The Green Road: A Novel Page 13

  Then, very quickly, it became ordinary. Not pleasant, of course. Just normal. A dog with a human arm in its mouth.

  Now, sitting like a fool on a toilet in West Africa, it wasn’t normal any more.

  Emmet braced his hands against the breeze-block walls, listening to his body, thinking, This is how you die.

  When he finally got out of there, a wreath of dawn bites around each ankle, Alice was still in her place by the bottom of the stairs. Blood was coming out of the dog’s back end now, and he was nearly dead. She didn’t ask about her cup of tea. She just cried and cried.

  Ibrahim let himself in to the house just as the sun came up. He paused at the bloody scene in the dining room then ducked into the kitchen. There was silence. Emmet imagined him in there, steadying himself against the sink.

  ‘It’s going to get hot, Alice.’

  Alice gave a tiny answer, that sounded like ‘Yes’. She stirred herself and picked vaguely at the cloth of her trousers, where the blood had dried.

  ‘Have a shower.’

  He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She trailed upstairs and Emmet went to the kitchen where Ibrahim was standing stock still, holding his bag, ready for the market.

  ‘All right, Ib?’

  ‘I pain,’ said Ibrahim.

  ‘Have you? Little one?’

  ‘Yes. Little bit sick.’

  ‘Right. Well off you go. Don’t worry about the dog, Ib. I’ll sort that. N’inquiètes-pas du chien.’

  ‘Non, Monsieur. Merci, Monsieur.’

  When he was gone, Emmet texted Hassan. He stood listening to the light, erratic footfalls in the bedroom above and looked at the dog’s little teeth, exposed in the snarl of death.

  ‘Oh man,’ said Hassan when he walked in. ‘So dirty this thing. Blood. Dead fucking dog. I can’t touch this thing, man, or I spew. You know? For this I spend three weeks in hell.’

  ‘Come on, Hassan my friend. Come on.’

  ‘It’s like you ask me to dirty my soul. I love you Emmet, but no way I can do that disgusting thing.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much, my soul? OK. OK. Put him in something. OK. I’ll come back.’

  And in surprisingly short order, he did. He brought a small, stocky-looking ‘Christian man’, who helped Emmet roll the dog into a square of hessian then shouldered the body so that the white plume of Mitch’s tail was hanging down his back. They were just about set when Alice appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ she said.

  Emmet looked at her.

  ‘Can you clean that up?’ he said, pointing at the blood on the floor, but Alice did not even pretend to hear.

  ‘Bury him,’ she said. ‘I want him properly buried.’ She looked very proud, standing there.

  ‘Yes, Madame,’ said Hassan.

  Outside the door, Emmet said, ‘Don’t throw it in the fucking river, Hassan. People drink that stuff.’

  He had his roll out. Hassan said, ‘Three bucks.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘No commission.’

  He fumbled out the notes, and they left, the Tuareg opening the gate with great ceremony. But instead of going to the Land Cruiser to put the dog in the boot, the ‘Christian man’ walked away from them, without a word, down towards the market and the river.

  Emmet watched him go.

  ‘Give me half an hour,’ he said to Hassan.

  Hassan let a big laugh out of him. ‘I love you, my man,’ he said. ‘I’ll kiss you when you’re clean.’

  That night Alice said it was Ibrahim who had poisoned Mitch.

  ‘Rat poison. He gave him rat poison. He had internal bleeding. That was how he died.’

  ‘Ib’s a good guy.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘So I am supposed to live with this man. I am supposed to eat his food?’

  ‘Yes. Yes you are. Yes.’

  She started to weep.

  Emmet had a fair idea, by now, who had poisoned the dog, but he wasn’t about to get a different man fired. He said, ‘Can we draw a line under this one?’

  ‘Draw a line?’

  Emmet steadied himself.

  ‘Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s only a dog.’

  And that, he knew, was the end of them.

