Finding Tom Connor

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Like most shuttle drivers, he looked as if every moment not spent behind the wheel of his van was spent with a fag hanging out the side of his mouth, a pack of cards in one hand, a glass of hard liquor in the other.

  ‘Get away on you, did he? Off to the airport now, my love, if you want to chase after him. Climb aboard if that’s where you’re headed.’

  Have there always been so many comedians in the world? Molly wondered as she climbed in the side door and crouched her way to the back seat of the van, hoping she would be too far away from the driver to make polite conversation, or rude conversation for that matter.

  As the van pulled out into High Street, the tears that had so far remained in hiding made a break for freedom and for the next 20 minutes Molly Brown sobbed her heart out, broken as it was.

  Chapter 4

  1969

  ‘You can keep your wandering hands to yourself, you dirty article,’ Margaret Mary O’Reilly said forcefully as Colm Fogarty’s fingers attempted to tiptoe under her skirt.

  ‘Ah, come on with you, Margaret Mary,’ the black-eyed teenager grinned. ‘You know you want to.’

  ‘I know me Da will chop off your roving hands and take my own legs with them if anybody sees us. That’s what I know,’ said the pretty blonde, slapping away her suitor’s hands. ‘Get away with you, Colm. Could you not do something romantic like read me a poem or something instead?’

  Colm looked at her as though he didn’t know what a poem was and Margaret Mary didn’t even want to contemplate that possibility.

  The two of them had slipped off the hill road behind Ballymahoe and were sitting under the sole tree in the little green valley between Full Hill and Hungry Hill.

  It was a sunny May afternoon and Margaret Mary had managed to escape the eagle eye of her doting mother in favour of a stroll with Colm, although slapping him away was wearing her out.

  Not for the first time she wished she came from a town that had more than one street so that she might meet a boy with whom she had more in common. Colm was really only a last resort, with his lewd suggestions and talk about war movies. At night she dreamed of princes and movie stars and moving to the city but by day she was reduced to sitting on the little pier in front of Brendan’s pub slapping away Colm’s clumsy advances in view of the whole village.

  Today she had thought she would bring him up the valley to slap him away in private.

  ‘There once was a boy from the dock,’ the great dolt sitting next to her was saying, prompting Margaret Mary to silence him with a hefty shove to his shoulder.

  ‘You haven’t a romantic bone in your body, you bollocks,’ she scolded, ‘but let me tell you this, Colm Fogarty, if you really think I’m suddenly going to roll over on my back and say “Take me, take me,” then you’re even more of an eejit than I thought.’

  With that she stood up, straightened her petticoat and smoothed down her skirt.

  ‘Do you really think I’m going to end up fat in the pants before I’ve a ring on my finger and tied to a tinpot town like Ballymahoe for the rest of my life?’ She stuck her pretty pert nose in the air and shook her blonde shoulderlength curls.

  Colm stared at her breasts and wondered what it would feel like to stick his nose in between them.

  ‘As soon as I’m finished school I’m off to Hollywood to be a movie star,’ she went on, throwing one hand in the air in a theatrical fashion. ‘Jenny O’Keefe at school says I’m a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe, you know.’

  ‘Well, then, Marilyn,’ said Colm, leaning back with his arms behind his head and thrusting his hips forward as he stared up at her, ‘any chance of a ride?’

  ‘You dirty little …’ Furious now, she kicked him in the thigh, turned on her heel and started to march down the valley back towards the road.

  In a jiffy Colm was behind her, laughing but rubbing his bruised leg as well.

  ‘You’re a right little tease, Margaret Mary O’Reilly,’ he said as he grabbed her around the waist from behind. She twisted angrily to belt him once again but one foot tripped over the other and she lurched sideways and fell to the ground, taking him with her.

  ‘You little shite,’ she seethed, lying on her back with tears in her eyes as she tried to extricate herself from the mangle of herself and Colm, who was on top of her, his face perilously close to her breasts, laughing and leering.

  ‘What would the nuns say if they could see you now?’ he taunted.

