looked over to him. And there he was.

Dan was a year younger than Constance, fifteen months. His growing up struck her as daft, in a way. So she was not bothered by her brother’s gayness — except, perhaps, in a social sense — because she had not believed in his straightness, either. In the place where Constance loved Dan, he was eight years old.

He stood beside her as she sorted out the ticket, then they walked across the car park together, almost amused.

This was the boy who ran alongside her in her dreams. Constance, asleep, never saw his face exactly, but it was Dan, of course it was, and they were on the beach in Lahinch coming round a headland to find something unexpected. And the thing they found was the river Inagh as it ran across the sands into the sea. Sweet water into salt. Constance had been there many times as an adult, and the mystery of it remained for her. Rainwater into seawater, you could taste where they met and mingled, and no way to tell if all this was good or bad, this turbulence, if it was corruption or return.

‘You know what I want?’ said Dan. ‘I saw it on my way through and I can’t believe it — because what I want, more than anything, is some Waterford crystal. Don’t you think it’s time? Some champagne saucers. I should have got some for Lady Madigan, she’d love them.’

‘You think?’

‘Or for me. I knew there was something missing in my life. I just didn’t know what it was.’

‘Champagne saucers?’

‘Champagne saucers?’ They were both, and immediately, imitating their mother.

‘Oh go ’way now,’ said Dan. ‘I’m tired of you.’

‘Actually,’ said Constance, ‘she’s in good form.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s in good form. I mean, apart from all this stuff about the house. She’s.’ Constance could not find the word.

‘Mellowed?’ said Dan. They were at the car which, Constance remembered, was a Lexus. She did not know if she was ashamed of this fact or proud of it, but Dan did not seem to notice, as she popped the boot with the logo on it, and he lifted it high.

‘More like mood swings, I’d call it.’

Dan said nothing to this, just worked the luggage into the boot, placing her shopping carefully to one side.

‘I know,’ he said, shutting the lid.

Though he had no way of knowing. How could he know? He had not been there.

Dan was ducking towards the driver’s door, when he realised what country he was in.

‘Wrong side!’ he said, and they bumbled around each other. Constance touched his waist as they swapped over and he seemed smaller than he used to be. This was not possible, of course. It was just that everyone was fatter, these days, your eyes adjusted to it. Everyone was fatter except Dan.

He noticed the car, all right, when Constance put it into reverse and a video of the rear view came up on the dash.

‘Con-stance,’ he said. ‘What is this thing you’re driving? You’re like the doctor’s wife these days.’

‘Ha,’ said Constance.

‘Mood swings,’ he said. ‘Is she serious about the house?’

‘Yeah well,’ said Constance. ‘I think she’s just getting old.’

‘And. Not in a good way?’ he said. Constance was searching through the gears for first and then reverse, and she could not laugh until she was straightened up. Then she laughed so hard she could not find the ticket for the barrier.

‘Shut up,’ said Constance. ‘I am trying to get us out of here.’

It was seven o’clock in the morning. The sun over Limerick was fat and red, and coming in from the west, a shading in the air that was the beginnings of rain.

‘You hungry?’ she said.

‘Mmmm.’

Dan slid down in his seat, and Be like that, she thought, because he made her feel so guilty all the time, hallucinating eggs and bacon.

In fact, it was the sunrise did for Dan. He was jet-lagged. The light brought that familiar sense of wrongness (Why did Constance buy this huge, stupid car? When did she even learn how to drive?) and Dan did not catch it in time. He thought it was the smell — something like wet dog, or cheese — this sickening sense that he would rather be anywhere else but here. Dan squeezed his eyelids, trying to keep out the insistent light of home, which was the same as any other light, it was just at the wrong time.

‘Have you seen the others?’ he said.

‘Coming down tomorrow, if Hanna gets herself together. Emmet’s working away.’

‘Of course.’

‘He has a new LayDee.’

‘Does he, now?’

‘Well yes,’ said Constance, because that was always the case, with Emmet.

‘And you?’ said Dan.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Constance.

‘What are you up to these days?’

Constance tried to tease out the usual tangle of house, kids, mother, husband, mother’s house, Christmas presents, dinner for ten or maybe thirteen, her children having sex, now, except for Shauna, who was too shy. What could she talk about? Looking up Pilates on the internet, trying to manage her own stupidity, a long weekend in Pisa on Ryanair, that was three months ago now. Constance was doing everything. She was ‘up to’ damn all.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Nothing strange or startling.’

And Dan closed his eyes, as though in pain.

‘How are the kids?’ he said.

‘Oh!’ she said.

‘How’s?’

‘Shauna,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to see Shauna.’

‘What age, again?’

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘If only she knew it. Sixteen.’

Dan never really got a fix on Shauna, but Constance knew that this would change as soon as he saw her. Dan would take one look at Shauna, a girl who was as pale as he was, and with the same red in her hair. He would take this child, all knees and elbows, and he would fabulise her.

‘Skinny legs,’ she said. ‘Shot up.’

‘Mmmm,’ he said.

His eyes were still closed. Dan watched the sunshine bloom on the inside of his eyelids, the way he used to as a boy but today, even this felt wrong. Purple blossoms that looked like bruises. Sick yellow clouds, with a black underbelly of shame.

Jet lag.

He opened his eyes to see tail lights, the cream and grey upholstery of his sister’s car, the beginnings of rain on the windscreen. Ireland.

Great.

Constance was talking about the boys: Donal, who was the spit of his father, putting off uni for a year to work on a building site in Australia; Rory who was out every Saturday night.

‘What about yourself?’ she said, after a small silence.

‘Toronto,’ said Dan, as though the word contained all sorts of information, some of it surprising. ‘Yeah.’

‘I always liked Canada,’ said Constance.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember.’ It sounded like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. And, when she looked over to check he was asleep.

He woke from a dream of the river Inagh entering the sea — loosely, endlessly — which made him think he was wetting the bed. Even as he blinked, Dan thought he must be pissing, he could almost hear it. A deep, intimate clunking sound startled him with the fact that they were on a garage forecourt, and there was petrol pouring into the tank behind him, and it would not stop. He looked over the back of the seat to see his sister standing at the tail end of the car, in her caramel coloured wool coat. Constance was looking into the middle distance, her cream scarf lifting behind her, the wind annoying her thin hair. Dan bundled his way out of the car, hitched his — completely dry — trousers up at the belt. The fresh air was a welcome slap of cold.

‘I’ll go into the shop,’ he said. ‘Do you want a packet of crisps?’

Crisps. Such an Irish word — years since he had the taste of it in his mouth.

Constance looked across the glossy black roof at him.

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

As they travelled towards home, the landscape accumulated in Dan like a silt of meaning that was disturbed by the line of a hedgerow or the sight of winter trees along a ridge. All at once, it was familiar. He knew this place. It was a secret he had carried inside him; a map of things he had known and lost, these half-glimpsed houses and stone walls, the fields of solid green.

The road was wider than the road of his childhood and the rain felt less and less real to him as they spun along it. So much water. They were held up by it, the tyres skating over a film of rain. Aquaplaning. Flying his sister’s fancy car through the wet air. Touching nothing. Untouched.

If only he could keep his eyes open, Dan thought, everything would be all right.

Constance also dipped her lids as she spoke — they all did it, the Madigans, they blinked slow. They looked around inside themselves for a missing word, a feeling that was hard to catch or explain. They smiled into closed eyes, and shut their faces down.

‘You happy?’ he said, suddenly.

‘Hmp,’ she said.

‘You should have an affair.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

She drove on.

‘Who says I haven’t?’

‘Constance Madigan,’ he said.

‘Just telling you.’ She used to tell him everything.

‘Who?’

‘Years ago,’ she said. He waited for her to continue.

‘I thought, you know, it would be like jumping off a cliff,’ she said. ‘The big leap.’

‘And?’

‘It was like landing in a fucking puddle. A bit of a splash, that’s all. It was like standing out in the goddamn rain.’

Three miles from home they saw her little blue Citroën.

‘Oh look who,’ said Constance, gearing down to tuck in behind Rosaleen, then paddling the brake as their mother surged and slowed ahead of them.

Constance flashed the headlights but there was no sign from the woman in the car in front. Forty miles per hour. Twenty. They could see the back of her little-old-lady head, low to the wheel, intrepid. The tail lights came on and the tail lights went off and there was no rhythm or reason for it that Constance could see, on the road up ahead.

‘She walks a lot,’ said Constance. ‘She goes out for her walk.’

And, though Dan had not asked, ‘Anywhere,’ she said. ‘It’s the sea she likes. Along the beach maybe, or the pier at Doolin, up along the green road, or the cliffs, even.’

‘What time is it anyway?’ said Dan, with sudden irritation.

‘Time?’

They both saw it: their mother might die in a ditch, she might be blown off the cliff top and carried out to sea.

Constance pressed the horn.

‘Jesus, Constance.’

‘What?’

‘You want her to crash! You want to kill the woman?’

‘Oh give over.’ She bipped the horn again.

‘Stop it!’ Dan reached across her, as though to take the wheel.

‘What?’ Constance was bewildered by her little brother. ‘What?’

‘God, Constance!’ Dan was eight again, shouting at his bossy sister. And it was all comical in its way, but it did not signify. Their mother, who would be killed at any moment, could not hear them from the other car.

Constance fell back to observe. Rosaleen was driving on the brake. It wasn’t clear if she was stopping or accelerating. It was a problem with her eyesight. Or with her feet, perhaps. As if she had to use them both at the same time.

Co. Dublin

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Emmet rang his mother from his house in Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24, where she had never been. There was no reason for her to come here, any more than she might arrive in the door of a Dhaka high-rise or a crumbling colonial in the middle of Ségou. There was, in fact, considerably less reason. A three-bedroomed semi-detached house on a housing estate off the N7 that Emmet was renting by the month, for an absurd amount of money. The sofa under the front window was a puffy leather thing, half marshmallow, half mushroom — his mother would hate it, but Emmet was indifferent to the house, he was pleased to find. It was insulated, it was new. Any freedom from Rosaleen, small or large, continued to give him pleasure.

Down in Ardeevin, the phone rang on.

Emmet looked out the window at the identical house on the other side of the road, alive with fairy lights. Since the money came in, Ireland depressed Emmet in a whole new way. The house prices depressed him. And the handbag thing, the latte thing, the Aren’t We All Brilliant thing, they all depressed him too. But Verschoyle Gardens, in all fairness, did not depress him. Mateus, the little fella next door, would be out on his new bike tomorrow morning, his father holding the back of the saddle, running low and letting go.

A click. Silence at the other end. The electronic air of home.

She had a way with a receiver, picking it up as though it were a heavy object to be set with some precision against the human ear.

‘Hay-lo?’

His mother still answered a phone like it was 1953.

‘Mam,’ he said and then winced. She hated when he called her ‘Mam’.

‘Emmet,’ she said.

She would be sitting at the worn old table with the newspaper spread in front of her open to the easy crossword. She might turn to look out the window at the garden, or let her eyes settle on the easel she had in the corner, with a landscape she was painting, long unfinished. Or she would look at the old chair by the range where his father used to sleep after dinner and before the news. It was hard to say, when she looked at any of these things, what it was she saw.

‘I’m on my way,’ said Emmet.

‘You are?’

‘I’m waiting for Hanna and then.’

‘Oh good.’

There was a catch to her breathing; a difficulty or excitement. He could hear her rise out of her chair.

‘So it’ll be, three o’clock, maybe.’

Rosaleen was on the prowl.

‘I see,’ she said.

‘Or a bit after, maybe,’ he said, a little uncertain.

‘Any time is good,’ she said. ‘Just so long as it is the time you say.’

She’d got him.

‘Because that’s the annoyance, really,’ she said. ‘Either people coming early and you have nothing done, or they say a time and then leave you hanging. That’s what I hate. It’s not about being early or being late, it’s about telling the truth, really.’

‘I know.’ Emmet could not believe what he was hearing. ‘I’m waiting for Hanna,’ he said.

‘Hanna?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hanna?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hanna’s coming with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, well then, it’s anyone’s guess.’

It was true, Hanna was never on time. Emmet thought it was genetic.

‘What about?’

‘Hugh’s coming down on Stephenses Day,’ he said. ‘You’ll see him then.’

‘Right.’

‘Hugh and the baby. He’ll bring Hanna back up to Dublin with him.’

‘Oh the baby, what a pity. I suppose we don’t have the beds, really. So it’ll just be yourself? Lovely. And?’

‘Saar.’

His mother always paused after a name she considered unusual.

‘Yes. Saar is back in?’

‘Holland.’

‘Lovely. See you at three.’

‘Maybe closer to four,’ said Emmet.

‘Right. Well tell Constance what time, she’s the one with views on all that. Bye! Oh listen, are you bringing wine? I’m just saying don’t leave it Hanna’s end, unless you’re happy to see it go down the plughole. Of course you’re not the wine buff that. .’

She paused.

‘Oh Emmet, it would be lovely, now that Dan is home, wouldn’t it be lovely to have something nice for once? I’d love — I don’t know — are you bringing wine?’

‘No.’ He looked out the window. There was no sign of Hanna.

‘It’s just when Dan is back for once. I don’t know. I just have this. You know. Champagne.’

‘He’s landed, then?’ Emmet’s picture of the kitchen reorganised around Dan; the sainted face, the slow-blinking eyes.

‘He’s asleep,’ Rosaleen said, sotto voce. ‘I must tell Constance to get champagne.’

‘What about Hanna?’

‘Oh stop it. We’ll use the little glasses. The ones we got in Rome.’

Rome was 1962, an audience with the Pope, a man on a little Vespa, so handsome he would cut you, with a fat brown baby on his knee. Oh and Roma, Roma! The unexpected piazzas, the sprays of orange blossom, an old codger on the tram who stank of garlic so badly — Rosaleen should have realised that morning sickness was setting in. Dan was conceived in Rome. And Dan loved garlic! There was no end to the mysteries of Dan.

‘Listen, Ma, I’ll go.’

There was another small silence. Ma.

‘Off you go.’

‘See you soon.’

‘Goodbye now!’

Emmet put down the phone, exhausted. Saar had baked biscuits for him before she left and the kitchen still smelt of cinnamon. Saar was terrific. Dutch, pragmatic, team-spirited. He put her on a plane back up to Schiphol, knowing that, next Christmas, he would be going to Schiphol too.

‘I love you,’ he said.

And she said, ‘I love you.’

Then he faced back into the horrors of the Madigans — their small hearts (his own was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through. Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was: his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardeevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.

Mother.

His stupid sister late, as ever. Over-packing, at a guess, busy forgetting things, locating her phone, losing her phone, shouting about her phone, messing, messing, messing.

Emmet climbed the stairs and tapped, as he passed it, on his housemate’s door.

‘All right?’

Denholm came out and followed him to his own bedroom, as Emmet pulled a bag out and set it on top of the bed.

‘Shipshape,’ said Denholm.

‘Just checking you were still there.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Denholm, who did not have the money to be anywhere else and was, besides, always at the little desk in his room. ‘How are you, Emmet?’

‘Very well,’ he said, turning to shake the man’s hand — African style — there in lovely, suburban Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24.

‘How are you?’ he said.

Denholm was commuting to Kimmage Manor every day for a course in International Development. His mother had died a month after his arrival from Kenya and his sister, also in rural Kenya, was HIV positive, a fact she only discovered in the maternity unit of the local clinic that was run by the same nuns who got Denholm all the way to a housing estate off the N7 and to Emmet’s spare room.

‘I am very well,’ said Denholm.

