Small Things Like These(3)
While making the rounds, Furlong wasn’t inclined to listen to the radio, but he sometimes tuned in and caught the news. It was 1985, and the young people were emigrating, leaving for London and Boston, New York. A new airport had just opened in Knock – Haughey himself had gone down to snip the ribbon. The Taoiseach had signed an agreement with Thatcher over The North, and the Unionists in Belfast were out marching with drums, protesting over Dublin having any say in their affairs. The crowds down in Cork and Kerry were thinning out but some still gathered at the shrines, in the hope that one of the statues might move again.
In New Ross, the shipyard company had closed and Albatros, the big fertiliser factory on the far side of the river, had made several redundancies. Bennett’s had let eleven employees go, and Graves & Co., where Eileen had worked, which had been there for as long as anyone could remember, had closed their doors. The auctioneer said business was stone cold, that he might as well be trying to sell ice to the Eskimos. And Miss Kenny, the florist, whose shop was near the coal yard, had boarded up her window; had asked one of Furlong’s men to hold the plywood steady for her one evening while she drove the nails.
The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting on and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town.
3
Christmas was coming. Already, a handsome Norway spruce was put standing in the Square beside the manger whose nativity figures that year had been freshly painted. If some complained over Joseph looking overly colourful in his red and purple robes, the Virgin Mary was met with general approval, kneeling passively in her usual blue and white. The brown donkey, too, looked much the same, standing guard over two sleeping ewes and the crib where, on Christmas Eve, the figure of the infant Jesus would be placed.
The custom was for people to gather there on the first Sunday of December, outside the Town Hall, after dark, to see the lights coming on. The afternoon stayed dry but the cold was bitter, and Eileen made the girls zip up their anoraks and wear gloves. When they reached the centre of town, the pipe band and carol singers had already assembled, and Mrs Kehoe was out with a stall, selling slabs of gingerbread and hot chocolate. Joan, who had gone on ahead, was handing out carol sheets with other members of the choir, while the nuns walked around, supervising and talking to some of the more well-off parents.
It was cold standing around so they walked about the side streets for a while before sheltering in the recessed doorway of Hanrahan’s, where Eileen paused to admire a pair of navy, patent shoes and a matching handbag, and to chat with neighbours and others she seldom saw who had come from farther out, taking the opportunity to draw and share what news they carried.
Before long, an announcement was made over the speaker inviting everyone to assemble. The Councillor, wearing his brasses over a Crombie coat, got out of a Mercedes and made a short speech before a switch was flipped, and the lights came on. Magically, then, the streets seemed to change and come alive under the long strands of multi-coloured bulbs which swayed, pleasantly, in the wind above their heads. The crowd made soft little splashes of applause and soon the band piped up – but at the sight of the big, fat Santa coming down the street, Loretta stood back, anxious, and began to cry.
‘There’s no harm,’ Furlong assured. ‘Tis just a man like myself, only in costume.’
While other children queued up to visit Santa in the grotto and collect their presents, Loretta stood in tight and held on to Furlong’s hand.
‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a leanbh,’ Furlong told her. ‘Stay here with me.’
But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.
That evening, when they got home, Eileen said it was well past time they made the Christmas cake. Good-humouredly, she took down her Odlum’s recipe and got Furlong to cream a pound of butter and sugar in the brown delft bowl with the hand mixer while the girls grated lemon rind, weighed and chopped candied peel and cherries, soaked whole almonds in boiled water and slipped them from their skins. For an hour or so they raked through the dried fruit, picking stalks out of sultanas, currants and raisins while Eileen sifted the flour and spice, beat up bantam eggs, and greased and lined the tin, wrapping the outside with two layers of brown paper and tying it, tight, with twine.
Furlong took charge of the Rayburn, putting on tidy little shovelfuls of anthracite and regulating the draught to keep the oven low and steady for the night.
When the mixture was ready, Eileen pushed it into the big square tin with the wooden spoon, smoothing it out on top before giving the base a few hard bangs to get it all into the corners, laughing a little – but no sooner was it in the oven with the door closed than she took stock of the room and told the girls to clear down so she could get on, and start the ironing.
‘Why don’t ye write your letters to Santa now?’
Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves? Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing Christmas with his wife and daughters so much as on tomorrow and who owed what, and how and when he’d deliver what was ordered and what man he’d leave to which task, and how and where he’d collect what was owed – and before tomorrow was coming to an end, he knew his mind would already be working in much the same way, yet again, over the day that was to follow.