Read Cecelia Ahern Short Stories for Free Online Page B

and four, farty-four, I mean forty-four, excuse me,’ the bingo caller stuttered.
    The hall erupted in laughter and Mags snorted. She quickly grabbed her nose to stop it from happening again. Agatha looked around the room confused and turned to stare at her friend with her hand over her nose. ‘DON’T TELL ME YOU DID IT AGAIN, MAGS. IN THE NAME OF JAYSUS ARE YOU TRYIN’ TO KILL US ALL?’ Agatha yelled, sounding exasperated. This time her words weren’t heard by quite so many people over the sound of all the laughter.
    Mags tried to control herself, not wanting to be seen to be enjoying herself at the weekly bingo. She liked to think that it was now something she had to do for her friend Aggie and refused to accept the notion that she looked forward to the few hours every week she spent in the local school hall. Her life was far too interesting to be excited by bingo because … well, that would make her old.
    And she wasn’t old.
    She was seventy-eight. All the same, she couldn’t wait to tell her Connie when she left the bingo hall. How he would have laughed his heart out at this. Oh, yes, there was a man in the end. Cornelius Kelly was his name and Mags adored that man with all her heart. Still did. She couldn’t wait to tell this story to him.
    The bingo caller tried to recover from his embarrassment and when the giggles had died down in the hall he resumed his job. ‘Four and three, forty-three.’
    Mags smiled. The year she met her Connie.
    She had found a man all right. A real man, not one of those ones her mother kept trying to pair her off with, either. She hadn’t wanted to marry a dirty local and have to spend the rest of her life tending for his every unnecessary need. She wanted to fall in love, she wanted to work—and not the kind of work that involved scrubbing clothes and dishes, sewing socks and buttons and cooking. She wanted to work
outside
of a house.
    So she left Kilcrush in the west of Ireland and headed to Dublin City. The big smoke. Her mother and fatherhad been horrified at the very idea when she told them one evening that she was going to join her best friend from school, who had moved up the previous year. Her mother had been convinced she was one of the ‘funny ones’ and no daughter of hers was going to hang around the likes of her in a city full of sin. Dublin City, they said, was not designed for a single woman.
    Her parents wouldn’t hear of it.
    So she didn’t tell them.
    With the money she had saved from selling eggs from the hen her father had given her for her twenty-first (and selling the hen) and a small amount of farm produce at the local market, she bought a train ticket and disappeared into the night. Standing on the pavement on O’Connell Street, she took in the sights, sounds and smells that her new life had to offer. She stared with delight in the great big windows of Clerys department store and had a pain in her neck from standing at the foot of the large granite structure and looking up at Nelson’s Pillar, which she had previously only ever seen in photographs. She breathed in the smoke, the noise, the crowds, the buildings, the trams, so much concrete and such little green—she loved it.
    She moved in with her friend Agatha O’Reilly from school to a dark, dingy bedsit in the heart of the city. It was dirty and grotty, noisy and smelly and within days it felt like home to Mags. She took to life very quickly in Dublin. She loved the freedom, she loved being able to go to eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning (or Saturday night if she so wished), where she could wear her hair any way she liked it, go barefaced, sit in the back row and yawn to her heart’s content without being struck down by the Lord. She worked Monday to Friday as a chambermaid in a city hotel near the bedsit and she tried to save every shilling she made and stashed it in a box under her bed. She planned to create the best life for herself.
    One night the sweet, sweet music that filtered up