‘The Wi-Fi working?’ said Emmet.

‘A little slow,’ said Denholm. ‘But yes.’

He had been talking to his brother on Skype, he said, before his office shut down. It was a big holiday in Kenya. They were all heading out of Nairobi, the same way Emmet was heading out of Dublin. They would get back to the villages in time for Midnight Mass, then a big party — all night — more parties the next day, and then on St Stephen’s Day, which they called Boxing Day, a soup made out of the blood of the Christmas goat. Good soup, Denholm told him. Hangover soup.

Emmet went about the place, pulling open drawers, throwing some bits into a bag, which was a woven polyester conference bag with World Food Programme written on the flap. A couple of polo shirts, underwear and socks, a paperback from his bedside locker, his phone. He ducked into the en-suite bathroom to get his his toothbrush and deodorant.

‘Sounds like the business,’ Emmet said. He was slipping a hand under the mattress for his passport when he realised that he was just going down the road, in Ireland.

‘Yes,’ said Denholm, who could not keep the Christmas loneliness out of his voice.

And, ‘Wow,’ Emmet said, as he cast about him for nothing, trying to hide his sudden mortification at the fact that he was leaving Denholm alone. After all the hospitality he himself had been offered, in so many towns. Why did he not invite him home for his dinner? He just couldn’t.

It was not a question of colour (though it was also a question of colour), even Saar was out of the question — Saar with her Dutch domestic virtues, who would clear the dishes and wash the dishes, and sing as she swept the fallen tinsel off the floor. Christmas dinner, for Emmet’s family, was thicker than Kenyan blood soup, so none of the people that Emmet liked best could be there, nor even the people he might enjoy. The only route to the Madigans’ Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.

Hanna wasn’t even bringing the father of her child.

High standards at the Madigans’ dining room table. Keep ’em high.

‘Is the tram running tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denholm, who would be trapped for Christmas Day on a housing estate off the N7, and he went downstairs, offering tea.

Emmet blamed his mother. You could tell Rosaleen about disease, war and mudslides and she would look faintly puzzled, because there were, clearly, much more interesting things happening in the County Clare. Even though nothing happened — she saw to that too. Nothing was discussed. The news was boring or it was alarming, facts were always irrelevant, politics rude. Local gossip, that is what his mother allowed, and only of a particular kind. Marriages, deaths, accidents: she lived for a head-on collision, a bad bend in the road. Her own ailments of course, other people’s diseases. Mrs Finnerty’s cousin’s tumour that turned out to be just a cyst. Her back, her hip, her headaches, and the occasional flashing light when she closed her eyes — ailments that were ever more vague, until, one day, they would not be vague at all. They would be, at the last, entirely clear.

‘I was going to bring my housemate,’ said Emmet in the kitchen, a couple of hours later. ‘He’s having a rough time.’

‘Oh?’ said Rosaleen.

‘His mother just died.’

‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen loved a good tragedy. Tears — actual tears — came to her eyes.

‘And his sister and her baby are HIV positive.’

‘Oh.’

Though perhaps this was not the right kind of tragedy, after all.

‘I see.’

His mother seemed smaller than he remembered. Her skin was so thin, Emmet was afraid to touch in case she bruised. Not that anyone ever touched her — except Constance perhaps. Rosaleen did not like to be touched. She liked the thing Dan did, which was to conjure the air around her, somehow, making it special. When Hanna went to greet her, there was a big mistimed clash of cheekbones.

‘Oh.’

‘Ow.’

This was before they were over the threshold. Rosaleen opened the front door looking terrific. She had a crisp white shirt on, with a neat collar and her mid-length string of pearls. A slightly rakish pair of argyle socks showed between black trousers and tasselled loafers, her hair was a shining platinum from her special shampoo. And when Hanna reached up to kiss all this, their faces clashed at the bone.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

Rosaleen’s precision turning, as ever, into a kind of general difficulty for them all.

‘Yes I am fine,’ and then, ‘Where’s the baby?’

Even though Emmet had told her there would be no baby.

‘He’s with Hugh,’ said Hanna, after a pause.

‘What a pity,’ said their mother. ‘Oh well.’

And she looked at her daughter as though she, alone, would have to do.

Hanna had slept the whole way down in the car. The baby had kept her awake all night, she said — a little petulantly — and though his little sister annoyed him, Emmet felt sorry for her, freshly woken and bedraggled as she was, on their mother’s doorstep.

‘I told you,’ he said to Rosaleen.

‘Did you? Maybe you did.’ And then, a little sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’

She was an impossible woman. Emmet did not know why it was his job to keep his mother in line — he just couldn’t help it. He could not bear the unreality she fomented about her. Emmet could not understand why the truth was such a problem to Rosaleen, why facts were an irrelevance, or an accusation. He did not know what she was skittering away from, all the time.

‘A baby can’t have AIDS,’ she said, with some finality.

‘They did the test at the maternity clinic — an Irish nun, actually.’

‘A nun?’ she said.

‘Yes, in Kenya,’ said Emmet.

‘Oh.’

Rosaleen considered all this for a moment.

‘And is he from Kenya?’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Your housemate?’

‘He is. Yes, he is Kenyan.’

‘I see,’ she said and shifted her hips to one side on the chair.

‘Are you making that cup of tea?’ she said, suddenly, looking over her shoulder at Hanna. And Hanna, who was, in fact, spooning the leaves into the pot, paused for a micro rage with the caddy in her hand.

‘There is a child,’ Rosaleen said, turning carefully back to the table. ‘On the autistic spectrum. He was born to one of the people who run the Spar.’ And then, as a concession. ‘She is an Estonian, would you believe. And the husband is very nice. From Kiev.’

But Emmet was already bored by the game. He was a grown man. He was trying to expose the foolishness of a woman who was seventy-six years old. A woman who was, besides, his mother.

‘It’s a long way,’ he said. ‘From Kiev to County Clare.’

He could see the next couple of days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath was doing, what everything was worth these days — more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church — because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground.

Hanna put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and the smell of it rising through the house woke Dan and brought him downstairs. She heard his step outside the kitchen door and knew it immediately — she had kept the rhythm of his footfall inside her, all these years.

He came in; a handsome man who resolved himself into her brother as soon as he opened his mouth to say, ‘I thought it was you!’ His voice had an American inflection that Hanna remembered from the last time they met, some time before the baby, when she and Hugh took a week in Manhattan and Dan brought them to the Met and to an exhibition by Bill Viola, and they had a fantastic time: Hugh talking stage sets with Dan — a field of sunflowers, that is what Dan wanted, a lake, an expanse, and Hugh said, ‘Put it on the vertical, turn it into the back wall.’

‘Hiya,’ she said.

They did not kiss, not in the kitchen, though they would have kissed were they up in Dublin or in any other town. Instead Dan pulled out a chair, and Hanna got up to fill the kettle again. She knew, as the water hit the crusted element, that this was the only place in the world where Dan would sit, requiring tea. In any other kitchen he would serve and smooth and tend.

‘Tea?’ she said.

‘Perfect,’ he said.

‘You right?’ said Emmet. And Dan nodded to his little brother as though they had seen each other quite recently, when the truth was, neither of them could remember the date, nor did they try.

Rosaleen, meanwhile, was smiling. Her face seemed almost translucent. She was happy to see them all. She was happy because Dan was home.

Or she was happy for no reason, Emmet thought. Her face was a kind of cartoon. It had always been like this. There was something out of kilter with his mother’s happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

He wondered about her brain. Rosaleen found it hard to keep still, in her old age. She was always out in the garden, out on the road, she was always walking; rendered ecstatic by some view. She was hopped up, now, and out of the chair.

‘I could give you salad and some chicken,’ she said to Dan. ‘I have a bag of salad.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Dan.

‘They’re so easy.’

‘They are easy,’ he said. ‘But, you know, you load up with healthy groceries, I find, and they go off as soon as you reach for the ice cream. Not that this is off.’

He was beside her at the fridge door, they leaned into the interior light together and he had the bag of salad in his hand. Hanna knew it was the first bag of pre-washed salad Rosaleen had bought in her life.

‘It’s very light,’ said Rosaleen.

And Dan said, ‘You know that looks sort of perfect, I just might.’

After which there was a kerfuffle about dressing; what vinegar Rosaleen had, or did not have, and would he settle for lemon juice. Emmet, during all of this, read the paper in a stolid sort of way, but Hanna did not mind. She sat at the table with an unlit cigarette between her fingers and she could not get enough of Dan, the way he had grown into himself, and grown also into some version of a gay man that she might recognise. Her knowledge of him came from two directions and met in the human being sitting at the table, who was saying, ‘You know what I miss? Bread and jam.’ Grown up, Dan was so inevitable, and yet so unforeseen.

He sat in their father’s chair, the prodigal returned. He looked around him as though tranced by every small thing.

‘This!’ he said. He went to touch the little jug for milk and paused, his finger a millimetre away from the china. ‘I haven’t seen it in.’

‘Oh you’ll find us very,’ said Rosaleen.

‘No!’ he said.

‘Rustic,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Dan. ‘That’s what I mean. It’s perfect. It’s fine.’

‘I like to use things,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Even if nothing matches. Not any more.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Dan, thinking how much Ludo would like his mother’s table — how much Ludo would like his mother, perhaps, wondering if everything was going to be all right, after all.

Hanna saw Dan’s small smile. They all saw it. The shadow of someone else was in the room. Rosaleen looked to the window, where her reflection was forming on the pane.

‘Remember that Christmas,’ she said to Hanna, ‘you broke the Belleek?’

‘I didn’t break the Belleek,’ said Hanna.

‘The little Belleek jug,’ said Rosaleen, ‘Like a shell.’

‘It was Constance,’ said Hanna.

‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen, unconvinced. ‘Remember that little jug?’ she said to Dan. ‘It was like a shell, what do you call that glaze, what it does to the light?’

‘Lustre,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

‘It was Constance,’ said Hanna.

‘I thought it was you,’ said Rosaleen, mildly.

‘Well you were wrong.’

‘Oh it doesn’t matter,’ said Rosaleen, as though it was Hanna who had brought the subject up.

‘I Did. Not. Break. ThefuckingBelleek!’

‘You can get it all on eBay now,’ said Dan. ‘And, you know, it doesn’t price well.’

‘God, the way you went on about it,’ said Emmet. ‘Mind the Belleek!’

‘The Belleek!! The Belleek!!’ said Hanna.

‘How much is it, anyway?’ said Emmet to Dan.

‘Not much,’ said Dan.

‘We’ll get you a new one, all right, Ma?’

And Rosaleen, stilled by the word Ma, decided to say nothing, except perhaps for one last, small thing.

‘It was my father’s,’ she said.

Hanna went out to smoke her cigarette then, checking the rooms on the way through to the front door. But there wasn’t a drink to be had in the house, she knew that already, apart from the bottles of wine lined up on the sideboard in the dining room for the Christmas dinner, and those could not be breached.

Back in the kitchen Dan was still romancing their mother, feeding her anecdotes about some woman who was too wonderful to be famous.

‘She lives with just a housekeeper now, and someone to look after the dogs.’

‘And he never came back?’

‘He never came back.’

Hanna cleared some cups into the sink and signalled to Emmet, who was still stuck in the newspaper.

‘Will you walk out the road,’ she said. ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’

‘Oh right.’

‘They’ll all be below in Mackey’s.’

‘I suppose.’

And in three minutes flat they were out the door, over the humpy bridge, and passing the bright forecourt of the Statoil garage, where there was, Hanna realised, cheap wine on sale in the shop, if she needed to get some on the way home.

‘Jesus God,’ said Hanna.

The wind was against them, and flecked with rain.

‘I told her,’ she said. ‘I told her Hugh was taking the baby for the day.’

‘I told her,’ said Emmet.

‘You think she’s losing her grip?’

‘What?’ said Emmet.

‘Just.’

‘She’s sharp as a tack,’ said Emmet, because he could not countenance it.

The eaves of the houses on Curtin Street were draped with icicles that rained blue light on them as they walked beneath and the decorations continued tastefully into the main street where Christmas Eve was in full swing. It was taking your life in your hands, said Emmet, but it was more like passing your life on the road; some drunken geezer slapping you on the shoulder only to find — my God — Seán O’Brien from national school, who Emmet ran with and loved with the frank and unrepeatable love you have for another boy, when you are eight years old.

‘Seán O’Brien, how are you?’

‘Emmet, you langer.’

His eyes as blue and ironic as ever, in a scalded, red face.

Hanna, meanwhile, crouched low and flung her arms out, as a woman stumbled towards her — on to her, indeed — wearing gold sandals on bare feet, a golden cardigan, her hair gold blonde and leaping, fountaining, out of her head.

‘Mairéad!’

‘How are you, you good thing? How are you, my darling? Hanna Madigan.’

‘My God, look at you. My God! Look at you!’

‘You think?’ She dabbed at the bright blonde hair.

‘I thought you were in Australia.’

‘We’re home! We’re up in Dublin. Home for good.’

Mackey’s was jammed. They passed friends and the brothers of friends. Everyone was dressed, clipped, groomed; no beards, no stubble, no naked nails, some naked thigh, cleavage, muffin top. A pub that, in their youth, smelt of wet wool and old men was now a gallery of scents, like walking through the perfume department in the Duty Free.

Hanna stuck close to Emmet as they forced their way through the crowd. How was she supposed to recognise anyone, she said, when everyone’s hair was dyed and all the same damn colour?

‘They’ve all taken to the bottle,’ she said.

Emmet caught his reflection in a bar divider and he saw another decade — not just the unkempt hair or the cheap shirt, but something about the ordinary, diffident look in his eye which made the others look a bit mad, he thought. He wondered how much cocaine was in the place. And then he wondered at the thought.

In Mackey’s. Cocaine.

‘How are you Emmet Madigan? I thought you were out on the missions. Will you have something, now, on me. A Christmas drink, on me.’

It was one of the McGraths, a nephew of Dessie’s — and of Constance, therefore, by marriage — son of the real estate McGrath who was minting it these days. Michael or Martin. He was, as far as Emmet knew, a young lawyer beyond in Limerick. Not the worst of them, with the stubby McGrath thing. Walk through a wall for you.

‘I will not, thanks.’

‘You will.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You’ll take something anyway, for the good work. Keep up the good work.’

The man had his wallet out, and was thumbing through notes, half bent over, as though in humility. He could hardly see the damn things. Purple ones — five hundreds he had in there. He took out a wedge of apricot-coloured fifties and pushed it at Emmet.

‘You will,’ he said.

‘I will not.’

‘You will. Humour me,’ and when Emmet backed away, there was a horrible pause. His hand pulsed mid-air, as though marking time with the money. Then he lifted his eyes slowly to say, ‘It’s for a special intention, all right?’

There must have been four hundred euros there. Emmet looked at the man and wondered if he had murdered someone. What shame or sorrow afflicted him so badly he had to get it off his conscience in this way? Nothing, perhaps. The shame of being rich. He couldn’t hold on to the stuff.

‘I’ll get you a receipt for that.’

‘Fuck the receipt,’ said the McGrath nephew, and he loomed up into Emmet’s face. ‘Do you get me? Fuck the fuckin’ receipt. All right?’

‘I get you,’ Emmet said. ‘I get you. Fair play to you.’ Thinking he’d never be able to get this through the system: they were a charity, not a money-laundering operation.

‘We do have to keep things straight.’

The McGrath man leaned back and gaped at him then, as though to start a real fight, but Hanna, who had gone looking for a place to sit, was back by his side.

‘It’s bedlam,’ she said. ‘I went double.’

