It is early, ludicrously early on St Patrick’s Day morning. Himself is braving the elements to run the ‘Craic 10k’ and so I drag my tender self from bed to join my pair of tyrants upon the sofa. (Friday night saw me and two girls from the Tri-team let loose in General Merchants on the Ormeau. Dry January felt a long way off, I can tell you.) As we warmed our frozen feet under a blanket, and I tried to quell the queasiness within, I looked over at the fireplace.
‘How long has there been a face drawn there?’ I ask. My children shrug.
‘Seriously, who has been drawing on the mantelpiece?’ I repeat.
‘Not us,’ they reply, with indignation. Having never noticed it before, I begin to wonder if long-term exposure to Catholics makes one see miraculous apparitions on your mantelpiece on Saint’s days.
It definitely wasn’t me,’ insists the older child, and to prove her point, hops down onto the chilly floorboards (we remain rugless after the puppy we fostered urinated so extensively on the last one that I had no choice but to bin it) and starts doing an illustration by way of comparison. ‘You see,’ she says, after a few deft strokes with a felt-tip, ‘My ponytails look like THIS,’ she points to her picture, ‘and this ponytail,’ she points with her pen to the graffiti, goes like this.’
She returns to her snug position on the sofa, with something of an exonerated air. For six-fifty-five of a Saturday morning, I must say, I’m impressed.
The small child is keen to protest her innocence too. Up she jumps and sets to with colouring pencils. Her drawing bears even less resemblance to the mystery on the mantle. She holds it alongside, and makes flicking motions with her wrist, to show the upward thrust of the hairstyle on the grafitti’d face, in contrast to that her own. ‘You see,’ she says, solemnly, pointing at her picture. She shakes her head, looking every inch like a disgruntled holiday maker who gets her picture taken beside her over-flowing cistern in her hotel in Fuengirola and has her story featured in Take a Break.
I have no idea when I last looked at the mantelpiece. In fairness, the illustration could have been there for weeks. I could almost hand on heart say it was the small child, because that’s the sort of thing she does. That, and eat entire tins of biscuits behind the sofa of an afternoon. After resuming her seat, she chirps up, ‘You know, how sometimes, we have other children to visit?’ ‘Yes,’ I nod. ‘Must have been one of them.’
I’m hoping that the pair of them can find good jobs as barristers and keep LSB and me comfortable in our dotage. In the meantime, anyone know of a good French polisher?
