reading

1

Five o’clock, Monday morning, there’s a purple light far out at sea. When they pulled down the old wreck of a factory between Mona’s building and the next, they gave her the gift of a view, and because she’s three floors up, if she leans against the window at an angle, now she can just see over the chalets and beach huts to the dawn-bruised clouds and the rosy hue of early-morning sun. She makes toast and a cup of tea and waits for light. The third night of not sleeping.

Mona notices then, in an identical flat in an identical building across the new narrow road, someone else can’t sleep and has the lights on at an ungodly hour. He’s a floor below her, standing at his window looking out at the blurred horizon. He’s her age, perhaps a bit older, grey hair swept back, in a dressing gown maybe with a thick shawl collar, and although Mona can’t see the belt, she imagines it’s made of gold rope with tassels on the end. Before she can look away, he turns and catches her staring.

They face each other like two characters in an opera, lit from above, waiting for the music to start. Then, with great elegance, he makes a gesture with his head, something between a bow and a nod that reminds Mona of the films she watched as a girl, sumptuous, Technicolor movies, ladies in crinolines and generals with brass buttons, splendid and handsome and chivalrous. She smiles and raises her mug in salute. Hopes he gets the joke. She hears her toast pop up in the kitchen. When she turns back, the man has gone.

She brushes her teeth, dabs cream on her face and rubs it in, notices again the blue of her eyes paling with time, the give of the skin on her cheeks. ‘You’re as pretty as Christmas,’ he said and she believed him but that was a long, long time ago.

She chooses a gingham dress in oyster pink but it’s the end of the summer and no weather for sandals. She belts up her mac and slings a satchel over her chest. Downhill all the way.

Mona’s is first on the lane to open up, not yet eight. She unlocks the shop door and turns the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. She walks straight to the kitchenette at the back and puts the kettle on. It’s a little chilly for the end of September. She kicks the fan heater into life and it purrs warm air on to her feet.

‘That’s my girl,’ she says.

Under the sink she finds a duster and some polish and walks back to the front of the shop. In the window there she has seven of the standard dolls, sixteen inches each one, five seated and two standing courtesy of an ingenious little contraption the carpenter made, a plain wooden stand with two arms that grip the doll round the waist and the neck. The display has an autumn theme with miniature squashes Mona bought at the supermarket, twigs and leaves from the communal gardens, and all the dolls dressed in green velvet, tan leather, burgundy wool and tweed the colour of Highland heather.

Mona dusts all over and puts a quick polish on the window. She rearranges a leg and an arm. Then she dusts the centre display where some of the dolls have fallen over. All this movement must happen at night, because before she locks up she spends half an hour tidying and settling but somehow every morning she finds the dolls have shifted and moved.

So she props them up properly, lets their legs dangle over the side, sits them facing the front, saying hello to the customers. But it will be an extra quiet Monday because of the biting wind and because it’s much too early for people to think of Christmas. There’s all of October yet. Come November, the end of November, things will be different but she doesn’t want to think about November before she has to.

At last, the cafe is open and Mona nips out.

‘Morning, Mona,’ says Danny and slips an almond croissant in a brown paper bag. He adds a flapjack and winks. ‘Bit of extra for my favourite blonde,’ he says and when Mona smiles he leans over the counter and whispers, ‘There’s more where that came from. Sugar and spice on tap. Imagine it,’ and winks again.

Mona puts some change on the counter. ‘I’ve got five years on you, Danny,’ she says. ‘Dog years.’ She makes for the door.

‘I can work with that,’ he shouts. ‘Anyway, who’s counting?’

She makes coffee to wash down the croissant and licks the sugar from her fingers. She’ll need to flick a duster over the toys, the building blocks and trains on the lower shelves, over the miniature vans, the wooden alphabets and children’s names, mobiles that hang from the ceiling, pull-along dogs and cars, aeroplanes and elephants, all carved from beautiful bits of wood, natural or under matt varnish with the grain showing. But they can wait.

Instead, she carefully polishes the glass cases of the specials, the tall dolls that each have a wardrobe of clothes and a printed sheet about the making of them and the wood that was used. Every doll comes with a name, and a sort of birth certificate. Mona suspects that she might have doubled up over the years. By rights she should have kept some sort of register, but she never imagined she’d still be at the dollmaking after more than twenty-three years. Too late to start an efficient census now. The damage is done.

