Echoes Read Free Page A

her doing this, but once they had seen the bun by itself and it had alarmed Clare greatly because she hadn’t known what it was.
    The dark and very angry eyes of her mother landed on her. “Have you decided that you would like to belong to this family and do what’s required of you? Would it be too much to ask you to take that coat out of my way before I open the range and burn it down to its buttons?”
    She would never do that, Clare knew. She had hoped her mother might have forgotten it during the sojourn upstairs. But the coat was still going to be a cause of war.
    â€œI told her, Agnes—my God, I told her—but children nowadays . . .” Tom sounded defeated and apologetic.
    Clare stuffed her school coat into a crowded cupboard under the stairs and took a few potatoes out of the big sack on the floor. Each evening she and Chrissie had to get the potatoes ready for tea, and tonight, thanks to Chrissie’s disgrace, it looked as if Clare was going to have to do it on her own. In the kitchen sat her younger brothers Ben and Jim; they were reading a comic. The older boys Tommy and Ned would be in from the Brothers shortly, but none of this would be any help. Boys didn’t help with the food or the washing up. Everyone knew that.
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    Clare had a lot to do after tea. She wanted to iron her yellow ribbons for tomorrow. Just in case she won the history essay she’d better be looking smart. She would polish her indoor shoes, she had brought them home specially, and she would make another attempt to get the two stains off her tunic. Mother Immaculata might make a comment about smartening yourself up for the good name of the school. She must be sure not to let them down. Miss O’Hara had said that she had never been so pleased in all her years teaching as when she read Clare’s essay, it gave her the strength to go on. Those were her very words. She would never have stopped Clare in the corridor and said that, if she hadn’t won the prize. Imagine beating all the ones of fifteen. All those Bernie Conways and Anna Murphys. They’d look at Clare with new interest from now on. And indeed they’d have to think a bit differently at home too. She longed to tell them tonight, but decided it was better to wait. Tonight they were all like weasels and anyway it might look worse for Chrissie; after all she was two and a half years older. Chrissie would murder her too if she chose to reveal it tonight. She took upstairs a big thick sandwich of cheese, a bit of cold cooked bacon and a cup of cocoa.
    Chrissie was sitting on her bed, examining her face in a mirror. She had two very thick plaits in her hair; the bits at the ends after the rubber bands were bushy and didn’t just hang there like other people’s; they looked as if they were trying to escape. She had a fringe which she cut herself so badly that she had to be taken to the hairdresser to get a proper job done on it, and at night she put pipe cleaners into the fringe so that it would curl properly.
    She was fatter than Clare, much, and she had a real bust that you could see even in her school tunic.
    Chrissie was very interested in her nose, Clare couldn’t understand why but she was always examining it. Even now in all the disgrace and no meal and the sheer fury over what she had done to Miss O’Flaherty she was still peering at it looking for spots to squeeze. She had a round face and always looked surprised. Not happily surprised, not even when someone was delivering her an unexpected supper.
    â€œI don’t want it,” she said.
    â€œDon’t eat it then,” Clare returned with some spirit.
    She went back downstairs and tried to find a corner where she could learn the poem for tomorrow; and she had to do four sums. She often asked herself how was it that with six people living in that house who were all going to school, why was she the only one who ever needed to do any homework?
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    Gerry