A Taste for Love Read Free

support from Malcolm and eventually pick herself up and get on. She had made a new life for herself centred round her daughter Beth, her friends and family, and her work as a teacher.
    Alice knew that it was a lesson that she needed to learn, too.

Chapter Two
    Lucy Brennan stared at the standard polite rejection letter. She had sent twenty-two copies of her CV out to a number of shops and businesses over the past ten days, and only two had bothered to reply. This was the third, saying there were no current vacancies, but that they would keep her details on file. It was so depressing! Lucy rammed the letter into a bundle in the drawer of her desk. She had been unemployed officially now for twelve months, and judging by this letter it certainly didn’t look like anything was going to change.
    She was broke, single and back living with her parents! Her life was a Tragedy with a capital T! This time last year she’d had a great job, a great boyfriend, and been sharing a house in Ranelagh with Anna and Megan, two old school friends. They’d called it ‘the party house’ as it was always full of friends. So many great nights had started and ended back in the small red-bricked terraced house on Warwick Road. Then, fast as you could say global recession, economic downturn, banks, builders and bloody NAMA, everything had collapsed around them. Everyone was suddenly broke and looking for work, or trying to hang on to their jobs. Each time she turnedon the news or read a newspaper things were getting worse. It was so depressing. She was twenty-five, and this was meant to be her heyday – not the nightmare it had become.
    First, she had lost her job. Phoenix Records, the small record store off Clarendon Street where she worked, had closed down. She had pitied Jeremy and Charlie, the owners, as they’d watched sales dwindle week after week, everyone downloading their music to their iPods and iPhones, so that trying to sell CDs had become almost impossible.
    She’d felt bad for the guys in the young bands that Jeremy had promoted, putting their posters up in the window and giving their tracks a push by playing their music in the shop and advertising their gigs. Jeremy had had to give them back stacks of unsold CDs and tell them not to give up hope … things had to change … great music would always have a place in a civilized society. First Jeremy had cut her wages, then her hours, until eventually, heartbroken, he had explained that he could no longer afford the rent and he and Charlie were just going to close up and hand back the key to their landlord. Phoenix Records, for the moment, would have to shut.
    ‘But I promise you, Lucy, if, like our name, we rise from the ashes of this economic mess, you will be the first person we hire back.’
    ‘Thanks,’ she had said, hugging him, knowing how much money he and Charlie had lost over the past two years in the failing business. Music was their life, and she knew the two of them were almost broke. She couldn’t imagine her life without the small store with the big heart that could sell out a concert or a gig, and had even broken two or three of the big Irish bands and singers over the years. What would she dowithout the shop and the music and their customers? It had hardly seemed like work, coming in to a place she loved so much. She had immediately tried to get another job, Jeremy giving her an amazing reference, but no one had wanted a girl with no proper qualifications who only knew about bands and the music scene and how it all worked.
    At least, as she had told herself at the time, she had still had Josh Casey, her boyfriend of fourteen months. They were mad about each other and joked about having more time to spend together now that she was footloose and fancy-free. At first it had seemed great, but month after month it had eaten away at them. Josh, fully qualified, had become focused on his own job in the big firm of solicitors on the Quays. He had had to work later in