"Field of Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mina Denise)

SIX . SHOVELING FOOD IN

I

They could hear the burble of the gathering before they turned the corner to Granny Annie’s. All the lights were on, the front door sat open in welcome, and the shadows pressing up against the front window showed how busy it was.

As Paddy came through the front door she dipped her finger into the holy water font hanging on the wall, but Annie had been in hospital for a fortnight and dead a week, and the little sponge at the bottom had dried out. The contact left a sour stain on Paddy’s fingertips. She only kept up the habit because it pleased her mother so much when she witnessed it.

Someone’s auntie was doling out the entrance drinks from a table just inside the door, assisted by Paddy’s Gran Meehan, a small woman who had taken an abstinence pledge at the chapel twenty years ago and had neither enjoyed a drink since nor allowed a drink to be enjoyed in her company. The auntie pressed a glass with a smear of whisky into Sean’s hand and an inch of sweet sherry into Paddy’s. Afraid the sherry would interfere with the chemical reaction of the eggs and grapefruit, Paddy sipped, trying to mitigate the damage by not really enjoying it.

Annie had been a strict adherent to pre-Vatican II old-style Voodoo Catholicism, and it showed everywhere in the house. Holy pictures were hanging on every wall above the grab rails, and novenas were neatly tucked into the corners of toothy school photos of her grandchildren. A romantic plaster statue of Saint Sebastian, shot through with arrows and wilting in ecstasy, sat under a grimy glass dome on a windowsill, and a chipped Child of Prague was on the mantel, tipped at an angle by the silver ten-pence coin placed underneath it, a fetish that would invite prosperity into the house. Apart from superstition, sanctimoniousness, and a general distrust of Protestants, Annie’s only real weakness was the Saturday-afternoon wrestling on the television. She had a signed photo of Big Daddy on the wall below the Sacred Heart.

Paddy wasn’t even in the living room proper before the first industrial-sized baking tray of gammon rolls came past her nose. She managed to resist, saying No thanks, she’d just eaten as the bearer pressed her for the second time. A delicate white hand darted out over her shoulder, taking a roll and giggling a thank you. She turned to see her sister Mary Ann biting into the soft bread, her teeth sliding through the salt butter and sweet gammon. She giggled her appreciation, groaned, and took another bite, eclipsing her mouth with the rest of the roll, ashamed that she was savoring food so publicly, but then she laughed again because she liked it. Mary Ann was shy and inarticulate but had made an eloquent language of laughter that required a practiced ear. Unobservant people thought her a dolt. Her laughter was contagious: sometimes, as the swell and ebb rolled back and forth between them, Paddy thought that laughing with her sister was the purest form of communication possible.

Mary Ann took another bite, grinning as she chewed, and nodded to the door. Paddy turned to see Trisha and Con Meehan coming through the crowd, holding hands like teenage lovers. Trisha still French-combed her hair up into a high crowned bouffant for formal occasions. Behind her thick glasses her eyes were a beautiful shade of gray, so pale they looked silver in a certain light. Of all the children only Marty had inherited them; everyone else had Connor’s brown eyes. Con had a neat little David Niven moustache on his florid face and the same stocky build as Paddy. He was wearing an inappropriately jaunty dog-tooth jacket.

“Dad,” said Paddy, as Mary Ann laughed incredulously, “why in the name of mercy are you wearing that?”

“Your mother gave it to me.”

“He looks very swish,” said Trisha, brushing an imaginary speck from his lapel.

A man next to them who had been at school with Sean’s dad leaned over to Con. “Are you selling nylons?”

The gathered company laughed at the weak joke and Con joined in, not uncomfortable with his position in the pecking order. Mary Ann laughed hard into Paddy’s hair. Their father was a meek man, a gentle little soul, always in the audience laughing at a bigger man’s jokes. They both loved it about him.

“Well,” Trisha bristled, small-mouthed and angry as ever, “you’re hardly a fashion plate yourself.”

And Con laughed away at that one as well.