Foster

’

2

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.