to a yawn, not that that would be any use: Rosie showed no signs of ever needing sleep. She could stay up for hours when they were younger, demanding more and more stories from Peg, who obliged usually, even when there were slim chances of happy endings.
3
Condom (1971–1985)
(1971)
Could something so small cause so much fuss?
Mary Nelligan looked down at the condoms in her handbag and suppressed a giggle; it was hard to imagine the men on the train slipping on something so like a balloon. Forty-one and she was as bad as the children in her class! Mary gathered her composure. This was a serious matter. All the meetings in Bewley’s and the dinners in Mrs Gaj’s restaurant on Baggot Street led to this direct action, a kind so direct that Mary wondered if she might explode with the tension. They – the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement – had decided to protest against the ban on contraception by smuggling in condoms from Belfast, some of which sat innocently in Mary’s bag as the train jostled along.
Were the other women as nervous? If they had any nerves they were hiding them well, chatting to each other or reading the newspaper. Mary looked out at the dreary towns passing by. She felt as if she had a bomb in her handbag. What if the customs guards arrested them on the train and carted them off to jail before they’d made their point? Mary’s shoulders tensed in imagined resistance; she was prepared to fight beside these women, most of whom were younger than her, but had already figured out that the only real way to change the world was to grab it by the scruff of its neck. She might have died for them if it came to it. A foolish thought, absurd in its intensity, yet that was what Mary felt, the train hurtling towards Dublin, her heart hammering along with it, condoms jostling on her lap.
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