The Speckled People Read Online Free Page B

she couldn’t believe her eyes.
    ‘It’s only topsy dirty,’ the woman said.
    ‘But where is your husband?’
    ‘You have nothing to be afraid of, love. He’ll stay by the fire.’
    My mother says you can’t complain if you’re a pilgrim escaping from Germany. She says you have to offer things up. For people who are less fortunate and for all the awful things that happened. So she just got into bed with the woman of the house. She felt the warmth left behind by the man of the house. She could hear the whole room breathing, until the woman started speaking in the dark. She listened to the woman talking for a while, and then she began to talk as well, as if there were things that could only be said in the dark.
    She says she never saw the men. She heard them coming in and muttering for a while to each other in the room. She never saw the man of the house again either, but she heard him in the kitchen, tapping his pipe against the fireplace. She heard the children dreaming sometimes and the cows elbowing each other in the barn outside. She smelled the rain and heard it drumming on the roof, like somebody still saying the rosary. They whispered so as not to wake up the children. They talked for a long time as if they were sisters.

Four
    On the front door of our house there is the number two. I know how to say this number in German: Zwei . My mother teaches us how to count up the stairs: Eins, Zwei, Drei … And when you get to ten you can start again, so many steps all the way up that you can call them any number you like. And when we’re in our pyjamas, we say goodnight birds and goodnight trees, until my mother counts again very quickly and we jump into bed as fast as possible: Eins, Zwei, Drei .
    There are workers in the house and they know how to smoke. They made a mountain in the back garden and sit on it, drinking tea and eating sandwiches. They smoke cigarettes and mix sand and cement with a shovel. They whistle and make a hole in the middle where they pour in the water to make a lake, and sometimes the water from the lake spills over the side before the shovel can catch it. We do the same with spoons. The workers have different words, not the same as my mother, and they teach us how to count in English: one, two, three … But my father says that’s not allowed. He says he’ll speak to them later.
    One day there was a fox in the kitchen, just like the fox in the story book. The workers were gone, so my mother closed the door and called the police. Then a Garda came to our house and went into the kitchen on his own and startedbanging. There was a smell of smoke and we waited on the stairs for a long time, until the Garda came out again with the fox lying dead on a shovel with his tail hanging down and blood around his mouth and nose.
    ‘You’ll have no more strangers in your house, please God,’ he said.
    The Garda showed his teeth to my mother and called her ‘Madam’. The workers called her ‘Maam’. We called her ‘Mutti’ or ‘Ma Ma’ and my father is called ‘Vati’ even though he’s from Cork. The Garda had a moustache and said it was no fox we had in the kitchen but a rat the size of a fox. And the rat was very glic , he said, because he hid behind the boiler and would not come out until he was chased out with fire and smoke.
    There are other people living at the top of our house, all the way up the stairs, further than you can count. They’re called the O’Neills and they never take their hats off, because they think the hallway is like the street, my mother says. They are very noisy and my father makes a face. He goes up to speak to them and when he comes down again he says he wants the O’Neills out of the house. There will be no more chopping wood under this roof.
    Áine came to look after us when my mother had to go away to the hospital. She’s from Connemara and has different words, not the same as the workers, or the O’Neills, or the Garda, or my mother. She teaches us to count