Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘Oh toughen up,’ said Ludo. ‘Talk to a woman, they’ve been doing it for years.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dan, who did nothing but talk to the wives of rich men. He talked to them about their husbands’ paintings and their husbands’ ghastly wallpaper. ( Take it down! was his cry. All of it. Down! ) Dan loved these women; their woundedness and their style; he admired the way they rose to their lives. But he did not want to be one. That would be a convergence too far.

‘Don’t be too proud for me,’ said Ludo. ‘Don’t be too proud, is all.’

‘Proud?’ said Dan.

‘Defensive,’ said Ludo. ‘OK?’

‘OK,’ said Dan. And he put his head on Ludo’s chest, where it met the ball of his shoulder; in that dent.

‘OK.’

‘All you ever do is take!’ This from his mother, some time, from the black and white movie of their relationship, Whatever Happened to Baby Rosaleen . ‘All you ever do is take!’

Isabelle sending him a postcard, the year she moved upstate: ‘I was going to send back all the presents you gave me over the years, then I realised — you didn’t.’

And it was true that Dan stalled in the shop if he was ever obliged to buy a gift. Stalled, refused, could not calculate, drew a blank, was a blank. Walked away, as though from something terrible and, by the skin of his teeth, survived.

Another postcard, the next summer, from Dublin, a vintage thing with green buses going down O’Connell Street. And on the back:

‘I am still alive.’

This was from an exhibition they saw together in Dublin, himself and Isabelle, when they were, maybe, eighteen. A book of telegrams by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara, sent over the course of a decade to the same address and all saying the same thing: ‘I am still alive.’ The exhibition was a moment of complete excitement for Dan — it was a shaft of light that told him he had been living, all his life, underground. This was long before New York, long before he found conceptual work tiresome and even longer before he met the man, or thought he had, at a Starbucks around the corner from the Guggenheim, where the server called ‘Kawara!’ and Dan felt his knees weaken in his chinos. I am still alive .

Isabelle’s last card was from Barcelona.

‘Gaudete!’ it said, and on the front those curvy balconies by Gaudi.

And after that, none.

There were tears in his eyes. Dan never cried until he started with Scott; now he was weeping full time, he was leaking into the slackening skin of his lover’s arms.

‘There, there,’ said Ludo, who had a breakfast meeting at eight.

‘It’s not the money,’ Dan said. ‘I mean.’

‘Fuck the money,’ said Ludo.

‘It’s not the money,’ he said.

And it wasn’t. Dan thought of himself as more cat than dog. He did not need much, he could do as well without. So it was not the money that made Dan weep in the arms of Ludovic Linetsky, as he decided to marry him, for richer for poorer, all the days of his life. It was the sound of Ludo’s wonderful heart, deep in his chest. Because Dan might make a good cat but he was a raging blank of a human being and he knew he would fuck this good thing up, just like he fucked up all the rest of them. He would look at Ludo some day — he could do it now if he liked — and just not care.

And where would that leave Dan?

Alone.

Useless and alone.

Normal life was a problem for Dan. He was beginning to see that now. Small things upset him. He would have a petulant old age.

‘I’m not. I’m not,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ludo. ‘You’re straight.’

He was out of the bed and rummaging in a drawer now and he came back with a small hinged box of brown lizard skin and, inside, a pair of cufflinks: silver, inset with a fat little piece of amber. Dan took them out. They were lovely, and worth very little; the amber worn small and smooth as a butterscotch sweet in your mouth.

‘Marry me,’ said Ludo.

The cufflinks were his great-grandfather’s, he said, all the way from Odessa. Dan rose to his knees on the bed and held the little box in his hand. He had no shirt to try them against. He was naked and shivering. He was getting married.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘For what?’ said Ludo. ‘For nothing.’

They made love all night — two men, no longer young — and they talked it all out. He would grow old with Ludo, in a big house on the wrong side of a leafy street in Rosedale, Toronto. Dan stuck the tip of his tongue into Ludo’s mouth, all night, into the chaos and mass of him. He took the malty sweetness of Ludo’s body as a memory and a talisman, to keep him company on the journey home.

IF ONLY SHE could keep it in a box, Hanna thought, or a jug, or a thermos, something sealed, to stop it crusting over where the liquid met the air. A Tupperware box might do. What she really needed was one of those plastic bags that they used in hospitals, vacuum sealed, the ones they hung from a drip stand. A bag of blood. She could put it in her new fridge — God knows, it looked like something you would find in a morgue — she could put her blood in a bag, any sort of bag, and squeeze down until the air was out of it and then just tie a knot in the top. Hang it from the wine rack. Close the door.

Hanna tried to lift her head, but her cheek was stuck to the floor. The blood was eye level, it was spreading and congealing at the same time. It was a race to standstill. But even though it stopped as it went, Hanna could not see the extent of it, because her eye was flush with the ground. The edges turned hazy as the blood oozed away from her, across the white floor tiles.

There were plastic bags in the high cupboard — which wasn’t much use to her, down here. Hanna had put the bags up high so the baby couldn’t smother himself. And there were safety catches on all the bottom presses, which is why she would not be able to kick one open, so there you go — sometimes safety was not what you needed most. Sometimes what you needed was a little plastic bag to put the blood in, so when the men came they would be able to put it back into you again. Or see, at least, that you had not meant to die.

She had slipped.

Hanna thought she had slipped on the blood, but actually the blood had come after. And she was still holding something in her right hand. A bottle. Or the neck of a bottle. The body of the bottle was no longer there.

Hanna didn’t know how anyone could break a bottle and fall on it at the same time, unless they were very fucking drunk. Maybe she had been hit from behind. Maybe the attacker was going up now to the room where the baby slept, and he would do things to the baby. Nameless things. He would steal the baby or damage the baby and leave no mark, so no one could tell that he had been and gone.

The bottle broke, and then she sat down on the bottle and, after that, she was lying on the floor, looking at the spreading blood. Which must be coming from her leg. In which case, she was going to die.

The blood was dark, which was possibly a good thing. It was getting darker. It came quietly and then it stopped.

It was probably time to call Hugh though she did not want to call Hugh, she did not think she could. So unless the baby cried and woke him, he would not notice she was gone. And the baby was not crying, for once. They never did what you wanted them to. A little opposite thing, that is what came out of her. A fight they wrapped in a cloth. Push it, grab it, knock it away: she was feeding him once, and the spoon skittered away so she had to duck to retrieve it and the look he gave as she rose from the floor was one of pure contempt. It was as though he had been possessed — possibly by himself, by the man he would some day become — looking at her as if to say, Who the fuck are you, with your pathetic fucking spoon?