Month of Sundays

John Owens

Description

John O'Driscoll is madly in love with Karen Black but is so mesmerised by her beauty that in her presence his brain refuses to function. He walks in fear of school governor Father Kennedy, a man with nasal hair so terrifying it gives grown men nightmares and sends small animals scurrying for cover. And all O'Driscoll's efforts to impress Karen seem to end in disaster and public humiliation at the hands of the cantankerous cleric. Will O'Driscoll stay out of the pub long enough to win Karen over? Will he stay out of Father Kennedy's reach for long enough to have his teaching contract renewed? Follow the adventures of our bumbling hero over a month of Sundays as he embarks on a shambolic quest to save his job and win the heart of the woman he loves.

Sujets

• Humour

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785384226
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
A Month of Sundays
John Owens



Publisher Information
A Month of Sundays
Published in 2016
by AUK Authors
an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2016 John Owens
The right of John Owens to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
For Ivonne



Week One
Monday
If John O’Driscoll had been asked whether there was any way in which a week that had begun with him vomiting into a nun’s handbag could finish on an even more disastrous note, he would have laughed the idea off as ludicrous. He would, however, have been wrong, and the fact that his failure to predict the future would come as less of a surprise to those who knew him than it did to him said much for the esteem in which O’Driscoll’s abilities were generally held. For John O’Driscoll was often wrong: in fact, there were those who said that he had made it his life’s work to be wrong about pretty much everything.
To begin at the beginning though, the accident involving Sister Bernadette’s bag and his own bodily fluids happened at the end of an evening that had begun with Duffy’s suggestion of a “quiet pint,” and on that basis alone, O’Driscoll should have known it would end in tears. “Come on, just a quickie,” Duffy had insisted, deaf to his friend’s plea that he had already agreed to spend the evening helping organize a social evening for the old people of the parish. Against all better judgment, O’Driscoll had agreed and in no time the two young men were established comfortably in the back bar of The North Star on Ealing Broadway with several hours of a warm Spring evening at their disposal. When O’Driscoll looked up and saw his friend returning from the bar holding tumblers of whiskey, a series of tiny alarm bells began to ring in his head and had he heeded their warning chimes, the evening might have turned out very differently. But in the conviviality of the moment, the protest he made was but a token one and his doom was sealed.
“Jesus Christ, are you trying to ruin me altogether?” he said when he saw the glasses arriving.
“Yes,” replied Duffy simply. “Anyway, you might thank me for it tomorrow if it finally helps you pluck up the courage to speak to Karen Black. Tell you what, I’ll come with you and help you set up, and I’ll have a little chat with her for you.”
“No you bloody well won’t,” said O’Driscoll, for even though beguiling images of Miss Black filled his every waking moment, the thought of a drink-inflamed Duffy being let loose anywhere near her was a prospect too awful to contemplate.
And so it was that several whiskeys and several chasers later, the two arrived at the church hall of Saint Catherine’s in time to help make preparations for the dance, which was due to start at nine o’clock. An evening spent with a roomful of amorous octogenarians was not the entertainment that O’Driscoll would normally have sought out on a Monday night but, not for the first time, he had failed to take evasive action when the call for volunteers had gone out. There was also the little matter of his teaching contract being up for renewal and he was hopeful that an unassuming yet poised performance at tonight’s event would stand him in good stead when the school’s governing body met in a few weeks’ time to decide the following year’s staffing.
At the gates to the church, O’Driscoll stopped to take stock of the situation and consider the range of strategies that he had devised, over the course of his twenty-nine years, to foster the illusion of sobriety. That these devices rarely extended beyond the expedient of putting a half pack of mints sideways into his mouth, and that, although he himself fondly imagined them to be worldly and subtle, they invariably fooled no one was neither here nor there, for the sense of being master of one’s own destiny implicit in such acts helped O’Driscoll feel sober and that was the important thing. Now he straightened his tie, cleared his throat, burped softly and then spluttered as an unexpected jet of carbonated air raced through his nostrils. He felt in his pocket for a packet of Extra Strong Mints, broke it in two and offered one half to his friend, secure in the knowledge that through this cunning act of deception, their drunkenness would shortly be enveloped in a menthol infused cloak of invisibility.
