Chasing Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nazareth House, and Con she had kept. That decision had set the pattern Con would live by; for the rest of his life he had to
be the centre of attention for every woman he encountered. His two sisters had died in the care of the nuns, one of TB, the other after falling three storeys while cleaning windows. Quite why it
should have been thought safe or appropriate for a nine-year-old girl to be cleaning windows so far from the ground, said much about the standard of care destitute children received from the good
Sisters, but in a way their early deaths at least saved the two Kelly girls from the worst excesses of the nuns. Old Con, being as he was, decided to embrace both deaths with his usual Celtic
sentimentality. In his mind he had been specially selected by some cosmic influence to suffer greatly; Con Kelly, being an Irish Catholic, was a martyr, born to be persecuted and discriminated
against, as Irish Catholics were in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. The deaths of his sisters were part of his lot in life, but he would bear it bravely, if not in silence. Kathy doubted if he had any
clear memory of the unfortunate Kelly girls, but he indulged himself in the fantasy that their deaths were somehow targeted at him alone, his tragedy to carry and weep over whenever he’d had
a few, and he had a few often, to forget, he said. Not that it stopped at the people in his life, Con was prepared to accept any sad event as his and his alone. In 1962, when Glasgow finally got
rid of its ‘caurs’, its legendary tramcar system, the old vehicles had been driven in one last procession through the city, and great crowds of people had turned out on a rainy Monday
night to bid the ‘caurs’ farewell and to put coins on the rails for the trams to run over as mementoes. Con, overwhelmed by his loss, had lined up twelve brown pennies on the rail and
then arrived home bearing the deeply dented coins and sobbing; what no one seemed to realise was that the tramcars were being withdrawn from service to cause distress to Con Kelly alone.
‘He’s only greetin’ because he’s realised he canny use the pennies tae buy booze,’ Kathy snorted. ‘That’s an entire bob that’ll never find its way
doon his throat!’ And so to sentiment was added cruelty, prompting Con to subside once again in another rush of tears, for the beloved trams he would never see again and the insensitivity of
his daughter. Later, when he had been carted off to bed and was safely if loudly snoring, Kathy picked up the twelve ruined pennies that had slipped from his grasp. Then she made her way across
London Road and down to Glasgow Green where she scattered them into the air. Next morning Con asked if anyone had seen his souvenirs, and she replied caustically, ‘Mibbe the caur fairy took
them!’
    ‘It was you!’ he accused, tearfully.
    ‘Whit a thing tae say!’ Kathy replied with gleeful innocence. ‘Ah’m cut tae the quick! As if Ah would dae that!’ It was amazing how childish you could be, what
silly ways you could find to extract revenge when there was nothing more substantial available. She had been a child of less than ten years, and already so angry, so bitter. At the time she had
thought she was in control, that she was handling her situation, but sometimes Kathy would think back to those years and look at that child she had been, and she would almost weep with pity.
    Even from her earliest days, listening to her father’s ramblings and his tears, Kathy would exchange looks with Lily, angry looks in Kathy’s case, always answered with pleading looks
from Lily that her daughter had been reading all her life. ‘Please, don’t say anything,’ they said. ‘He’ll go to sleep soon if you leave it.’ Anything for a
quiet life, anything to appease him and avoid upsetting him. It was an image of her mother she would never get out of her mind, and the memory increased her anger against Con. The slight figure of
Lily, her reddish hair