She had her savings, of course: a few pounds that she’d squirreled away in a sock in her dresser drawer over the last few years. An elderly aunt, three years dead by the time of my mother’s disgrace, had given her the occasional few pennies when she ran errands for her and these had accumulated over time. And there was still something left over from her Communion money and a little more from her Confirmation. She’d never been a spender. There wasn’t much that she needed and the things that she might have liked, she didn’t know existed in the first place.
As expected, the bag was waiting for her when she got home, neatly packed and propped up next to the front door, her coat and hat thrown on top of it. She discarded these over the arm of the sofa, for they were hand-me-downs and she guessed that the Sunday clothes on her back would be more valuable to her in Dublin. Opening it now, she checked for the sock-purse and there it was, its secret as carefully concealed as her own had been until the previous evening when her mother had walked into her bedroom without knocking and discovered her standing before the mirror with her blouse undone, one hand stroking her convex belly with a mixture of fear and fascination.
The old dog looked up at her from his place in front of the fire and offered a lengthy yawn but didn’t trot over with his tail wagging like he usually did, hoping for a pat or a compliment.
She went to her bedroom and took one last look around for anything she might want to take with her. There were books, of course, but she had read them all and there would be books at the other end of her journey too. A small porcelain statue of St. Bernadette stood on her bedside table and for no sensible reason that she could think of, other than causing irritation to her parents, she turned its face to the wall. There was a small music box too, her mother’s originally, where she stored her keepsakes and treasures, and she began to sort through it as the ballerina turned and the melody sounded a tune from Pugni’s La Esmeralda before deciding that these things belonged to a different life and she closed it firmly, the dancer bending forward at the waist before disappearing from sight altogether.
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.”