Antarctica by Claire Keegan

Author:Claire Keegan [Claire Keegan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571313792
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Men and Women

My father takes me places. He has artificial hips, so he needs me to open gates. To reach our house you must drive up a long lane through a wood, open two sets of gates and close them behind you so the sheep won’t escape to the road. I’m handy. I get out, open the gates, my father free-wheels the Volkswagen through, I close the gates behind him and hop back into the passenger seat. To save petrol he starts the car on the run, gathering speed on the slope before the road, and then we’re off to wherever my father is going on that particular day.

Sometimes it’s the scrapyard, where he’s looking for a spare part, or, scenting a bargain in some classified ad, we wind up in a farmer’s mucky field, pulling cabbage plants or picking seed potatoes in a dusty shed. Sometimes we drive to the forge, where I stare into the water-barrel, whose surface reflects patches of the milky skies that drift past, sluggish, until the blacksmith plunges the red-hot metal down and scorches away the clouds. On Saturdays my father goes to the mart and examines sheep in the pens, feeling their backbones, looking into their mouths. If he buys just a few sheep, he doesn’t bother going home for the trailer but puts them in the back of the car, and it is my job to sit between the front seats to keep them there. They shit small pebbles and say baaaah, the Suffolks’ tongues dark as the raw liver we cook on Mondays. I keep them back until we get to whichever house Da stops at for a feed on the way home. Usually it’s Bridie Knox’s, because Bridie kills her own stock and there’s always meat. The handbrake doesn’t work, so when Da parks in her yard I get out and put the stone behind the wheel.

I am the girl of a thousand uses.

‘Be the holy, missus, what way are ya?’

‘Dan!’ Bridie says, like she didn’t hear the splutter of the car.

Bridie lives in a smoky little house without a husband, but she has sons who drive tractors around the fields. They’re small, deeply unattractive men who patch their wellingtons. Bridie wears red lipstick and face powder, but her hands are like a man’s hands. I think her head is wrong for her body, the way my dolls look when I swap their heads.

‘Have you aer a bit for the child, missus? She’s hungry at home,’ Da says, looking at me like I’m one of those African children we give up sugar for during Lent.

‘Ah now,’ says Bridie, smiling at his old joke. ‘That girl looks fed to me. Sit down there and I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘To tell you the truth, missus, I wouldn’t fall out with a drop of something. I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.’

He talks about sheep and cattle and the weather and how this little

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