"Ulysses"

In September 1906, James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus that he was considering adding one more tale to his Dubliners collection entitled "Ulysses." In 1907, however, he told Stanislaus that he "never got any forrader than the title." The JJQ decided that this gap in the record needed to be filled and sponsored a short-story contest where entries had to be set in turn-of-the-century Dublin and written in the style of the other pieces from Dubliners. Our winner is Nuala O'Connor, and this is her imaginative creation of "Ulysses."

Mr Thomas Broderick, once off the Galway train, was not sure how to take a tram or omnibus into Dublin city and so he decided to walk from Kingsbridge Station. Hailing a passer-by, he asked for directions, then Broderick struck out east by the River Liffey. He had left Galway under mizzle but it was a dry, cold spring morning in Dublin and that meant he could take in his surrounds with ease. Broderick stopped by the river wall at Usher's Island to study the water; he felt like taking a closer look because the river's high, weedy smell, and its meander, were so unlike the fervent spill of the Corrib into the sea at the Claddagh where he lived. He put his hands to the granite wall and conjured the foam-thick, portery rush of the Corrib and marvelled that the famous Liffey was a soupy, brown-murked, narrow stretch with little life to it. Broderick tapped the river wall with his fingers and walked on.

The redbrick houses that rose so high on both sides of the quays seemed to him a poor affair for they blocked the sky's light. When he looked about he agreed with himself that everything had a sombre hue: the clouds, the buildings, the Liffey. Dublin was surely the dimmest, most dreary of towns. He wondered how Ellen stayed in it at all. His daughter had left Galway in a clandestine hurry—a small misunderstanding had arisen between them—and Ellen was living life sub rosa in Dublin since. But word had come west that she had secured a job in Finn's Hotel off Nassau Street, and was living there too, and Mr Broderick meant to go to Finn's, find her and talk to her.

A tram truckled past but Broderick did not regret that he was not on it—he welcomed the vigour that a brisk walk afforded; he was not a man for idling about. He had risen at two o'clock that morning, as always, and fashioned loaves of bread in his brother's bakery before taking the train. Now it suited him to stride forward up the quays toward his daughter. It was his intention not just to uncover Ellen, but to bring the girl home to her mother and her people. Ellen had always been a singular person—high-minded and sure of herself—and that sometimes lead to discord. She had been that way since a small child.

Mr Broderick pulled at his collar, it heated him now to remember the last exchange between his daughter and himself.

"You've been to see that Protestant," Broderick had said to Ellen, when she came in late that last night, the cool sea air hanging around her clothes like a halo.

She haughtied her head as she was wont to do. "I have not," she said.

"You were seen below in the Nun's Island, walking arm in arm with him. Do you take me for a fool? Or your uncle that saw you for a liar?"

"Well, what if I was with him?" Ellen said and there was something like a smile running across her lips. "We were doing no harm." She turned away from her father.

"You low pup," Broderick murmured and his wife tried to pull him out of the room and up the stairs, but the hazel stick was already in his hand and he crashed it twice, then twice more, across his daughter's back.

"Daddy, Daddy!" Ellen cried out and she turned to implore...