Brooklyn

Má bhíonn tú liom, a stóirín mo chroí"-

He seemed part of a dream from which she had woken with considerable force some time before, and in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night.

No matter what she dreamed about, no matter how bad she felt, she had no choice, she knew, but to put it all swiftly out of her mind. She would have to get on with her work if it was during the day and go back to sleep if it was during the night. It would be like covering a table with a tablecloth, or closing curtains on a window; and maybe the need would lessen as time went on, as Jack had hinted it would, as Father Flood had suggested. In any case, that was what she would have to do. As soon as Mrs. Kehoe appeared with tea things on a tray, Eilis clenched her fist when she felt that she was ready to begin.

She noticed the cold in the air for the first time; it seemed to her that the weather had changed. But it hardly mattered now what the weather was like.

She considered writing to him now asking him if he too had felt like this, as though he had been shut away somewhere and was trapped in a place where there was nothing. It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.

She stood in the hall, and then turned upstairs, realizing that she was afraid too of the outside, and even if she were not she would have no idea where to go at this time of the evening. She hated this house, she thought, its smells, its noises, its colours.

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

“Some people are nice,” she said, “and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”

“Some of the shopkeepers in this town,” her mother said, “especially the ones who buy cheap and sell dear, all they have is a few yards of counter and they have to sit there all day waiting for customers. I don’t know why they think so highly of themselves.”

They ran a dance in that selfsame parish hall after the war and they had to close it because of immorality. Some of the Italians started to come looking for Irish girls