imagined the small girl her mother was, and the dining-room table set for the funeral meal and the bird flying out the window with the ivy in its beak. She doesn’t know how anyone could eat a meal after burying a mother.
Her sister crosses the street after her music lesson. Her mother has dropped off to sleep against the tree. If her mother has cancer and if she dies, then they will be the same—they will both have had a dead mother. She and her sister rouse her mother now. She hops up quickly, her eyes bright, and she looks strong again. Her legs are strong. Her voice is strong. On the way back to the car they buy three Super Split ice creams and on the drive home they are quiet and content, concentrating on the ice creams. She tries to make hers last, but she keeps looking over at her mother and she licks too hard and too fast. Her mother is talking about what has to be done when they get home. She thinks the danger has passed and that her mother might be okay after all. If her mother is okay she will thank God for the rest of her life.
Late in the evening she finds her brother sitting on the wall of the pen. Captain is lying at the edge of the yard, his head resting on his paws, his eyes following her. She can hear the engine of a tractor out on the main road. The day’s work is done, and her sisters and small brother are inside, playing, and her father is drifting around the farm—closing gates, tidying the shed, folding old fertiliser bags.
—What happened? she asks her brother. The pen is filthy and wet from the sheep dirt, but it is not that. Where did all the blood come from? she asks. What were ye doing?
—Squeezing the lambs, he says.
—What’s that? she asks, pointing to the corner. There is a heap of blood and guts in the dirt, and little circles of grey wool. They are like woollen hats for tiny dolls.
—That’s where he cut them underneath with the penknife. He cut them and squeezed out the little yokes. He had to pull out the guts with the pinchers.
She cannot look at him. One day he hurt himself on the bar of his bicycle on the way home from school. Did you hurt yourself underneath? her grandmother asked him when they got home. He couldn’t talk with the pain. She remembers when her mother used to bath herself and her brother together on Saturday nights. She knows that the underneath in boys is soft and easily hurt.
She is scraping the sole of her sandal on the edge of a brick. She is afraid to look, but still she turns her head a little towards the corner. The flies are swarming around. The guts are like short fat worms, creamy-pink and shiny, with little veins all over them. There are dozens of small pale balls, like raw meat, among them. And the little wool caps. She presses her hand on her belly button and for a second she cannot breathe.
—They have to be castrated, her brother says, so they won’t grow into rams.
She is running down the road to the Well Field, Captain running beside her. She stands outside, looking through the rungs of the gate. They are all lying down over by the ditch, the lambs pressed against their mothers’ bodies. She is thinking of their underneaths, open and sore, against the ground. As she watches a lamb rises slowly. The mother rises too and the lamb lowers his head under her, for milk. He pauses and stands there. Then his front legs fold at the knees and he is down again. The mother kneels too and the lamb lets out a thin feeble bleat. She has never heard such a sound.
She finds her mother at the clothesline at the back of the house. The pine trees are leaning over them, making everything darker. As soon as she starts telling her mother, the tears come.
—They have to do it, her mother says. It’s the way things are done. She is taking clothes off the line, shirts, pants, towels, and folding them into the laundry basket.
—They weren’t dosing them at all this morning, she sobs. You said they were dosing.
Her mother says nothing. She takes the clothes pegs off her father’s socks.
—Don’t be thinking about it, she says then. Put it out of your mind.
—They shouldn’t have cut them like that.
Her mother moves along the line, drags a sheet off roughly, folds it from the corners.
—They’re not able to stand up, she says.
—They don’t feel anything, they’re only animals. Her mother is frowning. She kicks the laundry basket to move it along.
—They’re bleeding, she cries. Below in the field now, they’re bleeding.
—God Almighty, will you ever stop! Will you? Will you ever just leave me alone?
The sun is setting. The little birds are sleeping in the trees. She stands at the gable end of the house, her head tilted, listening. Now and then she hears a single bleat in the distance. Soon it will be dark and everything will be silent. They will lie huddled against their mothers, all night long. She goes inside. They are all there, in the kitchen. The nine o’clock news is on. There’s a big search for a little girl who has gone missing on a bog. There are men out looking for her, beating down the heather with sticks.
She is afraid her heart is turning. And that her mother will know this, and then her mother’s heart will turn too. She thinks there is no one in the whole world as lonely as her mother.
THINGS I SEE
Outside my room the wind whistles. It blows down behind our row of houses, past all the bedroom windows and when I try to imagine the other bedrooms and the other husbands and wives inside, I hear my own husband moving about downstairs. He will have finished reading the paper by now and broken up the chunks of coal in the grate. Then he will carry the tray into the kitchen, carefully, with the newspaper folded under his arm. He will wash the mugs and leave them to drain; he will flip up the blind so that the kitchen will be bright in the morning. Finally, he will flick off the socket switches and pick up his bundle of keys. Occasionally, just, he pauses and makes himself a pot of tea to have at the kitchen table, the house silent around him. I know the way he sits, his long legs off to the side, the paper propped against the teapot, or staring into the corner near the back door, pensive. He drinks his tea in large mouthfuls and gives the mug a discreet little lick, a flick of the tongue, to prevent a drip. When I hear his chair scrape the tiles I switch off my lamp and turn over. Don is predictable and safe. Tonight he is making himself that last pot of tea.
There are nights when I want to go down and shadow him and stand behind his chair and touch his shoulder. My pale arms would encircle his neck and I would lean down so that our faces touch. Some nights between waking and sleeping I imagine that I do this but I stand and watch him from the kitchen door and I am aware only of the cold tiles under my bare feet. There is something severe and imperious in Don’s bearing that makes me resist. He has a straight back and square shoulders and black black hair. His skin is smooth and clear, without blemish, as if he has many layers of perfect epidermii. Beside him, with my pale skin and fair hair, I am like an insignificant underground animal, looking out at him through weak eyes.
Lucy, my sister, is staying with us for a week. She is sleeping in the next room and when she tosses I hear the headboard knock against the wall. I get up and stand at the window. The light from the kitchen illuminates the back garden and the gravel path down to the shed. When I am away from this house I have to let my mind spill over into this room before I can sleep. I have to reconstruct it in the strange darkness of another room before I can surrender. Its window bears on the old fir trees looming tall and dark beyond the back wall. There is the house and these trees and a patch of sky above and these are my borders. They pen me in and I like this. I cannot bear large vistas, long perspectives, lengthy hopes. When we first came here Don wanted