  After sex that night, she lifted one short white leg and looked at it in the dim light, turning her foot this way and then the other. Stefan, the Swedish guy, said she had an ‘old-fashioned body’, which she thought just meant ‘fat’, but then he said she wasn’t fat, she was just ‘pre-war’. What about Emmet, did he think she was fat?

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Emmet.

  ‘I saw him down in Bam,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  Within a week, she had stopped speaking much, and there was nothing else for it – late one night, Emmet said, ‘I love you, Alice. I think I am in love with you.’

  She paused where she was, and then walked on.

  The next evening, which was Thursday, she had too much to drink and said, ‘You always leave it too late, don’t you? You wait until it’s all over and then you say you’re only starting. And then it’s like, Oh but I love you, and why are women so mean to me, and why can I never settle down?’

  Emmet said nothing.

  He was wrapping things up anyway. Alice, too, would be moving on. So there was no reason to hate her the way he seemed to hate her now. He wanted to yell at her. Hit her, maybe. He wanted to tell her to go home and rescue some fucking gerbils, because she was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, she would end up killing more people than she ever helped. And it was all very well, he wanted to say, it was all very nice as a feeling, but love was no use, at the end of the day, to man or beast, when there was no fucking justice in the world.

  He also wanted to tell her that she was lovely and eternally right and that he, Emmet, was a failure as a human being.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She was gone when he got back. There was money on the desk, for rent, which made Emmet sad, and a note on the bed he really did not want to read. Alice had the kind of handwriting that put little circles over the i’s, and sticky-out puppy tongues where the full stop should be. Alice’s handwriting made him feel like a child-molester. The note was a single sheet of paper, inside which she had written the verse everyone quotes, by Rumi:

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

  and rightdoing there is a field.

  I’ll meet you there.

  Emmet did not take a shower. He shoved the hat back on his head and went downstairs, calling, ‘I’ll be back late,’ and Ibrahim, who had not emerged from the kitchen since he had arrived, called back, ‘OK, Monsieur Emmet. Bonsoir!’

  The Tuareg at the gate was wearing a new cloth of indigo blue, freshly dyed; for a wedding, perhaps. Original blue. The veil across the bottom of his face had stained the man’s cheeks – what Emmet could see of them – with years of dye. It occurred to Emmet that the Tuaregs came and went, that there might have been many different men at his gate, and this was why he never knew which one he was talking to and which one had poisoned the fucking dog.

  Poor Mitch. Poor bastard.

  Emmet went to a shebeen on the side of the marketplace and cracked a beer, watching out for the mad, sweaty guy on his left, nodding at the young lads drinking cola at the low table, and then turning, with the heels of his boots hooked on to the cross-bar of the stool, to watch the world go by.

  It was all as it should be. The market was a sea of tat that nobody seemed to buy, and the vegetables were laid out on decorative cloths, like handmade things.

  After a while, the bumpy woman came by; the one who was covered in tiny lumps, from the top of her head to the underside of her heels. She turned, as she passed, to level at Emmet a smile of great sweetness and sympathy. Emmet gave her a wan smile back and she continued on, gravely smooth, as though there was a pot balanced on he
r head.

  Rosaleen

  Ardeevin

  2005

  IN NOVEMBER OF 2005 Rosaleen decided to do her Christmas cards, which were few enough, and most of them local. Not, she thought, that she would be getting many back this year, as people died off, or their habits died off, through forgetfulness or the neglect of their families who would not think to go down to the post office and buy them a book of stamps.

  The cards were small and square shaped with ‘Merry Christmas’ written in copperplate writing across the top. All of them were the same design: a block of red, and on it a brown dune, with little camels and kings drawn on the sand in black ink. Above them was the Christmas star, long – like a crucifix with added rays bursting out from the crux of it. The light of the star was made with the white of the paper itself. The printer just left a gap.

