City Girl by Patricia Scanlan

Author:Patricia Scanlan [Scanlan, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471141041
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Two months later, six months after her return to Ireland, with her mother well on the road to recovery, Maggie gently but firmly told the family that she was going back to nursing in Dublin. Her father could well afford to get a woman in to help for a couple of hours a day and her mother was a fine healthy woman. She told them that she would visit them often but it was time for her to start working again. They had protested but Maggie was determined. Despite the health cutbacks, she had been lucky to secure a good job in her old training hospital and it seemed as though her years in New York and her time at home were all a dream.

She found a nice flat in Sandymount and settled back to life in Dublin and it was during this period of her life that she made friends with Devlin and Caroline, friendships that would endure with women whose lives would intertwine with hers in the future. She remembered so well the night they were moving into the flat below her. Maggie had lived in the house for about three months and the elderly woman in the flat below her was a real dipsomaniac. Maggie had once come in from hanging out clothes on the line to find her swigging the Bacardi Terry had brought her on his last trip to London. From then on she never left her door unlocked. For a while Mrs Ford would be fine and when she was sober she was an elegant cultured lady. But when she went on one of her batters she became slovenly and foul mouthed. She had a family, two sons and a daughter, and once, after a particularly bad binge, she had knocked herself out by falling against the fridge. Hearing the thud, Maggie had gone to investigate and found the poor woman unconscious, a lump as big as a golf ball rising on her forehead. She got her in to hospital, informed the eldest son of what had occurred and the following evening the son called on Maggie to say that the family were putting the mother in a nursing home and that the landlord would be letting the flat again. Maggie had been on tenterhooks wondering who would arrive next. After her experiences with Mrs Ford she was quite wary.

She returned home from work to find a friendly blonde girl and a quiet brown-eyed girl struggling through the front door with an assorted array of black plastic sacks full of all their bits and pieces. The blonde girl was cursing beneath her breath as the bottom fell out of one of the sacks and half a dozen saucepans, and a frying pan and kettle spilled out on to the floor. The brown-eyed girl, catching Maggie’s amused eye, had taken a fit of the giggles at the expression on her friend’s face and eventually they all ended up laughing. Maggie had offered to help them

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