Read Online The Convent by Maureen McCarthy - Free Book Online

up.
    â€˜You can’t keep it,’ Cecilia gasped. Their lockers were open for inspection all the time by anyone who cared to inspect them.
    â€˜Watch me!’
    â€˜But how … I mean?’
    â€˜I’ll hide it.’
    â€˜But what if she finds it?’
    Oh but it was good to laugh, to feel the knots loosening inside, to feel herself just nineteen years old, with all that energy spluttering to life again.
    â€˜So how …?’
    â€˜Today. Dad slipped it into my pocket.’
    â€˜Breda!’
    â€˜I know, I know.’
    â€˜But it’s so … neat,’ Cecilia whispered.
    Breda pushed it up against Cecilia’s ear. ‘Listen to this,’ she commanded.
    Love me do.
    The simple cheekiness of the tune bounced along Cecilia’s raw nerves like a tennis ball, making her weak suddenly with a dull longing for all that she didn’t know .
    â€˜The Beatles,’ Breda breathed excitedly, ‘from Liverpool in England. They’re coming to Australia. Dad’s going to take my two younger sisters.’
    Cecilia nodded. The yearning in her friend’s voice made her want to weep all over again.
    â€˜Where will the concert be?’
    â€˜Festival Hall.’
    â€˜They’ll tell you all about it at the next visit,’ Cecilia whispered encouragingly. ‘It will be the same as being there.’
    They stared at each other in the light coming through the window, and Cecilia saw then that Breda had been crying too. They both knew that hearing about the Beatles concert from her sisters a month after the event would not be the same as being there.
    â€˜It’s so hard sometimes, isn’t it?’ Breda whispered and Cecilia took her hand.
    â€˜It is,’ she murmured.
    It was after eleven and very cold, but the two newly received, nineteen-year-old brides of Christ were on their wedding night and there was a Beatles special on 3UZ. They stood side by side at the open window, taking turns with the radio, dressed in long plain flannelette nightgowns, their shorn heads turning occasionally, smiling at each other in the darkness, their fingers thrumming along in time with the music on the heavy wood of the window frame.

Peach
    Fuck! This can’t be. But … yes, it is. I’m awake now. Well and truly awake, and I know what I’m hearing. It’s the creak of the cutlery drawer followed by the fridge’s soft slam, then the slow shuffle of my sixteen-year-old sister’s slippers along the kitchen floor. Oh God, here goes.
    Yep. Now it’s the low but definitely discernable sound of the television, some strung-out seventies rock band of course, interspersed with bursts of manic applause. Oh please, not the Sex Pistols again ! I can’t stand it. They’d have to be grandfathers by now.
    It is three a.m. for Christ’s sake! I have an interview in the morning for a job I want. What to do now? What can I do, short of going down and throwing a fit, slamming a few doors, and screeching at the top of my voice for her to shut the hell up?
    In normal weather the creaks, rattles and groans of this old terrace shuts out whatever is happening downstairs, but tonight is so completely still, and so hot, that nothing is moving. When I hit the sack around midnight I left my door wide open hoping to get some air. So why don’t I just get up and close the door?
    For some reason I can’t move. I lie here as rigid as a dead sailor, hammered to the deck by the weird kind of inertia that disappointment creates. That last plan took us both the best part of a day to work out. All those solutions, strategies and promises written down so meticulously and pinned to the back of her bedroom door. The DOs on the left-hand side and the DON’Ts on the right. They’d looked so damned convincing spread across two large white pages. Mum and Dad were going to be so proud of her, of us , when they got back. It’s only two days later and