  The cards were very simple but they were good cards. The red was very satisfying; not so much a sky as a background, like something you would see in a Matisse. Vermilion. Rosaleen closed her eyes in pleasure at a word she had not expected and at the memory of Matisse: a red room with a woman sitting in it, from a postcard or a library book, perhaps. Years since she had given it a thought, and there the woman still sat in her head, waiting to surprise her for never having left. Waiting for her moment, which was an ordinary moment – half past four on a Thursday in November, the sun about to set, sinking towards New York and, below New York as the world turned, all of America.

  Straight across the ocean.

  ‘As the crow flies,’ said Rosaleen, only to hear an embarrassment of silence around her. The radio dead. Not even a cat, curled up in the chair.

  ‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn,’ she said, also out loud, and looked to the darkening window where her reflection was beginning to shadow the pane. Or someone’s shadow. An image thin and insubstantial, like something that happened in the camera once, her dog superimposed on the view of St Peter’s Square, after her mother died, when they went to Rome. And the dog, who missed them terribly, came through the photographs, running towards them on the green road beyond Boolavaun.

  Rosaleen looked to the window and stood to her full height.

  ‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair!

  Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!’

  Her voice worked perfectly. Rosaleen set the cards on the table and sat down to write.

  The kitchen was the easiest room in the house, with the heat of the range and two windows, one facing south and the other west. But it was November, and there were days when she filled a hot water bottle just to make it down the hall. Outside, she had a winter flowering cherry set against the silhouetted winter branches, but it would not bloom for many weeks yet. Meanwhile, she had no evergreens, for being too depressing, and every November she thought about a blue spruce, or those needle-thin Italian pines, and every November she decided against. It was an Irish garden. A broadleaf garden, except for the monkey puzzle at the front of the house. Straggly now – there were dead and half dead branches for fifty feet or more, but it was her father’s tree and nothing gave her more pleasure. The monkey puzzle was allowed, as Dan used to say.

  ‘That’s allowed.’

  Ah. But was talking aloud allowed?

  Rosaleen smiled. She picked up one of the cards and saw it again through Dan’s eyes. Because it was Dan – of course it was – who sent the postcard of the woman in the red room. It had lived on the fridge door for years. Dan, she thought, would like the little red Christmas card, that made no claims, that was innocent and tasteful enough. For an utterly pretentious boy, he was very set against pretension. Much fuss to make things simple. That was his style.

  And it was also her style. Rosaleen opened the card to check. ‘Beannachtaí na Nollag’ the greeting said, in Irish, which was all lovely and just right for an American mantelpiece, whatever his mantel looked like these days. Granite, perhaps. Or none, the fireplace a simple square cut in a white wall. Rosaleen set the card flat and lifted her pen with a flourish – a special gel pen she had bought in the new supermarket.

  ‘My darling Dan,’ she wrote, and then she paused and looked up.

  After a moment she saw what her eyes lingered upon: a shelf for the radio and for bills, and above that, a clock stopped these five years or more, the face sticky with cooking grease. The wall itself was a dusty rose, a colour which was unremarkable most of the day and then wonderful and blushing as the sun set. Like living in a shell. Under that was the 1970s terracotta, Tuscan Earth it was called, up on a chair herself, coat after coat of it, to cover the wallpaper beneath, fierce yellow repeats of geometric flowers that kept breaking through. And under the wallpaper? She could not recall. The whole place should be stripped and done properly or – better yet – the wall turned to glass, dissolved: it would be a kind of rapture, the house assumed into heaven. Like who? Our Lady of Loreto, of course. Her house flying through blue Italian skies. The patron saint of air hostesses everywhere. Because Everywhere is the place that air hostesses like to be.

  There was nothing that lifted Rosaleen’s heart like the sight of a plane in the summer sky.

  She looked down at the white paper on the table in front of her, and the writing on it – her own writing. ‘My darling Dan’.

  Dan would love a glass wall at the back of the house. Dan would strip back the old paper, he would paint the place ‘winter lichen’ or ‘mushroom’. When he worked in a gallery they painted the place every six weeks he said. He would get professionals in to do it, so the lines would be true.

