The baby, meanwhile, turned red and shat. The baby opened his round, red mouth, and screamed.
And Hanna — of course! — ran around doing a million things for the baby: soother, spoons, blankies, books, Calpol, wipes, socks, spare everything, spare hat, lanolin cream, cream without lanolin, because Hanna loved the baby. Loved, loved, loved him. Cared, cared, cared for him. Worried and fretted and was in charge of the baby. Because oh, if the baby lost his soother, if the baby lost his spare hat, then a hole would open in the universe and Hanna would fall through this hole and be forever lost.
When she drank a couple of Innocents-with-a-twist, pushing the buggy in the sunshine, she found they could all coexist, Hanna and the spare hat and the missing hat, and the baby, who was looking at her, and also the hole in the universe. She could keep them all in different corners of her mind, and the tension between them nice. She could make it all hum.
The other great things about the plastic bottle with Innocent on the label were a) the colour, b) the amusement factor, c) it was hers.
One day in November, when the baby was ten months old, Hanna got a Christmas card from her mother with a note at the bottom to say she was going to sell the house.
She rang Constance to say, ‘What the fuck?’
‘Oh it’s you,’ said Constance, because Hanna never rang home.
‘The fuck?’ said Hanna, and Constance said, ‘Don’t ask.’
‘It’s not true, is it?’ said Hanna.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Constance. ‘It’s not true, no. She’s just getting old.’
‘Any word from Dan?’
‘Full house this year. He’s coming home.’
The Madigans were never together, on the day. The girls always made it down, but the boys were wherever, either Claridge’s or Timbuktu. So this Christmas was going to be a big one. It was going to be a doozie. And that evening, somehow, the baby got hold of her little Innocent bottle and spat the stuff out, spilling it all down his front and, never mind the hole in the fucking universe, when Hugh smelt the alcohol off the baby’s Breton striped Petit Bateau, the world as Hanna knew it came to an end. Or seemed to come to an end. It was possible, like the time she ended up in Casualty, that when you have a baby there is no such thing as the end, there is only more of the same.
The thing was through the washing machine on the instant, so Hugh had no hard evidence. But he had the baby. He was sleeping in the baby’s room. He would not fight with Hanna, he said, but he would not leave her alone with the baby. And when it came to Christmas he would take the baby home.
Hanna said, ‘That’s a relief. No, really. Childcare. At last. Fucking fantastic.’
After two weeks of Hanna sober, they had sex in the kitchen, suddenly, they ended up on the floor — the same place as the night she cut her head, with the same view, when she turned to the side, of white tiles. Hanna was so wet between the legs she thought it was some kind of incontinence and later, in the shower, she wondered if there was something actually wrong with her, with her body, not to mention her mind. She went out and bought two bottles of white in the off-licence, because she’d got the drinking thing under control now and, after she opened the second one, the shouting started all over again.
‘I need a job,’ said Hanna. ‘I just need a fucking job.’
After she left college, Hanna formed a fringe company with some like-minded souls, who failed to get funding after their second, slightly disastrous year. She broke through to the main stages with the part of a maid at the Abbey, and went straight from this to a sexy maid at the Olympia. She had a two-week break before touring a production of Hugh Leonard’s Da, in which she played the girlfriend. Well. She played the girlfriend very well. After that, another maid, but this time on the big screen. There was a showing in the Savoy on O’Connell Street, a red carpet, Hanna, sitting in the dark with Hugh, their palms wet as they held hands, then her face a mile high, and Hanna blown back in her seat by the sight of her own opening mouth.
‘I don’t know, sir. She didn’t say.’
A saucy look. Innocent. Irish. They all said, she should go to LA, she was like an Irish Vivien Leigh.
But she didn’t go to LA. It was too late for Hollywood, she was twenty-six. And besides, Hanna wanted to do proper work, real work. She wanted the thing to happen, whatever the thing was, the sudden understanding of the crowd.
She did a Feldenkrais course and a Shakespeare workshop for schools, there was a fringe production of A Long Day’s Journey that was best forgotten, and six months with a company who liked Grotowski too much ever to make it to an opening night. There was an ad for spreadable butter, a week here and there on a film; she got a whole four months on a mini series, and she was trying to break into voiceover work, for the money. Everything hustled for and flirted for. There was sexual humiliation. There was no path.
She had thought there would be a path, one that wound from the school musical all the way up to the red carpet at Cannes. But there was no path. No trajectory. No career, even. There was just Theatre, darling.
She still needed it.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
At the age of thirty-seven, Hanna’s dreams were rich — as was her drinking, indeed — with applause. Or booing, more often. Missed cues, lost props, stage fright. Hanna was wearing a pyjama top with a crinoline, she was in the wrong play and even in the right play, she had forgotten to learn her lines. That evening, with Hugh blank-eyed, slumped on the sofa, she pawed her way along the living room wall. She pushed her cheek against it and dragged her face along, not sure who she was playing this time. Some madwoman. Ophelia, undone.
Undone.
‘Terrific,’ said Hugh, who hated her and slept with her anyway, even that evening, with the smear of her spit drying on the wall downstairs.
Or loved her. Because he said that he loved her. It came out of him while he was fucking her.
I love, I lov, I luh.
The next morning, Hanna packed to go down home. She stood in front of the wardrobe and went through the hangers, trying to figure out what to bring. Her mother hated her in black, and Hanna had nothing but black to wear. She thought a few scarves might break it up, or some loud beads, though she could never tie a scarf, it always looked wrong. Hanna put one top against her and then another, checking in the mirror. She caught sight of her face and thought it was possible, it was more than possible that the theatre was finished for her now. Hanna had the wrong face for a grown-up woman, even if there were parts for grown-up women. The detective inspector. The mistress. No, Hanna had a girlfriend face, pretty, winsome and sad. And she was thirty-seven.
She had run out of time.
She dumped both tops in the suitcase, and threw the hangers on the bed. Hugh was standing there, against the wall of Prussian Blue, and when the baby fought for her she took him from his father. Just for a little while. As she brought him towards her, the skin of her chest seemed to sing; a clamorous want for the baby hit her everywhere the baby would be in her arms. And then she had him, and they were calm.
‘Remember when we took him down to my mother’s,’ she said. ‘That first time? Because the stupid bitch couldn’t come up to Dublin, and “how many bedrooms did you say you had?” Remember we went down there and it was sunny all the way to the other side of Ennis, and then the heavens opened just outside Islandgar, and he liked it. The rain bucketing down, and I couldn’t see through the windscreen. He didn’t like the new car seat, or there was something wrong with him, until the rain came pelting on to the roof. You said, “Pull over, pull over!” and I said I couldn’t pull over because I couldn’t see where I was going in all the rain, there was just two inches of clear windscreen, after the wiper blade, this little slice, and even that just showed you more rain. The noise of it. And inside the car so silent, and I was still driving. I said, “It’s like a dream.” Remember?’