–  You didn’t need to hit Mary in the face! Don’t you think she’s been through enough lately? Eileen says she’s going to get the priest out to you!

–  She wouldn’t dare get the priest out to me! That tramp?

–  She would and you know it!

Kathleen had stood up now to face her. Mammy was taken aback but she was not beaten. Mammy couldn’t be beaten but even I could see that she had a worm of worry. The priest comes because we don’t have policemen. We don’t speak to the RUC because we’re Catholics. He will tell her off bigtime and everyone will find out. It’s even worse because he has God on his side not just a gun. His housekeeper, horrible Mrs Byrne, goes straight across to the parish-hall bingo and tells whole rows of women who’s in the clabber. I’ve heard about this before, it’s called ‘losing face’. Mammy usually really enjoys it when other women have lost their faces.

She’d likely fed the priest enough times to keep him on side. He always dropped by almost exactly at dinnertime and had to be persuaded that there was enough food to go round and he must stay – ‘shame not to, Father O’Brien, when it’s my own chicken roast.’ Mammy’s own chicken roast was famous throughout the whole townland and she threw open the windows even in the fierce winter frosts so the smell of it, stuffed to the gunnels with sausage meat and scallions, drifted down into the Cloon Valley to fill every mouth with water and nothing else.

The butter bubbling under the skin likely made it all the way to the parochial house on Aghabovey and the poor men of the cloth, suffering the skinny shin stews of Mrs Byrne all week, would be like lambs to the slaughter. If he tried to back out of the kitchen she would follow him with a roast potato on a fork ready to feed him like a baby bird if he opened his beak.

–  Father O’Brien will understand I’m rearing waynes who will honour their father and their mother, Kathleen Rattigan!

She knew she was safe. What happened inside the walls of this house stayed within its walls. Whatever Father O’Brien threw at her wouldn’t stick. That she had hit such an innocent as Bernie would be passed over as an accident. She’d be able to make him see that it needed to be done. He wouldn’t care that she had hit me, I was hers to hit.