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Somewhere in the small hours I grew mysteriously furious, really really angry, with her, and wanted to storm up the stairs and have it out with her. What did she think she was doing? The bloody foolishness of it!
Thank God I did not. That would have solved nothing. But very real worries assail me. The swelling in her legs could well be due to clotting, and if the clot should climb into the lungs or the heart, she will drop dead. Is this what she wants? Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.
I had meant to spend the evening devising some non-devious way to question Rosea
I had wanted to consult my edition of Barthus on Pathologies of Secrecy, which of course is a marvellous book, if I would only find time to read it again. I suppose I could have gone into my study and looked at it, but I was trembling. I was nearly apoplectic, if that is still a real condition in the modern world. So in the upshot I neither read my Barthus nor resolved Bet's recklessness. I am exhausted.
Rosea
Some weeks later it must have been, I was with my father on a particular job.
Rats start to breed with a vengeance in early spring, so late winter is a good time to go get them, when they have not expanded in numbers for a while, and the weather is not too murderous to the rat-catcher. I suppose looking back it was a queer thing to bring a young girl on the trail of rodents, but I did take a great interest in it, especially after my father read me the manual, which presented the task as one highly skilled, even verging on the vocational and the magical.
He had been working a few nights already in the Protestant orphanage, a strange place in its own right, rats or no rats. It was already about two hundred years old, and my father knew old stories attached to the place, and I do not think it was a very good idea to be an orphan in centuries gone by, judging by what he said. Perhaps in those days it was a decent place enough. He intended to work from the roof down, which was the proper way to do it, ridding the place of rats floor by floor. The upper attics had been cleared, and the top floor, and there were three floors to do, where the orphan girls actually lived, about two hundred of them in their nice canvaslike pi
'They've a bed each these times, Rosea
He worked away at the traps for a while, and I stood near him, the night wind moaning a little where it crept along the buildings. There was a cold cheap cankered-looking moon risen, just sitting on the roof of the orphanage. My father was dousing the rats with paraffin, preparatory to throwing them on the fire one by one, a fire he had managed to get lit in the centre of the courtyard, using smelly old boards and the like from one of the stores. This was his own method of disposing of the rats, that he had devised, working on from the manual, and he was quite proud of the method. When I think back it was perhaps a little unfortunate that the rats were still alive going into the flames, but I do not think it ever struck my father as cruel, and maybe he hoped it might serve as a warning to other rats if they were watching from the shadows. Which would be to some degree how my father's mind worked.
At any rate he was opening the traps, grabbing the rats one by one as I said and now I think of it, giving each a rap over the head before the flames, that has just popped up in my head as a picture, thank God, and chatting away to me, and maybe it was because he was not able to give it his full concentration, because I was with him, but didn't one of the rats escape between the trap and the knock on the head, wriggling out of his fingers suddenly, skirting the astonished Bob, who had nary a chance to react, and was gone back towards the orphanage in a dark blaze of blackness, but with that characteristic galloping motion…Myfather cursed gently and maybe thought no more of it, thinking he would get that rat again the following day.
So he worked away at the remainder, registering no doubt the squeaking yelp that each rat gave as he dispatched it, soaked in the paraffin, and threw it onto the bonfire, a sound that I imagine he heard in his dreams. And after about an hour, he wrapped up his bits and bobs, slung his traps around his body, put Bob on his habitual string, and we passed back through the dark orphanage to the street side, where it presented a rather elaborate carved front to the town, being no doubt the result of much philanthropic cash in the vanished century of its building. It was when we were just crossing the street that we heard a roaring, and turned about and looked up.
There was a strange, full, mysterious sound coming from the building, high up on the floor where the girls were sleeping. Although not all sleeping now, because pushing up through the slates of the roof was a thick black smoke, and a grey smoke, and a white smoke, all eerily lit by nothing but the moon and the meagre illuminations of Sligo. Now we heard the glass of windows break somewhere, and suddenly a long thin arm of bright yellow flame came streaking out, seemed to hang solidly in the night air, showing up my father's upturned face, and no doubt mine, and then just as strangely retrieved itself, with a horrible roaring moan, worse than any wind. It seemed to me in my enormous fright that the fire had spoken a word: 'Death, death,' said the fire I thought.