And grand, she thought as she left the house for the final time before making her way along the road to the post office, where she sat on the dry grass until a bus arrived, taking a backseat by an open window and breathing steadily throughout the journey to stop her from getting sick as it took her over rocky terrain into Ballydehob and the front of Leap, onward to Bandon and Innishannon before twisting north into Cork City itself, a place she had never visited but that her father had always said was filled with gamblers, Protestants and drunkards.
For two pence, she drank a bowl of tomato soup and a cup of tea in a café on Lavitt’s Quay and then walked along the banks of the River Lee to Parnell Place, where she bought a ticket for Dublin.
“Do you want a return?” the driver asked her, shuffling his satchel as he rooted around for change. “You’ll save money if you’re coming back again.”
“I won’t be coming back,” she replied, taking the ticket from his hands and placing it carefully in her purse, for she had a sense that this might be an item that would be worth holding on to, a paper memory with the date of the beginning of her new life stamped across it in heavy black ink.
From Out Near Ballincollig
A lesser person might have felt frightened or upset as the bus pulled away from the quays to begin its journey north but not my mother, who held a staunch conviction that the sixteen years she had spent in Goleen being spoken down to, ignored or treated as somehow less important than any of her six brothers had led her toward this moment of independence. Young as she was, she’d already made an uneasy peace with her condition, which, she told me later, she had discovered for the first time in Davy Talbot’s grocery shop on the main street, standing next to ten piled-up boxes of fresh oranges, when she felt my unformed foot give a little kick into her bladder, just a spasm of discomfort that might have been anything at all but that she knew would eventually be me. She didn’t consider any back-room terminations, even though there was gossip among some of the girls in the village regarding a widow-woman in Tralee who did terrible things with Epsom salts, rubber vacuum bags and a pair of forceps. For six shillings, they said, you could be in and out of her house in a couple of hours, three or four pounds the lighter. No, she knew exactly what she was going to do when I was born. She simply had to wait until I arrived in order to put her Great Plan into place.
The bus to Dublin was busy and at the first stop a young man climbed on board carrying an old brown suitcase and glanced around at the few remaining empty seats. As he paused next to my mother for a moment, she could feel his eyes burning into her but didn’t dare turn to look at him in case he was someone familiar with her family who had already heard the news of her shame and would only need to see her face to make some cutting remark. Nothing was said, though, and after a moment he walked on. Only when the bus had traveled another five miles along the road did he make his way back to where she was sitting and point at the empty place beside her.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“Do you not have a seat down the back?” she asked, glancing toward the rear of the bus.
“The fella next to me is eating egg sandwiches and the smell of them is knockin’ me sick.”
She shrugged and moved her coat to let him sit down, taking him in with a quick glance as she did so. He was wearing a tweed suit with a tie loosened at the neck and a cap that he took off and held between his hands. A couple of years older than her, she decided, eighteen or nineteen perhaps, and although my mother was what in those days was called “a looker,” the combination of her pregnancy and the dramatic events of the morning left her in no mood for flirtation. Boys in the village had often tried to initiate romances with her, of course, but she had never been interested, earning a reputation for virtue that had now been shattered. There were a few girls of whom it was said that it only took a little encouragement for them to do something or show something or kiss something, but Catherine Goggin had never been one of them. It would come as a shock to those boys, she realized, when they learned of her disgrace and there would be some among them who would regret never having tried a little harder to seduce her. In her absence they would say that she had always been a floozy and this mattered a great deal to my mother, for she and the person they would fashion from their sordid imaginations would have little in common except for a name.
“Soft day all the same,” said the boy next to her.
“What was that?” she asked, turning to look at him.
“I said it was a soft day,” he repeated. “Not bad for this time of year.”
“I suppose so.”
“Yesterday it was raining and the sky this morning looked heavy with showers. But look, there’s been no spillage at all. It’s grand out.”
“You take an interest in the weather, do you?” she asked, hearing the sarcastic tone in her voice but not caring.
“I grew up on a farm,” he told her. “It’s second nature to me.”
“I did too,” she said. “My father spent half his life staring at the sky or sniffing the late-afternoon air for rumors of what was to come the following day. They say it always rains in Dublin. Do you believe that?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. Do you go all the way, you do?”
“I beg your pardon?”
His face went scarlet, from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears, and the speed of the transformation fascinated her. “To Dublin,” he said quickly. “Do you go all the way to Dublin or will you be getting off at one of the stops?”
“Do you want my window seat?” she asked. “Is that it? Because you can have it if you want. I’m not particular.”
“No, not at all,” he said. “I was only asking. I’m happy where I am. Unless you’re going to start in on the egg sandwiches too, that is.”
“I’ve no food at all,” she told him. “I only wish I did.”
“I have half a baked ham in my case,” he told her. “I could slice you off a rasher if that would help.”
“I couldn’t eat on a bus. I’d be sick.”
“Can I ask you your name?” asked the boy, and my mother hesitated.
“Is there a reason you want to know it?”
“So I can call you by it,” he said.
She looked into his face and for the first time noticed how handsome he was. A face like a girl’s, she told me afterward. Clear skin that had never known the pull of a razor. Long eyelashes. Blond hair that tumbled over his forehead and into his eyes no matter how hard he tried to tame it. There was something in his manner that made her believe that he wasn’t a threat to her in any way and so she relented, letting down her guard at last.
“It’s Catherine,” she said. “Catherine Goggin.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he replied. “I’m Seán MacIntyre.”
“Are you from the city, Seán?”
“No, I’m from out near Ballincollig. Do you know it there?”
“I’ve heard of it but I’ve never been there. I’ve never been anywhere, really.”
“Well, you’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”