Free The Lost Garden by Kate Kerrigan

poked the lad and said, ‘You’re a stupid eejit, Noel Collins – keep your mouth shut,’ but he replied right back, ‘You’re the same, Claire Murphy – I heard you calling his name in your sleep. “Oh, Paddy, Paddy, kiss me, Paddy Doherty! I love you, Paddy Doherty!”’
    They all laughed at his exaggerated impersonation.
    ‘Still,’ Claire said, ‘you’ll all admit Paddy Junior is a fine thing.’
    ‘Keep in with Aileen there and you might have a chance yourself, Claire.’
    ‘What do you say, Aileen – will you fix me up?’
    Aileen wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.
    ‘Cross her palms with silver, Miss Murphy, and she just might make a match,’ Jimmy cut in.
    Claire smiled at Jimmy, showing off every tooth in her head, and wriggled her shoulders from side to side, delighting in the banter.
    ‘You’re as cheeky as a monkey, Shadow Man.’
    ‘There’s no shame in being a shadow,’ he said, ‘to a woman like this – and I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth and back again.’
    Aileen didn’t like the way they were talking about her as if she wasn’t there, but at the same time she wasn’t really able to join in all this chatter. She was still afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.
    ‘Well, if you ever get bored following her around and you want to step out into the limelight . . .’
    ‘Thanks, Claire,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
    Aileen had had enough. She grabbed Jimmy’s arm and, tugging him to his feet, said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
    As soon as they were out of earshot, over to the side of the women’s house, she turned to him, raging, and mimicked, ‘“Oh, I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks, Claire.” What was that, Jimmy Walsh? You think you’re so fine every woman wants you now? You think I can’t speak for myself? You think you have to follow me around everywhere? That I can’t look after myself? Well, let me tell you—’
    In that moment Jimmy reached down, and gripping theback of her head in his small hands, he kissed her firmly on the lips.
    It seemed then that a door opened on a room inside Aileen that she had not known was there and flooded it with light.
    Was this love?
    If it was, it felt something like terror, and something like joy, and something like her heart melting into a pool of blood, then opening out and sealing itself into the velvet petals of a freshly opened deep red rose.
    Aileen Doherty did not know how it came to pass that this young man, and no other, had taken her first kiss from her. She was not entirely sure she was happy about it, but then Jimmy Walsh the swimming fisherman from Aghabeg took her in his hands and looked down at her with his funny, crazy face and said, quite inappropriately and far too soon, ‘I love you.’ And in the deepest, truest part of herself, Aileen knew that, forever and ever, that was that.

Chapter Eleven
    ‘Now,’ said Sean Walsh, as Jimmy and the rest of the crew climbed into the truck that would take them on the short ten-minute journey back to the bothy, ‘there’s another honest day’s work done.’
    It was day twenty of the season and the end of another long session of potato-picking. Five bells sounded from the church tower in the nearby village of Cleggan and the workers trooped over to the long trough at the edge of the field where they threw the last of the day’s harvest to be collected, dusted and finally sold to the good people of Scotland.
    ‘Surely,’ said Tom Collins.
    ‘Never was a thing more certain,’ agreed his son Noel.
    ‘Aye,’ added fourteen-year-old Kevin, the younger of the Collins boys, always following the ‘big men’ in the family with his final affirmation.
    Jimmy was starting to really enjoy the company of these men. Aside from Sean and himself, there were ten other men: Aileen’s family and the two Kelly men, the three Collins men, Noreen Flaherty’s brother, James, and then the hilarious Iggy Murphy, whom Jimmy teased by saying that his twin