Read Online Living With Evil by Cynthia Owen - Free Book Online

heard her come into the room, and her voice made me jump, because it suddenly sounded hard. I felt my spine stiffen as I turned round.
     
    Mammy thrust a crumpled, faded, yellow bundle at me and in a stern voice that was not to be argued with said: ‘It has been handed down through all the girls in the family.’
     
    The dress looked like an old rag, and I felt tears fizzing up behind my eyeballs. I wanted to blurt out: ‘How many girls? How many years?’ but I held my quivering tongue. Mammy would kill me and call me an ungrateful little bitch. I wanted to go downstairs and eat sweets with my brothers and sisters. I didn’t want to be hit or called names.
     
    ‘Thank you, Mammy,’ I said quietly, blinking rapidly to push the tears back inside my head. When she left the room I took off the socks and shoes and sobbed silently into my veil.
     
    The following week, Mother Clara told us all to bring in our dresses for a rehearsal. I dawdled all the way to school, the faded dress shoved into a tatty old laundry bag. It felt like I was carrying around a shameful secret. As I arrived I caught glimpses of net underskirts fluttering in the breeze, escaping from the bottom of fancy suit-carriers being proudly paraded into school by the other girls.
     
    I was dreading the moment Mother Clara would tell us to put our dresses on, but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to let it break me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told myself firmly. ‘Nothing is going to spoil my First Holy Communion. I have a veil and a handbag, and new gloves and socks and shoes! I’ll puff out the veil and make it hide the dress. Yes! That’s what I’ll do.’
     
    I realized I had toughened up a lot since I started school. I had been humiliated and bullied so many times by Mother Dorothy that I couldn’t possibly let it get to me every day, or I would have just ended up as crumpled and ragged as my dress, and then she would have won.
     
    I didn’t want her to win, so I put on a brave face. When the time came to put on my dress, I pushed back my shoulders and tried to hold my head high. I could hear other girls oohing and aahing over each others’ dresses while I shuffled along at the back, desperately trying to make myself look proud and decent when all I really wanted to do was disappear.
     
    The rehearsal was an awful ordeal. ‘Focus on what you are actually doing, girls!’ Mother Clara instructed. ‘You are taking the body of Christ for the very first time. It is a momentous occasion in your life! You are receiving Christ!’
     
    I thought about nothing but my terrible dress, and when we practised eating the holy bread it stuck to the roof of my mouth like cardboard because I was so parched with nerves and tension. When the posh girls gave me sideways glances, nudging each other and sniggering behind their hands, I looked them straight in the eye and bit the inside of my cheek so I didn’t cry. ‘Don’t you dare cry,’ I warned myself. ‘Then they would win. Don’t cry. Be brave.’
     
    Afterwards, Mother Clara took me to one side and whispered that she would like to make me a new dress. I guessed she must have felt sorry for me, but I was too relieved and delighted to feel embarrassed by her pity.
     
    ‘Yes please!’ I said gratefully. ‘Thank you so much, Mother Clara. That is so very kind of you!’
     
    It was kind of her, but it gave me another problem.
     
    I walked home full of trepidation as to what Mammy would say. I knew she would go mad. I decided the best way to break the news was to make it sound as unimportant as possible. I just had to come out with it.
     
    ‘Oh yeah - did I tell you, Mammy?’ I said casually. ‘Mother Clara is going to make me a new Holy Communion dress… that’s kind, isn’t it?’
     
    Mammy immediately sat up. Her eyes were blank and her lips set in a mean snarl.
     
    ‘We do not accept charity, Cynthia. You cannot accept it. Do you hear me? Tell that nun to keep her nose out of our