Foster

’ She smoothes the sheet across me, pleats it. ‘Do you think she would be offended if I sent her a few bob?’

‘Offended?’

‘Do you think she’d mind?’

I think about this for a while, think about being my mother. ‘She wouldn’t but Da would.’

‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘Your father.’

She leans over me then and kisses me, a plain kiss, and says good-night. I sit up when she is gone and look around the room. Trains of every colour race across the wallpaper. There are no tracks for these trains but here and there a small boy stands off in the distance, waving.

He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for every version of him. I roll onto my side and, though I know she wants neither, wonder if my mother will have a girl or a boy this time. I think of my sisters who will not yet be in bed. They will have thrown their clay buns against the gable wall of the outhouse, and when the rain comes, the clay will soften and turn to mud. Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

I stay awake for as long as I can, then make myself get up and use the chamber pot, but only a dribble comes out. I go back to bed, more than half afraid, and fall asleep. At some point later in the night – it feels much later – the woman comes in. I grow still and breathe as though I have not wakened. I feel the mattress sinking, the weight of her on the bed.

‘God help you, Child,’ she say. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’

3

I wake in this new place to the old feeling of being hot and cold, all at once.

Mrs Kinsella does not notice until later in the day, when she is stripping the bed.

‘Lord God Almighty,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Would you look?’ she says.

‘What?’

I want to tell her, right now, to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over.

‘These old mattresses,’ she says, ‘they weep. They’re always weeping. What was I thinking of, putting you on this?’

We drag it down the stairs, out into the sunlit yard. The hound comes up and sniffs it, ready to cock his leg.

‘Get off, you!’ she shouts in an iron voice.

‘What’s all this?’ Kinsella has come in from the fields.

‘It’s the mattress,’ she says. ‘The bloody thing is weeping. Didn’t I say it was damp in that room?’

‘In fairness,’ he says, ‘you did. But you shouldn’t have dragged that down the stairs on your own.’

‘I wasn’t on my own,’ she says. ‘I had help.’

We scrub it with detergent and hot water and leave it there in the sun to dry.