Stand by Me by Sheila O'Flanagan Page B

that make me feel good. All the time.
     
    ‘Did Brendan ring you today?’ asked Evelyn as she threaded a needle.
     
    Dominique shook her head. ‘He was meeting a friend who’s coming up from Cork for a job interview tomorrow,’ she said.
     
    ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ Evelyn’s voice was suddenly taut. ‘Don’t let yourself down with him, Dominique.’
     
    ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Dominique as dismissively as she could, even though she could feel a cold sweat enveloping her.
     
    ‘Of course you do.’ Evelyn slipped a thimble on to her finger. ‘You’re easily led, Dominique.’
     
    ‘No I’m not.’
     
    ‘You are. You do things because you think they’ll make people like you. But they have to like you for what’s inside.’
     
    ‘You have such a low opinion of me!’ cried Dominique. ‘And you don’t know me at all.’ She clamped down on the guilt that was wrapping itself around her. Her mother couldn’t possibly know that she’d had sex with Brendan. She couldn’t possibly know that she was feeling elated, excited, in love - and scared too, because even as they’d started walking back to the main road to get a taxi, the awful thought had struck her that she could be pregnant - she hadn’t been to the family planning clinic yet; that would have been admitting that she wanted him to sleep with her.
     
    He hadn’t had any condoms, and she wouldn’t have known what to do with one if he had. After all, chemists didn’t regularly stock them. The priests and politicians were still trying to pretend that premarital sex didn’t happen in Ireland. They were still in the Dark Ages compared to the rest of Europe.
     
    Brendan had apologised about the condoms, had said that he wasn’t prepared because he hadn’t imagined that she would want . . . and she’d shut him up with a kiss and then he’d said not to worry, he’d be careful. She’d wondered fleetingly about that, wondered where and how and with whom he’d had the experience to know how to be careful. But she still hadn’t stopped, because she’d been totally and utterly overwhelmed by her desire for him.
     
    All the same, she thought now, her heart hammering in her chest, if I am pregnant, if Brendan got it wrong, my mother will kill me. She knew that Evelyn’s reaction should really be the least of her worries, but it was what concerned her most of all. In her head she composed a quick prayer to St Jude (obviously she wasn’t a lost cause yet, so praying to the patron of lost causes might be a bit extreme, but better to be safe than sorry as far as saintly interventions went). Please let me not be up the spout, she asked mentally. I’ll go to the family planning clinic next week and go on the pill. It occurred to her, as she finished the prayer, that St Jude might not be in a receptive mood. After all, he was a saint and she was asking him to condone a sin. It was a tricky situation to be in.
     
    ‘I don’t have a low opinion of you. But men aren’t like women,’ Evelyn was saying now. ‘They don’t always think with their heads and their hearts, you know.’
     
    Dominique couldn’t quite believe that Evelyn was having this conversation with her, however obliquely. Her mother never discussed relationships and sex. When Dominique had turned thirteen, Evelyn had given her a copy of Sex Education: Training in Chastity , which hadn’t exactly been helpful. She’d learned more from the girls talking in school and from the teen magazines she liked to read than she had from Evelyn’s book. Dominique always thought that Evelyn found the whole business distasteful. She knew that children couldn’t imagine their parents ever having sex, but the idea of Evelyn and Seamus doing what she and Brendan had done was utterly impossible to comprehend, and the idea of them enjoying it was beyond imagining. Doing it at least twice, too! She shuddered.
     
    ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ repeated