The Daisy Picker by Roisin Meaney

Author:Roisin Meaney [Meaney, Roisin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780717157235
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

Chapter Fifteen

‘You’re getting on well at Ripe, are you, Lizzie?’

Lizzie smiles to herself. She figured it was only a matter of time before Maggie would be on the hunt for a bit of gossip.

‘Grand, Maggie. I enjoy the work.’ Not to mention the company.

‘And yourself and Joe get on well together, by the looks of it.’ It’s not a question, but Lizzie is pretty sure she expects an answer.

‘Fine; but I don’t really see that much of him. He spends his time working on his carvings. That’s why he took me on – so he could get away.’ No need to mention that ‘away’ is still near enough for us to share a radio. Or that it’s only taken a few weeks for our tea break to stretch from ten minutes to nearer thirty. And the fact that they never stop talking, once they sit down, is certainly none of Maggie’s business. Sometimes Lizzie is amazed at the amount of conversation that flows back and forth between the two of them. They can talk about anything.

‘. . . You should never eat a banana till the skin is spotty; that’s when they’re perfectly ripe. Most people eat them before they’re ready – and then they wonder why bananas are supposed to be hard to digest. My favourite sandwich is mashed banana and peanut butter . . . What are you laughing at? . . .’

‘. . . The first cake I baked was a disaster – I read the oven temperature wrong, and it came out weighing a ton and hard as a rock. Daddy ate three slices, the creature. I’d say he was up half the night with indigestion . . .’

‘. . . I thought I was going to bleed to death – the chisel nearly took the top off my thumb. I had to wear one of those lovely leather thumb-covers for a month. Lucky I wasn’t my brother – everyone would have called me Tom Thumb. Look, you can just about see the scar . . .’

She just about managed to resist the urge to stroke it.

‘ . . . Jones got into the kitchen once when my mother had left half a salmon on the table – we were having visitors that night, and she had just poached it and left it out to cool. He didn’t eat again for almost two days, and every time she laid eyes on him she grabbed the broom . . .’

‘. . . My first pet was a bee. I caught him in a jam jar and called him Buzzer and put him beside my bed when I went to sleep. In the middle of the night I knocked over the jar, and Buzzer flew out and stung me . . .’

‘. . . I’ve always wanted to go to Greece – ever since I saw Shirley Valentine. I had no idea Tom Conti wasn’t Greek; I’d never seen him in anything else. When I spotted him on telly in a car ad years later, I was dead impressed with his Welsh accent .

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