Foster

‘Mammy says I have to change my pants every day.’

‘And what else does your mammy say?’

‘She says you can keep me for as long as you like.’

She laughs at this and brushes the knots out of my hair, and turns quiet. The windows in this room are open and through these I see a stretch of lawn, a vegetable garden, edible things growing in rows, red spiky dahlias, a crow with something in his beak which he slowly breaks in two and eats, one half and then the other.

‘Come down to the well with me,’ she says.

‘Now?’

‘Does now not suit you?’

Something about the way she says this makes me wonder if it’s something we are not supposed to do.

‘Is this a secret?’

‘What?’

‘I mean, am I not supposed to tell?’

She turns me round, to face her. I have not really looked into her eyes, until now. Her eyes are dark blue pebbled with other blues. In this light she has a moustache.

‘There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?’

I don’t want to answer back but feel she wants an answer.

‘Do you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s not “yeah”. It’s “yes”. What is it?’

‘It’s yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, there are no secrets in this house.’

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame, and shame is something we can do without.’

‘Okay.’ I take big breaths so I won’t cry.

She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’

As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.

Downstairs, she fetches the zinc bucket from the scullery and takes me down the fields. At first I feel uneasy in the strange clothes but walking along I forget. Kinsella’s fields are broad and level, divided in strips with electric fences she says I must not touch, unless I want a shock. When the wind blows, sections of the longer grass bend over, turning silver. On one strip of land, tall Friesian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass but not one of them moves away. They have huge bags of milk and long teats. I can hear them pulling the grass up from the roots. The breeze, crossing the rim of the bucket, whispers as we walk along. Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy. As soon as I have this thought I realise its opposite is also true. We climb over a stile and follow a dry path worn through the grass. The path snakes through a long field over which white butterflies skim and dart, and we wind up at a small iron gate where stone steps run down to a well. The woman leaves the bucket on the grass and comes down with me.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘what water is here. Who’d ever think there wasn’t so much as a shower since the first of the month?’

I go down steps until I reach the water. I breathe and hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back. The woman stands behind, not seeming to mind each breath coming back, as though they are hers.

‘Taste it,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Use the dipper.’ She points.

Hanging over us is a big ladle, a shadow cupped in the dusty steel. I reach up and take it from the nail. She holds the belt of my trousers so I won’t fall in.

‘It’s deep,’ she says. ‘Be careful.’

The sun, at a slant now, throws a rippled version of how we look back at us. For a moment, I am afraid. I wait until I see myself not as I was when I arrived, looking like a tinker’s child, but as I am now, clean, in different clothes, with the woman behind me. I dip the ladle and bring it to my lips. This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home. Then the woman pulls me back to where I am safe on the grass, and goes down alone. I hear the bucket floating on its side for a moment before it sinks and swallows, making a grateful sound, a glug, before it’s torn away and lifted.

Walking back along the path and through the fields, holding her hand, I feel I have her balanced. Without me, I am certain she would tip over. I wonder how she manages when I am not here, and conclude that she must ordinarily fetch two buckets. I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad because I can’t remember a time and happy, too, because I cannot.

That night, I expect her to make me kneel down but instead she tucks me in and tells me I can say a few little prayers in my bed, if praying is what I ordinarily do. The light of the day is still shining bright and strong. She is just about to hang a blanket over the curtain rail, to block it out, when she pauses.

‘Would you rather I left it?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you afraid of the dark?’

I want to say I am afraid but am too afraid to say so.