Going Through Changes
by
Brendan Gerad O’Brien
(From an idea by Claire O’Connell)
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Brendan Gerad O’Brien on Smashwords
Going Through Changes
Copyright © 2011 by Brendan Gerad O’Brien
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Dreamin’ Dreams, a collection of short stories by Brendan Gerad O’Brien, is also published on Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/21881
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Going Through Changes
A sheet of rain blew across the street and slapped against the bus shelter, causing a wave of water to cascade down the Perspex panels that were already distorted by the endless spiral of graffiti that was scratched all over them. Some of the scribbles you could almost read but most were just a jumble of crude obscenities and half scratched-out phone numbers.
The wind gusted again and rattled the trees, and a spray of wet leaves blew in the hole where one of the panels was missing. Katie pulled her collar up tighter around her neck and shrank back into the corner as far away from it as she possibly could.
She groaned out loud. She was already soaked to the skin and half an hour late for football practice. The only sensible thing to do now was to skip the practice and go straight on home. Given the circumstances, her mum was bound to understand. She’d probably send Katie for a nice hot bath and make her a mug of hot chocolate when she came back down afterwards.
But as Katie trudged wearily up the path towards the welcoming light of her house, her mother suddenly whipped the front door open.
‘Katie!’ she yelped, glaring down at her with her hands clamped angrily on her hips. ‘Why aren’t you at football practice?’
Stunned at the sharp tone of her mother’s voice, Katie could only stand there in shocked silence and blink the rain out of her eyes.
‘Mom!’ she managed to splutter eventually. ‘It’s like, raining! I’m wet and I’m cold, and it’s gone right through to my skin. I thought you’d understand …’
‘I don’t believe this!’ Katie’s mother groaned, a throaty sob in her voice. ‘Are you telling me you’re afraid of a little bit of rain? For heaven’s sake, Katie! Do you think any of those famous footballers you’re always going on about would stop playing football just because of a little drop of rain? Do you realise how hard I have to work to pay for your football practice? I can’t afford to just throw my money away like that! There’s very little of it coming into the house as it is, you know! I have to struggle for every penny I’ve got. Ever since your father died ... ’
Tears suddenly sparkled in her eyes and she wiped them away quickly with the back of her hand. She took a sharp gulp of air in through her nose as she struggled to compose herself, then she stepped back into the hall and held the door open for Katie.
‘Get upstairs,’ she said, her voice softer now but still heavy with emotion. ‘Get out of those wet clothes before you catch your death of cold.’
Upstairs in her room Katie flicked on the bedside lamp and flung her sports bag down on the bed so hard the pillows went flying onto the floor. She was visibly shaking as she scooped the stool out from under the dressing table with her foot and plonked down heavily onto it.
But she wasn’t just shivering because of the wet clothes that were tight and cold around her shoulders now. There was also a sharp, angry pain wedged like a heavy ball in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t put it into words exactly, it was like a solid lump of sheer frustration, and it was getting worse and worse with each passing day.
She was fourteen years old, for heaven’s sake, yet she was made to feel like she was still a little child and not capable of doing anything right.
Of course it didn’t help being piggy in the middle either, forced to share a house with a younger brother and a stroppy older sister. They certainly didn’t help the situation, with their flippant attitude towards her and their constant ridiculing of her passion for football.
At moments like this she hated them all!
Her eyes glistened in the weak light as she glared back at herself in the mirror, and she could see that they were tight with anger and ringed with dark red shadows. She grabbed her hairbrush and started tugging furiously at the knots in her sodden hair, and she gave a long, rippling shudder that made the stool shake under her.
All of a sudden she felt a strange, cold sensation, a weird impression that she wasn’t alone. There was someone else in the room! Thin icy fingers of alarm brushed the hairs on the back of her neck and made them stand on end. The very notion that she was secretly being watched made her skin crawl!
And there was something else!
She scanned the room through the mirror, moving only her eyes. Something was missing from her room! Right at that moment she couldn’t think what it was. But something definitely wasn’t where it should have been.
She turned her head slowly, and her scream exploded like a gunshot when the wardrobe door suddenly burst open and her brother James flew out with a mad shriek.
Katie’s hands jerked so wildly they scooped all her stuff off the dressing table and sent them crashing across the bedroom floor.
Hysterical laughter rippled around the room in sporadic bursts as James struggled to catch his breath. ‘That was awesome,’ he gasped. ‘I really scared the life out of you! You must have jumped six feet in the air. I nearly made you jump out of your skin! That was wicked!’
‘You stupid fool,’ Katie yelled as she flew off the stool and grabbed at him, missing him by a fraction of an inch as he dodged around her. ‘Look at what you’ve made me do. Look at my stuff! It’s all ruined - my ornaments, my makeup! They’re a mess. What did you think you were doing?’
Then she groaned even louder when she noticed what her brother was wearing. That’s what was missing from her room! The life-size Amazonian mask that she’d spent ages making in art class!
James had it strapped to his head and now it was ruined, the coloured string broken and dangling loosely from the end of a torn strip of parchment.
‘You stupid lump!’ Katie danced in frustration and ran at him again, crying hysterically and grabbing at the mask. ‘Look what you’ve done to my art project! You’ve wrecked it! It took me ages to make that! You knew it was my best work, you knew it wasn’t a toy. Now you’ve ruined it. It’s useless. This isn’t funny, James. I hate you. Get out of my room. Get out!’