At the bottom of the steps that led into the dank and forbidding church grounds, there was a small stream and they crossed it with the feeling of unease that ancient travelers might have experienced passing over the River Styx. Nodding a greeting to the ancient Irishman with the Pioneer badge who guarded the entrance like a gnarled and toothless Cerberus, they passed into the warmth of the church hall attached to the school where they both taught. As they did so a familiar aroma, sweet and redolent of hops, wafted across from the far corner of the room.
“Bloody hell, they’ve got a bar!” exclaimed Duffy and it was the existence of this makeshift arrangement in the corner that was to prove O’Driscoll’s undoing two hours and twenty minutes later. As they processed this new information, O’Driscoll suddenly caught sight of Karen Black heading towards the cloakroom and his stomach gave a familiar lurch. Miss Black, as she was known by her Year Four pupils, had joined the school at the start of the year and had immediately mesmerized O’Driscoll to the point where, in her presence, his brain refused to function beyond sending primitive signals to his eyes, imploring them not to stare longingly at her legs, breasts or parts in-between.
By each picking up a stack of chairs and carrying them across the room, O’Driscoll and Duffy contrived to arrive at the makeshift bar seemingly by chance.
“As we’re here, we’ll have a couple of whatever you’ve got,” announced Duffy to a large shape that could be dimly apprehended searching the shelves under the bar.
“Ye will, will ye!” came a well-known growl as the figure unwound and revealed itself to be none other than Father Kennedy, parish priest, school governor, and a man whose sudden terrifying appearance was in danger of reducing O’Driscoll’s bowels, already made watery by the presence of Miss Black, to a state of even greater liquidity. The priest had, over the years, established a fearsome reputation among the Catholic population of West London. He ruled his parish using a system of terror that Robespierre or Stalin would have envied, and on dark nights the mere invocation of his name was said to reduce misbehaving children to quivering acquiescence and send small animals scurrying for cover. And if he was “old school,” as some said, it was only in the sense of having crawled from the primordial slime of some ancient Borstal, carrying with him the value system of that sinister Dark Age.
Kennedy looked at them menacingly from under thick, bushy eyebrows, his great craggy face topped by an unruly white thatch. From flaring nostrils protruded great clumps of nasal hair whose oscillations O’Driscoll watched transfixed, for the movement of these tendrils was said to be an infallible barometer of the priest’s state of mind, and it was common knowledge that when he was angry, they danced wildly.
“Good evening, Father,” said Duffy, for with O’Driscoll examining his spiritual leader’s nose with the intentness of a medieval scholar reading a set of bulbous and hairy runes, it was clear the responsibility for opening verbal proceedings lay with him. “Lovely evening,” he went on with the insouciance which had, over the years, wreaked havoc among the fairer sex of West London. “We’ve come to help you prepare for the social evening. Such good work you and your team do - made us feel guilty so we’ve rearranged our squash match and here we are. Pretty parched though, after our training run, so we thought we’d grab a quick drink of something before getting to work.” As usual, Duffy’s charm had a disarming effect and within a couple of minutes, the two found themselves in the possession of cans of lager handed across by a Father Kennedy who, apart from giving vent to a muttered “Gypsies!”, remained silent.
Not for the first time, O’Driscoll contrasted Duffy’s easy charm with his own tongue-tied awkwardness, especially when dealing with the turbulent priest who was Chair of Governors at the school where both young men worked. His mind drifted back a few months to the church fete of Christmas 1994 and the faux pas which had blighted his first term and from which he was still trying to recover. In an effort to ingratiate himself with the powers that be, the newly-appointed teacher had volunteered to have a large poster printed which could be pasted onto the church noticeboard ahead of the event. Hoping to demonstrate appropriate levels of Catholic piety, but having typically left himself too little time to do the job properly, O’Driscoll had frantically searched the pages of Hymns Ancient and Modern for a suitable inscription. Hastily scanning the titles – Here I Am, Lord, Here at Your Table, Lord, Here I Am to Worship, How Great Is Our God , he had eventually chosen the shortest title, scribbled the artwork himself, rushed it off the printer and pasted up the returned poster with but minutes to spare before the op