Anne Doughty - The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

She looked baffled, but something in her manner suggested she would not give up easily. People were turning to look at us and I felt my ‘Irish’ complexion grow a few shades more rosy.

‘I think it’s the dampness of the air here.’

I tried to sound suitably casual, but I just sounded lame. What else could I say? I could hardly explain the adaption of skin colour and texture to environmental features, could I? What on earth would George say if I did that?

‘Gee, you Irish girls do talk cute.’

She beamed indulgently and gazed around at the women writing postcards, delighted to have got one of the natives to perform.

I was saved from further questions by the little lady in black who pushed past me, handbag firmly clutched in both hands, leaving me to face the postmistress who stared at me fiercely as I handed over my letters.

‘You’d be a friend of Mrs O’Dara, then?’

I nodded awkwardly. Of course Mary and I were friends, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant.

‘I’m staying with Mr and Mrs O’Dara for a few weeks,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m a student.’

‘We don’t get many students here,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Is it the Irish yer leamin’?’

‘Only the odd wee bit from Mr O’Dara. I’m really studying farming.’

That sounded a bit schoolmistressy too. Behind me, the queue was building up again and Adele from New York City was breathing down my neck.

‘And that’s nice fer ye too,’ she said decisively, as she studied the envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs William Stewart.

‘You’d be wanting to let yer paren’s know ye was safely landed, indeed,’ she said severely, as she turned her attention to my letters to George and Ben, and my thank you to the Hendersons.

‘Oh, I did write letters on Monday, but Paddy the Postman took them for me.’

‘Indeed, shure he wou’d take them for you, and why wou’dn’t he?’

Her face crinkled into a grimace that looked like a friendly gesture, though I could hardly call it a smile.

‘I’ll be seein’ ye again, Miss Stewart, won’t I?’

‘Oh yes, you will indeed. I’ll be doing the shopping while I’m here.’

I was so glad to escape the smell of Adele’s Ambre Solaire that I set off back to the Square at a brisk trot. But I had to slow down. Apart from the ache in my legs, the afternoon was getting hotter by the minute. Huge clouds were building up in threatening grey masses and it felt warm, sticky and airless.

The windows of the hotel with the summer seats had been thrown wide but there wasn’t the slightest trace of a breeze. The net curtains hung motionless and I could see into the dining room where small black figures moved to and fro. Like the pale, dark-eyed girls I’d seen at the Mount, these girls were equally young, straight from school at fourteen.

I thought about them as I waited in the queue at the butcher’s, drawing circles in the sawdust with my toe. I too might have left school at fourteen if I hadn’t passed the Eleven Plus. Even then, I still might have had to leave if it hadn’t been for the Gardiners.

‘Did ye hear that Mrs Gardiner today, bumming again?’

I was back in my bedroom in Belfast on a summer evening towards dusk, reading in the last of the light. My parents had come out into the yard behind the shop. There was a rattle as my father filled his old metal can so he could water the geraniums and the orange lilies which he grew in empty fuel oil cans he’d brought home from Uncle Joe’s farm. It was the beginning of July, for the lilies were in flower but hadn’t yet been taken to the Lodge to decorate the big drums for the Twelfth.

‘Oh yes, she was in great form, and the whole shop full. Did ye not hear? Ah don’t know how ye cou’da missed her.’

The reply was indistinct. My father always speaks quietly. Often, he just nods or grunts.

‘There’ll be no standin’ that wuman, if that wee girl of hers goes to Victoria an’ our Elizibith doesn’t.’

Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, I thought to myself. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. The window was wide open and they were right underneath.

‘Well, if Bill Gardiner is going to send that wee scrap of a girl, why shouldn’t we send our Elizibith,’ my mother went on. ‘None of the Gardiners have any brains worth talkin’ about an’ that shop of theirs is only a huckster of a place, not even on the main road. It won’t look well at all, Willy, if we don’t send her. People’ll think our shop’s not doin’ well. I think we should just send her. We’re every bit as good as the Gardiners. We’d have done it for wee Billy for sure.’

I stuck my fingers in my ears, for I hated them talking about wee Billy and I knew that was wicked. You shouldn’t hate your brother, especially if he was dead. The trouble was it didn’t feel as if he was dead. They were always talking about him, what he liked and disliked, what he used to say, what age he would be his next birthday if he’d lived, where he would be going to school, or even what flowers they would take when they next visited the cemetery where he was buried. My Aunt Maisie once said to me that it was a pity I hadn’t been a boy, for Florrie would never get over wee Billy now and her too old to have another.

I lifted Mary’s shopping bag onto the counter and let the red-faced man put the brown-paper parcel inside. The butcher’s counter was marble and the one in the shop was wood. I imagined myself standing behind it in a pink, drip-dry, nylon shop coat like my mother’s, handing out papers and cigarettes and penny lollipops, ringing up items on the till, running up the rickety stairs to the stockroom for a new box of Polo mints, or a fresh carton of Players.

He counted out my change slowly, made a mistake and corrected himself. His fingers were smeared with blood. My father’s fingers were yellowed with nicotine, the nails cut short to keep them clean. I could see him as he spread the day’s takings on the table each evening. Piles of silver, mounds of copper, creased pound notes, and the occasional papery fiver which he held up to the light to make sure it was all right. Business was good, he would admit as he counted. Never better, my mother would agree. Everyone has money these days, she would continue, especially the Other Side.

It was the Other Side’s money that let me stay at school to take A-levels. Then my scholarship had taken me to Queen’s. After seven years passing the back of the students’ union every day on my way to school, I got off the bus one stop earlier and stepped into a different world. It was luck. Pure luck. I had my books and my hopes for the future, these girls had their skimpy black skirts and their long hours of hard, poorly paid work.

‘Well then, how do you fancy a career in catering?’ Ben and I were sitting in our usual seats at the top of the double decker, our first week’s pay envelopes torn open on our knees.

‘Not a lot,’ I replied. ‘If this was all you had to live on you wouldn’t have much of a life, would you?’

‘No, not even if there were two of you and there was equal pay.’

I laughed wryly and counted the crumpled notes in my hand. We had worked so hard, sharing the same dreary jobs, working the same long hours. Ben had ten pounds, I had only seven.

‘It’s one thing if you’re earning book money,’ he went on, stuffing the notes into his pocket, ‘it’s another if it’s all you’ve got. Are you going to have enough for going to Clare, Lizzie?’

I’d reassured him that I’d be fine for I knew he’d offer to help me. I couldn’t let him do that for I knew what he was planning to buy. The newly published book he hoped might help him to make sense of his mother’s condition would cost several weeks’ work.