  But as his words tumbled out, he felt Margaret Mary stop struggling and saw her face turn ashen, her rosebud mouth fall open and her eyes widen in terror as they focused on something behind him.

  He rolled off her and twisted around to follow the line of her vision.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he gasped. ‘What would the feckin’ nuns say if they could see this now?’

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday, 17 February 1999

  When the front top layer of her wedding dress was sodden with tears and snot, Molly stopped crying.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t had a freshly pressed linen hanky to sniffle into. In fact she couldn’t even remember the last time she had cried. Maybe it was watching The Horse Whisperer.

  Up until now nothing much had ever made her feel sad.

  She pressed her hot, wet cheek against the cool glass of the shuttle van and wondered why that made her feel good. How could anything as simple as a cooling sensation on her face make her feel good when life as she knew it was over?

  Her eyes focused on the passengers in other vehicles zooming along the motorway. It was a clear Auckland evening and everywhere she looked people were making their way home from work, school and the park as though nothing had happened.

  Some even had the audacity to be laughing and clearly enjoying themselves.

  It’s only me this is happening to, Molly thought sadly, and it was the loneliest thought she had ever had.

  Up until now, nothing much had ever made her feel lonely either.

  A rear-window sticker caught her attention. ‘Driveaway with Us,’ it read, ‘for the Ride of a Lifetime.’

  The urge to laugh popped into Molly’s brain for a fleeting visit before being chased away by a dark cloud of anger. With a jolt she remembered why she was sitting in a shuttle van headed for Auckland airport but going nowhere and the anger shifted in to stay.

  It was a feeling with which she found herself unfamiliar. For God’s sake, thought Molly, don’t tell me nothing much has ever made me feel angry either. She must have been angry before, but just off the top of her head she couldn’t think of the last time she had felt this slow-moving blackness chewing up her insides.

  Perhaps I do have the personality of a hall rug, she considered with horror.

  The shuttle pulled in at the Departures level behind a painter’s ute and Molly paid the driver and turned towards the automatic doors.

  At this stage her plan was loose and unformed, but something about the painter’s ute made her stop. The vehicle was unattended except for a large kerry blue terrier sitting in the back with the supplies.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ Molly said in a low voice, holding out her hand to the dog. Canines had always loved her. I wonder if it’s a hall rug thing, she idled.

  Sure enough, the terrier sniffed at her and wagged his tail and she scratched him under his chin as she checked out the contents of the truck. Perfect. Easily within her grasp was an empty yellow bucket. She picked it up while still scratching her new friend’s chest and dropped it gently on the pavement.

  ‘See you later, fella,’ she said over her shoulder as she swooped up the bucket and headed into the terminal building.

  Her mother had been right. Molly’s wedding dress obviously wasn’t ‘zhooshy’ enough because nobody seemed to bat an eye as the tear-stained slightly snotty bride stomped through the busy airport swinging a bucket.

  Molly followed the signs to the ladies’ room and lifted the bucket into the first sink in the row.

  ‘Shit
!’ she spat through clenched teeth. The bloody basin was too shallow. She couldn’t get the bucket under the tap.

  Crashing through the door of the closest cubicle, she lifted the toilet seat and tried to fit the bucket in the loo, thinking that if she flushed it enough times the bucket would fill, but she couldn’t get the blasted thing close enough to the sides.

  ‘Bugger,’ she growled as a grey-haired woman eyed her nervously in the mirror before scuttling out of the room.

  Think, Molly, think, she ordered herself as she loudly extracted the bucket from the lav.

  A rubbish bin under the sinks caught her eye and Molly wrenched off its top and peered inside. A used disposable nappy, a pair of old tights and — yes, that should do it — a clear plastic triangular case that had recently housed some fresh sandwiches. Egg, by the look of it.

  Gingerly pulling it out of the smelly bin, Molly filled the plastic casing with water and tipped it into the bucket. It nearly covered the bottom.

  After another 50 or 60 casings-full the bucket was two-thirds full of only slightly eggy water and a bit of bubbly liquid soap that had slipped in there by mistake when Molly had tried to ease the repetitive strain of filling the bucket by leaning on the soap dispenser.

