Mammy didn’t think so. Women were not up to snuff, we were degenerate time bombs waiting to go off like Auntie Eileen had as soon as no one was watching. To lead Kathleen and me by example she kept herself braced. Monday to Saturday, she squeaked and creaked and strained at the sink, the cooker, the mangle as the very big bra, from shoulder to waist, and the very big girdle, from waist to mid-thigh, only allowed her to bend a certain painful amount in the middle. She was always rubbing her mid-section. She must have had welts as red as a bishop’s cape.

For Sunday she had an even tighter set of pristine white underpinnings. She would appear with sweat on her lip, trying not to look as if she was being pounded in the stomach. Every day called for nylons, her American Tans. The fact that long dark hairs cowered inside them never bothered her because she was ‘decent’.

Every month, one or other of the sets would be handwashed in Daz before anyone got up in the morning and pegged on the line inside a decent layer of tea towels and dishcloths in the summer. In the winter they were rolled in towels and coiled like a snake on the rack above the range.

Even kissing the most sought-after boy in town can’t keep her and her madness away for longer than five minutes. Everything about her – everything she does, her smells, everything she says– makes me want to take off at such a pace that one day she’ll go to hit me and all there will be is air.

8

After hours of analysis, me and Lizzie Magee admitted it seemed a very tricky business getting Body Part A into Body Part B without injury but she reckoned if my horrible mammy and her daft mammy had done it, we would be able to manage too as we were far smarter. It was hard to argue against that kind of logic. They had definitely managed it a few times. We were walking, talking, biscuit-eating proof of it and Lizzie was going to test her assumptions by allowing me to go first. She was too gracious.

She had big plans for my virginity during the school’s retreat in April at Gortnahook. I didn’t bother mentioning that I felt sick with nerves; she would have shot me down in flames. The nerves made me want to do it, the nerves made me not want to do it, I just wished it could be a bit less mechanical.