She had two dirty pints for him, encircled by thumb and forefinger. The other fingers held symmetrical small bottles of white wine, and in her right pinky, the stem of a glass.

‘Hanna Madigan,’ said the McGrath boy. ‘It’s well you’re looking.’

‘Ah, Michael,’ said Hanna, with blatant insincerity. ‘I didn’t see you there at all.’

He turned away and, ‘Why does everything feel so mad?’ she said to Emmet. ‘It’s like. I don’t know what it’s like. Everyone’s so.’

‘I know,’ said Emmet.

‘Showing off.’

‘It’s the money,’ said Emmet.

‘Like everyone’s a returned Yank, even if they’re living up the road. Hiya, Frank! home for the duration?’ She lifted a glass, then turned back to her brother.

‘That fecker. People you ran away from, years ago. Then back to the house, for more of it, I suppose. No wonder they’re fucking pissed.’

She was drunk herself, halfway down the glass. It happened all in one go, the shutters rolling up on a whole different woman. Emmet noted the transformation. Hanna’s eyes clouding with a kind of mid-distance indifference, a twitching lift of her chin, a tiny smile.

Here’s Johnny.

‘Fucking baby this, baby that. Who knew she was so keen on babies? Why don’t you have a baby? Take the onus off.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Emmet.

‘She’s very worried about you.’

‘You don’t say.’

It was what Rosaleen said: ‘I am very worried about Emmet.’

‘God, you’re cold,’ Hanna said. ‘You know that. You’re a cold bastard, really. Does that Dutch chick know how cold you are? Does she know?’

It was a good question. Emmet ignored it.

‘She always liked babies,’ he said. ‘It’s adults she can’t stand.’

‘Puberty,’ said Hanna.

‘At least you didn’t go bald,’ said Emmet. ‘She took that very personally. As I recall.’

‘Anyway, she’s very worried about you.’

It still got to them. Rosaleen never said it to your face, whatever it was. She moved instead around and behind her children, in some churning state of mild and constant distraction. ‘I am very worried about Hanna.’ It was her way of holding on to them, perhaps. Rosaleen was afraid they would leave her. She was afraid it was all her fault. ‘I’m really very worried about Constance, I think she might be depressed.’ All the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex, drink. ‘I am very worried about Hanna, she is looking very puffy about the face.’ And, for a while, to everyone’s great amusement: ‘I’m really worried about Dan, do you think he might be gay?’ to which Emmet had replied, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m only his brother.’

‘What about?’ said Emmet, despite himself.

Hanna’s face blanked and lifted.

‘Fuck her,’ she said. ‘She just said she was worried about you. That’s all.’

‘Well, she can relax.’

Hanna decided to leave it then, but it would not be left. As soon as she tried to change the subject, it came back, in a little surge of malice.

‘Just if there was some little problem there, is all.’

She was now actually and improbably drunk, and this distracted Emmet, for two seconds, from the fact that his sister was talking about his sexual functioning, which is to say, about his erection, first of all to his mother and then to his face.

‘What?’ said Emmet, suddenly angry. Terribly angry.

‘That’s what she said.’

‘What did she say? What, exactly?’

But Michael McGrath was back by Hanna’s side. ‘I hope that’s a Sauvignon Blanc,’ he said, handing her another little bottle of wine.

‘Ah now,’ said Emmet.

‘Not at all,’ said the McGrath boy, who had not, in fact, brought a drink for Emmet. He stood there and settled into his own pint, sank an inch or two off the top of it, feet planted.

‘How’s herself?’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Hanna.

‘She’s fierce fit. I do see her betimes on the road.’

‘Yes,’ said Emmet. The man tilted his head.

‘You’ll be sorry, I suppose, to see the old place go?’

‘Excuse me?’

The young McGrath clearly knew something they did not, and the intimacy of that was hard to handle. The glee.

‘Great time to do it. Great timing. I had a house, now, we were doing the conveyancing on a house outside Kilfenora, handsome looking thing all right, rotten inside to the rafters, and they pulled it off the market on the Friday, put it back on on the Monday fifty grand up, and it went for over that again. Well over.’

‘How much?’

‘Ah now!’ he said. He screwed up one side of his face, and bit off an imaginary large length of toffee. A wink. ‘That’d be telling.’

‘Right,’ said Emmet.

Hanna drank with some intensity, looking directly at Michael McGrath, while Emmet thought about the hungry and the dead and about the man who stood in front of him now.

He should go back to counselling, Ireland was wrecking his head. He could feel a child’s back under his hand; the amazing small bones, the acetone smell of his dying. Where was that? What day was that?

And, as though she knew what he was thinking, Hanna said, ‘Would you jump into my grave as quick?’

‘Drink up,’ said Emmet. ‘Let’s go.’

‘You go,’ said Hanna. ‘You fucking go.’

She blinked back some tears, gave Michael McGrath a gammy, wet smile. An offer of some kind. It did not bear thinking about. As if servicing Stubby McGrath would make things better. His own sister.

‘Come on,’ said Emmet.

‘I’m very worried about me, actually.’

‘Oh for feck’s sake,’ said Emmet.

But he felt sorry for her, too, and did not object when she stopped off in the garage shop for a couple of bottles of Oxford Landing, the place jammed with people buying batteries, chocolates, alcohol.

The Hungry Grass

ROSALEEN TOLD CONSTANCE she did not want a present this year. She said it in a faint voice, meaning she would be dead soon so what was the point? What was an object — when you would not have it for long? Too much? Not enough? It was hard to say.

Constance thought she was immune to this sort of guff, but she also needed to tell her mother that she was not about to die so she went up to Galway and trawled through every last thing in the shops, until she found a thick silk scarf that was the same price as a new microwave and so beautiful you could not say what colour it was, except there was lilac in there and also pearl, all of which would be perfect for her mother’s complexion and for her silver-white hair.

‘Oh I can’t remember,’ she would say when her mother asked the price, or complained about the price. Times were good. Constance bought a wheel of Camembert, various boxes of chocolates, Parma ham and beautiful, small grapes that were more yellow than green. She got her hair done in a place so posh it didn’t look done at all. Then she drove back home through the winter darkness in the smell of PVC and ripening cheese, happy in her car. Constance loved to drive. It was the perfect excuse. For what, she did not know. But there was such simplicity to it: crossing great distances to stop an inch away from the kerb, opening the door.

The next morning she was back behind the wheel, picking Dan up from the airport, depositing him in her mother’s, back in to the butcher’s and a few things around town, a poinsettia for the cleaner, a trio of hyacinths for the cleaner’s mother who was in hospital in Limerick and could not understand a thing the doctors told her. The cleaner was from Mongolia, a fact that made Constance slightly dizzy. But it was just true. Her cleaner — good hearted, a little bit vague with a duster — was from Ulan Bator. Constance left the presents with her money on the kitchen table, then back out to Ardeevin with the turkey and a quick tidy up while she was there: checking supplies, running a Hoover, though her mother hated the sound of the Hoover. After which, home to drive Shauna to a pal’s house, her fake tan leaving a shadow on the cream upholstery of the Lexus.

‘Ooofff,’ said Constance, when she saw it and then chastised her temper. That all her problems should be so small.

The next morning, she went early into Ennis. It was 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve and the supermarket was like the Apocalypse, people grabbing without looking, and things fallen in the aisles. But there was no good time to do this, you just had to get through it. Constance pushed her trolley to the vegetable section: celery, carrots, parsnips for Dessie, who liked them. Sausage and sage for the stuffing, an experimental bag of chestnuts, vacuum packed. Constance bought a case of Prosecco on special offer to wrap and leave on various doorsteps and threw in eight frozen pizzas in case the kids rolled up with friends. Frozen berries. Different ice cream. She got wine, sherry, whiskey, fresh nuts, salted nuts, crisps, bags and bags of apples, two mangoes, a melon, dark cherries for the fruit salad, root ginger, fresh mint, a wooden crate of satsumas, the fruit cold and promising sweet, each one with its own sprig of green, dark leaves. She got wrapping paper, red paper napkins, Sellotape, and — more out of habit, now the children were grown — packs and packs of batteries, triple A, double A, a few Cs. She took five squat candles in cream-coloured beeswax to fill the cracked hearth in the good room at Ardeevin, where no fire was lit this ten years past, and two long rolls of simple red baubles to fill the gaps on her mother’s tree. She went back for more sausages because she had forgotten about breakfast. Tomatoes. Bacon. Eggs. She went back to the dairy section for more cheese. Back to the fruit aisle for seedless grapes. Back to the biscuit aisle for water biscuits. She searched high and low for string to keep the cloth on the pudding, stopped at the delicatessen counter for pesto, chicken liver pâté, tubs of olives. She got some ready-cooked drumsticks to keep people going. At every corner, she met a neighbour, an old friend, they rolled their eyes and threw Christmas greetings, and no one thought her rude for not stopping to converse. She smiled at a baby in the queue for the till.

‘I know!’ she said. ‘Yes I know!’ The baby considered her fully. The baby gave her a look that was complete.

‘Yes!’ she said again, and got the curl of a sweet, thoughtful smile.

All this kept Constance occupied until the time came to unload the contents of her trolley on to the conveyor. The baby held itself so proudly erect, the young mother underneath it looked like a prop. She looked like some kind of clapped-out baby stand.

‘You’re doing great,’ Constance told her. ‘You’re doing a great job.’

The bill came to four hundred and ten euros, a new record. She thought she should keep the receipt for posterity. Dessie would be almost proud.

Constance pushed her trolley on to the walkway and the wheels locked cleverly on to the metal beneath them, and she was happy happy happy, as she sank towards the car park. She thanked God from the burning, rising depth of herself for this unexpected life — a man who loved her, two sons taller than their father, and a daughter who kissed her still when no one was there to see. She could not believe this was the way things had turned out.

Her feet were swollen already; she could feel them throb, hot in the wrong shoes. Constance bumped the trolley off the walkway, set her trotters thumping across the concrete of the car park. It was half past eleven on Christmas Eve. In the pocket of her coat, her phone started to ring and, by the telepathy of the timing, Constance knew it was her mother.

‘What is it, darling,’ she said, remembering, as she did so, that she had forgotten the Brussels sprouts.

‘He’s still asleep,’ said Rosaleen. For a moment Constance thought she was talking about her father, a man who was not asleep, but dead.

‘Well don’t wake him,’ she said.

Dan. Of course, she meant Dan, who was jet lagged.

‘Should I?’

‘Or maybe do. Yeah. Get him straightened out.’

There was a pause from Rosaleen. Straightened out.

‘You think?’

‘Have you everything?’ said Constance.

‘I don’t know,’ said her mother.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘It’s a lot of work,’ Rosaleen said, with a real despair in her voice; you would think she had just spent an hour in the insanity of the supermarket, not Constance.

‘But I suppose it’s worth it to have you all here.’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’ll be sorry to see it go.’ She was talking about the house again. Any time she felt needy, now, or lost or uncertain, she talked about the house.

‘Right,’ said Constance. ‘Listen, Mammy.’

‘Mammy,’ said Rosaleen.

‘Listen —’

‘Oh, don’t bother. I’ll let you go.’ And she was gone.

It was Rosaleen, of course, who wanted Brussels sprouts, no one else ate them. Constance stood for a moment, blank behind the crammed boot of the Lexus. You can’t have Christmas without Brussels sprouts.

Sometimes even Rosaleen left them on her plate. Something to do with cruciferous vegetables, or nightshades, because even vegetables were poison to her when the wind was from the north-east.

‘Oh what the hell,’ said Constance. She slammed the boot shut and turned her sore feet back to the walkway and the horrors of the vegetable section. Then over to the spices to get nutmeg, which was the way Rosaleen liked her Brussels, with unsalted butter. And it was a good thing she went back up, because she had no cranberry sauce either — unbelievably — no brandy for the brandy butter, no honey to glaze the ham. It was as though she had thrown the whole shop in the trolley and bought nothing. She had no big foil for the turkey. Constance grabbed some potato salad, coleslaw, smoked salmon, mayonnaise, more tomatoes, litre bottles of fizzy drinks for the kids, kitchen roll, cling film, extra toilet paper, extra bin bags. She didn’t even look at the bill after another fifteen minutes in the queue behind some woman who had forgotten flowers — as she announced — and abandoned her groceries to get them, after which Constance did exactly the same thing, fetching two bouquets of strong pink lilies because they had no white left. She was on the road home before she remembered potatoes, thought about pulling over to the side of the road and digging some out of a field, imagined herself with her hands in the earth, scrabbling around for a few spuds.

Lifting her head to howl.

Back in Aughavanna she unpacked and sorted the stuff that would go over to Ardeevin for the Christmas dinner and she repacked that. Then she went to Rory’s room, where the child was sleeping off a hangover. Constance took off her shoes and climbed on to the bed behind him.

‘Oh fuck,’ he said.

‘Your own fault,’ said his mother, as she spooned into him, with the duvet between them and the wall at her back.

‘Ah, Ma,’ he said and flapped a big hand over his shoulder to find a bit of her, which happened to be the top of her head. But Rory was always easy to hold; easy to carry and easy to kiss, and there, in the smell of last night’s beer and his rude good health, fretful, lumpy Constance McGrath fell asleep.

In the evening she brought Shauna over to Ardeevin with the ingredients for the stuffing and they put it all together right there at the table in the big kitchen. Dan knew exactly what to do with the experimental bag of chestnuts. They chopped and diced, the three of them, while the others were at the pub, and they put the vegetables under water for the next day while Rosaleen supervised happily from the chair by the range. Dan talked about Tim Burton with Shauna and they discussed the veins on Madonna’s arms. He asked a couple of excruciating questions about pop music, she asked about an artist called Cindy Sherman, and this just knocked Dan for six. He kissed the child before they left, he piled her hair on the top of her head, saying, ‘Look at you!’ and Constance would have loved to stay longer, to be that thing, a grown-up child in her parents’ house, but she had presents to wrap back in Aughavanna and she did not get to bed, as it turned out, until after two.

There was no dishwasher in Ardeevin so the next day Constance was at the sink non-stop, finding crockery, dipping through soaking pans and greasy dishes to prise out a bowl for the carrots, another side plate, a serving spoon. Hanna was too miserable to help and Emmet did not see the need for it — it was like he had a different set of eyes. So it was her and Dan, mostly, but Dan did not do dishes, Dan did food. And her mother did not like the scarf, of course she didn’t. How could Constance have ever expected her to?

There was no pleasing her.

Rosaleen spent the early part of the day quietly enough. She walked into town for Mass and stopped for a cup of tea with the two elderly sisters who lived over the Medical Hall, because Bart and his wife were in Florida for the duration. She came back with the cooking in full swing, and she spent some time organising the table and making it beautiful, with pine cones sprayed silver and white baubles, which she scattered in an artful way around two pewter candlesticks: white candles, white cloth, a sprinkling of glitter, a squirt of artificial snow. She went out to the garden for greenery and a fading, freakish rose that bloomed against her sunniest wall. And this yellow rose she set on a corner of the mantelpiece, where it dropped petals as the day went on and the dinner was not yet served because — and you couldn’t blame him — Dan did not get the bird on till nine. So Constance was grabbing the crisps out of Shauna’s hand, saying, ‘Wait’, and then out of Emmet’s hands, while Hanna leaned against the range, sipping sherry intended for the gravy, and nothing was on time.

And just as she had the gravy reducing in the pan, Rosaleen called them in to the front room. She was like a child, Constance thought, she waited until things were Completely Impossible, and then she went Beyond.

Rosaleen had the wrapped scarf in her hand. She held the parcel up and wiggled it from side to side.