Each of the special dolls reclines on a silk bed wearing a costume that Mona has handmade over weeks or months, their smooth, elegant bodies painted in two coats of flat, alabaster white. Their cases have compartments at the back with two extra little outfits hanging on a wooden peg. Mona’s made costumes from every era, Elizabethan, Georgian, Edwardian, Renaissance. She’s dressed dolls for great country houses and air-raid shelters, for weaver’s cottages, jazz clubs and field hospitals. She spends hours with books and magazines ensuring her designs are true yet unique creations, made to fit.

Ah, now the shop is warm. Mona sits at the counter, rubs her hands together to get them going and then takes the lid off the plastic drum she keeps at her feet. Most of her customers, especially the ones in Japan and America, like to think of every garment being sewn in a thatched cottage by an old lady with a thimble and half-moon glasses. The truth is that there’s very little now that can’t be done on a good Singer sewing machine and the bulk of the work is done at home. Nevertheless there are bits of embroidery and finishing that take nothing short of a needle and thread and a couple of hours under a good light so Mona reserves hand-stitching for quiet shop days.

She has a man to finish today. He has an orange suede jerkin and faded serge pantaloons. He has a green jumper, a rope belt, leather boots and a navy felt fedora. His red paisley neckerchief she will edge by hand with bright-green silk cotton. She holds the thread to the light and sees it waver in her breath. She kisses it, dampens it, pulls it through and draws out a length.

She makes a double stitch and sews carefully, tugging the thread after each delicate stitch, each movement of her hand and balletic stretch of her arm repeated over and over until the doll, who she will call Francis, has a new neckerchief. Then she will make his second outfit, one for the evening. Francis is a watchmaker by day but at night he plays the piano at the dancehall in town. He plays honky-tonk and Mona smiles because she has no idea what honky-tonk is. But she likes the word and Francis likes it too. She picks up his arms and makes him dance a jig. His heavy head wobbles on his neck.

‘Di-didilly-didilly-dee. So, Francis, you will need a black evening suit.’

She has just the thing at home, an old tuxedo. She’s used the sleeve already for an urchin’s waistcoat but this time she will cut right into the back for Francis and give him satin lapels to boot and a velvet dicky-bow. She might even fashion a cummerbund because Francis has a twinkle in his eye and a taste for the ladies. But he’s not a young man, Francis. He’s in his prime. Forty-five maybe, fifty would be pushing it. Mona holds him up close and whispers.

‘Who’s counting?’ Mona asks him. ‘I’ll tell you who. Old Father Time and his dreadful abacus, that’s who. Sixty on Saturday. Can you believe it, Francis? Me? Sixty?’

It’s nearly noon before a customer opens the door. Mona knows who she is straight away just by the cut of her but she waits while the woman has a look round, picks up a doll and comes at a creeping angle to where Mona sits behind the counter, hand-stitching a white ruffle shirt.

‘Gayle sent me,’ the woman says. She has huge pools of eyes, sore and glassy, with a beautiful tumble of hair the colour of October leaves. She’s as thin as a reed, white as milk; she might be thirty-five or ten years younger. That’s howling grief for you. Mona gets up and comes round to the other side of the counter, takes her hand.

‘Yes, I was expecting you. Hello, love.’

The woman’s coat is belted tight like the scarf round her neck and the grip she has on Mona’s fingers.

Mona smiles. ‘Now then, have you got something for me?’

The woman nods and opens her handbag. She brings out a little parcel, wrapped in white tissue paper tied with a white velvet ribbon.

‘Grand,’ says Mona. ‘Someone bought this for you, did they? We’ll take a look at this when you visit. Now, have you got a number for me?’

The woman purses her lips and swallows. Mona waits because some things are hard to say.

‘I’ll tell you what, let me give you this.’ Mona takes a business card from the counter and writes her address on the back. ‘That’s me. Shall we say next Wednesday at 4.00 p.m.? Would that suit you?’

The woman nods and Mona smiles. ‘I just need the weight.’

The woman’s voice is a whisper when she speaks. ‘Five pounds seven ounces,’ she says and she looks around as though she’s told a secret.

‘Lovely. Five pounds seven ounces. Good. All right now, I’m Mona and you are?’

‘Christine Burrows.’

