The China Factory Read Online Free Page B

check the steaming saucepans on the cooker. Her mother is always working, inside and out—putting down fires, making meals, bringing in turf. She is always tired. Sometimes at Mass she falls asleep and she or her sister has to wake her up to stand for the prayers. The work is never done. Every week brings new jobs onthe farm. She tries to see ahead and help her mother—she hoovers the house on Sunday mornings before Mass and stuffs the chicken and sews up its behind with a needle and thread, the way her grandmother taught her.
    It is not her father’s fault, all this work—he is tired too. But at night when he sits down to watch television, her mother is still at the cooker frying the tea, or at the table making apple tarts, or ironing, and the television is blaring and the kitchen is hot and the younger kids are arguing and fighting. Sometimes her mother snaps at her father and her father snaps back and her grandmother tells the kids crossly to have manners and then her mother cries. One winter’s night her mother flung a plate of rashers and sausages down on the table in front of her father and ran out of the kitchen. The food bounced on the plate. She followed her mother into the hall, begging her, but her mother put on her purple coat and walked out the front door. She ran after her, pulling at the coat, crying Come back, but her mother ran down the steps, and off into the night. She stood at the open door not knowing which way to turn. She thought she should be loyal to her mother but the little ones were crying in the kitchen. She ran in to her father. She’s gone, she cried. Are you happy now? His face was dark and lonely. She remembered that look on him before, when she woke one night and came down for a drink, and he was sitting in the armchair watching a film. Go after her, she said softly, you have to go after her. But he just sat there, sad and silent. When the kids were fed she stood at the front door again looking out into the dark. Her heart was shattered. Then her grandmother called her in. An hour later she heard the front door close quietly and her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Later when she went up to her own room her mother was in her bed. She put her arms around her and kissed the top of her head. Her mother only ever kisses her when she is sad. She thought her mother must have walked to the end of the lane, and might have kept going if the lane hadn’t ended.
    *
    The dinner is ready and she goes outside and calls down to her father and brother in the yard. Her brother is inside the pen, holding a lamb like a baby in his arms, its legs in the air. She knows that sometimes they are happy, the whole family is happy. Some mornings when they are at the breakfast and her mother is standing by her father’s side pouring out his tea he touches her waist and she sees the look they give each other. Last winter when her grandmother went on holidays to an uncle’s house, her father carried the record player out to the kitchen every night and put on Jim Reeves, and taught herself and her sister to dance. He lifted them, in turn, onto his stockinged feet and waltzed them around the floor. When they were finished she said to him, Dance with Mammy, and she ran and tugged on her mother’s arm. But her mother was tired. She was sewing buttons on a jacket. Her father stayed standing in the middle of the kitchen for a minute with his arms by his side, staring at the tiles.
    At the dinner table an argument starts and her middle sister grabs a crayon from her small brother’s hand and he starts to bawl. Give it back to him, her mother tells her. It’s mine, her sister says. She doesn’t care. She gives backchat to her mother and father all the time. To her grandmother too. Her mother is cutting open an apple tart now. Sometimes she is helpless; she does not know what to do or how to be a mother. She gives her sister a look across the table but her sister is defiant.