The Green Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

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