Foster

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can use the toilet past our room but there’s a chamber pot there too, if you’d prefer.’

‘I’ll be alright,’ I say.

‘Is your mammy alright?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your mammy. Is she alright?’

‘She used to get sick in the mornings but now she doesn’t.’

‘Why isn’t the hay in?’

‘She hasn’t enough to pay the man. She only just paid him for last year.’

‘God help her.’ She smoothes the sheet across me, pleats it. ‘Do you think she would be offended if I sent her a few bob?’

‘Offended?’

‘Do you think she’d mind?’

I think about this for a while, think about being my mother. ‘She wouldn’t but Da would.’

‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘Your father.’

She leans over me then and kisses me, a plain kiss, and says good-night. I sit up when she is gone and look around the room. Trains of every colour race across the wallpaper. There are no tracks for these trains but here and there a small boy stands off in the distance, waving. He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for every version of him. I roll onto my side and, though I know she wants neither, wonder if my mother will have a girl or a boy this time. I think of my sisters who will not yet be in bed. They will have thrown their clay buns against the gable wall of the outhouse, and when the rain comes, the clay will soften and turn to mud. Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

I stay awake for as long as I can, then make myself get up and use the chamber pot, but only a dribble comes out. I go back to bed, more than half afraid, and fall asleep. At some point later in the night – it feels much later – the woman comes in. I grow still and breathe as though I have not wakened. I feel the mattress sinking, the weight of her on the bed.

‘God help you, Child,’ she say. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’

3

I wake in this new place to the old feeling of being hot and cold, all at once. Mrs Kinsella does not notice until later in the day, when she is stripping the bed.

‘Lord God Almighty,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Would you look?’ she says.

‘What?’

I want to tell her, right now, to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over.

‘These old mattresses,’ she says, ‘they weep. They’re always weeping. What was I thinking of, putting you on this?’

We drag it down the stairs, out into the sunlit yard. The hound comes up and sniffs it, ready to cock his leg.

‘Get off, you!’ she shouts in an iron voice.

‘What’s all this?’ Kinsella has come in from the fields.

‘It’s the mattress,’ she says. ‘The bloody thing is weeping. Didn’t I say it was damp in that room?’

‘In fairness,’ he says, ‘you did. But you shouldn’t have dragged that down the stairs on your own.’

‘I wasn’t on my own,’ she says. ‘I had help.’

We scrub it with detergent and hot water and leave it there in the sun to dry.

‘That’s terrible,’ she says. ‘A terrible start, altogether. After all that, I think we need a rasher.’

She heats up the pan and fries rashers and tomatoes cut in halves with the cut side down. She likes to cut things up, to scrub and have things tidy, and to call things what they are. ‘Rashers,’ she says, putting the rashers on the spitting pan. ‘Run out there and pull a few scallions, good girl.’

I run out to the vegetable garden, pull scallions and run back in, fast as I can, as though the house is on fire and it’s water I’ve been sent for. I’m wondering if there’s enough but the woman laughs.

‘Well, we’ll not run short, anyhow.’

She puts me in charge of the toast, lighting the grill for me, showing how the bread must be turned when one side is brown, as though this is something I haven’t ever done but I don’t really mind; she wants me to get things right, to teach me.

‘Are we ready?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

‘Good girl. Go out there and give himself a shout.’

I go out and call the call my mother taught me, up the fields. ‘Coo hooooooooooo!’

Kinsella comes in a few minutes later, laughing. ‘Now there’s a shout and a half,’ he says. ‘I doubt there’s a child in Wexford with a finer set of lungs.’ He washes his hands and dries them, sits in at the table and butters his bread. The butter is soft, slipping off the knife, spreading easily.

‘They said on the early news that another striker is dead.’

‘Not another?’

‘Aye. He passed during the night, poor man. Isn’t it a terrible state of affairs?’

‘God rest him,’ the woman says. ‘It’s no way to die.’

‘Wouldn’t it make you grateful, though?’ he says. ‘A man starved himself to death and here I am on a fine day wud two women feeding me.’

‘Haven’t you earned it?’ the woman says.

‘I don’t know have I,’ he says. ‘But it’s happening anyway.’