Read Something in Common for Free Online Page A

better, given half a chance. She wouldn’t write for that rag, though – she’d choose a better class of paper.
    ‘Mama, jellies.’
    ‘I’ll get you some in a second, hang on.’
    She’d always loved reading. She’d worked her way through an impressive number of novels during the hours in her bedroom when she was supposed to be doing homework. She’d been a reader all through her twenties and beyond, up to the time that Cormac had been diagnosed, and then she suddenly couldn’t keep her mind on a newspaper column, let alone a book.
    At school, English had been the only subject she’d felt any enthusiasm for.
Helen has a clever turn of phrase
had been one of the few positive comments on the report cards her parents had opened silently. Helen would watch her mother scanning them with pressed-together lips.
    She
had
a clever turn of phrase: in fifth year she’d written a few pieces for the school magazine, before boys had begun to distract her from any kind of schoolwork. She remembered one in particular – her favourite – in which she’d scoffed at the ridiculous new Barbie doll.
I bet it was designed by a man
, she’d written.
No woman in the world could have a chest that big and a waist that small and still be alive, let alone capable of walking without toppling over. And this is what passes as an acceptable toy for little girls.
    Lyingin her darkened room, she remembered the ripple of attention it had caused among her classmates, the kick she’d got from seeing her name in print, even if it was only in faint purple type on a sheet of paper that had been cranked out on the school’s spirit duplicator.
    Why hadn’t she kept writing? Why hadn’t she gone in that direction when she’d left school? Young as she’d been, her articles had been a damn sight better than the drivel she’d just read. Drivel that someone, presumably, had been paid to write.
    Helen shows promise
, another English teacher had written, somewhere along the line. And she’d got a B in English in the Leaving Cert, even though she’d never really studied for it. She’d shown promise, and she’d done nothing about it.
    But maybe it was time to start again.
    ‘Mama.’
    ‘Coming.’
    She scanned the newsagent’s shelves and found the newspaper she used to read before she’d stopped reading anything. It was also her parents’ newspaper of choice – one of the few things they had in common – and by far the most respected of the nationals. She turned the pages until she came to the editorial, saw
M. Breen
beneath it. He’d been editor for years; he was practically a household name. She had no idea what his first name was; maybe he felt using an initial gave him some sort of cachet – or maybe his parents had christened him Montgomery, or Mortimer.
    What wasto stop her writing something and submitting it to him? What was to stop him printing it, if it was any good? She wondered if you needed some kind of qualification to write for a newspaper. Only one way to find out.
    But she needed an interesting subject, one she was familiar with, one she could write about confidently. She knew all there was to know about being widowed young, about the hell of watching your husband withering away and being helpless to stop it – six months on, the pain of his death was no less sharp – but that was probably not what people would choose to read about over their toast and marmalade.
    She could write about the day she’d driven to the bridge, she could spell out the abject misery of not wanting to go on living, and the dawning horrible realisation that she didn’t have the courage to stop the world and step off – but again, who wanted to begin their morning with someone else’s nightmare?
    She needed something light but also revealing, something that would inform as well as entertain. A topic that would give people something to think about, and send them off to work with a smile on their faces.
    What about life as a female shop