Foster

‘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.