Trespassers Read Online Free Page B

still.
    ‘Let’s stop,’ she says. ‘You’re getting too excited.’
    ‘No, no, don’t stop. Please, Mummy.’ I am like a drunk worriedabout hangovers but unable to give up the booze. ‘I promise not to have a nightmare.’
    ‘You always promise.’
    We are trespassing in an estate called Monks’s whose owners have been absent for years. Perhaps they haven’t the money to keep it up. We tell each other that they have forfeited their rights. Pinned crookedly to the jungly greenery are faded notices saying ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. I mix up words. Execution? Persecution. With which are we being threatened? I think of the broken doll. Persecution is what the English did to Catholic priests at the time of Queen Elizabeth which, according to Aunt Kate, was worse than guillotining. Disembowelling. The rack. Being hanged, drawn and quartered. She has described these processes in detail and Eileen has told her to stop filling my head with such stories. But meanwhile she herself tells me about witches. That’s different, she says, because witches don’t exist. Don’t they? I both do and don’t want them to. What
is
prosecution? I don’t know. And now, anyway, Eileen, tired of being a witch, is once again using her coat as a coat and, seated on a stone bench, is unwrapping a small snack.
    As we eat it, she reminds me that we must say goodbye to our Wicklow neighbours before we leave for good: to the two Miss Griffiths, old ladies who sometimes invite us to their big, old house for afternoon tea with hot buttered potato cakes, and other treats; to the Dennehys who sell milk just a stone’s throw from our house and sometimes give us a lift in their pony and trap; to Paul Henry and Michael Farrell and, most importantly, to Garret FitzGerald whose family – he has three older brothers – lives not far away.
    Garret, with whom Eileen has persuaded me I am in love, is agile, curly-haired, six years my senior and disliked by Kitty. This is to be expected, since in almost all the houses we know, boys are to maids what dogs are to postmen: suspect, teasing, fond of pranks and hard to control. They track mud indoors on their shoes, untiethe maids’ aprons, tease them, and generally make trouble. I myself am full of admiration for Garret who is a champion tree-climber and may, I fear, visit us for the sole purpose of climbing our – but soon to be no longer our – vast old cedar. When he climbs high enough to be almost out of sight, he calls down tauntingly, ‘It’s nice up here.’ I have never even touched the lowest branch. Desperate to do at least that, I run round and round the tree, calling up to him and feeling ridiculous. Eager as a puppy, I can’t stop myself begging, ‘Please, Garret. Come down. Give me a hand up. Please!’ Around I go. I almost bark. I am tormented by the thought that once we leave Wicklow, I may never see him again.
    Eileen, who will soon be preparing
The Little Black Hen
for publication, has put him into it. The story has the form of a folk tale, albeit one for primary-school readers. It is about an old woman’s pet hen being captured by evil fairies and about the risky adventures on which two children embark to save it. Their names are Garret and Julie, and Eileen will manage to keep their story going through a number of later books. She has made us into a couple, handing me a fantasy Garret in lieu of the unattainable, real one.
    Illustrations in the US edition of her book will show two barefoot children with brightly, not to say clownishly, patched clothes. This is not how Irish people, especially not those now running or hoping soon to run our young state, like to imagine themselves. Garret’s parents are part of this group, the part opposed to de Valera, and Garret himself, when he sees the pictures, will – I hope jokingly – complain. Though he cannot guess that he will one day be Ireland’s most distinguished Taoiseach, tree-climbing has given him a feeling for