Read Felicia's Journey for Free Online Page A

Bush Barracks and the Mendicity Institute were recorded, as were the British occupancy of the Shelbourne Hotel and the executions of Pearse and Tom Clarke. There were the Mass cards of the local patriots, and letters that had come from sympathizers, and a photograph of the coffins. An article about the old penal laws had been pasted in, and another about the Irish Battalion. Patrick Pearse’s cottage in Connemara was on a postcard; on another the tricolour fluttered from a flagstaff. The Soldier’s Song in its entirety was there.
The wallpaper scrapbooks, Felicia’s father believed, were a monument to the nation and a brave woman’s due, a record of her sacrifice’s worth. In red ink he had made small, neat notes, and stuck them in here and there to establish continuity. Among peeping flowers were the hallowed sentiments of Eamon de Valera:
    The Ireland which we have dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires men should live .
‘No sign of anything?’ Felicia’s father inquired that Monday evening, referring to her unemployment.
‘No.’
‘I still have Sister Ignatius on red alert.’
The day Slieve Bloom Meats made it clear that the closure was permanent he’d spoken to the Reverend Mother when she had finished her office. Later he’d mentioned the matter to Sister Ignatius.
‘Was there talk of something with Maguire Pigs?’ He made a mush of gravy and potato for the old woman and spooned out ground rice for her.
‘Bookkeeping. Lottie Flynn got it.’
‘The dentist, what’s his name, has a card in Heverin’s for a cleaner part-time.’
She filled the pepper container at the draining board while her father placed a chop and potatoes and a spoonful of greens on each plate, and passed the plates on to the table. He took in the old woman’s tray.
‘In a shocking condition,’ he said when he returned, ‘the brass outside the dentist’s. The same with the doctors’ and solicitors’. Time was those plates would be gleaming to the heavens.’
When she was twelve Felicia had been in love with Declan Fetrick. He was older, already employed on the ready-meats counter of the Centra foodstore. She used to wander about the Centra on her own, pretending to read the labels on the soup tins, picking up jars of shrimp paste and chicken-and-ham, pretending to change her mind as she put them back again. One of the women who came to work there in the afternoons took to eyeing her suspiciously, but she didn’t mind. She never spoke to Declan Fetrick, a scrawny boy who was trying to grow a moustache, and she never told anyone else about how she felt, not even Carmel or Rose or Connie Jo, but every day and every night for nearly a year she thought about him, imagining his arms tightening around her, and the soft bristles of his boy’s moustache.
‘Delaney that dentist’s called,’ her father said. ‘No wonder we couldn’t remember the name, the way you can’t see it, the state the brass is. Wouldn’t the part-time suit you though? Seventy an hour he’s offering. Nine hours a week. When you think of it, wouldn’t it suit you better than the full-time?’
It was what he wanted for her; he was relieved she hadn’t been qualified for the opening at Maguire Pigs. Some little part-time arrangement would get her off the dole and allow her to continue to do the housework, and the cooking for himself and her remaining brothers. A full-time job would mean having to pay Mrs Quigly for looking after the old