Anne Enright - The Green Road

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. The 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.