"Carry Me Down" by M.J. Hyland

When I see that my mother is near the last page of her book, I take a pack of playing cards and move it towards her elbow. Soon, she will put her book down and offer me a game. I look at her face and wait.
Suddenly, she closes her book and stands.
'John,' she says, 'please come with me.' She is taking me out to the hallway, away from my father. She is taking me out of his sight as though I am the rubbish. 'Come now and leave your book behind,' she says.
We stand at the base of the steep and narrow stairs that lead up to my parents' loft-bedroom - the only room upstairs - and she leans against the banister with her arms folded across her chest, the skin on her hands cold and white like chalk.
'Do I look different today?' she asks.
'No. Why?'
'You were staring again. You were staring at me.'
'I was only looking,' I say.
She moves away from the banister and puts her hands on my shoulders. She is 5 feet 10 inches tall and, even though I am only one and a half inches shorter, she bears down on me until I sink lower. Her body hunches over and her bottom pokes out.
'You were staring at me, John. You shouldn't stare like that.'
'Why can't I look at you?'
'Because you're eleven now. You're not a baby anymore.'
I am distracted by the cries of our cat, Crito, who is locked in the cupboard under the stairs with her new kittens. I want to go to her. But my mother presses harder.
'I was only looking,' I say.
I want to say that there is nothing babyish about looking at things, but my body shakes beneath the weight of her arms and I am trembling too much to speak.
'Why?' she asks. 'Why do you have to stare at me like that?'
She is hurting my shoulders and her weight is surprising. She looks lighter and smaller and more beautiful when she's sitting at the table or at the end of my bed, talking to me, making me laugh. I'm angry with her now for being tall, for being so big, so heavy and for making me so big, far too big for my age.
'I don't know why. I just like it,' I say.
'Maybe you should get out of the habit.'
'Why?'
'Because it's unnerving. Nobody can relax when you stare at them like that.'
'Sorry,' I say...

***

From this short extract from the second page of the book you can see it's about an eleven year-old boy. He lives in the country near Gorey in 1970s Ireland. I am a girl in her twenties living in Dublin in 2011, yet I was still able to relate to this particular part of the book, and even in some of the protagonists thinking throughout the book. John seems to fancy himself a human lie detector, when in fact he is just very observative. My scenarios may not be the exact same as this, but many a time I have sat eating my dinner in the sitting room with my mother, when she looks up at me and asks what is wrong, or what she is doing wrong. The answer is nothing. I am just looking at her. Maybe watching her eat or watching her watch the television and how her facial expressions tell how she is feeling about the programme on tv. She might also have a bit of a complex because I used to give out or get angsty about how I could hear her eating. I hate to hear people eating when all else is silent. It really curdles my blood. John also describes how his grandmother ate, and once he said she sounded like a seal being fed fish by the zookeeper. It makes me think that people who hate to hear others eat are just extremely perceptive. Being observative can be tiring at times, and sometimes you don't want to see the things you see.