  Who knew taking revenge was such hard work?

  ‘Ready!’ she trilled to nobody before picking up the by now considerably heavier bucket and heading out the door.

  Following the signs to the rental car desks, Molly went over in her head what she had to do next. Little had been clear since her life had been blown apart earlier in the day but this she knew: she had to throw this bucket of water on Tiffini’s frosty-tipped perm. She just had to. She would possibly die if she couldn’t.

  She didn’t want to think about how many it took to tango, she just wanted to get that cheap little slut in front of all this busy commuter traffic and drench her to her hopefully osteoporotic bones.

  Sure, she might then take the opportunity to slap her a bit, but mostly she just wanted to up-end the painter’s bucket on her head. That wasn’t too much to ask in the circumstances, Molly assured herself as she took the escalator down to the Arrivals hall. Was it?

  Rounding the corner at the northern end of the terminal, Molly immediately spotted the queues at the rental car desks. About 20 people milled in front of Hertz and another two dozen in front of Avis. In the middle of the two, a sole harried-looking customer lurked at the Driveaway counter.

  Elbowing the cheap tweed-jacketed customer out of the way, and keeping the bucket below the counter where it couldn’t be seen from the other side, Molly called out in a shrill voice, ‘Hello! Hello! We need service out here. Service, please.’ She banged the bell on the counter.

  A perfectly made-up woman of about Molly’s age, Jane according to her badge, came out from the office behind the counter, poking at the corners of her mouth and rolling her eyes slightly in a ‘thanks for interrupting my break, bitch’ kind of a way.

  ‘So sorry to bother you during your shift,’ Molly said, having a fairly successful crack at sarcasm. ‘Can you please get Tiffini for me.’ Her heart beating and her adrenaline pumping, she firmed her grip on the bucket handle.

  ‘She’s not here,’ said Jane. ‘Tiffini did a half-shift today. She left at midday. She’ll be back tomorrow if you want to come back then.’

  Hot air whooshed in Molly’s ears as rage transformed her.

  She was here with her bucket and its slightly soapy eggy contents and she was not leaving until she had upended it on Tiffini Slutty McSlutface’s head, Goddammit.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that Tiffini could have finished work already. She had assumed the little tramp was on her way to work all dolled up like that. It couldn’t be that on top of everything else she had got this wrong too. It was too much. Just plain old too much.

  Just like Elvis, Molly’s good sense left the building. She lost the plot.

  ‘Is that right, is it?’ she said, her voice growing louder as her anger gained momentum and as her chest heaved, the bucket jiggled, building up a tide of peaks and troughs that spilled over the side like Molly’s own fury.

  ‘Well, when that rat-faced little tart turns up to work again how about you tell her to leave other women’s nearly husbands alone, eh?’ she shouted at Jane. ‘How about you tell her that. Do you think you can do that? Do you? Or should I just go and paint a reminder in large letters on the outside of the terminal?’

  Jane, who had spent hours this week discussing the sexual prowess of Jack White with her colleague, guessed from the dress and the demeanour who Molly might be and was having trouble keeping her pleasant smile in place. This woman definitely had a deranged look in her eye.

  ‘I’m sorry, this is nothing to do with Driveaway —,’ she started.

  ‘Does that little bury-me-in-a-Y-shaped-coffin harlot wear that uniform?’ Molly shouted, jabbing the air in Jane’s direction. ‘Does she have a little badge that says “I’m Tiffini, Ride Me”?’ she screamed. ‘Does she know that finding her having sex with my fiancé has ruined my life? Does she?’

  Molly then turned to the crowd of agog renters-to-be standing at the Avis counter and screamed: ‘And I don’t know what you’re all standing over there for. If it’s a fuck you want it’s Tiffini at Driveaway you should be queuing for!’

  With that the humiliation of her situation hit her and she dropped the bucket to the floor, where it wobbled and teetered and spilt gobs of eggy water but didn’t tip. Then she put her hands over her face and started to sob.

