Cecelia Ahern - Short Stories - The Every Year Collection

He reminded Mags of her five brothers with his cheeky smile and overconfident stroll. She could see him demanding food on the table, hot water for his bath and freshly washed clothes every morning just like the boys. He leaned against the confessional box and watched all the single girls from the village being led in a neat line up the aisle by their mothers. The stone floor beneath his feet was scattered with muddy clumps as the muck on the soles of his leather boots dried, cracked and fell to the floor. So Mags felt far from upset when she watched him walk down the aisle with Katie McNamara that year. As all the women had watched the bride and gasped in awe at her dress as she passed, Mags had more interest in watching the soles of Seamus’s feet as he walked away out of the church a married man. Her suspicions had been correct. The mud cracked and fell with every step. To Mags, an obvious sign of what future lay ahead for poor Katie McNamara.

Mags wanted to find a man with shiny shoes, a man who didn’t sweat for a living. If such a creature existed in Kilcrush.

Her mother had been visibly devastated and had dabbed at her eyes throughout the wedding ceremony, claiming to be ‘so happy for Seamus and Katie’ between sniffles. Mags didn’t think it was her posture or her smile or her hair or her walk or her conversation or any of the other things her mother claimed it was that drove him away. Mags didn’t think Seamus even cared about any of those things. He had explained to Grainne that it was Katie’s ‘healthy glow’ that did it for him. Mags had wanted to grab her mother by the hands and dance and twirl her around the room when she heard that. For, much as she hated that brush scraping the powder onto her skin, it removed the healthy glow that could have imprisoned her in Seamus’s farmhouse.

But, despite her joy at not been chosen by the best boy in the village, it left Mags still a single woman at twenty and, much as her parents prayed for it, Mags’s Calling never came. Not of the sort they wanted, anyway.

Agatha’s sniffing the air brought Mags’s mind back to the present, ‘I STILL CAN’T GET IT, MAGS, SO DON’T WORRY.’

Mags rolled her eyes. ‘There is no smell, Aggie.’

‘HA?’ Agatha yelled squinting her eyes in concentration as though doing so would help her hear. ‘There is no smell. Nobody farted, Aggie. Now stop screaming.’ She raised her voice a little more.

‘IT’S ME BAD EAR, MAGS, WHA?’ Agatha shouted.

That did it. Mags’s blood boiled. She was sick and tired of having to repeat herself, and, not only that, her voice was sore at having to shout at Aggie all day every day. If they weren’t careful Aggie would be deaf and Mags would be dumb from having to raise her voice. ‘THERE IS NO SMELL, AGGIE, OK? I. DID. NOT. FART.’

Agatha jumped, the announcer on stage was silenced and a few chuckles were heard around the hall. Mags’s cheeks went pink again and she thought immediately of how angry her mother would be, just as she had been programmed to.

‘Eh … four and four, farty-four, I mean forty-four, excuse me,’ the bingo caller stuttered.

The hall erupted in laughter and Mags snorted. She quickly grabbed her nose to stop it from happening again. Agatha looked around the room confused and turned to stare at her friend with her hand over her nose. ‘DON’T TELL ME YOU DID IT AGAIN, MAGS. IN THE NAME OF JAYSUS ARE YOU TRYIN’ TO KILL US ALL?’ Agatha yelled, sounding exasperated. This time her words weren’t heard by quite so many people over the sound of all the laughter.

Mags tried to control herself, not wanting to be seen to be enjoying herself at the weekly bingo. She liked to think that it was now something she had to do for her friend Aggie and refused to accept the notion that she looked forward to the few hours every week she spent in the local school hall. Her life was far too interesting to be excited by bingo because … well, that would make her old.

And she wasn’t old.

She was seventy-eight. All the same, she couldn’t wait to tell her Connie when she left the bingo hall. How he would have laughed his heart out at this. Oh, yes, there was a man in the end. Cornelius Kelly was his name and Mags adored that man with all her heart. Still did. She couldn’t wait to tell this story to him.

The bingo caller tried to recover from his embarrassment and when the giggles had died down in the hall he resumed his job. ‘Four and three, forty-three.’

Mags smiled. The year she met her Connie.

She had found a man all right. A real man, not one of those ones her mother kept trying to pair her off with, either. She hadn’t wanted to marry a dirty local and have to spend the rest of her life tending for his every unnecessary need. She wanted to fall in love, she wanted to work—and not the kind of work that involved scrubbing clothes and dishes, sewing socks and buttons and cooking. She wanted to work outside of a house.

So she left Kilcrush in the west of Ireland and headed to Dublin City. The big smoke. Her mother and father had been horrified at the very idea when she told them one evening that she was going to join her best friend from school, who had moved up the previous year. Her mother had been convinced she was one of the ‘funny ones’ and no daughter of hers was going to hang around the likes of her in a city full of sin. Dublin City, they said, was not designed for a single woman.

Her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

So she didn’t tell them.

With the money she had saved from selling eggs from the hen her father had given her for her twenty-first (and selling the hen) and a small amount of farm produce at the local market, she bought a train ticket and disappeared into the night. Standing on the pavement on O’Connell Street, she took in the sights, sounds and smells that her new life had to offer. She stared with delight in the great big windows of Clerys department store and had a pain in her neck from standing at the foot of the large granite structure and looking up at Nelson’s Pillar, which she had previously only ever seen in photographs. She breathed in the smoke, the noise, the crowds, the buildings, the trams, so much concrete and such little green—she loved it.

She moved in with her friend Agatha O’Reilly from school to a dark, dingy bedsit in the heart of the city. It was dirty and grotty, noisy and smelly and within days it felt like home to Mags. She took to life very quickly in Dublin. She loved the freedom, she loved being able to go to eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning (or Saturday night if she so wished), where she could wear her hair any way she liked it, go barefaced, sit in the back row and yawn to her heart’s content without being struck down by the Lord. She worked Monday to Friday as a chambermaid in a city hotel near the bedsit and she tried to save every shilling she made and stashed it in a box under her bed. She planned to create the best life for herself.

One night the sweet, sweet music that filtered up through the floor of their bedsit from the smoky club below made Mags and Aggie sit up in bed and listen. The voice of an angel accompanied by the tinkling sound of a piano flowed like warm silky caramel through their ears. Mags closed her eyes and pictured herself and Fred Astaire dancing around the room. It was music so unlike anything she had heard in real life. This was the stuff she saw and heard only in the movie theatres she went to occasionally with Aggie. It wasn’t like ‘The Fields of Athenry’, which she was used to hearing sung in the pubs and at parties at home. There was no screeching fiddle or banging bodhrán, there were just silky soothing sounds that made her feel as if she was a million miles from home.

Every weekend she was transported to New York City, to a smoke-filled jazz club full of sophisticated, strong, beautiful, confident women, with big made-up eyes, rich sparkling jewels and glitzy dresses that revealed more flesh than any man in Mags’s home town dared to even dream about due to the fear of having to confess immoral thoughts. The kind of woman that inhaled sexily on a cigarette balanced effortlessly between gloved fingers, not a hint of their bright-red lipstick left behind on the cigarette tip. They would laugh flirtatiously as they tipped the ash into the tray right on target without even looking while sipping on a Cosmopolitan, being adored by men, envied by other women, not a care in the world.