After the play was over, Hanna went to find the toilets, where the women were talking with such carelessness to each other, as they splashed their hands beneath the tap, or pulled some fresh towel down from the roll. Hanna didn’t want real life to start again yet. She tried to hold on to the play as they walked through the rainy streets and turned down by a big river; even though the river was exciting in the night-time, she tried to hold the play safe in her mind.
In the middle of the bridge, sitting against the balustrade, was a beggar woman who asked Hanna if she had any spare change, but Hanna didn’t have any money at all. She turned to tell her this, then stopped, because the woman had a baby — this old, dirty woman had a real, live baby — under the plaid blanket she used for a shawl. Dan took Hanna’s arm to steer her forward, and Isabelle smiled.
‘Hold on a minute,’ she said, and she went back to drop a coin.
Dan’s flat was above a hardware shop. They stopped at a little door and went up the narrow staircase to the first floor, where there was a large room with a kitchenette and a sofa for Hanna to sleep on. The sofa had square steel legs and nubbly brown cushions. Hanna rolled out her sleeping bag and took off her shoes, then she climbed into it, and took off her trousers inside, extracting them up out of the mouth of the bag. She reached down again to get her socks, but it was a bit tight in there, and she ended up just pushing them off with her toes. It was the same sleeping bag of dark blue nylon that Emmet brought to the Pope’s Mass and Hanna thought she could smell the cigarettes he had smoked that night. She imagined how jealous he would be of all she had to tell, now.
Hanna got off the bus and made her way down Curtin Street, up over the humpy bridge home. The house looked very empty and she went around the back where Emmet had a den out in the garage, but he wasn’t there. He was in the broken greenhouse with a new batch of kittens, the mother cat stiff with fury outside the door.
Hanna told him about the girlfriend.
‘So much for that,’ he said, getting to his feet.
‘It’s not like it used to be,’ she said. ‘They encourage you to date girls, until you take your final vows.’
‘Date,’ said Emmet.
‘What?’
‘Date?’
He took her ear and twisted it.
‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Emmet.’
Emmet liked to watch her face when he hurt her, to see what it might do. He was more curious than cruel, really.
‘Did she stay?’
‘Who?’
‘The girlfriend?’
‘No, she did not stay. What do you mean, “stay”?’
‘Did she sleep with him?’
‘God almighty, Emmet. Of course not. I was in the next room.’
She did not tell him how beautiful Isabelle was: how Dan sat after she was gone and took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
Hanna went into the house through the back door, along the passage, with its washing machine and coal store and apple store, into the big kitchen, where the heat was dying in the range. She went through to the hall, glanced into the little study, where papers fell out of their piles to make yellowed fans on the floor. There was a shaft of cold air twisting in front of the cracked hearth in the front room that was actually someone’s ghost, she thought. The house was its weirdly empty self, with their mother ‘sequestered’, as Dan used to call it. Horizontal. With her mother dead.
So Hanna went upstairs to tell her dead mother she was home, to ask if she wanted tea and to sit beside her on the bed, and then lie down, while her mother — who was warm and actually, beautifully alive — lifted the eiderdown so Hanna could spoon back into her, with her shoes stuck out over the edge of the mattress. Because Hanna was her baby girl, and she would never make her mother cry, and it was enough to lie there, and let her arm hang over the edge of the bed to stir the books piled up on the floor.
Rain on the Wind
‘Not that one,’ said her mother. ‘It’s a bit old for you.’
The cover was a girl with pale lipstick flirting with a man. ‘Drama, excitement and romance amid the terrible beauty of Galway’s Atlantic seaboard.’
‘He has a girlfriend,’ said Hanna.
‘Does he now,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Hanna.
‘Are you telling me?’ said her mother.
‘She’s really nice,’ said Hanna.
And before Hanna knew it, her mother had the covers pulled back and was off out the other side of the bed. She took off her little jacket of turquoise quilted polyester and sailed it across the bedroom on to Hanna’s lap.
‘Go on. Out!’ she said, but Hanna just slid down between the sheets, while her mother walked around the room doing things she could only guess at. It was so nice, lying there in the darkness as the hairbrush clacked on the dresser top and hair clips made their tiny, light clatter. Hanna heard the shush of a hoisted skirt and, as her mother left the room, the dull sound of something tripped against. A shoe belonging to her father, perhaps. When she was gone, Hanna rose into the bedroom light and checked by the end of the bed. There it was, kicked astray; black and polished, ready for Mass.
‘Come on now, Hanna!’
Downstairs, her mother filled the rooms again. There was housework. There was chat: ‘Tell me all about Galway, you went to see a play?’
Hanna told her about the pirate queen and about the beggar on the bridge, and her mother had the tea towel for a headscarf, and she was hobbling along saying: ‘O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all’! Hanna joined in with the poem which they had not done together since she was a little girl. Her mother told her the story about the day war was declared and she went to see Anew McMaster play Othello. She was only ten and it was in Ennis, maybe, and he was in blackface, with big hoop earrings and armlets, naked to the waist. You could feel his voice like something pushing against you in the darkness. After this, she looked at the tea towel in her hand and had it suddenly thrown into a corner by the sink, saying, ‘God, that was in my hair,’ and she wrestled out the big saucepan to boil all the kitchen cloths on the range. Before long, the whole house smelt of cooked carbolic and hot, dirty cotton. Hanna came back into the steamed up kitchen, looking for something to eat, but Constance was back up working in Dublin and the only thing cooking was dirty dish-rags. Hanna lifted the lid and looked at the grey water, with its scum of soap. Her mother was sitting at the table, looking straight ahead.
‘I thought I could do some cheese on toast,’ said Hanna and her mother said, ‘I made him. I made him the way he is. And I don’t like the way he is. He is my son and I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me either. And there’s no getting out of all that, because it’s a vicious circle and I have only myself to blame.’
This all seemed, to Hanna, either true or beside the point. But instead of telling her mother this, she said the thing she was supposed to say:
‘But you like me, Mammy.’
‘I like you now,’ said her mother.
Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the big kettle on the range.
‘Go on up to your uncle’s for me, will you?’ she said. ‘Get me some Solpadeine.’
‘You think?’
‘My head’s a fog,’ she said. And when Hanna went down to her uncle Bart’s there were new perfumes in the Medical Hall.
Dan, New York, 1991
WE ALL THOUGHT Billy was with Greg, though the truth was they had both moved on months before — if they had ever been together. It was hard to put a name on things in the East Village in those days, when everyone was dying or afraid to die, and so many were already gone — the pages of your address book scored through, your dreams surprised by the sweet and impossible faces of the dead.