Emmet went about the place, pulling open drawers, throwing some bits into a bag, which was a woven polyester conference bag with World Food Programme written on the flap. A couple of polo shirts, underwear and socks, a paperback from his bedside locker, his phone. He ducked into the en-suite bathroom to get his his toothbrush and deodorant.
‘Sounds like the business,’ Emmet said. He was slipping a hand under the mattress for his passport when he realised that he was just going down the road, in Ireland.
‘Yes,’ said Denholm, who could not keep the Christmas loneliness out of his voice.
And, ‘Wow,’ Emmet said, as he cast about him for nothing, trying to hide his sudden mortification at the fact that he was leaving Denholm alone. After all the hospitality he himself had been offered, in so many towns. Why did he not invite him home for his dinner? He just couldn’t.
It was not a question of colour (though it was also a question of colour), even Saar was out of the question — Saar with her Dutch domestic virtues, who would clear the dishes and wash the dishes, and sing as she swept the fallen tinsel off the floor. Christmas dinner, for Emmet’s family, was thicker than Kenyan blood soup, so none of the people that Emmet liked best could be there, nor even the people he might enjoy. The only route to the Madigans’ Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.
I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.
Hanna wasn’t even bringing the father of her child.
High standards at the Madigans’ dining room table. Keep ’em high.
‘Is the tram running tomorrow?’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denholm, who would be trapped for Christmas Day on a housing estate off the N7, and he went downstairs, offering tea.
Emmet blamed his mother. You could tell Rosaleen about disease, war and mudslides and she would look faintly puzzled, because there were, clearly, much more interesting things happening in the County Clare. Even though nothing happened — she saw to that too. Nothing was discussed. The news was boring or it was alarming, facts were always irrelevant, politics rude. Local gossip, that is what his mother allowed, and only of a particular kind. Marriages, deaths, accidents: she lived for a head-on collision, a bad bend in the road. Her own ailments of course, other people’s diseases. Mrs Finnerty’s cousin’s tumour that turned out to be just a cyst. Her back, her hip, her headaches, and the occasional flashing light when she closed her eyes — ailments that were ever more vague, until, one day, they would not be vague at all. They would be, at the last, entirely clear.
‘I was going to bring my housemate,’ said Emmet in the kitchen, a couple of hours later. ‘He’s having a rough time.’
‘Oh?’ said Rosaleen.
‘His mother just died.’
‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen loved a good tragedy. Tears — actual tears — came to her eyes.
‘And his sister and her baby are HIV positive.’
‘Oh.’
Though perhaps this was not the right kind of tragedy, after all.
‘I see.’
His mother seemed smaller than he remembered. Her skin was so thin, Emmet was afraid to touch in case she bruised. Not that anyone ever touched her — except Constance perhaps. Rosaleen did not like to be touched. She liked the thing Dan did, which was to conjure the air around her, somehow, making it special. When Hanna went to greet her, there was a big mistimed clash of cheekbones.
‘Oh.’
‘Ow.’
This was before they were over the threshold. Rosaleen opened the front door looking terrific. She had a crisp white shirt on, with a neat collar and her mid-length string of pearls. A slightly rakish pair of argyle socks showed between black trousers and tasselled loafers, her hair was a shining platinum from her special shampoo. And when Hanna reached up to kiss all this, their faces clashed at the bone.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
Rosaleen’s precision turning, as ever, into a kind of general difficulty for them all.
‘Yes I am fine,’ and then, ‘Where’s the baby?’
Even though Emmet had told her there would be no baby.
‘He’s with Hugh,’ said Hanna, after a pause.
‘What a pity,’ said their mother. ‘Oh well.’
And she looked at her daughter as though she, alone, would have to do.
Hanna had slept the whole way down in the car. The baby had kept her awake all night, she said — a little petulantly — and though his little sister annoyed him, Emmet felt sorry for her, freshly woken and bedraggled as she was, on their mother’s doorstep.
‘I told you,’ he said to Rosaleen.
‘Did you? Maybe you did.’ And then, a little sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
She was an impossible woman. Emmet did not know why it was his job to keep his mother in line — he just couldn’t help it. He could not bear the unreality she fomented about her. Emmet could not understand why the truth was such a problem to Rosaleen, why facts were an irrelevance, or an accusation. He did not know what she was skittering away from, all the time.
‘A baby can’t have AIDS,’ she said, with some finality.
‘They did the test at the maternity clinic — an Irish nun, actually.’
‘A nun?’ she said.
‘Yes, in Kenya,’ said Emmet.
‘Oh.’
Rosaleen considered all this for a moment.
‘And is he from Kenya?’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Your housemate?’
‘He is. Yes, he is Kenyan.’
‘I see,’ she said and shifted her hips to one side on the chair.
‘Are you making that cup of tea?’ she said, suddenly, looking over her shoulder at Hanna. And Hanna, who was, in fact, spooning the leaves into the pot, paused for a micro rage with the caddy in her hand.
‘There is a child,’ Rosaleen said, turning carefully back to the table. ‘On the autistic spectrum. He was born to one of the people who run the Spar.’ And then, as a concession. ‘She is an Estonian, would you believe. And the husband is very nice. From Kiev.’
But Emmet was already bored by the game. He was a grown man. He was trying to expose the foolishness of a woman who was seventy-six years old. A woman who was, besides, his mother.
‘It’s a long way,’ he said. ‘From Kiev to County Clare.’
He could see the next couple of days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath was doing, what everything was worth these days — more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church — because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground.
Hanna put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and the smell of it rising through the house woke Dan and brought him downstairs. She heard his step outside the kitchen door and knew it immediately — she had kept the rhythm of his footfall inside her, all these years.