‘Wait, Mammy,’ said Constance, wiping her hands on her apron.

‘A scarf!’ said Rosaleen.

But when the paper was off and the beautiful thing out in the light, Constance knew who had won this time around. The scarf was even better here in the living room than it had been in the shop and Rosaleen was almost put out, it looked so well in the winter light. She set it across her shoulders and picked at the fabric.

‘Oh this is far too good for me.’

Rosaleen hated being upstaged by her own clothes. It was a rule. Vulgarity she called it, but the scarf was not vulgar, it was entirely discreet.

‘It’s lovely on you,’ Constance said.

They had all drifted in to watch: Constance, Dan, Emmet, Hanna. With Dessie at the back of the room, looking at all the Madigans.

‘Pink,’ said Rosaleen, taking it off and setting it against the dark green and glitter of the Christmas tree. ‘Very fresh. Though Lord knows, I’m probably a bit old for pink.’

No one answered, so she said it again.

‘Long time since I wore pink.’

‘I wouldn’t call it pink,’ said Constance. ‘Maybe lavender.’

‘Lilac,’ said Hanna.

‘Lilac shawl,’ said Emmet. ‘You know that’s actually Sanskrit.’

‘Is it?’ said Dan, because there was no getting around Emmet when he had a fact, you just had to let him slap it out there, and admire.

‘Yes. Both words. “Lilac” and “shawl”.’

‘Thanks, Emmet,’ said Hanna.

Rosaleen bunched up the ‘lilac shawl’, annoyed by Emmet, or annoyed by the thing itself. She chucked it into the easy chair by the fireplace, and was cross with herself then, because her children were all looking at her.

‘Oh I am tired of myself now,’ she said.

And because it was Christmas, she started to cry.

‘Oh, Mammy,’ said Constance.

‘My own children,’ she said, as though they had ganged up against her in some terrible way.

‘Your own children what?’ said Emmet.

‘My own children!’ she said. Furious now. ‘My own flesh and blood!’

And Hanna, who had done nothing all day except mope, said, ‘Mama, Mama. Come on.’ Leading her gently to the sofa. ‘Would you like a little sherry?’

‘No I would not like a little sherry,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Tell them, Desmond. Tell them what I want.’

Dessie was standing well back from them all.

‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘Orange shampoo,’ said Emmet. ‘That’s another one.’

‘Oh shut up,’ said his siblings, almost as one: Hanna inserting, ‘the fuck’ in there so ending a little late and off the beat.

‘Tell them,’ said Rosaleen, looking to Dessie, as though to her only protector, and Dessie (the fool, thought Constance) said, ‘Well.’

‘I’m putting the house on the market,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Dessie has it all arranged.’

There was nothing for Dessie to do now, except concur.

‘Your mother thinks it’s a good time — and it is a good time, it is a really good time — to realise this. . asset.’

He waved his hand vaguely, as though talking about the wallpaper, or the carpet, a gathered handful of air.

‘Excuse me?’ said Hanna.

‘She wants to get the money moving. Am I right? To divide it up a little. Now, rather than later.’

‘Well none of you has any money,’ said Rosaleen, perched on the edge of the sofa. She smoothed the cloth of her skirt over her knees and picked at a piece of fluff.

‘I don’t know whose fault that is. I mean, apart from mine. I don’t know what I did to deserve that.’

And there it was. Her children were going to object. They wanted to say that they had money or that they did not need money, but their failure gaped back at them, and they just stood there, looking at it. It was true. They had no money. And yet, and yet. They each struggled to remember this, they had enough. Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t this.

‘Please don’t,’ said Emmet.

‘It’s too much for me,’ said Rosaleen, her voice beginning to tremble. And this was also true: the house was too big for one person.

‘So that is the way, I suppose,’ Dessie said. ‘That’s where things are tending.’

‘I am moving in with Constance,’ Rosaleen said. ‘I’ve had enough.’

Dessie stopped then, as though this last was news to him too.

And Constance said, ‘Jesus, the dinner.’

The Brussels sprouts were burning. The smell of it had been getting worse for some time.

‘The sprouts,’ she said.

‘Oh please don’t fuss,’ said Rosaleen as Constance squawked and ran out the door.

‘Please stop.’ She lifted her voice. ‘No one likes them anyway.’

There was a silence in the hall. After a moment Constance came back in to the room.

‘You like them,’ she said to Rosaleen. The smell by now was quite intense.

‘Oh I just. I don’t know. Maybe I do.’

As they went in, at Dan’s behest, to the dining room, where the smoked salmon and asparagus was set, they could hear Constance in the garden beating the saucepan on the ground outside, and a noise out of her like a heifer stuck on a barbed wire fence. She was weeping.

Dessie said, ‘Maybe a little bungalow, Rosaleen. Maybe that’s what you are looking for.’

He pulled his mother-in-law’s chair out for her, and she sat down.

‘Oh Desmond,’ she said, picking up her napkin. ‘And the price of them going up by the day. As you tell me, yourself.’

Donal was in Australia, which left two young McGraths, Rory and Shauna, to sit at the little fold-out table, and though they were the size of adults, they stuck like children to their mobile phones.

‘Put them away,’ Dessie said, as he passed, but they ignored him, and the Madigans sat in the tiny, demented sound of their electronic games. Hanna picked up the fork and set it down again. Constance did not come in.

They sat and looked at the food in front of them. It was half past two on Christmas Day, the weather outside was clear and fine; no traffic on the road, no wind to curl under the eaves or annoy the windows. The house was silent and large about them. There was no one to say grace — their father was dead.

It was Dan’s job now. Dan the spoilt priest. He looked around him, then down at the table. He took a breath.

‘Buon appetito,’ he said.

Which gave the siblings a small jab of pleasure. They applied themselves to the asparagus, which was wrapped in smoked salmon with a lemon dressing. It was very good.

‘This is very good,’ said Emmet.

‘Really simple,’ said Dan.

Outside, Constance had stopped weeping.

‘How’s school?’ said Hanna.

‘Good,’ said Shauna from the little table.

‘Any word from Donal?’

‘Surfing, sure. Byron Bay. There’s a whole gang of them there from Lahinch.’

When the starter was done, Dan cleared and went into the kitchen where Constance was filling the Christmas plates. He brought them in two at a time; ham, turkey, three types of stuffing, all the trimmings. Then Constance herself came in — red-faced, sweating, the silk of her blouse flecked with grease.

‘Ta-dahh!’ said Dan.

There was a little round of applause for Constance and she sat into her accustomed place, and there they all were, girls facing the window, boys facing the room: Constance-and-Hanna, Emmet-and-Dan. Their mother sat at the foot of the table, Dessie at the head, and for a moment they pretended that nothing had happened, that this room would always be the same, and always theirs.

It was older, now, of course. The damp had crawled higher through the bamboo patterned wallpaper, leaving its tea coloured watermark, and the edge in the north-east corner was spotted with black and curled up from the skirting board. The Madigan children saw it with wiser eyes. The chandelier — so wonderful, long ago — was a cheap enough thing. The brown carpet was the best you could do in 1973.

The people inside the room were older, too. All of them so child-like still, despite the absurd grey hairs and the sagging skin in which their familiar eyes were set.

They worked the gravy and the sauces, passed stuffing, the salt, the water jug and the wine. They looked at the plates heaped with food and marvelled aloud at it, each of them silently shouting that she could not take it away from them, whatever it was — their childhood, soaked into the walls of this house.

And of course it could be sold. That was also true. The house was hers and she could sell it, if she liked.

‘The turkey is great,’ said Rory from the little table and Constance was proud of him; Rory, the peacemaker, working hard.

‘Thank you,’ said Dan.

‘Very moist,’ said Dessie.

Dan tried not to laugh at the word.

‘You think?’

He looked up at stubby Dessie McGrath, there at the top of the table. He remembered a brief encounter with the alcoholic brother, Ferdy McGrath, when they were both still boys, playing by the river Inagh. But he never got near Dessie. Not even close. His brother-in-law was not so much straight as sorted. Dessie McGrath was a weapon.

‘Yes it is,’ said Dan. ‘Surprisingly moist.’

Dessie did not blink.

‘Hard to get right, at a guess,’ he said and went back to his plate, shovelling the stuff into himself, while the Madigan children chewed and chewed, and could not swallow.

The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little. Four children on the brink of middle age: the Madigans had no traction in the world, no substance. They had no money. Dan, especially, had no money, and he could could not think why this was, or who might be to blame. But he recognised, in the silence, the power Rosaleen had over her children, none of whom had grown up to match her.

‘I don’t know how I’ll eat all this.’ She was a bit like a child, herself. ‘My goodness.’

She forgot to tell us about money, he thought, and we forgot to make any, because the Madigans were above all that. The stuck-up Madigans, the Madigans beyond the bridge. Rosaleen thought money would fly to us, because we deserved it. She thought we would spend our lives giving it away.

Which is what Emmet had done, pretty much. Poured his life out, like water into the African sands. He felt it keenly — they all did — the lack of anything to show for it all. Twenty years saving a world that remained unsaved. If you thought about it, he was as much a fantasist as his mad mother.

The yellow rose gave up a clump of pale petals and they sighed as they hit the mantelpiece.

Hanna said, ‘You know, Mammy, it’s our house too.’

Rosaleen looked at her. She said, ‘Beautiful. Beautiful Hanna Madigan.’

Each of them came back from the privacy of their own thoughts then, ready for the fight. The air cleared.

‘What do you mean?’ said Hanna.

‘Nothing,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Just that you are. So pretty.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hanna.

‘You have a heart shaped face, I always thought. An old-fashioned face. You were born to play Viola.’

‘Yeah well,’ said Hanna.

‘No?’

‘Sure,’ said Hanna.

‘Well you are an actress,’ Constance said, trying to keep the inverted commas out of her voice.

‘Yes I am an actress,’ said Hanna. ‘Yes that is what I am.’

‘Well then,’ said Rosaleen, in a soothing tone.

‘I just don’t,’ said Hanna. Her hand was flat and she brought the edge of it down on the tabletop. ‘I don’t.’

‘Work?’ said Emmet.

‘Darling, you have a baby to look after,’ said Rosaleen.

‘Hang on,’ said Dan.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Hanna, losing it.

‘Can you please leave her alone?’ Dan said, but Hanna was already building to a shout.

‘I Just Don’t Want To Play Viola.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ said her mother, sadly.

‘I’m not sure anyone’s asked,’ said Emmet. ‘In all fairness’.

‘I have no interest in playing Viola,’ said Hanna in a very deliberate voice. ‘I am interested in process. That’s what I do. New stuff. Viola is not where I am at, all right? It’s not what I’m for. Anyway, nobody ever puts on Twelfth Night.’

‘What a pity,’ said her mother. ‘I’d love to see you do it. Before I get too old.’

‘Rosaleen, darling,’ said Dan. ‘Please stop.’

‘Stop what?’ said Rosaleen, but by some miracle she distracted herself into an old story about the night war was declared, when she was ten years old and Anew McMaster was playing Othello, naked to the waist and his beautiful voice, you could feel it on your skin, it was a force. Her father saying they were in for it now — because of the war, you know — and she had no idea what he meant. She thought it was something to do with the events on stage.

‘What about your mother?’ Constance said quietly and Rosaleen sighed.

‘Oh, Mama.’

‘Was she there, too?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said Rosaleen.

‘I mean, you know what I mean. What was she like?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Was she nice?’

‘Well of course she was nice.’

‘What kind of nice?’ Hanna joined in, now. ‘What style of a woman was she?’

‘My mother?’ said Rosaleen. ‘Oh she was lovely. She was always beautifully turned out. She had to go to Limerick specially, or up to Dublin once a year, for a fitting. Always wore a hat. She had three of them on the go; a summer hat, a winter felt, and, you know, a thing for the races, or a wedding if there was a wedding. A dress hat, that is what I mean.’

‘Right,’ said Hanna. They were all turned towards their mother now. They were looking for something from her and Rosaleen did not know what it was.

‘She always did things the right way,’ she said.

Dan said, ‘And was she — I don’t know. Was she a happy type?’

‘Well I think she was happy,’ said Rosaleen. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

To which there was no answer, really.

‘It’s a very hard thing,’ said Rosaleen, finally. ‘To describe your mother.’

‘Yes,’ said Hanna.

‘Except that she is your mother,’ Constance said, her voice full of disapproval, her face tucked down as she worked her plate. But the others did not know what she meant by that. And they sat for a moment, in silence.

‘It’s like there’s some secret,’ said Hanna. ‘But there just isn’t.’

And there they were. It was a Christmas like the ones they remembered from the old days — and how could they forget how the dinner always ended? It was traditional, you might say. Rosaleen got upset.

‘I don’t know why everyone is getting at me,’ she said. ‘The ungrateful children I reared.’

Tears coated her eyeballs; she blinked them back.

‘Oh, darling,’ said Dan in a voice that was almost bored. ‘Rise above.’

‘I gave you everything.’

Constance reached a useless hand across the tablecloth.

‘And there is no end to it. I am still handing it over. I can see no end to it all.’

She was on her dignity, face averted.

‘Whatever I did — whatever it was — it was not enough. Clearly. That’s all. I just don’t know.’ The tears spilled over now. Rosaleen was a little girl. Rosaleen was a sad old woman. Their own mother. In a moment she would leave and go up to bed and Oh, they all loved her now, they were hopeless in it. They yearned to make her happy.

‘Stop, Mammy,’ said Constance. ‘You’ll make yourself sick, now.’

‘No I am not talking to you, not any of you,’ she said. ‘Shauna, say your poem.’

‘What poem, Granny?’

‘Oh little Corca Baiscinn.’

But Shauna did not have that poem, or any poem. She had a song, said Constance. But she didn’t have a song either, apparently.

‘Did you bring your tin whistle?’ said Dessie.

‘No,’ said Shauna. Then she changed her mind. ‘I mean yes, I have it here.’

‘Good girl.’

Shauna stood where she was, slender in a dress of black jersey that just about covered the beautiful S of her backside. She flung back her red hair and lifted the tin whistle, then she tossed her hair back again and stuck her hip to one side. After a quick, nervous smirk, she applied her lips and fingers to a tune that they all recognised, on the first four notes, as the beautiful ‘Róisín Dubh’.

‘Ah,’ said Rosaleen, because it was her song, translated.

O my Dark Rosaleen!

Do not sigh, do not weep!

The sound of it sweet beyond reckoning and sadly heroic.

‘Incomparable,’ said Dessie, adoring his daughter openly, there in the middle of all the mad Madigans. ‘Ye girl ye!’

And it was Shauna’s job to light the pudding, because she was the youngest, so they turned off the lights and Dessie poured the whiskey from the cap of the bottle; two tin measures. The liquid fire spilled down the dark sides of the pudding, then the flames licked back up themselves, and they matched Shauna’s eyes for blue, and her hair for orange. She shrieked at what she had done and, delighted, stepped back.

After which, Rosaleen rallied, as only Rosaleen could. She took up a spoon and struck it against her glass and, as if there had been no argument, no tears, she lifted her chin and made her Christmas speech:

‘I look around me on a day like today and I can’t believe how well you look, or that you are anything to me, or anything indeed, to the creatures running around my feet in this very room all those years ago. I can see them yet. The children you used to be. And how sad that your father is not here to enjoy you the way I still can. And maybe Dan could do the honours. Dan?’

Dan stood up.

‘What is it again?’

‘Go mbeirimíd beo,’ said Constance.

‘Guh merrimeed bee-oh,’ said Dan

‘Ag an am seo arís.’

