Jessie
To begin with, Jessie was confident that Ger would contact her. As pointless arguments went, theirs had been on the higher end of the scale. He’d understand that, wouldn’t he? She also reasoned that, even if he wasn’t minded to apologise, curiosity would win out. Surely he’d want to know if her hunch about Etty had been correct?
A day passed. Then another. Then three. Then ten. Every day, she contemplated calling or sending a message. She was desperate to tell him about Bridget’s letter and Norah’s photograph. But her desperation was fused with anger. She’d been right about her grandmother, and he’d been completely wrong. He needed to admit that. She tended her grievance with care, taking it out and polishing it every evening.
Okay, she’d probably been wrong to suspect Lorna of having an affair, but something strange was going on there. Whatever Dave did for a living, she doubted it involved selling choc ices and tubs of raspberry ripple.
All around her, the summer was taking shape. The fine weather had returned, and the beach hummed with sunbathers and sandcastle builders. Jessie served golfers in salmon-coloured chinos and women in jewelled sandals and ill-fitting white jeans. She sold ice-cream to small children and strong coffees to hung-over parents. She watched flirting teenagers, the girls in bikini tops and denim cut-offs, the boys in board shorts and flip-flops, and envy rose within her. What she didn’t envy was the girls’ obsession with taking and uploading photos. It was as if their family holiday had been turned into a personal marketing campaign.
Lord, she thought, I sound old.
Without Ger, Jessie had no one to knock about with. There was no one to listen to her stories about the café’s more eccentric customers or to take an interest in what she’d been reading about the Famine. She missed his company, but could only assume that he didn’t miss hers. He, after all, had friends, a girlfriend, a demanding job. His life was full. She decided to invite Shona and some of her other Dublin friends to Clooneven. All found reasons to say no.
Still determined not to contact Ger, she thought she’d try to engineer a meeting. She remembered that, despite the breath-taking cold of the Atlantic, he was one of those people who enjoyed swimming. She took to walking the beach. Once or twice, she thought she saw his dark head bobbing between the waves. On other occasions, she imagined she saw his loping walk. Each time, she was wrong. She told herself that in such a small town she’d have to bump into him eventually. But she didn’t.
More than two months in Clooneven had honed Jessie’s knowledge of home. She saw that, just as she’d caricatured her family for a city audience, she’d done something similar with her town. She’d long been irritated by the tendency of Dubliners to view the west of Ireland as a rural Disneyland where all was tranquil and picturesque. An oasis of fiddles and fishing rods and hampers of artisan food. A place where all the fires burnt turf, all the bread was homemade, and all the locals were self-effacing charmers. But by dismissing Clooneven as bland and parochial she’d fallen into another trap. If the sense of community was real, so were the fissures that ran through the town. It was a more complex place than she’d been willing to acknowledge. A place of three-day weddings, wellness seminars and cars the size of minivans, but also a place of peeling paint, potholed roads and young guys in court for heroin possession.
She would have liked to share her observations with someone. Oh, let’s be honest, she would have liked to share them with Ger. But that was no longer possible.
Since hearing about her connection to Bridget, Jessie’s compulsion to find out more had strengthened. Her fourth-great-grandmother felt as real as her colleagues in the Seashell or the sunbathers on the beach. On her days off, she sought information about boats leaving Galway for Boston in the spring and summer of 1848. She scoured websites and forums until, finally, the County Library’s archives provided her with a result, albeit not one that she’d hoped for.
Initially, she didn’t want to believe the words in front of her. Maybe the documents related to a different Bridget Moloney from a different Clooneven. Maybe Bridget hadn’t tried to go to America. Maybe she’d ended up moving to Dublin or Liverpool or London.
But Jessie was deluding herself. In her heart, she knew she’d found the right woman.
On the bus home, she considered her options. Climbing down was against her nature. All her life, she’d waited for people to come to her. The trouble was, she really wanted to talk to Ger. Without him, she wouldn’t have known about Johanna, Bridget and Norah. After ten minutes of shilly-shallying, she found her phone and sent a message: Have found out what became of Bridget. If you’re still interested, let me know. BTW I was right about Etty.
