Read Online The Fields by Kevin Maher - Free Book Online Page B

real women they either love Mam or they hate her. They sit on her bed late at night with the door closed, and have private chats for hours about fellas and things and who fancies who and what that bitch called this bitch and so on. Or else they just walk in the garage door, see her there, up to her elbows at the sink, and hate her on the spot. One time when Sarah shouted out that Mam was such an old cow, Mam responded by saying this little poem that she has memorised off by heart. It goes,
As you are now, so once I was. As I am now, so you will be
. Mam always says that she was thick in school and that she never did Irish and never got further than her Inter Cert, but when she wants to she can really pull it out of the bag.
    The kitchen’s getting busy. Mam has thrown off her glamorous church outfit and is down to a tracksuit top and jeans whilequickly making a melon-balls starter by scraping a butter-ball scooper through a melon. When she says the words, ‘melonballs’, Mam adds the phrase, ‘saving your presence’, which means that she doesn’t want you to think of the rudeness in the word ‘balls’ when she says it. But by saying it she actually does, so it’s a joke. Claire and Susan are both in stiff Sunday-best blouses and pleated skirts. Their hair-dos are neatly pulled back from their faces with metal clips and they’re sitting on opposite sides of the table annoying each other.
    Claire is trying to make origami animals out of the eight paper napkins on the table. Susan is picking at the folds in her skirt and in a big huffy mood because she wasn’t allowed to go and stay at the Joyces last night. The Joyces are posh family friends with a giant house in Ballinteer. Claire slept over there last night in the same room as Brenda Joyce and she keeps talking about how they played dares and Girl’s World all night and it’s driving Susan mad. Susan’s also annoyed because Claire wore her favourite luminous deely boppers, the ones that she’d been saving up for some night when she’s actually asked to go somewhere, anywhere.
    Eventually, after about twenty minutes of
Hooked on Classics
, stair-thumping, shouting and pan-bashing, Sarah, Siobhan and Fiona come trudging down to the table. Even though it’s only Sunday lunchtime, and not a disco, Sarah’s hair is filled with mousse and gone all curly and she’s wearing a denim miniskirt and a wrap-around top with no bra. Siobhan’s wearing a second-hand black silk blouse, black drainpipes and cowboy boots, and Fiona’s in a baggy grey tracksuit, with a thin blue scarf on her head that makes her look like a pirate but is used to flatten down the bits of red hair that got badly stuck up during the night’s short kip.
    The kitchen table has two foldable wings on either side, so normally it looks like it can hold about six of us, but when youflip out both wings it can hold the full eight at a squeeze. Sarah and Siobhan sit at the far end, near the door – this is useful for Sarah, so she can call Dad a senile old twit during the meal and dash straight up to her room before he gets a chance to squeeze out of his seat. Dad and Susan sit with their backs to the radiator. This is good for Susan, because it makes her feel like Dad’s special girl. Mam sits opposite Dad and Susan, with her back to the kitchen presses and with Claire on her right-hand side. And me and Fiona sit opposite Sarah and Siobhan, with our backs to the big kitchen window, the one that Gary smashed with the hockey ball.
    The meal starts with Mam marching inside and turning off
Hooked on Classics
. Dad doesn’t make a sound about this. He just keeps his head slung low in his hands, staring down at the empty plate in front of him. He’s tired again. Super tired. It’s like all that heavy-duty paper-reading has taken it out of him completely. He wouldn’t dare argue with Mam about the music anyway, because her face is red and sweaty from preparing a meal for eight, and this gives her a