Going Places

On their way home from school, Sophie informs her friend Jansie that one day she will own a boutique. Skeptical, Jansie tells Sophie that she would need money, but Sophie is undeterred. She says she’ll be a manager first, which Jansie finds implausible, but Sophie is confident that her natural talent will land her “the most amazing shop this city’s ever seen.”

Jansie, who knows that both she and Sophie are destined to work at the biscuit factory, feels sad when Sophie talks like this, and she asks Sophie to “be sensible,” since shop work isn’t lucrative and Sophie’s father would never allow it. Sophie replies that maybe she will be an actress, since there’s “real money in that.” She muses that she could have a boutique or be a fashion designer on the side, since actresses don’t work full time.

Walking into her home, Sophie announces that if she ever comes into money, she will buy a boutique. Her father replies that, if she had money, she would “buy us a blessed decent house to live in, thank you very much.” Sophie’s little brother Derek quips that Sophie “thinks money grows on trees,” and their mother sighs. Sophie watches her mother “stooped over the sink,” noticing the “incongruity” between the “delicate bow” on her apron strings and her “crooked back.” The “small room” is “cluttered” with her “heavy-breathing” father and the “dirty washing piled up in the corner.” Feeling a “tightening in her throat,” Sophie goes to find her older brother, Geoff.

Geoff, an “apprentice mechanic,” is in the next room working on a part of his motorcycle. Every day he travels to the “far side of town” for work, and—since he is “almost grown up”—Sophie suspects that there are parts of his life he doesn’t tell her about. In fact, he rarely speaks at all, and Sophie is “jealous of his silence.” When he isn’t speaking, it seems as though he is “away somewhere…she had never been,”  places that fascinate Sophie because they are “out of reach” to her.

Sophie also imagines that Geoff is secretly friends with “exotic, interesting people,” although she concedes that he is “quiet” and doesn’t “make new friends easily.” Still, she longs for Geoff to like her enough to “take her with him.” She is conscious of a “vast world out there waiting for her,” and she knows that she will feel at home there. In her mind, she sees herself riding behind Geoff on his motorcycle with him wearing “shining black leathers” and her “a yellow dress with a kind of cape.” She imagines applause as “the world [rises] to greet them.”

As Geoff works on the motorcycle, Sophie says “I met Danny Casey.” Geoff does not believe her, and then he asks if she has told their father. This upsets Sophie, because she wants Geoff to understand that he is “the first” to hear her secrets. She claims that she met Danny Casey while out shopping, and when Geoff asks what he looked like, Sophie notes that he has “gentle eyes” and is “not as tall as you’d think.”

In the living room, Geoff tells their father about Sophie meeting Danny Casey. Their father turns his “thick neck” to look at Sophie with “disdain.” He and Geoff argue about how good at football Danny Casey is (with her father suggesting that Casey is too young to play professionally) when Sophie interjects that Danny Casey is going to “buy a shop.” Grimacing, Sophie’s father asks if this is another of her “wild stories,” and Geoff defends her. Their father tells Sophie that someday she is going to “talk [herself] into a load of trouble,” and he says that Geoff doesn’t believe her, “though he’d like to.”

In Geoff’s bedroom, which is full of posters of Danny Casey, Sophie swears Geoff to secrecy about something, saying that their dad would “murder” her. Geoff protests that he would only murder Sophie if he believed her, and Danny Casey “must have strings of girls.” Sophie protests that Danny Casey “isn’t like that”—he’s “quiet,” and Sophie was the one who approached him. She tells Geoff that she asked if he was Danny Casey and he looked surprised, and then when she asked for an autograph, they couldn’t find a pen, so they talked about clothes for a while. She said he seemed “lonely” being so far from Ireland, and he asked if she would meet him next week to get the autograph.

“You do believe me now, don’t you?” Sophie asks Geoff. She watches him put on a “shiny and shapeless” jacket and wishes to herself that he paid attention to his looks and cared about clothes. He tells her that the story is the “unlikeliest thing he ever heard.”

On Saturday, Sophie’s whole family attends a football match, and their team wins with Danny Casey scoring the final goal. Sophie “glow[s] with pride” and Geoff is “ecstatic.” Their father goes to the pub to celebrate.

The following week, Jansie asks Sophie about meeting Danny Casey, and Sophie is “startled” and dismayed. This is a “Geoff thing, not a Jansie thing,” she thinks, cursing Geoff for sharing what was meant to be “something special just between them” with Jansie, who gossips to the whole neighborhood. Sophie says that it’s a secret, since she wants to keep it from her dad. When Jansie says she would think Sophie’s father would be pleased, Sophie realizes that Geoff didn’t tell Jansie about the date, and she is relieved, thinking that Geoff “believe[s] in her after all” and that “some things might be sacred.” Jansie says she wishes she had been there to meet Danny Casey, but Sophie dismisses it as a “little thing, really.”

After dark, Sophie walks by the canal to “a wooden bench beneath a solitary elm where lovers sometimes came.” She thinks that it’s the “perfect place” for a date, and she knows that Danny Casey would approve. While she waits, she imagines him appearing, and “some time elapse[s]” before she begins to entertain the possibility of him not coming.

Sophie wishes fervently that Danny Casey would come, but she feels “pangs of doubt.” She remembers Geoff telling her that Danny Casey “would never come” and “how none of them believed me when I told them.” Sophie wonders what she’ll tell them if Danny Casey doesn’t come. Even though “we know how it was, Danny and me,” Sophie still becomes “despondent” at knowing that she’ll “never be able to show them they’re wrong to doubt me.”

Sophie is sad, which is a “hard burden to carry.” She sits waiting and “knowing he won’t come,” and she “can see the future”: her family will doubt her, as “they always have,” so she will have to “hold up [her] head remembering how it was.” She imagines the “slow walk home” and Geoff’s “disappointed face” when she tells him Danny Casey didn’t come. He’ll slam the door, but Sophie will tell herself that she and Danny “know how it was.”

Walking home, Sophie climbs “crumbling steps” and notices her dad’s bike propped against a wall by the pub. She’s glad that he won’t be there when she arrives home.

Sophie pictures herself meeting Danny Casey at the shops again. She asks him for an autograph, and she notices that his eyes are “on the same level” as her own, he smiles “shyly,” and his eyes are “gentle, almost afraid.” Danny Casey runs his eyes over Sophie and she looks at him, “breathless.” After he’s gone, she stands in the store remembering him: he’s “No taller than you. No bolder than you. The prodigy. The innocent genius.” She remembers the previous Saturday as he maneuvered the ball into the goal to an “eruption of exultant approbation.”