The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3)

by Gerald Hansen

  Jed had to park his HATFUL BICTH Lexus just outside the cemetery gates, forcing Ursula to make do with catching a glimpse of the proceedings through the railings and a veil of tears. After Father Hogan shuffled away, prayers for salvation over, trailed by the black-suited undertakers who had lowered the casket into the gorge, Ursula stifled a moan, teeth clenched into the back of her fist, as she watched Roisin, Cait, Stephen and Paddy sneer at the card on the wreath she had gotten delivered. To Mammy: I hope you do love me she had written. They spat out a few words of contempt, chucked the flowers to the adjoining grave and gently placed their own ostentatious bouquets in its place. She glumly regarded the abundance of lilies Fionnuala bestowed with grand self- importance upon the mound of upturned earth and wondered how much they had set the Floods back and how long it would take them to ask her for help paying the bill.

  But, no. As Ursula peered through the bars, Jed massaging her shoulders and cooing words of comfort that were anything but, Ursula realized a line had been crossed. They would never approach her again, even for money. She had wasted ten years of her life, coming back to that godforsaken town and trying time after time to ingratiate herself to people who hated her. From that moment on, she and Jed would live alone in their upmarket house, surrounded by their Jamie Oliver roasting pans, brushed aluminum and a row of gargoyles. She had turned to Jed in the driver’s seat and told him as much.

  In your dreams, Jed had thought, grimly asphyxiating the steering wheel. He loved his wife dearly, but enough was enough.

  He had opened the tackle box and now scrabbled through the yellowed documents and black and white photos until he came upon the envelope from the Foyle Travel Agency.

  He took a quick inventory of Ursula with his eyes, his wife swaddled in the bedclothes, her face graced with something approaching a smile. It had been such a long time since he had seen her smile without the aid of pharmaceuticals. He hated himself for what he was about to do —abandon her to the vultures—but when she awoke, she would want for nothing. Except, perhaps, love and affection. Brandishing the ticket, he leaned over and kissed the harsh lines around her lips. Ursula murmured and rolled over.

  The hidden airline ticket showed that Ursula was a part of his past.

  Finding the right time had always been the difficult part, when he hadn’t had the nerve, hadn’t had the heart, was too decent a man to pack his bags and head back to Belfast International. He had deserted her mentally months ago, and now it was time to desert her physically.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JED SQUINTED THROUGH lager-riddled eyes, shards of sleet lacerating the windscreen. His destination: Belfast International Airport.

  Dead Slow! Warned the road sign. Jed didn’t give a damn.

  In his beleaguered mind, he repeated like a deranged mantra: 7, 9, 12, 20, 24, 29 Bonus: 36, 7, 9, 12, 20, 24, 29 Bonus 36.

  And, in the murky arena between suicide and accident, somewhere between Ballykelly and Limavady and in the pelting spring sleet, Jed’s new Lexus squealed on black ice and collided with a telephone pole. It was three hours before the paramedics hauled his body out of the wreckage.

  £ £ £ £

  Ursula was imagining Jed’s funeral: in her mind’s eye, it was a dour affair, attended only by the occasional golf partner, his bookie and the woman from the corner off-license. And Ursula, of course. His wake was another matter: Ursula’s OsteoCare patients and the members of her old choir and neighbors she hadn’t clamped eyes on since paratroopers had swanned through their front garden crawling out of the woodwork and elbowing their way into a sitting room already black with beings and fag smoke. And not a Flood in sight.

  Ursula could hear the pensioners clucking in sorrow, their rosaries jostling for position around the coffin and their curious eyes gazing down at the stranger in the suit within, cowboy hat on his chest. They wouldn’t have known the Yank very well, but they were always up for a grieving, and where better than at the funeral of the husband of a woman who had already suffered so much. Her family casting her out, the affront of the court case, the harassment of the rowdies, the whispers of mental instability, her mammy’s death just the week before, and now this. They would be hard pressed to find somebody more deserving of their tears.

  And, after that lotto win of hers, they were all of no doubt Ursula would splash out, stocking the sideboard and fridge with wild dear drink and finger foods much more elaborate than sausage rolls.