‘Egg on ahm shee-yuh a-reesh.’

‘That we will all be alive this time again. Or this time next year,’ Dessie translated, for the benefit of his daughter, and Shauna said, ‘Ew,’ making them all laugh. He pulled her into his lap, saying, ‘Is that the way of it?’ And Constance stood to clear the dishes, one more time.

‘This time next year. Indeed,’ said Rosaleen, in a wan voice. ‘Wherever we may find ourselves.’

Constance, stacking the dishes, cracked a plate off the one below it.

‘Mind the Belleek!’ said Emmet.

‘Any chance of a coffee?’ said Dan.

‘There’s no coffee,’ said Constance. ‘Sorry. I forgot.’

‘You forgot,’ Hanna said, reaching for her cigarettes; the sloppy sarcasm perfectly pitched to undo her sister, who was heading for the door. Constance turned.

‘Yes, I forgot. There is no coffee, except instant maybe. I forgot.’

‘Just asking,’ said Hanna.

‘You can bring your own fucking coffee, do you hear me?’

‘Oh, dearie-me,’ said Rosaleen.

‘Mind the Belleek!’ said Emmet. ‘Mind the Belleeek!’

Constance was holding the pile of plates, but instead of dropping them or flinging them against the wall, she clutched them tight and screwed her face up.

‘Oh God,’ said Dan.

She looked altogether pathetic. She turned to leave then ducked back towards them again.

‘You can’t come,’ she said.

It was a moment before they realised what she was saying. She was talking to Rosaleen.

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s not fair. You can’t come. You can’t live in my house.’

‘I can do what I like,’ said Rosaleen.

‘No, you can’t. You just can’t. There’s about seventy little houses getting built around here, you can have one of them. You would love it. Everything new and clean. You can have your own little house.’

‘You’re not going to put me out on the roads,’ said Rosaleen and Constance lowered her head.

‘I just mean,’ she said.

‘Your own mother!’

‘You can have your own little house.’

They thought they knew what would happen next. Constance would throw something (Mind the Belleek!) and Rosaleen would win. And when she had won, when she had everyone at the limits of themselves — Constance weeping as she brushed up the broken china, Constance begging to be forgiven — then she might decide not to sell the house, after all. She might not bother. And life would continue as before.

But in fact, Constance did not drop anything. She said, ‘Dessie?’ and she turned and walked out of the room. After a moment, Dessie lumbered after her.

‘Tea will be fine,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

Hanna, who was drunk, lit up a cigarette.

‘Fuck this,’ she said. She took a couple of drags, then pushed back her chair and walked out too. After which, the men pretended to clear the table and scattered quietly about the house and no tea was made.

Dan went up to his old room to check his phone, and to text Ludo OMG SOS. He sat on the edge of the bed and even the sag of the mattress was familiar to him: taking his shape, as it had always done. There was no signal. He checked through old messages, that in their carelessness would remind him of his actual life — the one that happened far away from here.

If you can pick up some nice white fish, hake or turbot even I will give you a big kiss and a lick. xxl For like, four people?

Someone needs to tell Dale where to get off.

Hello from Atlanta airport. 2435 steps to gate C24 on the pedometer. Walking my way back to you babe.

Code for alarm is my birthday, figure it out! Don’t forget to pick the raspberries. Enjoy!

The immersion cylinder next door made its usual hum: the high note of water thrilling through the pipes, a rolling chord of underboil, then the knock-back of an air hammer. Silence. Dan looked about the room where his young life was stored, his life before New York, not innocent so much as stupid.

Not innocent, at all.

The row of books: Man Ray, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tennyson, even — how could he not have known? Listener’s Guide to Opera. The anglepoise lamp he bought from his own pocket money in the local hardware store. The Modigliani poster on the wall a failed attempt to love some idea of a woman in the raw. Wrong painter. Wrong picture. Dan could not forgive himself all the misdirection of those years, as he told Scott, his portable therapist who was back now in his head. He could not sentimentalise. All that withering and wasted time. He had failed to name the real events of his youth, or possess them as his own.

Even now, he wondered at the home movie of his memory. His father shrugging him away on Fanore beach — the slow motion feel to it. Who had pressed the mute button on his childhood? His father’s hands were wet and cold. His mother was foolish. His grandmother had three hats. And, yet, everywhere he looked, the house held memory and meaning that his heart could not. The house was full of detail, interest, love.

It was a question of texture, Dan thought, a whiff of your former self in a twist of fabric, a loose board. It was the reassuring madness of patterned wallpaper under the daily shift of light. The sun rose at the front and set at the back of Ardeevin, wherever he was in the world, and when he came back, the house made sense in a way that nothing else did.

Downstairs, the sound of Constance hectoring her children about the washing-up. In the front bedroom, his brother Emmet, thinking his own thoughts. Dan could tell it was Emmet by the sound of his breathing almost. His little brother. He was fond of Emmet as a boy but, grown up, the man bored and frightened him. Balder now, Emmet always managed to look somehow undernourished, unfit. Unprepossessing. Dan did not know when their paths last crossed, then he remembered, with a jolt, the bones, under his hand, of his brother’s shoulder as they carried their father’s coffin down the aisle of the small church in Boolavaun.

That happened.

They carried the coffin. Six men. Sons at the front. In the middle, Dessie and their uncle Bart (queer as Christmas, Dan thought, how did he not guess?) A neighbour at the back, paired with a surprising American cousin, who was doing a course up in Dublin and had been dispatched west by a transatlantic phone call. It was a strange way to meet up. But the coffin — the coffin containing his father’s body — was not so heavy. And it was such a practical thing to do. It was a task more than a burden. Once you have actually carried a dead man you are happy enough to leave him down, let them put the box into the damn ground.

Emmet had gone into his parents’ room to find something, and he forgot, as soon as he entered it, what it was he was looking for.

It was a year or more since anyone had been in here. The wardrobe swinging open and half empty, his mother’s pile of paperbacks on a little table beside the bed. Emmet glanced at the things on her dressing table, and it was as though she had already died. A couple of emery boards sliced with the residue of her nails. A tube of hand cream. Her little compact with a picture of a rose on the lid and — he knew the surprise of it so well — a mirror on the inside. There were bits of cheap jewellery in a crystal dish that might have been an ashtray once and rosary beads hung over the edge of the mirror. The rosary was his father’s, last seen twisted about the dead man’s fingers — she must have prised them off it again — when he was laid out in that same bed whose reflection was behind his own. Emmet almost expected his father’s corpse to appear in the blank of the mirror, or to find him lying in the bed when he turned around.

His father was a Catholic. He was the real thing. Sinner and supplicant, one of the fretfully unredeemed.

Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,

Hail our life our sweetness and our hope.

To thee do we send forth our sighs

To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve

Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

The beads were made of some translucent material gone grey inside, like poor man’s pearls. Emmet reached to touch the thing and then couldn’t, it made him feel slightly sick.

He looked, instead, at the postcards Rosaleen had stuck into the frame, between the wood and the glass: a minotaur by Picasso, the Annunciation by some Renaissance Italian, a version of the Nativity by Gauguin. All of them, he presumed, from Dan.

That mirror had seen enough action over the years.

It didn’t bear thinking about, the things that happened in that bed. But also from Rosaleen, sitting in the little chair applying lipstick, tweezing, dabbing, checking and improving. She had such a demanding relationship with her own reflection. Rosaleen challenged her looks, and they rose to meet her.

He wondered where she had hidden herself, the passionate woman he had avoided and adored when he was a child. The woman who quoted poetry at them and the Bible. I would you were cold, or hot. But because you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth. The woman who knelt down on the floor in front of him, and took him by the shoulders on the morning of his First Holy Communion, and said, ‘Remember who you are. When you take the host, say it in your heart: Hello Jesus, my name is Emmet Madigan.’

This is what pushed him, from one country to the next. This energy. A woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected.

Emmet caught sight of himself in the empty glass, and he took his disappointing face out of there. He had to get away from his mother, somehow. He had to step to one side, let the rush of her wanting pass him by.

He would marry Saar, that was one way to do it. He could follow her to Aceh in a few months’ time, and after that he would follow her wherever she wanted to go. But when he tried to locate Saar in his mind, he found only Alice. Foolish Alice, with her helpless goodness, her idiotic lack of guile. He wondered who she was sleeping with now, if she would be at the big FAO bash in Rome, what would happen if he fell at her feet and wept, would that make any difference? He had an image of himself as Gabriel, offering a lily to a white-skinned Madonna who had Alice’s downward glance and her slight, sad smile.

Outside, a jackdaw was bashing a snail on the roof, its feet scrabbling against the metal guttering. And Sell sell sell, he thought. Give the money to the poor. Burn the fucking place down.

Because Emmet was still trapped, always would be trapped, in some endlessly unavailable, restless ideal.

O clement, O loving,

O sweet Virgin Mary.

And he laughed a little, at the ironies of all that.

Downstairs, Constance did not know where to put herself. She was shaking after the confrontation in the dining room. She was so worried about Rosaleen, she was desperately worried about her mother, also cross with her, and cross with herself for buying the stupid scarf. And she was in a rage with Dessie, for taking the woman at her word. Rosaleen would never sell the house. It was just the kind of thing she liked to say. Because Rosaleen never did anything. This maddening woman, she spent her entire life requiring things of other people and blaming other people, she lived in a state of hope or regret, and she would not, could not, deal with the thing that was in front of her, whatever it was. Oh I forgot to go to the bank, Constance, I forgot to go to the post office. She could not deal with stuff. Money. Details. Here. Now.

Rory came up behind her at the sink and he put his arms round her, the way Dessie sometimes did, though Rory was taller than Dessie and he also lacked — it went without saying — Dessie’s sexual intent. He bent to lay his cheek against her shoulder and he swayed from side to side, humming a little.

‘Happy Christmas,’ he said.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she said.

He lingered there another moment.

‘Can I have some money?’ he said.

‘What do you want it for?’

‘I just need, like, thirty.’

‘Ask your father.’

He did not leave. He said, ‘I love you anyway,’ and he planted a kiss on the nape of her neck.

‘I’m sure you do,’ she said. ‘Now go ask your father.’

He let go, but turned to prop his handsomeness against the counter and look at her for a minute.

‘Next time, you could throw in a couple of beers.’

‘I might,’ said Constance.

‘If you remember.’

‘Hah.’

‘God, Mum, she’s really stiffed.’

‘Don’t talk about your auntie like that.’

‘I mean really, though.’

‘Shift.’

It was a secret thing for her — it wasn’t a big deal — but just the fact of her son made Constance entirely happy. He could do what he liked, she would not mind. He was a good guy, and he loved his mother, and not even his laundry offended her. Or not much.

‘Out of my way now. Move your big spágs.’

Hanna came into the kitchen, and looked at the pair of them as though she knew they had been talking about her. She stubbed out the cigarette on the top of the range, and poured herself a glass of white wine. She lifted the glass to her mouth, and felt the baby at her lips, warm and baby-smelling, an unexpected yearning, as she drank, for his frank gaze, the damp interior of his hand.

The house was disappearing around her.

Hanna pushed away from the range and wandered away, before there was a fight with Constance, who was, clearly, in a snit. She went back into the hall and wondered where she could set it down, this hurt that sloshed around inside her. She glanced into the dining room and saw her mother gone from the Christmas table. She turned in to the good front room, with the cracked hearth, and walked all the way to the front window, where she set her hands on either side of the frame, facing north. The glass was as old as the house. It was her favourite thing, a fragile survivor, slubbed and thickened to gather and distort the light. Hanna tipped her forehead briefly against it as she looked out into the gloaming.

The house was disappearing around her, wall by wall.

It came to her at dinner, and she could not let it go. The knowledge that if she walked out of it now and kept walking, she could reach the famous Cliffs of Moher and there she could, unfamously, die. She looked about her, at the faces moving, the food, the candles, the glassware, the yellow of the white wine and the brown of the red. She thought about the cold outside, wondered how far the fall, how long the drop. She had her baby in her arms and they twisted slowly in the black air, drifting towards the sea, and then hitting the sea. The water was hard and the baby bounced up out of her arms and they were swamped and sank, both of them, and even that sinking was just a slower fall, as they turned and found each other, and lost each other again. It was a soft and endless death — at least in her mind. The baby astonished by it, the way it was astonished by escalators, lifts, the wonder of gravity, the baby looking to Hanna and Hanna looking to the baby saying, ‘I have you. Yes!’

She heard Dan come in behind her, recognised him by the squeak of his shoe. This is how they knew each other, the Madigans, they knew the timbre of a voice, the rhythm of fingers tapping on a tabletop, and they didn’t know each other at all. Not really. But they liked each other well enough. Apparently.

‘I am getting married,’ he said.

‘Oh God Dan are you?’

Hanna turned.

‘Why?’

Dan could not find an answer to that. Not immediately.

‘Oh come on,’ he said.

‘Sorry. Sorry, I mean, who is the guy?’

‘Well that’s the why,’ Dan said. He tried to say Ludo’s name but couldn’t, the room wasn’t ready for it yet.

‘It’s someone in Toronto,’ he said.

‘That’s brilliant,’ she said.

‘Clearly.’

‘No I am. I am really pleased for you. Of course I am. I just thought that you got away from all that, you know? That great institution called marriage.’

‘I did get away from it,’ he said. ‘And now, I can do what I like.’

‘Absolutely.’

They heard Rosaleen’s little car coughing into life outside and the wheels chewing the gravel. The driveway was full of cars — the Lexus, Dessie’s BMW, the battered tin can that Emmet affected, these days. Hanna glanced out the window to see her mother’s Citroën up on the grass, headlights washing the trunk of the monkey puzzle tree, before she bounced across a flowerbed and sliced, at an angle, through the piers of the gate.

‘Nice one,’ she said.

Rosaleen was indicating right, away from the town and towards the sea. The inside light was on and everything was very yellow in there. It looked, Dan thought, like some kind of artwork, he could not think by whom — the dirty, electric look of the lit box jouncing out of the dim garden, Rosaleen, inside, in a purple woollen hat and a teal coloured coat.

Did the coat have a hood? Yes it did have a hood, it was one of those waterproof things for hikers that everyone wore these days. Did the hood have a fur trim? No it did not.

He remembered every detail. She left the inside light on. She was wearing a purple hat and a North Face three-quarter-length jacket in a blue-green. The light still lingered in the western sky. They all heard her leave and none of them thought anything of it. Except that it was Christmas Day and there was no place in particular for her to go. For the first long while after the sound of her engine faded, they did nothing.

‘Where’s she off to?’ said Emmet. ‘With no bell on her bike.’

He was passing the front room and the others followed him down to the kitchen, where the kids had turned on the TV. They were happy to leave the front of the house to its festive, empty business. They dipped into the wine and stood about. Constance would be moving on soon, and they did not want her to go.

‘Is there some nun?’ Dan said. There used to be a nun — a sip of sherry and MiWadi for the kids, who all came back from the convent parlour laden with miraculous medals and little prayer cards with their names on the back.

‘Sister Jerome? She’s long dead,’ said Constance, who was packing up, or trying to, because she had to drive her gang across town for the Christmas evening gathering of the McGraths.

‘Tell them,’ said Hanna.

‘No,’ said Dan.

She picked up the remote and turned the TV down.

‘Dan has some news,’ she said.

‘Tell them what?’ said Dessie.

Dan looked at his brother-in-law’s broad face, pink with Christmas wine and well-being. He lifted his hands up suddenly, to clack non-existent castanets.

‘I’m engaged!’

There was a small silence. Dessie’s pink intensified.

