Felicia's Journey (3 page)

‘Damp one hour, cold the next,’ a man going by grumbles. ‘You don’t know where you are with it, Mr Hilditch.’

‘Shocking.’ Mr Hilditch smiles back. ‘But at least the days’ll be getting longer.’

‘Enjoy your meal, Mr Hilditch.’ A woman with a tray nods pleasantly as she passes.

‘And yourself, Iris.’

It is an expression they often use, ‘enjoy your meal’: picked up from the television, he supposes. Mr Hilditch doesn’t have television himself. He hired a set once, but found he never turned it on. Sometimes, in reply to the good wishes about his meal, he says he enjoys all his meals, a little pleasantry that invariably causes amusement.

In the canteen the bustle has increased. He can no longer hear
the greetings and comments from the queue by the counter. Dishes and knives and forks rattle on the trays, the trays themselves noisily deposited. In the smoking area cigarettes are lit; another queue forms for cups of tea or coffee; newspapers are spread out on table-tops.

Mr Hilditch likes to watch it all. Flirtations begin or continue in the canteen; girls, sometimes women, eye the young apprentices; men, known to Mr Hilditch to be married, chance their luck. Besides this kind of thing there are a couple of long-established liaisons. A man called Frank from the finishing shop, older by a few years than Mr Hilditch, sits every day with one of the Indian women; Annette from the paint shop keeps a place at the same corner table for young Kevin, to whom she could give fifteen years at least. You can’t tell what is going on or if at other times, outside the factory, these companionships continue. Everyone knows, yet Mr Hilditch reckons that no one, meeting the legal partners of these people, would divulge a thing. The factory is another world; within it, so is his canteen.

He finishes his steamed pudding and queues for tea, exchanging further views on the weather with those on either side of him. He returns to the kitchens, stands for a moment in the doorway, then makes his way out of the building to his office beyond the loading bays.

As he progresses on the tarmacadamed surface, taking his time while digesting, he notices a solitary figure ahead of him. It is a girl in a red coat and a headscarf, carrying two plastic bags. He notices when he is closer to her that she is round-faced, wide-eyed, and has an air of being lost. He doesn’t recognize her; she doesn’t belong.
Chawke’s
it says on the plastic bags, bold black letters on green. He has never heard the name before; it doesn’t belong, either.

‘I don’t know am I in the right place,’ the girl says as he is about to pass her by, and Mr Hilditch smiles in his usual way. Irish, he says to himself.

‘What place are you looking for?’

‘The lawn-mower factory. Someone said it could be here.’

‘We don’t make lawn-mowers, I’m afraid.’

‘Then I’ve got it wrong.’

‘I’m afraid you have.’

‘D’you know the place I’m looking for?’

He shakes his head. Lawn-mowers are not manufactured anywhere near here, he says.

‘Oh.’

She stands there awkwardly, her mouth depressed at the corners, her eyes worried. Escaping from the headscarf, wisps of fair hair blow about her face; a tiny cross, on a cheap silver-coloured chain, is just visible beneath her coat. Being curious by nature, Mr Hilditch wonders what her plastic bags contain.

‘I have a friend works in the stores of a lawn-mower factory. The only thing is I’m not certain where it is.’

‘There are definitely no lawn-mowers manufactured round here.’

The nearest to anything like that would be on the industrial estate half a mile away, where there are garden-supply showrooms. Pritchard’s on the estate do grass-cutters – Mountfield, Flymo, Japanese.

‘Haven’t you got your friend’s address?’

The girl shakes her head. She only has the name of this town, and the lawn-mower information.

‘Pritchard’s is retail, nothing manufactured there.’

‘Maybe I got it wrong about a factory.’

‘Try the estate anyway. It could be they’d put you in touch.’

Mr Hilditch, who is a careful man, doesn’t wish to be seen with a girl on the factory premises. No one has observed their meeting, of that he is certain. No windows overlook the tarmacadam expanse; no one is, or has been, about. He has never been seen in the company of a girl on the factory premises, nor anywhere in the immediate neighbourhood. Nothing like that on your own doorstep is the rule he has.

‘Walk out the yellow gates, the way you came in.’ He hurries the directions, hardly waiting for the nods of acknowledgement they elicit. ‘Turn right and keep on until you come to the dual carriageway. Turn left there. After that you’ll see the sign to the estate. Blackbarrow Industrial Estate it says.’

