Foster

Sometimes people come into the house at night. I can hear them playing cards and talking. They curse and accuse each other of reneging and dealing off the bottom, and coins are thrown into what sounds like a tin dish, and sometimes all the coins are emptied out into what sounds like a stash that’s already there. Once somebody came in and played the spoons. Once there was something that sounded just like a donkey, and the woman came up to fetch me, saying I may as well come down, as nobody could get a wink of sleep with the Ass Casey in the house. I went down and ate macaroons and then two men came to the door selling lines for a raffle whose proceeds, they said, would go towards putting a new roof on the school.

‘Of course,’ Kinsella said.

‘We didn’t really think –’

‘Come on in,’ Kinsella said. ‘Just ’cos I’ve none of my own doesn’t mean I’d see the rain falling in on anyone else’s.’

And so they came in and more tea was made and the woman emptied out the ashtray and dealt the cards and said she hoped the present generation of children in that school, if they were inclined towards cards, would learn the rules of forty-five properly because it was clear that this particular generation was having difficulties, that some people weren’t at all clear on how to play, except for sometimes, when it suited them.

‘Oh, there’s shots!’

‘You have to listen to thunder.’

‘Aisy knowing whose purse is running low.’

‘It’s ahead, I am,’ she said. ‘And it’s ahead I’ll be when it’s over.’

And this, for some reason, made the Ass Casey bray, which made me laugh and then they all started laughing until one of the men said, ‘Is it a tittering match we have here or are we going to play cards?’ which made the Ass Casey bray once more, and it started all over again.

5

One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, when the job is more than half done and the sugar is already weighed and the pots warmed, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never done before.

‘I think it’s past time we got you togged out, Girl.’

I am wearing a pair of navy blue trousers and a blue shirt the woman took from the chest of drawers.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ the woman says.

‘Tomorrow’s Sunday, and she needs something more than that for Mass,’ he says. ‘I’ll not have her going as she went last week.’

‘Sure isn’t she clean and tidy?’

‘You know what I’m talking about, Edna.’ He sighs. ‘Why don’t you go up there and change and I’ll run us all into Gorey.’

The woman keeps on picking the gooseberries from the colander, stretching her hand out, but a little more slowly each time, for the next one. At one point I think she will stop but she keeps on until she is finished and then she gets up and places the colander on the sink and lets out a sound I’ve never heard anyone make, and slowly goes upstairs.

Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile then looks over to the window ledge where a sparrow has come down to perch and readjust her wings. The little bird seems uneasy – as though she can scent the cat, who sometimes sits there. Kinsella’s eyes are not quite still in his head. It’s as though there’s a big piece of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind. He toes the leg of a chair and looks over at me.

‘You should wash your hands and face before you go to town,’ he says. ‘Didn’t your father even bother to teach you that much?’

I freeze in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen, but Kinsella does nothing more; he just stands there, locked in the wash of his own speech. As soon as he turns, I race for the stairs but when I reach the bathroom, the door won’t open.

‘It’s alright,’ the woman says, after a while, from inside and then, shortly afterwards, opens it. ‘Sorry for keeping you.’ She has been crying but she isn’t ashamed. ‘It’ll be nice for you to have some clothes of your own,’ she says then, wiping her eyes. ‘And Gorey is a nice town. I don’t know why I didn’t think of taking you there before now.’

Town is a crowded place with a wide main street. Outside the shops, so many different things are hanging in the sun. There are plastic nets full of beach balls, blow-up toys. A see-through dolphin looks as though he is shivering in a cold breeze. There are plastic spades and matching buckets, moulds for sand castles, grown men digging ice cream out of tubs with little plastic spoons, potted plants that feel hairy to the touch, a man in a van selling dead fish.

Kinsella reaches into his pocket and hands me something. ‘You’ll get a Choc-ice out of that.’

I open my hand and stare at the pound note.

‘Couldn’t she buy half a dozen Choc-ices out of that,’ the woman says.

‘Ah, what is she for, only for spoiling?’ Kinsella says.

‘What do you say?’ the woman says.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

‘Well, stretch it out and spend it well,’ Kinsella laughs.