Anne Doughty - The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

He greeted me as I stood disconsolately at the bus stop outside the Curzon Cinema waiting for a Cregagh bus. It was the first Monday in July, seven-thirty in the morning. I was sleepy and cross, my period had just started, and I was trying to convince myself it wasn’t all a horrible mistake.

‘Holiday job up in Cregagh.’

He looked me up and down, took in my black skirt, my surviving white school blouse and the black indoor shoes I’d worn at Victoria.

‘It wouldn’t by any chance be the Rosetta, would it?’ he asked, as he squinted down the road at an approaching double decker.

‘How did you guess?’

‘Read the same advertisement. That’s where I’m for too,’ he announced, grinning broadly. ‘When I get my scooter back, I can give you a lift. Save you a lot in bus fares.’

I could see how delighted he was and the thought of his company was a real tonic, but something was niggling at the back of my mind.

‘But weren’t you going to Spalding for the peas, Ben?’ I asked uneasily. ‘It’s far better paid.’

‘You’re right there,’ he nodded. ‘But Mum’s not well again,’ he said slowly. ‘She won’t see a specialist unless I keep on at her. You know what she’s like. So I cancelled and the Rosetta was all I could get. It could be worse,’ he grinned. ‘It could be the conveniences in Shaftesbury Square.’

When the bus came, we climbed the stairs and went right to the front so we could look into the branches of the trees the way we always did when we were little.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, I counted silently, as I scraped up the last of my custard, but before the prune stones had told me who I was to marry, a cup of coffee descended in front of me and my future disappeared before my eyes.

The coffee was real coffee, freshly made Cona with a tiny carton of cream parked in the saucer. I could hardly believe it. I sipped slowly and went on watching the pale, dark-haired girls as they humped battered metal containers full of cutlery from table to table. At least we didn’t have that to do at the Rosetta. The restaurant only opened in the evenings, at lunchtime we only served bar food, sandwiches and things in a basket. But there were other jobs just as boring as the endless laying of tables.

Every morning at eight o’clock, we started on the mess the evening staff had to leave so they could run for the last bus from the nearby terminus. Stacks of dishes, glasses and ashtrays from the bar. After that the staircases and loos to sweep and mop before we started on lunches. That first day, the manageress set us to work separately and by four o’clock when we staggered off to the bus stop we were not only bored but absolutely exhausted. Next morning Ben had an idea.

‘C’mon, Lizzie, let’s do it all together. I’ve worked out a system.’

‘But what’ll we say if she catches us?’

‘Wait and see,’ he grinned.

I knew there was no use pressing him, because he’s good at keeping secrets. You could sooner get blood out of a stone.

We were standing under one of the Egyptian kings who provide the decor at the Rosetta with Ben holding a table on its side and me vacuuming under it, when she appeared.

‘I thought you were supposed to be doing the washing-up, Ben,’ she said crossly.

‘Oh, that’s all finished,’ said Ben cheerily. ‘But you were losing money on it.’

‘What? What d’you mean?’

She wrinkled up her brow, peered into the kitchen behind the bar, and saw it was all perfectly clean and tidy.

‘Time and motion,’ he said easily. ‘I did you a complete survey yesterday. No charge of course, it’s just a hobby of mine, but when I processed the results last night I really was shocked. . .’

He put the table aside, pulled out a chair and motioned to her to sit down.

‘You must never stand while talking to employees, it’s bad for your veins. Senior staff must safeguard their well-being, it’s one of the first principles of efficient management.’

Standing there with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a clean duster in the other, I had an awful job keeping my face straight. Ben is a medical student, so he does know about veins; it was the time and motion study that really got me. But it worked a charm. After that, she left us to do the jobs in whatever way we liked. Often, we even enjoyed ourselves.

As I finished my coffee I began to wonder how much my lunch was going to cost. Just because it wasn’t very nice didn’t mean it couldn’t be expensive. Then there would be the taxi fare to Lisnasharragh and a night in a hotel if I’d got it wrong. Suddenly, I felt very much on my own, a solitary figure in an empty dining room. Ben and the Rosetta and the familiar things in my life were all a very long way away. I was painfully aware of being a stranger in a strange place.

It was some time before Feely breezed in. He ignored my unease about not having had the bill, said the car was at the door and he was all ready to take me to Lisnasharragh. Which way did I want to go?

According to my map, there was only one possible way. I took a deep breath and explained carefully that the village lay at least five miles away on the coast road to the Cliffs of Moher. But it might be as much as six.

I might as well not have bothered. As soon as we were out of town, he dropped to a crawl, following the thin, tarmacked strip of road between wide, windswept stretches of bog. Nothing I said had the slightest effect upon him and we continued to crawl along, furlong by furlong, through totally unfamiliar territory. For once in my life, I was more anxious about the distance itself than about the hole this luxurious journey would be making in my small budget. As each mile clicked up on the milometer, I became more agitated. Once it showed seven miles, I would know I’d got it wrong. Either I had misread my map, or worse still, Lisnasharragh no longer existed.

As we approached the five-mile mark, the bog ended abruptly. On my left the land rose sharply and great outcrops of rock dominated the small fields. On the other side of the road, the much larger fields dropped away into broad rolling country with limestone hills in the distance. Bare of any trace of vegetation, the Hills of Burren stood outlined grey-white against the blue of the sky.

We turned a corner and there ahead of us was the sea. Sparkling in the sun across the vast distance to the horizon, it broke in great lazy rollers over a black, rocky island about a mile from the shore. Beyond this island, in the dazzle of light, like the backs of three enormous whales travelling in convoy, were the Aran islands. Inisheer, Inishman and Inishmore.

My heart leapt in sheer delight. For weeks now these names had haunted me with their magic. Now the islands themselves were in front of me. Nothing lay between me and them except the silver space of the sea. As if a window in my mind had been thrown open, I felt I could reach out and touch something that had been shut away from me. My anxieties were forgotten. The islands were an omen. Now I had found them all would be well.

The road began to climb and as it did, I crossed an invisible boundary onto the map I carried in my mind. I knew exactly where I was.

‘It’s not far now, Mr Feely,’ I said quickly, making no attempt to conceal my relief. ‘Down the hill and over the stream. There’s a clump of trees to the right and then a long pull up. Maybe we could stop at the top.’

‘Ah, shure you’ve been pulling my leg, miss. Aren’t you the sly one and you knows Lisara as well as I do.’

Feely turned to me and laughed. He seemed almost as pleased about finding Lisara as I was. Even the idea that I’d played a trick on him didn’t appear to bother him.

‘Oh no, Mr Feely, I haven’t been here before, truly,’ I assured him as I studied the road ahead. I wished he would look at it himself just occasionally.