Creative Writing: Mad About The Boy

Mad About the Boy.

You paddle across the yellow sand with your brother-in-law, Jack, who is carrying a huge banana-coloured parasol over you to keep the bright sun from your black-haired head.

Your twin sister, Jean, walks a few metres away carrying her own parasol, lifting the hem of her lemon-coloured dress in case the incoming tide should dampen it. Your dress is the same colour and style as hers. Your mother always dressed you the same when you were young girls, and now that you are young women, you still dress in similar colours and styles, even without your mother’s insistence or advice.

Jack stands watching you as if you were a child in whose care you had been placed. The blue sea is some way off, but still you lift your dress’s

“No one has seen Boyd since the night before the wedding,” says Jack.

“He left Beryl at the altar with no reason or explanation. Not a single word,” Jean says gazing at Jack. “Why did he do that, Jack?”

“I wish I knew, Jean, I wish I knew,” Jack replies softly. “He wasn’t there when I went to pick him up at his house. The house was empty. His bed unslept in.”

“If he couldn’t face marrying Beryl why didn’t just say so?” Jean asks. Jack shakes his head and stares at you on the sofa with your eyes closed and head resting on the sofa.

You remember Boy’s words. His voice would get high if he were angry. Why did he touch me there? “Touch me!” you shout out suddenly. “Boy! Boy! Boy!”

The echo touches the walls like a ball hit hard. Jean and Jack stare at you. They seem frozen to the spot by the force of your voice.

“That Boyd,” Jean says angrily, “that damned Boyd.” The room becomes silent. Jack turns to gaze out of the window at the beach. Jean takes your hands in hers and holds them as if they were some treasures she’d forgotten the value of, but now holds

Even on an evening like this with all the things going well and the good guy buying her drinks and taking her places she only dreamed of Ceili knew it couldn’t last she knew that it was all just one of those passing phases that she dreaded as a girl like the fact that her mother was going to die of cancer and her father too maybe of some heart disease if she was unlucky enough to outlive them and she knew then that she probably would and live to regret all the things she said and the things she did and how even the small sins of her childhood would later haunt her and torment her in her sleep and the vision of the priest Father Dulkenny with his stern features and his black rosary hanging from his thick belt and his eyes like dark olives and that thin lipped spoken utterance after confessions and how he always wanted her to say the Pater Noster five times in a row with a couple of Aves thrown in for good measure and the smell of the incense lingering in her nose as she knelt in the chapel and felt the priest’s hand about her buttocks and pretended nothing happened and her mother wouldn’t have believed her anyway not him being a priest and all with the words of herself meaning less or little against the holy Joe words of the priest she mused gazing up at the sky and seeing how far away the stars looked and how it was said that Pascal dreaded that vast expanse of night sky and her father would have surely have beaten the backside off of her if she mentioned such a thing about