The Green Road: A Novel Read online

  Not that she would wish them gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Oh indeed.’

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

  Everything seemed to happen very fast.

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

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Constance said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘My God,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

  And what was her news?

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

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

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

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

  Awful!

  Hmmm.

  Nothing was right.

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

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

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

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘Oh no!’

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

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

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

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Lovely. Where?’

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

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

  ‘I’d say that one’s got bad news.’

  ‘Sorry?’

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

  ‘Has she?’

  Constance listened for tears or wails from the ultrasound room.

  ‘Maybe they’re on a coffee break.’

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

  ‘They saw us coming,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

  Was it for the ice cream?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The wedding.’

  ‘Oh, the wedding. My daughter.’

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

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

  ‘I have a girl,’ said Constance.

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

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Constance.

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

  ‘What age is Rory, again? Three?’

  Even her own mother listened without listening.

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

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

  ‘Do something!’ said her mother.

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

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Take up horse riding.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘So pretty,’ said Rosaleen.

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