As Katie grabbed a handful of her brother’s shirt and dragged him towards the door, her sister Clara came charging into the room.
‘What’s on earth is going on in here?’ she yelled. ‘Katie, let him go!’
‘Look what he did to my art project,’ Katie cried. ‘He’s ruined it. It was my favourite piece. It isn’t funny …’
‘Oh c’mon!’ Clara shouted back. ‘He didn’t mean to damage your stupid mask. He was only playing with it, that’s all. And it’s only a bit of old cardboard, anyway. What’s it for? Aren’t you supposed to wear it? Well, he is wearing it! He was only having a bit of fun with it.’
‘Well he shouldn’t have been in my room in the first place …’
‘It’s isn’t your room,’ Clara snapped, pulling James away from her. ‘It’s our room. And I’m the oldest, so if I say he can come in our room, he can come in our room. All right?’
‘That doesn’t give him the right …’
‘What is the matter with you, Katie?’ James shook himself free and pushed his way between the two of them, and he practically ran out of the room. ‘You’re no fun anymore,’ he called back. ‘You’ve turned into a right old moody cow. I’m going back to my own room.’
After a second a door slammed down the hall.
‘He’s right, you know!’ Clara curled her nose up in agreement and she flicked her hair from her face as she swung around on her heels and strutted back over to the door. ‘There was no need to yell at him like that. You have to realise that he’s only a child!’
With a loud huff Clara pulled the door behind her, and Katie flinched as it slammed shut with the force of a hard slap. She sagged down onto the edge of the bed and burst into tears.
‘Why couldn’t Dad be here?’ she sobbed quietly. ‘When I desperately need someone to talk to?’
He would have listened to her. He would understand the way she was feeling, the way she’d been treated by the rest of the family over the last few months. Everyone was so horrible to her. No one ever took her seriously.
As she moved her foot, it brushed lightly against something on the floor. She bent down and picked it up. It was the picture from her bedside table, a framed photograph that her father had taken on their last holiday together in Ireland.
They were sitting on the cliff above the Ladies’ Beach in Ballybunion, looking down at the Castle Green. He had zoomed in on the castle with his new digital camera when a shaft of sunlight popped out from behind the rolling bundle of clouds that had been hugging the horizon all evening. For the briefest of moments the castle was wrapped in a soft golden halo, making it appeared to almost shimmer. Then in a heartbeat the clouds folded over again and the sunbeam was gone, and a dull curtain of fading daylight came back down around them.
But Katie’s father had captured that rare, precious image, and he was so proud of it he had it enlarged and framed, and it had pride of place by Katie’s bed where she could look at it every night before she went to sleep.
Her dad once told her that the photo seemed to encapsulate the very essence of his own childhood in Ireland, growing up on a small farm in County Kerry. The farm was on the outskirts of Listowel, just a short bike ride from Ballybunion and the miles of sandy beaches, and even though everyone knew dear old Dad was prone to generous helpings of selective memory, he still insisted that his school holidays were just one long, happy round of swimming in the sea and playing football on the sand.
When Katie was younger and they were sitting on the rocks watching the rolling waves crashing against the bottom of the high black cliff, she asked him why, if he loved the place so much, he didn’t just stay here and not go back to London.
He took a long, slow drag on his pipe as he reflected on the answer. Then he took a deep breath and started to sing a verse from his favourite Furey’s song:
To the fields and the farmyards
Where I ran as a lad
Came the stories of London
And the times to be had
So I saved all my money
Came as fast as I could
And the stories were true one
And the times they were good
Ah, but now and then I miss North Kerry
And I dream of the auld days
And I swear to go home
But the work and the money
Make a man play a part
And in the clay and the concrete
He can bury his heart …
Suddenly his eyes sparkled and his voice broke with a soft sob, and Katie understood the confusion of feelings that danced in his heart. London was a great place to live and he was very happy there, but it was also quite natural that sometimes the pull of the green, green grass of home could be almost overwhelming.
However, he more than made up for it by taking the family back to Kerry for a holiday every summer, come rain or shine. It was almost like a pilgrimage.
Sadly, the farm was long gone now and the rest of his relatives were scattered to the four winds, so they usually rented a caravan on the edge of the town overlooking the beach, and they would spend the two weeks re-visiting the same old haunts. And Dad would bore everyone within earshot with the same old stories about the wild and wonderful adventures that he and his pals were always getting involved in.
Katie sighed and wiped the tears from her eyes, and held the photo to her chest as she reflected on how different everything had been back then, when their life was so normal, so very ordinary. They were just a typical, contented family that enjoying doing things together, going places together. Nothing special.
How could it have changed so suddenly, so unbelievably quickly?
A stupid girl talking on a mobile phone while doing 52mph in a 30mph zone! She didn’t see that the lights had changed. Katie’s dad was on his way to work. He didn’t survive the impact. The girl escaped with a broken wrist.
They knew he wanted his ashes to be scattered on the beach at Ballybunion when he died. He’s said it often enough. But now, in the terrible surge of grief that was overwhelming the family, they just couldn’t do it. Not yet. They needed him near; close enough for them to visit, safe in a place where they could stills spend some precious time with him.