The Green Road (26 page)

‘
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.