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a bother,’ the woman says.
    When we are out on the road, and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend, the questions start. She is eaten alive with curiosity; hardly is one question answered before the next is fired: ‘Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Who was there? What were they selling the lines for? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butteror margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’
    I answer them all easily, until the last.
    ‘The child’s clothes?’
    ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Sure if you’re sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?’
    ‘Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here but we went to Gorey this morning and bought all new things.’
    ‘This rig-out you’re wearing now? God Almighty,’ she says. ‘Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred.’
    ‘I like it,’ I say. ‘They told me it was flattering.’
    ‘Flattering, is it? Well. Well,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, after living in the dead’s clothes all this time.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The Kinsellas’ young lad, you dope. Did you not know?’
    I don’t know what to say.
    ‘That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure didn’t he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown? That’s what they say happened anyhow,’ she says.
    I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is getting close but the day feels like it isn’t ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and clouds, and, far away, a round moon coming out.
    ‘They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field but he hadn’t the heart to shoot him, the softhearted fool.’
    We walk on between the bristling hedges in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Further along, the same lost heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road.
    ‘And you know, the pair of them turned white overnight.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Their hair, what else?’
    ‘But Mrs Kinsella’s hair is black.’
    ‘Black? Aye, black out of the dye-pot, you mean.’ She laughs.
    I wonder at her laughing like this. I wonder at the clothes and how I’d worn them and the boy in the wallpaper and how I never put it all together. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the bars of the gate.
    ‘Shut up and get in, you,’ she says to him.
    It’s a cottage she lives in with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs, and tall Red Hot Pokers growing out of the ground. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There’s a baby in a high chair. He lets out a cry when he sees the woman and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the edge.
    ‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘The state of you.’
    I’m not sure if it’s the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn’t even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.
    I don’t know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave but just as I’m deciding what to do, the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the door frame.
    ‘Good evening all,’ he says.
    ‘Ah, John,’ the woman says. ‘You weren’t long. We’re only in the