The Insect Rosary

by Sarah Armstrong

  Sister Agatha turned her feet away from the table but didn’t get up. She must have been looking out of the window because the conversation carried on with just Beth and Mum.

  ‘They did,’ said Beth. ‘A herd of cows all over the garden. They’d had it designed by a proper company. Thousands of pounds chewed and trampled.’

  Sister Agatha’s voice was high. ‘Thousands of pounds? What did they have, gravel made from gold chips?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Beth snapped.

  My mother snorted.

  ‘They had the topsoil brought over from somewhere . . . I can’t remember where. Somewhere very fertile.’

  ‘A farmyard? You should have brought them here.’

  Agatha mumbled something. Nancy took the last biscuit and then broke it in half so we could share it. The crumbs that had fallen between us she swept roughly towards me.

  My mother was talking. ‘But accidents happen. Cows get out, farmers are incompetent, teenagers are mischievous. There are a million reasons that could have led to the cows in their garden.’

  ‘True, but why not my garden?’

  ‘Because it looks a bit rubbish? Because it’s covered in thorn bushes?’

  Beth’s heel was tapping again. ‘Ha ha. Funny. They took the bushes out and the garden was destroyed. I kept the bushes and my garden wasn’t.’

  ‘Clearly the fairies,’ said my mother, and laughed, her legs swinging out. She caught Nancy’s shoulder, but must have thought it was a table leg. ‘Fairies, that’s funny.’

  ‘Not to God, it isn’t,’ mumbled Sister Agatha.

  ‘Oh, Aggie,’ said Mum, ‘we remember when you thought you could hear a banshee screaming out the front all night. Don’t come over all holier than thou with us.’

  Sister Agatha’s feet turned back in to the table. ‘I was six years old. And, as I remember it, it was you who put that idea in my head. She,’ she must have pointed at Beth, ‘is far too old for this nonsense.’

  There was silence. Nancy and I stopped chewing, just in case. Beth crossed one leg over the other and starting kicking it violently towards my ear. Sister Agatha had both feet neatly paired up as if she’d stepped out of the shoes to get ready for bed. My mother pulled her feet backwards and then her chair.

  ‘I’ll freshen the pot,’ she said. ‘So when will the house be ready? You’ve been in that caravan since March. Weren’t you planning to be in before the baby?’

  ‘We’ve got three more weeks.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said my mother, ‘but I bet it’s before that. You’ve dropped.’

  Beth hands appeared under the table, feeling her bump. ‘No,’ she said, but she didn’t sound sure.

  Now Sister Agatha’s feet started to dance a little. ‘That’s going to be very difficult for you.’

  ‘Oh shut up, you old prune.’

  They went quiet again, apart from my mother who was making a racket emptying the pot, warming the pot, and generally banging it around to fill in the silence.

  ‘Are you trying to break that?’ said Beth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sister Agatha, ‘she never liked that teapot.’

  ‘Not stylish enough for her, like her London china.’

  They did this, rounded on each other in turn. There didn’t seem to be any natural pairings, maybe because there were three of them. There had been two other sisters, but they didn’t talk about them. That’s how they got the bigger room though, when there were four boys.

  We hadn’t seen Donn all day. It was a bit of a relief after what happened with the sheep yesterday. I didn’t know how cross he could get until we finally stopped running and listened to him shouting, ‘Stop running!’ He looked at us like I’d seen him look at a dog worrying the sheep.

  I shivered. Nancy nudged me and I turned to say sorry. She pointed out, from under the table, towards the dresser on the other side of the room. I looked at the dresser and shrugged. She poked her finger across and then bent it downwards. I saw a pea pod and it made me think of Ryan, of the peas falling from Sister Agatha’s skirt. I made myself not look at the place beyond the table where the blanket had been. I’d tried to tell her about the gun and the blanket, but she didn’t believe me about the gun and said a blanket meant nothing. She hated being left out.

