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disagree with was all the makeup she wore going to see The Lord in His House. ‘Our Lord doesn’t need nor require young Margaret to wear a mask in his home, Grainne.’
    ‘Ah, yes, but our Lord does want young Margaret to find a suitor so she doesn’t grow old a shamed woman. And unless the Lord requires her to be a nun there is no need for her to be without a man. The world isn’t designed for a woman without a man and as far as we know she hasn’t received the Calling.’
    Her parents and five brothers had all stopped walking at that point to stand still and stare at Mags. Her cheeks flushed instantly and her mother let out an exasperated sigh as though Mags was deliberately acting out against her mother’s hard work.
    Mags gulped and stared back at her family wide-eyed. ‘What is it?’ she stammered.
    Her mother shook her head sadly at the lack of grace of her daughter.
    ‘Have you received the Calling?’ Jackie, her twenty-year-old brother had asked her with a smirk on his face.
    ‘Margaret! Margaret!’ Her younger brother had called her name playfully in the background.
    To Mags’s surprise, her mother started laughing and then immediately smacked her son over the head with her handbag for joking about the Lord. Only Mags’s father watched her face curiously.
    ‘Em, no, I haven’t,’ Mags whispered in embarrassment. He simply nodded his head once as he absorbed this information and then continued on walking. The rest of the family trudged on after him, overtaking Margaret, whose feet remained firmly fixed to the spot with pure terror and shame. She knew what they were all thinking: if she hadn’t received a calling like Kathleen from down the road and she hadn’t courted a man at the age of twenty then maybe she was one of those ‘funny ones’ that cut their hair short and moved to the city.
    ‘Hurry along, Margaret,’ her mother had spat angrily, even more disappointed. ‘The Lord waits for no one, especially not twenty-year-old girls who dilly-dally.’
    Margaret’s heartbeat quickened at her mother’s tone and she ran to catch up with her family.
    ‘Sorry,’ she had whispered to their backs as they walked ahead of her. And she had meant it. Sorry she wasn’t more like them. Sorry she lacked the social graces of her mother, the personality of her father, the popularity of her brothers, the beauty of all the other girls in the town.
    They arrived at the church at 7.30 in the morning, as they did every week, and gathered with the rest of the congregation for the next half-hour. Mags hated the way the women gossiped about that week’s scandal, hated how her mother pretended not to be interested even though Mags knew she looked forward to thosechats all week more than the mass itself. The men would talk about the weather and how it was affecting the crop. Mags loved when the weather was good because her father became a whole new man. They would stay up until all hours listening to his stories and listening to his songs, but when the farm wasn’t going well it felt to Mags as though there was a stranger in the house. He became an intruder who conversed in only grunts and monosyllabic words and appeared only at eating time. A man she didn’t much like.
    Finally, the gossip would end when the church bell signalled eight o’clock. They would all pile into the church, which would quickly become packed to the brim with hung-over men, crying children, coughing teenagers, women hiding their yawns out of respect for the ‘Good Lord’ in case he struck them down for such an act of humanity. Mass for Mags was a real-life cattle mart. Her mother would herd the family down the aisle, Mags would walk towards the crucifix to hisses in her ear of ‘Watch your posture, Margaret’ or ‘Look happy for Our Lord, Margaret’ until they reached their usual spot in the front row.
    Mags knew now it was no more for Our Lord than for the mice in the field, it was for the rows of young single men who lined the