Free Black Diamonds by Kim Kelly

don’t know what I imagined working men did in their spare time, but it certainly wasn’t that. The Lad may be reticent but there’s apparently something going on upstairs. How else could he have created this? My copy of Native Flora and Fauna finally arrived this afternoon, but I haven’t even opened the package. My watercolours, any watercolours, are pale dribbles compared to his abilities. And it is not the fact that is it so tiny and so detailed he must have gone half blind doing it. Neither is it in the practical skill of doing it at all. It’s the way the bird looks at me, on the verge of laughter. The way its claws reach around the bit of branch it sits upon as if poised to fly. The Lad is something of an artist, I’m afraid. That makes this all the more excruciating.
    I even tried to hide it when I first got home. Put it in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe where I keep things I never look for. Shame bit, and I had to take it out again and put it on the dressing table, where it sits now, looking at me.
    I tell myself that it is the fault of my inexperience. That I really am a child and have no idea of these things. That I’ll get it over with as soon as I find something sensible to do with myself. But I know all that is rot. I know, I don’t know how, but I know I am in love with him. Oh, but there must be a hundred girls dizzy in love with him. I see his sun-kissed chest, the knotted thickness of his shoulder, the fire-glimmer in his raven hair as it falls in a thick curtain across his forehead. His green eyes looking at me as if I am gaga, and wanting his opinion, wanting him to look at me.
    I shall have rather a few higher thoughts to contemplate at Mass on Sunday, if I can make it past the thoughts I should not be having at all.
    Father relieves me of my misery by coming home at four. But there is no relief, since I have to give him the message about the house, which requires me to mention His name.
    â€˜Good, good,’ Father says, well pleased, and I can barely hear him above the rushing in my ears. ‘I’ll have a word with our John Drummond and get an answer shortly, shouldn’t be a problem with that, money’s money to him.’ Then he peers at me as I perch like a statue on the edge of the sofa. ‘You look a bit wan, Francy. What’s the matter?’
    How I want to tell him the whole terrible thing; have him make it go away with a jocular wave of his hand. But instead I force out a chuckle that I hope sounds dismissive but in fact sounds as if I am being strangled. ‘Nothing!’ I say. ‘I just drifted off for a minute.’
    â€˜Where did you go, my girl?’ he asks and he’s sparkling above his pipe, damn him. I am so overstrung I suspect he knows, and is enjoying this torture along with everything else he’s put me through these past weeks. This is all his fault.
    Mine too, though. I was the fool who said she’d go back for more next Friday, and there’s no getting out of it this time.
    Oh the melodrama! But I simply can’t help it. This is hideous. Hideous. And even my own hyperbole is making me ill.
    â€˜Actually, I am a little tired,’ I tell him. ‘I think I’ll just have some toast and go to bed.’
    He puffs on his pipe and nods. Leprechaun!
    Mass does not go well, as if I thought it would. I am contemplating how tall He might be standing up when Father Hurley spies me from the pulpit with his careworn forbearance. I’m sure he knows, as does everyone else here. The place is packed full of decent working people who are married and goodly with pure and simple lives, full of faces I don’t know, except Mr Drummond’s tight-shut dreary-old-bachelor face, and I studiously avoid looking at him. But everyone else knows me — I am the lunatic, too-good-for- this-town hussy who teases hapless miners. An injured, helpless, bereaved miner no less. Look at her! But I say in my