The Green Road: A Novel Page 3

  Poor, stupid, dirty and poor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Later, that evening, Emmet sneered at him.

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

  And Dan gave his new, priestly smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Fancy a scoop?’ she said.

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

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

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

  The pub was very dark, inside.

  ‘She would,’ said Dan.

  ‘And what? Do you want a pint?’

  ‘Maybe she’ll have a fizzy orange.’

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

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

  ‘Doing their best,’ said Hanna.

  ‘No bother to you.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘So what’s the story?’

  ‘She’s well up to it,’ she said.

  ‘You think?’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Hanna told him about the girlfriend.

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

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

  ‘Date,’ said Emmet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Date?’

  He took her ear and twisted it.

  ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Emmet.’

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

  ‘Did she stay?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girlfriend?’

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

  ‘Did she sleep with him?’

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

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

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

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

  Rain on the Wind

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

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

  ‘He has a girlfriend,’ said Hanna.

  ‘Does he now,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanna.

  ‘Are you telling me?’ said her mother.

  ‘She’s really nice,’ said Hanna.

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

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

  ‘Come on now, Hanna!’

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

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

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

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

  ‘But you like me, Mammy.’

  ‘I like you now,’ said her mother.

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

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

  ‘You think?’

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

  Dan

  New York

  1991

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

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