Foster (2 page)

Beyond the kitchen, carpeted steps lead to an open room. There’s a big double bed with a candlewick spread, and lamps at either side. This, I know, is where they sleep, and I’m glad, for some reason, that they sleep together. The woman takes me through to a bathroom, plugs a drain and turns the taps on full. The bath fills and the white room changes so that a type of blindness comes over us; we can see everything and yet we can’t see.

‘Hands up,’ she says, and takes my dress off.

She tests the water and I step in, trusting her, but the water is too hot.

‘Get in,’ she says.

‘It’s too hot.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

I put one foot through the steam and feel, again, the same rough scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can’t stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. This water is deeper than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, lathers my hair and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘Now your clothes,’ she says.

‘I don’t have any clothes.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ She pauses. ‘Would some of our old things do you for now?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Good girl.’

She takes me to another bedroom past theirs, at the other side of the stairs, and looks through a chest of drawers.

‘Maybe these will fit you.’

She is holding a pair of old-fashioned trousers and a new plaid shirt. The sleeves and legs are too long but she rolls them up, and tightens the waist with a canvas belt, to fit me.

‘There now,’ she says.

‘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.

‘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.’

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.’

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.’