The Runners Read Online Free PDF

for his pocket money. He didn’t tell his mam. He knew she’d say ‘that’s too much money’. Bobby’s dad used to have a car, but he had amassed a thousand pounds in parking fines and had received a two-year driving ban for another traffic offence. Bobby didn’t know what the offence was. His dad didn’t believe in using parking meters or in reading the fine that would appear on the window as a result. He was eventually summonsed to court, where he agreed to pay a fiver a week to the parking fines man, who would always call to the house on a Friday evening around seven o’clock. Bobby’s mam either took a fiver out of her purse to give to Bobby for him, or he was told to say that there was nobody home. Bobby knew that, at five pounds a week, theman would be calling for a long time. In one hundred weeks, he would have handed over five hundred, so it would take two hundred weeks to pay off the fines. Nearly four years. He had heard a row one Friday night after his dad came home from the Sunset. Bobby had been told to say his dad wasn’t in when the fines’ man called. His mam was shouting at him that if they didn’t pay the fines, he would end up in prison. He didn’t go to the Sunset the next Friday. The fines man got paid. When he had sold the car after the driving ban, he had got fifty pounds for it. It was a Morris Traveller and a banger. Bobby was embarrassed getting into it. The floors in the back had holes in them, so if you sat in there you had to be careful your feet didn’t touch the road as the car was moving.

CHAPTER 4
    ‘I’ll have the seven bananas for a pound special please.’
    ‘Here you go, love.’
    Bernie put the fruit in a plastic bag and handed it to the customer. The young woman opened the bag and took out one of the bananas. It had black spots on it. It was very ripe. Bobby hated them with black spots. He preferred them a little bit green. They were a bit drier and didn’t have as much of a banana taste off them. He couldn’t eat them at all if they had a black spot on the inside of them.
    ‘Can I have the greener ones instead, please?’ asked the woman.
    Bobby knew what she meant. The ones she had been given would be too ripe within hours.
    ‘If you want to choose them yourself, it’s only five for a pound.’
    ‘That’s ridiculous.’
    ‘That’s the way it is, if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else.’
    The fruit sellers were like actresses and Bernie was queen amongst them. Her mother had been a fruit seller before her. They were constantly putting on a show. They would always be gathered in groups of two or three, and when anyone stopped at their stall they would invariably say, ‘Do you want something, love?’ like you were interrupting a good chat. They never had lessons in customer service; they made up the rules themselves. One side of Moore Street had fruit sellers; the other side had fish sellers. The smell on the street was horrible. On a summer’s day there would be loads of bluebottles flying around the fish. The sellers just laid the fish out on their tables. Flies or not, people still bought the fish. Molly Malone had sold cockles and mussels on Moore Street. It was mainly cod and whiting now, with the odd bluebottle thrown in for free. Bobby had never seen a cockle or a mussel.
    The city centre was a ten-minute walk from Ballybough. There was a brand-new shopping centre built beside where Jay’s ma worked her stall. The people at the Ilac Centre thought it would be a good idea to put a fountain in the middle of it where people could throw their pennies. Jay thought it was a good idea too. He had longer arms than Bobby and could reach in farther. The security guard caught them one day and kicked them out. Not before Jay got fourteenpennies. They bought two JR ice pops and licked them all the way home. The fountain was eventually emptied of water because there were loads of people stealing the pennies.
    ‘Come on into Dunnes Stores and I’ll show