  Their kind words paired with the wringing of hands:

  “Yer man’s lovely looking in his coffin.”

  “The undertaker’s gone and done a quare grand job.”

  And to Ursula herself—

  “I'm wile sorry about yer trouble.”

  “C’mere, it was dead sudden, aye?”

  “It musta been a terrible shock, like.”

  —Ursula nodding and turning away, her eyes still raw from the tears, her feet squelching through the still-damp orange-tinted carpeting as she shoved her way through the masses, balancing a tray of crab canapés on a silver tray. The odd bleeping sound in her ears, casting the canapés a look of suspicion.

  “Ach, Ursula’s quare and cut up.”

  “God luck to her.”

  Ursula watching them raid her drink out of the corner of her eye, clawing their way to get at the stuffed shitake and the crudités and the Thai dipping sauce and realizing she was alone in the world as all the while the bleeping grew more insistent. A party of one raging against a town of stokes which had turned its back against her, banished from the choir, her mother growing cold in her grave...wondering did Eda love her or loathe her, she would never know, the sight of Fionnuala’s rabid face barking at her without end, Dymphna’s smirk as she eyed her handbag, Padraig’s wee hand clutching a petrol bomb, hooligans from Magilligan poised to attack her frail body and mind and where in the name of the merciful Lord was that bleeping coming from?!

  Ursula jerked, thinking she was in a video arcade, what with all the flashing and blinking and bleeping around her, the machines alive with some change in Jed’s condition, her fingers stuck in his clutching hand, barely able to make out his features beyond the bandages and tubes, the plaster casts bulky on his limbs. Ursula moaned against his leg brace, the tears rolling down her face. She squeezed and squeezed, wringing his hand and willing him to health.

  “Nurse! Nurse!” she wailed. “Something’s up with them machines! Me fella’s dying!”

  A pack of orderlies and doctors burst into the room and booted her out as they set to work on his sputtering body. Ursula fretted at the threshold for a minute until the door was slammed in her face.

  She stared down at the curious one way ticket in her hand. The paramedics had pried if from Jed’s fist in the ambulance en route to the hospital, and the police had handed it over to her. That and £4000 in cash.

  “Ach, Jed, Jed, Jed...”

  He had always been hovering in the background, shuffling alone to his daily pleasures of the off-license and betting track and darts club, bull’s-eyes celebrated alone, always to be relied on, and never a loving word did she have for his ears. If Jed died, Ursula would never know if he had been planning on deserting her, just as she had never demanded to know of her mother if she loved her. She would phone the Foyle Travel Agency and insist on knowing when he had purchased the ticket to see if she could figure it all out.

  She glanced into the room. They were still toiling away on Jed’s spasmodic body, the machines bleeping, and she couldn’t tell because of the doctors’ face masks if they were smiling or not. She didn’t know if Jed would make it.

  She hurried over to the payphone and dropped a coin in the slot.

  “Foyle Travel Agency—”

  “C—”

  “—One moment.”

  Ursula stood before the apparatus, tongue poised, “S Club Party” blaring in her ear. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the wall, then whipped around at a commotion erupting from down the corridor.

  “We w
ant her moved to a private room!”

  “Ye kyanny have a woman of her standing lying there with the druggies and alkies from the next bed pawing through her grapes!”

  “If ye want to pay for a separate room—”

  “—all her privates spread out for the world to see—”

  “—kyanny take a comfort break without the—”

  “Have ye the funds—”

  A glimpse of Roisin’s flailing arms, the curls of Dymphna’s hair and the spittle from Paddy’s mouth spraying into the face of a beleaguered orderly. Ursula crouched behind the payphone as she fought to contain the alarm, seeing her family for the first time as a clinical psychologist might.

  “Funds me hole!”

  “Private rooms is only for Orange bastards now? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Ye see you, ye mingin wee bean flicker—”

  “I’ve had it up to here with the likes of youse!” Lily screamed. “Security! Security! Fling these stokes into the car park now!”

  Straining the telephone cord, receiver still clamped to her ear, Ursula skulked, gorilla-like, toward Jed’s room and glanced inside. They were still toiling away on Jed’s convulsing body, the machines bleeping. It was still impossible to tell if Jed would survive. A human voice finally broke through the Europop.

