into one of those ferocious spinsters of the parish and you can get married and have eleven children, and I’ll drive them all insane. We can take over the whole of this house and all the kids in Golden Square will be afraid of me. Mad Miss O’Callaghan who lives with her sister and the eleven children. What do you think?’ she grinned at Nicky, who gave her a very halfhearted grin back.
Eventually, Connie got off the bed.
‘I’ll have a terrible headache in the morning,’ she said. ‘Please, I beg you, get me out of bed at seven thirty. Mrs Caldwell will be like a weasel if the hen-night people are late in.’ The Principal considered good time-keeping to be on a par with saving the world from destruction.
‘I’ll wake you,’ Nicky said, in such a voice of gloom that Connie spent the next hour in bed berating herself for worrying her sister. Some people got what they wanted in life and some didn’t. it was futile to cry over being a have-not rather than a have. Life wasn’t fair. She knew that.
And finally, exhaustion got the better of her and she dozed off.
The famine road isn’t far from our house. It’s a stony route to nowhere, built to give men a few coppers when the countryside was riddled with potato blight. Perhaps your generation won’t hear much about the famine – it’s true, we’ve grieved enough about it, but it would be a pity if people forgot the past.
Ireland isn’t the only country to have suffered starvation. Agnes said she heard them talk at the Fitzmaurices about the people out in Africa who have nothing. There are little babies with bellies big from hunger. It must break a mother’s heart to watch a little one starve and not be able to find a crumb to feed it. It would break mine. A bit like the people eating grass here when there was nothing else.
Every time I pass that famine road, I thank the Good Lord for what we’ve got. Thanks for you, Eleanor, thanks for my beloved Joe, thanks for Agnes, the best sister ever. I get on my knees to say thanks for all the gifts I’ve been given. To some people, I haven’t got much, but I know I’ve had the best of life.
Sister Benedict in the convent says not to feel guilty over our luck in life. We all have our crosses to bear, she says, even though not everyone can see them. All lives have some pain.
This isn’t the story the canon says, mind you. Pain is what you get for sinning, according to him.
The canon has lived a sheltered life and sees every sin as worse than the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah put together. You should hear him at funerals. Most poor corpses are two inches from hellfire, to hear the canon speak. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. There’s no joy in the man. God is kind, my mam used to say. I like to pray to that God and not the canon’s one.
It’s strange that the potato blight killed so many and still we live off the potato. Your father never thinks it’s a proper dinner unless there are potatoes in it. Agnes is the same, for all the fine meals she’s had at the big house.
My mam’s Cally is the best dish you’ll ever have with potatoes. There’s many names for it, Colcannon is one, but in this part of the West of Ireland, we call it Cally. Take some nice floury potatoes and boil them in their skins. When they’re falling apart, tear the skins off, mash them, make a round shape on the plate and then pour the sauce into the middle – melted butter, with a little hot milk and some chopped spring onions. Then eat. When life is falling apart all around you, this is as good a comfort as any, I promise you.
Every morning since she’d arrived in Golden Square a week ago, Megan had woken to the noise of building work coming from across the street. The sounds of drills, diggers and builders laughing were comforting, familiar. There was always somebody building or extending something on her street in London: she was used to it as the background of birdsong and bleating horns from the street below.
So every morning, waking to the building hum, she enjoyed a sliver of time thinking that life was still glorious. She’d stretch, revelling in the feel of her body between the sheets, the body that Rob loved. For one misguided second it seemed that the day lay ahead of her with dazzling brightness: Rob’s smile as he saw her, the director’s smile as he told her that her performance was breathtaking…
Then she’d wake up properly and real life shoved out her fantasy dreamworld. Everyone hated her, her career was over and her heart was broken.
The next step in the morning routine would be awareness of something furry shifting on top of the duvet and then a rough tongue would lick whatever part of Megan was out of the covers.
‘Cici?’ she said the first morning and the shape had wriggled with delight.
Leonardo liked to lie on the floor on the other side of the bed and Megan’s sleepy voice was all he needed to start his welcoming proceedings.
Both dogs would clamber on top of her, licking and wagging their tails eagerly.
After a week, they had the routine down to a fine art. With enough licking and snuffling, they could force Megan out of bed and into the kitchen to give them dog biscuits, and then, once she’d had her morning coffee and cigarette, she might take them for a walk. Nora, of course, would have gone to work.
It was her own fault, she knew, for setting a precedent that first day. But today she had a mission to accomplish on the walk. She’d decided she needed a disguise.
It took ages to clip the leads on because the dogs were dancing about so much, but she wanted to take them with her because she figured she’d looked less strange wearing glasses she didn’t need and a dark bandana to cover her hair if she was hauling two dogs along. Mad people often had dogs. Once out of the door, the dogs pulled towards the garden in the square but Megan dragged them in the other direction.
There was a highly glamorous hairdresser’s about half a mile away, all smoky glass and exquisite hairstylists. She wouldn’t go there. They’d take one look at her and know exactly who she was, and in the fashionable clubs of the city – which they would frequent – the news of both her arrival and her new hair colour would be that night’s gossip. On the west side of the square, however, tucked in front of the Delaney council flats, was Patsy’s Salon, a place that had probably looked old and faded twenty years ago but which she’d noticed the night she’d arrived. She’d found the number in the phone book yesterday but it just rang out. So today she took a chance and went to make an appointment. If Patsy’s was closed, she’d just buy a home dye kit.
Patsy’s was remarkably busy for a place that clearly hadn’t been redecorated for many years. There were three baby-blue basins, all being used, and two women under dryers, talking loudly to each other over the noise.
One girl was delicately putting Velcro rollers into a very elderly lady’s silvery purple hair.
Megan stood for a moment watching.
‘Can I help you?’ said a woman with curled hair an unnatural red, who emerged from the back of the shop.
She had to be fifty, and boasted an hourglass figure all poured into very tight Capri jeans and a red gingham blouse fastened by buttons which looked to be under considerable strain. Megan would not have been surprised if the woman had launched into the chorus of ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’
