‘I like to know where I am,’ she said to the dentist, who promised to stuff her with local anaesthetic. Then she got up out of the chair, her jaw banging like a gong, and she got into the car, and drove back home.
Her mother was outraged.
‘You should have called me,’ she said. But Rosaleen liked to say things like that, when the opportunity to help was gone.
‘He cares too much,’ Constance said. ‘That’s the problem. He loves me too much,’ listening to her mother’s silence on the other end of the phone.
There was, of course, a fair amount of boasting in the complaints she made to her mother. Dessie’s caring was legendary, and Constance herself was indestructible: those two things were well known.
‘God you are indestructible,’ said Rosaleen. She made it sound like an insult.
Because Rosaleen was actually depressed, Constance thought, there was no other word for it. She was two years a widow and Constance felt her mother leaving, now, all the time.
‘So smug,’ she said, when Constance rattled on about the kids — which admittedly, she did non-stop.
‘So smug.’
Her own grandchildren.
Oh all your geese are swans.
And why not? Why not have children who were wonderful?
Everyone was so disappointed, these days, Constance thought, it was like an epidemic. Lauren was clearly disappointed with her life in Strasbourg, her Prada trousers notwithstanding. And Dessie viewed his fortieth birthday as a personal insult, he couldn’t understand it was happening to him — never mind the trips to New York and the Galway Races, and the house he was finishing now, out in Aughavanna with more space than Constance wanted or could fill. He had one of those little cherry blossoms already planted; big, solid pink pompoms on this little sapling in the middle of the lawn. Horrible. Her mother clearly thought it was all vulgarity rampant.
‘How lovely,’ she said to Dessie. Driving him up the wall.
When Constance told her mother she was getting married, Rosaleen said Dessie was ‘an eccentric choice’, which was an odd thing to say, because Dessie was just the opposite, really. Twelve years on, they were very thick.
‘Have you had enough, Desmond?’
Sometimes Constance felt she was actually in the way.
‘Cut him another slice of that cake, Constance. Will you have another slice of cake?’
Her mother would put her hand lightly to Dessie’s forearm, she would glance over her shoulder at him, with some backward-flung piece of charm. It was a hoot to watch the pair of them. Two drinks and they’d be off laughing in a corner: Dessie buttered up, plumped up, lifting the jacket on to her shoulders from the back of the chair, ‘You have to hand it to her’, as though Rosaleen was an opponent worth considering, for a man like Dessie. Then, as soon as he was through his own front door, saying, ‘That woman’, because she had played him, yet again.
Though she managed it less and less, it had to be said, since her own husband died.
Constance was very worried about Rosaleen. She was still out in the old house in Ardeevin and it was still letting in the rain, she had a hundred small things wrong with her, none of which you could name. This had always been the way with Rosaleen, but she went to some new quack in Ennis who told her not to eat broccoli, or to eat lots of broccoli, Constance could never remember which. The GP, meanwhile, said her bloods were coming back fine, so Rosaleen was fighting with the GP whom she had never liked — nor his father before him, she said. Everything was off. She was tired all the time.
The stupid thing was that if you agreed that there was, clearly, something wrong with her, Rosaleen would snap that she was perfectly fine. Or if, in the middle of some intense medical discussion, you suggested she get a scan of the offending organ, whichever one it was, then Rosaleen would look quietly affronted, because of course the thing that was wrong with her was not the sort of thing you could just see with a machine.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she would say, turning to look out the window, and a small smile would come, as though she enjoyed being so misunderstood.
Constance did not think there was a cure for grief, but she did think an anti-depressant might cut the worst of it. She was on a little Seroxat herself, since her father got sick and she wouldn’t be without it, but it was not something you could ever suggest to your mother.
Daddy said he felt fine.
‘I feel absolutely fine,’ he had said. Twelve months and two courses of chemo later, he was dead. So a healthy man was in the ground, and a woman who felt mysteriously unwell was driving about the countryside, switching on the windscreen wipers every time she wanted to turn left. Coming home, then, to a house that was falling down around her ears.
Dessie wanted to develop a site out at Boolavaun, that was one of the things Rosaleen teased him about, he had some scheme. He would get the cash to her, and Rosaleen would sign the land over — he would buy it, in effect — and the money would plug the holes in her roof and keep her in nice skin cream. But Rosaleen seemed to like the holes in her roof. She seemed to like saying, ‘What will I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She liked panicking with pots and buckets and having them all run around for her, calling Constance every time it rained. Calling Constance when the mousetrap went off, saying, ‘I think it’s a rat.’
Constance who had cancer. Or who did not have cancer.
What was the word she was looking for?
‘No.’
What do you mean, ‘No’?
‘No, I am busy. No, I have more important things on. No, I will not do this for you now. No.’
‘Margaret Dolan!’
The woman beside Constance lunged towards the floor to gather her basket and her bag and her empty water bottle, and her gown opened to show her back, which was creamy and huge. Constance had the urge to touch it. She wanted to lay her head on the expanse of it, say, ‘Stop. Hush.’ And when Margaret Dolan paused, she would reach down to take her scarred and pudgy hand, and feel her own hand squeezed in return.
‘OK,’ said Margaret Dolan and she heaved herself, with some difficulty, up off the seat.
‘Well,’ she said, turning slightly to Constance. ‘Here goes nothin’!’
‘Take it easy now,’ said Constance.
The empty space she left behind was still occupied by the sharp, peculiar smell of her sweat.
‘Keep drinking the water!’ said Constance, at the last minute, just before the door closed, and the woman from Adare shot a small glance her way.
It was true.
All Constance wanted to do was to make people happy. Why was it her job to fix them? Not one of the people she cared so much about knew where she was, right now. There wasn’t a sinner to remember that she had a mammogram today, or enquire how it had gone, and a terrible sharp desire came over Constance to be told the lump was malignant, so she could say to Dessie, ‘You know where I was this morning?’ and tell her mother, ‘Yes Mammy, cancer, they saw it on the scan’, then wait for the news to filter, finally, through to Lauren, Eileen, Martha Hingerty: who would then be obliged to call, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I just heard.’
There it was.
She was in the room and there it was: a picture of her breast was pinned on to a light-box on the wall and, on her breast, which was a network of white lines and intersections, was a lump: it looked like a knot, a snarl of light. And everything around it — the exterior line of the breast, the map of ducts, or veins, perhaps — was very beautiful, like a landscape seen from space, one of those pictures of the earth taken at night.