‘Congratulations, man,’ said Rory. ‘Legal! Hey.’

He loped over to his uncle and hugged him, right there and then. A big wraparound hug, complete with back pat. So no one had to ask the obvious question — the one to which they all knew the answer. Of course it was a man. Of course.

‘Oh I am delighted,’ said Constance.

‘Congratulations,’ Emmet said.

Hanna raised her glass. ‘Safe at last.’

And Rory said, ‘So who’s the lucky guy?’

So that took another half-hour of their day, because Dessie went to the boot of the BMW and liberated a bottle of champagne intended for his mother’s house, and they popped it and had an awkward glass. Then Constance was barking and squawking as she tried to get her brood out the door, and with Constance gone, there was no one to worry about Rosaleen.

The house was silent. They left the TV on and watched people singing and dancing for a while.

A phone call came in from their uncle in Florida. Emmet picked up and, after a few pleasantries, Bart said, ‘Will you put your mother on?’

‘She went out for her walk,’ said Emmet.

‘What time is it there anyway?’

Emmet looked at his mobile.

‘It’s nearly five,’ he said.

‘Listen I’ll catch her in a bit,’ said Bart. ‘I’ll ring at seven.’

Emmet put down the phone.

‘Should we ring Constance?’ he said.

And Dan said, ‘What for?’

The Green Road

ROSALEEN WAS OUT on the green road, and she was cold. She was going for her constitutional. As she did after lunch, most days. She was getting out for a bit of air. She had left it a little late. Lunch was late. Even so, she had not thought it would be dark, not yet, the way the Atlantic sky held the light for so long after the sun was down, something to do with the height of the heavens out here on the green road. The west was still open and clear but the ground under her feet was tricky enough. All the colour was going from things and nothing was easy to see. You could not tell grey from grey.

The little Citroën was parked where the tarmac stopped, back at Ballynahown, and Rosaleen was out on the dark road under a deep sky. There was no moon. There was the sound of running water, quite loud. One of her feet was wet — the front part — and the path was uneven. Rosaleen found the strip of grass in the middle of the road and stuck to that, and, Lift your eyes. There it was. She stopped to look. The stone wall that was the remains of a fort keeping watch on the Aran Islands and the far distant mountains of Connemara. The mountains were purple and navy blue, the three islands black against a silver sea. The sun was gone below the horizon, but the light from it still bounced up off the sky. So the sea was dark in the distance and light close to. It was all a question of the angle. Because the world was round but the light was straight.

There were no more people.

The houses were far behind her. The last two on the left hand side were dark and deserted, their blank windows looking out over the valley. And then a farmhouse on the right, with an arthritic collie who herded her along her way, in sprints and crouches, its belly scraping the ground. Old people in there. Who knows what kind of Christmas in that house.

The sea was on her left, while the slope, she knew, rose on the right, the boulders, grey and humpy in the darkness; the few sheep standing behind them for shelter, their heads drooped and shoulders slumped, foursquare on patient feet.

There was no wind but the air was cold. Her eyes smarted with it, and Where did it begin? That was the question that went through her, though it was more a cadence than a question, it was another scrap in a life full of scraps, some of them beautiful.

O my Dark Rosaleen!

Do not sigh, do not weep!

She was sighing now, she was weeping now, she was feeding the wind with the little shards of her tears, that the wind blew back at her, hurting her own face. Hard to know if they were tears of sorrow or of cold. She was so frustrated. Rosaleen, Rosaleen someone was calling her name, but when she listened it was no one, not even the wind.

Rosaleen was tired of waiting. She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer. Rosaleen was in a hurry, now. She thought she might find a cliff edge and throw herself down it from purest impatience. She might kill herself just to get something done.

But she was not going to kill herself. She had never been interested in that sort of palaver. Where did it begin? And where was the end of it. How long would she have to continue, being like this. Being herself.

O my Dark Rosaleen.

And why was there no one to love her?

She was a small thing under a big sky, and being tiny was not the same as being dead. It was quite the opposite. Rosaleen spread her arms wide and flung her face up.

‘Hah!’ she said.

In the middle of nowhere, on Christmas Day, when no one was out, not one person was walking the roads.

‘Hah!’

Old women were not given to shouting. Rosaleen did not know if she still could, or if your voice went slack like the rest of you, when you got old.

‘Oh, don’t mind me!’ she said. She roared it. She stuck her fists down straight by her sides. ‘Don’t mind me!’

There was no problem with her voice, that is what she discovered. Old women do not shout because they are not allowed to shout. Because if they shout and roar then there will be no dinner.

And let that be an end to it now.

‘Don’t you worry about me!’

The mountain took her on. Knockauns was to the right of her and it sent her voice back her way, and there was mist, she saw, coming down for her too. So she quickened her pace and stumbled on a rock, but she did not fall.

‘Hah,’ she said.

Rosaleen was on her own. And that was the way she wanted to be. That was just great. She got in her little car and she drove away from the lot of them. The big faces on them. She left them to it. Such selfish children she had reared. She left them to get on with it, whatever it was — their lives — and she came out to walk off her dinner and take the sharpness of the air inside herself. To get the sea air.

Rosaleen opened her lungs and filled herself up.

It hurt her chest. It hurt the inside of her. The air was cold and she was cold so Rosaleen thought hot thoughts — driving up over her own lawn. Yes! And out the gate. She was so cross, the car drove itself. They went for miles down familiar roads until they found her own stands of dark pine. They bumped past the house where Pat Madigan was born, the little door painted in flaking layers of green over red over blue. They drove right past all this, Rosaleen and her little car, through another stand of trees that were her trees, horrible and dark. On and on they went, until they came to the edge of things. Then the car stopped and Rosaleen got out.

The sea was huge for her. The light gentle and great. The fields indifferent, as she walked up the last of the hill. But she got a slightly sarcastic feel off the ditches, there was no other word for it — sprinkles of derision — like the countryside was laughing at her.

Presences.

At the gate beyond the last house, where the tarmac road turned into a green road and the sheepdog turned for home, she looked back on the valley of Oughtdarra. Solemn and dark now, with the Flaggy Shore at the sea edge of it, graves and dolmens there, and ancient roads and gateways to nothing, from nothing. A couple of houses were lit up for Christmas, the blink of the lights a glimmering from this distance. There was a little ruined church down in that place, with a curse in the name of the man who built it too terrible to speak aloud. This she knew from Pat Madigan who took her walking along these uplands with her little dog in the late summer of 1956. He talked more in those days and weeks than he ever did after, about curses and the like, piseogs, the fairies on the mound of Croghateehaun and the people lost in the scrubby, treacherous ground below it. He talked about the foxes behind Knockauns mountain, the seventeen ancient forts between here and Slieve Elva, and the goats that lived in the hazel scrub. He told her the depth and beauty of the cave called Polnagree, the two Englishmen who went down it with ropes and lamps. He pointed to the place where the three townlands met, Oughtdarra, Ballynahown and Crumlin, a gap in the cliff that belonged to none of them called Leaba na hAon Bhó, The Bed of the One Cow. There was a story, he said, about that cow and the end of the world.

Then he laughed, and told her about a heifer he had once, who came into heat with her head stuck in a big bucket — a tub almost, made out of blue metal — the handle was up over her poll, whatever way she managed it, and the bull was working her, the pair of them walking the field with the bucket swinging and banging until she came into a standing heat and he mounted her. ‘And the sound out of her then’, he said. ‘I am surprised she didn’t deafen herself, in the bucket.’

There was no stopping him.

He pointed to a house where a man killed himself by hanging and a rock overlooking the sea where the ghost of a hungry man was said to sit, turning to stare at passers-by. He talked of a place — miles away — where a woman kept her daughter chained in the hen-house, and a woman whose house was full of money sent by her sons in America. He said there were babies born in one house that never saw the light of day. He said that the women of one family in particular took their babies back into themselves like cats did their kittens, and it was important always to marry out, in a place like this, if you got the chance. And she was his chance. He did not say that he loved her. He said that if she would have him, a fine woman like her, unencumbered and free, with her own money and no one to stop her, if she would make her choice and choose him, that he would worship her with his body, and with his entire soul, until the day he died.

Foolish but true.

That is what he said.

And that is the way he saw the land, with no difference between the different kinds of yesterday. No difference between a man and his ghost, between a real heifer and a cow that was waiting for the end of the world. It was all just a way of talking. It was the rise and fall in the telling, a rounding out before the finish. A flourish. A shiver. And it was for her. He had saved every detail up for her alone, as though every rock and tree awaited her coming for its explication.

And when she laughed at him, he only agreed with her.

‘If I am a fool,’ he said. ‘Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.’

There was no turning him down. And when he entered her — that first time and every time subsequent — it was a sacred kind of pleasure he took. She was sure of it.

My own Rosaleen!

Pat Madigan worshipped her. And he did not tell a lie. He wanted her for the money she had, for the fine house and the children he could get out of her. He laughed at her talk and then he ignored her talk. But there were times, even in his last days, even at the very end, when he looked at her with a pride so keen it was sinful.

My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,

Somewhere along here, that is where the first kiss happened between them, her little dog sitting down for them to finish, looking out to sea. She had married beneath her. Even the dog seemed to indicate it, by the indifferent set of her head.

My life of life, my saint of saints,

my Dark Rosaleen!

And, ‘Hah!’ she said, because she’d had the pleasure of Pat Madigan for forty years, and ‘Hah’ because he was dead and she was still alive, up here on the green road. Years since she had been kissed on the mouth. Years.

Rosaleen missed her little dog, a little grey pompom of a terrier cross, with a red tartan bow between her ears. Milly. She could feel her almost running along beside her, could feel her brush against her shins. Rosaleen lifted her foot not to tread on her and saw the blackness of the road underneath. If it was the road — it might as well be a river. Whatever it was, she was sitting in it. And there was no dog, of course there wasn’t. She was plonked like a fool on her wet backside, and it was time to get up and sort herself out. It was time to get on with it. Her walk on this road which was the road of her youth.

There was no rain, but everything was wet. Sopping. A deep liquid sound in the ditch on her left, there was a cave somewhere near and Rosaleen was afraid of caves. She was afraid of heights, too. She did not know what she was doing up here — when she thought about it she was afraid of the dark and it was getting dark now, though the afterglow lingered over the western Atlantic; a sky too big for the sun to leave.

It was old age, of course — the fear. Passing cars, children on bicycles, plugs and sockets, escalators: she was afraid of things that beeped, or hummed, she was afraid of looking like a fool, of wearing the wrong stockings, wearing the wrong clothes. She put something on because she liked it and then a while later she realised it was all terrible. Rosaleen was terrified of losing her mind, of saying things or snapping in public — if she hit at a stranger, if she said something rude or obscene, that would be unbearable. She took the precaution of saying very little, any more. Even here on the mountain she kept her own counsel. But she was afraid the stone wall would fall on her and her leg would get trapped, she was afraid of getting raped, and what were the chances of that? On Christmas Day of all days. Who would even rob you up here on the green road?

‘Hah!’

This is why Rosaleen had come up here, to this wild place. She had come to cleanse herself of forgetfulness and of fury. To shout it loud and leave it behind. To fling it away from herself.

‘You see!’ She wanted to roar it out, but her throat didn’t like her mouth opening and the rasp of the cold.

Rosaleen could not see the top of Knockauns or the walls on either side of her. It was truly dark now. There was no moon. The sea was glittering under a black sky and Rosaleen could not tell black from black, except for the sense of motion from the distant water and even that was going dark and still.

She might as well be dead. She might as well be underground.

Except for the movement of her legs, one in front of the other, and the sense under her cold feet, of the rocks and earth and tussocks of grass on the green road.

It was here she walked with her lovely dog, Milly, and with Pat Madigan when they were courting. She cycled out to him, with her little dog in the front basket, and they left the bike against a ditch. It was here they kissed, and more.

Pat Madigan grew silent with the years. After that first rush of talk he said less and less. Towards the end of his life, he said little or nothing.

And that was her fault too.

What did it mean, when the man you loved was gone? A part of his body inside your own body and his arms wrapped about you. What happened when all of that was in the earth, deep down in the cemetery clay?

Nothing happened. That is what happened.

Rosaleen held her hand up to verify it in the black air. She pulled off her glove to see the living whiteness of it, but there was something around her legs — the dog, perhaps — and she was crawling, she was on her knees, with one gloved hand and one hand naked. The cold was in her hand now.

Each breath hurt. She pulled the air into the tiny parts of her lungs. Her flesh was pierced in microscopic places by the air of the vast world as it pushed its way into her blood.

Rosaleen’s head was hanging low like an old horse, she was on all fours and the stones hurt her knees. She wanted to go back and find that glove, but she couldn’t turn back, she had no confidence in the road, she thought it might be disappearing behind her. Because there were gaps between things, and this frightened her. This is where Rosaleen was now. She had fallen into the gap.

BART RANG FROM Florida at seven o’clock.

They sat another half an hour. Dan flicked channels. Emmet read an old newspaper. But they must have been thinking about her, because they each said, when the time came to go out and look for her, that none of them were sober enough to drive.

At half past seven, Emmet walked into town to check with the old ladies above the Medical Hall while Dan went through the phone numbers she had at the front of the phone book, but most of the people listed there were either in the kitchen, or dead. No one wanted to tell Constance, but she had to be told, so when Emmet came back they made the call and, seven minutes later, they heard her car sweep through the gate.

Constance was frantic. And it was all their fault. She was crying and blaming and fretting, she did not know where to sit herself down. She took out her mobile and scrolled through the numbers, despairing at each one. She rang a neighbour, asked them to ring another neighbour. She left the house, still talking, to drive around and look for her mother. Half an hour later she was back with her husband in tow, and he said, ‘Have you contacted the Guards?’

The Madigans looked at him.

Dessie had been drinking. Of course he had — it was Christmas Day.

‘Let’s not panic,’ said Emmet.

The men sat in silence, in the stillness of Rosaleen’s stopped kitchen clock and the sound of Constance making instant coffee through her tears.

It was the nine o’clock news stirred them, the thought that Rosaleen might be a news item herself, by the morning. Or some memory of their fathers, perhaps, saying, ‘Shush, now,’ their mothers saying, ‘Turn on the news for your father,’ the ritual observance of an outside world that had entered the kitchen and filled it, silently, on this night. It was already here.

‘We have to call the Guards,’ said Constance.

Dessie waved his mobile.

‘I’ll try Maguire,’ he said and made a call. He listened a moment and said, ‘Christmas.’

‘Oh for goodness sake,’ said Dan, who picked up the house phone and just dialled 999.

Hanna sat with her hands over her face, for all that followed, pressing down on her eyelids, feeling the flick of her pupils beneath her fingertips as her eyes moved from side to side. She thought about the cliffs. She saw, in her mind’s eye, her mother’s face washed over and again by dark water, her limp body bending with the curve of the waves; the cold, unfeasible weight of her, pulled on to dry land.

‘This guy’s in Ennis. He says it’s the third missing person this evening, Christmas is a busy time. He says to ring everyone, check the outhouses. He says we need a bunch of people to drive around and look for the car. He told me to check the graveyard. He asked about her mental state.’

‘The graveyard?’ said Constance.

‘I said it was fine?’

All of this came out of Dan with a rising inflection at the end of each sentence, as though he was in an American movie, with a camera in front of him, and a future audience of millions. His siblings watched him. They waited for the moment the drama of his life became his actual life — for that shock.

‘She never goes to the graveyard,’ said Constance. ‘She doesn’t do the grave.’

