Trio - [52]

If God was so strong and powerful then why couldn’t he make everyone be good all the time and then there wouldn’t be any sins? No wars or robbers or lies or anything.

‘Oh, my God,’ Father Leary began, ‘because thou art so good…’

They all joined in. You had to know it off by heart. And once you’d done confession then you could make your First Holy Communion. Nina had her dress already. There were tiny pearl buttons and lace round the sleeves. The lace was dead itchy. She wasn’t allowed to try it on any more in case it got dirty. She had white gloves too and a headband, a tiara like something a Princess would wear but no diamonds, just white. And white shoes and socks.

Father Leary was nice. He smiled a lot. Not like Daddy, who only smiled at Stephen and mainly had a shut look on his face like you couldn’t come in. When he got cross his mouth made a mean line. But he didn’t smack her. Mummy did the smacking. She usually smacked her legs.

Father Leary had a nice laugh too. It made you want to laugh.

It was hard to be good all the time. The priest said the confession was to say you’re sorry to God and that you had to try hard to be good after your confession. Yesterday she’d ambushed Stephen. She’d got the metal colander for her head and the sink plunger for her death ray and she’d waited behind the door on the landing and when she heard him coming upstairs she jumped out. ‘Exterminate! Exterminate! I am a Dalek, I will exterminate you!’ He’d jumped and screamed and she had laughed so much it hurt. He was bigger than her after all. He scowled at her and went off and she thought he might tell tales but Mummy didn’t come. It couldn’t be a sin that, being a Dalek, but maybe it was a bit mean. And teasing him about his books. He was always reading. Not fun stuff, like she got Bunty and there was good stories and pictures and always a free gift, like last week there was a hair slide on the front and it came through the door with the paper and it was great. But Stephen picked Look and Learn, which was more like school-y. And he read books without pictures in. She hated that sort. The pictures were always the best bit. But even when Nina was nice to Stephen and did kind things she would still think bad thoughts, they came into her head without her wanting them to, sneaked in so quick she didn’t see how you could stop them.

She knew she would have to go to confession a lot. If she died in-between she’d be sent to purgatory and be tortured until they decided she could go to heaven. She didn’t know what they used to torture you but it hurt a lot. In Hell they had fire but maybe purgatory was different – bamboo shoots under your nails or that one where they put a rat on your tummy and then a cage over it and when the rat got hungry it ate a tunnel through you to escape.

‘Nina.’

Startled, she looked up.

‘Make your act of contrition.’

‘Yes, Father. Oh, my God, because thou art so good…’

Megan

‘All right, Megan?’ Joe was on earlies, one in three weeks. She knew them all now, the regular drivers, but Joe was the most talkative.

‘So-so,’ she replied and put her fare on the metal dish. He rang her off a ticket and shoved the bus back into gear.

He waited till she was sat on the first seat before moving off.

‘They’ve forecast snow,’ he called over his shoulder. The bus was practically empty, sometimes she wondered if they ran it just for her. Now and then you’d get a student with a hulking great backpack off to India or Amsterdam on the Magic Bus from town but no one in their right mind would be on a bus at five in the morning if they could be tucked up warm in bed. Megan had no choice.

‘My mammy’d say it was too cold to snow,’ Megan called back. She lit up. They were bringing in rules about smoking, you had to go upstairs, but Joe didn’t mind and there was no one else to bother. He’d a fag in his mouth like a permanent fixture, even got a little yellow-brown stain there above his lip.

‘Never quite got it myself,’ she continued. ‘I mean, it snows at the North Pole, doesn’t it, and up Everest an’ all? Can’t get much colder than that.’

‘It’s not the same in town, is it, the snow? All mucky by the end of the day.’

‘That salt they chuck everywhere, the gritters and that, you should see what that does to the carpets. Burns ’em. It’s corrosive, that’s what it is. Ruins ’em if you let it build up.’

Joe swung the bus on to Rochdale Road leading down into town. ‘Your Brendan had any luck?’

‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Anything that comes up there’s half of Harpurhey after it. And they take the youngsters. Pay ’em less.’

‘Bloody crime,’ Joe put in. ‘When I started out you could always find something.’

‘Like the buses?’

He laughed. ‘Aye. Well they had conductors too in them days. Or the railways, markets, factories. Everywhere’s hit now. Rolls Royce gone bust, did you see that? Dockers and engineers on strike, even the post office.’

She knew only too well. After she’d been off having Chris they’d cut back at her old place. When she went to see about going back to work they couldn’t give her anything. Not even part-time. Orders were down and overheads were up. People blamed cheap imports and they were tightening their belts.