He also wanted to tell her that she was lovely and eternally right and that he, Emmet, was a failure as a human being.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She was gone when he got back. There was money on the desk, for rent, which made Emmet sad, and a note on the bed he really did not want to read. Alice had the kind of handwriting that put little circles over the i’s, and sticky-out puppy tongues where the full stop should be. Alice’s handwriting made him feel like a child-molester. The note was a single sheet of paper, inside which she had written the verse everyone quotes, by Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
Emmet did not take a shower. He shoved the hat back on his head and went downstairs, calling, ‘I’ll be back late,’ and Ibrahim, who had not emerged from the kitchen since he had arrived, called back, ‘OK, Monsieur Emmet. Bonsoir!’
The Tuareg at the gate was wearing a new cloth of indigo blue, freshly dyed; for a wedding, perhaps. Original blue. The veil across the bottom of his face had stained the man’s cheeks — what Emmet could see of them — with years of dye. It occurred to Emmet that the Tuaregs came and went, that there might have been many different men at his gate, and this was why he never knew which one he was talking to and which one had poisoned the fucking dog.
Poor Mitch. Poor bastard.
Emmet went to a shebeen on the side of the marketplace and cracked a beer, watching out for the mad, sweaty guy on his left, nodding at the young lads drinking cola at the low table, and then turning, with the heels of his boots hooked on to the cross-bar of the stool, to watch the world go by.
It was all as it should be. The market was a sea of tat that nobody seemed to buy, and the vegetables were laid out on decorative cloths, like handmade things.
After a while, the bumpy woman came by; the one who was covered in tiny lumps, from the top of her head to the underside of her heels. She turned, as she passed, to level at Emmet a smile of great sweetness and sympathy. Emmet gave her a wan smile back and she continued on, gravely smooth, as though there was a pot balanced on her head.
Rosaleen, Ardeevin, 2005
IN NOVEMBER OF 2005 Rosaleen decided to do her Christmas cards, which were few enough, and most of them local. Not, she thought, that she would be getting many back this year, as people died off, or their habits died off, through forgetfulness or the neglect of their families who would not think to go down to the post office and buy them a book of stamps.
The cards were small and square shaped with ‘Merry Christmas’ written in copperplate writing across the top. All of them were the same design: a block of red, and on it a brown dune, with little camels and kings drawn on the sand in black ink. Above them was the Christmas star, long — like a crucifix with added rays bursting out from the crux of it. The light of the star was made with the white of the paper itself. The printer just left a gap.
The cards were very simple but they were good cards. The red was very satisfying; not so much a sky as a background, like something you would see in a Matisse. Vermilion. Rosaleen closed her eyes in pleasure at a word she had not expected and at the memory of Matisse: a red room with a woman sitting in it, from a postcard or a library book, perhaps. Years since she had given it a thought, and there the woman still sat in her head, waiting to surprise her for never having left. Waiting for her moment, which was an ordinary moment — half past four on a Thursday in November, the sun about to set, sinking towards New York and, below New York as the world turned, all of America.
Straight across the ocean.
‘As the crow flies,’ said Rosaleen, only to hear an embarrassment of silence around her. The radio dead. Not even a cat, curled up in the chair.
‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn,’ she said, also out loud, and looked to the darkening window where her reflection was beginning to shadow the pane. Or someone’s shadow. An image thin and insubstantial, like something that happened in the camera once, her dog superimposed on the view of St Peter’s Square, after her mother died, when they went to Rome. And the dog, who missed them terribly, came through the photographs, running towards them on the green road beyond Boolavaun.
Rosaleen looked to the window and stood to her full height.
‘Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair!
Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!’
Her voice worked perfectly. Rosaleen set the cards on the table and sat down to write.
The kitchen was the easiest room in the house, with the heat of the range and two windows, one facing south and the other west. But it was November, and there were days when she filled a hot water bottle just to make it down the hall. Outside, she had a winter flowering cherry set against the silhouetted winter branches, but it would not bloom for many weeks yet. Meanwhile, she had no evergreens, for being too depressing, and every November she thought about a blue spruce, or those needle-thin Italian pines, and every November she decided against. It was an Irish garden. A broadleaf garden, except for the monkey puzzle at the front of the house. Straggly now — there were dead and half dead branches for fifty feet or more, but it was her father’s tree and nothing gave her more pleasure. The monkey puzzle was allowed, as Dan used to say.
‘That’s allowed.’
Ah. But was talking aloud allowed?
Rosaleen smiled. She picked up one of the cards and saw it again through Dan’s eyes. Because it was Dan — of course it was — who sent the postcard of the woman in the red room. It had lived on the fridge door for years. Dan, she thought, would like the little red Christmas card, that made no claims, that was innocent and tasteful enough. For an utterly pretentious boy, he was very set against pretension. Much fuss to make things simple. That was his style.
And it was also her style. Rosaleen opened the card to check. ‘Beannachtaí na Nollag’ the greeting said, in Irish, which was all lovely and just right for an American mantelpiece, whatever his mantel looked like these days. Granite, perhaps. Or none, the fireplace a simple square cut in a white wall. Rosaleen set the card flat and lifted her pen with a flourish — a special gel pen she had bought in the new supermarket.
‘My darling Dan,’ she wrote, and then she paused and looked up.
After a moment she saw what her eyes lingered upon: a shelf for the radio and for bills, and above that, a clock stopped these five years or more, the face sticky with cooking grease. The wall itself was a dusty rose, a colour which was unremarkable most of the day and then wonderful and blushing as the sun set. Like living in a shell. Under that was the 1970s terracotta, Tuscan Earth it was called, up on a chair herself, coat after coat of it, to cover the wallpaper beneath, fierce yellow repeats of geometric flowers that kept breaking through. And under the wallpaper? She could not recall. The whole place should be stripped and done properly or — better yet — the wall turned to glass, dissolved: it would be a kind of rapture, the house assumed into heaven. Like who? Our Lady of Loreto, of course. Her house flying through blue Italian skies. The patron saint of air hostesses everywhere. Because Everywhere is the place that air hostesses like to be.
There was nothing that lifted Rosaleen’s heart like the sight of a plane in the summer sky.