A Greyhound of a Girl (11 page)

She looked straight at Mary.

“But Emer,” she said. “Your granny. That was different.
Emer, I fretted about. I lived longer than should have been possible. Did they ever tell you that?” she asked Scarlett.

“Yes,” said Scarlett. “They said you fought it and kept asking for Emer.”

“I'm glad of that,” said Tansey. “I needed Emer to know that, after I'd gone. That I tried my best. I'm glad now she knew. I'd cry if I could, girls.”

She smiled.

“So,” she said. “It was Emer made a ghost of me. She wouldn't let me go. I had to make sure she'd be grand.”

“She was grand!” said Scarlett.

“But I was never sure,” said Tansey.

Scarlett put a cup in front of Tansey.

“Oh, look now.”

And one in front of Mary. Then she sat down.

“So,” said Tansey. “I lingered.”

“No one ever mentioned a ghost,” said Scarlett. “Or even—sorry—a cold spot in the house. You might have—”

“No, no,” said Tansey. “I stayed clear of the house. I'd no wish to disturb the peace or mending. But I had to stay near, all the same.”

She looked down at her tea.

“I was never that mad about tea at all,” she said. “You
know, the way others go daft if they don't have a cup every hour. I was never like that. But now—”

She smiled again—there was nothing sad in her smile. “I'd love to taste this tea.”

“It must be hard being a ghost,” said Mary.

“Well, it is,” said Tansey. “It's harder than living. Especially if you die young, like I did. I hope now I'm not depressing you two ladies.”

“No!”

“No way.”

“I felt terrible guilty, you see. I couldn't help it and I still can't. Because I died too soon and I died too quickly. I know it wasn't my fault, but even when you're dead, you can't help your feelings. So. Drink your tea there. I'm grand, don't be staring at me.”

Mary and Scarlett did what they were told. The tea was much too hot for Mary, but she said nothing. She sipped and scalded herself, and knew she was doing the right thing, being calm in front of Tansey.

“So,” said Tansey. “Like I said, I felt guilty and very unsettled. I'd left things unfinished, not properly looked after. I suppose now all mothers would feel that way if they were leaving little ones behind.”

“And fathers,” said Mary.

“Fair enough,” said Tansey. “You're right, you're right. But the saddest ghosts, I'd say—male or female—would be the ones who died when their children were still children, in school maybe, just starting to grow up. The poor ghosts feel terrible about it. So they stay. They linger. D'you know, I hate that word,
linger
. It's too cozy altogether. They stay to see if everything is all right. To see their children grow up, for a while. To make sure the children are fine.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Mary asked Tansey.

“That's exactly what,” said Tansey. “I couldn't leave Emer.”

“Why did you stay so long?”

“Oh, Lord,” said Tansey. “That's the question.”

carlett was five when she found her mother crying in the milking parlor. It was the second day of their summer holiday. The rain had stopped during the night, when they were all asleep. Scarlett slept in a room high up in the house, right under the straw, and she could hear the mice up there, but they didn't frighten her at all. She thought mice were lovely.

She put on her holiday clothes, her old holey jeans and her plastic sandals, and she went carefully down the wooden steps from her little room to the landing, and then down the dark stairs to the kitchen. The smell of rashers got stronger as she went down each step. But she didn't rush. She went slowly, carefully. She couldn't really see in front of her until she turned the corner in the stairs and the light from the open kitchen door came in a hard, straight
line across the floor to where the stairs started, and she was safe.

The kitchen was empty. That meant she was the last one up this morning. She listened, and she knew: the whole house was empty. It was so bright and warm in the kitchen, she knew it was quite late. She'd had a great sleep. But now she wanted to be awake. And she couldn't be really awake unless there were people to see her and hear her.

She went out into the yard.

She could hear a tractor far away. She knew that was her uncle James the Baby. She guessed that her daddy had walked down the lane to the shop, to get his paper and his cigarettes. So that just left her mammy, somewhere. Scarlett didn't call out yet. She wanted to surprise her.

She went to the gate of the kitchen garden. A piece of wire held it closed. It was easy to lift, even though she didn't have to go in. She could see that the garden was empty, just rows of lettuces and other vegetables, some of them with huge fat leaves that looked like shoulders, bent over, protecting their little baby vegetables. She didn't like the strawberry plants, or the way they didn't grow up; they were sneaky. She stayed looking into the garden for a while longer, just to make sure her mammy wasn't behind
one of the apple trees or at the very back of the garden, at the gooseberry bushes, where—her mammy told her—people went to wee before the house had a toilet. She waited a little while more, but there was no one down there. She could still hear the tractor, and she could hear the crows giving out, in the big trees behind the kitchen garden.

Next, Scarlett went to the shed that was full of nothing except a smell. The smell was so bad, it made her daddy laugh and cough whenever he stuck his head into the shed. Scarlett knew her mammy wouldn't be there, but she looked in anyway, into the dark and the stink.

“Hello?”

Nothing answered.

All the sheds were whitewashed and the walls were uneven, as if big flat hands behind the whitewash kept pushing them out of place. Uncle James the Baby whitewashed them every couple of years, but the inside walls of the empty shed were covered in green stuff that seemed to climb up from under the ground. There was no door anymore, just two big rusty hinges where the door had hung. It was cold in there, and not nice. But Scarlett loved looking into it, from a safe distance. She'd wondered why
it was the only shed that wasn't used. The rest of the farmyard was bright and useful. She'd asked her uncle James the Baby about it, the night before.

