Where have you been, all this time?
A MAN CALLED John Fairleigh walked in to the dining room in waterproofs and hiking boots. Young, black haired, weatherbeaten; he introduced himself and went straight to the map on the table, pushed away the silver and white baubles — but carefully — and said there were more on the way, the team would be here soon.
‘Any word?’ he said. And Dan looked at him.
‘No.’
‘Is this where she liked to go?’
Emmet looked at the map.
‘Somewhere on the coast. Somewhere. Walking in circles.’
John Fairleigh said he did not think so. Their mother was not walking in circles.
‘A woman of that age, she will be moving in a linear way. She will be near the car, definitely within a kilometre of the car, probably within a hundred metres. So the first job is to find the car. And when we find the car, it’s a hundred metres, a kilometre max.’
‘Right.’
‘Not that easy, not necessarily,’ he said. ‘It’s dark. Your mother may be cold. She’s looking for shelter. A building, a barn. That’s the only thing she is thinking about now, is where to hide herself away from the cold, which means she could end up hiding from us too — behind a wall, under a bush, an old fertiliser bag. She could make herself hard to find.’
Constance was weeping.
‘But we will find her,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘No, no,’ she said, waving him on.
‘How was she in herself?’
‘Sorry?’ said Emmet.
Constance flicked a glance at her brother.
‘Hard to tell,’ he said.
‘She went for her walk. Our mother is absolutely fine,’ Constance said. ‘She went out for her walk.’
‘She’s just a wonderful person,’ Dan intervened, in a pathetic, upbeat kind of way.
‘Wonderful,’ said Emmet.
‘It’s a word,’ said Dan.
‘Yeah well,’ said Emmet. ‘Wonderful in your prime is a bit mad when you’re older, is bipolar in your fifties, maybe, and by the time you are — what age is she? — seventy-six, well by then it’s more your brain, isn’t it? It’s plaques or what have you. It’s hard to tell.’
‘She was never bipolar,’ said Constance, utterly shocked.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Not even close.’
‘Well,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘It’s hard. Old age is hard, emotionally. It just is.’
‘I don’t know how you can say she was bipolar,’ said Constance.
‘I suppose what I am trying to ask is,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘Was she in any way despondent?’
Constance gave a small cry.
‘Please don’t take my brother’s word about this,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’
But John Fairleigh ignored them. Dan had the brief idea he was some kind of impostor.
‘Don’t worry. We had an elderly woman out for two nights running, September two years ago. And she wasn’t fantastic, in all fairness, but she was absolutely fine.’
The siblings were quiet then.
‘It’s a good clear night,’ he said, and looked at the map again. ‘Talk about Christmas.’
ROSALEEN WAS BY the little house, that was tucked into the side of the mountain. A famine cottage of tumbling-down stone, with one door one window, no roof. She could see it by starlight. She was surprised how much she could see. She could go into the little famine house and look up at the stars, there were so many of them, but first she had to cross the hungry grass in front of the doorway. There wasn’t much, just a few blades of it, and once she was across the hungry grass she would be safe from the weather. Of course, after she crossed the hungry grass then she would be hungry for ever. That was the curse of it.
Sometimes the grass was on a grave where no priest came to say prayers, because the priest was too busy, or the priest was fled. Sometimes the grass was on the threshold of a house where all the people died, with no one left to bury them, and the house fell into ruin after.
But it did not matter if she crossed the hungry grass, because she, too, was going to die. This she knew because her dead husband Pat Madigan was beside her on the road. He went so quiet when he was alive. He stopped talking. He stopped liking her. But he always loved her. And when he was young he walked that road like it belonged to him. He was king of everything green about him, king of the hedgerows, king of the sky. He picked up a stone and he flung it into the broad heavens. He flung it into the sea, where it grew into an island. Grew and grew.
Fuh fuh fuh fuh
If she bared her teeth, they clattered against each other like a pair of joke dentures, so she tried to press her lips together, to stop them cracking and breaking in her skull. The expense of it.
Fuh fuh fuh fuh
Her husband Pat Madigan was a little bit cross with Rosaleen now because Pat Madigan was a saint but he could be cranky enough, betimes. He wanted Rosaleen to crawl over the hungry grass and get in out of the cold.
‘Would you stop your romancing,’ he said. ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘Hup!’
And Rosaleen swung her arm up and put her hand down, and then the other, and she dragged her old legs through the ruined doorway of the little stone house. No roof, but a gable wall to protect her against the slice of the cold. Two little rooms, the first had something in it — she could see the pink of it in the darkness and it was toilet paper. Rosaleen backed away in fright and then crawled carefully to the left, into a second tiny room, where she turned about slowly and keeled over, curled up on the ground. She lifted her top knee a little, and put her hands between her thighs.
The ground was fine.
There was no sign of Pat Madigan. He was gone now.
After a while, she felt very good. Her brain cleared in a way that was marvellous. There were pains in her wet knees, but they did not matter. The cold was hard in her left hip and she was shaking in a way that was new to her. But the stars were lovely, she could see a piece of the heavens out of the corner of her eye, framed by the stones of the cottage wall.
If she slept now, she thought, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.
There was a medicine her father used to spoon into her when she was a child. Very pink, whatever it was. And as soon as she swallowed it — out like a light. Asleep. She often wondered what that medicine was.
Her father gave her Kaolin and Morphine for her stomach. There was great company in morphine, he used to say, it is hard to pull yourself away from it. They put Pat on it, at the end — Fentanyl patches that she stuck on his thigh. It made him happy. The morphine made him love her again, and then it made him constipated and cross. And then he died.
Rosaleen was shivering. Her body was shaking her loose, she was just holding on. She had to remember as much as possible, now, she had to be sensible. There was no such thing as hungry grass. And Pat Madigan was long dead. She had to remember everything. The names of the tablets and the names of the diseases, the names of the parts of the body that was trying to leave her now. But she had no intention of going, or of letting it go. She had no intention.
Rosaleen saw a satellite moving through a delicacy of stars above her, and it was as though she could sense the earth’s turning. She felt fine. She was out of the worst of the cold. She would have a small sleep and make her way home before morning.