Cecelia Ahern Short Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

angrily as though the very vision of them offended her. Her mother would cover her face in clouds of white powder before Mags would head out to the local dance on a Friday night. No daughter of hers would find a man with awful pink cheeks on her face, especially not her only daughter. The bristles of the powder brush used to scrape away at Mags’s cheeks, causing her eyes to water and her irritated skin to redden even more. Faster and faster her mother would brush, nearly scraping the layer of skin away so it would reveal pure whiteness. The angrier and angrier she would get, the redder and more sore-looking her daughter’s face would become.
    Twice a week Mags would have to endure this. Once on a Friday before the local dance and again on the Sunday morning before they walked along the potholed road to eight o’clock mass. Mags would have to sit for an hour for her mother while she tied up her hair and powdered her face. Mags wondered why she couldn’t just dip her face into the bowl of flour her mother left sitting on the kitchen counter in preparation for the Sunday homemade apple tart. At least that way not a pink blotch would be in sight.
    She would be ordered to sit still, afraid to move a muscle in case she felt the sharp sting of the back of the brush against her flesh, which inevitably caused her cheeks to turn rosy. It was a vicious circle. So she sat tight, hands on lap, back straight (‘A man wouldn’t want a wife with bad posture now, would he, Margaret?) while her five brothers could remain in bed for the extra hour. Mags often felt like questioning her mother on why it was that men didn’t need to make the same effort for women. Mags certainly had no desire for a man who smelled of cow manure, sweat thick with the stench of stale black coffee, muddy big black boots with faded trousers and dried muck in the creases, tucked into their thick black socks (no doubt darned by their mothers and sisters) all held up by a pair of braces. Mags was convinced that the only reason for these was so the men would have a place to rest their thumbs while they stuck their chests out and strolled the town as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
    Mags had sometimes wished, while sitting for her mother, that she had been born a man. There were few or no rules, fewer expectations and what appeared to be no pressures apart from watching the weather and worrying about the amount of milk they could get from the cow that morning. But she wouldn’t dare share these thoughts with her mother, especially while she had the spiky brush in one hand and a lock of her black silky hair firmly grasped in the other. Mags doubted her mother would have a problem scalping her in an instant; however, the only thing that held her back was the knowledge that a bald patch on a girl is not easy on the watchful eye of a hot, red-blooded young male. No, the hair remained untouched—it was pulled at and twisted, knotted and pinched, but remained unscalped.
    Once ready, her mother would call the boys. Mags would hear them mumbling and grumbling and moaning about having to get up at such an early hour. Mags would stare desperately in the mirror at her reflection, herpowdery white face appearing ghostlike against the whitewashed walls of her bedroom in the background. While her mother banged around the boys’ bedroom, pulling open curtains and laying out clothes, laughing and pretending to be angered by their protests but secretly loving the attention, Mags sucked in her cheeks, widened her eyes and pretended to float around like the ghost she felt like. It was as though her mother wanted her to be invisible and it wasn’t only the makeup that made Mags feel it.
    Her father, when he wasn’t at the pub or working the farm, doted on her. Her mother despised her for it. But he wasn’t one to argue with the woman he married, and, sure, didn’t she know best how to treat a growing young woman when she herself was one? One thing Mags loved him to