Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online Page A

so that’s the end of all the trick-acting by the children of this parish, I’m glad to say. You’ll have to start to do a day’s work for a change and be like we were at your age.’
    ‘Is it brothers or nuns would you say?’
    ‘That would be telling,’ said Jack Coyne, who didn’t know.
    ‘Isn’t he a pig?’ Dara said cheerfully when they had left him. ‘A small dark offensive-looking pig.’
    ‘Imagine him young,’ Michael said, as they passed the bag of toffees between them. It was a feat of imagination too difficult for either of them.
    ‘An offensive piglet,’ Michael said, and they were in a fit of giggles by the time they reached the bridge and turned left up the main street.
    There would be no place for Dara and Michael on the bridge, even Kitty Daly was a bit too young for the small group that met there in the evenings. They saw fellows sitting up on the stone parapet clowning, and a group of girls laughing. There was Teresa Meagher whose mother and father were always fighting. If you went past Meagher’s any night when the shop was closed you always heard voices raised. Teresa was going to get a job in Dublin it was always being said, but then her parents would cry and cling on to her so she had to relent and stay. Nobody on the bridge was courting. If you were courtingyou were down the river bank, or in Coyne’s wood, or at the pictures.
    Devotions were over and Father Hogan was closing up the church. He waved at Michael.
    ‘Any hope you’d be able to sing “Panis Angelicus”? he said without much confidence.
    ‘No, Father, sorry, Father, I haven’t a note in my head,’ Michael said.
    ‘Come on out of that, you were in the choir at the concert. Why don’t you . . . ?’
    ‘No, Father, I can’t sing, and anyway you’d never know what might happen to my voice.’ Michael had been dying for his voice to break like Tommy Leonard’s had. Every morning he tried it out and was disappointed that it still sounded the same.
    Dara was no help. ‘You should hear him singing from the bathroom, Father, he’d have the tears in your eyes.’
    ‘I’ll kill you,’ Michael said.
    ‘Well I’m certainly not going to beg and cajole you.’ Father Hogan was huffy now. ‘I didn’t think a Catholic boy would have to be flattered and pleaded with to sing in the House of God.’
    Dara realised she had gone too far.
    ‘I was only saying that to tease him, Father. Really and truly he’d be no good, he’d embarrass you, it’s like an old tin can. I know he would sing if he could, but he’s just in the choir to make up the numbers for Brother Keane, to sort of fill the stage up a bit.’
    Father Hogan said that was all right then.
    ‘Now.’ Dara was triumphant. ‘Didn’t I rescue you?’
    ‘You needn’t have gone on so much.’ Michael hadn’tenjoyed being described as an old tin can that would embarrass you. There were times when Dara felt the need to give far too many explanations. They had reached Tommy Leonard’s house. The stationery shop was closed for business so the twins knocked at the door beside the shop. Tommy was there to greet them, his finger on his lips. Behind him a voice called.
    ‘Where are you going, Thomas?’
    ‘Just out for a bit of a walk.’
    ‘All right, but be back at nine o’clock, and no skitting and playing with all that crowd of hooligans.’
    ‘Right oh.’ Tommy was good-natured. It was easier not to bring the whole thing down round your ears with a catechism of questions. That was Tommy Leonard’s view. Just say yes and no, don’t get involved in long explanations. Michael thought he was dead right; if he had desperate parents like Tommy’s he would be exactly the same. Dara thought that this was entirely the wrong way to handle things, and if she were Tommy she would make it all clear from the word go, instead of giving in to all the cracked notions. That only made them come up with more cracked notions still.
    Maggie Daly said they were to wait