Anne Enright - The Green Road

The Innocent bottle was interesting. Hanna tried it in front of Hugh and he didn’t notice it, either. It wasn’t within his range.

Hugh was a very tidy person. He got upset if there was a scratch on something, or a mark, if there were used tea bags on the kitchen counter or a damp towel on the floor. Living with him put Hanna semi-permanently in the wrong. He told her to pick her knickers up off the stairs, in a tone of great disgust. Or he wanted to shag her on the stairs. One or the other. Sometimes both. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind.

They had, in the early days, enormous amounts of sex. It was not high-quality sex, but it was terrifically frequent. Then it just got terrific. Nothing outrageous, Hugh was a straight-up kind of guy — unless he plucked one of his cooking hatchets off the magnetic strip on the kitchen wall and stuck it in her, one fine day. There was no sign, anyway, of murderous intent. There was just this massive, penetrative intent that felt like murder, at least to Hanna. Not that she minded, being killed. And it was in the course of one of their happy little fuck-fests, tender, savage and prolonged — well done, us! — that the baby happened.

Happened.

The baby arrived.

Hugh made a baby in Hanna because he loved Hanna. In the middle of all that fury, a baby.

Hanna did not realise, of course. She thought her beer had gone off, the wine was corked, she got a pain in her back and there was a density to her coming that was muscular and new. She woke one morning utterly abandoned, wrecked. And, after a couple of weeks of this, she said, ‘Oh.’

Hugh was delighted, ecstatic. He loved the baby both inside and outside of Hanna, and he loved the baby’s clever mother. But he did not have sex with the baby’s mother, after the baby came. He fought with her instead.

‘What the fuck is this doing here?’

‘What?’

‘My script is under there.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘My script. I’ve been looking for my script and now its covered in. . Jesus.’

Hanna shoved the buggy down the quays into town replaying the fights in her head. Push. Push. Shove. Shove. She was so lonely, she was horny all the time now. And it was a bit like sex, she thought — the fighting — but it really wasn’t sex. Throwing Hugh’s phone into a gorse bush up the mountains, or her own stupid cheap clutch bag into the River Liffey. There were long and impossible silences on the hard shoulder, there was the time she walked back down the motorway leaving the baby in the car seat, eating his crinkly toy. There was the broken front light and the deep scrape along the passenger door — Hugh really hated it when she pranged his precious car, because Hugh claimed to be calm but he really wasn’t calm, Hugh was stony and white with rage.

The baby, meanwhile, turned red and shat. The baby opened his round, red mouth, and screamed.

And Hanna — of course! — ran around doing a million things for the baby: soother, spoons, blankies, books, Calpol, wipes, socks, spare everything, spare hat, lanolin cream, cream without lanolin, because Hanna loved the baby. Loved, loved, loved him. Cared, cared, cared for him. Worried and fretted and was in charge of the baby. Because oh, if the baby lost his soother, if the baby lost his spare hat, then a hole would open in the universe and Hanna would fall through this hole and be forever lost.

When she drank a couple of Innocents-with-a-twist, pushing the buggy in the sunshine, she found they could all coexist, Hanna and the spare hat and the missing hat, and the baby, who was looking at her, and also the hole in the universe. She could keep them all in different corners of her mind, and the tension between them nice. She could make it all hum.

The other great things about the plastic bottle with Innocent on the label were a) the colour, b) the amusement factor, c) it was hers.

One day in November, when the baby was ten months old, Hanna got a Christmas card from her mother with a note at the bottom to say she was going to sell the house.

She rang Constance to say, ‘What the fuck?’

‘Oh it’s you,’ said Constance, because Hanna never rang home.

‘The fuck?’ said Hanna, and Constance said, ‘Don’t ask.’

‘It’s not true, is it?’ said Hanna.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Constance. ‘It’s not true, no. She’s just getting old.’

‘Any word from Dan?’

‘Full house this year. He’s coming home.’

The Madigans were never together, on the day. The girls always made it down, but the boys were wherever, either Claridge’s or Timbuktu. So this Christmas was going to be a big one. It was going to be a doozie. And that evening, somehow, the baby got hold of her little Innocent bottle and spat the stuff out, spilling it all down his front and, never mind the hole in the fucking universe, when Hugh smelt the alcohol off the baby’s Breton striped Petit Bateau, the world as Hanna knew it came to an end. Or seemed to come to an end. It was possible, like the time she ended up in Casualty, that when you have a baby there is no such thing as the end, there is only more of the same.

The thing was through the washing machine on the instant, so Hugh had no hard evidence. But he had the baby. He was sleeping in the baby’s room. He would not fight with Hanna, he said, but he would not leave her alone with the baby. And when it came to Christmas he would take the baby home.

Hanna said, ‘That’s a relief. No, really. Childcare. At last. Fucking fantastic.’

After two weeks of Hanna sober, they had sex in the kitchen, suddenly, they ended up on the floor — the same place as the night she cut her head, with the same view, when she turned to the side, of white tiles. Hanna was so wet between the legs she thought it was some kind of incontinence and later, in the shower, she wondered if there was something actually wrong with her, with her body, not to mention her mind. She went out and bought two bottles of white in the off-licence, because she’d got the drinking thing under control now and, after she opened the second one, the shouting started all over again.

‘I need a job,’ said Hanna. ‘I just need a fucking job.’

After she left college, Hanna formed a fringe company with some like-minded souls, who failed to get funding after their second, slightly disastrous year. She broke through to the main stages with the part of a maid at the Abbey, and went straight from this to a sexy maid at the Olympia. She had a two-week break before touring a production of Hugh Leonard’s Da , in which she played the girlfriend. Well. She played the girlfriend very well. After that, another maid, but this time on the big screen. There was a showing in the Savoy on O’Connell Street, a red carpet, Hanna, sitting in the dark with Hugh, their palms wet as they held hands, then her face a mile high, and Hanna blown back in her seat by the sight of her own opening mouth.

‘I don’t know, sir. She didn’t say.’

A saucy look. Innocent. Irish. They all said, she should go to LA, she was like an Irish Vivien Leigh.

But she didn’t go to LA. It was too late for Hollywood, she was twenty-six. And besides, Hanna wanted to do proper work, real work. She wanted the thing to happen, whatever the thing was, the sudden understanding of the crowd.

She did a Feldenkrais course and a Shakespeare workshop for schools, there was a fringe production of A Long Day’s Journey that was best forgotten, and six months with a company who liked Grotowski too much ever to make it to an opening night. There was an ad for spreadable butter, a week here and there on a film; she got a whole four months on a mini series, and she was trying to break into voiceover work, for the money. Everything hustled for and flirted for. There was sexual humiliation. There was no path.