Foster

All through the day, I help the woman around the house. She shows me the big, white machine that plugs in, a freezer where what she calls ‘perishables’ can be stored for months without rotting. We make ice cubes, go over every inch of the floors with a hoovering machine, dig new potatoes, make coleslaw and two loaves, and then she takes the clothes in off the line while they are still damp and sets up a board and starts ironing. She is like the man, doing it all without rushing but neither one of them ever really stops. Kinsella comes in and makes tea for all of us and drinks it standing up with a handful of Kimberley biscuits, then goes back out again.

Later, he comes in looking for me.

‘Is the wee girl there?’ he calls.

I run out to the door.

‘Can you run?’

‘What?’

‘Are you fast on your feet?’ he says.

‘Sometimes,’ I say.

‘Well, run down there to the end of the lane as far as the box and run back.’

‘The box?’ I say.

‘The post box. You’ll see it there. Be as fast as you can.’

I take off, racing, to the end of the lane and find the box and get the letters and race back. Kinsella is looking at his watch.

‘Not bad,’ he says, ‘for your first time.’

He takes the letters from me. There’s four in all, nothing in my mother’s hand.

‘Do you think there’s money in any of these?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah, you’d know if there was, surely. The women can smell money. Do you think there’s news?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say.

‘Do you think there’s a wedding invitation?’

I want to laugh.

‘It wouldn’t be yours anyhow,’ he says. ‘You’re too young to be getting married. Do you think you’ll get married?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Mammy says I shouldn’t take a present of a man.’

Kinsella laughs. ‘She could be right there. Still and all, there’s no two men the same. And it’d be a swift man that would catch you, Long Legs. We’ll try you again tomorrow and see if we can’t improve your time.’

‘I’ve to go faster?’

‘Oh aye,’ he says. ‘By the time you’re ready for home you’ll be like a reindeer. There’ll not be a man in the parish will catch you without a long-handled net and a racing bike.’

That night, after supper, when Kinsella is reading his newspaper in the parlour, the woman sits down at the cooker and tells me she is working on her complexion.

‘It’s a secret,’ she says. ‘Not many people know about this.’

She takes a packet of Weetabix out of the cupboard and eats one of them not with milk in a bowl but dry, out of her hand. ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘I haven’t so much as a pimple.’

And sure enough, she doesn’t. Her skin is clear.

‘But you said there were no secrets here.’

‘Ah, this is different, more like a secret recipe.’

She hands me one, then another and watches as I eat them. They taste a bit like the dry bark of a tree must taste but I don’t really care, as some part of me is pleased to please her. I eat five in all during the nine o’clock news while they show the mother of the dead striker, a riot, then the Taoiseach and then foreign people out in Africa, starving to death, and then the weather forecast, which says the days are to be fine for another week or so. The woman sits me on her lap through it all and idly strokes my bare feet.

‘You have nice long toes,’ she says. ‘Nice feet.’

Later, she makes me lie down on the bed before I go to sleep and cleans the wax out of my ears with a hair clip.

‘You could have planted a geranium in what was there,’ she says. ‘Does your mammy not clean out your ears?’

‘She hasn’t always time,’ I say, guarded.

‘I suppose the poor woman doesn’t,’ she says. ‘What with all of ye.’

She takes the hairbrush then and I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred and then she stops and plaits it loosely. I fall asleep fast that night and when I wake, the old feeling is not there.

Later that morning, when Mrs Kinsella is making the bed, she looks at me, pleased.

‘Your complexion is better already, see?’ she says. ‘All you need is minding.’

4

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes back out to the yard. Myself and the woman make a list out loud of jobs that need to be done, and just do them: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press and hoover out the spider webs and put all the clean clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, pull the weeds out of the flower beds and then, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields and to the well. Every evening the television is turned on for the nine o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I’m told it is time for bed.