  Then I saw the mouse and turned to smile and nod. Nancy gathered up some of the crumbs between us and flicked them across the floor. She clicked her finger together silently to attract the mouse. And then Sister Agatha screamed. I slapped my hand to my mouth. Had my mother flipped and thrown the teapot at her? Nothing fell, nothing shattered. Sister Agatha just pushed her chair away from the table and then her feet disappeared. I saw a bit of a horror film once and when that happened the person had been eaten by a dinosaur insect. I squealed a bit. Nancy swore that I screamed louder than Sister Agatha but sometimes she’s wrong.

  My mother was pulling up the tablecloth to poke her face beneath it and there was a sudden groan from Beth. She stood up and water poured on to the floor, down her legs. My mother jumped away. We scrambled out from under the table. Sister Agatha was pointing at the mouse from on top of her chair.

  ‘Has it started?’ shouted my mother.

  ‘Those girls have brought mice in!’ shouted Sister Agatha from near the ceiling.

  The house was a sudden whirl of closed doors, which we were put outside, and panicked voices with Auntie Beth the loudest of all.

  ‘You need to find Jackie!’

  We sat on the stairs, out of sight of the phone, so we knew what was happening. Florence was crying and Auntie Beth was crying and Mum was phoning people and Agatha was making tea. It was better on the stairs.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispered Nancy, ‘you made her baby come! You’re in soooo much trouble!’ Her eyes sparkled and she hugged herself.

  ‘I didn’t!’

  She smiled at me. ‘It’s the funniest thing ever.’

  I tried to smile back but couldn’t.

  Mum put the phone down and saw us.

  ‘Go and find Jackie!’

  We had wandered around the barns and then settled back to making bows and arrows under the monkey puzzle tree.

  ‘Victorians thought that their baby would look like the last thing they saw,’ said Nancy. ‘If the baby has hairy, pointy ears it will be your fault.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not,’ she sang. ‘They wouldn’t go to the zoo if they were pregnant.’

  ‘But I didn’t put the mouse there. They’ve had mice before, I’ve seen the mousetraps.’ They were grey and spiky with half an Opal Fruit that had gone hard. Mum caught me trying to set one off with a matchstick.

  Nancy took her penknife from her pocket and cut off another springy sapling. She made a show of stripping off the leaves with the knife, even though it was dull and took two or three energetic swipes for each side.

  ‘How do you know that anyway, about the Victorians?’

  ‘Sandra’s mum told her. That’s why her younger brother looks different to her and her older brother.’ Nancy lowered her voice and I leaned in. ‘Sandra said that her mum was really pregnant and she opened the door one night and there was a black man standing there with a basket of kittens for sale and she got such a fright her waters broke there and then.’ Nancy’s voice returned to normal. ‘And that’s why her brother looks coloured when he’s not.’

  I thought this over. ‘So why didn’t he look like a kitten?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. He might have done. Maybe they were brown kittens.’ Nancy went back to carving her stick. ‘Turn back, don’t watch. I’ve never seen a brown kitten though.’

  ‘Do you think Auntie Beth will keep it if it does look like a mouse?’

  ‘She’ll have to. What else is she going to do with it?’ She signalled with her stick. ‘You can turn back round now. I need the string.’

  I pulled the ball of string from my pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘You’ll have to help me knot it. Hold th
e stick for me.’

  Nancy did terrible knots. I held the white, skinned stick and imagined a white, mousy baby. It could have a tail, and then Auntie Beth would make a fortune from charging people to look at him and she might give me some. I wouldn’t mind a tail.

  ‘Turn it this way.’

  I turned it.

  ‘Hold it tighter, dumbo.’

