Chapter 4: The Buzzing Skeps

Our ordered take-out arrives before we clear any of my garbage from the spare bedroom downstairs. As a break from my cooking, a regular couple of Friday treats a month for Caoimhe is to dine on a take-out ordered in.

It arrives hot and ready to serve and means that there’s only a couple of plates and sets of cutlery to load into the washer, no pots or pans to bother with and no missing ingredients that I didn’t know were missing until well into the food prep. Yeah, it happens a lot, we have had some odd dinner combos over my daughter’s short life. So I guess take-out every other Friday is a real treat for us both.

Today it is Chinese food from Qian Kee, always generous portions and this evening it seems that Caoimhe has cell-ordered enough for three that is actually double our normal order, including a couple of dishes we’d never included before.

We only have a small breakfast table in the kitchen, the house is still small even after extending it to more than double its original size, so the dining area is in a corner of the kitchen and what you would call cozy, especially with little table-top space amongst all these aluminum cartons. After I filled up three glasses of water from the kitchen tap for us, there was little space left for elbow room.

I always use chopsticks for Chinese food, I was brought up using them naturally back home. El used to eat Chinese from a blue porcelain bowl that sits in the dresser long unused, because I was brought up to use round dinner plates. Caoimhe is strictly a right-handed fork user for everything except soup, a habit formed copying me at home before they unsuccessfully tried to reeducate her in Irish two-handed table manners at school dinners.

Yeah, school dinners not lunches, that gets me every time. Over here in Ireland ‘lunch time’ in the middle of the school day is always referred to as ‘dinner time’; now that’s Irish, who would’ve guessed?

So, Caoimhe sets the table with the plates and cutlery, I get my chopsticks and Etain is given a fork to use. Our guest watches me with interest as I overconfidently grapple with a sweet and sour pork ball completely dunked and redunked until completely smothered in sticky sauce with my favourite chopsticks and promptly miss my mouth completely and drop it with a sloppy ‘plop!’ into my lap.

Smooth, Richard, really smooth. Show up the whole family to a stranger as damn slobs why don’t you?

Of course my daughter thinks my clumsiness is a total hoot and makes no attempt at maintaining any decorum in front of a stranger.

Caoimhe almost spits out her mouthful of masticated egg noodles, swallows it quickly and laughs so loud and long that her puffed cheeks are tracked by runs of salty tears.

Then she laughs even more as I pick up the hot rogue pork ball with the fingers of my left hand and drop it onto my plate and immediately suck my sticky fingers, not so much for the taste but because the hot sugary sauce has really burned my fingers after the pork ball had made its presence felt, and not residing too comfortably I might add, in my lap.

Etain regards me with an amused look on her face, then she looks at my helplessly amused daughter and she starts to laugh herself.

“I’ve an ointment in my bag for your burned fingers,” she states helpfully between what I have to admit are delightfully childish giggles, “Do you want me to fetch it?”

“No, I’ll be fine,” I reply as I use a paper napkin, rather ineffectually, on spreading the sticky stain on the front of my pants but at least lifting the stained cloth with a pinch of my sore fingertips so the sauce’s heat stops conducting to more delicate parts fleshwise. “I’ll just go change my pants, won’t be long.”

I can hear the unchecked laughter as I ascend the stairs to my bedroom, Caoimhe’s raucous high notes, Etain’s deeper, softer giggles and, probably, punctuated by my daughter’s rhythmic slapping of the table with the flat of her hand, the orchestration clearly a soundtrack to a father’s total self-embarrassment.

But hey, aren’t fathers put on this earth to amuse and entertain their munchkins and, by association, their sleepover guests?

I’m only gone for a minute or three. By the time I get back the conversation is more excited than amused between them as Caoimhe is showing Etain something interesting on the tablet that she normally uses for school. They both look up at my arrival and regard me with smiles, of amusement on one side and what seems more like pity on the other.

