Ever walk past houses and wonder who lives in them? I was enjoying some such midmorning revery when a woman speaking loudly to her child approached on the same side of the narrow Ranelagh street as I was purposefully imagining. She was explaining something complicated to her young daughter and her grating voice caused me to cross the street to avoid any interaction. My revery was so pleasing, that I didn’t want anyone to burst it with their mundanity. As I crossed the narrow street there was a gate pier and I saw Katie’s face in it. It was cracked, dull in colour and despite its decrepitude, was built like a brick shithouse. Katie’s cottage was down Katie’s Lane, near home when I was young. She didn’t have electricity, sat within her inglenook with a face as blackened as the crook perched above the small dirty fire. The room was always dark. There were always fifty pence pieces standing in the plate groove of the dresser opposite the fire. The walls and she were the same colour. Black skirtings and black bent boots. I can still taste the small of that room, the turf dust heavy in the air. The windows were small, the floor crooked. After a time in the darkness of the room, I could discern more of her form. The room revealed itself like a Sigurd Lewerentz church I visited when I lived in Scandinavia; darkness and then half-darkness. The hole in the shed door was just big enough for her loud dog to run through.
When the priest walked into Third Class and asked for altar servers for Katie’s funeral; my arm stayed down. Every boy’s arm stayed down. One of the boys turned around and asked who she was. Nobody seemed to know who she was. This meant there was probably going to be no fiver for the effort. One boy eventually raised his arm and went with the priest to serve at the funeral further up the sweep of lawn in the cold Victorian church. I felt the priest look at me. The door of the classroom closed and we resumed our learning. I never heard Katie speak, I don’t know what her voice was like. Her name did not appear on her family headstone as there was nobody to remember her and the cottage was torn down. Seeing that cracked pier as I crossed the street to avoid the young woman and her daughter; I remembered the skin of her face appearing from the gloom of that room she always sat in, the deep rivulets across her forehead, the solid form of her dull form. The hole for the dog to run through. The dresser laden with unused plates and fifty pence pieces. The bricks of an inglenook, now gone.
And I walked on.
