Peeling Oranges Read Online Free PDF

‘singing arthritic’ (Jack developed rheumatism in his fingers) might mar the cloth. However, the suit fitted Foley so neatly at the shoulders and hung so well on his frame, that no one knew that the diplomat had a hump.
    When Jack’s wife died in nineteen fifty-four, he and Sinéad left the Liberties and followed the peregrinatio to the suburbs – he had accrued a fair amount of money by sheer hard work. They took up residence in Rathfarnham, a few roads away from where my mother and I now live.
    The origins of Jack Ó Súileabháin’s anti-Englishness are not clearcut, but for the convenience of folklore (myths like their causes and effects uncomplicated), they are rooted in the Tan war. It was said the Tans attacked his home looking for rebels, and that they threw his mother onto the street and she only wearing a nightdress (not unlike my dream), and then they came at her with her own scissors and cut her long mane of auburn hair into shreds. Patrick records my mother telling him that the later recounting of such an outrage had a profound effect on a young Gearóid Mac Suibhne who swore that there would be retribution for all crimes committed against ‘his’ people.
    The tailor instilled in Sinéad a hatred of all things English. He indoctrinated her so strongly in lore, myth and song that no amount of education could ever hope to redress. ‘ Is treise dúchas ná oiliúnt ’ (nature is stronger than nurture) was a favourite saying of Sinéad’s and one could hear her father’s echo in it.
    As a primary school kid, Sinéad often called to our house, more to see my mother, to practise her Irish than to see me. My mother is a fluent non-native Irish speaker. She told me in one of her rare moments of denouement that she had been in the same Gaelic League class as Éamon de Valera.
    What happens to the real offspring of a mother when she is seconded to someone else? We search for blocks to fill our own absences. Sinéad got information out of my mother that I could never get: about Cumann na mBan , the Irish language, the Troubles of the twenties and more besides.
    My mother berated me for my apparent luke-warmness towards the language.
    ‘Sinéad is going to get a good result in her exam because she practises all the time. How do you expect to do well if you don’t speak it? I never hear you speaking it.’
    ‘I hear it. I hear you . Isn’t that enough?’
    It was the first time I remember being deliberately cheeky to my mother. It was to do with her showing me up in front of Sinéad. Or maybe it was because I saw through her words and found something hollow.
    One Christmas – I remember now it was the Christmas after that summer excursion to the seaside – I got a plastic ring in a cracker. Sinéad was visiting us. She never men tioned that incident by the sea, and I never brought it up either. But it made me feel close to her, not in any overt sexual way (I was still prepuberty then), more like a kind of bonding, making her a sort of surrogate sibling. I offered her the ring. She laughed. She was just at the stage of shedding those soppy female qualities that she later called weaknesses (like calling her father, Daddy – she was now referring to him simply as Jack).
    We were sitting on a bed over the shop. Tomás’ room.
    ‘I want you to wear it,’ I said.
    ‘You know we could be cousins. We are like cousins.’
    By cousins I think she meant that we lived close to each other, and to give a ring to a cousin or to kiss her was not ‘on’.
    But she said that I was go deas and that she would keep the ring but not to wear.
    Her refusal to wear the ring troubled me. I felt rejected. I had saved it for her. It was meant to be a sign of something between us. I remember going outside. It was beginning to snow. I began to shiver. I was in shirtsleeves and short pants. There were goosepimples on my legs. I walked into Saint Patrick’s Park and saw a statue all grey on a bench with the snow falling on it. And