the derry girl || james maguire

sixteen

Niamh's pov

holy god, Peter was here, why the fuck was Peter here.

"Okay, so I see a few familiar faces out there. As some of you may know, I took a bit of a sabbatical last year."

"Do you mean when you shacked up with a slutty hairdresser, but then she dumped you?" I said.

"Miss McCarthy, please! Raise your hand if you want to ask a question." Sister Michael told me.

and so I did, I raised my hand, but as I suspected, Peter ignored it.

"Okay, I think we should just move on." Peter said.

"The hairdresser certainly did."

I snickered at that. Good one sister.

"Okay, so this is just a little exercise I like to kick off with. I want you guys to give me examples of things that Catholics and Protestants have in common and things that they don't have in common. Let's start with similarities. Erin, why don't you get the ball rolling?" Peter asked.

"Okay, So, we both. Right. So, we all. God, this is actually quite hard." Erin struggled.

"Anything at all, a small thing even."

"Okay, so Right. God, I'm, actually, drawing a blank here, to be honest."

"Not to worry, someone else? A similarity? Yes"

"Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish."

"Alright, So that's actually a difference.
Quite a Quite a big difference."

"But that's OK, we can write that down.
Now, back to similarities."

"Yes?"

"Protestants are richer."

"Okay, so that's another difference. And I'm not sure that's actually I mean, is that true?"

"I would say so."

"Yeah, I suppose that's fair enough."

"Yes, great. Off you go."

"Catholics really buzz off statues and we don't so much."

"I do enjoy a good statue, it has to be said."

"So again, what we have there is a difference."

"Ooh! Protestants like to march and Catholics like to walk." Orla said.

"OK, can we just? Jenny, could you just Oh, you've already written it down, have you? Great, thank you, Jenny. I want to just pause and think about what's in here.
What about the fact that we all feel and love and hope and Write this down. We all cry. We all laugh. We all dream. I just want to think along those lines, for a moment. Okay." Peter smiled.

-

"Catholics watch RTE!"

"Protestants love cleaning!"

"Protestants are taller!"

"Catholics have more freckles."

"Protestants hate Abba."

"Okay, thank you. Let me just rephrase slightly. Can you think of anything that unites every single person in this room? Is there anything that we all want?" Peter asked.

"For this to be over."

"And we'll wrap it up there."

thank fuck.

-

now we were attempting to get into the Protestant boys room, Michelle had made us sneak out of the room and upstairs to find them.