Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

      The black taxi driver pulling in beside us was laughing uproariously as a huge fire-truck thundered up. But Min had been struck by something else. ‘Did you see that?’ she said. ‘A whole can of Coke when he could easy have got water.’

      Typical. Never asked me how I was, or whether by any chance there was anything I’d rather be doing than hanging around Kennedy Airport to attend to her. Never apologised for all the trouble she’d caused. Didn’t enquire where she’d be sleeping. But … it was such a change to hear her talk after the silence of Kilbride! She was babbling even, perched on the very front of the seat, her head swivelling this way and that.

      ‘Rosie, aren’t the houses awful small? You wouldn’t think houses would be that small in America. When the people are so big – the ones that come to Ireland, anyway. And— ’

      As we were coming over a rise, the driver interrupted her to say that there was Manhattan now.

      ‘It’s nearly the same as the Sorrento!’ Min cried.

      And she was right. A version of a Manhattan skyline was picked out in red tiles on the wall of the Sorrento Fish & Chip, and all our lives we’d had nothing else to look at while Enzo riddled the chips out of the fryer and whooshed them into paper bags. A magic shape doesn’t have to be exact.

      She was delighted by the tollbooths. ‘They should do that in Dublin,’ she said – ‘make everyone pay to come in and give the money to everyone who lived there already!’

      There was nothing she didn’t have a comment on: a white stretch-limo, music pounding from it; the people who streamed in front of us at stoplights and the different kinds of hats they wore; the number of dry-cleaning shops; a panhandler singing and joggling his paper cup who she said would make a fortune at home, he looked so happy.

      I pointed out the UN.

      ‘Where’s the Irish flag?’ Min said. ‘Wrap the green flag round me, boys!’

      ‘That Ireland,’ the driver said. ‘That is one sufferin’ country.’

      ‘Ah it’s not so bad now,’ Min said. ‘It’s gone very quiet since President Clinton came over and made the Northerners talk to each other.’

      Is that so?’ he said. ‘Well, thank the Lord Jesus for that.’

      ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

      ‘I’m coming from Sierra Leone, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘In Africa. A sufferin’ country, too. Which you understand, coming from Ireland.’ He was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘But you tell me the good Lord is sending you better times. May it please the Lord Jesus to send His peace to Sierra Leone, too.’

      ‘Oh,’ Min said, ‘you’re right there.’

      ‘Let us pray,’ he said.

      We were on the West Side Highway now and near the hotel.

      ‘Our Father,’ the driver began, ‘which art in heaven…’

      We picked up the prayer and finished it with him.

      She did agree that our room was like something out of Hollywood. ‘A white carpet! Thank God I don’t have to clean it.’ And she also remarked that the girl at the desk was the image of your one who was married to Bobby in Dallas. But otherwise, she had gone back into her old silence, and her eyes kept straying now to the window where the sky showed a wild mixture of magenta and black above the chasm of the highway and the river. I began to feel the usual soreness. ‘Dreams That are Brightest’ had been the one I liked best of the opera aria 78s she used to play on her wind-up gramophone, and this was as near as we were ever likely to get to make a dream come true. Surely she might say something like that? We were on holiday in a room that had a white sofa as long as the window for looking at the astonishing sky, and two big beds covered in silk and velvet throws and cushions, and a telephone beside each bed and one in the bathroom. It was beyond a dream – that one day we would be in such a room, in such a city. And a man who looked like Clint Eastwood – like he looked when he was in his prime, not now – was taking the two of us out to dinner. She had me to thank for that, too.

      But ‘What happened back home?’ was all that, within our etiquette, I could say.

      ‘Ah, that Sunshine was a terrible place,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t put your worst enemy in that place. You should have heard them crying! And we had to sit in front of the television all day and watch the racing.’

      ‘You had a room of your own,’ I began. ‘You didn’t even have to come out except for meals. And if you were going to run away you needn’t have caused all that trouble in the airport; you could have gone home. If you’re well enough to turn up in America, you were well enough to go home.’

      But it so happened that I brushed against her as I was saying this. She was in the kitchen alcove, fumbling in her shopping bag for the teabags she’d nicked from last night’s guesthouse, and there wasn’t room for the two of us when I leaned across her to fill the kettle. So my side touched her side. And when it did, I almost exclaimed aloud. Because I felt from her slight body a deep, anxious quivering that she could not control, even to keep it hidden from me. She was as nervous as a dog. That must be why she’d stopped talking: it must be taking all her energy to keep her face and voice normal. I ran the tap so that she wouldn’t know I knew. I’d glimpsed how much there was, from her point of view, to fear. My anger, now that she didn’t have the presence of the taxi driver to protect her. My questioning; my control over this place. The loss of the expertise she had in her own house.

      And there were other challenges. Here was a woman of nearly seventy who’d always lived as simply as anyone well can. Who every week, when she cashed her pension, divided most of the money between the tins marked ESB, Bell’s Food, Gas, Insurance Man and TV Licence and put the rest in a zipped purse in the innermost pocket of her handbag, and that was her administration, done. And here she was flying the Atlantic for the first time, going through US immigration for the first time, making tea with an American kettle for the first time.

      ‘How about a little nap, Min?’ I suggested.

      To which she obediently wrapped herself in a Harmony Suites bathrobe many sizes too big and went asleep instantly on the coverlet.

      I stayed on the other side of the room.

      I was going to be sleeping a few feet away from her.

      That hadn’t happened since Bailey’s Hut. The partition between the two rooms there didn’t reach to the ceiling and when I woke in the early morning I’d hear my father snoring or breathing loud and shallow or mumbling. Once, I heard him singing. I liked his night noises the same as I liked everything about him. When he was showing me how to swim, with me on his back, we snorted and spat and coughed and threw water at each other and fell in and out under the waves and his body was a safe thing that made me fearless. But Min didn’t swim. Min didn’t really go in for touching people at all. The reason I remembered every detail of a night she stayed up with me, on the rug in front of the fire carefully dropping warm olive oil into my ears, was that it was exceptional. She touched me in a matter of fact way every day, of course, dressing me and undressing me. But that night was the only time she wasn’t hurrying. And she wasn’t giving me instructions. She just turned me gently first onto one side, then onto the other.

      Then one year a sports field opened a little farther out the wharf road from The Hut, and Min had the idea of her and me using the shower in its changing room – because we had an Elsan chemical toilet but no running water in The Hut. She said that if anyone caught us sneaking through the fence with shampoo and soap and a towel in a supermarket bag we’d be laughing stocks but we’d be clean laughing stocks. So for a few years the two of us took a shower every evening.

      We were never caught. We’d wait in the late summer light for the last shouts from the sports-field and for the caretaker to cycle back to Milbay town past our wire fence. Then we’d make a run for the pavilion across the dark grass. Min would hoosh me up and I’d slide my hand inside the window and open it outward. Then