16
The watch is her father’s. She sits among the daisies, waiting for him while he looks for it. She arranges the pink flowers on a dock leaf and they are strawberries on a plate and it is a party except that no one comes to it but herself. The dandelions are another fruit, maybe pears, she doesn’t know. ‘Crickets talk with their legs,’ her father says when he comes back. The watch always dangles into his top pocket, only it wasn’t there when he looked. He took it off to keep it by him, so that he’d know the time when his jacket was off. He drooped the watch-chain over a fallen branch and then walked away without it. ‘We’ll go and look,’ he said in the kitchen. Her mother was there too. A Sunday because they’d all been to Mass. It’s too hot where she is so he says go under the tree. His grandfather’s the watch was, brought back from Dublin the time his grandfather was killed by the soldiers. ‘It won’t take long,’ someone else says. ‘Try and relax now.’ It’s when he worked for the Mandevilles, before he worked for the nuns. ‘There it is,’ he says. ‘Right as rain.’ There is music a long way off, a man singing and the music. ‘That’s Felicia, ma’am,’ her father says, and a tall woman bends down and holds her hand out. ‘Shake hands with Mrs Mandeville, Felicia.’ But she doesn’t want to, and the woman laughs. She has smooth hair drawn back from her face, and trousers. ‘Felicia’s a nice name,’ she says. A white dog sniffs her foot and she cries. The tall woman puts a finger into the dog’s mouth to show it won’t bite. The music is still playing, and the voice is singing. ‘Look, Felicia,’ her father says, and she sees people sitting on chairs in front of a house, a man and another woman and a boy. The music is coming from there. ‘John Count,’ her father says. The house is green, a big square house. The bottom of a curtain has blown out of an open window and trails on the windowsill, white net on green. The hall door is open as wide as it will go, darkness inside. Tall Mrs Mandeville walks with the dog behind her, going slowly towards the chairs, her footsteps sounding on the gravel, silent on the grass. There is a rattle of plates and cups when the music ceases. In a shed in the garden her father shows her the garden tools he uses. He tells her what each is called: rake, fork, shears, spade, hoe. This is where he spends his days. He shows her a bird’s nest in the roof of the shed, and lifts her up to see speckled green eggs. ‘Isn’t that a queer thing?’ he says. They pick bluebells to bring back. She can hear the music again, but it’s different now. Jazz, her father says, the music of the southern American negro. ‘A black man that is, Felicia. Black all over.’ It’s hot when they come out of the wood where the bluebells are, she can feel it on her head. Her father takes one hand and she holds the bluebells in the other. The hinge on the watch is faulty, he says, he must get it fixed in MacSweeney’s. ‘Aren’t you the big girl now,’ he says, ‘able to be a companion on a Sunday?’ On the road they stop while he opens a packet of cigarettes. Sweet Afton he likes, but sometimes he’ll try another brand. He doesn’t smoke much, just now and then during the day. ‘Keep the midges off us,’ he says, lighting a match. He tells her about when he was small, as small as she is, and about how his own father had bare feet going to school. His own father and his mother are dead, but he still has his grandmother. They go into Lafferty’s shop and he has some of her lemonade because he is thirsty, too. He carries her on his shoulders and she can smell the tang of tobacco on him. ‘All done,’ someone says and it isn’t him, and there are lights and a smell that isn’t cigarettes, clean like Jeyes’ Fluid or the stuff when the sink’s blocked. The sheets are cool, a soreness is just beginning. ‘All done,’ someone says again; the fingers on her wrist have black hairs on them. ‘She can take herself off now,’ another voice says.