Read Online The Stone House by Marita Conlon-Mckenna - Free Book Online Page B

rounds of free drinks for the customers after the swarm invaded the place. There was even one under the deck in the tennis club. They’re bloody everywhere!’
    â€˜Well you just get rid of it safely, John-Joe, before my daughter comes back,’ she instructed.
    As the heatwave continued Kate swam and played tennis in the evenings with a few school friends. As often as she could she went sailing with Uncle Joe and the boys, who kept a small yacht moored off the pier. Lying in the grass half dozing and reading she watched lazily as her mother set to with the secateurs on an overgrown pyracantha bush in the corner of the garden, clearing away branches, and the undergrowth. Moya, spreadeagled, lay in the full sun in a tiny bikini trying to tan herself.
    She remembered the heat and the haze and her mother’s sudden ‘
Oh
!’ of surprise as the paper-like rugby ball shape tumbled from a spiky overhead branch, floating for a second before splitting and shattering in the air, the wasps flying in every direction, falling on her mother’s hair and head and face and covering her bare arms as she frantically tried to brush them off her. Moya jumped up screaming, wrapping the towel she was lying on around herself as Kate flayed uselessly at the wasps with the cushion she’d been sitting on, her mother screaming trying to escape them.
    The wasps moved
en masse
, clinging to her skin, the buzzing loud in the still summer air as her mother screeched and yelled. Kate grabbed the towel off Moya and whacked crazily at them, desperate to get them off their mother, ignoring the stings on her own hand as she tried to knock them off with the towel.
    â€˜Get the hose or a bucket of water!’ she shouted.
    Moya raced back with the hose, then rushed to the kitchen door to turn on the tap, as Kate sprayed her mother with the water, the force managing to loosen some of the wasps, that dripped soggily in clumps onto the grass, others taking off into the air. She sprayed the wasps off her mother’s clothes but others were left in her hair and her ears and around her neck. She looked awful, barely able to speak.
    Moya ran into the house to phone the doctor, but Mary Deegan told her it was her husband’s half-day and that he was out on the golf course and uncontactable. Their neighbours the Costigans were gone to France for a month: Moya and Kate were being paid to feed their cat and water Mrs Costigan’s potted geraniums. The octogenarian Lily Murphy who lived beside them was deaf and couldn’t drive.
    â€˜We have to get her to the doctor or the hospital,’ said Moya, worried.
    â€˜Phone your father. He can drive me,’ murmured Maeve Dillon through lips that were already swollen.
    There was no reply from their father’s office but it could be that he was talking to someone and didn’t bother picking up.
    â€˜I’ll go and get him, Mammy, I’ll only be a few minutes,’ shouted Kate, grabbing her bike and flyingoff down the gravelled driveway, pedalling as fast as she could, heart racing, to the village. She couldn’t believe it – his office was shut, the key turned in the lock. She ran into Paddy Powers bookmakers but there was no sign of him; McHugh’s public house hadn’t seen him either. She’d spotted his big silver Mercedes parked down a laneway. He must be in the town, but where? She looked up and down the street panicking. Half the place was shut as it was Wednesday half-day. Even Lavelle’s café had the blinds down. She thought of Sheila O’Grady. She was friendly with her mother and had an old Renault 4, maybe she could drive her or help her. She raced down the lane to O’Grady’s narrow two-storey house and knocked on the front door, then chased around to the side, calling Mrs O’Grady’s name. She’d been in the house a few times before, collecting Romy or bringing messages from her mother, and now she could