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

percent in a biology exam and 36 / marian keyes

    I was lucky to escape with my life, which wasn't really fair because the exam was on the reproductive system, and they probably knew a lot more about it than I did, and would have all got high marks if they had only turned up.

    But every time there was an exam they brought faked sick notes from their mothers.

    Their mothers were even more scary than they were and if the nuns cast doubts on the authenticity of the sick notes and administered punishment accordingly, the mothers--and sometimes even the dads--came to the school and caused an uproar, accusing the nuns of calling their daughters liars, and shouting wildly of "reporting" them.

    Once, when Maureen Quirke brought three sick notes in one month, each of them asking for her to be excused because she had her period, Sister Fidelma slapped her and said, "Do you take me for a fool, girl?," and within hours Mrs. Quirke arrived at the school like an avenging angel. (As Maureen said later, the funniest part of all was that she was actually preg- nant at the time, although she didn't know it when she wrote the notes.) Mrs. Quirke shouted at Sister Fidelma, "No one lays a finger on any of my children. No one! Except me and Mr. Quirke! Now get yourself a man, you dried-out old mickey-dodger, and leave my Maureen alone."

    Then she marched imperiously out the gate, dragging Maureen with her, and slapped Maureen all of the way home. I knew that for a fact because when I got home from school at lunchtime my father fell on me eagerly and said, "I saw that Quirke child passing up the road earlier with her mother, and the mother slapping forty shades of shite out of her. Tell us, what happened?"

    So when I stopped taking antidepressants and went to secretarial college, my depression didn't return in all its savagery, but it hadn't entirely gone away either. And lucy sullivan is getting married / 37

    because I was terrified of being depressed again and didn't want to take pills, I dedicated my life to finding out the best ways of keeping it at bay, au naturel.

    I wanted to banish depression entirely from my life, but had to be content with just stemming it by constantly reinforcing my emotional sandbags.

    So along with swimming and reading, fighting depression became a hobby. In fact, strictly speaking, swimming wasn't really a hobby in its own right, it was more accurate to say that it came under the heading of Fighting Depression, subheading Exercise, category Gentle.

    I read everything on the subject of depression that I could lay my hands on, and nothing raised my spirits like a good, juicy story of a famous person who suffered agonies from it.

    Accounts of people who spent months on end in bed, not eating, not speaking, just staring at the ceiling, tears trickling down the sides of their faces, wishing they had the energy to kill themselves, thrilled me.

    I was in very exalted company.

    Churchill called his depression his "black dog," but, at eighteen, that confused me because I loved dogs. However, that was before the media had invented pit bull terriers. Once that happened, I understood exactly what Winston had been getting at.

    And everytime I went to a bookstore, I pretended that I was just aimlessly browsing but, before I knew it, I had bypassed the new releases, the fiction, crime, science fiction, cookbooks, home decoration and horror sections, kept going through the biography section (pausing only briefly to see if any depressed person had recently published their life story) and somehow, as if by magic, always ended up at the self-help section, where I would spend hours reading through books that I hoped might fix me, that might have 38 / marian keyes

    the magic solution, that would take away, or even just ease, the corrosive gnawing that was nearly always with me.

    Of course a lot of self-help books were so full of garbage that they could reduce the most happy, well-balanced person to despair. Nevertheless, I