LITMIR.BIZ

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Dad! Ah told the boys you would know the answer.’

      Dan had glanced up from his paper.

      ‘Twenty-two,’ he said.

      ‘Naw, naw. Listen, Dad. Andrew got hit in the face wi’ the ball.’

      Dan looked at her and rolled his eyes.

      ‘Hit in the face wi’ the ball!’ Danny said.

      ‘In the face,’ Dan said. ‘With the ball. Correct.’

      ‘All right. He was goin’ to tackle Michael. And Michael lashed it. He really thumped it. An’ it hit Andrew right in the face. Full force.’

      ‘Amazin’,’ Dan said.

      ‘Naw. But listen, Dad. Is it a foul?’

      Dan started to laugh.

      ‘What d’ye mean?’

      ‘Is it a foul?’

      ‘How can it be a foul?’

      ‘But it hit him right in the face!’

      ‘Danny! It’s not a foul. Because the ball hits somebody in the face. It’s mebbe an accident. But it’s not a foul.’

      Betty remembered Danny’s disappointment and then the hope that rekindled his eyes, the counsel for the defence who has found the incontrovertible point of law.

      ‘But, Dad,’ he said. ‘Andrew’s cryin’. He’s really roarin’.’

      While Dan explained that tears didn’t make a foul, Betty thought she had glimpsed the core of Danny and remembered why she loved him so much. He believed that circumstances had to yield to feeling. He was such a lover that he couldn’t understand why the deepest feeling didn’t make the rules. As Danny trailed disconsolately back out the house to announce the bad news from the adult world, Betty felt a compassion for him that was out of all proportion to a football match.

      It was perhaps that memory that determined how she would decide when Raymond picked up the cards from the mantelpiece as soon as he had finished eating. He was about to play patience again.

      ‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘Ah’m goin’ to play at cards.’

      ‘With Danny?’

      ‘No way. Danny’s a diddy.’

      The venom of it annoyed her.

      ‘No he’s not,’ she said. ‘You want to play, Danny?’

      ‘Uh-huh.’ Danny put his last piece of toast in his mouth and crossed towards Raymond. Raymond threw the cards on to the floor. Danny painstakingly picked them up.

      ‘Right, Raymond,’ Betty said. ‘You don’t want to play with Danny, you don’t want to play. But just make sure you leave him alone.’

      She heard Dan coming downstairs as Raymond brushed past her. When she went into the kitchen, Dan was standing, wearing only a pair of old trousers and looking drowsily into a packet of cornflakes as if there was a message there he must decipher. His rumpled presence somehow provoked her and one of those familiar quarrels over nothing already hung in the air around them. The rules for such quarrels were that the cause of them should be irrelevant and that the venom they evoked should be out of all proportion. Raymond had exiled himself to the back green and she could hear him kicking a ball steadily against the wall of the house as if he was trying to tell her something. Danny was pretending to play with the cards that had caused the trouble but he had put the television on. Dan shook the cornflake packet and its contents rustled faintly. The sound made her grit her teeth.

      ‘Oh-ho,’ Dan said. ‘No cornflakes.’

      He said it gently enough but it was audible.

      There’s some in it. I can hear them,’ Betty said.

      Dan pulled open the packet and held it towards her.

      ‘If ye’ve got a microscope, Ah’ll show ye them.’

      ‘You normally take cornflakes for your supper?’

      ‘It’s ten past ten.’

      ‘The money I’m getting, we’re lucky we’ve got bread.’

      He crushed the packet with unnecessary force and put it in the bin.

      ‘Your period due?’ he said.

      It was the remark that rendered any mediating sanity powerless to intervene, the unfair reprisal that escalated the conflict. Until then she would have been herself inclined to admit that he was the offended party to begin with, but his spite had wakened to the possibilities quickly enough and she was content that the war was on, both sides wheeling out their weaponry.

      They traversed some familiar ground, littered with the dead of old campaigns. Her contempt was loud for his need to relate any recriminations of hers to the menstrual cycle, as if having a womb precluded having a mind. He touched again on how she made a crisis out of every casual conversation, saw deliberate attacks in accidental gestures. The structure of the day was set, an expression of the complex of devious failures and abandoned possibilities and secret chambers of hurt where their lost hopes lived alone.

      The fact that they weren’t going anywhere that day seemed simple enough. But behind it lay a reminder that they had recently had to sell the second-hand car. Just staying in the house compounded her frustration at the way they had to live, his sense of how he was failing them. Lunch was communication through the boys.

      When he took Raymond and Danny out the back to play with the ball in the afternoon, she sat indoors with her coffee, reading her own alternative text in the glossy magazine she leafed through. It was how she might have been living, somewhere among those advertisements. She wouldn’t have minded that but the text between adverts depressed her, suggested that perhaps the price was too high. The bright preoccupied tone, so full of blind assurance, was like a more intellectual version of her mother set in type.

      She thought about her mother. Were daughters condemned to fulfil their mothers’ worst fears for them as punishment for disobedience? But then her mother’s fears for her had been so chameleon that they would have been able to fit in with whatever habitat Betty had chosen, found a niche there and been ready to feed on any stray passing thoughts of hers, as now. Protectively, Betty reminded herself of her mother’s desperately self-limiting philosophy, like a cage to keep her in. It was the cage she had kept herself in.

      Her mother had known things with a certainty beyond the power of reason to refute. She had known that housework put off is housework doubled. She had known that you would see things differently when you were older. She had known that a girl shouldn’t cheapen herself, steam irons never get the job done properly, once a Catholic always a Catholic, educate a girl you educate a family, some men only want the one thing, if she had her life to live again she would do it differently, you’re only a virgin once, nobody needs to be out at two in the morning, they should hang them, the truth never hurt anyone, marry in haste, repent at leisure and Dan Scoular wasn’t good enough for her daughter.

      She had also been a very good cook and baker and the house had always been tidy, very tidy, but Betty honestly couldn’t remember when her mother had touched her spontaneously. She could recall her mother kissing her goodnight but that was a ritual, something she had decided you were supposed to do, not an unrehearsed act of affection. When she thought of her mother, and she had often tried so hard to do it justly, she thought of that voice like a barking dog forbidding the world to come near her. She thought of One Thousand and One Nights of clichés, of a Scheherazade whose frenetic variety of repetitions was not a postponement of death but of life, a charm against the dread of coming alive.

      And her father had fallen in love with that ability. She thought of the way he used to raise his eyebrows and shrug, as if in conspiracy with Betty’s outrage, but really – she had realised how many times since – in conspiracy with her mother. In return for those utterances

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