Felicia's Journey

24

The convent girls climb up St Joseph’s Hill, hurrying while the bell still tolls. Their conversation is breathless as they turn in at the convent gates, feet running now, faces flushed. Sister Benedict awaits them by the window of a classroom, where other girls are already assembled. A distant figure digs the patch where soon the first of the maincrop potatoes will be planted. Reminded by this figure of the missing girl, Sister Benedict prays. In Hickey’s Hotel a traveller in office stationery, coughing through cigarette smoke over the remains of a late breakfast, checks his call-book for the day. Above the cycle and pram shop, Connie Jo experiences the morning nausea that her friend, then newly her sister-in-law, experienced five months ago. At Flanagan’s Quarries the lorries are loaded with chippings while the drivers wait beside them, silently smoking. In the Co-op yard Shay Mulroone fork-lifts bales of sheep wire. ‘God, she’s a cracker,’ Small Crowley confides elsewhere; and Carmel, of whom he speaks, mops a floor at the hospital and worries a little about being a cracker perhaps once too often. The old woman dies on the day before her hundredth birthday. The stiffened body is taken from the bedroom, and the bedroom is empty now. An irony, the general opinion is, being taken at this particular time, but there it is. One night the boots of the big twin brothers thump into Johnny Lysaght’s stomach and his ribs, and he lies insensible in the dark, by the memorial statue in the Square. Blood oozes from his face, an eye is closed beneath contusions. The cigarettes have not been removed from his attackers’ lips while the punishment was meted out. No word has been spoken. The unconscious youth remains where he has fallen, and the glasses that have been left waiting in Myles Brady’s bar are emptied and then replenished. The photograph of a girl in a bridesmaid’s dress has long ago been circulated. In one police station or another it has been perused, and details of the disappearance noted. In time, the details and the photograph are filed away. She will come back, her father believes, guilt assailing him. At Confession he recalls his anger at the time and is forgiven, but feels no forgiveness himself. He makes the bedroom ready for her, arranging her shells on surfaces that are now entirely hers, emptying the drawers of the old woman’s possessions. He dismantles the old woman’s bed and makes room for it in the backyard shed. ‘Have faith,’ the Reverend Mother urges in the convent garden. ‘One day you’ll walk in and she’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.’ He knows that too, he says; he knows she’ll be there. Hers is the forgiveness that matters. She’ll come back to offer it, that being her simple nature. Mrs Lysaght shops in Chawke’s for thread, a shade of pale blue. She takes the spools she’s offered to the door, to examine them in the daylight, but is not satisfied and returns them. More will be coming in, she is informed, and she says she’ll come back. The unpleasantness is over now and there’s a satisfaction to be found in that: as she leaves the shop she reminds herself of this, which is something she does many times in the course of a day. He has been taught a lesson by the circumstances that developed; in a sense, even, all that has occurred may have been for the best.

In the kitchens and on the work floor a conclusion is reached. The catering manager, so affectionately part of everyday life for so long, suffered an illness of some mysterious nature: he took his life in the belief that the bewilderment of doctors indicated a grim prognosis. A collection is made in the canteen. A wreath is sent. The funeral is well attended. Notices outside 3 Duke of Wellington Road announce it is up for sale. ‘A useful property,’ a young estate agent remarks, showing prospective buyers around, adding that an auction will be held, that all the junk will go. Found parked on the gravel in front of the house, the car owned by the deceased has been disposed of already. All there is belongs to the state, there being no inheritor. ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ a police sergeant retorts when Miss Calligary insists that this same deceased, on his own admission, suffered from delusions. ‘He’d hardly have done it, miss, if he wasn’t in a state.’ ‘That man wasn’t what he seemed.’ ‘Happen he wasn’t, miss. Happen all sorts of things. But for the record what we have is that the gentleman is no longer with us.’ Miss Calligary mentions the Bible, inquiring if the sergeant ever has cause to consult it. She offers a brochure. For the one who dies there is a paradise earth, she promises, and adds that the deceased displayed an interest when this was pointed out to him, that he invited her young friend and herself into his house so that he could hear more about it. When all the time he was stealing money. ‘The Lord knows where that child is now,’ Miss Calligary adds. ‘We pray for her day and night.’ ‘You keep on at it,’ the sergeant breezily advises, and points out that he’s on the busy side this morning.

Other girls set out, on the run from a mess, or just wanting things to be different. Mysteries they’re called when they are noticed on their journey; and in cities, or towns large enough to have a trade in girls, the doors of Rovers and Volkswagens and Toyotas open to take them in. At Mr Caunce’s house they come and go. They try out the doorways of shops. There’s a first time for everything, they say, settling into this open-air accommodation. Missing persons for a while, they then acquire a new identity. Riff-raff they’re called now.