Read Marian Keyes - Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married for Free Online Page A

sent for, but not before a day or so was spent tidying and cleaning frantically in honor of his arrival. And he dia- gnosed depression and--surprise, surprise--prescribed antidepressants for me, which I didn't want to take.

    "What good will they do?" I sobbed at him. "Will the antidepressants give those men in Yorkshire back their jobs? Will the antidepressants find the pair to this...to this..." (by now I was gasping and incoherent with crying) "...to this MITTEN!?" I wailed.

    "Oh, would you ever shut up about that bloody mit 34 / marian keyes

    ten," tisked my mother briskly. "Yes, doctor, she'd be delighted to start on the pills."

    My mother was like a lot of people who hadn't been allowed to finish their schooling in that she believed that anyone who had been to a univer- sity, especially doctors, were almost Popelike in their infallibility, and that taking prescribed narcotics was a mystic and sacred kind of a thing.

    ("I am not worthy to receive them but only say the word and I shall be healed.")

    Also she was Irish and had a huge inferiority complex and thought that everything English people suggested had to be right. (Dr. Thornton was English.)

    "Leave it to me," my mother grimly assured Dr. Thornton. "I'll see that she takes them."

    And she did.

    And after a while I felt better. Not happy or anything like that. I still felt that we were all doomed and that the future was a vast wasteland of bleak grayness, but that it mightn't hurt if I got up for half an hour to watch some TV.

    After four months, Dr. Thornton said it was time for me to stop taking the antidepressants and we all held our breath, waiting to see if I could fly on my own or if I would dive-bomb back to that salty, single-mittened hell.

    But by then I had started at secretarial college and I had faith, however fragile, in the future.

    My world opened up at college, I learned many strange and wondrous things--I was amazed to hear that the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, that i comes before e, except and only except after c, that if I began a letter with "Dear Sir" and ended it with "Yours sincerely" that the world would come crashing to an immediate end.

    I mastered the demanding art of sitting with a wire- lucy sullivan is getting married / 35

    bound notebook on my lap and covering the page with squiggles and dots, I strove hard to be the perfect secretary, quickly working up to four Bacardis and diet Cokes on a night out with the girls, and my knowledge of the stock of the local department store was, at all times, encyclopedic.

    It never occurred to me that perhaps I could have done something else with my life--for a long time I thought it was such an honor to get the chance to train as a secretary that I didn't realize how much it bored me. And even if I had realized how much it bored me, I wouldn't have been able to wriggle out of it because my mother--a very determined wo- man--was adamant that it was what I would do. She actually cried with joy the day I got my certificate to say that I could move my fingers quickly enough to type forty-seven words a minute.

    In a fairer world, she would have been the one to enroll in the typing and shorthand course and not me, but that's not the way it happened.

    I was the only girl from my class at school who went to secretarial college. Apart from Gita Pradesh, who went to Physical Education college, everyone else either got pregnant, got married, got a job stacking shelves in Safeway, or a combination of the three.

    I was quite good at school, or at least I was too afraid of the nuns and my mother to be a complete failure.

    But I was too afraid of some of the other girls in my class to be a complete success either--there was a gang of "cool" girls, who smoked and wore eyeliner and had very developed chests for their age and were rumored to have sex with their boyfriends. I badly wanted to be one of them but I hadn't a hope because I sometimes passed my exams.

    Once, I got sixty-three