‘Now then, Christine, four o’clock on the eighth of October. It takes a little while, at least an hour, sometimes more. Have you got other children? Do you need to pick them up from school or is that time all right?’

‘No others,’ she says, ‘four o’clock is fine,’ but she looks at the white parcel with the white ribbon on the counter. She touches it with the tips of her fingers and the paper crinkles.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Mona. ‘You’ll see it again. I’ll take very good care of it. Special care. You’ve done the hard bit now, haven’t you? You’ve come all the way here and spoken to me. Wednesday week at 4.00 p.m. The address on the card. Come alone.’

Mona pats her on her shoulder because anything more would make the woman collapse. Anyone can see that.

2

Joley comes in after lunch. She smells of hairspray and roll-ups. She dances around the centre display with her arms out, fingers splayed.

‘Guess what?’

‘You got it!’

‘Yeah!’ Joley pirouettes, flies round the counter and into the little office opposite the kitchen. Mona follows.

‘Oh, that’s grand, Joley. I’m so pleased for you, love. When do you start?’

Joley takes off her denim jacket and puts it on the back of the office chair. She sits down and turns the computer on.

‘Six weeks.’

‘Six?’

‘You should have let me show you before. I’ve been telling you for ages.’

‘I know but … I’ll have to get someone in when you’ve gone,’ says Mona. ‘I can’t do it myself.’

‘You can! I keep telling you, Mona. You can!’ Joley puts a bar of chocolate on the desk and takes white headphones out of her pocket.

‘What did you wear?’ asks Mona, looking her up and down. Her vest covers nothing, not the navy ink on her tattooed arm, not the generous inch of cleavage, not the creamy skin of her abdomen.

Joley laughs. ‘Wish you’d seen me. I wore, like, this black dress that my mum bought in, like, the nineties. And these?’ She raises her feet and shows Mona her heavy black boots. ‘And then I did my hair like yours, all tidy and straight in a sort of bun thing. Mum said she didn’t recognize me.’

‘Chignon, Joley.’

‘Yeah, I used a sort of plastic doughnut that gives you this kind of bouffant.’

‘Well, it did the trick anyway. Joley Carter, Teaching Assistant. They’ll call you “Miss” and everything,’ says Mona, straightening the denim jacket and giving Joley a little hug. ‘I’m very pleased for you, love.’

Joley turns her face up and smiles. Mona can see the child in her, see the toddler, the baby in the crib, but when Joley turns back to the computer she’s as fast as a cat, her fingers flying over the keyboard, her eyes darting over the screen, her black hair sprayed into impossible peaks and knots, like a doll herself or an alien. God, the place will be dead without her.

Mona goes to the toilet and looks in the mirror. Tidy and straight, is she? Maybe she’ll take her hair down or pin it up at the sides. Too old for a hairband, too old for a fringe. It’s still modern though, isn’t it, a chignon? Mona’s lipstick has disappeared, eaten along with her sandwich. And she could do with a manicure. That’s what she’ll have done at the Spa on Saturday. And a facial. And a back massage. She’ll have a healthy lunch and ruin it with wine. She’ll have bubbles in her glass and bubbles in the Jacuzzi. She’ll have afternoon tea with clotted cream. Proper tea in a proper pot, the way her mother used to make it. An old enamel pot it was – everyone had one in those days in that corner of Ireland – that was filled and refilled throughout the day, fresh leaves, fresh water added and kept hot by a thick felt cosy with red embroidery that her mother made. She made everything herself, clothes and curtains, coats, Mona’s dresses and a strange all-over apron of coarse brown material that she called ‘sackcloth’ because it only appeared for the annual spring cleaning.

Mona’s mother always pretended that the day was an almighty chore. She would enlist the help of Big Maureen O’Shea who also took in washing and ironing. She’d arrive at the front door with a pail, a couple of scrubbing brushes and a clutch of dusters, but mostly the two women would sit and drink tea. Very little cleaning was even attempted but a desperate bout of dusting was crammed into the last couple of hours of an April afternoon after which Big Maureen would waddle home with ten shillings, a cake, a pie and some of Mona’s old clothes for the little O’Shea twins.

Mona must only be four or five years old, swinging her little legs on a kitchen chair while she’s colouring in at the table. The two women chatter near the sink.

‘You weren’t at the wedding, Kathleen,’ says Maureen O’Shea.

