Felicia's Journey Read Online Free PDF

from dreams as they evaporate. ‘I’ve brought you a shell,’ Sister Benedict is saying, and a boy runs out in front of the Corpus Christi procession and someone waves from a window. Flanagan’s Quarries is on one of the lorries her brothers drive, parked by Myles Brady’s bar as the procession goes by. Passing Aldritt’s garage, you can see petrol vapour in the bright sunlight, a man filling his car at the pumps. ‘Angels flying low,’ Sister Francis Xavier says, but that isn’t something that began in a dream, although perhaps it came into one. Sister Francis Xavier said it whenever she referred to the Little Sisters who worked among the heathen of Africa. Just as the Reverend Mother used to tell how St Ursula set forth with her girl-companions, sailing the world because she wished to keep herself holy. ‘You never considered the celibate life, Felicia?’ the Reverend Mother inquired once, out of the blue. Afterwards, when she told them, Carmel and Rose said she had the face for a nun.
When people went to the sea they brought her back shells because her mother had died. She arranged them on the chest of drawers in the bedroom she shared, but her great-grandmother kept knocking them off by accident so she kept them in one of her drawers instead. The first time she saw the sea herself was when she came on this journey. ‘The sea, the sea, the open sea…’ Reciting that in class one day, she couldn’t remember what came next. She stood there, going red, ashamed because she’d known it off pat the evening before.
Felicia closes her eyes in the darkness, but does not sleep. The details of her journey impinge – the sickness, the woman who used her toothbrush in the washroom, the security man’s questions, one train and then another, asking where the factory was, the hatchet-facedlandlady who brought her shepherd’s pie and tinned fruit in the empty dining-room, the cup of tea afterwards. Then Johnny is there, lightening the tiredness and frustrations of the day before: his grey-green eyes, his dark hair, the neat point of his chin, his high cheekbones. She sees him in a factory crowd, the first in a throng that comes out of Thompson Castings, hurrying as if he has a premonition that she’ll be waiting for him, his deft, angular movement. ‘The other day I thought it was you was the bride’: the Monday after the wedding it was when he spoke to her on the street, coming up to her outside Chawke’s.
She loves making it happen again, better than any dream or any imagining because it’s real. ‘Ah no, no,’ she said, shaking her head, not adding that she didn’t think she’d ever be a bride. A woman in Chawke’s window was changing the clothes on the models, replacing the summer styles. ‘Johnny Lysaght,’ he said, smiling friendlily as he had when she was in her bridesmaid’s dress. ‘D’you remember me at all?’
She remembered him vaguely from way back, when he was still at the Christian Brothers’. He was seven, maybe eight, years older than she was; he didn’t live in the neighbourhood any more; occasionally he returned to see his mother. ‘How are you getting on?’ she said.
Lying there with her eyes still closed, she hears her own voice boldly asking that because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. He had never belonged with the Lomasney lot or Small Crowley’s crowd; he’d been more on his own, going off to Dublin when he left the Brothers’ and soon after that going to England. He had an English accent.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Yourself, Felicia?’
‘Out of work.’
‘Weren’t you in the meat place?’
‘It closed down.’
He smiled again. He asked why Slieve Bloom Meats had closed down and she explained; again it was something to say. A woman failed to report a cut on her hand that went septic, and an outbreak of food-poisoning was afterwards traced back to a batch of tinned kidney and beef. No more than a scratch the little cuthad seemed to Mrs Grennan, even though it