Stand by Me (3 page)
‘She’s right,’ murmured Emma Walsh as they took a final bow. ‘You were great, Dominique.’
‘Thanks.’ Dominique glowed. Emma had been very supportive throughout the performance and Dominique was beginning to think that the other girl wasn’t as snooty as she’d originally thought.
‘Who’s that guy beside your mother?’ Emma asked.
‘My dad, of course,’ she replied, unable to actually see him because without her specs she was far too short-sighted to identify anyone.
‘It can’t be your dad,’ said Emma. ‘He’s too young.’
‘Oh, him.’ Dominique squinted. ‘That’s Gabriel. My older brother.’
‘No way,’ said Emma. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Dominique knew why Emma sounded so surprised. While she’d been stuck with the plain gene in the family, Gabriel was almost heart-stoppingly handsome. Three years older than her, he was much taller. His face was chiselled and thoughtful, with a permanent shadow of stubble around his chin. He’d never had a spot in his life. His eyes were brown like hers but not hidden by glasses and a fringe. If she’d looked like Gabriel, Dominique thought, she could definitely have been a Nikki. No question.
After she’d changed out of her costume and into jeans and a jumper, she went to find her family. As she approached them, Emma joined her.
‘Introduce me,’ she said to Dominique.
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Dominique’s father, Seamus, shook Emma’s hand. ‘You were very good as Mary Magdalene.’
‘Thanks,’ said Emma. ‘I think she’s a tragic figure really.’
‘I never approved of her,’ sniffed Evelyn. ‘But we’re all God’s children.’
‘Even Judas Iscariot,’ said Gabriel warmly. ‘You were very good too, Dominique.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Emma turned to look at him. ‘You would’ve made a great Judas yourself,’ she said. ‘All dark and brooding.’
Gabriel smiled and Dominique laughed. ‘He wouldn’t have had the right attitude towards it,’ she told Emma, who, she realised with a sudden spurt of amusement, fancied him. She looked wickedly at her, tickled by the idea that the most popular girl in the class was interested in her gorgeous, unavailable brother. ‘He’s going to be a priest, you see.’
‘No!’ Emma’s eyes opened wide. ‘Not really?’
‘It’s true,’ admitted Gabriel. ‘It’s my vocation.’
‘You’re kidding me?’ Emma still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘He’s going to make a wonderful priest,’ said Evelyn. ‘We’re so proud of him, aren’t we, Dominique?’
‘Absolutely,’ said his sister, although her tone belied her words. ‘He’s our very own Superstar.’
‘God, what a waste!’ Emma said the following week in class. ‘I mean, I can’t believe that you have such a hunk of a brother, Dominique Brady. Or that I never met him before. Or that he’s going to be a priest! Will he go through with it, d’you think? It would be such a loss to women everywhere. ’
Dominique shrugged. ‘He’s always wanted to join the priesthood, ’ she told Emma and the others who had clustered round. ‘Ever since he was small. Other kids played cowboys and Indians and stuff. He said pretend Masses. He said he had a vision.’
‘What sort of vision?’ breathed Tanya Johnson.
‘Oh, of God,’ said Dominique dismissively. ‘He said that God came into his room one night and told him that he had a mission for him and that it was to do his work or something like that.’
‘Don’t you believe him?’ asked Natasha Howard.
‘C’mon!’ Dominique looked at her scathingly. ‘God doesn’t come into people’s bedrooms. That’s all church stuff. Gabriel wants to be a priest because my mother brainwashed him when he was a kid by making him be an altar boy and telling him he was special and everything. He’s not.’
‘He’s utterly gorgeous,’ sighed Emma dreamily. ‘I wonder if I could persuade him that his talents lie in other directions.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to try,’ Dominique told her. ‘But you’d certainly be the first to succeed.’
Dominique had hoped that successfully carrying off the role as Judas would make her more popular with her classmates, but it was actually because of Gabriel that she was suddenly in demand. Girls who’d hardly ever spoken to her before asked her about him, wanted to know when he was at home, and took to calling around to her house on the off chance that he’d be in. Evelyn was surprised and not always pleased by her daughter’s new friends. She was especially wary of Emma Walsh, who always turned up wearing lashings of mascara, shiny pink lip gloss and low-cut tops. Evelyn considered Emma to be a bad influence on Dominique who was spending more and more time looking critically at her own reflection in the mirror and beginning to use mascara and lip gloss herself. She didn’t want Dominique giving in to vanity like so many girls her age. She wasn’t worried about Emma’s influence on Gabriel. She knew that no girl would divert him from his chosen path.
Despite Evelyn’s certainties, saving Gabriel from the priesthood became a mission for the girls in Dominique’s class, and they embraced it enthusiastically. They wanted to change his mind before he joined the seminary, because he’d chosen to go to college before devoting himself solely to his vocation. The way they looked at it, they had a year to turn his life around and they were all going to do their best to be the one to achieve it. Dominique wondered what would happen to her new-found popularity at the end of the year when Gabriel departed, as she knew he would, for his training. She wondered if Emma, in particular, would continue to call around to the house. Much to her surprise, she was beginning to like Emma, even if she couldn’t help thinking that she was really silly over Gabriel. She was surprisingly generous with make-up tips and suggestions for, as she put it, enhancing Dominique’s appearance, although Dominique herself had to admit that she wasn’t brave enough to go for bright blue mascara and gold glitter on her cheeks. Not that Emma’s flirtation with coloured mascara and glitter was having any effect on her brother either.
‘It’s like
The Thorn Birds
,’ said Cara Bond in school one day. ‘He should follow his heart and not his head.’
The Thorn Birds
,’ said Cara Bond in school one day. ‘He should follow his heart and not his head.’
