Foster

It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off to milk. When he comes inside, he says he’s not ready for bed and that there will be no visitors tonight anyhow, on account of the wake – not, he says, that he wants any. The woman goes upstairs and changes and comes back down in her nightdress. Kinsella has taken my shoes off and has put what I now know is the boy’s jacket on me.

‘What are you doing now?’ she says.

‘What does it look like? And she’ll break her neck in these.’

He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs up the soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll break them in.’

‘Didn’t she already break them in? Where are you taking her?’

‘Only as far as the strand,’ he says.

‘You’ll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella,’ she says. ‘And don’t you go without the lamp.’

‘What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?’ he says but he takes it anyhow, as it’s handed to him."

"There’s a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes small steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

When we reach the crossroads we turn right, down a steep, sloping road. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully through the dry boughs, when their leaves rise and swing. It’s sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing we will, at its end, come to the sea. The road goes on and the sky, everything, seems to get brighter. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way then falls into the quiet way he has about him, and time passes without seeming to pass and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park cars. It is full of tyre marks and potholes, a rubbish bin which seems not to have been emptied in a long time.

‘We’re almost there now, Petal.’

He leads me up a steep hill where, on either side, tall rushes bend and shake. My feet sink in the deep sand, and the climb takes my breath away. Then we are standing on the crest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.

Kinsella lets me loose and I race down the far side of the dune to the place where the black sea hisses up into loud, frothy waves. I run towards them as they back away and run back, shrieking, when another crashes in. When Kinsella catches up, we take our shoes off. In places we walk along with the edge of the sea clawing at the sand under our bare feet. In places he leaves me to run. At one point we go in until the water is up to his knees and he holds me on his shoulders.

‘Don’t be afraid!’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Don’t be afraid!’

The strand is all washed clean, without so much as a footprint. Beyond a crooked line in the sand, close to the dunes, things have washed up: plastic bottles, sticks, the handle of a mop whose head is lost and, further on, a stable door, whose bolt is broken.

‘Some man’s horse is loose tonight,’ Kinsella says. He walks on for a while then. It is quieter up here, away from the noise of the waves. ‘You know the fishermen sometimes find horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in one time and the horse lay down for a long time before he got up. And he was perfect. Tiredness was all it was, after being out so long.

‘Strange things happen,’ he says. ‘A strange thing happened to you tonight but Edna meant no harm. It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed but she sometimes is.’

He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh. I don’t know what to say.

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

Everything about the night feels strange: to walk to a sea that’s always been there, to see it and feel it and fear it in the half dark, and to listen to this man saying things about horses out at sea, about his wife trusting others so she’ll learn who not to trust, things I don’t fully understand, things which may not even be intended for me.

We keep on walking until we come to a place where the cliffs and rocks come out to meet the water.