Anne Enright - The Green Road

Emmet put down the phone, exhausted. Saar had baked biscuits for him before she left and the kitchen still smelt of cinnamon. Saar was terrific. Dutch, pragmatic, team-spirited. He put her on a plane back up to Schiphol, knowing that, next Christmas, he would be going to Schiphol too.

‘I love you,’ he said.

And she said, ‘I love you.’

Then he faced back into the horrors of the Madigans — their small hearts (his own was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through. Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was: his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardeevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.

Mother.

His stupid sister late, as ever. Over-packing, at a guess, busy forgetting things, locating her phone, losing her phone, shouting about her phone, messing, messing, messing.

Emmet climbed the stairs and tapped, as he passed it, on his housemate’s door.

‘All right?’

Denholm came out and followed him to his own bedroom, as Emmet pulled a bag out and set it on top of the bed.

‘Shipshape,’ said Denholm.

‘Just checking you were still there.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Denholm, who did not have the money to be anywhere else and was, besides, always at the little desk in his room. ‘How are you, Emmet?’

‘Very well,’ he said, turning to shake the man’s hand — African style — there in lovely, suburban Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24.

‘How are you?’ he said.

Denholm was commuting to Kimmage Manor every day for a course in International Development. His mother had died a month after his arrival from Kenya and his sister, also in rural Kenya, was HIV positive, a fact she only discovered in the maternity unit of the local clinic that was run by the same nuns who got Denholm all the way to a housing estate off the N7 and to Emmet’s spare room.

‘I am very well,’ said Denholm.

‘The Wi-Fi working?’ said Emmet.

‘A little slow,’ said Denholm. ‘But yes.’

He had been talking to his brother on Skype, he said, before his office shut down. It was a big holiday in Kenya. They were all heading out of Nairobi, the same way Emmet was heading out of Dublin. They would get back to the villages in time for Midnight Mass, then a big party — all night — more parties the next day, and then on St Stephen’s Day, which they called Boxing Day, a soup made out of the blood of the Christmas goat. Good soup, Denholm told him. Hangover soup.

Emmet went about the place, pulling open drawers, throwing some bits into a bag, which was a woven polyester conference bag with World Food Programme written on the flap. A couple of polo shirts, underwear and socks, a paperback from his bedside locker, his phone. He ducked into the en-suite bathroom to get his his toothbrush and deodorant.

‘Sounds like the business,’ Emmet said. He was slipping a hand under the mattress for his passport when he realised that he was just going down the road, in Ireland.

‘Yes,’ said Denholm, who could not keep the Christmas loneliness out of his voice.

And, ‘Wow,’ Emmet said, as he cast about him for nothing, trying to hide his sudden mortification at the fact that he was leaving Denholm alone. After all the hospitality he himself had been offered, in so many towns. Why did he not invite him home for his dinner? He just couldn’t.

It was not a question of colour (though it was also a question of colour), even Saar was out of the question — Saar with her Dutch domestic virtues, who would clear the dishes and wash the dishes, and sing as she swept the fallen tinsel off the floor. Christmas dinner, for Emmet’s family, was thicker than Kenyan blood soup, so none of the people that Emmet liked best could be there, nor even the people he might enjoy. The only route to the Madigans’ Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.

Hanna wasn’t even bringing the father of her child.

High standards at the Madigans’ dining room table. Keep ’em high.

‘Is the tram running tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denholm, who would be trapped for Christmas Day on a housing estate off the N7, and he went downstairs, offering tea.

Emmet blamed his mother. You could tell Rosaleen about disease, war and mudslides and she would look faintly puzzled, because there were, clearly, much more interesting things happening in the County Clare. Even though nothing happened — she saw to that too. Nothing was discussed. The news was boring or it was alarming, facts were always irrelevant, politics rude. Local gossip, that is what his mother allowed, and only of a particular kind. Marriages, deaths, accidents: she lived for a head-on collision, a bad bend in the road. Her own ailments of course, other people’s diseases. Mrs Finnerty’s cousin’s tumour that turned out to be just a cyst. Her back, her hip, her headaches, and the occasional flashing light when she closed her eyes — ailments that were ever more vague, until, one day, they would not be vague at all. They would be, at the last, entirely clear.

‘I was going to bring my housemate,’ said Emmet in the kitchen, a couple of hours later. ‘He’s having a rough time.’

‘Oh?’ said Rosaleen.

‘His mother just died.’

‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen loved a good tragedy. Tears — actual tears — came to her eyes.

‘And his sister and her baby are HIV positive.’

‘Oh.’

Though perhaps this was not the right kind of tragedy, after all.

‘I see.’

His mother seemed smaller than he remembered. Her skin was so thin, Emmet was afraid to touch in case she bruised. Not that anyone ever touched her — except Constance perhaps. Rosaleen did not like to be touched. She liked the thing Dan did, which was to conjure the air around her, somehow, making it special. When Hanna went to greet her, there was a big mistimed clash of cheekbones.

‘Oh.’

‘Ow.’

This was before they were over the threshold. Rosaleen opened the front door looking terrific. She had a crisp white shirt on, with a neat collar and her mid-length string of pearls. A slightly rakish pair of argyle socks showed between black trousers and tasselled loafers, her hair was a shining platinum from her special shampoo. And when Hanna reached up to kiss all this, their faces clashed at the bone.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

Rosaleen’s precision turning, as ever, into a kind of general difficulty for them all.

‘Yes I am fine,’ and then, ‘Where’s the baby?’

Even though Emmet had told her there would be no baby.

‘He’s with Hugh,’ said Hanna, after a pause.

‘What a pity,’ said their mother. ‘Oh well.’

And she looked at her daughter as though she, alone, would have to do.

Hanna had slept the whole way down in the car. The baby had kept her awake all night, she said — a little petulantly — and though his little sister annoyed him, Emmet felt sorry for her, freshly woken and bedraggled as she was, on their mother’s doorstep.

‘I told you,’ he said to Rosaleen.

‘Did you? Maybe you did.’ And then, a little sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter , does it?’

She was an impossible woman. Emmet did not know why it was his job to keep his mother in line — he just couldn’t help it. He could not bear the unreality she fomented about her. Emmet could not understand why the truth was such a problem to Rosaleen, why facts were an irrelevance, or an accusation. He did not know what she was skittering away from, all the time.