Mr Hilditch nods to himself, an indication that the encounter has reached an end. Then abruptly he turns away from the girl and continues on his way.

3

Since she arrived in the town that morning Felicia has discovered that she cannot always understand what people say because they speak in an accent that is unfamiliar to her. Even when they repeat their statements there is a difficulty, and sometimes she has to give up. On the industrial estate she makes inquiries in a building that sells office requirements – filing-cabinets and revolving chairs as well as paper in bulk and supplies of envelopes and fasteners and transparent tape, everything stacked up higgledy-piggledy, not as in a shop. Half of what the girl says in reply escapes her, but she knows it doesn’t matter because the girl keeps shaking her head, denying in this way all knowledge of a lawn-mower factory.

The industrial estate is an endless repetition of nondescript commercial buildings, each with a forecourt for parking. Trade names blazon: Toyota, Ford, Toys ‘Я’ Us, National Tyre and Autocare, Kwik-Fit, Zanussi, Renault Trucks, Pipewise, Ready-bag, Sony, Comet. Next to Britannia Scaffolding are Motorway Exhausts, then C & S Roofing, Deep Drilling Services and Tomorrow’s Cleaning Today. At an intersection a little further on, Allparts Vehicle Dismantlers share the corner with OK Blast & Spray Ltd.

The concrete roads of the estate are long and straight. Nobody casually walks them for the pleasure of doing so. No dogs meet other dogs. Business is in all directions, buying and selling, disposal and acquisition, discount for cash. It takes Felicia nearly two hours to find Pritchard’s Garden Requisites and Patio Centre.

‘A rotary you’re thinking of, is it?’ the salesman responds in answer to her query, and she asks if the place is a factory, if the lawn-mowers are made here.

‘We have our workshops on the premises for after-care. The annual service we recommend, though it’s entirely up to you. You’d be going for electric, would you?’

‘I’m looking for a friend. He works in the stores of a lawn-mower factory.’

The man’s manner changes. He can’t help her, he states flatly, disappointment emptying his tone of expression.

‘Someone I met said you might be able to tell me where a factory was.’

‘Our machines are manufactured in works all over the country. I’m sorry. I believe someone else requires my attention.’

A couple are measuring garden furniture with a dressmaking tape. They’re after something for their conservatory, they inform the salesman. Felicia goes away.

A man in a Volkswagen showroom is patient with her but doesn’t know of a lawn-mower factory in the vicinity. Then an afterthought strikes him as she’s leaving and he mentions the name of a town that he says is twenty-five or -six miles off. When it occurs to him that she’s bewildered by what he’s saying he writes the name down on the edge of a brochure. ‘Not the full shilling’, is an expression her father uses, and ‘Nineteen and six in the pound’: she wonders if the man is thinking that.

No one else can help her. She walks through the estate, investigating every road, inquiring in a do-it-yourself emporium and in Britannia Scaffolding. In OK Blast & Spray Ltd a woman draws a map for her, but when she follows the arrows on it she finds herself at a plumbers’ supply warehouse that is closed. She returns to Pritchard’s Garden Requisites and Patio Centre in the hope that the salesman isn’t busy now. Crosser than before, he ignores her.

She tramps wearily back to the town, on the grass verge beside a wide dual carriageway. An endless chain of lorries and cars passes close, the noise of their engines a roar that every few moments rises as a crescendo, their headlights on because it has become foggy. The scrubby grass she walks on is grey, in places black, decorated by the litter that is scattered all around her – crushed cigarette packets, plastic bags, cans and bottles, crumpled sheets from newspapers, cartons. In the middle of the morning she had a cup
of tea and a piece of fruitcake; she hasn’t had anything since and she doesn’t feel hungry, but she knows that as soon as she arrives back in the town she will have to find somewhere to spend the night. Her arms ache from the weight of the two carrier bags; her feet are sore, blisters in two different places, one of her heels skinned. She knew it wouldn’t be easy; even before she set out she knew it wouldn’t be; she hadn’t been expecting anything else. What has happened is her own fault, due to her own foolishness in not making certain she had an address. She can’t blame anyone else.

