“They’re sweethearts, aren’t they?” asked my mother, and now Seán frowned. For all his mischief, he wasn’t accustomed to mocking the clergy. “I have six brothers,” she told him after a moment. “Five of them have straw in their heads where their brains should be. The only one I have any time for, my youngest brother Eddie, wants to be a priest himself.”
“How old is he?”
“A year older than me. Seventeen. He goes into the seminary in September. I don’t think he’ll be happy, because I know for a fact that he’s mad for the girls. But he’s the youngest, you see, and the farm has already been parceled off for the first two, and the next two are to be teachers, and the fifth wouldn’t be capable of work on account of a softness in his head, so that just leaves Eddie and so he must be the priest. There’s great excitement over it, of course. I suppose I’ll miss all that now,” she added with a sigh. “The visits and the clothes and the ordination by the bishop. Do you think they let fallen women write letters to their seminarian brothers?”
“I know nothing of that life,” said Seán, shaking his head. “Can I ask you a question, Catherine, and you can tell me to go and whistle if you don’t want to answer it.”
“Go ahead so.”
“Does the daddy not want to take some responsibility for…you know…for the baby?”
“He does on his eye,” said my mother. “Sure he’s happy as Larry that I’ve got out of the place. There’d be murder if anyone found out who it was.”
“And are you not worried at all?”
“About what?”
“About how you’re going to cope?”
She smiled. He was innocent and kind and perhaps a little naïve, and there was a part of her that wondered whether a big city like Dublin was the right place for a fella like him. “Of course I’m worried,” she said. “I’m worried out of my head. But I’m excited too. I hated living in Goleen. It suits me to get away.”
“I know that feeling. West Cork does funny things to you if you stay there too long.”
“What’s your friend’s name anyway? The one at Guinness’s?”
“Jack Smoot.”
“Smoot?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a fierce odd name.”
“There’s Dutch people in his family, I think. Going back, like.”
“Do you think he’d be able to find a job for me too? I could work in the office maybe.”
Seán looked past her and bit his lip. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I’ll be honest with you and say that I wouldn’t like to ask him as he’s already put himself out to find a place for me and him only in the door a wet week.”
“Of course,” said my mother. “I shouldn’t have asked. Sure I can take a stroll up there myself one day if nothing else shows up. I’ll have a sign made and wear it around my neck. Honest Girl Seeks Work. Will Need Some Time Off in About Four Months. I shouldn’t joke about it, should I?”
“You’ve nothing to lose, I suppose.”
“Would you say there are lots of jobs in Dublin?”
“I’d say that you wouldn’t be too long looking anyway. You’re a…you know…you’re a—”
“I’m a what?”
“You’re pretty,” said Seán with a shrug. “And employers like that, don’t they? You could always be a shop girl.”
“A shop girl,” said my mother, nodding slowly, considering it.
“Yes, a shop girl.”
“I suppose I could.”
Three Ducklings
In my mother’s opinion, Jack Smoot and Seán MacIntyre were as different as chalk and cheese, so it surprised her that they were such good friends. Where Seán was outgoing and affable to the point of innocence, Smoot was a darker and more reticent figure, given, she would discover, to prolonged periods of brooding and introspection that occasionally veered toward despair.
“The world,” he would remark to her a few weeks into their acquaintance, “is a terrible place and it was our misfortune to be have been born into it.”
“Still, the sun is out,” she would reply then, smiling at him. “So there’s that at least.”
As the bus arrived in to Dublin, Seán grew more animated in the seat next to her as he looked out the window, his eyes opening wide as he took in the unfamiliar streets and buildings that marked their approach, larger and more tightly packed together than any in Ballincollig. When the driver pulled in to Aston Quay, he was first up to collect his case from above and seemed agitated to be left waiting as the passengers ahead of him gathered their belongings. When he finally disembarked, he looked around anxiously until, with a glance across to the opposite side of the quay, he saw a man walking toward him from the direction of the small waiting room next to McBirney’s department store, at which point he broke into a relieved smile.
“Jack!” he roared, his voice almost choking in happiness as the man, about a year or two older than him, approached. They stood before each other for a moment, grinning, before shaking hands heartily and Smoot, in a rare moment of playfulness, pulled Seán’s cap off his head and threw it in the air in delight.
“You made it then,” he said.
“Did you doubt me?”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought I might be left standing here like O’Donovan’s donkey.”
My mother walked toward them, as happy as anyone to be out in the fresh air again. Unaware, of course, that a plan had been hatched somewhere between Newbridge and Rathcoole, Smoot didn’t pay any attention to her and focused entirely on his friend. “What about your father?” he asked. “Did you—”
“Jack, this is Catherine Goggin,” said Seán as she stopped next to him, doing her best to appear inconspicuous. Smoot stared at her, uncertain why the introduction was being made.
“Hello,” he said after a brief pause.
“We met on the bus,” said Seán. “We were sitting next to each other.”
“Is that so?” said Smoot. “Are you visiting family up here?”
“Not exactly,” said my mother.
“Catherine has found herself in a bit of bother,” explained Seán. “Her mammy and daddy threw her out of the house and they won’t have her back, so she’s come up to Dublin to try her luck.”
Smoot nodded, his tongue bulging in his cheek as he considered this. He was dark-haired, as dark as Seán was fair, and his cheeks were pockmarked with tiny scars. His broad shoulders gave my mother the immediate image of him carrying wooden barrels of Guinness around the forecourt of the brewery, swaying beneath the air-polluted stench of hops and barley. “There’s many who try that,” he said finally. “There’s chances, of course. Some don’t make it and they take the boat across the water instead.”
“I’ve had a recurring dream since I was a child that if I ever set foot on a boat, then it would sink and I would drown,” said my mother, inventing this bit of nonsense on the spot, for she’d never had any such dream and only said it now so that the plan that she and Seán had concocted on the bus would come to fruition. She hadn’t been scared before, she told me, but once she arrived in the city the idea of being left alone frightened her.