The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

home.

      The queue for the post office greeted me on the broken pavement outside. It moved slowly forward. When I finally got inside the door the smell of damp and dry rot caught at my nostrils. The place hadn’t seen a paintbrush for years, the walls were yellowed with age and seamed with cracks. Behind a formidable metal grille, an elderly lady with iron-grey hair and spectacles despatched stamps and thumped pension books with dogged determination, apparently unconcerned by the queue of restless women with coppery tans, white trousers and suntops in violent shades of lime-green and pink.

      I shuffled forward on the bare wooden floor. In front of me, an old lady cast disapproving glances at two women writing postcards on the tiny ledge provided. She glared at their bare shoulders and arms and the skimpy tops that revealed their small, flat breasts. Despite the heavy warmth of the afternoon, she was wearing a black wool coat and a felt hat firmly skewered to her head with large, amber hatpins.

      The woman behind me fidgeted impatiently and shuffled her postcards as if she were about to deal a hand of whist.

      ‘Gee, you Irish girls sure do have lovely complexions. How come you manage it?’

      Her voice so startled me, I must have jumped a couple of inches but I went on watching the postmistress counting out money for the old lady, a pound note and some silver coins. Could her pension possibly be so small?

      I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned round she was looking down at me. Waiting. Pinned to her suntop was a button which said: ‘I’m Adele from New York City . . . Hi.’

      ‘I think it’s probably the climate,’ I said, awkwardly.

      The moment I spoke I knew it was ‘my school teacher voice’. George often says I must never become a teacher. Women who do always lose their femininity and he couldn’t bear that. He loves me just as I am so I mustn’t ever change.

      ‘D’you mean all that there rain we had in Killarney lass’ week?’

      She looked baffled, but something in her manner suggested she would not give up easily. People were turning to look at us and I felt my ‘Irish’ complexion grow a few shades more rosy.

      ‘I think it’s the dampness of the air here.’

      I tried to sound suitably casual, but I just sounded lame. What else could I say? I could hardly explain the adaption of skin colour and texture to environmental features, could I? What on earth would George say if I did that?

      ‘Gee, you Irish girls do talk cute.’

      She beamed indulgently and gazed around at the women writing postcards, delighted to have got one of the natives to perform.

      I was saved from further questions by the little lady in black who pushed past me, handbag firmly clutched in both hands, leaving me to face the postmistress who stared at me fiercely as I handed over my letters.

      ‘You’d be a friend of Mrs O’Dara, then?’

      I nodded awkwardly. Of course Mary and I were friends, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant.

      ‘I’m staying with Mr and Mrs O’Dara for a few weeks,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m a student.’

      ‘We don’t get many students here,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Is it the Irish yer leamin’?’

      ‘Only the odd wee bit from Mr O’Dara. I’m really studying farming.’

      That sounded a bit schoolmistressy too. Behind me, the queue was building up again and Adele from New York City was breathing down my neck.

      ‘And that’s nice fer ye too,’ she said decisively, as she studied the envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs William Stewart.

      ‘You’d be wanting to let yer paren’s know ye was safely landed, indeed,’ she said severely, as she turned her attention to my letters to George and Ben, and my thank you to the Hendersons.

      ‘Oh, I did write letters on Monday, but Paddy the Postman took them for me.’

      ‘Indeed, shure he wou’d take them for you, and why wou’dn’t he?’

      Her face crinkled into a grimace that looked like a friendly gesture, though I could hardly call it a smile.

      ‘I’ll be seein’ ye again, Miss Stewart, won’t I?’

      ‘Oh yes, you will indeed. I’ll be doing the shopping while I’m here.’

      I was so glad to escape the smell of Adele’s Ambre Solaire that I set off back to the Square at a brisk trot. But I had to slow down. Apart from the ache in my legs, the afternoon was getting hotter by the minute. Huge clouds were building up in threatening grey masses and it felt warm, sticky and airless.

      The windows of the hotel with the summer seats had been thrown wide but there wasn’t the slightest trace of a breeze. The net curtains hung motionless and I could see into the dining room where small black figures moved to and fro. Like the pale, dark-eyed girls I’d seen at the Mount, these girls were equally young, straight from school at fourteen.

      I thought about them as I waited in the queue at the butcher’s, drawing circles in the sawdust with my toe. I too might have left school at fourteen if I hadn’t passed the Eleven Plus. Even then, I still might have had to leave if it hadn’t been for the Gardiners.

      ‘Did ye hear that Mrs Gardiner today, bumming again?’

      I was back in my bedroom in Belfast on a summer evening towards dusk, reading in the last of the light. My parents had come out into the yard behind the shop. There was a rattle as my father filled his old metal can so he could water the geraniums and the orange lilies which he grew in empty fuel oil cans he’d brought home from Uncle Joe’s farm. It was the beginning of July, for the lilies were in flower but hadn’t yet been taken to the Lodge to decorate the big drums for the Twelfth.

      ‘Oh yes, she was in great form, and the whole shop full. Did ye not hear? Ah don’t know how ye cou’da missed her.’

      The reply was indistinct. My father always speaks quietly. Often, he just nods or grunts.

      ‘There’ll be no standin’ that wuman, if that wee girl of hers goes to Victoria an’ our Elizibith doesn’t.’

      Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, I thought to myself. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. The window was wide open and they were right underneath.

      ‘Well, if Bill Gardiner is going to send that wee scrap of a girl, why shouldn’t we send our Elizibith,’ my mother went on. ‘None of the Gardiners have any brains worth talkin’ about an’ that shop of theirs is only a huckster of a place, not even on the main road. It won’t look well at all, Willy, if we don’t send her. People’ll think our shop’s not doin’ well. I think we should just send her. We’re every bit as good as the Gardiners. We’d have done it for wee Billy for sure.’

      I stuck my fingers in my ears, for I hated them talking about wee Billy and I knew that was wicked. You shouldn’t hate your brother, especially if he was dead. The trouble was it didn’t feel as if he was dead. They were always talking about him, what he liked and disliked, what he used to say, what age he would be his next birthday if he’d lived, where he would be going to school, or even what flowers they would take when they next visited the cemetery where he was buried. My Aunt Maisie once said to me that it was a pity I hadn’t been a boy, for Florrie would never get over wee Billy now and her too old to have another.

      I lifted Mary’s shopping bag onto the counter and let the red-faced man put the brown-paper parcel inside. The butcher’s counter was marble and the one in the shop was wood. I imagined myself standing behind it in a pink, drip-dry, nylon shop coat like my mother’s, handing out papers and cigarettes and penny lollipops, ringing up items on the till, running up the rickety stairs to the stockroom for a new box of Polo mints, or a fresh carton of Players.

      He counted out my change slowly, made a mistake and corrected himself. His fingers were smeared with blood. My father’s fingers were yellowed