Cecelia Ahern Short Stories by Cecelia Ahern Read Free Book Online

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.
    Every Friday and Saturday night Mags and Aggie would become those women in the privacy of their own bedsit while they let the music take them away and let the noises from below make them feel as if they were in the very room. They would doll themselves up to the nines in their Sunday best, flicking cigarette ash around the room, revealing so much flesh their parents would be saying decades of the rosary. She lived life happily in a city not designed for single women.
    The voice called out to her louder and louder week after week until Mags finally felt confident enough to leave the safety of her bedsit in order to explore downstairs. And when she left the room that night she leftthe Margaret Divine of Kilcrush behind her. For on stage performing was an angel, the stage spotlight acting as a beam from heaven shining on the man who sang as though he were from another world. His eyes sparkled at her as his magic hands glided gracefully over the keys, and he sang with a smile. A smile all for her. He just seemed to glow to Mags; she could hardly take her eyes away from him, couldn’t stop listening to his voice. There was an air of sophistication about him and at the age of twenty-one Mags knew she had already fallen in love with the voice of an angel, and now she had fallen in love with the man. It had been the Calling she had been praying for. His voice calling her to leave her safety net behind and come downstairs.
    He was smart and friendly and funny and listened to Mags’s stories, laughed at her jokes, seemed interested in her opinions, made her feel loved and intelligent and sexy, and this was all new to her.
    They became engaged only weeks later and, as Mags’s parents still refused to visit her in Dublin, she embarked on the train journey to Kilcrush with her love. He made her feel strong, as if she could take on the world and perhaps even her mother.
    And, for a woman who didn’t think much of city people and their ways, Mags had never seen her mother so uncomfortable and nervous, so well dressed; she had never seen the cottage look so clean, not even as clean as when the local priest visited. It was as though her mother thought royalty was among them. But Connie was a man of the world. He had seen countries, learned of things Grainne could never teach her daughter or preach to her friends. Mags was surprised to find her mother intimidated by this confident young man who looked at her daughter in a way she found uncomfortable.
    While Cornelius became acquainted with the men in the