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door. Aren’t we only in the door, Child?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Kinsella hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you, to take her home.’
    ‘It was nothing,’ the woman says. ‘She’s a quiet young one, this.’
    ‘She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her,’ he says. ‘Are you ready to come home, Petal?’
    I get up and he talks on a little, to smooth things over, the way people do. I follow him out to the car where the woman is waiting.
    ‘Were you alright in there?’ she says.
    I say I was.
    ‘Did she ask you anything?’
    ‘A few things, nothing much.’
    ‘What did she ask you?’
    ‘She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry.’
    ‘Did she ask you anything else?’
    ‘She asked me was the freezer packed tight.’
    ‘There you are,’ says Kinsella.
    ‘Did she tell you anything?’ the woman asks.
    I don’t know what to say.
    ‘What did she tell you?’
    ‘She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to Mass last Sunday.’
     
    When we get home, the hound gets up and comes out to the car to greet us. It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off to milk. When he comes inside, he says he’s not ready for bed and that there will be no visitors tonight anyhow, on account of the wake – not, he says, that he wants any. The woman goes upstairs and changes and comes back down in her nightdress. Kinsella has taken my shoes off and has put what I now know is the boy’s jacket on me.
    ‘What are you doing now?’ she says.
    ‘What does it look like? And she’ll break her neck in these.’
    He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs upthe soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.
    ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll break them in.’
    ‘Didn’t she already break them in? Where are you taking her?’
    ‘Only as far as the strand,’ he says.
    ‘You’ll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella,’ she says. ‘And don’t you go without the lamp.’
    ‘What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?’ he says but he takes it anyhow, as it’s handed to him.
    There’s a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes small steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of howshe walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.
    When we reach the crossroads we turn right, down a steep, sloping road. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully through the dry boughs, when their leaves rise and swing. It’s sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing we will, at its end, come to the sea. The road goes on and the sky, everything, seems to get brighter. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way then falls into the quiet way he has about him, and time passes without seeming to pass and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park cars. It is full of tyre marks and potholes, a rubbish bin which seems not to have been emptied in a long time.
    ‘We’re almost there now, Petal.’
    He leads me up a steep hill where, on either side, tall rushes bend and shake. My feet sink in the deep sand, and the climb takes my breath away. Then we are standing on thecrest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.
    Kinsella lets me loose and I race down the far side