Annie Dunne Read Free Page A

chair when I realise it is coming from the children’s room.
    To their door I dart, lifting the metal latch as gently as old practice can manage, and peer into the glistening dark. What little light follows me in the door now finds the turns and angles of things, the dull brass on the beds and the like. I wonder is it the boy awake and confused by the strange surroundings? But no, it is not he, but the soft swan of the girl in her white nightdress. Her covers are down in the chill bath of stray lights, her little legs are up at the knees, her head of dark hair twists and turns, and out of her red mouth issues the curious sound of something akin to distress.
    Of course I creep over to her. I know it is wrong to wake a sleepwalker, but she is not walking. All the same she looks like she is awake in another setting, dreaming she is somewhere with her eyes open. The eyes are not looking at me or anywhere, they are focused on invisible things.
    Perhaps I ought to wake Sarah because Sarah for all her silence often knows the solutions to matters that to me seem tangled and dark. The limbs of the little girl are rather beautiful in the murky light, she reminds me of something, maybe my own girlhood, maybe my own early softness and slightness, before my tussle with polio. I do not know.
    The little girl cries out. I risk putting a hand on her forehead and immediately her eyes change as I stoop there over her. She lets out a pure thin scream, I never heard the like.
    ‘What is it, what is it?’ I say.
    ‘The tiger is in the room,’ she says.
    ‘There are no tigers in Wicklow,’ I say, but, God help me, I gaze about nevertheless in the fear of seeing one. ‘Bless us, child, there is nothing. Now,’ I say, sitting on the edge of the little bed and stroking her head. Her hair is soft as first grasses. ‘Now, there is nothing to fear. Here you are in Kelsha. You are safe and sound tucked up in your bed. I am here and Sarah.’
    The little girl starts to cry. It is a slight, distant, private crying, melancholy and affecting. I am ashamed of myself suddenly for thinking littler of her earlier than her brother. My heart goes out to her, as whose could not?
    ‘Oh, Auntie Anne,’ she says.
    ‘Oh, dear,’ I say.
    I gather her in my arms. She is only gentle bones. To think a person is a soul wrapped in this cage of bones. What an arrangement, how can we possibly be protected?
    ‘I am very afraid of the tiger,’ she says. ‘I am glad he is not here.’
    ‘That’s the truth,’ I say.
    She looks at me. She pushes me away a little, as if to see me better. Her own eyes are more accustomed to the dark of that room. There is a world of words in her look, I can almost see her brain struggling. But it is too much for her. Perhaps she does not have words for what she wants to say. Instead she says something else, something simple, that all the children of the world have said in their time, to their mothers and the like. But I had never had it said to me.
    ‘I love you, Auntie Anne,’ she says.
    The wolf of pride smiles in my breast.
    ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ I say, as pleased as I have ever been, and tuck her back down into the bed. And I laugh.
    And she laughs.
    ‘You go off to sleep now,’ I say. ‘I’ll sit here till you do. God knows.’
    And, just as I had mentioned to the boy, the barn owl, that roosts not in the barns, but in the tallest pine at the margin of the woods, calls out one haunting, memory-afflicted note.

Chapter Two
    Daylight opens the farm wide, the fearful shadows flee from the damp trees, the pony wakes in his standing, the calves clamber up in the calf byre. I stand in the yard at the rain barrel, holding the enamel jug, stilled by the unexpected veil of sunlight thrown over everything. There is almost heat in it, that May sunlight. Even the cobbles lose their toes of shadows, and the water at the top of the barrel lies in a loose mirror.
    I can feel the heat getting into the very fibres of my blouse, a slight