The same way her own boys chatted to Dessie, coming up the path, back from hurling on a Saturday. The light clear voice of Donal, who was the spit of his father, he was his father all over again:
‘What happens to gravity in the middle of the earth, Daddy?’
‘Good question.’
‘I mean, if you went through the earth, and you were in the middle of the earth, you wouldn’t weigh anything.’
‘I don’t know. You might weigh even more.’
‘Or you might just get very small.’
‘Certainly. Certainly. That too.’
It was June. In a few weeks’ time she would bring the children down to the sea when the turf at Fanore was fragrant with clover. She could lie down on it — the low aromatic carpet of green that covered the land behind the dunes — and this year she would learn all the names. Sand pansies she knew and, further inland, the meadowsweet and woodbine, but there was a tiny yellow thing like broom that was also scented, and even the tough little succulents behind the marram called the bees through the salt air by their surprising, sweet perfume. This year she would bring a book of names and instead of sitting on the sand while the children played she would walk the turf with her head bowed. That is what she would do.
‘How did it go?’ said Dessie.
‘How did what go?’
‘The thingy.’
‘You knew?’
‘Of course I knew. I mean, I remembered. Sorry.’
‘Oh you remembered.’
‘Sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘So you should be.’
‘What thingy?’ said Rory, who was her middle child and the most considerate of the three.
‘It was fine,’ she said.
‘Of course it was fine,’ said Dessie.
‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ said Constance, who was starting to rattle the pots and pans now.
‘What thingy?’ said Rory again.
‘Nothing. Everything’s fine.’
‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ said Dessie. ‘That’s what the GP said.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yeah. He did. Remember, he said the way it moved around, that was the good thing. I mean, you’re a bit young.’
‘Am I?’ said Constance.
‘Well. That’s what he said.’
‘Oh, dear God,’ said Constance. ‘Oh dear Lord give me patience,’ and Rory slipped out of the room.
‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘No really. Fuck you! The lot of you.’
And they let her blow and stomp, they let her weep and rail, and stagger, weeping, off to the bedroom, after which Dessie went out and got fish and chips for dinner from the takeaway in town.
Later, Donal came in to read her his comic, and Rory lay behind her and stroked her hair. When they left, Dessie came in with a cup of tea and Constance said, ‘Did you save me some chips?’
‘Oh, sorry. Did you want any?’
‘Chips!?’
‘Did you want some? I can get some more.’
‘You’re all right,’ she said.
Dessie stood looking at her from the end of the bed.
‘There was a woman in front of me,’ she said. ‘And she had it.’
‘Right,’ he said, and showed willing by sitting on the edge of the mattress. But it was no use.
‘She was very big,’ said Constance. ‘I mean, big.’
‘She was probably on the medical card,’ said Dessie.
So Constance abandoned one version of her day, and told Dessie instead about the pain she had felt when she had looked at the woman’s scars, the feeling that shot down the length of her thighs. She did not know if other people felt this kind of thing; it was not something she had ever heard discussed. She said, ‘Do you ever get that? You know if you see something terrible, if one of the kids is hurt, or that time your man nearly lost the finger, with the knuckle sticking out of it — you remember? — and the whole thing dangling by a piece of skin.’
‘Run that by me again?’
‘Do you ever get that pain in your legs? Quite a sharp pain. Like, Oh no!’
‘Em. I get that, you know. That scrotum-tightening thing.’
‘Sympathy.’
‘Protection maybe. Like, hang on to your lad.’
‘Great,’ she said.
‘Or sympathy. Yeah. Maybe that’s what it is.’
And he kissed her.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
When she got up later, she hugged the boys and went to look for Shauna and found her outside, lying on the trampoline, looking at the stars. Constance clambered up there to join her, the pair of them in each other’s arms. Constance said sorry for shouting and Shauna said, ‘It’s not that. It’s not that.’ Then she had a little cry: some friend being mean to her, they could be very bitchy already, at eight and nine.
‘Never mind,’ said Constance. ‘Never mind.’
The cold webbing of the trampoline dipped and rose under them, Shauna’s hair flung back across it, fanned out by the static.
‘She’s just horrible,’ said Shauna. ‘She’s thinks she’s like the bee’s knees.’
The wind drifted up through the mesh and cooled them from below. They lay on the black expanse that rocked them lightly as they moved, and her daughter was comforted. Constance could do that much, at least. She could still do that much. And Constance was also comforted, lying on the trampoline under the stars, with her daughter in her arms.
Emmet, Ségou, Mali, 2002
THREE MONTHS AFTER Emmet moved in with her, Alice found a dog in the marketplace, or the dog found her and followed her home. It was a short-haired street dog with a dirty white pelt and a blunt face, and there was a dry, pink cyst growing from the corner of its left eye. She must have encouraged it. Emmet imagined her smiling over at the dog, then flinching when it turned to look at her. Or starting forward, her hands pressing into her cotton skirt as she crouched to talk to the dog; then reaching out to touch it, pulling back its ear to examine the bad eye.
Alice was drawn to suffering, which is why she lived near the marketplace and not on the edge of town. Emmet, too, was drawn to suffering — it was, after all, his job — and he was drawn to Alice. He did not ask why she had spoken to a dumb animal in a language that was foreign, even to the passers-by. It was her nature. And it was the dog’s nature to follow her, with one dog-brown eye more pathetic than the other.
It was the dry season and Emmet was often on the road, so he did not know how long it took him to notice the creature lying in the street outside the house, or to realise that it was always there when he opened the front gate. He seemed to forget the dog each time, and when he stepped around the stretched and panting thing it was with the sense of something he had left unsaid.
‘Stop by the dog,’ Emmet would say to his driver, meaning, ‘Don’t run over the dog.’ He assumed — if he ever gave the thing a thought — that the dog belonged to the street vendor on the corner, or that the vendor tolerated it: because street dogs don’t belong to anyone, they just desperately want to belong. So there it was — each time Emmet came back, dusty and hot, and hoping that Alice had sourced a decent Dutch beer. The dog lay on the ground like a dead dog, with its legs straight down, and its nose straight out, and only when you came close could you see the quick motion of its belly’s rise and fall. The creature did not belong in the heat, Emmet thought, any more than they did themselves: the flabby corners of its mouth pulsing pink inside black lips, the eyes squeezing painfully shut against the dust and — one of them — around the slowly expanding balloon of the cyst. Wincing, winking, squeezing tight. This difficulty gave the dog a salty air.