The remarkable thing was the way Rosaleen’s children spent such enormous amounts of energy getting themselves, in one way or another, turned down by her too. Even the money she gave them felt like a coldness, once the house was gone.
Emmet, who had seen so much injustice in the world, had to remind himself as he checked his bank account — and then pulled back from the screen to check it again — that his mother never killed anyone. And yet, her children thought she was ‘terrible’. Her eldest daughter, especially, felt, as she tended her, supplicatory, rejected.
‘Mammy would you like a biscuit with that?’
‘A biscuit? Oh no.’
Rosaleen, who was so needy, was always telling you to go away. So when she was, for those few wonderful months after the green road, easy to love, her children were utterly beguiled.
Paying Attention
EMMET WALKED IN to the house on Verschoyle Gardens one Saturday afternoon in November, to find his mother sitting in the kitchen with Denholm.
‘How are you, Emmet?’ said Denholm. ‘Your mother has arrived. I made a cup of tea.’
‘Mam,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the N7,’ she said. ‘I thought I would run out of petrol.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘Evidently,’ she said. ‘Would you check the handbrake? I am always afraid that thing will roll away on me.’
‘You drove,’ he said. Her car was in the driveway. Emmet had seen it, he realised. He had noted it in passing: There’s Rosaleen’s car.
‘Yes! My goodness. And the fields flooded everywhere. I saw two swans paddling into a barn outside Saggart. But the roads are all very different these days. You know I haven’t done that journey in so many years, I can’t think when I did it last.’
She laughed, towards Denholm, a light little trill of hilarity.
Emmet put his bags of shopping down on the counter and took his phone out of his pocket. Right enough, the thing was jammed with missed calls and text messages: Hanna, Dessie, Dessie, Dessie, Hanna.
Nothing from Constance.
‘I should have been up before, you know, I have been very remiss.’
‘Rosaleen,’ he said.
His mother turned to Denholm.
‘I never liked Dublin.’
‘Really?’
‘It was always so dirty. Dear dirty Dublin, that’s what we used to say. But Hanna too, you know,’ she said to Emmet. ‘I should have been up here, for the baby. I do love that baby.’
‘You are the grandmother,’ said Denholm.
‘Well indeed,’ she said. And the little laugh was back again, her body light and tiny in the chair as she rocked forward to touch Denholm on the forearm.
There was a pause then, as she considered what she had just done.
‘Your sister’s baby. How is your sister’s baby?’ she said.
‘The baby is very well, thank you.’
She’s here, Emmet texted to them all, and could not think what else to say. His mother was exerting the full of her charm on a Kenyan, in his kitchen.
‘You’re here,’ he said.
‘Yes!’ she said, and there was a slight manic gleam to her eye. ‘I came to see you.’
She looked at her son, she looked him straight in the eye, and for a moment, Emmet felt himself to be known. Just a glimmer and then it was gone.
‘And it is such a nice house. Such a nice road. I didn’t realise there were houses like this, just off the motorway. You never know what is behind the trees.’
‘I am sorry we only have tea,’ said Denholm.
‘Oh. Sorry. Yes,’ said Emmet, turning to the shopping bags. ‘Biscuits! We’re not really a biscuit house except for Denholm, he is addicted to those Belgian things with the chocolate.’
‘Not for me! I never had a sweet tooth.’ She put her hand on Denholm’s forearm again and this time, as though surprised, she let it rest there. The veins of her old hand were purple under the thin white skin, and the surface of Denholm’s arm very opaque by comparison. Rosaleen reached for Denholm’s hand, quite slowly. She held it up off the table and ran a curious finger along the side of it, where the dark brown of his skin gave way, in a line, to the lighter shade of his palm.
Emmet nearly died, he said later. I nearly died.
‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.
Denholm pulled his hand gently away, and curled it into a loose fist on the tabletop.
‘Why have I not seen it before?’
‘Rosaleen,’ said Emmet.
‘Why have I not seen that before?’ she said. She was quite fretful now. ‘Why do you think that is?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Emmet.
And Denholm, in a rush of compassion, held both his hands out to her and turned them palm up and then palm down.
‘Please don’t listen to my mother,’ said Emmet.
Rosaleen gathered herself then and glanced down at her lap.
Her car keys were on the table in front of her and she picked them up, in a decisive way. Emmet thought she was about to leave again and he started forward from his place at the counter, but she just clicked the remote. An electronic squawk came from the car outside.
‘My bag is in the boot,’ she said.
Emmet stopped where he was.
‘Right,’ he said.
And his mother reached for her cup of tea.
‘Everyone is looking for you, Rosaleen. Constance is beside herself.’
‘Oh Constance,’ she said, in a tone of great exasperation.
And it occurred to Emmet that Constance had not, in fact, phoned.
‘What do you mean, Constance?’
His mother looked terrible, suddenly. There were shadows like bruises under her eyes, and the eyes themselves all pupil; black as black glass. Tears came. She leaned in to Denholm.
‘Constance threw me out,’ she said.
And Denholm said, ‘Your daughter? Oh no. Oh no. That is pretty bad.’
For a long and amazing moment, Emmet thought it was true.
Later, he rang his sister’s phone in Aughavanna, and Dessie picked up. She could not be disturbed, he said. She was in bed.
‘OK,’ said Emmet, moving into the living room, pacing about.
Constance wasn’t well.
‘Right.’
Dessie’s voice trembled a little. She’s had a diagnosis, he said. They would operate pretty much immediately and get the lot of it in one go, but it was major — Dessie paused at the word — major surgery, and when she told Rosaleen this morning, Rosaleen took it all the wrong way. She lit out the road and Constance was frantic, she was more concerned about her mother than she was for herself. She was under the doctor now, pumped full of Ativan. And it was typical of Rosaleen, Emmet could hear a slur in his voice, whiskey perhaps — chypical — to cause the maximum bother at just the wrong time.
‘It’s all about her,’ he said, as though he had a right to say such a thing. ‘It’s all about her.’
Emmet had a sharp urge to defend his mother.
Dessie fucking McGrath.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, Constance. Oh, no.’
‘Can you hang on to her?’ said Dessie. As if Emmet had an option.
‘Of course. Of course,’ as he rolled his eyes and walked the living room, wondering what he had to cancel at work — the hundred thousand people on the side of a road in Aceh, perhaps — and if there was a set of clean sheets to be had. His mother sleeping in his bed. It was an odd thought.