The Book of Tomorrow

I think I’ve heard my uncle Arthur speak about five words in my life. It’s as though Mum has gone through her life speaking for both of them—not that he would have shared her views on anything she said. Arthur speaks more than Mum these days. He has an entire language of his own, which I’ve slowly but surely learned to decipher. He speaks in grunts, nods and snot-snorts; a kind of mucous inhale, which is something he does when he disagrees with something. A mere, ‘Ah,’ and a throw back of the head means he’s not bothered by something. For example, here is how a typical breakfast-time would go.

Arthur and I are sitting at the kitchen table and Rosaleen as usual is buzzing about the place with crockery piled with toast, and little dishes of home-made jam, honey and marmalade. The radio, as usual, is blaring so loudly I can hear every word the presenter is saying from my bedroom; some annoying miserable man talking in monotone about the terrible things happening in the world. And so Rosaleen comes to the table with the teapot.

‘Tea, Arthur?’

Arthur throws back his head like a horse trying to rid his mane of a fly. He wants tea.

And the man on the radio talks about how another factory in Ireland has closed and one hundred people are losing their jobs.

Arthur inhales and a load of mucus is sucked up through his nose and then down his throat. He doesn’t like this.

Rosaleen appears at the table with another plate of toast piled high. ‘Oh, isn’t that terrible, God love their families. And the little ones now with their daddys out of work.’

‘Their mothers too, you know,’ I say, taking a slice of toast.

Rosaleen watches me bite into the toast and her green eyes widen as I chew. She always watches me eat and it freaks me out. It’s as though she is the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’, watching for me to become plump enough so that she can throw me into the Aga with my hands tied behind my back and an apple stuffed in my gob. I wouldn’t mind an apple. It would be the fewest calories she’d ever given me.

I swallow what’s in my mouth and put the rest of my toast down on my plate.

She leaves again, disappointed.

On the news they talk about some new government tax increase and Arthur inhales more mucus. If he hears any more bad news, he’ll have no room for his breakfast with all that mucus. He’s only in his forties but he looks and acts older. From the shoulders up he reminds me of a king prawn, always bent over something, whether it’s his food or his work.

Rosaleen returns with a plate of Irish breakfast enough to feed all the children of the one hundred factory workers who have just lost their jobs.

Arthur throws his head back again. He’s happy about this.

Rosaleen stands beside me and pours me tea. I’d love nothing more than a gingersnap lattÉ but I tip the milk into the strong tea and sip it all the same. Her eyes watch 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 make yoghurt 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 a committee 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. Me and Mum got a swimming pool as our treat, but each to their own. The demesne is surrounded by a famine wall, which was a project to provide work for the starving during the potato famine. It runs right along Arthur and Rosaleen’s garden and house, and creeps me out every time I see it. If Rosaleen had ever visited our house for dinner she’d probably have started building a wall around us, because none of us eats carbs. At least, we never used to eat carbs, now I’m eating so much I could fuel all the factories they’re closing down.

Kilsaney descendants continued to live in the castle until the 1920s, when some arsonists didn’t get the memo that the inhabitants were Catholic and they burned them out. After that they could only live in a small section of the castle because they couldn’t afford to fix it up and heat it, and then they eventually moved out in the nineties. I don’t know who owns it now but it’s fallen into disrepair: no roof, fallen-down walls, no stairs, you get the idea. There’s loads of stuff growing inside it and whatever else that scutters around. I learned all that while I was doing a project on it for school. Mum suggested I stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for the weekend and do some research. She and Dad had the biggest fight I’d ever seen or heard that day, and Dad became even more crazy when she suggested I go away. The atmosphere was so bad that I was happy to leave them. Plus, Mum trying to get me to leave the house really pissed Dad off, and so feeling it was my duty as a daughter to make his life hell, I merely obliged. But as soon as I got there, I wasn’t really interested in snooping around and finding out the history of the place. I just about managed to stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for lunch, and then went to the toilet to call my Filipino nanny, Mae—who we’ve since had to send back home—and made her collect me and bring me home. I told Rosaleen I had stomach cramps and tried not to laugh when she asked me if I thought it was the apple pie.