Mona’s mother wrings the mop in the bucket and catches her breath. ‘No, I wasn’t well. I’ve had a terrible chest. Was it good? What did she wear?’

‘Molly Kavanagh?’

‘As was.’

‘As was, is right. As will be again if what I hear is correct.’

Mona’s mother looks up suddenly. ‘Go on!’

‘Listen while I tell you, but look …’

As long as the two women are emptying cupboards and scrubbing and splashing the flags with water, Mona takes no notice. But the conversation about Molly Kavanagh makes Mona look up from her colouring book and the two women stare at her. Without saying a word, they both turn and look at the rain drumming against the kitchen window.

‘She can’t go outside,’ Mona’s mother says.

‘No,’ adds Maureen.

Mona’s mother wipes her hands and goes to the dresser. ‘We’ll have to be careful.’ She pulls a drawer open and Mona hears the rustle of paper. ‘Now then, lovely,’ says Mona’s mother, putting three wrapped sweets on the table in front of her. ‘You carry on with your colouring and you can have those sweets one after another, sucking them slowly. Good. And draw me something. You concentrate on that while we do our work. All right?’

Mona pops one of the sweets into her mouth. It’s sharp and lemony and makes the water start from the back of her throat. She will draw a flower for her mother and a fisherman for her father for when he comes home from work. She wants to ask her mother what her favourite colour is but when she looks up the women have walked to the stove and are making more tea.

‘So?’ says Mona’s mother, nudging Maureen. ‘Wasn’t she only married Saturday week?’

‘It didn’t last twenty-four hours.’

‘What didn’t? Do not tell me that Stephen Hooley has disgraced that poor girl. Was he drunk? What did he do? He’s always been a fast one, that boy.’

Maureen O’Shea turns her head slowly and Mona has time to look down and carefully colour in the petals on her little flower.

‘Well, they went on up to the house after the wedding. As would be expected, after the celebrations had finished. The flowers were lovely, Kathleen. Molly did them herself. She’s as plain as an old coat, God bless her, but the blooms were grand and there’s not much to choose from this early in the year.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, it’s night-time and they’ve retired for the nuptials, if you know what I mean –’ Maureen O’Shea nods in the direction of Mona – ‘and Stephen Hooley has a friend.’

‘A friend?’

‘Yes, a friend he’s kept well hidden all during his courtship with Molly Kavanagh. And the friend is eager to see her. Very eager.’

Mona’s mother sniffs. ‘I see.’

‘But when the friend is introduced into the room, so to speak, Molly is horrified. “What’s that?” she screams. Says she doesn’t like the friend and he must be put away.’

Mona’s mother has her mouth wide open. ‘But the girl has lived on a farm all her life. What did she think was going to happen? She has two brothers, for pity’s sake. Did no one tell her?’

‘Well, from what I hear, she knew all about the existence of friendship but had no idea that – that the – er – friend would be – had intentions of, well, you know, would be inserted into …’

‘Her friend?’

‘Precisely. But Stephen Hooley, after months of denial, is banking on his powers of persuasion. “Don’t worry, Molly,” he says, edging his friend closer and closer, “he doesn’t bite.” ’

Mona’s mother begins to laugh, one hand splayed on her chest, great gulping gasps that rock her backwards and forwards. She has to grab the handle of the kettle. Maureen O’Shea’s face is creased and red.

‘She hit him! Molly Kavanagh leaps out of the bed, picks up a shoe and lamps him one!’

‘Him or the friend?’ says Mona’s mother through her laughter.

‘The friend was out of it like a shot! He shrank away,’ blusters Maureen O’Shea and the women howl and scream and it’s ten minutes before they recover. Mona watches them with a smile on her face, with her crayon poised over her drawing, drinking in the sound and the sight and the love in the warm kitchen in the grey April light. She would remember it for ever.

When Mona’s father comes home that night and they’re eating dinner together, she hears the same sound of fun in her mother’s voice as she tells him about her day.

‘Tell Dadda, Mammy,’ says Mona.

‘Tell him what, pet?’

‘You know, about Stephen Hooley’s friend?’

‘What friend?’

‘The shrinking one.’

The laughter seems to last for ever, her mother weeping again and wiping her eyes with a corner of the tablecloth, her father shaking his head and begging for an explanation, and Mona between them knowing she has made a wonderful joke.

