Felicia's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t heal. Dr Mortell had seen it and given Mrs Grennan a note, but she had gone on working because when you went sick you sometimes found yourself laid off when you returned: since 1986, when there had been another food scare – one that was general in the processed-meat business then – the factory hadn’t been doing well. There was an opinion in the neighbourhood that sooner or later it would have closed down anyway, and with some justification Mrs Grennan believed she was a scapegoat. ‘Sure, the work’s gone and that’s all there’s to it,’ Felicia heard another woman comforting her at the time. ‘Does it matter whose fault it was?’
On the street outside Chawke’s Johnny Lysaght asked her if she had ever worked anywhere else and she said no, only at Slieve Bloom, where she’d been since she left the convent. She didn’t go into details. She didn’t say that, being out of work for the past three months, she saw no opportunity for further employment, at least in the locality. What experience she had was with canning, and although very little skill was required she could rapidly make the movements she had become familiar with, and had developed an eye for a faultily sealed can. You had to be trained to work a till in a supermarket, and the smaller shops preferred casual labour – schoolgirls or elderly women. There was never anything these days at Erin Floor Coverings or the hospital. If you waited you might get something in the kitchen of a public house that did dinners or in Hickey’s Hotel, but you’d easily wait a year. ‘I have a word put in for you with Sister Ignatius,’ her father reassured her from time to time, Sister Ignatius being the nun he had most to do with through his work in the garden of the convent. On the other hand, it eased matters, having her at home: she was company for her great-grandmother, who left neither her room nor her bed these days; she was able to attend to all of the cooking and the cleaning that previously had been shared.
‘It’s no joke being unemployed,’ Johnny Lysaght said, leaning against Chawke’s window. He undid the cellophane on a packet of cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head.
‘It’s not, all right,’ she said. ‘No joke.’
Her freedom had been taken from her with the loss of heremployment – the freedom to sit with Carmel and Rose and Connie Jo in the Diamond Coffee Dock, an evening at the Two-Screen Ritz without first having to calculate the cost. Within a few weeks of the canning factory’s closure she had spent what savings she’d accumulated, and it was only fair – as her father had made clear – that any dole money coming into the house should go towards board and upkeep. A family had to pull together, especially the family of a widower.
‘Come down to Sheehy’s,’ Johnny Lysaght invited. ‘A drink?’
‘Ah no, I have to get back now.’
It was half past three in the afternoon. She had chops and greens to buy yet. The main meal was at a quarter to six because her brothers couldn’t get back from the quarries in the middle of the day, and her father was given something at half-twelve in the convent kitchen. At four she would put the chops on to stew, with half a turnip cut up, and a sliced onion. It was necessary to have the stew beginning to bubble by a quarter past.
‘Later on?’ Johnny Lysaght suggested. ‘Seven? Half-seven?’
In her lodging-house bed Felicia remembers wanting to say yes, but hesitating. She remembers feeling awkward, saying nothing.
‘Half-seven?’ Johnny Lysaght suggested again.
‘In Sheehy’s, d’you mean?’
‘What’s wrong with Sheehy’s, Felicia?’
He laughed and she laughed, experiencing a surge of relief in her stomach. The cigarette packet was still in his hand; through his smile he blew out smoke. Why was he bothering with her? Carmel or Rose or any other girl she could think of would drop everything to go out with Johnny Lysaght. She hadn’t their looks; she wasn’t