Free Shade by Neil Jordan Page B

this vast house where she had grown up, with this child whose imaginative world filled all the empty spaces. She slept late often, rose to find Nina already fed by Mary Dagge and realised her more ardent self was slumbering too. “Nine across,” she said to her husband once at dinner, “Spanish Court painter.”
    “Velázquez,” he replied, but without the recognition she had hoped for. She decided then, to let that self slumber on.
    And in the absence of Isobel Shawcross, she decided to leave her daughter’s schooling to nature, Dan Turnbull and the “two disgraces” from the cottage across the river. Nina would eventually learn to spell, with the same George and Janie, in the national school across the river, and would misspell one word consistently, leaving out the “e”: lonly. And when the mistake was pointed out to her, she would misspell it deliberately, claiming it looked more beautiful that way.
    But for the moment she was left free, to substitute real friends for imaginary ones, to share their world, to adopt the townland dialect, so fivepence became fippence, a long walk became a dreadful foreigner. She would talk of silage and rides on the back of the harvester with Dan, of colly dogs that are whores for barking, and her bemused parents would see this lithe tinker grow between them. Her father would walk her through that long cathedral of steaming ice and hear her talk with the shellfish packers in a tongue that was, to him, near impenetrable.
    Her summer became one long swathe of sensuality, a bathing suit beneath a tattered dress, whole weeks spent on the dunes that spread from the Baltray golf-course to the interminable stretch of empty beach to the north of the river-mouth. The cottages across the Boyne river from her father’s shellfish plant became her second home: George and Janie Tuite in one, fifteen children spread between the other two. The blue and white horizon of the foaming sea was always perched, it seemed, over the three smoking chimneys, threatening to douse them entirely. Between those cottages and her parents’ large, ungovernable house was the estuary swamp, a terrain of dried mud, of slowly creeping tides, of barely formed canals Dan Turnbull had chosen to call Mozambique.
    Why Mozambique, they were never sure. But there were flies in Mozambique, Dan told them, flies, mosquitoes, and the fetid humours you get in flatlands below sea-level, so Mozambique it did become. And in Mozambique there were all of the estuary delights, crabs and kingfishers, channels and runnels, stagnant ponds, mudflats and seeping tides that rose at will, turning cracked black earth into mud that squelched and oozed between George’s ever-naked toes. There were men digging for earthworms in the early morning, mists like white hair clinging to the low ground, obliterating the dunes beyond, making Mozambique seem endless, men turning sand with spades, severing a lugworm here, a ragworm there. And when the men and the mists departed, there were monsters to be found in Mozambique: a huge flatfish left in a runnel by the departing tide, flapping, gasping vainly for air with its whitened mouth; an eel slinking in a stilled pool; multitudinous crabs; and one day a horned creature, up to its midriff in the soft mud, mud caked on its hair, its tail, mud from the incessant flailing of its four trapped legs, mud which dried around it as the sun rose.
    They surveyed this thing for hours, a footless mound of hair with two curved horns rising from it, wondering was it reindeer, unicorn or seahorse, until Dan arrived and told them it was none of those, it was Mabel Hatch’s goat. He undid the muddied rope from round its neck, slid it beneath its belly, avoided its jagging horns and pulled. And they heard grotesque sucking sounds as first the front legs, then the back ones emerged from their prison in the sludge and the whole goat was up, unsteady on its feet but standing free and readying itself to take a run at Dan.