Joley puts the New Orders file on the counter. ‘You don’t need to get anyone else, Mona. I can show you. The printing’s easy. Then all you’d have to do is concentrate on Orders. You fill in the invoice, put it in with the doll, write an email from the pro forma file, press send. When the –’

Mona pushes it aside. ‘I don’t even want to think about it, Joley. I’ve enough to do without trying to get my head round spreadsheets or whatever they are.’

‘The spreadsheets are even easier.’

‘Next week, I’ll have a go next week.’

Joley taps the file with her finger. ‘Time’s ticking,’ she says.

3

There’s a pile of new orders. All for specials. One from Korea, one from America, one from New Zealand, and a pair of dolls, male and female, wanted in South Africa. That’s a lot of orders for one month along with all the Christmas extras. Mona makes herself another cup of tea and stands at the window watching the lane. It’s filled up now. There are young women in denim jackets and others in T-shirts despite the chill, mothers with toddlers, toddlers with ice creams, their little hands and faces covered in chocolate stickiness, everyone trying to eke out the last of the Indian summer.

Saturday will bring the day trippers with windbreaks and towels on the beach, sauntering along George Street, sniffing scented candles and handmade soaps, trying on plaited leather bracelets and hand-sewn purses. Across the road they’ll wonder who on earth can afford the cashmere blankets in Grey’s. They’ll weave in and out of the antique shops and vintage emporiums, up and down, up and down the street, until finally settling at the White Horse for a late lunch. On their way to the car park, they’ll spend a fiver in the pound shop and when they get to Mona’s they’ll stare and point and hold their babies up to see the wooden skittles and Noah’s Ark.

But Mona’s routine is no less predictable. Monday to Saturday, it’s the shop, and then dollmaking on Sundays and most evenings. On Wednesdays the shop shuts for half a day and Mona takes the international orders to the post office or sometimes she’ll see the women that Gayle sends to her. She hardly alters her schedule except for Christmas and New Year and her annual trip to Val or Val coming down for a bit of sea air.

One year, one February, the snow was atrocious. Mona didn’t open up for five days. She put her snow boots on and visited the carpenter a couple of times, collected a few dolls and scurried back home, holding tight to handrails and hedges all the way up the hill. And another year George Street flooded and no one could get in. So all in all, it’s only the rare act of God that interferes with her plans.

Mona closes up at four and walks to Clearwater Lane, which has all the best charity shops. She’s out sourcing stock whenever she can, imagining and dreaming and planning outfits for her dolls, the thing that sets her apart, that keeps her business thriving. She knows what looks good with what. She can look at a silk blouse with a satin cuff and see what it might turn into, which doll might wear it and how she might take it apart. Mona’s always on the lookout for scraps of leather and wool, or an evening bag covered in tiny beads and buttons that she will painstakingly tease apart. She always needs lace for edging dresses and underskirts, also for the ruffs of shirts. She uses string or heavy thread for laces in boots, sequins and little bits of fashioned metal for jewellery, pendants and necklaces. And real hair of all colours – curls are a bonus. She sorts through the rails and carousels at Save the Children, Oxfam, the Blue Cross and Toby’s Hospice but there’s only a meagre yield: a navy suede jerkin, a rusty brooch with loose stones that she can pick out to decorate a dress, a Fair Isle cardigan that will be felted for a miniature carpet bag and two stained tablecloths with gros-point edging.

Then there’s just time to pop in on the carpenter before she heads home. She takes the long way down to the seafront, turns left away from the pier and the arcades, the ice-cream parlours and young men slouched over the railings, throwing their cigarettes on to the stones. She walks slowly in step with the long breaths of the sea. An early mist creeps over the water. She heads east towards the cliffs. This isn’t the tourist end of the beach; the buildings, all but one, are anonymous workshops and industrial units huddled under pewter cliffs that leach grey water from some leakage inland. Great lumps of rock scatter the beach. But even this end of town is being tarted up with oyster shacks and the Ropemaker’s Grill, local ice creams and the promise of the Old Town Heritage Centre.

The carpenter’s workshop is on the first floor. She can see it in the distance – it juts out, cantilevered almost over the old warehouse beneath. The wooden shutters are open as always, like great flat arms that beckon the great flat sea that sweeps all the way out, right to the edge of the world. Once, on a winter’s evening, Mona saw a crimson sun half dipped in the water and another time she hung out of that window and saw the clouds shuffle and sweep across the sky, the sunlight suddenly slicing through them and dancing over the waves.