Yet in spite of everything she wouldn’t not be here, closer to him. On the day of Aidan’s wedding, when she was Connie Jo’s bridesmaid, when she held her bouquet of autumn flowers, she hardly knew he existed, yet the day has been special ever since because it was then, suddenly, that he was there, the beginning of everything. In the Church of Our Saviour she had been thinking that her shoulders were ungainly, that her face hadn’t responded to the softening attentions of Carmel’s make-up, that no doubt her hair had gone limp. Tulle and lace stretched flatly over the upper half of her body and she wished she had taken Carmel’s advice and puffed her brassiere up with wads of cottonwool. ‘God, you’re gawky,’ Carmel used to say when they were twelve, and she felt she still was, at seventeen on the day of her brother’s wedding. ‘I will,’ Aidan responded to Father Kilgallen at the altar, and Connie Jo said it too. Afterwards on the steps they smiled for the bald photographer – she and Connie Jo, and Moss McGuire with his best man’s buttonhole, carnation and asparagus fern, similar to Aidan’s. Confetti clung to their shoulders on the walk from the church to Hickey’s Hotel in the Square, and was carried into the Kincora Lounge, where Connie Jo’s kid sister was already asking for Pepsi Cola. Sister Benedict, who loved the weddings of her convent girls, was perched on the scarlet upholstery of a gold-painted chair, one of a set arrayed against the walls. The scarlet was soiled where it bulged, the gold of the legs worn away in patches, or chipped. Barry Manilow whispered softly through the speakers.

As Felicia progresses on the dual carriageway, the faces of that
October afternoon jostle in her thoughts; scraps of conversation echo. The Reverend Mother, and other nuns, joined Sister Benedict, specially invited because the father of the bridegroom was the gardener at the convent. Artie Slattery, who supplied the cake, stood near it with his buxom wife. Old Begley, who attended all funerals and weddings as a matter of course, waited for the first of the food to appear. Sergeant Breen, off duty, and Fogarty the tractor-repair man, crossed the hall of the hotel from the front bar to the Kincora Lounge at the invitation of the bride’s father. Mr Logan, proprietor of the Two-Screen Ritz and the Dancetime Disco, was natty in a chalk-striped suit and blue bow-tie, as befitted the locality’s most prominent businessman and bachelor. Welcoming guests at the door, Connie Jo’s mother was unable to dispel from her expression the opinion that her daughter, by marrying a plasterer, had married beneath her. Connie Jo was Felicia’s friend, had been since their time at the convent, which Felicia was privileged to attend because of her father’s connection with it. Occasionally, when a nun was cross, Felicia had been reminded that she was there on sufferance. The nuns weren’t always severe, but those who still favoured the tradition of honouring sacred figures in their names had seemed so to Felicia before she knew some of them better: Sister Antony Ixida, Sister Ignatius Loyola, Sister Francis Xavier, Sister Benedict, Sister Justina.

‘How’re things at the quarries?’ Tim Bo Gargan inquired of Felicia’s big twin brothers. Things were all right, they replied and left it at that, no more communicative at a wedding party than at any other time. ‘How’re you doing, Felicia?’ Small Crowley asked, speaking out of the corner of his mouth the way he believed American gangsters did, eyeing Carmel while he spoke because it was Carmel he was interested in. ‘How’re you doing, Carmel?’ he plucked up the courage to ask eventually, causing Carmel’s cousin Rose to giggle. ‘Any time you want it, Aidan,’ Connie Jo’s father offered, ‘there’s a place for you in McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams.’

Tim Bo Gargan tried for Scott Joplin on the piano, but desisted when there were protests. Trifle was handed round. ‘Ah no, no, you look great, Felicia,’ Connie Jo reassured her, and Carmel and
Rose agreed that of course she did. Small Crowley struck a match on his thumbnail and said he’d heard Fogarty had been out all morning trying to start a tractor in some farmer’s field, which was the reason why a smell of petrol was coming off him. ‘We’ll have the cake soon,’ Connie Jo’s mother announced, interrupting the conversations in the Kincora Lounge, and then the cake was cut and there was applause, with glasses and tea-cups raised. In the hall the children opened and closed the lift doors. ‘You’re wanted! You’re wanted!’ they called up the stairs, and a girl Felicia didn’t know told her that Dessie Flynn had put the remains of a chicken salad in a bed. ‘Hold on to that confetti till they’re outside,’ Hickey of the hotel begged when the bride and groom were ready to go. ‘Keep the confetti for the street, lads.’ Everyone was moving out of the hotel behind Aidan and Connie Jo, and a cheer went up when they stepped into the car Connie Jo’s father had hired for them. ‘Bray,’ Tim Bo Gargan knowledgeably declared. ‘I’d say they’re headed for Bray.’