Dessie said he could get twenty men with cars in half an hour through the local hurling team, and Constance said on a day like today it’s not hurlers you need but alcoholics, by which she meant the dry variety, because they were the best bet, also women like herself, maybe, the ones who were too busy doing the dinner to bother with wine. There was a world of blame in this sentence, if anyone chose to hear it, but what she said was also true. Dessie was already walking out in the hall and talking quietly into his phone.

‘I have that sorted for you now,’ he said, and twenty minutes later half the membership of the local AA meeting (or so they were to assume) was convened in the dining room, Ferdy McGrath chief among them. Six men and one woman, they introduced themselves to Emmet and to Dan, and then generally, as though innocent of each other’s sorrows and abjections. A mixed bunch, Hanna thought, eyeing them with careful contempt. None of them carried a sign.

Constance went out to the pantry with some empty bottles, trying to make the place look decent, and she knew this was a bit mad but it was also allowed. Constance was allowed. She felt almost light-hearted.

The passageway beyond the kitchen was very cold. There was a cardboard box against the wall and Constance put the bottles into it. The place smelt the way it always had: musty, with some creosote in there, and the sweetness of old apples. As she straightened up, she remembered her mother standing at the back door, looking out at the summer rain. It must have been when Constance was a child.

She could see it still: her mother’s silhouette in the doorway; beyond her, the red of poppies, the green of the garden, the air golden with shining rain. Rosaleen standing, looking out at it all, waiting to leave.

It was nearly ten o’clock on the evening of Christmas Day; a still enough night, with no rain. Emmet had a map spread out on the table and he marked out sections and roads with bold arrows and circles. He took mobile numbers, checked for torches; he was on the brink of doling out malaria pills.

Three cars to the cliffs, one to the car park at Lahinch, another along the coast roads between Doolin and Liscannor, a phone call to a guy in Doolin to check the harbour car park, another car along the coast from Doolin to Fanore, the last to the high road from Ballinalackin to Ballynahown.

The house was filling up with people from the town. Dan saw men he had not seen since school. They eyed him carefully and then they touched him, a deliberate hand on his arm or shoulder, saying, ‘All right, Dan? Anything I can do?’ Down in the kitchen, four women were wiping the kitchen table, setting out bowls and plates of food covered in cling film. Dessie’s sister Imelda brought, among other things, two bags of coffee, and Constance had a weakness, she had to be helped to a chair.

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she said as her legs gave way from under her, and she sat with her feet planted and a bag of Colombian grounds in her lap.

‘Oh,’ she said again, taking the blame for it all, the forgotten coffee, the hissy fit, her mother now wandering the night. ‘Oh.’

‘Oh, yeah what,’ said Hanna, who was leaning against the range with her arms crossed, and there was nothing to be done with her except put her in one of the cars, she was no use to anyone at home.

‘Go,’ said Dan, so she stumbled out with Ferdy McGrath, a twist in his eye that said he would be able for her.

‘God, Ferdy, remember you used to coach me at camogie?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘You had a great burst of speed.’

‘I had,’ she said. ‘That’s true. I did.’

And he put her in the passenger seat of his drinker’s jalopy and closed the door.

The cars put on their indicators and left, one after the other, heading west. Dan followed the sound of them out to the gate, and then went along the deserted road, looking for a phone signal. As soon as he got one, he rang home to Toronto, and when Ludo picked up he said, ‘My mother’s gone. She drove off. She could be anywhere.’

It was pitch black. Dan had walked away from the house and when the light went out on his phone, the night blinked and swallowed him. The darkness shifted, not to a place five feet away, but right up to his face. It stole his breath. He turned one way and then the other, and was not sure of his direction. Twenty yards away from the house and he did not know where he was, or how to return. He found the grass verge and shied away from the ditch beyond it, felt his way back by the sense of vegetation against his shoe and by the promise of a distant street light around a curve in the road. It took an unconscionably long time. He felt, at every step, as though he was walking into something, and he flinched away, taunted by the black air.

ROSALEEN STOPPED WHERE she was. Head low, swaying from side to side. She could not feel where the ground began and the flesh stopped, it was all one pain.

She had lost her glove. And that was a nuisance.

Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A nuisance.

Rosaleen was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was increasingly difficult. She made her children cry.

They’d be sorry, to find her gone. They would be very sorry. These people, who spent their entire time leaving her. Not ringing, not writing. They told her nothing, spent their lives getting out of there. Get out and keep going! that was the cry. Don’t turn back! If you turn back you will see your mother turned into a pillar of salt.

Well two could play at that game.

Rosaleen had two feet, she had a car. Rosaleen could also walk out that door and not come back. And how did that feel? How did it feel when your mother left you?

Hah!

The same, the same. It felt the same.

Rosaleen put the old head down, one knee in front of the other. She was on all fours and the stones were very sore under her. There was a shooting pain also in the flesh of her palm, a nerve thing. She took it up and shook it, but she could feel nothing of the hand itself, just the shooting pain, and a burning in her fingertips. She wanted to go back and find her glove, but she could not go back into all that — the pursuing darkness and the night.

She took the glove off her right hand and squeezed the cold hand into it, with the thumb twisted around the wrong way. There was a little ruin of a house up here, and she would be safe inside it. A little famine cottage she had passed many times, but whether it was near or far she could not tell. Everything was taking such a long time. Rosaleen did not think she would make it. She would die on the side of Knockauns mountain, they would find her cold and still in the morning light, and then they would be sorry.

And she was sorry too.

Her lovely children.

Why she could not be nice to them, she did not know. She loved them so much. Sometimes she looked at them and she was so flooded with love, she just had to go and spoil it. It made her angry in the after-wash. They were so beautiful. They used to be so beautiful. They were so trusting and good. It made her feel not good. Unappreciated. It made her feel irrelevant. That was it.

What about me? she said.

But Rosaleen did not exist. Oh no. Rosaleen did not matter.

Hah!

Rosaleen wanted to say it out loud but she couldn’t. She was stuck in the sound of her own breathing, dragging and rough, an immense clattering in her teeth when she pulled the air into her.

Fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh

The cold was inside her. It was in her bones, making its way into her flesh, it was wrapped around her innards, seeping into her stomach, her body tried to shake it out again. A deep trembling took hold and her arms and legs grew comical and stiff, she had to swing them high and down. After an endless long time of this, she realised the person beside her was Pat Madigan, it was his was the voice urging her on. And a great sense of peace spread through her then, followed by a jag of irritation.

Where have you been, all this time?

A MAN CALLED John Fairleigh walked in to the dining room in waterproofs and hiking boots. Young, black haired, weatherbeaten; he introduced himself and went straight to the map on the table, pushed away the silver and white baubles — but carefully — and said there were more on the way, the team would be here soon.

‘Any word?’ he said. And Dan looked at him.

‘No.’

‘Is this where she liked to go?’

Emmet looked at the map.

‘Somewhere on the coast. Somewhere. Walking in circles.’

John Fairleigh said he did not think so. Their mother was not walking in circles.

‘A woman of that age, she will be moving in a linear way. She will be near the car, definitely within a kilometre of the car, probably within a hundred metres. So the first job is to find the car. And when we find the car, it’s a hundred metres, a kilometre max.’

‘Right.’

‘Not that easy, not necessarily,’ he said. ‘It’s dark. Your mother may be cold. She’s looking for shelter. A building, a barn. That’s the only thing she is thinking about now, is where to hide herself away from the cold, which means she could end up hiding from us too — behind a wall, under a bush, an old fertiliser bag. She could make herself hard to find.’

Constance was weeping.

‘But we will find her,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘No, no,’ she said, waving him on.

‘How was she in herself?’

‘Sorry?’ said Emmet.

Constance flicked a glance at her brother.

‘Hard to tell,’ he said.

‘She went for her walk. Our mother is absolutely fine,’ Constance said. ‘She went out for her walk.’

‘She’s just a wonderful person,’ Dan intervened, in a pathetic, upbeat kind of way.

‘Wonderful,’ said Emmet.

‘It’s a word,’ said Dan.

‘Yeah well,’ said Emmet. ‘Wonderful in your prime is a bit mad when you’re older, is bipolar in your fifties, maybe, and by the time you are — what age is she? — seventy-six, well by then it’s more your brain, isn’t it? It’s plaques or what have you. It’s hard to tell.’

‘She was never bipolar,’ said Constance, utterly shocked.

‘No?’ he said.

‘Not even close.’

‘Well,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘It’s hard. Old age is hard, emotionally. It just is.’

‘I don’t know how you can say she was bipolar,’ said Constance.

‘I suppose what I am trying to ask is,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘Was she in any way despondent?’

Constance gave a small cry.

‘Please don’t take my brother’s word about this,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’

But John Fairleigh ignored them. Dan had the brief idea he was some kind of impostor.

‘Don’t worry. We had an elderly woman out for two nights running, September two years ago. And she wasn’t fantastic, in all fairness, but she was absolutely fine.’

The siblings were quiet then.

‘It’s a good clear night,’ he said, and looked at the map again. ‘Talk about Christmas.’

ROSALEEN WAS BY the little house, that was tucked into the side of the mountain. A famine cottage of tumbling-down stone, with one door one window, no roof. She could see it by starlight. She was surprised how much she could see. She could go into the little famine house and look up at the stars, there were so many of them, but first she had to cross the hungry grass in front of the doorway. There wasn’t much, just a few blades of it, and once she was across the hungry grass she would be safe from the weather. Of course, after she crossed the hungry grass then she would be hungry for ever. That was the curse of it.

Sometimes the grass was on a grave where no priest came to say prayers, because the priest was too busy, or the priest was fled. Sometimes the grass was on the threshold of a house where all the people died, with no one left to bury them, and the house fell into ruin after.

But it did not matter if she crossed the hungry grass, because she, too, was going to die. This she knew because her dead husband Pat Madigan was beside her on the road. He went so quiet when he was alive. He stopped talking. He stopped liking her. But he always loved her. And when he was young he walked that road like it belonged to him. He was king of everything green about him, king of the hedgerows, king of the sky. He picked up a stone and he flung it into the broad heavens. He flung it into the sea, where it grew into an island. Grew and grew.

Fuh fuh fuh fuh

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

Fuh fuh fuh fuh

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

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

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

The ground was fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m awake, she said. I am alive.

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

It was the house at Boolavaun.

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

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

He looked over to her.

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

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

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

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

‘We should be looking for the car.’

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

She cried out. ‘Ferdy!’

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

‘Ferdy!’

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

Passions. Impossibilities.

The push of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mama, Mama.

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

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

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

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

‘Rosaleen!’

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

‘Mam! Mam!’

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

‘Mammy?’ she said.

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

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

‘Mama!’

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

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

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

‘Lifeboat?’ said Constance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanna was already there.

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

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

‘Oh I am sorry.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh I am sorry.’

‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

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

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

‘Oh no!’ she said.

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

‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

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

‘Good woman,’ he said. ‘Good woman.’

It was the kind of phrase their mother hated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, ‘Oh. The moon.’

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

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

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

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

Waking Up

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

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

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

‘So pretty,’ she said.

The nurse took no offence.

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

‘That’s good.’

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘You were up a mountain,’ he said.

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

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember?’

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

She was looking at him very intently.

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

‘I mean before the mountain.’

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

‘Oh darling,’ she said.

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

‘Oh darling. I am sorry.’

‘No need,’ he said.

‘I put you through it.’

‘You’re all right.’

‘I put you through the wringer.’

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

‘What’s she on?’ he said.

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

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

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

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

‘Ya ya ya yah,’ said Rosaleen, and the baby laughed.

She was delighted. And the baby was delightful. Hanna tried to hold all that, so she could remember it the next time the baby screamed, the picture of her mother, handing the baby back to her saying, ‘Oh, how I envy you now.’

As if life was always worth having, worth reproducing, and everything always turned out well in the end.

Emmet saw what he had not seen in many years: his mother being wonderful. She regaled them all with descriptions of the ambulance, the doctor’s cold hands, the cow on the other side of the wall when she fell asleep on the mountain.

‘It was like a plane taking off in your ear,’ she said.

When Dan came in, the pair of them laughed at everything and Emmet was not jealous. He watched Rosaleen for deterioration of some kind but her brain was fine — or what the world called her brain: short term, long term, the current Pope, the days of the week. It was just her mood that changed. It was just her life that had changed.

She looked on her children as though we were a wonder to her, and indeed we were a bit of a wonder to ourselves. We had been, for those hours on the dark mountainside, a force. A family.

There followed a time of great kindness and generosity, not just from neighbours and from strangers, but among the Madigans. There was no talk of bringing Rosaleen home to Ardeevin, ‘That cold house,’ said Constance. She had the room all made up, she said, and Rosaleen’s things brought over, so she could stay as long as she needed to, out in Aughavanna.

A Face in the Crowd

DAN FLEW BACK to Toronto and found that Ludo had posted an alert for Rosaleen on his social media page, saying, ‘If anyone has anybody in Ireland, especially on the west coast, then please spread the word about this missing woman.’

‘That was a bit previous,’ he said, scrolling through the responses and best wishes, including one from a psychic in Leitrim offering his dowsing skills. He paused at a line from a guy called Gregory Savalas and clicked through to his homepage, which showed mountains and lemon groves. Dan thought it must be in California, but his address was listed as Deya, Mallorca, and there were pictures of a dog, another guy, a small pool, and ‘Greg’ himself in a faded denim baseball cap and cutoff jeans, a blue neckerchief, boots, his face sticking a little strangely on to his bones. He also had a little paunch and a glitter in his eye, to tell you he was not clear — how could he be clear — but he was damn well alive, he was inhaling, exhaling, swimming, drinking Rioja and looking at the lemon grove, enjoying the lemon grove. He was inhabiting a life and he was living the hell out of it, because it was his life to enjoy.

Greg.

Dan checked the photograph again. There he was: that sardonic, slow-moving, slightly fey guy who had died, Dan was sure of it, in the mid nineties. Greg who was once dead, and was now alive.

The page was quite the lifestyle statement. There was very little you might call ‘real’ — a slight intensity to his expression perhaps, in a world of aged stonework, bowls of lemons, stunned blue skies. But there, under a photograph of an under-lit palm tree, with a comet streaking across the Milky Way were the lines: ‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/Enwrought with golden and silver light,’ which was Dan’s party piece, all those years ago when he played at being ‘Irish’ for them all.

Dan checked the friends list: some of them were linked to Ludo but there were none that he recognised from the old days, not even Arthur who seemed destined not to die. He searched and searched, remembering Billy, remembering Massimo and Alex, the loft on Broome Street. His heart was busy with the cohort of the dead: men he should have loved and had not loved. Men he had hated for being sexy, beautiful, out, dying, free. It was not his fault. He had forgiven himself, as he told Scott-in-his-head, or he had tried to forgive himself, years before. But now — look — Gregory Savalas.

The relief he felt was close to love. The fact that this human being, among so many human beings, should have survived.

Hi Greg,

You won’t remember me, but I remember you from way back in the day, when you had that tiny gallery on the Lower East Side with, like, one perfect thing on the wall. I was a friend of Billy Walker before he went — you know I still turn a corner and see him and have to give myself a shake, he was such a beautiful boy, a beautiful person really. Anyway, this is Irish Dan. I am still alive. I see that you are still alive. Enjoy the lemon groves. Enjoy. Enjoy. Just sending you a little wave.

