Echoes Read Free Page B

Doyle came in as she was ironing her yellow ribbons.
    â€œWhere’s Chrissie?” he asked Clare in a whisper.
    â€œShe’s upstairs. There was murder here. She gave Miss O’Flaherty some desperate fright with seaweed. Don’t ask for her. They’ll all go mad if you even mention her name.”
    â€œListen, would you tell her . . .” He stopped, deciding against it. “No, you’re too young.”
    â€œI’m not too young,” Clare said, stung by the unfairness of it. “But young or old, I don’t care—I’m not giving your soppy messages to Chrissie. She’ll only be annoyed with me, and you’ll be annoyed with me, and Mammy will beat the legs off me, so I’d much prefer you kept them to yourself.” She went back to the ribbons with vigor. They were flat gleaming bands now, they would fluff up gorgeously tomorrow. She couldn’t get herself up to the neck in Chrissie’s doings because there would be trouble at every turn. She must keep nice and quiet and get ready for tomorrow, for the look of surprise on Mother Immaculata’s face, and the horror on Bernie Conway’s and Anna Murphy’s.
    Gerry Doyle laughed good-naturedly. “You’re quite right—let people do their own dirty work,” he said.
    The words “dirty work” somehow cut through all the rest of the noise in the O’Brien kitchen and reached Agnes O’Brien as she pulled the entire contents of the dresser’s bottom cupboard onto the floor. Tom had said that she must have thrown out the length of flex he was going to use to put up a light outside the back door. She was sure she had seen it somewhere and was determined that the project should not be postponed.
    Tommy and Ned were going through the paper for jobs as they did every week, marking things with a stubby purple pencil; Ben and Jimmy were playing a game that began quietly every few minutes until it became a slapping match and one of them would start to cry. Tom was busy mending the wireless which crackled over all the activity.
    â€œWhat dirty work?” Agnes called: a grand fellow, that Gerry Doyle, but you had to watch him like a hawk. Whatever devilment was planned he had a hand in it.
    â€œI was saying to Clare that I’m no good at any housework, or anything that needs a lot of care. I’m only good at dirty work.” He smiled across, and the woman on her knees in front of a pile of tins, boxes, paper bags, knitting wool, toasting forks and rusted baking trays, smiled back.
    Clare looked up at him in surprise. Imagine being able to tell a lie as quickly and as well as that. And over nothing.
    Gerry had gone over to the job consultation, saying he heard there was going to be a man from a big employment agency in England coming round and holding interviews in the hotel.
    â€œWouldn’t that be for big kind of jobs, for people with qualifications?” Ned asked, unwilling to think anyone would come to Castlebay to seek out him or his like.
    â€œHave sense Ned, who is there in this place with any qualifications? Won’t it save you shoe leather and the cost of writing off to these places if you wait till this fellow arrives and he’ll tell all there’s to be told?”
    â€œIt’s easy on you to say that.” Tommy, the eldest, was troubled. “ You don’t have to go away for a job. You’ve got your business.”
    â€œSo have you.” Gerry pointed to the shop.
    But it wasn’t the same. Gerry’s father was the photographer; during the winter he survived on dances, and the odd function that was held. In summer, he walked the length of the beach three times a day taking family groups and then out again at night into the dance hall where the holiday business was brisk and where there would be a great demand to buy prints of the romantic twosomes that he would snap. Girls were his biggest customers, they loved to bring back