Himself(43)

She had seen all the hairs on Mrs Lavelle’s top lip as she bent forward to shake hands with Mammy at Mass.

‘Peace be with you.’

She had seen Ruth Quigley’s new sailor coat from England, navy blue with little anchors on the brass buttons. Mrs Quigley said Mr Quigley had sent it over; he was there working ever so hard and ever so successfully.

‘I have a yo-yo,’ Ida told Mrs Quigley. But Mrs Quigley didn’t hear on account of her getting stuck into telling Mammy all about Mr Quigley’s important work.

Ida tried to touch the white piping on Ruth Quigley’s hem. It was made to look like real rope twined all about but Ruth Quigley said to leave off with her filthy dirty fingers. On the way home Mammy told Uncle Eamon that Mrs Quigley was always blowing her own coals. Ida imagined Mrs Quigley with her head in the fire and her big arse sticking up behind and her mouth full of air. Puff. Puff.

The priest had shaken Ida’s hand and smiled at her with all his teeth.

‘Peace be with you.’

‘Peace be with you, Golden Margaret,’ said Uncle Eamon.

‘That’s not my name,’ she’d whispered. ‘That’s not what I call meself.’

There were five girls in her school with yellow hair, but she had the finest. Mammy didn’t know where she got it from, for hers was brown and Daddy’s was ginger.

‘Look it. Like spun gold. Goldilocks.’

Golden Ida. Hop, skip, point, down the lane on a good-weather day in her best dress with a cardigan for the nip in the air. Mammy had wanted her to get changed into her day clothes. Then Uncle Eamon started talking to Mammy and winked at Ida so that she could slip out.

Slip out, like her tongue through the gap in her teeth. She hissed over to the cows and climbed up on the gate. She made her hand go like a snake. Snap. Then she felt sorry for the cows and she showed them her toy, taking it from her pocket, shyly uncovering it.

‘It is a yo-yo.’

She rolled the sound in her mouth and made big shapes with her lips as she said it. She opened and shut her jaw with the saying of it. Yo-yo.

The cows looked impressed, as well they should, up to their hocks in shit with no entertainment.

Hop, skip, point, to the Gallagher’s.

Eileen and Phyllis had a biblical case of head lice. They’d be in there with their hair heaving and their mammy having a good rake around with the nit comb. Their hair was dead straight, so you’d think the nits would just slide off. Ida wondered if their mammy had cut all their hair off like she’d threatened she would. She said she’d see them scalped. Ida thought about them with their eyes all red and their hair all tufted and shorn, like baldy baby birds. She laughed and climbed up on the gate and showed her toy to the outside of their house.

The empty windows blinked back at her.

‘It’s a yo-yo, don’t you know?’

The shut front door listened but didn’t comment.

Ida danced off up the road.

She had seen a great deal already that day.

She had seen the tidemark in the breakfast jug where the milk had gone sour in a little ridge. She had pushed it with her nail then wiped her nail on the tablecloth.

She had seen a web as big as a piano. Although she felt it more than she saw it when she ran through it. It brushed her face and got in at her mouth. Ida spat on the ground for ages. For she knew that if you swallowed a mammy spider the babies would grow all inside you and would crawl into your ears and make you as deaf as a hedge. All you’d hear was the rustling of spider feet as they ran about your skull.

When Ida got to the forest she got her toy out of her cardigan pocket and showed it to the trees.

‘This,’ she announced, ‘is a yo-yo. Don’t you know?’

She showed them how to flip it, trick it and walk the dog with it, and although the trees were impressed, Ida knew better. She’d seen it done for real. She wound the string up and the yellow moon fell straight down again. She wished for it to bounce and run back up the string again. She glared at it.

It took ages and ages and ages to wind the string up. That was the boring part. You had to get it right. She poked her tongue through her tooth gap as she concentrated, breathing through her nose.

There.

It was shiny and round and perfect and yellow. She licked it but it didn’t taste of yellow, although she didn’t know what yellow should taste like.

Her yo-yo had come with her to make boats and sail them on the water. She’d use anything: a leaf or an acorn cup, a raft of moss and a weave of twigs. Passengers sailed too, on awful cursed kinds of crossings. Across wild uncharted seas to savage shores. The captain was a woodlouse and the passengers were ants, but all were condemned – God bless their souls! She would wave bravely and sob into her hankie as they sunk all the way down to the silty bottom of the Shand.

Hop, skip, point.

In the dirt with her best shoes on – Mammy would roast her!

She wasn’t allowed near the river. Sometimes the edges were thick with slime. You had to break it to launch the boats; you had to poke them through, leaning right over. Maybe even step in a bit, even if you were wearing your school shoes, or else you were a baby.

But you always had to be careful that the river didn’t grab you.

Ida had already seen a great deal that day: Uncle Eamon’s gleeful green eyes as he promised to marry her, the potatoes laughing their skins apart and steaming up the rim of Mammy’s good blue bowl. She had seen the dog nosing in the garden heap, a line of wet around his snout, and her school shoes filled with paper by the fire, drying.