The Green Road: A Novel Read online

  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 deli
ghted, 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