‘Ooh, yes,’ agreed Lisa-Anne Downey. ‘He has to do what’s right for him.’
‘His heart is in the priesthood,’ said Dominique. ‘God knows where his head is. Up his arse most of the time.’
‘Oh, Dominique, you know that’s not true!’ cried Emma, who’d been around at the house the previous night, ostensibly to work on a geography project with Dominique and Maeve. As it turned out, Dominique was the one who researched the project, while Maeve drew up a chart of how it would look and Emma spent much of the time batting her (purple) eyelashes at Gabriel, who pretty much ignored her and continued reading his book on philosophy. ‘He can’t help being perfect.’
Dominique snorted. She was perfectly prepared to admit that Gabriel was a hunk, but as far as she was concerned, his perceived perfection was bloody irritating; Evelyn and Seamus were forever telling her that she should try to live up to his example, which drove her nuts. Deep down, she couldn’t wait until he joined the seminary and was out of her life, lifting the pressure to be as wonderful as him off her shoulders.
Emma Walsh definitely didn’t want Gabriel to leave. Whenever possible, she would start a discussion with him about God and the Church, which he always took seriously but which left Dominique shaking with suppressed laughter. Maeve, the only one of her friends who didn’t fancy Gabriel (she’d known him all her life and, like Dominique, thought he was too good to be true), sometimes got annoyed with seeing Emma at the house so much. But both Maeve and Dominique agreed that the other girl was actually quite good fun when she wasn’t flicking her hair from her face and mooning over Gabriel. It would do her good, Maeve added, to realise that not every male in the universe could be charmed by her ever-changing lash colour and glossy lippy (although both of them wished that mascara and lippy would work the same wonders on them as they so clearly did on Emma, who, despite her failure with Gabriel, continued to be the girl most of the boys in their year wanted to date).
Gabriel left for the seminary at the Royal English College at Valladolid, in Spain, just after Dominique left school. By then Emma Walsh was the only one of the gang who still fancied him - all of the others had given him up as a lost cause, and Dominique couldn’t help feeling that she’d never again be as popular as she was for the few months when her brother had been the hottest item in town.
Emma continued to drop around to the Brady house until Gabriel left. She was thrilled when Evelyn (despite some reservations, and still thinking that the Walsh girl wore too much make-up and too few clothes) invited her to the family celebration to mark Gabriel’s departure for the seminary. It was at the house, and low-key, just family, neighbours and the local parish priest. Evelyn fussed around making sure that they all had plenty of tea and sandwiches, while Gabriel appeared both pleased and slightly embarrassed at the attention.
‘I can’t believe he’s really going,’ said Emma mournfully. ‘I mean, who becomes a priest these days? Who’d want to?’
Dominique glanced at her brother, who was in the corner of the room talking to their parish priest. ‘He was always a bit spiritual,’ she conceded. ‘I know my mother influenced him too, but he truly seems to believe he has a vocation and will help people.’
‘Doesn’t help me,’ said Emma glumly, and Dominique laughed.
Evelyn made a short speech saying how proud she was of Gabriel, and then Gabriel himself said some words about the great gift that God had bestowed upon him and how he hoped to be found worthy of it. Meanwhile, Dominique wondered if there was anything she could ever do in her life to make Evelyn and Seamus half as proud of her as they were of her older brother.
She did rather better than she’d expected in her leaving exams. Both of her parents had congratulated her on her results, but since the posting of them had coincided with Gabriel’s departure to Valladolid, they hadn’t given them that much attention. The good results didn’t make a lot of difference to her anyhow, because there weren’t any jobs to be found. Not even in the local shops or businesses, most of which were struggling in an economy that was going nowhere. The only place hiring temporary staff was the local pub, and both Evelyn and Seamus made it quite clear that Dominique wasn’t working in a bar.
‘Dirty, smelly places,’ Evelyn said, even though she’d never set foot inside the door of their local lounge, which was famous for the quality of its Sunday carvery lunches. ‘And not the sort of job you want.’
‘I want anything that can help me earn some money of my own,’ said Dominique.
‘But not a bar,’ said Seamus, who, like Evelyn, was a teetotaller and wore a Pioneer Total Abstinence pin on the lapel of his suit. ‘There’s no way I want you working in a pub. I’ll continue to give you an allowance until you get something suitable.’
‘It’s not the same,’ replied Dominique. ‘And besides, you don’t give me very much.’
‘It’s all your father can afford,’ Evelyn told her. ‘I think he’s more than generous.’
‘Can we go on holidays this year?’ asked Dominique, changing the subject. ‘Can we go to Majorca like Maeve’s family?’
The Mulligans had headed off on holiday after the results of the exams had come out. Like Dominique, Maeve had done better than she’d hoped. Unlike the Bradys, the Mulligans were using it as an excuse to get away for a fortnight.
Evelyn sniffed. ‘I can’t believe they’re wasting all that money on two weeks of lying about,’ she said, ‘when they could put it to so much better use.’
‘I think two weeks lying in the sun sounds fabulous.’ Dominique sounded wistful.
‘Well I can’t think of anything worse,’ said Evelyn. ‘Now why don’t you go down to the parish office and see if you can help with the meals on wheels?’
‘It’s very unfair to be part of a family that considers Lourdes to be a potential holiday destination,’ Dominique told Maeve the following week when she’d arrived back home and shown off her photographs of hunky guys on the beach at Palma Nova. ‘We’re living in the nineteen eighties, not the fifties! I want to go to Fuengirola, not Fatima.’
Maeve sympathised. She’d had a great time in Majorca and enjoyed her first real romance, with an English guy she’d met at the apartment block where they were staying. She’d sent him three letters since she’d come home, although he hadn’t yet replied to any of them.
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