Ice cream for dessert or “afters” seems to be a new experience for our guest, she appears in raptures over every mouthful of Murphy’s sea salt flavour, Caoimhe having consumed all the less-adult flavors in the chest freezer without telling me we’d run out.

After putting the Chinese leftovers away in the frig, for Saturday lunch, no waste in our house ever, and leaving the dishes in the washer for tomorrow, we sit and visit in the sitting room.

While I had dealt with the dishes, the girls had swiftly boxed up and stowed all my junk from Etain’s room into the storeroom upstairs.

I watch the news on the gogglebox but the two girls are shoulder to shoulder on Caoimhe’s tablet, talking in whispers, then Etain takes over control of it. Kids today just seem to take tech in their stride. They’re probably playing an educational game.

It’s a tablet she needs for school, it has teacher/parental controls so it cannot access sites designated for adults, or download commercial games, but some of the educational games for early years have a certain charm and I was impressed when she first got it programmed at school two or three years ago. It came in handy when school was in lockdown. They are supposed to be limited to a certain amount of online time each day, I think it’s six hours a day, but a long time ago when I noticed she was still using it at home during a long lockdown day without having to pause its use for hours at a time, she explained that when her time expired, she was offered a 15-minute extension, which she accepted and, fiddling with the set-up she discovered she could force it to give her unlimited 15-minute extensions ... so much for parental controls!

Towards Caoimhe’s bedtime, nine o’clock, the tablet has been put away and the girls’ talk is about bee hives, with Etain promising to show my daughter how to weave a traditional Irish skep in the morning.

While I watch the news I half-listen to their conversation which is interesting. I never knew that the Patron Saint of Bees was an Irishman called St Modomnóc.

“I’ve never heard of him,” I say.

“He was the missionary that first brought bees to Ireland,’ Caoimhe says with confidence, looking at me with the chin-up superiority of a youngster speaking to an idiot adult, but she wavers when glancing at Etain’s raised left eyebrow, she rallies with, “we learned that at school.”

Etain smiles gently, quite sweetly, “To be sure, Dominic O”Neill did bring Welsh bees over with him on his return to Ireland, after training as a missionary with St David, but bees were here for at least a hundred bliain before him. And St Gobnait was also patron saint of bees before Modomnóc. No wonder Gobnait was spending so much time talking to bees, though, she was the ugliest woman you ever saw, or so people have said about her; her nose was so sharp Caoimhe, your father could have used her face to shave every morning and her nose was a blade as sharp as the rest of her looks were dull. Becoming an abbess of a convent was a necessity, not by choice.”

With Caoimhe off to bed at nine, Etain wants to retire too, so I look out a new tooth brush for her. While finding that in my bathroom, I quietly remind Caoimhe to lock her bedroom door, with a stranger in the house, which she does without any complaint. We both have our own bathrooms, although her electric pump shower was inside the bathtub.

The downstairs bathroom is where the old scullery used to be on the back of the house, behind the sitting room. Once Etain goes to bed in the room on the other side of the sitting room, I retire to my bedroom to sleep. It would’ve felt uncomfortable staying in the sitting room watching TV, besides I am tired, I haven’t entertained anyone at home since at least six months before Covid changed everything.

I wake early in the morning to the delicious smell of fresh baked bread. We’ve never made bread before. I am up before Caoimhe, but then I’m always up before her. I rub the sleep from my eyes and throw on a tee and shorts. Etain is in the kitchen, plating up three plates with chopped runny eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, and hot buttered toast. I look at the cooker, none of the electric rings are showing hot which is odd. She looks up and smiles.

“Good morning, Richard, our break fast meal is nearly ready. Would you rouse Caoimhe, please?”

“Yeah sure,” I say.

As I turn I see the three place settings are laid with tea already poured in the mugs. I don’t want to spoil it by saying I always have coffee, but, hey, I could put up with drinking hot mud every morning if it means a traditional cooked breakfast that I haven’t cooked for myself.