  I frowned and held it so that all of her pulling to make the string taut hardly moved my hands at all. She was finally happy and took the bow back. It didn’t twang much but she started to search for a good arrow. I sat down on one of the hummocks that I knew had a tractor tyre underneath the grass because I remembered when you could still see the tyre. Now it was completely greened over, with some longer, feathery grass growing from the middle. I thought that Donn had just wanted to hide the tyres instead of taking them wherever you take old tyres, but now I liked these soft stools. I lay down, around the edge, and looked up at the sky beyond the pale grass feathers. It was cloudy. It was usually cloudy, but that was fine. We would have gone out even if it was raining because we liked it. At home Mum would keep us in but here it rained too often so we always had our wellies on and then she didn’t mind. I worried that one day Nancy would be too old to come out and make bows and arrows, but there wasn’t anything better to do, she said. I was so pleased every time she came out because after a year at comprehensive I thought she might say it any time. When she got too old I would have to be too old because Florence was small and awful.

  ‘Accidents,’ Nancy had said, before she told me how babies were made. I called her a big, fat liar so I didn’t have to think about it right then. I didn’t think Florence could be an accident or why didn’t everyone have twenty accidental babies. And Mum seemed to like her anyway, and Dad avoided her as much as he did us. Nancy said she was an accident because she was a girl, and they must have wanted a boy. I thought that meant that we must be accidents, but she said one girl was just a girl and a second girl should have been a boy. I cried then and we just called Florence the Not Boy so I could feel better.

  Nancy had trimmed her arrow, leaving a bit of leaf at one end. The wood was too green to go to an actual point, but it splayed out more every time she drew the knife across it. I’d read a book where they made bows and arrows that actually worked, but I couldn’t remember what kind of wood you were supposed to use. I didn’t know what kind of wood she was using either, in any case. I rested my cheek on the grass so I could see Nancy. She stood side on to the tree, pulled the string back and the arrow fell to the ground.

  ‘It’s not long enough,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks, smarty pants.’

  She knew worse words than that, so I knew she wasn’t really angry. She untied the string on the bow, sawed at it for a bit before giving up and snapping a bit off. She gave it to me to retie the string. She had to pull it tighter this time because it was shorter and took ages to do the knot how she wanted it.

  I looked over her shoulder towards the house, but Jackie’s car was still there. I felt guilty now that he was missing the excitement of his mouse-baby. Nancy took the bow and I climbed onto the hillock.

  ‘I think we should find Jackie,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘Go on then.’

  He wasn’t in the paddock by the house and, although I could see over the hedge, I couldn’t see into the field properly because of the massive rhododendrons. I jumped off and found a hole to look through. It was like using a telescope, moving around to see different parts of the field. I saw him and opened my mouth.

  I ran back and sat on the hillock, my arms around my knees.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tommy’s over there.’

  Nancy dropped the bow to her side, stood on the tyres and looked across. She looked like a hunter. She jumped down and smiled.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs and watch him.’

  She ran inside. I thought about it and then followed her.

  Mum’s stuff was everywhere in that room. By the time Dad arrived she’d have sorted it all out for him and would be using the drawers, instead of leaving the suitcase open on the chair. We crept over her pile of clothes because we knew that, however much there seemed to be no order, she could tell when we had been in. She liked having a room to herself, she said. She hadn’t had it as a child, she didn’t have it as a married woman. She only had it for the first five weeks of the summer holiday before our dad arrived for the last. We didn’t have a room to ourselves either, I shared with Nancy at home as well as here, and the NB had the small bed because she still sometimes wet herself through the nappy, so I could understand this. I would keep my room tidier if I had it to myself, though, so it seemed even bigger.

  Nancy had made it to the window and had crouched on the commode chair. It didn’t smell or anything, but I just didn’t like touching it. If this was my bedroom I’d put it somewhere else. Like the silo.

  I bent down behind Nancy and lifted my head to the same height as hers, but just to the side. We’d crept in here before, mostly to look in Mum’s suitcase, but there was a great view from here of the monkey puzzle tree. The one in front of our window had become familiar, but this had different twists. As from our window, there was no good view of the driveway, because of the trees. But the field to the left of the house looked wide and sloping in a flat way and we could see the stone pile in the corner, and Donn, Jackie and Tommy standing near it. There were sheep in the field as well, of course, and Bruce had lain down, almost flat to the ground, watching them.

  ‘Can you see what they’re doing?’ I asked.

