What’s that, he asks.
Left-over steak. It’s for the fox.
You saw it, he asks. Becky thinks I was seeing things.
I think it’s a female. She comes most nights. I think she’s coming out from behind the shed.
He looks in the direction of the shed even though it’s too dark to see. How do you know it’s a vixen, he asks.
Her teats. She’s lactating. I googled it, but I could be wrong. I think she set your alarm off when you were away, I explain.
He inhales his cigarette. I’ll be honest with you, he says, the gardaí said they saw you walking around when they arrived. Found you suspicious.
What, I shriek. I was checking your studio. For you. Becky called me to see if everything was okay.
She said you were out of breath.
I was outside with the fox. I had to run back in to get my phone.
I wondered if maybe you’d fallen over, against the bins and set it off …
That happened once.
You’ve had a couple of wild nights lately.
It won’t happen again. Did the guards seriously say it was me.
They told us to check the cameras.
Why don’t you.
He doesn’t reply.
I think back over my conversation with Garda Laura in the garden and then again when I met her outside the station. I had been trying to be friendly, to actually befriend her, and she had been suspicious of me. Hurt again by people. Deceiving, misunderstanding fuckers. Everything upside down and inside out. I don’t get humans.
They came over again yesterday. They suggested it might be you. They didn’t know for sure.
I groan. Yesterday was Daisy, I say. A kind of friend who’s no longer a friend. I’m sorry. I told her not to walk past the sensor, but she has mental problems. Jesus, I sigh. I wanted her to be my friend, I say aloud even though I didn’t mean to. I wanted Garda Laura to be my friend.
He studies me. There’s better ways of meeting people than triggering alarms, he says.
I didn’t, I splutter, so frustrated.
He laughs a little. Just kidding, Allegra, I believe you.
So you checked the cameras.
I did.
And.
Someone had wiped them. Odd, because they usually last a few months before recording back over themselves.
Well it wasn’t me, I say, and then it dawns on me. It must have been Becky. To stop anyone from seeing her hairy-arsed guest’s comings and goings. But as a result I’ve lost my proof.
I watch the steak, he watches me.
What are you staring at.
Your profile.
Please don’t, I say, shuffling away from him a little. Weirdo.
He smiles and looks away.
There’s a sound from the bushes and we both look. Nothing.
Should have put the steak in one of your bowls, I say and, despite himself, he laughs.
I’m not used to him being so quiet, but he seems weary.
Why do you make bowls, I ask suddenly.
Well that … he thinks long and hard, is a very big question.
Is it, I laugh.
Did you know there are seven different types of soup bowls.
No.
There’s the soup plate, the coupe soup bowl, the soup-cereal bowl, covered soup bowl, lug soup bowl— That’s very interesting but I don’t recall asking, I interrupt him.
Bowls are fascinating things really, he continues with a smile, and I think he’s enjoying my ambivalence. So much more interesting than you first think, so much depth to them.
Not to your bowls. You couldn’t fit a Weetabix in one.
He laughs. There’s more to them, on closer inspection, he says, looking at me. Like most things.
He’s doing it again. I look away, focus on the steak.
Anyway I thought they were vessels.
Inspired by soup bowls, I’ll admit at least that.
I try not to laugh, who gets inspired by soup bowls.
Remember the soup kitchens in Ireland during the genocide, he says.
I smile. During the famine.
You say famine, I say genocide. Potato, potato. Pardon the pun.
Yes, I say, they were set up to feed the poor.
Not the poor. The deliberately starved. By 1847 there were three million people being fed every day. But they shut them down, expecting the next crop of potatoes to be good, which it wasn’t. They told people that instead of the soup kitchens they could go to the workhouses. So the soup kitchens effectively became the workhouses, which became prisons for people who were being systematically starved to death. The local workhouse in the town where I grew up is the local library now. In its day it had housed eighteen hundred people when it only could accommodate eight hundred. Bad conditions, diseases spread, the places were hellholes. It became a private home then, to a rich noble family. My grandparents worked for them. My grandmother in the kitchen, my grandfather in the gardens. Right where their ancestors lay starving. One million people starved to death, while we were still exporting food from the country. So, I make soup bowls, he says simply, lest we forget.