It’s a beautiful space. You couldn’t help but make something beautiful in it. It smells of trees and forests, of resin and oil and sawdust and metal and all the minerals that make up the sea. It smells of food if he’s been cooking on his two-ringed stove in the corner, bacon sometimes or a fried egg, fish and chips if he can’t be bothered. Certain places, certain corners of the open space, smell of coffee or whiskey, and although he keeps it scrupulously clean, his toilet smells faintly of stale urine, like the back alley of a pub – but that’s men for you. Just as you walk in, there’s an alcove behind a faded velvet curtain, sapphire blue with a maroon fringe, something belonging to an old theatre or cinema, the sort of place that might pair those colours together and think it looked all right.

Once, by accident, many years ago, Mona had pulled the curtain back. There was a single bed against the wall, all made up neat and trim with a stripy flannelette sheet and a grey blanket, as old as the Crimea, tucked in tight apart from one corner he’d overlooked. It was all she could do not to nip in and make it perfect. She stopped herself. It wasn’t her business.

She opens the thick wooden door at the bottom of the metal steps. It’s never locked. There’s always been a carpenter here, a carpenter and an apprentice, one taking over from the other, their names carved on the heavy oak lintel, six in total but no youngster these days. The stairs are metal, open tread, slippery when they’re damp, and she’s suggested a couple of times that he fixes a rubber tread on each step for the sake of safety and peace of mind. He says he will but nothing changes.

She knocks at the door that leads to the big open room and walks in. ‘Only Mona,’ she shouts.

She can’t see him. She dips her head under the bulk of a wooden beam, walks round the workbench and the black pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room. The windows are open and the sea breeze makes the sawdust dance in the light. On a shelf near the window, he arranges the dolls by finish, from those ready for fine sanding to the rough ones, works in progress or in pieces. He lays the ones she can take on a table underneath with the finished toys. She comes so regularly there’s only ever three or four at most.

Mona loves the feel of a new doll, all loose-limbed and naked. The way they clack and tangle together reminds her of the crabs brought in at Kilmore Quay. Each wooden carcass has an egg-shaped body and smooth tapered limbs with articulated joints. The head has a small pointed chin, a peak of a nose and a medieval look. The carpenter sands them well enough but every now and again there’s a little rough patch he’s overlooked so she keeps a stock of fine-grade sandpaper for finishing. She uses light, quick, gentle strokes, blows the dust off, wipes it with a damp cloth, especially in the crevices, and then leaves it a while. It’s nothing she would ever tell the carpenter but all the same she’s become just a little finickety about texture over the years.

The carpenter always works with his back to the door, bent over, sawing or sanding, whittling or chiselling, both hands to the job, his long hair falling in jagged shanks. From behind you’d take him for a hippy maybe but you’d be wrong and if you ever got a close look at his eyes or saw past the beard, you would know it. He’s not a man to care about hairstyles or fashion and more than once Mona has found him with his head shorn and the ponytail making ash in the wood burner. But under it all, he’s broad and strong, his face worn and manly, with a smile, if ever you see it, that would make you blush.

And there he is, at the back by the lathe, planing something, slow and deliberate, his head inclined to the side in the dim light.

‘Afternoon,’ she says. ‘Though it’s barely that.’

He hardly raises his head but moves his hand. His greeting. She’s learnt to wait, to winkle out a conversation. She runs her finger along the top of a small wooden armoire, antique.

‘Who’s this for? It has a lovely deep sheen. Yew, is it?’

‘Yew, yes.’

‘I need a five-pound-seven-ounce baby,’ she says. ‘And I’ll put the kettle on if you’ve a few minutes.’

He stands up and stretches his back. His jeans hang at the back and the front and if it wasn’t for his belt, Mona would see everything. ‘Five pound seven,’ he says, ‘that’ll be a little one.’

‘Balsa?’

‘Too light.’

He walks over to the holding bays that line the workshop where he stacks his stock of wood and planks and off-cuts. Mona follows. He scratches his beard and crouches down on his haunches. He shifts blocks, weighing them against each other, muttering. His ribs furrow his shirt. Mona wonders if he’s hungry, whether she should offer to get them both fish and chips. She dare not go as far as a meal in a restaurant. He springs up suddenly with a dull piece of pine.