  Nancy had her head just to the left of me and I was sure she could see more.

  ‘They’ve got a bag on the ground,’ she said.

  I said, ‘That’s Bruce.’

  ‘Behind Tommy, not in front of him. It might be black, but I can tell the difference between a bag and a dog.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t see what’s in it. Tommy looks angry though.’

  He did. His arms swung between Donn and Jackie, over to the road and back to the stones. None of the sound of his voice travelled to the house, or not through the shaking glass, in any case.

  ‘Should we tell him? Jackie, I mean?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not interrupting them. You can.’ Nancy looked as if she was going to dare me. ‘I think you should.’

  ‘Not a chance.’ I tried to make it sound as final as I could because once she started to push I found it really hard to say no. ‘You’re the one he likes.’

  She sat down on the commode chair and I stayed in a half bent position.

  ‘I think you’re wrong about seeing Ryan’s bag.’

  ‘Yeah, you said.’

  ‘Mum said he phoned from London. Ryan is totally fine. It was just a bag.’

  ‘And the gun?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d recognise a gun. It was probably a spanner.’

  Nancy smirked. I knew that was the version that Sandra would hear. Clever Nancy and stupid Bernadette. I think if Ryan had phoned – well, I would just have known.

  She turned to look out of the window, her head recklessly higher.

  ‘They’ll see you.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  Jackie was talking the most now, but his palms were upturned. He didn’t look angry. Donn was still standing with his arms crossed, one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t see him rock his weight from one to the other, but I would bet he was. I had seen him do that when priests were in the house, especially when Sister Agatha had abandoned him in a corner with a particularly cross one.

  Tommy was pointing to the bag on the ground now. Donn put his hands up, palms towards Tommy, and started to nod. Jackie shrugged, like he was sorry for something, and picked the bag up. It only went up a little, like it was really heavy, and he put it down again. We heard Sister Agatha calling his name from the gate near the back of the house, next to the cows. He turned and Donn put his hands to his mouth.

  Jackie held his hand up to Sister Agatha an
d began to walk, backwards, to the gate. Tommy and Donn stood still for a while. When Jackie and Sister Agatha were out of sight, they quickly acted together to drag the bag into the hole between the stones in the corner of the field.

  ‘Come down,’ I said. ‘They’ll be coming back now.’

  Nancy pushed me out of the way a bit to stare down. ‘I don’t think Bruce likes Tommy, you know.’ Then she gasped and ducked too quickly, banging her head on the arm of the chair.

  ‘He saw you?’

  She nodded, one hand to her head. She checked for blood on her fingertips, but there was no cut, no distraction. We’d been warned and now we’d been caught. I bit my fingernails and we then we both jumped as we heard Sister Agatha’s footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Where are youse?’ she shouted.

  We left the room, our heads low. She didn’t seem to notice which room we’d come out of as Nancy closed the door behind us.

  ‘I’m off to the hospital with Jackie. Florence is in the kitchen so you need to come and mind her. Donn will be back in soon and he’ll fetch your tea. OK?’

  We looked at her.

  ‘OK?’

  We nodded.

  ‘Agatha,’ I whispered, ‘is Tommy staying?’

  ‘No, he’s gone. I wouldn’t . . . He’s already gone.’ She ran back downstairs, ‘And stay out of my room!’

  Donn was in charge. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. We’d had dinner, but could he cook? No man cooked in this house.

  ‘You’re going to have to cook,’ I said to Nancy.

  ‘Maybe you’ll have to kill what I cook,’ she sneered.

  Sister Agatha ran back. ‘And three rosaries each to pray for the safe delivery!’ And was gone.

  ‘Bern, I haven’t seen my beads for ages.’

  I knew where they were, but I didn’t want to say.

  She kicked me. ‘Bern! Where’ve you put it? You must have mine too.’

  ‘We left them in the stable.’

  12

  Now

  Bernie had laughed at the thought of retracing their dad’s car wheels.

  ‘You never liked those trips, Nancy. You always wanted to go shopping with Mum.’