Read Online The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton - Free Book Online

else in our house needed shoes, too, but my mother said it would allbe paid back in other ways. So Áine got new shoes, but it made no difference. At night she left the light on in her room and my father said that was a waste, too, because she was not even reading a book, only sitting there smoking cigarettes. He said he gave up smoking when he wanted to buy German records and the only way of paying for them was to take the money from the cigarettes instead. If he had a mouse for every cigarette that Áine smoked and a penny for every mouse that he caught, he would be able to buy every opera and every symphony that ever existed on Deutsche Grammophon. He said it was the cigarettes that were making Áine sad. And one morning, my mother found a black hole in one of the pillow cases and she was afraid the house would burn down.
    Every day my mother sits down with Áine and tries to make her smile. She says nobody can make you smile if you don’t want to. Every day my father goes to work on the train. Every day we catch three mice and every day new ones come. Every day I scream and laugh when my mother’s mackerel hands go under my jumper. Every Sunday Onkel Ted comes to tea after his swim at the Forty Foot because he doesn’t feel the cold. We tell him things that happened, but not about mice and not about Áine or the black holes burned in her dresses. My sister Maria pulls up her dress to show Onkel Ted her tummy and then we reach into the pocket of his jacket for the sweets. He goes upstairs to make the sign of the cross over Áine and when he comes down again, he says my mother should take her out dancing.
    ‘Irish dancing,’ my father said. ‘It would have to be Irish dancing.’
    Then everybody is silent for a while looking at each other. Until my mother suddenly bursts out laughing andsays she’s forgotten how to dance. Two silent brothers looking at my mother laughing and laughing at the idea of coming all the way over from Germany to bring an Irish woman out to Irish dancing. Onkel Ted smiles and waits for my mother to finish. He’s very serious and says there are things you never forget like cycling and swimming and helping other people. So one evening, my mother and Áine got dressed up and went dancing in the city. She put on her blue dress with the white spots and Áine put on her new shoes and a dress without holes in it. My father stayed at home reading his book and we sat on the carpet playing cars and listening to mice.
    My mother said Irish dancing was not like waltzing or any kind of dancing that she had ever seen before. She said in Ireland your feet never even touch the ground. Everyone was floating, except for a man who sometimes slapped his heel down with a bang to the music as if he were trying to make holes in the floor. The dance hall smelled of smoke and perfume and sweat and it was filled with people of all ages. There was a priest and some nuns as well, sitting down in the seats. An old woman with long hair was dancing as if she were only sixteen. All the men were on one side of the hall and all the women on the other. The women danced as if the men didn’t exist, and at the refreshments counter there were people talking over tea and sandwiches as if the dancing didn’t exist. My mother watched three boys sharing a bottle of fizzy lemonade. Each time one of them drank through the straw, the other two kept watch to make sure he didn’t go past a certain mark before he passed it on to the next boy. They had tears in their eyes from drinking so fast.
    All the time, men came walking across from the other side of the hall to ask my mother to dance, but she smiledand shook her head. She thanked them and asked them to dance with Áine instead. My mother says you can see a man’s face drop. But once they had come all the way over, they could not just turn around and go away again empty-handed. Áine didn’t want to dance either. She said her legs were gone soft. So the man had to pull her out by