‘Nana!’ Noah was aghast. ‘Mr Nibbles isn’t a rat, he’s a gerbil and he’s very nice. Look,’ he held the cage up as high as he could and Maureen jumped back with a shriek.
‘Get it away from me!’
‘Mammy get a grip of yourself,’ Roisin hissed, embarrassed by the stares they were garnering. ‘It’s a gerbil like Noah said. He can’t hurt you.’
‘It’s small and furry with big teeth, what’s the difference?’
‘He’s a mammal, not a rodent,’ Roisin said. She’d looked it up knowing the information would come in handy but she hadn’t expected to have to drop it in before they’d even left the airport.
‘Well, I’m not going to be responsible for Pooh. He might think your gerbil rat there is a new toy.’ Pooh was Maureen’s poodle. It was down to Roisin she had a dog as the last time she’d been in Dublin a friend had been looking to rehome their puppy. Twins and a puppy had not been a good idea, her friend had cried down the telephone, and Roisin having heard her mammy making noises about getting a nice little doggy to keep her company had thought it a great idea for their poodle pup to come and live with Mammy. She’d heard the word “poodle” and pictured a small, yappy little dog that would prance around her mammy’s ankles and sit on her lap to watch Fair City of an evening. Only, it transpired Pooh wasn’t a toy poodle he was a standard and was now four times the size he’d been when Roisin had last seen him. She knew Mammy had made concerted efforts to change the pups name from Pooh upon adoption but he would not answer to anything else and so it had stuck.
‘He’ll be staying in his cage for the duration we’re at yours. Won’t he, Noah? Sure, it will be grand, Mammy, don’t worry.’
‘There she goes, Easy-osi, Rosi with her “she’ll be grand” attitude.’ Mammy shook her head and muttered things like dead gerbil and what was that daughter of hers thinking bringing it to Dublin, all the way out to the car.
They’d only just pulled out into the steady traffic when Noah tapped Roisin on the shoulder.
‘I need a wee-wee, Mum.’
Chapter 6
Roisin was nearly knocked to the ground by a yapping blur of woolly black curls as she followed Mammy into her apartment. Noah shot off for the toilet leaving Mr Nibbles on his nana’s dining table and her to fend off Pooh who had a paw resting either side of the top of her legs. She could smell his hot panting, doggy breath as he gazed up at her before trying to bury his head in her nether regions. ‘Mammy, get him off me!’
‘Down, boy,’ Maureen said, giving him a tap.
Pooh ignored her. She looked at her daughter. ‘He likes you, Rosi. He has a thing for the ladies so he does. Rosemary Farrell won’t visit me at home anymore unless I promise to put him in the spare room and you want to hear the fuss he makes when he thinks he’s missing out.’ Maureen got him by the collar and dragged him off her. ‘You’re a very naughty boy, Poosy-woosy, aren’t you?’ She gave him a pat on the head just to really hammer her point home, and a bit of a cuddle before looking at Roisin who was sidling through the apartment with her case positioned in front of her in case he came back for round two.
‘You never spoke to us like that when we were naughty, Mammy,’ she shot back. ‘And you certainly didn’t give us a pat on the head. The wooden spoon on our backside was what we got.’ She was a bit put out by the amount of attention the poodle was receiving. She wondered how Moira was coping having had her position as the baby of the family, one she revelled in, usurped.
‘You only got the wooden spoon when you were bold and I’ve enrolled Pooh in puppy obedience school. He starts in the new year.’ She looked at the poodle and then back at Roisin, lowering her voice to a barely audible whisper. ‘He’s getting his you know what’s seen to as well in January. It’s for his own good but he won’t see it that way, I mean, would you? The vet’s after telling me it will help with aggressive behaviour as he gets older and marking his territory that sorta thing. He won’t get nasties down there either like the cancer. I’m hoping it will help with this habit of going around putting his nose in places it has no business going too because it’s getting out of hand and it’s embarrassing so it is. The rambling girls are beginning to talk thanks to Rosemary.’
‘We can’t have that now, can we?’ Roisin whispered back, and Maureen shot her a look, unsure whether she was being clever or not.
She dared move her gaze from the poodle to the artwork on the wall. Moira’s painting of Foxy-Loxy had won her first place in a well-respected children’s art competition when she was a child. It was nice to see the familiar painting hanging on a wall in a room that otherwise felt strangely out of kilter to her. The apartment opened up into the living room, the kitchen was at the far end and to the right of the open plan space a utility room was tucked away off the kitchen. Over to Roisin’s left was the door that led to the hall where two generous bedrooms were positioned opposite each other. A large picture window was the living room’s focal point. On a clear day it afforded a glimpse of blue from the sea but today she could see the rain spattered
