Anne Enright - The Green Road

Emmet had gone into his parents’ room to find something, and he forgot, as soon as he entered it, what it was he was looking for.

It was a year or more since anyone had been in here. The wardrobe swinging open and half empty, his mother’s pile of paperbacks on a little table beside the bed. Emmet glanced at the things on her dressing table, and it was as though she had already died. A couple of emery boards sliced with the residue of her nails. A tube of hand cream. Her little compact with a picture of a rose on the lid and — he knew the surprise of it so well — a mirror on the inside. There were bits of cheap jewellery in a crystal dish that might have been an ashtray once and rosary beads hung over the edge of the mirror. The rosary was his father’s, last seen twisted about the dead man’s fingers — she must have prised them off it again — when he was laid out in that same bed whose reflection was behind his own. Emmet almost expected his father’s corpse to appear in the blank of the mirror, or to find him lying in the bed when he turned around.

His father was a Catholic. He was the real thing. Sinner and supplicant, one of the fretfully unredeemed.

Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy ,

Hail our life our sweetness and our hope.

To thee do we send forth our sighs

To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve

Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

The beads were made of some translucent material gone grey inside, like poor man’s pearls. Emmet reached to touch the thing and then couldn’t, it made him feel slightly sick.

He looked, instead, at the postcards Rosaleen had stuck into the frame, between the wood and the glass: a minotaur by Picasso, the Annunciation by some Renaissance Italian, a version of the Nativity by Gauguin. All of them, he presumed, from Dan.

That mirror had seen enough action over the years.

It didn’t bear thinking about, the things that happened in that bed. But also from Rosaleen, sitting in the little chair applying lipstick, tweezing, dabbing, checking and improving. She had such a demanding relationship with her own reflection. Rosaleen challenged her looks, and they rose to meet her.

He wondered where she had hidden herself, the passionate woman he had avoided and adored when he was a child. The woman who quoted poetry at them and the Bible. I would you were cold, or hot. But because you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth. The woman who knelt down on the floor in front of him, and took him by the shoulders on the morning of his First Holy Communion, and said, ‘Remember who you are. When you take the host, say it in your heart: Hello Jesus, my name is Emmet Madigan.’

This is what pushed him, from one country to the next. This energy. A woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected .

Emmet caught sight of himself in the empty glass, and he took his disappointing face out of there. He had to get away from his mother, somehow. He had to step to one side, let the rush of her wanting pass him by.

He would marry Saar, that was one way to do it. He could follow her to Aceh in a few months’ time, and after that he would follow her wherever she wanted to go. But when he tried to locate Saar in his mind, he found only Alice. Foolish Alice, with her helpless goodness, her idiotic lack of guile. He wondered who she was sleeping with now, if she would be at the big FAO bash in Rome, what would happen if he fell at her feet and wept, would that make any difference? He had an image of himself as Gabriel, offering a lily to a white-skinned Madonna who had Alice’s downward glance and her slight, sad smile.

Outside, a jackdaw was bashing a snail on the roof, its feet scrabbling against the metal guttering. And Sell sell sell , he thought. Give the money to the poor. Burn the fucking place down.

Because Emmet was still trapped, always would be trapped, in some endlessly unavailable, restless ideal.

O clement, O loving ,

O sweet Virgin Mary.

And he laughed a little, at the ironies of all that.

Downstairs, Constance did not know where to put herself. She was shaking after the confrontation in the dining room. She was so worried about Rosaleen, she was desperately worried about her mother, also cross with her, and cross with herself for buying the stupid scarf. And she was in a rage with Dessie, for taking the woman at her word. Rosaleen would never sell the house. It was just the kind of thing she liked to say. Because Rosaleen never did anything. This maddening woman, she spent her entire life requiring things of other people and blaming other people, she lived in a state of hope or regret, and she would not, could not, deal with the thing that was in front of her, whatever it was. Oh I forgot to go to the bank, Constance, I forgot to go to the post office. She could not deal with stuff. Money. Details. Here. Now.

Rory came up behind her at the sink and he put his arms round her, the way Dessie sometimes did, though Rory was taller than Dessie and he also lacked — it went without saying — Dessie’s sexual intent. He bent to lay his cheek against her shoulder and he swayed from side to side, humming a little.

‘Happy Christmas,’ he said.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she said.

He lingered there another moment.

‘Can I have some money?’ he said.

‘What do you want it for?’

‘I just need, like, thirty.’

‘Ask your father.’

He did not leave. He said, ‘I love you anyway,’ and he planted a kiss on the nape of her neck.

‘I’m sure you do,’ she said. ‘Now go ask your father.’

He let go, but turned to prop his handsomeness against the counter and look at her for a minute.

‘Next time, you could throw in a couple of beers.’

‘I might,’ said Constance.

‘If you remember.’

‘Hah.’

‘God, Mum, she’s really stiffed.’

‘Don’t talk about your auntie like that.’

‘I mean really, though.’

‘Shift.’

It was a secret thing for her — it wasn’t a big deal — but just the fact of her son made Constance entirely happy. He could do what he liked, she would not mind. He was a good guy, and he loved his mother, and not even his laundry offended her. Or not much.

‘Out of my way now. Move your big spágs.’

Hanna came into the kitchen, and looked at the pair of them as though she knew they had been talking about her. She stubbed out the cigarette on the top of the range, and poured herself a glass of white wine. She lifted the glass to her mouth, and felt the baby at her lips, warm and baby-smelling, an unexpected yearning, as she drank, for his frank gaze, the damp interior of his hand.

The house was disappearing around her.

Hanna pushed away from the range and wandered away, before there was a fight with Constance, who was, clearly, in a snit. She went back into the hall and wondered where she could set it down, this hurt that sloshed around inside her. She glanced into the dining room and saw her mother gone from the Christmas table. She turned in to the good front room, with the cracked hearth, and walked all the way to the front window, where she set her hands on either side of the frame, facing north. The glass was as old as the house. It was her favourite thing, a fragile survivor, slubbed and thickened to gather and distort the light. Hanna tipped her forehead briefly against it as she looked out into the gloaming.

The house was disappearing around her, wall by wall.

It came to her at dinner, and she could not let it go. The knowledge that if she walked out of it now and kept walking, she could reach the famous Cliffs of Moher and there she could, unfamously, die. She looked about her, at the faces moving, the food, the candles, the glassware, the yellow of the white wine and the brown of the red. She thought about the cold outside, wondered how far the fall, how long the drop. She had her baby in her arms and they twisted slowly in the black air, drifting towards the sea, and then hitting the sea. The water was hard and the baby bounced up out of her arms and they were swamped and sank, both of them, and even that sinking was just a slower fall, as they turned and found each other, and lost each other again. It was a soft and endless death — at least in her mind. The baby astonished by it, the way it was astonished by escalators, lifts, the wonder of gravity, the baby looking to Hanna and Hanna looking to the baby saying, ‘I have you. Yes!’