Read Online The Story of Danny Dunn by Bryce Courtenay - Free Book Online

know?’ she shouted, then turning back to Danny she hissed, ‘ You are mortified! Well, now I’m the one mortified, see! Because yer such a bloody coward! Afraid of what people will think. I don’t care what people think – I don’t give a shit!’
    Danny had never before heard Brenda swear, but he was damned if he was going to cave in.
    â€˜Mum, can’t you see – it’s showing off! It’s bragging!’
    Brenda burst into tears. ‘Can’t I show off . . . even once?’ she asked.
    Danny, shocked to see his mum cry, tried to make her understand. ‘It’s making them eat crow! Mum, most of my best mates haven’t even got permanent jobs and neither have their fathers. They’re still lining up at Pyrmont every morning hoping for the privilege of a day’s work. Their brothers and sisters go hungry as often as they eat, and here am I boasting because I was lucky enough to go to Fort Street then get into uni! Throwing a party for a bunch of freeloaders . . . Jesus, Mum, it’s just not on!’ Danny yelled, now close to tears himself, but unable to stop. ‘Your speech today about me going to uni to get a BA, how proud you were I’d be a somebody, it’s rubbing their noses in it! Don’t think it doesn’t all add up! Stopping me going to the Olympics, when they’d have killed to have one of their sons selected, this bloody stupid piss-up, and then going on and on about me having diphtheria when I was six and missing out on a year of schooling and now, hooray, I’m off to uni. Ferchrissake! It’s only a fucking BA!’
    Brenda burst into fresh tears. Danny’s university career was her emotional blind spot. Scrubbing the pub floor at midnight in the bad old days, wiping up the vomit in the toilets, or the piss on the tiles, or the crappy toilet lid where somebody had been too drunk to know it was down, all of this and more she’d happily endured in the knowledge that Danny Corrib Dunn, her precious son, who’d very nearly killed her in childbirth, who’d come close to dying as a small boy, would one day go to university.
    The vision of her father in his Irish tweed marriage suit, woollen shirt and polished side-buttoned boots in the scorching heat of her wedding day in Wagga had never left her. She could still see the great beads of sweat trickling down his scrawny cheeks and neck as he led her to the altar at St Michael’s, blinking the perspiration out of his eyes. She recalled his blistered, sun-scabbed face, his hopeless, pale-blue eyes reflecting all that he’d silently endured, the bitter lines etched around his mouth by a pitiless and unforgiving land; a man who had left the sweet grass and green fields of Ireland, never again to feel the evening breeze blow in from Galway Bay, who’d lived his young life in a crofter’s stone cottage looking out onto the sparkling waters of Lough Corrib as he woke each dew-glittering morning. He’d left to make his fortune in a new land that had rewarded him with nothing more than a baking corrugated-iron roof over his head, a handful of dust and a weekly charity handout from his daughter. It was never going to happen again.
    Her son would be a ‘somebody’, an educated man who could hold his head up in any company, a man who didn’t have to remove his hat and hold it by the brim in both hands and look down at his feet when he was addressed by a smug, patronising bank manager leaning back in his captain’s chair behind his big desk with his thumbs hooked into his braces.
    Brenda didn’t see the beautiful boy who caused a young woman’s knees to tremble when his deep-blue eyes picked her out in a crowd or the lopsided grin that every girl knew she would be unable to resist. She didn’t care about the brilliant young sportsman who was being spoken of as almost certainly a Kangaroo rugby