Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘She might have gone in the back door,’ she said.

‘We should be looking for the car.’

The bottom of the door was rotted away and covered with boards of thin plywood. Hanna bent down and pulled one away and, ‘Hold your horses,’ he said, but she was already crawling through it, into the little porch, across lino that was multicoloured, like a scattering of sweets. This was the floor she remembered from her childhood. She stood up in the little space and opened the door into the kitchen.

She cried out. ‘Ferdy!’

She called out for his help, even though she did not like the man much.

‘Ferdy!’

His wide torch flashed at the window and the place was weakly illuminated. An old table, cupboard doors hanging open, the rusted hulk of the range. Hanna saw it all in shapes and shadows, the floor crackling with grit beneath her feet. So many things had happened in this place, and nothing much happened. People grew up and moved away. Her granny died.

Passions. Impossibilities.

The push of it.

‘Are you right?’ The torch left the window and she heard Ferdy walk along by the wall of the house. A long silence then the loud jiggle of the latch on the back door.

‘She’s not here,’ she said, and she backed slowly out, hunkering down. ‘She’s not here.’

When they got back in the car and Ferdy looked across at her in the passenger seat.

‘You have her eyes,’ he said. ‘You know that. She was a powerful woman, a great woman, your grandmother. She was a cousin of my mother’s — but you know that too, sure.’

Hanna thought he might touch her then, but something queered the impulse and he shoved up the lever beside the steering wheel instead, indicating to no one his intention to pull back out on the road.

A mile further on, they saw Rosaleen’s car, beached on the ditch, with the front door hanging open and the inside light still on.

The call came into Ardeevin, just before midnight. The car was found.

Hanna was calling for her mother. Emmet could hear her down the line, a tiny pathetic sound.

Mama, Mama.

Ferdy put a muffling hand over the phone, in order to shout, ‘Hang on!’

‘Don’t let her go,’ Emmet said, thinking Hanna would be the next one lost.

Constance drove the rest of them up there, the expensive car tight to the bends of the road and when she reached the spot, she pulled in behind Rosaleen’s little Citroën with sad precision. Emmet jumped out to walk around it, he pulled open the front door and checked, for no reason, under the front seats. Then he switched on the headlights and the hazard lights, and they stayed in the blinking urgency of all that, willing their mother to appear.

Rosaleen’s children stood peering and calling into the black air. She was somewhere out there, and it was unbearable. Their concern was also a concern for themselves, of course. Some infant self, beyond tears. Dan felt it like a whiteness inside his chest. A searing want.

‘Rosaleen!’

Even Emmet was surprised by the force of it, this huge need for a woman he did not think he liked, any more.

‘Mam! Mam!’

Constance ran to the nearest wall and looked over it, as though her mother was a dropped wallet or a set of keys.

‘Mammy?’ she said.

The comedy of it was not lost on them, the fact that each of her children was calling out to a different woman. They did not know who she was — their mother, Rosaleen Madigan — and they did not have to know. She was an elderly woman in desperate need of their assistance and even as her absence grew to fill the cold mountainside, she shrank into a human being — any human being — frail, mortal, old.

They stood, facing north, north-west, west, their shadows swapping on the road in front of them while Hanna’s voice came, in a wisp of sound, across the land.

‘Mama!’

There were headlights making their way up the valley from the turn-off at Ballinalackin. The cars took a long time. They drew up, and parked, or failed to find a space, blocking each other and doing three-point turns on the narrow road. Emmet knew this well, the provisional feel to large events, even when — especially when — lives were at stake. This time, however, the life was something like his own: this was the disaster he had been avoiding, in the midst of all the disasters he had sought out. This was real.

John Fairleigh walked up, glued to the phone, one arm beckoning everyone together.

‘No need for the lifeboat, now,’ he said, and the vertigo dropped through them again; their mother falling down the massive cliff face.

‘Lifeboat?’ said Constance.

‘Listen, lads,’ said John Fairleigh, generally. ‘I am going to hold you here, for a minute, all right? I don’t want anyone falling into a bog-hole, or what have you. All right? You’re going to check the road and the sides of the road. You do not go off the road. That’s what we are doing at this particular point. We are all staying on the road.’

They moved away from the frantic lights of her car, a clutch of heroically recovering alcoholics and the children of Rosaleen Madigan, while more car headlights made their slow way up from the valley. The gate was closed behind them — everyone minding their country manners, though you could barely see the surrounding countryside, you might as well have been on the moon, for all the fabled beauty of the green road.

They walked together, torch beams criss-crossing. People tripped and cursed in low voices, or they blinded each other with the glare of the lights.

‘Keep them low, lads. Give your eyes a chance.’

Constance stopped and turned off her torch, to let her sight adjust, and in a while, she could see everything. A haze of light gathered in the sky above Galway, in the far distance, but Knockauns was dark and the night above her open to an endless depth of stars.

She had been left behind, now. She was alone — Constance, who was never alone, whose mind was always full of people — and after the first pang of it, she allowed the darkness to have sway. She lifted her hands a little to test the air.

A call came through to Emmet’s phone from Ferdy McGrath, and when the line broke up they all heard him hallooing in the distance, and saw the signalling light of his torch. They picked up the pace, saw after a while the little ruined house where she must be.

Hanna was already there.

She went in through the doorway and stumbled in the rocks and rubbish in the small main room, before she looked into the smaller second room and saw the dark heap that was her mother lying on the ground.

Afterwards, neither of them could remember what they had said, except that Rosaleen kept apologising and Hanna kept reassuring.

‘Oh I am sorry.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh I am sorry.’

‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

And so the two of them continued, in a kind of bliss, as Hanna opened her coat and spread it on her mother, then laid herself down beside her, drawing Rosaleen’s hands in under her own clothes to get the heat of her bare skin, rubbing along her arms and back, and they stayed like that heedless of everything that happened around them.

Outside the house Ferdy McGrath gave the cry, while inside, Rosaleen whimpered at the pain in her hands, that were burning in the heat of Hanna’s skin.

‘Oh no!’ she said.

Hanna should have been more careful, she thought later, she might have done the wrong thing entirely, but the only thing that was on her mind was to stop the rattling in her mother’s body, so she pushed Rosaleen’s legs straight with her knees and lay alongside her, lifting her shoulders to complete the embrace and pressing her close, holding tight and then tighter as she tried to still the trembling.