‘What’s worrying,’ Bell calls after me, ‘Is that Fay also asked for the same necklace and what if Rojhha Thilveenya were to give Fay the nicer necklace? Because Fay can be a bit sly that way. I tumble through the rotting rafters, intent on escaping the interminable necklace saga.
‘I wonder,’ says Bell tugging at a lock of wavy blond hair, ‘If Rojhha Thilveenya has brought me back the turquoise and real silver necklace from Mehicko? She did promise faithfully.’ A workman is lazily sweeping up sawdust in the vast and soon to be abandoned workshop. Cat watches from her perch on the worn down workshop steps. Father is on the phone to another debtor. Mother is in her room, resting with the auguries. Re-heeled and just-polished plain shoes await duty like squat footmen.įrom our vantage point perched on the rotten rafters of an outhouse, and through the half open kitchen window, I can hear grandmother at prayers, a sort of extended mumbly-chant, punctuated by rattling beads. A freshly dry-cleaned coat in its crinkly paper cover is slung across the counterpane. Upstairs in the smallest bedroom, my suitcase is neatly packed and double fastened with leather strap for extra security. she trills, cigarette ever dangling from a doggedly impassive lip. She croons tuneless thirties songs cranking up the volume whenever there’s a skirmish or if all out strife threatens. Her preoccupations with these and the many joys that await in the eternal home, leave little time today for sick child spotting.Ī gaunt, chain-smoking woman comes to the house daily. She has neatly divided sixteen offspring into three categories of e’er-do-wells and ne’er-do-wells and doing-well-enoughs. My paternal grandmother is stern and sleek, elegant as a tiny column of obsidian in her widows’ weeds. She pronounces the latter name with marvellous authenticity as Drojhha Thilveenya. If I were ever to lie in the actual throes of death, rattling along to a speedy end, Bell would pluck at her hair and produce an unrefusable invitation of incalculable distinction to the sprawling hacienda of Rosa Silvina. They abide in sprawling mansions that exist chiefly to be coveted by Bell, elegant residences that are not daily theatres of war, or wellsprings of looming plumbing cataclysms. These two angels are the only people to bring any shred of real joy into Bell’s life. Her two friends in the Preparatory Foundation of Unencumbered Learning and Fine Education are Fay Larkin of Greystones and Rosa Silvina McCabe of Mexico City. But as the baby sister, I can’t be picky. Older by three years, she can spontaneously un-spark the joy in any situation. I spend the morning clambering through the semi-rotting beams of a long abandoned stable. My library card is filed away for safe keeping until the next holiday. He has berated my sister for the shortness of her skirt and the insolence of her fringe. All the while, he issues ominous warnings of impending plumbing catastrophes in this the grandmother’s Mayo home. He writes letters to debtors in tall longhand on carbon copy paper, Parker pen scraping resolutely across the page. These make up the crumbling embers of his construction business.
He pores over a stack of repeat reminders for payment of bills and a handful of receipts. He now sits rigid as a steel girder in the cramped kitchen, wearing an expertly patched and not altogether invisibly repaired brown suit.
He has collected four pairs of mended shoes from the cobbler. He has settled grocer’s bill, butcher’s bill and draper’s bill. By eleven o’clock he has mended a faulty washing machine, visited solicitor, bank manager and zealous barber. The father has been busy since first light. We are due to set off at two o’clock in a hired car, allowing us plenty of time to catch the half past three train that will chug chug out of Connacht, across the great midland plains, and right into the heart of Dublin, returning my sister and I to the Preparatory Foundation of Heavenly Peace, Unencumbered Learning, and Fine Education. Perhaps the auguries are taking a well-earned rest.
#O reilly timing light skin
My skin has slackened and goose-bumped like boiled old chicken gizzards. Yet this morning, even she has failed to clock that my eyeballs are already the colour of rotten egg yolk. Though I’m a notoriously shiny, buzzy child with a careless zest for life, she is convinced by various pious, invisible, and unspecified auguries that I’m frail enough to croak at any moment. The fretful mother has spent rare conscious moments these past days in prayerful panic. Like the clammy onslaught of a sudden tropical storm.