MONDAY
HE is 18 and has done very little work over the past few years at school. Because of the Leaving Certificate, this fact will shortly and sadly be revealed. She is grasping at straws now, because I was at school with her mother. "I suppose you and Mum didn't do all that much back in the old days, did you? I mean you weren't intellectuals or anything?" Not studious by nature, like?
This, I agreed, was true.
"So she couldn't go round saying I had let her down - if she was just the same, you know. She'll probably remember that, won't she. I'd say she will; she's basically quite fair about things like civil liberties.
I thought her mother was very fair-minded indeed, and said so.
"Well, if it was just the same situation for her, then we don't have anything to worry about. Her face had brightened, and it didn't seem the time to remind her that there were a few differences.
Her mother had actually put her head down for the first four months and got three Honours in her Leaving Certificate, in that summer 41 years ago. She did a shorthand and typing course, a BA degree, a diploma in Higher Education, and worked for to years teaching in a school, and then part-time when the children were young.
Unwise to tell her that her mother, as a non-intellectual, far-from-studious person, might still have a vague, unfair sort of feeling that her lovely, long-limbed daughter, who had all the freedom in the world, could have opened a book to study now and then,
But leave it, let it pass. Mothers, are wonderful, tolerant and forgiving. Maybe civil liberties is higher on her list of her priorities than it might be on mine.
TUESDAY
THE woman ordering a bouquet in the flower shop seemed absent-minded. Yes, yellow flowers were fine... and white, maybe. Whatever.
A bunch, a bouquet, a spray? Whatever was easiest. They were all easy? Well, a bouquet.
Sorry, she wasn't concentrating her mind was miles from getting flowers, as it happened. Her son had taken to his bed. He just won't get up. And when she goes in to talk to him, all he says is "What's the point?" It's the Leaving, of course.
He was never like this before, and they've put no pressure on him at home. They haven't gone on and on about what points he needed, like some families do, They had hoped he might get into engineering. it was what he had always said he'd be good at. But now he just lies there, his eyes all dull. and says there's no point. Your whole life is decided by a couple of weeks of exams, and even if you do get good marks, there are no places, and no jobs.
Yes, she got the doctor, and he said it was a common enough thing - a panic - and that on the day of the exam he'd get up, right as rain, and go in and sail through it.
But suppose he didn't. Suppose tomorrow he just lay there and asked what was the point?
WEDNESDAY
THE rain was lashing down and the cars crawled through the rush-hour traffic. The girl, wild-eyed, soaked to the skin and crying at the top of her voice, staggered across the road. "Help me, help me someone. I'm doing my Leaving. It's starting today, and the DART is cancelled. It's because of flooding. What am I going to do?"
The little cocooned world of commuters was unexpectedly touched by her plight. People got out of their cars to discuss where she could go, they could give her a lift to here or to there, but the traffic was moving so slowly, was this the best way?
They gave her toffees, held an umbrella over her, tried to pat her down.
"They'll make allowances," someone said.
"They never make allowances," bawled the girl.
Somebody made a call on a mobile phone. Somebody listened to the car radio.
Great news, the DART was starting again in to minutes. She would make it. Her life wasn't over after all.
THURSDAY
THEY were having a convivial smoke, a group of boys. At least the thing had begun - it must have been like being in a war or something, one of them said: once you heard the boom of the guns, somehow it calmed you down. The waiting for it was the worst thing. They debate whether you'd hear the boom of guns nowadays or was that only in history; you might hear a scud or see an Exocet or inhale some germ warfare. They seemed remarkably philosophical about it all - exams and war.
What had they thought of the essays yesterday? Great, grand swooping titles; you could write anything, anything you wanted. Their teacher had told them over and over the essay title wasn't important: it was what you made of it. The examiners were only trying to find out could you express anything, it didn't matter what you expressed.
Which was just as well, because Kevin had taken the title "I'm a bundle of prejudices" and wrote about how much he hated old people, and that people should line up for voluntary euthanasia when they were 39 to clear the world of befuddled old brains. A bright future with no one around over 40.
They really hoped, for Kevin, that the teacher was right, that, it wasn't what you said but that you could say it. They thought it was quite possible a lot of the people marking the thing could be over 40 with no sense of hum our.
FRIDAY
"WE'VE a girl doing her Junior Cert this year, and you know, they're all in a state of hysteria, her and her friends. I dread to think what they'll be like when it's the Leaving or a Deb's dance or - God between us and all hand - a wedding.
"There's more planning every night on the phone, they'll meet at this house and all walk there together, or at that house, and they have to have money for a Big Mac at lunchtime or they won't have the energy for the afternoon.
"And I say to, my husband we've got to humour them, because its not like when we were young, and he says it certainly is not, we'd have got a cuff on the ear. I said that's right, we would have - but look at all the other things we had that they don't have now, like grannies doing novenas. You have to be fair."