“What shed would we be talking about, now?”

“The one with the smell,” said Scarlett.

“That'll be the pigs,” said Uncle James the Baby, as he took off his boots at the kitchen door.

“There are no pigs,” said Scarlett.

“But the smell lingers long after they leave,” said Uncle James the Baby. “Oh, God, it does linger.”

“Why did the pigs leave?”

“I told them to,” said Uncle James the Baby. “ ‘Off with you, pigs,' I said. ‘My niece is coming to stay and she'll be wanting your room to sleep in.'”

“Yeuk!”

Uncle James the Baby came into the kitchen. He was high up, like Scarlett's mammy. He had to bend at the kitchen door and his hair stood up on top of his head after he took his cap off, and it made him look even higher. He sat down in the big chair that used to belong to his granddad and now belonged to his dad, although his dad, Jim—Scarlett's granddad—was in the hospital in Wexford with something wrong with his stomach. They were going
to see him tomorrow. They'd be bringing him grapes and
Ireland's Own
, his favorite magazine. She watched Uncle James the Baby lower himself into the chair. He had to fold himself—that was how it looked—like her dad's penknife, and it seemed to take forever before he was sitting properly in the chair.

“Myself and your granddad,” he said, “we decided we didn't want the pigs anymore and we'd concentrate on the cows. It must be ten years ago now. So the pigs went off to sausage land, but the smell stayed behind. They don't put the smell into the sausages, thank God. But we're stuck with it. Did you see the trough in there, did you?”

“What's a trough?”

“It's—it'd be like the bucket for their food. Made of stone. There's a water trough down in the village, where the horses drank their water in the days of the horses. D'you know it, do you?”

“Yes. Dad always sits there and reads the front of his paper.”

“That's right,” said Uncle James the Baby. “Well, that's a trough.”

Scarlett stood at the shed door now and looked at the trough she hadn't noticed before. It was lower than the
one in the village, because, she knew, the pigs' legs were shorter, so the trough had to be nearer the ground. It was much longer than the trough in the village. It went down the side of the shed, all the way. That was where the pigs had had their food, in the olden days. She wanted to see if there was any old food still in the trough. But she didn't go in.

She crossed the yard to the greyhounds. The tractor was still going, and she guessed that her daddy was down in the village by now, sitting on the side of the trough—she knew what a trough was now—reading his paper and having a cigarette.

She stood at the fence.

Her mammy didn't like the greyhounds. They were too skinny, she said, and too needy—although Scarlett didn't know what that meant.

Scarlett didn't mind them. They were big and skinny, all right—there were four of them—but they were shiny and they reminded her of the seals she'd seen at the zoo when they'd gone there for her birthday. Their backs were like the seals' backs, when they ran. They all came up to the fence to see her, but they didn't go mad or anything. She knew her mammy definitely wasn't
in there with the greyhounds, so she turned away.

“Bye-bye,” she said.

And she went back across the yard to the milking parlor. She went carefully around the old dried-up cow poo, and the poo from this morning that was nearer the door and hadn't dried up yet. There were diseases and little, nearly invisible things in cow poo.

She loved the milking parlor. She always loved the way the cows came slowly up the lane, by themselves, as if they were on their way to school. Her dad once said that they should have had schoolbags on their backs, and caps with holes for their horns. Then the cows all turned, sometimes pushing each other—but not hard—like they were forming a queue, and went into the parlor, straight to their places in the parlor, to be milked. They all had their place, and they all knew where they had to stand. Sometimes, at home, she dreamed about the cows walking up the lane, a line of them that never ended until she woke up. Once, in the dream, there was a television on the other side of the lane, but Scarlett couldn't see what was on, because the cows kept walking past it. She didn't get annoyed or try to move. She was happy looking at the cows. They were so close, she could rub them.

This wasn't a cow time, though. She'd missed the one early this morning, because she'd been asleep, and it was ages before the next one, just before the humans had their tea—after the cows were put back in their field and Uncle James the Baby had washed his hands all the way up to his elbows.

The parlor was quiet now but not a bit scary. There was water on the floor where Uncle James had used the hose after he'd finished with the cows that morning. The parlor was always nice and cool when the day outside was getting hot, and there was none of the green stuff growing on the walls. The shiny steel machines were all hanging in their places. “I don't know myself with the electric,” Scarlett had heard Uncle James the Baby tell her parents. Scarlett didn't know what he'd meant, exactly, but she thought it had something to do with the machine things that went over the cows' milk things and milked the cows for him while he could lean against the wall and chat. Before he had the machines, he'd had to do it all himself, with a man from up the lane called Lefty, who had gone off to England to work in a factory.

She stepped into the parlor. She didn't have to be careful now because the concrete floor had been washed
and it was grand and clean. She walked right in and heard her mammy. Then she saw her. She knew it was her mammy, before she could see. Her mammy wasn't hiding or anything. She was standing close to the wall, just behind where Scarlett now stood, and her forehead was leaning against the whitewash. She wasn't bawling, just crying quietly. Weeping.