The Book of Tomorrow Read Free Page B

me and don’t look away till I swallow.
    I don’t know how old Rosaleen is exactly but I’m guessing somewhere in her early-to-mid-forties, and if this makes sense, I’m sure whatever age she really is, she looks ten years older. She looks like she’s from the 1940s in her floral tea dresses buttoned down the middle, with a slip underneath. My mum never wore slips; she barely wore underwear. Rosaleen has mouse-brown hair, always worn down, parted sharply in the centre of her head, revealing grey roots, and it’s short, to her chin. She always tucks her hair behind both ears, pink little mouse ears peeping out. She never wears earrings. Or makeup. She always wears a gold crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck. She’s the kind of woman that my friend Zoey would say looks like she’s never had an orgasm in her life and I wonder, while cutting the fat off the bacon and as Rosaleen’s eyes widen at me doing this, if Zoey had an orgasm when she did it with Fiachrá. Then I visualised the damage the hockey stick did to her and I instantly doubted it.
    Across the road from the gatehouse is a bungalow. I have no idea who lives in it but Rosaleen pops back and forth every day with little parcels of food. Two miles down the road is a post office, which is operated from somebody’s house, and across the road from that is the smallest school I’ve ever seen, which unlike my school at home, which has activities every hour throughout the year, is completely empty during the summer. I asked if there were any yoga classes or anything in it and Rosaleen told me she’d show me how to makeyoghurt herself. She seemed so happy that I couldn’t correct her. In the first week I watched her make strawberry yoghurt. In the second week, I was still eating it.
    The gatehouse that is Arthur and Rosaleen’s house once protected the side entrance to Kilsaney Castle in the 1700s. The castle’s main entrance has a disused scary-looking gothic entrance that I imagine I see severed heads hanging out of every time we pass. The castle was built as a towered fortification of the Norman Pale—that was the area with Norman and English control in the East of Ireland, established after Strongbow invaded—sometime between 1100 and 1200, which, when you think about it, is a bit vague. It’s the difference between me or my half-human, half-robot great-great-great-great-grandchildren building something. Anyway, it was built for a Norman warlord, so that’s why I think of the severed heads, because they did that, didn’t they?
    The area it’s in is called County Meath. It used to be East Meath and, along with Westmeath—surprise surprise—it made up a separate and fifth province in Ireland, which was the territory of the High King. The former seat of the High Kings, the Hill of Tara, is only a few kilometres away. It’s in the news all the time now because they’re building a motorway nearby. We had to debate it in school a few months ago. I was ‘for’ the motorway being built because I thought the King would have liked to have one in his day, as it would have made it easier for him to get to his office instead of having to go through shitty fields. Imagine the filth on his sandals. I also said it would be more accessible for tourists. They could drive right up to it or take photographs from open-top buses going one hundred and twenty kilometres on the motorway. I was only taking the piss, but our substitute teacher went crazy, thinking I actually meant it, because she was on acommittee to try and prevent the motorway being built. It’s so easy to give substitute teachers nervous breakdowns. Especially the ones who believe they can do some good for the students. I told you, I was nasty.
    After the Norman psycho, various lords and ladies lived in the castle. They built on stables and outhouses around the place. Controversially one lord even converted to Catholicism after marrying a Catholic, and built a chapel as a treat for the family.