Therapy

realizing its religious significance. “It means the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” she said, making a little reflex inclination of her head as she pronounced the Holy Name. These pious allusions to gridirons and hearts, with their incongruous associations of kitchens and offal, made me slightly uneasy, reminding me of Mrs Turner’s threats to wash me in the Blood of the Lamb in infancy, but didn’t deter me from seeking to make Maureen my girlfriend.
    I had never had a girlfriend before, and was uncertain of how to start, but I knew that courting couples often went to the cinema together, because I had queued with them outside the local Odeon, and observed them necking in the back rows. One day, as Maureen lingered outside the florist’s, I summoned up the courage to ask her if she would go to the pictures with me the following weekend. She blushed and looked at once excited and apprehensive. “I dunno. I’d have to ask my Mum and Dad,” she said.
    The next morning she appeared at the top of Beecher’s Road accompanied by an enormous man, at least six foot tall and, it seemed to me, as wide as our house. I knew it must be Maureen’s father, who she had told me was foreman at a local building firm, and viewed his approach with alarm. I was afraid not so much of physical assault as of a humiliating public scene. So, obviously, was Maureen, for I could see she was dragging her feet and hanging her head sulkily. As they drew nearer, I fixed my gaze on the long perspective of the main road, with its shining tram-tracks receding to infinity, and hoped against hope that Mr Kavanagh was just escorting Maureen, and would ignore me if I made no attempt to greet her. No such luck. A huge shape in a navy-blue donkey-jacket loomed over me.
    “Are you the young blackguard who’s been pesterin’ my daughter?” he demanded in a thick Irish accent.
    “Eh?” I said, stalling. I glanced at Maureen, but she avoided my eye. She was red in the face and looked as if she had been crying. “Dad!” she murmured plaintively. The young overalled assistant arranging flowers in buckets outside the florist’s paused in her labours to enjoy the drama.
    Mr Kavanagh poked me in the chest with a huge forefinger, horny and calloused and hard as a policeman’s truncheon. “My daughter’s a respectable girl. I won’t have her talkin’ to strange fellas on street corners, understand?”
    I nodded.
    “Mind you do, then. Off you go to school.” This last remark was addressed to Maureen, who slouched off with one despairing, apologetic glance at me. Mr Kavanagh’s attention seemed caught by my school blazer, a gaudy crimson garment with silver buttons, which I loathed, and he screwed up his eyes at the elaborate coat of arms with its Latin motto on the breast pocket. “What’s this school that you go to?” I told him, and he seemed impressed in spite of himself. “Mind you behave yourself, or I’ll report you to your headmaster,” he said. He turned on his heel and walked back up the hill. I stayed where I was, looking along the main road until my tram came in sight, and my pulse rate returned to normal.
    Of course this incident only drew Maureen and me closer together. We became a pair of star-crossed lovers, defying her father’s ban on further contact. We continued to exchange a few words every morning, though I now prudently stationed myself just round the corner, out of sight of anyone surveying the Five Ways from the top of Beecher’s Road. In due course Maureen persuaded her mother to let me call at their house one Saturday afternoon when her father was out, working overtime, so that she could see for herself I wasn’t the kind of street-corner lout they had imagined when she first asked if she could go to the pictures with me. “Wear your school blazer,” Maureen advised, shrewdly. So, to the astonishment of my own parents and disgust of my mates, I missed a home game at Charlton and put on the blazer I never normally wore at weekends and walked up the long hill to Maureen’s house. Mrs Kavanagh gave me a cup of tea and a slice of home-made soda bread in her big, dark, chaotic basement kitchen, and burped a baby over her shoulder as she assessed me. She was a handsome woman in her forties grown stout from childbearing. She had her daughter’s long hair, but it was going grey, and piled up in an untidy knot at the back of her head. Like her husband she spoke with an Irish brogue, though Maureen and her siblings had