Ferdia swallowed hard but remained steady.
Jessie looked appalled and said, ‘I never even thought of that.’
‘No money for soap, no money for paracetamol, no money for new socks for Kassandra when the old ones fall apart. The relentlessness of the struggle makes me want to go to bed and never get up.’
‘Why don’t you work?’ Jessie asked. ‘Ireland’s crying out for doctors.’
‘Mum!’ Another explosion from Ferdia. ‘Asylum-seekers can’t work.’
‘But there was a Supreme Court decision. I read about it!’ Jessie was sick of being made to feel stupid.
Ferdia interjected, ‘They have to pay a thousand euro for a permit –’
‘And there’s a list of sixty jobs they can’t take: hospitality, taxi driving, cleaning …’ Nell said.
‘The kind of jobs that people with language difficulties can usually get.’
Ferdia and Nell did a one-two exposition on the sneaky ways the government had effectively blocked asylum-seekers from working.
‘God, that’s awful. I didn’t know …’ Jessie said. ‘I’m sorry for not knowing.’ By way of an apology, she filled Perla’s glass again.
THIRTY-NINE
… while maintaining the basic psychoanalytic paradigm, K. Horney draws attention to the fact that the girl grows, knowing that the man for the society has a ‘heavy price’ in the human and spiritual terms, and thus the cause of masculinity complex in women should look at individual and …
Jesus, he’d literally nearly nodded off there. The two weeks Ferdia had been at this job felt more like two years. All he’d done was read long, teeeeeeedious reports and reduce them to one-page bullet points for the directors. He was studying sociology because he wanted to make an active difference to people’s lives. A trained monkey could do this shit.
But he couldn’t walk away. Johnny had as good as got him the internship because, according to the boss-lady Celeste Appleton, she used to be his girlfriend. Earlier this week, Johnny had actually showed up at the office, giving Ferdia a moment of extreme confusion. Taking Celeste for lunch. ‘Old friends,’ he’d said. Trying to let everyone know that he’d once doinked Celeste, the pathetic old melt.
‘Less of the old,’ Celeste had said, applying a perfect mouth of red lipstick without a mirror – that was kind of cool.
A lot about Celeste was kind of cool. She was hot in a porny, office-ballbreaker kind of way. She stalked around in spiky shoes, silky blouses and narrow skirts, wearing sexy black-framed glasses.
Her hair was beautiful, some sort of shiny dark colour, and she wore it gathered in a heavy bun at the back of her neck.
Sometimes, part way through most of the tedious reports he had to summarize, he fantasized about opening Celeste’s hair-slide just to watch that hefty weight of hair tumble slowly down her back, like a molasses waterfall.
Thank God it was Friday. Wow. Did he really just think that? How quickly he’d become a serf.
Today they’d let him come in early and work through his lunch hour so he could leave at three to catch the train to Westport, a concession they made probably because of Johnny. It was insane making him go to Mayo for Nana and Granddad Casey’s wedding anniversary – they weren’t even his granny and granddad. But his mum had begged him to come. She was tragic, her need for a fakey happy family. She should give it up, because he would never like Johnny and Johnny would never like him.
Saoirse didn’t feel the same, probably because she was too young to remember Dad. She seemed quite happy to be part of a big Casey clan.
Ed was okay, though. Ed was sound.
Liam, on the other hand, was a clown, literally worse than Johnny.
The only reason Ferdia was going to Mayo this weekend was that Barty and Sammie were coming too. Barty was one of the most important people in the world to him. They even looked alike – Barty was a shorter version of Ferdia; people often thought they were brothers. They drove each other mad, but they were literal family.
And Sammie? Sometimes it felt like an odd relief that it was almost over. He was twenty-one now, nearly twenty-two. A man. Which filled him with cold fear. His future was unknown, but whatever it was, he didn’t feel equipped for it. Like, what did actual grown-ups do with their lives? Some high-achievers in his faculty, still a full year out from graduation, were already assured of positions in big banks or accountancy firms – but to do what, exactly? Some sort of murky workings, manipulating capitalism, making