Foster

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.

‘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.