  Apart from one slightly sheepish backpacker who moved surreptitiously from the Avis queue to the Driveaway desk, everyone remained silent and staring.

  ‘Molly?’ The weeping bride suddenly heard a grating yet familiar voice.

  ‘Molly, is that you? For chrissakes, girl. What the hell is going on here?’

  Opening her fingers to see if the voice belonged to who she thought it did, Molly momentarily felt that perhaps she had died and gone to hell.

  ‘Aunt Vivienne?’ she whispered, staring in disbelief at the impeccably dressed figure approaching her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Sitting in the scungy airport bar with a couple of double gin and tonics between them, Vivienne was trying her hardest to find out what sequence of events had led her niece to be having some sort of breakdown in the middle of Auckland International Airport.

  ‘Is it a breakdown, Molly?’ she asked. ‘Because I have one terrific therapist at home. I tell you, he puts me back together at least once a month. We could call him.’

  Molly’s snivelling was slowing down and her tears were drying. She took a long glug of her gin and looked at her aunt with red swollen eyes.

  ‘It’s all over, Vivienne,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘It’s all over between me and Jack. The wedding’s off.’

  ‘Well, I got a bad feeling when I saw you standing there in your wedding dress waving a bucket of water around and shouting obscenities at a group of strangers, I must say,’ said Viv dryly. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I walked in on him shagging some hussy in red slingbacks is what happened,’ sniffed Molly. ‘Just a few hours ago.’

  ‘They were actually having sex?’ her aunt asked.

  ‘No, he was standing there with no clothes on and she was sprawled out on the bed like some Amsterdam postcard,’ Molly snapped back. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘It could make all the difference in the world, Molly. Is there any chance you got the wrong end of the stick?’ Viv suggested in her business voice.

  ‘There was only one person in that room getting any end of the stick and it wasn’t me,’ said Molly. ‘You may as well get used to the idea that your niece’s perfect love match has gone right down the gurgler just like everyone else’s.’

  With that she slammed the rest of her gin and tonic down her throat.

  ‘You’d better slow down on the mother’s ruin, Molly,’ Viv suggested. ‘It can make you pretty w
acko if you’re not used to it.’

  ‘You can’t say it has that effect on Mum,’ said Molly quickly.

  ‘Well, you can’t say she’s not used to it,’ answered Viv, taking a deep, depressed breath and knocking back a big chunk of her own drink.

  ‘So are you going to tell me about the dress?’

  Molly looked down at what she was wearing. The wedding dress that it had taken five months for Chrissie to perfect was actually in pretty good nick considering what it had been through over the past few hours. The beaded bodice clung admirably to Molly’s 34C bust. The low, wide neckline showed off her delicate collarbone and perfect cleavage and the capped sleeves revealed her well-toned upper arms.

  She’d had the idea for the dress watching Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love and had imported the silk from Thailand and the organza for the overlay from Hong Kong.

  Chrissie had found some half-baked old hippie out on the west coast of Auckland who had hand-made the gold and pearl beads for the bodice and that alone had taken 52 hours of painstaking stitching by hand.

  It was beautiful.

  Well, it was slightly crusty with dried snot down one side and a bit of flaky vomit at the hem-line but that was proving quite easy to pick off.

  ‘It’s just perfect, isn’t it?’ she sobbed, tears once again drenching her cheeks. ‘I was trying it on when I saw Jack sauntering up the street with his fancy woman so I guess I’ll have to pay for it now even though there isn’t going to be a wedding.’

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll see about that. I mean, I didn’t fly all the way from New York City just to have a few watery gin and tonics in this crappy little airport bar.’

  Molly sat bolt upright in her seat. Vivienne always did this to her. Marched all over her with her Manhattan sophistication. Made her and Bobs feel like oiky little colonials. Never was-beens.

  ‘I am so sorry if I have inconvenienced you in any way, Vivienne. See how selfish I’ve become? Here I am talking about myself and my miserable little life falling apart when it’s you who must be devastated by 18 hours of first-class travel. Were you coming for the wedding or are you on your way to something more interesting?’