The Four Streets Read Free

knew their story that Jerry and Bernadette had benefited from that all too rare but wonderful thing, love at first sight.
    He realized as he walked over to her that there was no reason on God’s earth why he, a complete and total stranger, should be taking a mug of sweet tea to a woman he had never met in his life before and might never meet again. Jerry introduced himself, as best he could, but it came out as a prolonged and indistinguishable jabbering.
    Holy Mary, he thought to himself, where the feck has me sensibility gone and why is me hand shaking like a virgin on her wedding night, spillin’ the bleedin’ tea everywhere?
    Although Jerry was talking gibberish, Bernadette could tell he was offering her the tea. So desperate was she to feel better that she accepted it, assuming that he could see how ill she felt.
    ‘Thank ye,’ she whispered, as she took the mug out of his hand, managing a very thin and feeble smile that she didn’t for one second feel herself. ‘I’m so glad there is someone who knows the cure for how bad I feel.’ She tried to improve the smile and look grateful, whilst her stomach did an Irish jig in her belly.
    Jerry’s stomach also began a jig, but it had nothing to do with feeling seasick. He smiled to himself at how it seemed to have gone into free fall, something he had never experienced before.
    Bernadette was doubly grateful for the tea as she had only half a crown in her purse and hadn’t wanted to waste a penny. She wasn’t sure if drinking tea with milk was the right thing to do in the circumstances, but she trusted him. He looked trustworthy – and gorgeous; even through her sickness she could see that. And why shouldn’t she drink the tea in any case? In Ireland, strong, sweet tea was the cure for everything from scurvy to colic.
    As she drank slowly and tentatively, Jerry studied every detail of her profile, her neck and her hair, which kept blowing across her face, covering it like a lace veil. Finding his sea legs at the same time as his courage, Jerry played the fool with his best show-off jokes and Bernadette tried her best to laugh at his audacity. After all, he was outrageously flirting with a sick woman. Suddenly, without warning, they both saw the tea again, all over the deck and Jerry’s shoes.
    Jerry sprang into action. The wind had met its match. He gathered Bernadette’s flyaway hair together and spun it into a knot, before tucking it back under her cap as tightly as he could, for fear she would vomit straight onto it. Bernadette was beyond caring that a stranger was stroking the back of her neck and whispering soothing, comforting noises into her ear. Her eyes had filled with tears of shame and she looked as though her knees were about to buckle at any moment.
    Jerry kept hold of Bernadette, and her hat, keeping her hair away from her face for almost the entire crossing. The seasickness claimed her as she vomited over the rail all the way to Liverpool during the notoriously choppy journey across the Irish Sea.
    As deathly as the seasickness made her feel, Bernadette had noticed Jerry’s black wavy hair and, for an Irishman, his unusually broad shoulders. He wore a typically oversized cap, which, although pulled down low over his forehead against the wind, blew off to the other side of the deck so that Jerry, thrown from side to side by the rocking of the boat, had to run like a madman to rescue it. Despite how ill she felt, she laughed. It was impossible not to laugh at this cheeky Irishman.
    They didn’t leave each other’s side for the entire crossing. If they had, Bernadette might have fallen over. By the time they docked at Liverpool, she felt she had known him all her life. To be fair, she had: not necessarily Jerry, but many young men from home just like him. However, it was the fact that there was something very chippy and confident about Jerry that made him different and extremely attractive, despite her self-imposed intention to meet a rich American