It wasn’t the most gracious of messages, but it would have to do. Twenty minutes passed without a reply. School was finished for the day, so she assumed he was ignoring her. This was disappointing, and not just because she was keen to share her knowledge. She was disappointed that someone whose opinion she’d valued had turned out to be so petty.
And then, just as the bus was about to turn off for Clooneven, her phone pinged. Still very much interested. Sorry for late reply. Cleaning up after school sports. If you’re around, I can meet you on the prom in ten minutes.
The first few minutes were as awkward as Jessie had feared. She sat on a bench, eating an ice cream. One scoop pistachio, one scoop salted caramel. Ger paced. He looked tired.
He conceded that he’d been too hasty to dismiss her theory about Etty. He was sorry for that. She could tell that he felt slightly foolish. She did too. She admitted she’d been too quick to take offence. All the while, they avoided eye contact.
‘It was a stupid row,’ she said, ice cream dripping onto her hand. ‘It was,’ he replied, sitting down beside her. ‘But isn’t that the problem with stupid arguments? They’re the hardest ones to back down from.’
‘You should have got in touch.’
‘Maybe so, only I wasn’t the one who stormed off in the rain. I’d have been happy to drive you to Etty’s house.’
‘I think “happy” is a bit of an exaggeration. As I recall . . .’ Jessie stopped and looked him in the eye. ‘Please can we not have another dumb argument?’
‘I can agree to that,’ said Ger. A long pause. ‘I kind of missed our conversations . . . about Bridget and that, y’know?’
‘Me too.’
Another long beat of silence followed. There they were, with thousands upon thousands of words available to them, and still they couldn’t find the right ones. She crunched the last of her cone while trying to think of a way to move the conversation on.
Thankfully, Ger broke the silence. ‘So what have you found?’ he asked.
Jessie started by telling him about Bridget’s letter to Norah. Given what she’d learnt a couple of hours previously, it was difficult to recount the story without feeling emotional.
‘What a fantastic woman she must have been,’ he said.
‘A total star. And you should see the photo of Norah. I still have difficulty believing we’re part of the same family. Anyway, this afternoon I managed to discover what happened next.’
In front of them, the sun was creeping across the sky. The beach had its distinctive end-of-day look: crumbling sandcastles, bins erupting with bottles, cans and wrappers, hundreds of footprints leading in all directions. It was hard to reconcile the calm, glistening water with the pitiless ocean that had torn apart a ship and taken the lives of more than eighty people. Because, as she explained to Ger, that was what had happened.
‘There were seven survivors,’ she said. ‘Two women, four men and a baby girl. They were able to cling to part of the ship’s hull until a rescue boat reached them.’
‘By the sound of things,’ he said, ‘it was a miracle anyone made it ashore.’
‘Oh, God, yeah. According to reports from the time, the men who pulled them from the water in Cohasset were lucky not to lose their own lives.’ She took out her phone and passed it to him. ‘I’ve got a few screenshots. Here’s the list of survivors.’
‘Patrick Hassett, Gort, County Galway, aged eighteen,’ he read. ‘Nancy Quinn, Ennistymon, County Clare, twenty-nine; Martin McDonagh, Claddaghduff, County Galway, thirty-eight; Michael Slattery, Galway city, nineteen; Tom O’Meara, Doonbeg, County Clare, thirty-one; Alice King, Tulla, County Clare, twenty; and Delia King, daughter, ten months.’
‘Awful, isn’t it? Because the tragedy happened so close to Boston – Cohasset’s only a short distance to the south, apparently – there were several newspaper reports. One said the survivors wouldn’t let go of the men who rescued them, even after they were all back on dry land. If you swipe to the next image, you’ll see Bridget’s name.’
Ger moved on to the following page. ‘List of the dead and lost,’ he said. ‘Bridget Moloney, Clooneven, County Clare, aged twenty-two; Eugene Hester, Ballinasloe, County Galway, forty-three; Maria Hester, wife, thirty-six; James Hester, son, sixteen; Annie Hester, daughter, twelve; John Talbot (Captain), Dublin, forty-eight . . .’ He allowed his voice to fade away.
