I’m always hungry. Mother Peter is fond of saying, ‘It’s hollow legs you’ve got, Kate O’Sullivan.’ Once I happened to say that it wasn’t my legs but my belly that was hollow, due to the measly portions of food we got in the orphanage. Growing girls could not grow much on half a bowl of porridge, one slice of bread with no butter, watery cocoa, mashed potatoes, and the occasional rasher and raw egg a special treat. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Mother Paul had boxed me around the ears so hard her next words had been accompanied by the ringing of bells. ‘Ungrateful child! You should be thankful for the food Our good Lord puts in your belly, thankful for having a roof over your head. Spare a thought for Our Lord who suffered on the cross for you, and think yourself lucky to be alive, instead of complaining and gassing nonsense all the time.’ As if to emphasize what she’d said about the suffering and all, she’d given me another thump, only this time in my belly. It had hurt so much I’d felt the tears leap to my eyes, and it had been really difficult not to cry in front of her. But I didn’t; wouldn’t give her or any of them the satisfaction I’m sure they’d feel if they reduced me to a blubbering idiot, like some of the other girls.
The only time I really enjoy apples is when I get invited to Lizzy Molloy’s house and her mother makes apple pie. My mouth waters anew at the thought of the sweet apple taste, mixed with melt-in-your-mouth pastry and lashings of thick clotted cream. Lizzy is my second best friend after Bridget. I sit next to her in school. I’m much brighter than Lizzy, and I let her copy all of my homework. Bridget said that was the only reason she invited me to her house.
Once, when I fell out with Bridget – I can’t even remember what about – I told Lizzy she was my best friend, and would be for ever and ever. Of course it was a lie; Lizzy could never replace Bridget. Lizzy was from another world, she had a mam and da, a sister and two brothers, one in America – an accountant in Baltimore, thank you very much. The Molloy house, though not big, was spotless, and it always smelt of cooking, the sort of smells that make the mouth water. I never wanted to admit it, even to myself, but Lizzy’s main attraction was her mother’s cooking. I had food at Lizzy’s like I’d never tasted before. Thick gravy made from meat juices with chunks of onion in it, poured over floury potato mixed with real butter and not margarine; the same butter spread thick on doorstep slices of home-made bread and scones, washed down with gallons of cherry lemonade, the fizzy, quench-yer-thirst-from-the-pop-van kind. Yes, being Lizzy’s friend had its advantages. And you could eat off the Molloy floors, so Bridget said, although why you’d want to when you could eat off a lovely polished mahogany table with a white lace tablecloth was beyond me.
Every room in the Molloy house was crammed full of wooden ornaments Mr Molloy made in his spare time, and beautiful patchwork cushions and blankets Mrs Molloy made in her spare time. I often wondered when they had any time left over for five kids. One son had died when he was three; Michael, the lad in America, had married very well and was, according to Mrs Molloy, doing very nicely, thank you very much. Mrs Molloy had an odd habit of tagging ‘thank you very much’ on the end of all her sentences. And there were a lot – sentences, I mean. She never shut up. I’d asked Lizzy about it once, and had been told to mind my own bloody business.
My knickers are hanging around my knees, the right leg lower than the left owing to the loose elastic. I wipe my backside with a square of newspaper and pull my knickers up to my waist, thinking of the underwear Lizzy has ordered from her friend Sally Heffernan’s mother’s catalogue: a bra and pants set in black lace, the see-through type with little red satin bows on the waist of the panties and the bra straps. Lizzy is very thin with a flat chest and one of those stomachs that go in – concave, I think, is the word – and I’m not sure the bra and pants will look the same on her as they do on the model in the picture, but I don’t say so. The underwear is being sent to Sally’s house, ’cause if Mr Molloy got wind of it there would be hell to pay, and the only thing she’d feel next to her backside would be his belt buckle. Lizzy wants to wear them for her third date with Frank Sheridan.
‘Honest to God, Lizzy, his eyes will pop clean out of his head if he sees you looking like that,’ Sally had said, her eyes popping.
Lizzy had winked. ‘Who says he’s going to see me?’
At that point I’d piped up with, ‘To be sure, if Frank’s not going to see you in the sexy lace you might as well just wear your old blue school knickers with the holes in the arse.’
Sally had said, giggling, ‘Kate’s right. What’s the point of spending all that money on underwear if nobody is going to see it?’
At this Lizzy had pulled a long face, the one that makes her look daft. ‘Wearing sexy underwear makes me feel different. You know, grown up and sexy. Who knows, I might let Frankie have a quick peek. Let him see what he can have if he waits awhile.’
Giving Lizzy an affectionate pat on the arm, Sally said, ‘If he puts a ring on yer finger and marches you down the centre aisle is more like it, Lizzy Molloy.’
Lizzy had stuck out her tongue but hadn’t argued. She knew Sally was right, so did I, only Lizzy didn’t want to admit it. She would tease and titillate Frank until she got a ring on her finger, then she’d let him into the secret place between her legs, and in her head she’d live happily ever after in a thatched creeper-clad house in the country, the one she went to in her dreams.
The one she’d have, more likely, would be a two-up two-down middle-of-terrace house with a new bathroom and a shiny kitchen on hire purchase – if she was lucky and Frank kept up the payments and didn’t throw his wages down his throat like his father and grandfather before him. Both are dead now. The drink killed them, according to Mother Paul. ‘The demon drink,’ she’d said, ‘puts the devil in good men.’
‘To be sure, it’ll be for me to decide when I wear the underwear, and who sees it. It’s costing me four weeks’ wages and I don’t have to tell either of you how hard I work on Saturdays for that old miser Sheehan.’
I can’t resist saying, ‘Not half as hard as Bridget for the oul’ bitch Mary O’Shea. Jesus, Bridget slaves in that shop from seven in the morning ’til gone seven at night, sometimes eight by the time she’s cashed up. Honest to God, she’s as mean a woman as ever lived. Wouldn’t give you the drippings off her nose, and that’s no lie. The oul’ bugger scrimps on everything: her clothes are darned to death, she’s cobbled her shoes so many times she’s two inches taller, and still she cuts up newspaper for the lavvie when the shelves are stacked full of toilet roll. Gives Bridget strict instructions when she makes her a sandwich to cut the bread wafer-thin.’ I form a tiny space with my thumb and forefinger. ‘She’s got an old press in the back shop (full of rubbish, so she says), and keeps the key on a chain around her neck like a bloody gaoler. Bridget reckons it’s stuffed with money, says that she’s forever moaning about bank charges, and how when her pa was alive and running the store he never believed in banks, said all bank managers were daylight robbers – worse than the feckin’ English.
‘Apparently he’d fought for a free Ireland.’ I imitate Mary O’Shea’s thin voice: “‘If it wasn’t for good men like me da, you, Bridget Costello and Kate O’Sullivan, would be working for some Englishman. A Protestant heathen, not God-fearing and generous like me. Yer should be grateful, thankin’ the Lord and me every day of yer life to be living in a free country, after eight hundred years of the English.”
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll not be thanking the likes of Mary O’Shea, or the good Lord for living in this wet hole of a place, nor will I be blaming the English for all of Ireland’s problems.’
Sally, a finger to her lips, had said, ‘Hush, Kate, you’ll get me in no end of trouble talking like that.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Me da’s an IRA man, believes in the cause, hates the English. You know how it is …’
Distracted by a noise in the yard outside the toilet I forget about Sally’s dad and Lizzy’s underwear. It’s Mother Peter talking to Paddy Fitzpatrick, the man who owns the farm shop a couple of miles from the orphanage. With the flat of my ear pressed against the door I strain to hear what they are saying.