CHAPTER ONE

      “I’m going.” Tony O’Neill gave the door a good slam.

      “And don’t bother coming back,” his wife Jean shouted angrily. Tony heard the baby start to cry. He wanted to go back into the house and cuddle her but Jean would say he was spoiling her. Tony looked back. He could see his mother-in-law peering through the lace curtains that hung on the windows of her small red-brick house. When she saw him looking back she hastily dropped the curtains. Tony sighed. Mrs Feeny would blame him for the row. His mother-in-law blamed him for everything these days.

      Tony walked slowly in the direction of Phibsboro. It was starting to rain. The sky was low and grey. Big raindrops plopped onto the ground in front of him. That was all he needed. He quickened his pace. He could take shelter in the newsagents down the road. The rain came faster and heavier until it was a downpour. Tony had to run the last few steps to shelter.

      He stood looking at the newspapers in the rack, his eyes skimming across the headlines. Interest rates up. Mortgages up. Unemployment figures up. The punt down. All bad news. As usual. He knew all about bad news. Being unemployed and living with your mother-in-law was about the worst thing.

      He’d been a printer in a small printing firm. It had specialised mostly in wedding stationery and Thank You cards and party invitations and such like. The firm had been doing well. Then there had been a postal strike. Orders stopped coming in. Existing orders had not been paid for. The staff began to get very worried. With good reason. After several weeks, with no sign of a settlement in sight, the boss called a meeting. The business had failed and he had no choice but to make his staff redundant.

      That was the worst day of Tony’s life. Going home to their flat to tell Jean the news had been dreadful. He felt that he had let her down terribly. After all it was his duty to provide for his wife and new baby daughter. Some of his mates were redundant and he had never been able to understand their misery at signing on the dole. He couldn’t understand when they talked about it taking away their pride. Wasn’t it great to get money handed out to you? You could spend all day doing exactly what you wanted to do, he once joked with Mick, a pal of his.

      “It’s not like that at all,” Mick snapped.

      Tony thought he was being a bit touchy. Now he understood. Signing on robbed a man of his pride. Robbed him of his independence. And robbed him of his will to get up off his ass and do something.

      The first morning he had signed on he felt worthless. Although the girl behind the counter had been very nice and helpful, Tony went home to Jean, put the money on the table, and cried like a baby. His wife tried to comfort him. It was only temporary. Things would improve. He would get another job, she assured him.

      Nothing she said eased his fears. Tony had seen men like himself, men younger than him, and older men who had been signing on for years. They too had tried to get jobs. And failed, time and again. Why should he be any different? New technology that made man’s skills unnecessary was helping to cut down on the workforce. Computers didn’t take tea- and lunch-breaks. They didn’t take an hour off each week to cash a pay-cheque. They didn’t need unions to fight for their rights. Bloody computers, he hated them.

      That first terrible week of his unemployment he sat down with the Golden Pages directory and wrote to every printing firm listed. He wrote to all the newspapers, local and national. Jean, who had worked as a typist before her marriage, typed his CV neatly and expertly. He wrote over fifty letters seeking employment. He cycled the length and breadth of the city hand-delivering them. He prayed that the postal dispute would end so that the postman could start delivering the replies. Surely, out of the fifty firms he had written to, he’d get a job offer from one of them.

      With great anticipation Tony heard the ending of the postal dispute announced on the six o’clock news one evening several weeks later. The next morning he was waiting for the postman. To his dismay all he got were several brown envelopes containing bills, and a card from his sister who had been in Spain on holidays.

      “Don’t worry,” Jean assured him. “They’ll have lots of mail to sort. There’s probably loads of replies waiting for you.”

      Tony got two replies out of the fifty letters he had sent out. Both regretting that they could not offer him employment. He was gutted. Despair enveloped him. What a failure he was as a husband and father. “Stop worrying, we’re managing all right. Something will turn up,” Jean encouraged. But he could see the new worry lines in her face. The anxious furrowing of her brow when more brown envelopes with their unwelcome bills dropped on the doormat in the mornings.

      “Maybe I should go to England,” Tony suggested glumly. “I’d surely get a job there.”

      “It’s as bad there as it is here. Hold on for a while. We’re not on our uppers yet,” his wife said, but Tony could not get rid of the nagging anxiety that weighed him down.

      They quickly learned to economise. No more Chinese take-aways. No newspapers. No more biscuits or cakes. They started to buy cheaper loo rolls and cheaper nappies for the baby. Yellow-pack labels saved them a few pounds. As fast as the sand in the egg-timer, their little nest egg of savings disappeared. Jean suggested that maybe they should start looking for a less expensive flat.

      Her mother stepped in and suggested that they come and live with her until things picked up and her son-in-law got another job.

      “I think it’s for the best, Tony. At least it won’t be taking an enormous amount out of your dole money in rent. I could look after baby Angela for Jean if she was able to get a part-time job,” Mrs Feeny said with that delicate breathy voice that hid a will of iron. Tony knew he would be making a big mistake by agreeing to his mother-in-law’s suggestion. They’d manage on their own. Thousands … no millions of people managed in similar circumstances and he’d get a job somewhere, he knew it. “Let’s wait another little while,” he urged his wife. But he could see that she wanted to move in with her mother.

      “I’ll get a job in an office or maybe a shop