DUBLIN 1990
The Daisy May on Camden Street had definitely seen better days. The paintwork was scuffed and the windows were permanently steamed up. The menus looked as if they had survived the trauma of decades. But the café had its fans and a steady trade of coffee-slugging students who seemed to hold its comfortable shabbiness in real affection. Alison had fallen for the Daisy May during her first weeks in Dublin. She had clung to its friendly warmth between lectures on days when there was much to read and little to keep her in Mrs Duggan’s miserable digs.
It was Rose, whose name and life she would later learn, who served her the first of many milky coffees and toasted cheese sandwiches and gave her enough part-time hours so that she could escape the clutches of the unbearably nosy Bea Duggan and her smelly little box room. Within weeks of starting work in the Daisy May she had found a flat to share with another girl on the first floor of a house in Ranelagh. The landlady, who lived on the ground floor, seemed cheerfully oblivious to their existence except for every second Friday when she accepted their rent money.
‘Oh, is today Friday?’ she would enquire with feigned innocence as she grasped the notes out of their hands with poorly concealed glee. The gin bottles that sprawled around the black plastic bin on weekend mornings gave the girls some indication of their key role in Jean McDermott’s household budget. Alison was gone from Mrs Duggan’s two weeks before her father discovered that she had left.
‘What do you mean you have moved?’ Richard Shepherd was prone to sudden flashes of temper that subsided nearly as quickly as they rose. Alison stayed silent, hoping that if she didn’t aggravate him any further, this one conversation might be the end of it. She had told her mother as soon as she had found the flat and needed the deposit of a month’s rent. Cathy Shepherd had been terrified of her only daughter being lonely at Mrs Duggan’s and was in favour of the move if it meant she had company of her own age. She had promised to break the news to Richard the next time Alison came home for the weekend.
Here they were now at the kitchen table after Sunday dinner and he looked as if his switch had tripped and his entire fuse board had blown. ‘But it took us ages to find those digs,’ he spluttered, looking to his wife for solidarity. ‘Talk to her, Cathy, for God’s sake talk to her!’
‘Richard, you know Alison has a good head on her shoulders. I think she deserves our trust, don’t you? She has found a part-time job so it will actually end up costing us less than the digs. Besides, think of the company she will have.’
Cathy’s voice was soft like honey and Richard’s deflation was more or less immediate under its gentle pressure. He muttered something about square meals and all-night parties while he rolled the newspapers furiously into an impossibly tight bundle. Alison pictured the last Spam and canned pineapple concoction that Mrs Duggan had allegedly ‘cooked’ and barely stifled a laugh. Her mother flashed Alison a conspiratorial grin as her father turned and went to the living room to read the paper. As the custard congealed on his untouched bread pudding Alison knew that the matter was over, for the moment at least.
An hour or so later she reheated his dessert for him over a pan of boiling water. In the living room the papers were strewn around him, tossed in untidy heaps. He accepted his daughter’s peace offering with an indulgent smile. ‘You will mind yourself, Alison, won’t you? You are there to study, not to carouse. Remember where you come from. Be careful who you hang around with.’
Alison interrupted him in mid flow before he started reminding her not to take sweets from strangers. ‘Dad, of course I will. I’m older now and I can take care of myself.’
His tears welled up but Richard forced a smile for this ever-so-grown-up girl that his daughter had become while he had been looking elsewhere. Years had passed, becoming a decade, with a second one now close on the heels of the first. It seemed to him like no time at all.
‘There must be loads of fine-looking men in that college of yours,’ Rose chirped on Alison’s second or third week at the Daisy May.
Alison pictured some of the earnest and dreary faces that had turned up to the tutorial on the Crusades that morning. ‘Do you know what, Rose, I think the entire history department is sorely lacking a decent-looking man. I thought secondary school was bad but this is ridiculous.’ She felt very free, being able to indulge in this kind of talk, and relished the anonymity of her existence in Dublin. Nobody yet knew her past or what she had been like growing up. Rose didn’t know, as they chatted about men, that Alison had been painfully shy at Caharoe secondary school and had never so much as gone out with a boy, let alone discussed them in such a casual fashion with anyone. Up to now her love interests had been a painful mess of crushes and awkwardness.
‘Well, Alison, you will just have to look further afield to find a nice young man with prospects.’
‘I’m only eighteen. I think I would settle for the good looks and hang the prospects for the moment.’
Rose eyed her and was charmed by a familiar innocence. She too had had high hopes once but they had crumbled under the strain of experience. ‘I was married when I was barely older than you are now. I loved my Frank but cursed money was always scarce and there’s feck all romance in scrimping. Remember that.’
Alison thought for a second that Rose was going to cry and she wasn’t sure how she was going to comfort this grown woman whom she barely knew. Sensing the girl’s awkwardness, Rose’s face broke into her familiar grin.
‘Here’s one for you now,’ she said, flashing a smile at a gangly but gorgeous man who had just walked in. Alison was frying bread for a full Irish that had been ordered by a couple of builder’s labourers at a corner table. Typical, she thought. Here she was covered in grease, wearing a hairnet and an oversized cook’s jacket in a shade of tired and insipid grey. ‘The usual is it, Dan?’ she heard Rose say. The fried bread needed to be rescued before it smouldered to the same colour as the pan but Alison was putting off any action that wasn’t strictly necessary. She did not dare attempt to move because she feared nerves rooted her to the spot. Rose moved behind her to butter a mound of toast.
‘It’s a fry they were wanting not a cremation,’ she said in a low-enough whisper, giving Alison an encouraging nudge of her elbow. Rose delivered the toast to the counter in front of Dan with a mug of steaming coffee as Alison finally plucked the bread from the pan. ‘Oh, you haven’t met my new girl, have you, Dan?’ she said, giving Alison an animated wink. Alison turned her flushed face to meet the gleam of piercing green eyes as Rose introduced them. ‘Dan Abernethy, meet Alison. Alison Shepherd.’