‘No one knows the exact number of dead. According to the survivors, more than thirty people had already died on the journey. Oh, and one of the articles made it clear that this wasn’t considered a particularly high number. It was just your regular common or garden coffin ship.’ She took back her phone and put it into her bag. ‘It’s enough to make you scream, isn’t it?’
‘Except you can’t get angry with bad weather.’
‘But if the ship had been in a better state, there’s a strong chance it would have survived the storm. The Mary and Elizabeth might have had a fancy name, but it was a heap of junk. The reports said it was rotten from top to bottom.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Point taken.’
‘And you know what? Bridget didn’t even get a proper grave. None of them did. The bodies washed ashore were all buried together. Seriously, you’d have to be raging. As Etty might say, I’m pure vexed.’
‘She’s going to be disappointed too.’
‘She is. I’ll drop up to Boherbreen later and tell her. We’d all hoped for a happy ending, but I guess it wasn’t to be. I’d even planned on writing something about Bridget, only I’m not sure it would work now. Ah, well.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll have more time to devote to being Lorna’s dogsbody.’
‘I thought you liked the café?’
‘Oh, yes. Because my life’s ambition was to earn the minimum wage in a coffee shop owned by my sister . . . and to spend the rest of my day running errands and minding her children. I said as much to the career-guidance teacher in sixth year, and she said, “Fair play, Jessie Daly. That sounds like a worthwhile career.”’
Ger laughed. ‘Why don’t you go back to Dublin then?’ He raised a hand. ‘Not that I’m telling you to go or anything.’
Jessie was about to sidestep the question. Then she changed her mind. Chances were she was making another mistake. Chances were she was giving him another reason to judge her. But she felt an urge to tell the truth.
‘It’s not that simple,’ she said, before outlining how she’d fled Dublin and how her sister and parents had settled her debt.
When she’d finished, they sat in silence. Two blonde women in garish exercise clothes sat down on the next bench. A young boy on a black scooter zoomed past.
‘I can see why you feel trapped,’ said Ger. ‘I’d be the same, but to be honest—’
‘It’s my own fault? Do you not think I know that? Have you any idea how rubbish it is when you can’t blame other people for your troubles? And that’s not all. I’ve managed to tear up the narrative on landlords. Who ever heard of the landlord being the good guy, huh?’
Jessie worried that she sounded too sharp. Perhaps it would be difficult to put their argument behind them. Perhaps her ears would be on constant alert for slights or putdowns.
That was when Ger did something unexpected. He touched her hand, not in a condescending way, or a let’s-have-sex way, but in a friendly way. It was a gesture that said, ‘I understand.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be unsympathetic. If I can roll out the clichés, this won’t last for ever, you know. You’ll move on soon enough. You’ve got to decide what you want.’
‘Ah, Ger. Whatever the self-help books claim, good stuff doesn’t happen just because you visualise it. I’ll have the debt paid off by the autumn but getting started again in journalism is going to be tough, and I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach for it.’
Mostly Jessie avoided thinking about what she’d do when her job in the Seashell ended. She was starting to accept that her old life was gone. Doors had closed behind her, and she didn’t have the strength to reopen them. Salvaging any part of her career would be difficult, and without regular work, she couldn’t afford somewhere to live. Meanwhile, many of her friends and acquaintances were coupling up and moving on. Soon they’d be obsessed with babies, yoga classes and garden furniture. They’d begin reminiscing about the days when they were young and wild and effortlessly thin; the days when their boasts had been about body counts and three-day sessions, not promotions and engagement rings.
This realisation hadn’t come in a sudden burst of enlightenment. Rather, it had arrived in a series of dull thuds. Occasionally, one of those thuds brought a reminder of what Phelim had said about the opportunities she’d squandered. He’d been right, and it hurt.
