. Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn’t know about the money yet, that they wouldn’t even have found the note she’d left, but none of that was a help.
For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again. Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. ‘Sorry,’ Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn’t matter. There can’t be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn’t had much to eat that day. ‘Take a drink of water,’ one of the girls advises. ‘We’ll be in in twenty minutes.’ The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. ‘God, I’m sorry!’ the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. ‘I thought it was the ship’s.’
Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn’t there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn’t have found the note until he went in with the old woman’s breakfast. ‘She’s taken herself off,’ he’d have told her brothers and there wouldn’t have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn’t have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he’d have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory.
Announcements are made. There’s a flutter of activity among the passengers, suitcases gathered up, obedient congregating in a designated area. A blast of cold air sweeps in when the doors are opened for disembarkation, and then the small throng moves forward on to the gangway. In the evening, when her father and her brothers had returned to the house, they’d have sat in the kitchen, with the note on the table, her father shaking his head slowly and mournfully, as if he in particular had been harshly treated: everything was always worst for her father. One of her brothers would have said he’d go down to McGrattan Street to tell Aidan, and whichever one it was would have called in at Myles Brady’s bar on the way back. Her father would have cooked the old woman’s supper and then their own, stony-faced at the stove.
Felicia’s nervousness returns as she passes with the other passengers into a bleak, unfurnished building in which a security officer questions her. ‘Have you means of identification?’ he demands.
‘Identification?’
‘What’s your name?’
Felicia tells him. He asks if she has a driver’s licence.
‘I can’t drive actually.’
‘Have you another form of identification?’
‘I can’t think that I have.’
‘No letter? No documentation of any kind?’
She shakes her head. He asks if she is resident in the UK and she says no, in Ireland.
‘You’re here on a visit, are you, miss?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s the purpose of this visit?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘And you’re travelling on to where?’
‘The Birmingham area. North of Birmingham.’
‘May I look through your bags for a moment? Would you mind just stepping aside, miss?’
He pokes about among her clothes and the extra pair of shoes she has brought. She thinks he’ll comment when he comes across the banknotes in her handbag, but he doesn’t.
‘I’ll just jot down the address of your friend,’ he says. ‘Would you give me that, please?’
‘I don’t know it. I have to find him yet.’
‘He’s not expecting you?’
‘He’s not really.’
‘You’re sure you’ll find him?’
‘I will, through his place of work.’
Her interrogator nods. He is a man of about the same age as her father, with a featureless face. He is wearing a black overcoat, open at the front.
‘I’ll just jot down your address in Ireland,’ he says.
She says she is from Mountmellick, the first town that comes into her head. She gives an address she makes up: 23 St Mary’s Terrace.
‘Right,’ the security man says.
No one stops her at the Customs. She asks where the trains go from, and is directed. When she makes further inquiries she is informed that the train for Birmingham isn’t due to leave until a quarter past two. It is now just after midnight.
For a while, in the waiting-room, she sleeps. She dreams: that she is shopping for meat in Scaddan’s, that Mr Scaddan thumps a huge cut of liver on to the weighing-scales and says he took it out of the bullock himself. This isn’t true; in her dream she is aware that it isn’t; Mr Scaddan is well known for his tall stories. One of the young Christian Brothers comes into the shop and Mr Scaddan says it is a disgrace, but she doesn’t know what the butcher is talking about. ‘I was out for a walk one night,’ he says to the Christian Brother. ‘Down by the old gasworks.’ She knows then.
The train comes in, long before it’s due to go out again. Felicia makes certain it is the right one, and when the journey begins she falls asleep again. Wakened by the ticket-collector, she is drowsily confused for a moment, not knowing where she is. The man is patient while she searches in her handbag for her ticket. Her mother’s calm features are snagged in her consciousness, the residue of another dream.
‘Thank you,’ the man says, passing on.
The dream about her mother has gone; but although she cannot recall what it was about, it has stirred her memory. ‘Hurry now, for Mrs Quigly,’ her great-grandmother ordered her that day, ages ago. ‘And tell Father Kilgallen he’s wanted quickly.’ The old woman was holding a cup of tea to her mother’s lips and her mother’s eyes were half closed; her cheeks were the colour of cement. ‘Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’ She was six that day, banging the letter-box of the house next door. Later she had to run to keep up with Father Kilgallen’s urgent stride in Main Street and the Square, and when they got to the house Mrs Quigly and the old woman helped her mother into the bedroom. Father Kilgallen whispered there, and then her brothers came in from the Christian Brothers’ and Aidan went to get her father from the convent garden. It was her father who drew the sheet over her mother’s face, a last few minutes he had with her while they waited in the kitchen and Aidan cried. The satchel with her schoolbooks in it was on the floor where she had dropped it, light-blue and shiny, Minnie Mouse with pink shoes on the flap. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Quigly said, taking her apron off after she’d crossed herself, the flowers on it too garish now. ‘Thank God,’ Father Kilgallen said because he had arrived in time. ‘I’ve outlived another one,’ the old woman said.
The train judders on, rattling on the rails, slowing almost to a halt, gathering speed again. Felicia opens her eyes. A hazy dawn is distributing farmhouses and silos and humped barns in shadowy fields. Later, there are long lines of motor cars creeping slowly on nearby roads, and blank early-morning faces at railway stations. Pylons and aerials clutter a skyline, birds scavenge at a rubbish tip. There’s never a stretch of empty countryside.
The train fills up. Newspapers are read in silence, eyes that meet by accident at once averted. Everything – people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials – are packed together as if there isn’t quite enough room to accommodate them. Faces acquire an edginess when the train threatens to stop even though it isn’t at a station.
Johnny will be going to work, too: Felicia imagines him, hurrying as everyone else is, but carefree, not worrying about it, because that is his way. For as long as she can she retains an image of his easy-going expression, then of his profile the afternoon he took the bus himself, the last time she saw him, when he didn’t know she was still in the Square; as a faraway, whispering echo, there is the murmur of his voice.