Something in Common Read Online Free PDF

her out to dinner.
    And within six months they were living together in the house his grandmother had left him, arguing about the merits of The Beatles (him) over the Stones (her), and talking politics, which thankfully they agreed on – they both leant sharply to the left and despised the Church’s stranglehold on Ireland – and all she wanted was to take his name and to wear his ring for the rest of her life.
    She went along when he and the band were performing, followed them around the ballrooms and dancehalls of Dublin and beyond, although up to this she’d despised the middle-of-the-road music put out by the showbands, giving a nod to jazz and pop and country-and-western with none of the grit of Led Zeppelin or Procol Harum, none of the fierce excitement of Grateful Dead or The Doors.
    Itdidn’t matter: if he’d been playing organ music in cathedrals around Ireland she’d have sat in the front pew, mesmerised. He had bewitched her, he had swept into her life and taken it over. She watched him perform, the other band members invisible to her. She saw the way the women in the crowd eyed him up, all frosted lipstick and blue-lidded eyes, batting their false lashes at him and the other musicians, and she wanted to slap the smiles off their faces. She counted the minutes until the dancing ended and everyone went home, and he walked off the stage to her.
    Needless to say, her parents had been horrified. Not so much at the idea of their only daughter living in sin – this was bad; but provided the neighbours, or their parish priest, didn’t find out, they were willing to endure it. Far worse was the fact that he was a member of a struggling showband and not at all wealthy or famous. But Helen hadn’t given a damn about her parents: all she cared about was the incredibly wonderful state in which she now existed.
    She’d suspected, walking up the aisle a year later to Cormac – her father stiff with disapproval beside her – that she was already carrying his child, and she’d been right. Alice had been born seven months after the wedding, much to her parents’ fresh dismay. Bad enough that she’d married a musician from the wrong side of the tracks: far worse that he’d got her up the duff in advance.
    She’d handed in her notice at Burke’s when she was eight months pregnant, told her boss she wouldn’t be back; much, she suspected, to his relief – they hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye over the years, but she’d been careful never to give him enough ammunition to sack her. The prospect of becoming a full-time housewife and mother didn’t exactly fill her with joy, but she’d bide her time until Alice started school, and then hopefully she’d find a more exciting workplace. In the meantime, they’d make do on Cormac’s sporadic earnings.
    Butnow Cormac was gone, and his earnings were no more, and she needed to find some other way to support Alice and herself, and she had no idea how she was going to do that.
    She pushed the newspaper into the bin. She took her clothes from the table and went upstairs to bed.

Sarah
    ‘S hewasn’t suicidal, it was a cry for help.’ Christine took a biscuit from the plate and sniffed it. ‘Is there ginger in these?’
    ‘No. How can you be so sure she wasn’t going to kill herself?’
    ‘Because of the scarf.’ They both looked at it, folded on the table by Christine’s mug. ‘She left it there deliberately, it’s obvious. She knew someone would come along and find it, just like you did, and stop her.’
    ‘But why didn’t she take it back when I offered it?’
    Christine shrugged. ‘Maybe she was sick of it.’
    Sarah wasn’t convinced. The woman had seemed in real distress – she’d seemed so wretched and defeated. But in the five days since their encounter there’d been no mention in the paper of an abandoned car, or a body found in a river, so thankfully it looked like she hadn’t gone through with it.
    Christine stroked the soft silk. ‘It’s