The Eyes of the Buddha

EMMET WAS EXHAUSTED when he got back to Verschoyle Gardens. Again. He was not burnt out, he just needed to talk to someone. He needed to read. He meditated for an hour each morning and, when he was done, stretched his hands out, giving thanks for the people sleeping in the rooms on either side of him, Saar on one hand and Denholm on the other. This was the way relationships went for him now. The sex with Saar was important, of course it was, the sex with Saar was an intimate thing. But he also knew it was something other than sex that moved him along his life’s course. It was a kind of tension and it was here, in this configuration.

Emmet would never fall in love. He would ‘love’, he would, that is to say ‘tend’. He would cure and guide, but he did not have the helplessness in him that love required.

Denholm slapped his shoulder and said he should have children. Every man should have children.

‘You think?’ said Emmet.

‘No question,’ said Denholm. This was a guy who had been educated in a mud room to speak convent English, write in Victorian copperplate: Denholm could, at eight, recite the Kings and Queens of England and the life cycle of the tsetse fly. Back in Kenya, he would often hold hands with his male friends, and here in Ireland he did so too, once, walking home with Emmet after a few drinks in Saggart. He had forgotten where he was and who he was with, and Emmet went to sleep that night, smiling like a fool.

One evening in February, he got an email from Alice in Sri Lanka:

You know when they are making a new statue of the Buddha, they do the eyes last. They use a mirror to paint by, and afterwards the artist is blindfolded and led outside where he washes his face in milk. They call it Opening the Eyes of the Buddha — wood into flesh, or at least, presence. I go every morning to the Temple of the Tooth and then work until dusk, living by the light, have not woken in proper darkness for months. From here back to the UK in March and then, who knows. If you hear of anything coming up, let me know.

Emmet sat and meditated, but it did not help. He shifted on his sit bones, and did not know what to do with this holy hard-on he had for a woman he had failed to love some years before. He let all the psychic rubbish of sex clatter through his mind, to enter and leave at its own chosen speed — which was pretty fast, as it happened: flashes of breast and cock, the movement of pink tongue behind (a surprise this) Denholm’s (but that’s all right, that’s fine) white teeth. He let it all barge through him and when it was gone, there he was, back with Alice.

Dear Alice

Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking of you just recently, at the malaria forum we are setting up here, and actually that’s not a bad place to consider if we ever get to the stage of looking for applications. Hopefully in the next three months. Rainy Ireland, eh? But you’d be in the field a fair amount. Malawi, mostly. I’ll let you know, if you like. Don’t want to blather on. Hope you and Sven (??) are thriving. Lots of love, xEmmet.

He sent this and regretted it. Wrote another one, that was also, in its way, a bit of an untruth.

I think about you all the time.

He sent this too, and listened to his life opening.

Property

HUGH WAS BETWEEN jobs and he came back with Hanna in the New Year to help sort and pack and get Ardeevin on the market. He brought an old Polaroid camera and some last rolls of film and Hanna heard him about the place the first day they were there, silently looking, then the click-whirr-click as the photograph was extruded, another silence as he shook the thing dry and a little piece of her childhood rose to view. She looked through them later: the spiral at the bottom of the bannister, the squat taps in the upstairs bathroom, the vivid ghost, on the wallpaper, where a wardrobe had shielded its own shape from the sun.

‘Research,’ he said.

When the baby took a nap, they went upstairs and made love in her childhood bed, releasing all her scattered selves into the room: Hanna at twelve, at twenty, Hanna here, now.

The baby was walking, and into everything, Hanna followed him around that afternoon and it was all murderous: the broken greenhouse, the stream at the side of the garden, where he might drown. But it was simple too: the pleasure of the door knocker she hoisted him up to lift and drop, the textured granite stoop and the door that gave under his pushing hands to expose the vastness of the hall.

They ordered a skip, bought paint. In the evening, she washed and went over to Aughavanna with the baby, leaving Hugh in his painter’s overalls, blanking out the bamboo grove on the dining room wall.

Hanna thought that once the house was gone her thirst might go too, but the house was not gone yet. And neither was her mother, who made such a fuss of the baby — Hello, you. Yes. Hello! — from a slight distance, of course, because of the baby’s sticky hands but loving him, nonetheless, and getting all his smiles.

It was a long day. Back in Ardeevin, Hanna succumbed to a bottle or two of white from the garage shop, and there was such a bad fight, Hugh threw her out of the house. Physically. He pushed her into the garden and closed the door. Hanna bashed the knocker and yowled. She stumbled back and around to the kitchen window where she saw Hugh pouring the last of the wine down the sink. He went from room to room, turning out the lights and he left her there for a very long time, looking up at the blank house, weeping in the cold.

The next morning, after they had kissed, made up and all the rest of it, Hanna lay and looked at the ceiling and remembered looking at the same ceiling, as a child. She wondered what it was she had wanted, before she wanted a drink.

A life. She had wanted a life. She lay in this bed as a child and she thirsted after the great unknown.

The baby slept and woke and rolled off the mattress they had set for him on the floor. Then he was off again, pulling books on top of himself from off the shelves and laughing.

‘Ben, stop it, Ben, no!’ But she did not really mind. He could break the Belleek for all she cared, in a couple of weeks it would all be gone.

Over in Aughavanna she said to Constance that maybe Dublin was the problem, the baby was in much better form.

‘Boys!’ Constance said.

Her own screamed for the first year, there was no consoling them. Then once they got on their feet, that was it, they never cried again.

‘Run them and feed them,’ she said. ‘That’s all you have to do with boys.’

‘And what do you do with girls?’ said Hanna. ‘Drown them at birth?’

‘Yeah well,’ said Constance. ‘There’s a rain barrel round the back.’

They both glanced over to Rosaleen, but she had not heard, or pretended not to hear.

With all the running around supermarkets and cold mountainsides and overheated hospital corridors, Constance actually lost weight over the Christmas. When she looked at herself in the mirror, the ghost of a former self looked back at her and Constance thought it was trying to tell her something, even as she turned to the side and smoothed her stomach with a smile. Something terrible would happen, she was sure of it, because her mother had courted chaos and found it up on the green road. She had made some deal with death, and Constance did not yet know when it would fall due.

It was a good thing Hugh painted the place because half of County Clare trooped through the house on the first Saturday, it was busier than a wake. The house sold in three weeks, closed in eight. By the first of March the Madigans had shut the door for the last time. Whoever bought it did not move in — a developer, by all accounts — so the place stayed empty while Rosaleen’s bank account filled up with money. Pucks of it. No one took her Christmas promise all that seriously: she had always been very private in these matters and never exactly open-handed, so it was a great surprise to each of her children to find themselves so much the richer. They had money, a significant amount of money, and that felt fine.

Rosaleen did not bother going over to Ardeevin. ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said and Constance did not pressure her. It was an emotional time. They looked at smaller houses in the newspaper and Rosaleen said, ‘Lovely,’ but it was a bit of a reach after all she had been through. When they went to view, she drifted from living room to kitchen to bathroom.

‘Oh Mammy, look at the insulation on that hot water tank.’

The new houses in their neat estates seemed only to confuse her, and indeed it was difficult to imagine her there. Constance set her heart on a little gate lodge, a sweet house with high ceilings and big Georgian windows, but the garden was far too small and it was slap bang up against the main road.

‘What about this one, Mammy? You just need to put a kitchen in.’

‘A kitchen?’

Besides, the market was turning. According to Dessie, the market was in a massive state of denial. Better to wait than to buy.

But the price came plummeting down on a place in town; an old stone house covered in Virginia creeper, tucked in behind the church, refurbished inside, everything to hand.

‘Is that limestone or granite?’ said Rosaleen. ‘It’s a very dark grey.’

Then she saw something rustling through the foliage. A rat, she said later. Or she thought it was a rat. She fumbled her car keys and dropped them in a bed of hydrangeas, she pulled at the collar of her blouse, and took a turn. Constance got her checked out, over and back to the hospital again, it took three weeks for tests and waiting for tests, and by the time she was given the all-clear, the little house was gone.

Constance drove her home one last time from Limerick Regional and their path took them up over the humpy bridge, past Ardeevin. The front windows were boarded up and the gate hanging open, but Rosaleen did not seem to notice the house, it was as though the place had never been. That evening, Constance went to pick a few roses from the wreck of the garden and she came back hugely tired and alone.

There would be no perfect house, how could there be? Because Rosaleen was impossible to please. The world was queuing up to satisfy her, and the world always failed.

It was a trick she had learned early, in the front room of Ardeevin, perhaps, when one suitor or another would be sent off with a flea in his ear for thinking he might be good enough for the daughter of John Considine. Or earlier than that — it was hard to tell. Rosaleen was difficult to psychologise, a woman who never spoke of her childhood until she was in her sixties, and then in a way that made you wonder if she had ever been a child at all.

The remarkable thing was the way Rosaleen’s children spent such enormous amounts of energy getting themselves, in one way or another, turned down by her too. Even the money she gave them felt like a coldness, once the house was gone.

Emmet, who had seen so much injustice in the world, had to remind himself as he checked his bank account — and then pulled back from the screen to check it again — that his mother never killed anyone. And yet, her children thought she was ‘terrible’. Her eldest daughter, especially, felt, as she tended her, supplicatory, rejected.

‘Mammy would you like a biscuit with that?’

‘A biscuit? Oh no.’

Rosaleen, who was so needy, was always telling you to go away. So when she was, for those few wonderful months after the green road, easy to love, her children were utterly beguiled.

Paying Attention

EMMET WALKED IN to the house on Verschoyle Gardens one Saturday afternoon in November, to find his mother sitting in the kitchen with Denholm.

‘How are you, Emmet?’ said Denholm. ‘Your mother has arrived. I made a cup of tea.’

‘Mam,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the N7,’ she said. ‘I thought I would run out of petrol.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Evidently,’ she said. ‘Would you check the handbrake? I am always afraid that thing will roll away on me.’

‘You drove,’ he said. Her car was in the driveway. Emmet had seen it, he realised. He had noted it in passing: There’s Rosaleen’s car.

‘Yes! My goodness. And the fields flooded everywhere. I saw two swans paddling into a barn outside Saggart. But the roads are all very different these days. You know I haven’t done that journey in so many years, I can’t think when I did it last.’

She laughed, towards Denholm, a light little trill of hilarity.

Emmet put his bags of shopping down on the counter and took his phone out of his pocket. Right enough, the thing was jammed with missed calls and text messages: Hanna, Dessie, Dessie, Dessie, Hanna.

Nothing from Constance.

‘I should have been up before, you know, I have been very remiss.’

‘Rosaleen,’ he said.

His mother turned to Denholm.

‘I never liked Dublin.’

‘Really?’

‘It was always so dirty. Dear dirty Dublin, that’s what we used to say. But Hanna too, you know,’ she said to Emmet. ‘I should have been up here, for the baby. I do love that baby.’

‘You are the grandmother,’ said Denholm.

‘Well indeed,’ she said. And the little laugh was back again, her body light and tiny in the chair as she rocked forward to touch Denholm on the forearm.

There was a pause then, as she considered what she had just done.

‘Your sister’s baby. How is your sister’s baby?’ she said.

‘The baby is very well, thank you.’

She’s here, Emmet texted to them all, and could not think what else to say. His mother was exerting the full of her charm on a Kenyan, in his kitchen.

‘You’re here,’ he said.

‘Yes!’ she said, and there was a slight manic gleam to her eye. ‘I came to see you.’

She looked at her son, she looked him straight in the eye, and for a moment, Emmet felt himself to be known. Just a glimmer and then it was gone.

‘And it is such a nice house. Such a nice road. I didn’t realise there were houses like this, just off the motorway. You never know what is behind the trees.’

‘I am sorry we only have tea,’ said Denholm.

‘Oh. Sorry. Yes,’ said Emmet, turning to the shopping bags. ‘Biscuits! We’re not really a biscuit house except for Denholm, he is addicted to those Belgian things with the chocolate.’

‘Not for me! I never had a sweet tooth.’ She put her hand on Denholm’s forearm again and this time, as though surprised, she let it rest there. The veins of her old hand were purple under the thin white skin, and the surface of Denholm’s arm very opaque by comparison. Rosaleen reached for Denholm’s hand, quite slowly. She held it up off the table and ran a curious finger along the side of it, where the dark brown of his skin gave way, in a line, to the lighter shade of his palm.

Emmet nearly died, he said later. I nearly died.

‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.

Denholm pulled his hand gently away, and curled it into a loose fist on the tabletop.

‘Why have I not seen it before?’

‘Rosaleen,’ said Emmet.

‘Why have I not seen that before?’ she said. She was quite fretful now. ‘Why do you think that is?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Emmet.

And Denholm, in a rush of compassion, held both his hands out to her and turned them palm up and then palm down.

‘Please don’t listen to my mother,’ said Emmet.

Rosaleen gathered herself then and glanced down at her lap.

Her car keys were on the table in front of her and she picked them up, in a decisive way. Emmet thought she was about to leave again and he started forward from his place at the counter, but she just clicked the remote. An electronic squawk came from the car outside.

‘My bag is in the boot,’ she said.

Emmet stopped where he was.

‘Right,’ he said.

And his mother reached for her cup of tea.

‘Everyone is looking for you, Rosaleen. Constance is beside herself.’

‘Oh Constance,’ she said, in a tone of great exasperation.

And it occurred to Emmet that Constance had not, in fact, phoned.

‘What do you mean, Constance?’

His mother looked terrible, suddenly. There were shadows like bruises under her eyes, and the eyes themselves all pupil; black as black glass. Tears came. She leaned in to Denholm.

‘Constance threw me out,’ she said.

And Denholm said, ‘Your daughter? Oh no. Oh no. That is pretty bad.’

For a long and amazing moment, Emmet thought it was true.

Later, he rang his sister’s phone in Aughavanna, and Dessie picked up. She could not be disturbed, he said. She was in bed.

‘OK,’ said Emmet, moving into the living room, pacing about.

Constance wasn’t well.

‘Right.’

Dessie’s voice trembled a little. She’s had a diagnosis, he said. They would operate pretty much immediately and get the lot of it in one go, but it was major — Dessie paused at the word — major surgery, and when she told Rosaleen this morning, Rosaleen took it all the wrong way. She lit out the road and Constance was frantic, she was more concerned about her mother than she was for herself. She was under the doctor now, pumped full of Ativan. And it was typical of Rosaleen, Emmet could hear a slur in his voice, whiskey perhaps — chypical — to cause the maximum bother at just the wrong time.

‘It’s all about her,’ he said, as though he had a right to say such a thing. ‘It’s all about her.’

Emmet had a sharp urge to defend his mother.

Dessie fucking McGrath.

‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, Constance. Oh, no.’

‘Can you hang on to her?’ said Dessie. As if Emmet had an option.

‘Of course. Of course,’ as he rolled his eyes and walked the living room, wondering what he had to cancel at work — the hundred thousand people on the side of a road in Aceh, perhaps — and if there was a set of clean sheets to be had. His mother sleeping in his bed. It was an odd thought.

But please come down, Dessie went on. Please come. When Constance is up and about again. There were plenty of beds in the house God knows, they were coming down with bedrooms. Stay a while, when you bring her back home.

But that was yet to come. For the moment, Emmet looked at his mother sitting in his pathetic, chipboard kitchen and he was strangely pleased to see her there.

‘I don’t know where I am to sleep tonight,’ she told Denholm. ‘Though I don’t sleep much, you know. Not any more.’

‘No.’

She sat there, very small.

‘I am sorry I touched your hand.’

‘Oh. Please,’ said Denholm.

‘No really,’ she said.

And, in all fairness, Emmet thought, she looked pretty bad.

‘I have paid too little attention,’ she said. ‘I think that’s the problem. I should have paid more attention to things.’

Ballynahown — Bray — Sandycove