  “Foyle Travel Agency? May I help you?”

  “I’ve a one way ticket to Wisconsin here,” Ursula said, struggling to make herself heard over the scuffling and elbowing and effin and blinding echoing down the corridor. “I was just wondering if you could tell me...”

  She couldn’t shake from her mind the vision of rage and desperation and unjust entitlement that her family inflicted upon the world.

  “If you could tell me...”

  It was suddenly all so dead easy to understand. She had had enough of them and all. A decisiveness steeled her tongue.

  “Could ye tell me how I can go about adding another passenger to the ticket?”

  As Ursula wittered off her details and dragged out her weary credit card, the plans poured through her brain and the heavy load of a lifetime’s worth of persecution slipped from her shoulders. She would creep around the corner to the Floods and silently slip the keys to 5 Murphy through the letterbox. They could have her new dream house as well; she just wanted rid of it, the sight of her orange Gaggenau fridge making her sick.

  “So that’s two passengers confirmed for flight 608.”

  “Aye, aye, that’s right,” Ursula said when all the particulars had been rattled off.

  As she hung up, she wondered briefly where in the continental US Wisconsin might actually be, what vegetation it had, and what its exports were. Would Jed survive his ordeal? she wondered. Would the doctors work their magic so she would be able to cover him in kisses, tell him he had always been—

  Father Hogan rounded the corner, almost knocking her to her feet. He had been called to read Jed his Last Rites, but had been in the car park for a fag break. The stench of tobacco from him had Ursula retching, but she managed a grin.

  “Yer services might not be required no more,” she said.

  Father Hogan didn’t know where to look.

  “Mind when I was banged in the cell, Father,” Ursula said, “and ye asked me if I might not clear outta town? I'm on me way to a new world called Wisconsin, no thanks to the likes of you. And I don’t mind telling ye I'm handing over the ill-gotten gains from wer lotto win to them shameless pack of sinners I used to call me family. Not an ounce of Christian compassion in any of their bones. Me dream house, including me Jamie Oliver roasting pans, 5 Murphy Crescent, they are to have em all. Probably put em on the market and sell all me gear down the market stalls at Magazine Gate with all them drug dealers, I don’t give a rat’s behind. Mark me words, their lives’ll change!”

  She knew well Fionnuala, if she ever woke from her coma, wouldn’t offer a word of thanks. That would give Ursula something to smile about on the flight to Wisconsin. The flight home.

  She left Father Hogan and went to wrap her arms around her loving husband. She prayed he was still living.

  Ursula opened the door and stepped inside.

  SOME TIME LATER

  DEEP WITHIN THE CHIPPED-paint corridors of the intensive care ward of Altnagelvin, Fionnuala’s lids flickered and slowly peeled from her eyeballs. She winced in confusion at the unfamiliar light. The fog lifted from the outskirts, and her eyes twitched in puzzlement at an outstretched arm with a catheter snaking up to an IV and life support machines which whirred away inches from her bedridden form. As Fionnuala’s brain cells struggled to comprehend, her eyes took a wider tour of the environs: the wilted flowers on the bedside table, the half- deflated heart-shaped balloons moored against the enclosing curtains, the get well cards curling at the corners and yellowed with age. Her body suddenly lurched up with fear.

  Fionnuala spied the nurses’ call button and hauled her long- dormant limbs the length of the mattress, struggling, the bed clothes sliding to the floor, her mind racing.

  She reached a trembling hand forward, alarm registering as she took in the frail, claw-like nature of her flesh, the bulging blue veins and spidery wrinkles. Tendrils of terror prickled up and down her spine. She stifled a hysterical moan and jabbed away at the call button like a thing possessed. An elderly thing possessed. She had become a pensioner and hadn’t had the state of mind to see it.

