Something in Common Read Online Free PDF Page A

square on the worn lino and stood in the centre, feeling the cold worming its way up through the bare soles of her feet. She worked methodically, without a mirror, beginning above her left ear and feeling her way slowly around. The scissors made a sawing sound that reminded her of a purring cat. The hair dropped silently, sliding past her naked shoulders and falling onto the newspaper.
    Whenshe had finished, she went back into the sitting room and looked again at her reflection. The right side was shorter than the left, the ends blunt and higgledy-piggledy, the top too full without its counterbalancing length. With her gaunt, blank face she looked like a doll whose owner in a fit of spite had hacked off her toy’s beautiful curls.
    But Cormac had adored her hair, and without him it had become one more painful reminder: twining his fingers in it when they slow-danced, trailing it along his body when they were drowning in one another in bed, or wherever they got the chance. Washing it for her, both of them squeezed into the bath as he lathered and massaged and rinsed. Hadn’t she some chance of surviving without him if it wasn’t around to torture her with memories?
    She didn’t care how she looked, but she wasn’t about to give strangers any excuse to stare at her. Tomorrow she’d take a tenner from the dwindling supply in Rick’s envelope and find someone to take off the rest of the curls, give it a shape that nobody would look twice at. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser in years. She’d go to some place that didn’t look like they’d rob you.
    She lowered herself to the floor and lay on her side on the awful orange and yellow carpet that Cormac had chosen six months before they’d met. She brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. The cold air raised goose pimples on her bare skin but she stayed there, wound up tight, eyes open and unseeing, until she heard the doleful notes of the national anthem playing on her neighbour’s television.
    She uncurled slowly and got to her feet, shivering now. She rubbed her arms and stamped her feet, feeling the lightness around her head. Back in the kitchen, as she was bundling up the newspaper sheets, a
help wanted
column caught her eye. She eased the page out from the rest, smoothed it flat and ran down through
dental technician, typist, lorry driver, seamstress, legal secretary, waitress, crane operator.
    Shecrumpled up the page and returned it to the bundle. Nothing she wanted, nothing she was qualified to do, apart from waitressing. Anyone could carry a plate from A to B, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to do anything.
    She’d flatly refused to consider any kind of third-level education after secondary school, much to her parents’ dismay. ‘Have you any idea how many girls would give their eye teeth for the chance to go to university?’ her father had demanded, and Helen had resisted the urge to tell him to send one of them instead of her. She’d held her tongue and refused to budge.
    His subsequent offer of a secretarial position within his brother’s legal practice had left her equally cold – she had no intention of working in a place where she was known as the boss’s niece. Instead she’d found a job without his help behind the counter of the glove department in Burke’s Department Store.
    It wasn’t in the least demanding – in fact most of the time it bored her stupid – but it paid enough to allow her to move out of home and into a shared house, with a few pounds left over to have a couple of good nights out every weekend.
    Twenty-seven and having the time of her life, marriage the last thing on her mind. Why would she tie herself down, give up her freedom in exchange for some man’s ring? And then twenty-eight-year-old Cormac Fitzpatrick had come in one day looking for a pair of gloves for his mother’s birthday, and while Helen was wrapping the sheepskin ones he eventually chose, he asked her if he could take