Free The Shelter of Neighbours by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne

purpose.
    â€˜Just give me two minutes, sweetie pie!’
    â€˜Now!’ She didn’t exactly stamp her foot, but she positioned it in readiness for stamping. Berry could throw the mother and father of a tantrum at the drop of a popsicle. Well, to be fair to her, it was past her bedtime. She was tired – according to the philosophy of the Roley school of child-rearing, this would excuse anything up to and including murder. ‘Hansel and Gretel! Hansel and Gretel! Hansel and Gretel!’
    She made me tell the same story every night. We had half a dozen new endings, some that involved the eating of the children by the witch, some the eating of the witch by the children. Berry (Beryl the Peril, I called her in my letters home) was bloodthirsty. Cannibalism enthralled her. More to the point, it sent her to sleep. To my knowledge, she was not troubled by nightmares.
    I grabbed her middle finger and scrutinised it.
    â€˜Darn and double darn!’ Morgan said that when she was cross. It sounded absolutely ridiculous, but I had enough sense not to use the curses we had at home, even when she wasn’t around to hear them. ‘This little girl is still much too skinny!’ I glanced meaningfully at the cooker. ‘My sweet little child, you must eat lots and lots and lots of candy, so you’ll grow big and juicy and fat … oops, I mean, big and strong!’ And I gave my version of a witch’s chuckle. Hargh Hargh Hargh . A bit like a donkey’s braying. (Do they bray? Or do they neigh? What’s the difference?)
    Berry was five years old, sweet as a biscuit, with blueberry eyes and skin like maple syrup. I was her au pair. Just for the summer. I’d come over after the Leaving to take the job, which a teacher at home had fixed up for me. The first six weeks I spent at the Roleys’ gingerbread house in Morristown, New Jersey, minding Berry while her parents were at work. Now it was August and we were on holiday, at a lake somewhere in Upper New York State. Lake Elizabeth. It was very nice: a long sliver of blue water with enormous rocky mountains as a background and black spiky trees all around the edges, like eyelashes. It wasn’t like anywhere I’d ever been or even heard tell of. Morgan just called it ‘Lake Elizabeth’, and once or twice Warren referred to it as a resort. ‘Resort’ meant somewhere like Kilkee, to me, or Ballybunion. Blackpool. Seaside towns, real places. This was more like a boarding school, or monastery, even if its only purpose was pleasure. (It had its own little white chapel, mind you, discreetly tucked away in the woods.) There was a big house like a hotel down by the canoe harbour, where we ate sometimes, fabulous feeds of chowder and crab bakes. Pancakes and waffles and maple syrup. You could stay in this big house if you wanted to, but we lived in a log cabin. That was considered a cut above the hotel, to my surprise. I’d never stayed in a hotel; I would have loved to try it. But the cabins cost more, apparently.
    I got along well with the Roleys, or as well as it’s possible to get along with people whose servant you are, even if the au-pair label lifted my job out of the absolute mud; I told myself again and again that I wasn’t really a maid or a servant. I was a student, or soon would be. After this summer I’d be starting college, I’d be studying anthropology and English, I’d be a free person. But even though I knew this, and believed that being a student was an occupation that carried plenty of dignity with it, plenty of class , and even though I made sure everyone knew that I was a student doing a holiday job, not some Irish lowlife immigrant, it was impossible to convince myself of this. That is a most peculiar thing: after less than week with the Roleys, I started to feel like a slavey in a James Joyce short story or one of those maids in frilly white caps in Upstairs, Downstairs . I stopped