The Green Road by Anne Enright Read Free Book Online Page A

the phone.’
    This was when they were walking back uptown.
    ‘Is there something wrong?’ Billy said.
    ‘What do you mean, something wrong? I can’t walk that fast, any more.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I am not asking for you to be sorry, I am asking for you to slow down.’
    Billy did slow down and then he stopped.
    ‘Greg?’
    Greg turned.
    ‘What?’ he said.
    ‘Oh my God.’
    Billy, to Greg’s great surprise, was devastated. He twisted around, and around again, as though looking for a missing chair. He stood in the street and looked at Greg, then he lifted his hands to cover his eyes. He started to cry.
    ‘Oh my God, Greg. Oh my God.’
    ‘Well, what did you expect?’ said Greg.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Billy. ‘I just didn’t. I didn’t expect.’
    They went to one bar, and then another and they got very drunk. At one point, Billy wept and Greg comforted him, looking up at the ceiling as he rocked him briefly in his arms, thinking, ‘But I am the one. I am the one who is going to die.’
    Through all those years, whenever Greg looked into the mirror at his changing face, he thought about Christian and wondered if his lover would be proud of him now. After he and Billy had finished their mercy fuck (drunk – yes – but careful, so careful) he went into the bathroom and checked his skin for black marks and looked into his own eyes and he remembered just how dead Christian was, after he died. There was no one looking at him in the mirror, except himself.
    It was hard to cry when there was no one watching, he thought, then he brushed his teeth and went back to bed.
    In the months that followed, they were often on the phone. When Greg lost weight, Billy took him out shopping for smaller jeans. He brought up wine and treats from the local deli which quite quickly turned into ordinary bags of food.
    ‘Just the heavy stuff,’ he said, smiling at Greg’s door that was three flights up – not even breathless after the climb.
    ‘You shouldn’t have.’
    ‘I want to.’
    And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.
    Which did not mean that Greg was easy. The groceries were always wrong, for a start. Billy could never tell what was fun trashy food – like Oreos, say – and what was just trash.
    ‘You call this stuff cheese ?’
    In fact, there was no Indian prince at Massimo’s on Thursday evening. There was a very nice risotto, which Billy personally found a bit disappointing.
    ‘It’s a bit like . . . rice?’ he said.
    Massimo’s boyfriend Alex was in from the west coast and he brought a rather grizzled Ellen Derrick, who stuck to gin and smoked throughout. Jessie was there, of course, as was Greg. There was a wonderful Dominican boy who said very little and, as Jessie later pointed out, only ate three grains of rice all night. There was Arthur, who had aged so much since Max died. And there was an Irish guy, called Dan, who had sandy hair you might flatter to red and beautiful, pale skin.
    Massimo’s place on Broome Street was an old sweatshop and its floor was made from two foot wide hardwood boards. He had factory windows that kept nothing in or out – not the heat, the cold, nor the noise of the printworks two floors below – but were beautiful nonetheless, each one of them dividing the dusk into thirty rectangles of fading light. Inside, he had many candles and a table so long and monastic that eight people felt like few. The place had cast-iron columns, Marsalis was on the stereo and a long scribbled piece by Helen Frankenthaler took up an entire cross-wall. After the risotto came noisettes of lamb with roast garlic and a mint-pea purée, which Massimo served with a Saumur-Champigny that was like an elevator in a glass, as Greg said,