Peeling Oranges Read Online Free PDF Page A

them away from home. Some kids travelled home by marbles. The marbles led them all the way along the side channels of streets like lodestones to welcoming hearths. When I tired of rolling, I held the marbles up to the light and imagined mysterious universes captured inside the coloured glass.
    There was one time I remember – perhaps the only time – being conscious of a feeling of belonging. It was before I reached the age of knowing, before I wandered away from the tribe, before I developed an orphan mind. It was to do with the sea. All Liberties’ children love the seaside. We got the train from Amiens’ Street Station. My mother, my aunt Peg, and a few of the Liberties’ children and myself were all packed tightly into a train compartment. There was vying for the window seat and the winner (a boy with scaled bald patches on his head whose name I can’t remember) controlled the leather strap that raised or lowered the window. The prize for the winner was a squint.
    As we walked along the beach I saw a woman’s shoe in the sand. When I told my mother, she suddenly looked sad. ‘I don’t suppose that’s all she lost,’ she said. And I remember moving away from the group, and the wide expanse of sand with the tide out, miles and miles like a desert and nowhere to hide or shelter from the wind that always blows across the Irish sea. And the little pretty girl in a bathing suit. We had buckets and spades and had been digging wherever we found a whirl formation in the sand in a quest to discover the mysterious sculptor. The little girl was behind me. She told me not to look around. I heard a hissing sound drilling a hole in the sand.
    I had to look.
    The straps of her pink pleated bathing costume were removed revealing two raw little nipples with no breasts to cling to. The bathing suit was pulled down to just above her knees as she squatted, still holding her bucket and spade. There was a temporary look of hurt in her freckled face, but she quickly pulled up her swimsuit and shook her dark pigtails and, with a smile that is registered immortal, bounded off along the strand.
    The girl’s name was Sinéad.
    ***
    Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin’s people were well known in the Liberties. They shared a common republicanism with my mother’s people and were frequent visitors to the Woodburn shop. Sinéad’s mother died of consumption when Sinéad was very young. She was brought up by her father, Jack the tailor. I remember as a child someone mentioned the tailor’s donkey and I spent a long time wondering how a donkey could fit into a flat. My mother sometimes sent me over to the Ó Súileabháin’s with a message or something from the shop. ‘Ah Derek,’ Jack would say, greeting me always with a smile. ‘How is your mother? Is she bearing up?’ ‘She’s fine,’ I would say, not quite clear what his meaning was. ‘Will I give you a bar?’ he would say, and I thought at first it was a bar of chocolate he meant, but he started straightway into The Bold Fenian Men , sewing as he sang.
    I remember a musty room with chalk-marked cloths cut into the shapes of triangles and squares strewn across the linoleum floor as if awaiting a geometry class; brown paper patterns hanging from hooks in the ceiling; a delineator and a heavy shears with its adjustable brass screw; boys’ short pants pressed and made ready to be sold to drapery shops throughout the city and the new suburbs; steam gushing from an iron making the room appear like a train station; the hum of the sewing machine or the silver thimble on his finger and the halfmoon glasses hanging down his nose as he worked on the ‘special’.
    Jack Ó Súileabháin could make cloth curve and fall in all the right places to nullify the imperfections in the human frame. Some say he was an artist, but cloth covers up and art lays bare. I discovered in my reading that Jack made Patrick Foley’s wedding suit. My mother recommended him, but Patrick was concerned that the