conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'Felicia's Journey'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Felicia's Journey
  It's cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke's, fifty pence each. They have Chawke's name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes for her Irish ones.
  Not many people are travelling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in a corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses.
  It is the evening ferry; she wasn't in time for the morning one. 'That's Ireland's Eye,' one of the children called out not long after the boat drew away from the quayside, and Felicia felt safe then. It seems a year ago since last night, when she crept with the carrier bags from the bedroom she shares with her great-grandmother to the backyard shed, to hide them behind a jumble of old floorboards her father intends to make a cold frame out of. In the morning, while the old woman was still sleeping, she waited in the shed until the light came on in the kitchen, an indication that her father was back from Heverin's with the Irish Press. Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn't know about the money yet, that they wouldn't even have found the note she'd left, but none of that was a help.
  For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again. Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. 'Sorry,' Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn't matter. There can't be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn't had much to eat that day. 'Take a drink of water,' one of the girls advises. 'We'll be in in twenty minutes.' The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. 'God, I'm sorry!' the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. 'I thought it was the ship's.'
  Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn't there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn't have found the note until he went in with the old woman's breakfast. 'She's taken herself off,' he'd have told her brothers and there wouldn't have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn't have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he'd have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Inside, trestle-tables and benches are set out in rows. In a corner there's a sink, beside a refrigerator and a gas stove. Three other women are spreading sliced bread with margarine; a fifth is pouring tea from a large metal teapot into rows of mugs with milk already in them. There's a smell of gas and washing-up.
  The morning visitors shuffle in, mostly men, all of them unkempt. They are silent except for two who mutter quarrelsomely. Lena has begun again about her colleague in gaol and the scheme she has devised for extracting extra benefits from the social-security system. 'That'll do there,' the woman pouring tea sharply calls out, a reprimand to the men who are quarrelling. They're not running a beer garden, the woman adds jollily, doing her best to cheer the men out of their disagreement. But the men remain morose.
  Two more women, clearly not intent on sustenance, and younger than the women supplying it, enter the hall. Swiftly they survey those gathered there, and choose Felicia and her companions to approach first. 'The Aids brigade,' Lena remarks.
  When the Aids women have passed on, and in a tone that suggests he has been giving the matter thought during their harangue, George says:
  He nods repeatedly to emphasize this conclusion, and Lena says she agrees. Not in their line, she adds, but there you are. They finish the breakfast they've been provided with and Lena says:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Wretched, awful man, poor mockery of a human creature, with his pebble spectacles and the tiny hands that didn't match the rest of him, his executioner's compulsion'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Wretched, awful man, poor mockery of a human creature, with his pebble spectacles and the tiny hands that didn't match the rest of him, his executioner's compulsion. Her living brought his death, but she didn't say so, listening to him vilified that day; she didn't say he was more terrible than a man who stole a distressed girl's money; she didn't mention murder, for what use would that be, now that he had murdered himself? 'Please, child, come back to us!' Miss Calligary cried, but she shook her head, even though she remembered the generosity and the friendliness of the Gathering House when first she arrived there. She shook her head at each repeated invitation, hearing between one plea and the next about the visits made to Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, and how its occupant's manner had seemed like madness to Miss Marcia Tibbitts, and how there'd been an occasion at a police station after the death occurred, a sergeant who'd been dismissive. In the end, reluctantly, Miss Calligary and Miss Marcia Tibbitts walked away, passing for ever out of her life.
  Again her thoughts shift: to a mother collapsed on the kitchen floor, and seaside shells brought back later in kindly compensation; to speckled green bird's eggs, and John Count's singing, no sign then of her father's bitter eyes; to the inflicted wound that answered the ignominy of a husband gone away, and love for a son, as gentle as a cancer. Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been.
  Such contemplations, alien to her once, fill Felicia's day. She seeks no meaning in the thoughts that occur to her, any more than she searches for one in her purposeless journey, or finds a pattern in the muddle of time and people, but still the thoughts are there. Alone, no longer a child, no longer a girl, with the insistence of the grateful she goes from place to place, from street to street, binding her feet up, wet by rain that penetrates her clothes, frozen when there is ice on the gutter puddles. By day the clouds scutter or hardly move, or crowd away the sun in shades of grey, or blackly advance in bunched-up density, like ominous monsters of the sky. They're there again in wind-blown tails of smoke, in big white bundles soft as down, in scarlet morning streaks. Sometimes all day there is an empty blue, hazy with mist or cleanly bright, backdrop for spindly winter trees, and backdrop again for summer greenery. At night, there is a city's afterglow. There is a happiness in her solitude at dawn.
  The leaf blows from her palm in another soft breeze. The watchful seagull struts the parapet, still hungry for crumbs that are not there. Someone stopped who need not have, and called an ambulance for Dumb Hanna when she lay senseless on the street. The ladies come at night with soup, well-meaning, never forgetting, no matter what the weather. The woman dentist said don't be in pain. The woman dentist has dedicated her existence to the rotten teeth of derelicts, to derelicts' odour and filth. Her goodness is a greater mystery than the evil that distorted a man's every spoken word, his every movement made. You would say it if you could, a new thought is, but sometimes saying isn't easy.
  Idiot gawking, fool tramping nowhere: shreds of half-weary pity are thrown in the direction of a wayside figure, before the hasty glance darts on to something else. There will be other cities, and the streets of other cities, and other roads, Tappers and Georges and Lenas, Kevs and Davos and Dumb Hannas. There will be charity and shelter and mercy and disdain; and always, and everywhere, the chance that separates the living from the dead. Again the same people wander through her thoughts: the saint and the Little Sisters, Elsie Covington and Beth, Sharon and Gaye and Jakki and Bobbi, her mother not aged by a day. Are they really all together among the fragrant flowers, safe and blessed? She might be with them if it had happened; but she reflects, in modest doubt, that the certainty she knows is still what she would choose. She turns her hands so that the sun may catch them differently, and slightly lifts her head to warm the other side of her face.