Wandering in Exile Read Online Free PDF

contractors and the likes.
    At first he had qualms, but if he didn’t take them somebody else would.
    His manager wasn’t a great one for work, preferring to leave it to his assistants. As long as Jerry looked after his cronies, he had a free hand in how the more minor public contracts were doled out. It was all small stuff so nobody ever came nosing around. There were far bigger deals going down, further up.
    “We used to stand up for each other back then,” Magee commented to no one in particular. “Didn’t matter what race or creed either. If you were a working man, that was good enough. And we were fighting to protect a democratically elected government too. And just for the principle of the thing. We don’t do stuff like that anymore—not unless they have oil or something.”
    Jerry nodded in agreement. Every time he stuffed an envelope into his pocket he agreed. The working man had to get a bit of his own back every chance he got. All the big shots were doing it and pocketing a lot more than the hundred or two that Jerry got. And God knows he needed it; there was always something.
    “Have you any news?” Magee nudged him to let him know he was almost finished.
    “Did you hear about Johnny Giles?” Jerry asked as he ordered one more round and then he’d be gone.
    “Who?”
    “The manager of the football team. He just quit.”
    “We used to play football in Spain too. We used to play against the English and the Scots. We played against the Spanish too. They were a bunch of cheating bastards, but we still fought for them, you know?”
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    Danny phoned his mother’s house most Saturday mornings and Deirdre got to talk with him there. They didn’t risk him calling her parent’s house—not yet. Her mother knew about the calls but said nothing to her father.
    Danny always said he was fine but Deirdre could tell he sounded lonesome and homesick. Though he might have been drinking, he did phone late at night, his time. He told her how much he missed her and he couldn’t wait until she came over for the summer.
    She still hadn’t agreed to it, not for the whole summer anyway. She might go over for a few weeks, just to see what it was like. Her mother wouldn’t mind a few weeks. Her father wouldn’t be too happy about it but Deirdre was sure that her mother was probably chiseling away at him. She would remind him of how proud he was of her and how well she was doing at university. Her mother would tell him that she was quite grown up, almost enough to make her own choices in life and to find her own happiness.
    Her studies were going well but the shadow of the future was looming. The world was changing again and having a fine arts degree was of little value.
    Ireland was changing, too, looking more and more to the Continent. Everyone told her that, after she had gotten her degree, she should get away somewhere else and find a good job. They were, she was told, crying out for people who could speak French. She could move to Brussels and get plenty of work translating. She heard the money was good but she couldn’t see herself being very happy doing that. She wasn’t really sure what she’d be happy doing and she hoped that a few years in Canada would help her see things differently. She wasn’t even sure if she loved Danny, but she missed him. She could go over and spend a few weeks with him and find out, one way or the other. It wasn’t like she was going to spend the rest of her life with him.
    Her mother had always told her to try things because that’s how she would find out what she liked, but she probably meant vegetables and things like that and not going to live with a boyfriend. She was very liberal about a lot of things but she was having enough difficulty getting her father to accept that Grainne had a child with a painter. And they still hadn’t gotten around to getting ‘Church’ married.
    Grainne had explained it all patiently—that they loved each other and wanted to have children