‘This is right,’ he says.

‘Good.’

Mona goes and fills the kettle at the little sink in the corner. It’s all bleached clean and shining; a little shelf to the side has a new bar of soap, a rough cloth, a folded towel.

‘Freezing wind today,’ she calls behind her. There are only two mugs, draining upside down on a wooden breadboard. There’s a beautiful little walnut cupboard wedged into the corner, with a bowed door and a marble top. It holds his life. Money, teabags, birth certificate, tablets, plasters, pencils, an old photograph. Mona could tell you every scrap in there. She takes out the teabags and wipes over the marble top.

‘You wouldn’t think it was September.’

Suddenly he’s next to her.

‘No?’

‘My hands are like slabs of ice,’ she says and holds them out. ‘Feel them.’

‘There’s always the promise of winter,’ he answers and leans past her to fill the mugs. She smells him, herby and sharp, like leaves in a forest. She puts her hands in her pockets and shuffles out of the way to the window. Down below, squatting on the pebbles, are a young man and his girlfriend.

The two of them are piling one big stone on top of another into a sort of totem pole and even from this distance Mona can hear the girl laughing and the young man’s baritone jokery. Their clothes are so insubstantial, her blouse buffeted by the wind, his T-shirt rising up at the back. They know nothing of the promise of winter, those two.

Mona turns back to the room and takes her tea. ‘I brought biscuits,’ she says, dipping into her bag. ‘Chocolate.’ She fights with the wrapper, takes one and puts the rest in the walnut cabinet. She takes eighty pounds from her purse and tucks it under the jar of coffee where he’ll see it.

‘Did she get it?’ he asks.

‘Who?’

‘You told me that girl that works for you was after a job.’

Mona takes a step towards him. ‘Yes, she’ll be gone in six weeks. I have her until then.’

‘Well, then,’ he says.

‘She wants to train me up. She thinks I can do it myself but I’ve never been good with figures.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, me, on the computer.’

He says nothing. She picks up the dolls and toys he has made and puts them in a canvas bag. When she looks again, he has gone back to his work.

‘Oh and I’ll have to bring back the yellow birch dolls from last week. They’re stained on the leg, two of them.’

‘Stained?’ He moves towards her and stands at the window.

‘Or something like that,’ she says. ‘There’s a sort of brown mark on the legs. I don’t want to paint over it.’

‘Bring them back. I’ll take a look.’

‘I thought you’d want to see them.’

‘Spalting. Discoloration.’

‘Yes?’

‘Fungal infection on the wood probably. People pay good money for spalted wood. You wouldn’t want it on a doll. Can’t think why I didn’t notice it though. Don’t paint over it. It might show. It would look like a mistake. And it’s not a mistake. Might make you look sloppy.’

She hears him swallow his tea, hears the grinding bob of his Adam’s apple. They are close together looking out at the two young lovers, giggling still, their stone construction uneven and listing. If she moved an inch she could touch him, elbow to elbow. He moves away.

‘Bring the dolls back,’ he says. ‘The pair of them.’

4

Soon, Mona’s mother seems to be crying all the time and not from laughter. Mona’s walking up the wooden stairs in her dusty sandals, straight in from the garden, and just as she gets near the bedroom door she hears the sniffing and mewling and she tiptoes down again, out the back door, through the hard stone lane, over the yielding dunes and down to the fringe of the Kilmore shore. Sand as soft as powder all around the wide curve of the bay. She splashes and plays and gets her sandals wet and stays away for hours. Away from her, away from her. Mona’s ashamed of herself now but at seven or eight children can be heartless.

One day, Mona’s father comes striding after her with his shirt untucked, his house slippers sinking as he walks. When he reaches where she’s playing, he stands still and, for a moment, says nothing. He looks like he’s been sleeping or crying himself.

‘Mona,’ he says, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Playing, Dadda,’ she replies.

‘Where do you think you should be? Where did I ask you to be, now?’

‘With my mother.’

‘Doing what?’

‘But, Dadda …’

He crouches down until his big head is level with hers and takes both of her hands in his. He tugs on them.

‘Is it boring with your mother, Mona? Because she can’t get up and run into the waves with you like she used to? Because she can’t sit you on her lap and brush your hair, because she doesn’t get out of bed? Is that it, Mona?’

