The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna Page A

grate and up in smoke before he’d manage to get the first sentence down.
    He leaned back on the kitchen chair and sighed heavily. There was nothing else for it but to cycle down to Rose McFadden and ask her to write it for him. Because although Jamie’s handwriting was reasonably legible, he wasn’t so great at the spelling and punctuation and the like.
    Of course, this would mean that Rose would know his business. But since she was on intimate terms with his underwear anyway, sure what did it matter? And wasn’t it Rose who had suggested the idea to Paddy in the first place, after all? And, at the end of the day, Rose was a very decent woman and not one to go spreading rumors or smearing gossip about—unlike Maisie Ryan and her sort.
     
     
    Rose understood at once. “No trouble at all,” she said. “You just sit yourself down there, Jamie, and we’ll see what we can do.”
    She pulled out a chair from the cluttered table, straightened and patted a plump cushion.
    The kitchen was hung about with the aromas of baking bread commingling with past and future meals: the breakfast fry-up, the lunchtime casserole, a pot of broth a-bubble on the stove. She appeared like a dust-blown mason in a quarry; flour coated her strong forearms and powdered her ginger hair, unwisely permed in a nimbus of loopy curls. Her cheeks were forever reddened from heightened blood pressure, broken veins, and the heat from oven and stovetop.
    She was an industrious housewife and capable cook, had conquered most recipes in her Raeburn Royal Cookbook with varying measures of success, could knit and sew, produce and fashion most things from instruction sheet or pattern.
    Every chair and window and surface in the house expressed Rose’s devotion to creative crafts and a liking for thrift-store tat. Drapes: swagged, tailed, pleated and flounced. Cushions: ruffled and ribbed. Antimacassars and runners: laced, crocheted, appliquéd, embroidered, tatted and frilled. Items of basketry: a bowl and matching stool wrought in a postnatal occupational therapy class when she’d felt depressed. A papier-mâché rooster made over six Friday nights at the local parish hall, whilst Paddy competed in the Duntybutt Championship Darts Tournament in Murphy’s pub. Items with shells and ideas from Portaluce beach: a wine-bottle lamp with a fringed shade; a postcard plate of a whale; a card table trimmed with cockles and scallops; a collage of a fish with milk-bottle-top gills, a Fanta cap eye and a seagull’s primary wing feather, stiffened with glue for a tail.
    “Ye know,” Rose told him, “I drew them ads to my Paddy’s attention for you. I sez: ‘Ye know poor Jamie could be doin’ with a woman about the place, to help him out now that Mick isn’t about no more, and here’s the very thing,’ sez I, and I showed him the paper and he sez: ‘Ye know, Rose, you’re right,’ sez he.”
    She won some space on the messy tabletop, pushed the rolling pin and mixing bowl to one side, wiped the area clean with a damp cloth. The plastic tablecloth showed a repeat pattern of piglets hopping over gates in a green field, their tails spaghetti twists against a blurred, blue sky.
    “God, that was very good of you, Rose.”
    Jamie settled himself, took the ballpoint from his inside pocket, fumbled out the notepad and envelopes from his string bag.
    “Now, Jamie, I’ll just get me glasses. I’m as blind as a mole without them, so a am.” She plucked the spectacles from the gaping lips of a china guppy on the mantelpiece, and held the ad at arm’s length, murmuring over the wording. “Oh, she sounds like a fine lady, right enough.”
    “Maybe she’s too fine, Rose, to be havin’ anything to do with the like of me.” Jamie was studying the plastic pigs in the plastic field, growing depressed at the thought of rejection before the project had even got underway.
    “Nonsense, Jamie! There’s many’s the woman would give their back teeth to have you as a