Cecelia Ahern - Short Stories - The Every Year Collection

Twice a week Mags would have to endure this. Once on a Friday before the local dance and again on the Sunday morning before they walked along the potholed road to eight o’clock mass. Mags would have to sit for an hour for her mother while she tied up her hair and powdered her face. Mags wondered why she couldn’t just dip her face into the bowl of flour her mother left sitting on the kitchen counter in preparation for the Sunday homemade apple tart. At least that way not a pink blotch would be in sight.

She would be ordered to sit still, afraid to move a muscle in case she felt the sharp sting of the back of the brush against her flesh, which inevitably caused her cheeks to turn rosy. It was a vicious circle. So she sat tight, hands on lap, back straight (‘A man wouldn’t want a wife with bad posture now, would he, Margaret?) while her five brothers could remain in bed for the extra hour. Mags often felt like questioning her mother on why it was that men didn’t need to make the same effort for women. Mags certainly had no desire for a man who smelled of cow manure, sweat thick with the stench of stale black coffee, muddy big black boots with faded trousers and dried muck in the creases, tucked into their thick black socks (no doubt darned by their mothers and sisters) all held up by a pair of braces. Mags was convinced that the only reason for these was so the men would have a place to rest their thumbs while they stuck their chests out and strolled the town as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Mags had sometimes wished, while sitting for her mother, that she had been born a man. There were few or no rules, fewer expectations and what appeared to be no pressures apart from watching the weather and worrying about the amount of milk they could get from the cow that morning. But she wouldn’t dare share these thoughts with her mother, especially while she had the spiky brush in one hand and a lock of her black silky hair firmly grasped in the other. Mags doubted her mother would have a problem scalping her in an instant; however, the only thing that held her back was the knowledge that a bald patch on a girl is not easy on the watchful eye of a hot, red-blooded young male. No, the hair remained untouched—it was pulled at and twisted, knotted and pinched, but remained unscalped.

Once ready, her mother would call the boys. Mags would hear them mumbling and grumbling and moaning about having to get up at such an early hour. Mags would stare desperately in the mirror at her reflection, her powdery white face appearing ghostlike against the whitewashed walls of her bedroom in the background. While her mother banged around the boys’ bedroom, pulling open curtains and laying out clothes, laughing and pretending to be angered by their protests but secretly loving the attention, Mags sucked in her cheeks, widened her eyes and pretended to float around like the ghost she felt like. It was as though her mother wanted her to be invisible and it wasn’t only the makeup that made Mags feel it.

Her father, when he wasn’t at the pub or working the farm, doted on her. Her mother despised her for it. But he wasn’t one to argue with the woman he married, and, sure, didn’t she know best how to treat a growing young woman when she herself was one? One thing Mags loved him to disagree with was all the makeup she wore going to see The Lord in His House. ‘Our Lord doesn’t need nor require young Margaret to wear a mask in his home, Grainne.’

‘Ah, yes, but our Lord does want young Margaret to find a suitor so she doesn’t grow old a shamed woman. And unless the Lord requires her to be a nun there is no need for her to be without a man. The world isn’t designed for a woman without a man and as far as we know she hasn’t received the Calling.’

Her parents and five brothers had all stopped walking at that point to stand still and stare at Mags. Her cheeks flushed instantly and her mother let out an exasperated sigh as though Mags was deliberately acting out against her mother’s hard work.

Mags gulped and stared back at her family wide-eyed. ‘What is it?’ she stammered.

Her mother shook her head sadly at the lack of grace of her daughter.

‘Have you received the Calling?’ Jackie, her twenty-year-old brother had asked her with a smirk on his face.

‘Margaret! Margaret!’ Her younger brother had called her name playfully in the background.

To Mags’s surprise, her mother started laughing and then immediately smacked her son over the head with her handbag for joking about the Lord. Only Mags’s father watched her face curiously.

‘Em, no, I haven’t,’ Mags whispered in embarrassment. He simply nodded his head once as he absorbed this information and then continued on walking. The rest of the family trudged on after him, overtaking Margaret, whose feet remained firmly fixed to the spot with pure terror and shame. She knew what they were all thinking: if she hadn’t received a calling like Kathleen from down the road and she hadn’t courted a man at the age of twenty then maybe she was one of those ‘funny ones’ that cut their hair short and moved to the city.

‘Hurry along, Margaret,’ her mother had spat angrily, even more disappointed. ‘The Lord waits for no one, especially not twenty-year-old girls who dilly-dally.’

Margaret’s heartbeat quickened at her mother’s tone and she ran to catch up with her family.

‘Sorry,’ she had whispered to their backs as they walked ahead of her. And she had meant it. Sorry she wasn’t more like them. Sorry she lacked the social graces of her mother, the personality of her father, the popularity of her brothers, the beauty of all the other girls in the town.

They arrived at the church at 7.30 in the morning, as they did every week, and gathered with the rest of the congregation for the next half-hour. Mags hated the way the women gossiped about that week’s scandal, hated how her mother pretended not to be interested even though Mags knew she looked forward to those chats all week more than the mass itself. The men would talk about the weather and how it was affecting the crop. Mags loved when the weather was good because her father became a whole new man. They would stay up until all hours listening to his stories and listening to his songs, but when the farm wasn’t going well it felt to Mags as though there was a stranger in the house. He became an intruder who conversed in only grunts and monosyllabic words and appeared only at eating time. A man she didn’t much like.

Finally, the gossip would end when the church bell signalled eight o’clock. They would all pile into the church, which would quickly become packed to the brim with hung-over men, crying children, coughing teenagers, women hiding their yawns out of respect for the ‘Good Lord’ in case he struck them down for such an act of humanity. Mass for Mags was a real-life cattle mart. Her mother would herd the family down the aisle, Mags would walk towards the crucifix to hisses in her ear of ‘Watch your posture, Margaret’ or ‘Look happy for Our Lord, Margaret’ until they reached their usual spot in the front row.

Mags knew now it was no more for Our Lord than for the mice in the field, it was for the rows of young single men who lined the outer aisles, backs against the cold, white, stone walls, thumbs tucked into their braces, wandering eyes staring back at her under floppy fringes. There was one man in particular her mother had her eye on. She tried to convince her Mags it was for her of course but Mags had her suspicions. Her mother became another woman when he was around, laughing at his jokes, being shockingly polite and being far too interested in what the young man had to say for Margaret’s liking. Ploughing a field really wasn’t that comical in Margaret’s opinion and her mother never seemed as enthusiastic to listen when her father talked about it. Seamus O’Reilly was his name, a local who worked on his father’s farm and who probably would be doing the same for the next fifty years of his life. He was twenty-five years of age, strong as an ox, great with his hands and a ‘decent sort of a lad’, according to her father.