As Etty had predicted, her mother was pleased to have her at home. Maeve had been enthusiastic about what she’d uncovered and urged her to find out more about both sides of the family. Suspecting this was her mam’s way of encouraging her to stay in Clooneven, Jessie felt grateful and guilty in equal measure. Being at home brought numerous benefits: ironed sheets, nutritious dinners and a drawerful of clean underwear among them. It also brought regression to the age she’d been when she’d last lived there. She was twenty-nine, not eighteen. Being back under her parents’ roof was never going to feel right.
‘Does Lorna really pay the minimum wage?’ asked Ger.
‘Uh-huh. I’m sure she pays a bit more to Ivana and Ashling. They’re on the books, though. I’m strictly cash – or no cash – in hand, so she can do what she likes.’
‘She gives you nothing?’
‘Well, she gives me enough to pay my phone bill and buy the odd drink or pack of smokes.’ She put up her hands. ‘And, yeah, I know. It’s a terrible, dirty habit. Other than that, everything goes towards paying what I owe to her and my folks.’
‘Right. Just so we’re entirely clear about this: officially you’re not employed, which means Lorna doesn’t have to pay any employers’ tax. She holds on to most of what you earn, and she also keeps what you’d expect to get for minding your niece and nephew.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ said Jessie, staring down at her chipped toenail polish. God, she’d love a pedicure. ‘Like you said, though, I’ve only myself to blame.’
‘That’s not what I’m getting at.’
‘No?’
He turned, angling his body so he was speaking more to her, and less to the prom-walkers. ‘I’ve been thinking about that guy, Dave. The “ice-cream salesman”.’
Catching the scepticism in his voice, Jessie smiled. ‘You’ve changed your tune. Does this mean you accept that he’s dodgy?’
‘To be fair, I’ve never met the fellow.’
‘He’s not Mr Snuffleupagus. He does exist.’
‘If you remember your Sesame Street correctly, so does Mr Snuffleupagus. Anyway, back to the enigmatic Dave. I’ll admit I still have a problem with your theory about him being Lorna’s lover.’
‘I’ve moved on from that idea,’ said Jessie, trying not to make it sound like a climb-down. ‘On the night of the . . . On the night I went to see Etty, I met him up near Lorna and Simon’s house. He’d been talking to both of them. Also, I decided . . . well, he’s a bit too Dublin for Lorna’s tastes, if you get my drift.’
The more she thought about their encounter, the more uncomfortable she became. It was clear that Dave got a kick from knowing more about her than she knew about him, and she couldn’t figure out why.
‘Fair enough,’ said Ger. ‘Listen, you were right about Etty playing games with you. And I reckon that, in a way, you’re right about Dave. What you’ve said about your arrangement with Lorna has confirmed my theory.’ He hesitated. ‘Nah, confirmed is too strong, but it certainly gives it more weight.’
‘Go on.’
‘I haven’t seen their house since it was done up, but I gather they spent a fortune.’
‘Two fortunes,’ said Jessie. ‘It’s like something out of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. And my sister’s not exactly low-maintenance either.’
‘If you look at their businesses, though, it’s hard to see any of them bringing in huge money. Not when, for a lot of the year, Clooneven’s a ghost town. I mean, the arcade and the shop probably have a decent turnover in the summer, but the season’s short. And, yeah, the Americans are great, only they don’t stay for long. They’re more interested in the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. So I was thinking that, maybe, Simon and Lorna owe money to Dave.’
‘Duh,’ she said, ears filling with the sound of pennies dropping. A few weeks ago, the idea of her sister being in debt would have seemed absurd. Taking everything into account, however, it made sense.
She slapped her cheek. ‘I did wonder if a lack of cash might explain why they’d done nothing with the garden in Clevedon. And why Lorna couldn’t bail me out on her own. Mam and Dad put up half the money.’
‘Not to mention,’ said Ger, ‘why Dave, if that is his name, is hanging around.’
Jessie was annoyed with herself. She’d invented all sorts of explanations for Dave’s connection to Simon and Lorna, but it had taken Ger to spot the truth. Everything came down to money in the end. That had been the case in Bridget’s day, and it remained so now.
‘Do you think he’s a moneylender, then?’ she asked.
‘Obviously I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s the most likely explanation. Don’t you?’
‘I do,’ she said.