As he speaks he picks strands of Mona’s white-blonde hair from where it blows across her eyes.

‘Yes, Dadda.’

‘One day,’ he says, and his voice is kind so Mona knows she isn’t getting a telling-off, ‘one day, you will want these hours back, my girl. You will wonder how you lost them and you will want to get them back. There’s a trick to time.’

He stands up, brushes the sand from his trousers, and Mona jumps up on to his back for the ride home. He lollops over the dunes with her hands round his neck and her chest against his ribs.

‘What’s the trick, Dadda?’

He likes to explain things so Mona expects a good long answer that might delay them getting back home.

‘You can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer,’ he says.

‘How?’

Mona clings to him. She looks out to sea for one last glimpse before it sinks over the brow of the hill and her father turns his head also.

‘By the sea all life’s worries wash away,’ he says.

This is typical of him, quoting something from a poem or a book and not answering a straight question with a straight answer. And anyway, the sea must be losing its special powers because Mona’s father is worried all the time these days and he’s right here by the sea in the wrong trousers and the wrong shoes without even a comb through his hair. And it has nothing to do with making time grow.

‘All life’s worries wash away?’ she asks. He nods and says no more.

When they get home, Mona goes straight upstairs to her mother, sitting up in bed wearing the horrible knitted hat, the one with bits of hair stuck to the sides, the same black hair that once used to cascade over her shoulders or rest like a plaited rope on her back. But Mona can see straight through the wispy veil that now barely covers her mother’s scalp; whole skeins of her loveliness are tangled in the knitted bonnet or lie loose and dark on the pillowcase like dry seaweed on the rocks. And then there are the sores at the corners of her mother’s mouth. Sores that make Mona turn away from a kiss. God forgive her.

Mona’s mother takes a piece of linen out of her sewing basket and holds it up to the window.

‘Come, look at the light through the weave,’ she says. ‘See? It’s the colour of your summer skin, Mona.’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘When you grow up, when you’re a big girl, you’ll go to other countries, Mona. To Italy and France and Spain. Far, far away, where it’s hot every single day and you’ll go browner than this.’

Mona can feel her mother’s eyes all over.

‘You’ll be tall, I think. Yes, tall you’ll be and very, very pretty, a stóirín.’ She strokes Mona’s arm. ‘I can see you now. Walking down a street that has a French name, the Rue something, and it’s not summer, it’s winter, yes, let’s say it’s a crisp December evening and maybe you’ll be hand in hand with a husband or a sweetheart. You’ll have a coat with a fur collar and a pair of leather boots with buttons up the side.’

‘What else will I have?’

‘You’ll live on a wide boulevard or maybe up by the strand in Rosslare in a big house with two cats and a rabbit. Two children – no, four children and a maid. Yes, shall we give you a maid, my little treasure? Shall we give you a maid and a cook and someone to open the front door to visitors and curtsy?’ Mona’s mother puts her nose in the air and speaks in an English accent. ‘I beg your pardon, madam. Miss Desdemona is not to be disturbed.’

But as Mona laughs, her mother loses the smile on her face.

‘You know, I might not be there, Mona. I might not be with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you have your life to live and you won’t want your mother with you all the time, will you?’ She begins to tack the linen with long, even stitches. ‘And because I might not be well enough to see you grow up.’

‘I’m growing quickly. Dadda said.’

‘Yes, you are. But I’m getting sicker quickly too. And if it was a race, Mona, I think you would win.’

‘Mammy,’ says Mona, ‘you can live with me when I have my big house.’

Mona sees how her mother’s nightdress gapes at the neck, how her face is sunken, the colour of the grey rocks on the beach. ‘And the cook will make you a nice dinner with lots of bread and butter. And jam,’ Mona adds.

Her mother’s reply is a squeeze from her cold hand and a little cough.

It goes on for hours, their sewing and imagining and making each other laugh. Mona stays upstairs until it’s nearly dark, until her mother leans back against the iron bedstead, until her blinks get slower and slower and her sewing drops on to the covers. Mona creeps off the bed and tiptoes down to her father, who is still in the wrong clothes sitting in front of a dead fire.

‘Good girl,’ he says.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kit De Waal

THE TRICK TO TIME

VIKING

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