  Rosaleen picked the paper up and turned it over again. It was his Christmas card and he would like it. Dan liked simple things. He would be over forty now. He would be forty-four in August. Her son was forty-three years old.

  Rosaleen tried to think what he might look like, this very minute, or how he looked the last time he made the trip home, but all she could remember was his smooth eight-year-old cheek against her cheek. Her blessed boy. He was so happy up against her, never pulled away. And he smelt of nothing, not even himself. Leaves, maybe. Rust. Boys were easy, she always thought. Boys gave you no trouble.

  ‘I think of you often,’ she wrote. ‘And just as often I smile.’

  They were another planet. Surrounded by their own sense of themselves; their faces englobed, she thought, in their boyhood beauty. They wore their maleness as a gift.

  What did you do today? Nothing. Where did you go? Nowhere. Though that was more Emmet’s style. Dan told you everything except the thing you needed to know. The schoolmaster’s shoes with the secretly stacked heels, the local woman gone up to Dublin to be in the audience for The Late Late Show. Dan was a master of irrelevance.

  ‘I miss your old chat,’ she wrote.

  Dan’s eyes, Emmet’s eyes, as they looked at their mother, playful and impenetrable. Two sets of green, flecked with black. Stones under bright water.

  She could still see them asleep, each in their beds as she passed their bedroom doors. Emmet under a hundred blankets. Dan sprawled, agape, a kind of push in him, even then, as though dreaming impossibilities. He slept like a shout. And as soon as he got the chance, he was gone.

  The whole night long we dream of you, and waking think we’re there, –

  She indulged herself a moment, pictured him sitting across the room from her, with a newspaper, perhaps, a cup of tea. It gave her a pang, just to catch the edge of it. An imagined life. Dan and herself somehow together in this house with their books and their music. The old style.

  Vain dream and foolish waking, we never shall see Clare.

  The world she grew up in was so different it was hard to believe she was ever in it. But she was in it, once. And she was here now.

  Rosaleen Considine, six years old, seventy-six years old.

  Some days, it wasn’t easy to join the dots.

  She had not redecorated the bedrooms, upstairs. They were still the same. The same quilt on Dan’s bed. It was there now, if she cared to
go up and look at it. The side lamp he found all by himself down in the local hardware, coming home excited, at what age? Eleven. Excited by a lamp. A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. And, in Emmet’s room, a big map of the world, the countries pink, green, orange and lilac. Yugoslavia. USSR. Rhodesia. Burma. When they grew up, Dan went everywhere, and Emmet, she liked to say, went everywhere else. But Dan always sent a message home.

  ‘All my love,’ she wrote. And then looked at what she had written. She underlined the word ‘All’ with a strong stroke of the pen: once, twice, a little wiggling tail on this second line, trailing down the page.

  ‘Your fond and foolish Mother, Rosaleen.’

  The card went into its envelope. She tucked the flap in, turned it, pristine, and smoothed it down before writing ‘Mr Dan Madigan’ on the other side. Then she propped the envelope up against the little stainless steel teapot. His address was on a piece of paper in the drawer. Toronto. That was where he was. Or Tucson. One or the other. She did not know how he lived, but there were always rich people around him. At least that was the impression he liked to give. That he was thriving in some way that was beyond her understanding.

  Which, indeed, it was.

  ‘Oh rough the rude Atlantic.’

  Rosaleen spoke the poem a little out loud as she fumbled about in the drawer full of old papers, and what did she come across, only the postcard of the woman in the red room. The woman was dressed in black, and her face was carefully inclined over a stand of fruit that she set on the red table, and you could tell by the tilt of her head that she thought the fruit was beautiful. A widow, perhaps, or a housekeeper. The pattern on the tablecloth moved up on to the wall behind her and it was both antique and wild. Rosaleen turned the card over and there was Dan’s grown-up writing: ‘Hi from The Hermitage, where the security guards all look like Boris Karloff and are ruder than you can imagine. Love! Danny.’