Foster

’

We walk on between the bristling hedges in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Further along, the same lost heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road.

‘And you know, the pair of them turned white overnight.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Their hair, what else?’

‘But Mrs Kinsella’s hair is black.’

‘Black? Aye, black out of the dye-pot, you mean.’ She laughs.

I wonder at her laughing like this.

‘Shut up and get in, you,’ she says to him.

It’s a cottage she lives in with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs, and tall Red Hot Pokers growing out of the ground. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker.

‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘The state of you.’

I’m not sure if it’s the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn’t even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.

I don’t know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave but just as I’m deciding what to do, the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the door frame.

‘Good evening all,’ he says.

‘Ah, John,’ the woman says. ‘You weren’t long. We’re only in the door. Aren’t we only in the door, Child?’

‘Yes.’

Kinsella hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you, to take her home.

‘It was nothing,’ the woman says. ‘She’s a quiet young one, this.’

‘She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her,’ he says. ‘Are you ready to come home, Petal?’

I get up and he talks on a little, to smooth things over, the way people do. I follow him out to the car where the woman is waiting.

‘Were you alright in there?’ she says.

I say I was.

‘Did she ask you anything?’

‘A few things, nothing much.