The Silver Swan Read Free Page B

got used to, never.
     
She played with the other children of her own age in the gritted square in front of the Flats, where there were broken swings and a seesaw with filthy things written all over it and a wire-mesh fencethat was supposed to keep their ball from flying out onto the road. The boys pinched her and pulled at her, and the older ones tried to feel under her skirt, while the girls talked about her behind her back and ganged up against her. She did not care about any of this. Her father came home half cut one Christmas with a present for her of a red bike—probably robbed, her brother Mikey said with a laugh—and she rode around the playground on it all day long for a week, even in the rain, until at New Year's someone stole it and she never saw it again. In a rage because of losing the bike she got into a fight with Tommy Goggin and knocked out one of his front teeth. "Oh, she's a Tartar, that one," her Auntie Irene said, with her arms folded across her big sagging bosom and nodding her head grimly. There were moments, though, on summer evenings, when she would stand at the open window in the parlor, so-called—in fact it was the only room in the flat, apart from two stuffy little bedrooms, one of which she had to share with her parents—savoring the lovely warm smell from the biscuit factory and listening to a blackbird singing its heart out on a wire that was as black as the bird itself and seemed drawn in ink with a fine nib against the red glow dying slowly in the sky beyond the Gaelic football park, and something would swell in her, something secret and mysterious that seemed to contain all of the rich, vague promise of the future.
     
When she was sixteen she went to work in a chemist's shop. She liked it there among the neatly packaged medicines and bottles of scent and fancy soaps. The chemist, Mr. Plunkett, was a married man, but still he tried to persuade her to go with him. She refused, of course, but sometimes, to get him to let her alone for a while and because she thought he might give her the sack if she did not cooperate, she would trail unwillingly behind him into the room at the back where the drugs were kept, and he would lock the door and she would let him put his hands under her clothes. He was old, forty or maybe even more, and his breath smelled of cigarettes and bad teeth, but he was not the worst, she reflected, gazing dreamily over his shoulder at the stacked shelves as he palmed and kneaded herbelly under the waistband of her skirt and pressed his thumb to the stubbornly unresponsive tips of her breasts. Afterwards she would catch Mrs. Plunkett, who did the books, studying her out of a narrowed, speculative eye. If old Plunkett should ever think of trying to get rid of her she would waste no time in letting him know that she had a thing or two she could tell his missus, and that would put manners on him.
     
Then one day Billy Hunt came in with his suitcase of samples, and although he was not her type—his coloring was something like her own, and she knew for a fact that a woman should never go with a man of the same skin type as herself—she smiled at him and let him know that she was paying attention as he did his salesman's pitch to Mr. Plunkett. Afterwards, when he came to talk to her, she listened to him with a concentrated look, and pretended to laugh at his silly, schoolboy jokes, even managing to make herself blush at the risky ones. On his next time round he had asked her out to the pictures, and she had said yes loud enough for Mr. Plunkett to hear, making him scowl.
     
Billy was a lot older than she was, nearly sixteen years older, in fact—was there something about her, she wondered ruefully, that was especially attractive to older men?—and he was not good-looking or clever, but he had a clumsy charm that she liked despite herself and that in time allowed her to convince herself she was in love with him. They had been going together only a few months when one night as he