  How many years had passed? She feverishly wondered how Magella had coped without her at the Sav-U-Mor, who had gone to Eda’s funeral, what Dymphna had worn to her wedding, and how many times over she and her Orange fancy man had made her a grandmother. She even wondered if the North had at long last been reunited with the South. And then she wondered about Ursula. Had the greedy bitch finally got her comeuppance? Was she suffering for her tight-fisted sins? Paying her penance for...paying...?! A sudden thought came to Fionnuala, hope glittering in her eyes. Her finger jabbed frenetically at the button, impatience dissolving into fury.

  “Ach, would ye hurry yerselves up,” she muttered, “ye flimmin lazy-arsed—!”

  A young one in white tights and cap rushed into the room, the look on her face as if the Virgin Mary had just planted herself astride one of the sagging balloons.

  “Mrs. Flood!” she gasped. “Ye’ve come to yer senses! At long last! Lemme seek out the head nurse!”

  “Wait! Just wait you there a wee minute!” Fionnuala croaked.

  Already halfway out of the room, the nurse turned back.

  “H-How many years have I been laid here, me body wasting away, like?”

  The orderly stared at her, her brow furrowing with concern and not a little confusion. At the very bottom of the list of emotions a recently awoken coma patient might experience was excitement, yet there it was, staring out eagerly from Fionnuala Flood’s face. Sometimes, the orderly thought, these patients were a wee bit simple in the head for the rest of their lives, the coma having eaten away at those brain cells which contained common sense.

  She took a timid step toward the bed.

  “We’d best get the nurse,” the orderly said. “We kyanny—”

  “It’s a question any simpleton would have no bother spewing out the answer to!” Fionnuala barked.

  The orderly chewed her lower lip.

  “What year does it be?” Fionnuala demanded feverishly, clutching the nurse’s lapels and dragging her into her face. “What age’s me Padraig? What age is me Padraig?”

  A bevy of hospital employees now crowded the threshold in wonder. Such a selfless woman, this Mrs. Flood, they marveled, wrenched from a coma and unconcerned about her own traumas, a caring mother, worried sick only about the welfare of her wanes. This Padraig she kept mentioning must be her favorite wee dote.

  “Is he eighteen?” Fionnuala begged to know, staring wildly around the room. She caught the fleeting silhouette of a tall orderly, broad shoulders, sauntering down the corridor. The hope blossomed on her ravaged features.

  Her Pa
draig, she marveled, finally of age!

  “Is that me Padraig?” she insisted on knowing.

  “Calm you down, Mrs. Flood,” the head sister, finally arriving, cooed, wiping her brow. “Ye’ve not been out long, sure.”

  The feverish excitement lunged into despair, Fionnuala’s lips curled with scorn.

  “Ach, catch yerself on, ye headbin!” she spat. “Not been out long, me arse! Would ye look at the state of me body!”

  The head sister looked Fionnuala’s body up and down and pursed her lips, thinking, That’s the way it came in, sure. She spread a copy of the latest Derry Journal on the nightstand.

  “Go on and have a look at the date, love,” she said.

  Suspicious, Fionnuala willed herself to cast a look at the newspaper. Her eyes widened. Her body shuddered, incensed.

  “Nine bloody days?” she gasped, clutching at her heart. “Ye kyanny be telling me I’ve still seven flippin years to wait? Seven flippin years for that fecking compensation money?!”

  “Code blue! Code blue!” wailed the head nurse. “A cardiac arrest, so it is!”

  They wheeled Fionnuala off to surgery.

  Anderson Publishing

  324 Fleet Street

  London W1

  UK

  Dear Ms. Moira Flood:

  We are pleased to inform you that we have decided to take on your novel, An Embarrassment of Riches. Might we suggest, however, that you work with our editor to change the first-person narrative to third person?

  Paul McMurphy will be in touch with you in the near future regarding this matter.

  Congratulations!

  Best,

  Lucretia Neff

  Editor-In-Chief

  Praise for Hand In The Till:

  “CONTINUED BRILLIANCE, the characters still make you laugh and cry and fume the entire time you’re reading,” Colin Quinn

  “Another excellent piece from Hansen. Darkly comic, I laughed out loud. Hansen brings the personal side of the continuing divisions in Derry with the dynamic interplay of his wonderful characters,” Kate Rigby, Little Guide to Unhip, Lost the Plot, Seaview Terrace, among others