Ursula scrabbled through her purse and located her tired checkbook. Another hundred dollars would probably never be seen again, but Jed didn’t ask for much often anymore. He had learned to bet only what they could afford. She reached for her wallet, as she would need to show her driver’s license.
“Hey, honey, you shoulda seen the big win I had after you left the table. I put almost all my chips on nineteen, you know, Gretchen’s birthday, and—Ow! You’re hurting me!”
Ursula’s fingernails sliced into his arm. Her face drained as a dread gripped her.
“Me driver’s license has gone missing!”
And she knew, the way one does, that it had found its way into those RIP-stenciled fingernails.
“Jed! She knows where we live!”
CHAPTER 13
DYMPHNA SADLY INSPECTED the hand-held shower hose attached to the bathtub tap. After almost a year in the splendor of the Waterside, she had gotten used to the Riddell’s state of the art walk-in steam affair that fit two, its ceiling rain shower and soft lighting, the all glass surround, water pressure that fairly took the flesh off her bones, and aromatherapy option (Dymphna was partial to the ylang-ylang). The shower had frequently been a social affair for her and Rory when set to ‘steam.’ They would never again share another sexy scene loofahing Christian Dior gel into each other’s crevices in the steam, Dymphna thought glumly, staring with hatred at the sliver of soap bleeding down the side of the tub.
When Rory coerced her to be his fiancée, she had found it frustrating to have the same male body next to her in bed night after night (especially that body), but recently she had been finding it comforting. Now she had nobody. She knew she could go to any pub in the city center and take her pick of the fit young lads in their Nikes and soccer shirts, but—
As she forced her bare feet from the ratty carpet to the icy tub, her tingly nipples and a slight sense of nausea reminded her of the shameful secret growing inside her, the horror of her sordid little family expanding. She took careful aim with the hand-held shower. Thin rivulets of tepid water dribbled over one foot, then one hand of goosebumps. Dymphna moaned as she shivered, and she looked with a further sense of doom at the bathtub itself, with its filthy ring and mildewed tiles. She damned the misunderstanding at the Pence-A-Day storage units which had led to her expulsion from both a ready-made support system for a newborn infant and an unborn child and a house which had the Internet actually inside it.
She had suffered a fitful, sleepless night at 5 Murphy Crescent as Keanu screamed at her side and her granny Heggarty snored in the next room, wondering if she should chance and how she could afford the bus ride, ferry ride and taxi ride over to England for a termination, and the taxi ride, the ferry ride and the bus ride back. She cursed the lunacy of Irish legislation which still had abortion illegal, just as she had ten months earlier.
“It’s all coming back to me now,” she thought grimly, “This is what me whole life was like.”
The rooms of 5 Murphy Crescent were more dank and dingy than the romanticized memories of when she had been forced to live there with her granny Eda (her parents had been furious the then-unborn Keanu was a half-Proddy bastard). The misery of life in the semi-detached council house came flooding back to her, the hot water bottles, shivering and weighed down, a prisoner to the mattress, under the weight of seven smelly blankets, the coal bin, the tiny fridge which could only hold three eggs and a half pint of milk, the smell of a pensioner’s wee.
“And now I’m back in the Moorside,” she sighed to herself. “And me life is only gonny get more miserable.”
She had been positioning the showerhead at her trembling flesh in a wide array of angles, yet was still barely damp.
“Och, this flimmin attachment is useless, so it is,” Dymphna finally realized. She would have to forgo the middle-class pretensions of a shower and revert to running a common bath, another step back into her past. She dismounted the tub and wrapped herself in the silk bathrobe with the ZR monogram she had secreted in the bottom of her suitcase under her smalls.
She tugged the rubber tubing from the tap and glumly watched water of a yellowish hue fill the tub. She wished she had thought to nick some of her mother’s Dead Sea bath salts. And then she recalled what she had finally seen clearly on her mother’s face when Fionnuala had entered the kitchen the night before: disappointment, annoyance, a hatred reserved especially for her. Her mother was right, Dymphna suddenly decided, the shame overwhelming her: she was a jumped up wee bitch, with ideas above her station; this was the world she had been born into and to which her flesh belonged.
She slid her hand in the pocket, pulled out her cellphone and frenetically dialed Bridie’s number. There had been a time they were inseparable as mates; if you kicked one, the other would limp. Once again, she received Bridie’s voicemail message. She rattled the cellphone, hoping this would bring about a different result. The beep unleashed a torrent of tears from her.
“Och, Bridie, why don’t ye answer me calls, ye daft cunt?” she cried down the line. “From bad to worse, it’s getting. Rory’s mammy kicked me out. I’m relegated to living at me auntie Ursula’s old house with me granny and the wanes, me mammy hates me and...Och, Bridie, for the love of God almighty, answer me, would ye? Maybe ye’re at work? I’m slavering for one of them TakkoKebabs from the ChipKebab, and some Chicken Dippers with that garlic sauce. I’m gonny be down the town the morrow and I’ll pop in to see ye, and ye can have a wee gander at Keanu, ye’ve not seen him, aye? And a round of gossip and all. We’ve ten months of it to trawl through, aye?”
She clicked the phone shut and flung it at the sink, and it knocked the ashtray to the floor, butts flying. But as Dymphna sniveled on the edge of the tub, an insurgent thought bubbled up from an unknown corner of her mind: she wouldn’t settle for what she had been born into. She would land a job at the ChipKebab with Bridie and become financially solvent; then she would somehow get Rory back, tell him about his new child growing within her, and he would be overjoyed; she would move back into the bungalow; she would even learn to love Zoë’s organic spinach and courgette pies. She might even give up lager and groping strange lads’ arses. And then her life would be perfect.
As the teenager gingerly lowered herself into the mire, her fingers reached squeamishly for the sliver of soap, but Dymphna had a feeling she would arise from the tub a different creature altogether, swathing the silk robe around her dripping body somehow reborn—a woman.
CHAPTER 14
WHILE SCOURING BURNT spud bits from the side of a pot, Fionnuala discovered she was humming Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” It was no wonder, as the song was playing on the radio next to the teeming sink, and Titanic was her favorite movie of all time.
“Near...far...wherever you are...!” Fionnuala sang into the grubby suds.
The fallout of her birthday, her sacking, her unflattering image on the cover of Moira’s book, all made the pan pipes of the song tug on the strings of her anthracite heart. Fionnuala felt a tightening in her throat as she made her way through an eggbeater, three teacups and a spatula and was carried off to an Ireland she was hard-pressed to find in the drudgery of the gray bricks beyond the net curtains (and even that she was hard-pressed to see, as the broken window had been duct taped with cardboard). Fionnuala knew that Celine’s Hollywood version of the Celtic wonderland of Eire existed somewhere, but she had visited it only in her heart.
Behind her, Paddy padded in and placed his hands around where he suspected her hips must be, singing in baritone,“We’ll...stay...forever this way...!” He nuzzled his three-day growth against his wife’s neck, and yelped as Fionnuala cracked her elbow into his rib.
“Are ye mental, ye eejit?” she scoffed.
There was a limited amount of physical affection Fionnuala could stand, and during the birthday bedroom antics of the night before, Paddy had gone over her limit. Then she remembered Paddy and Padraig had been the only two who gave her presents that cost more
than a tenner, and her heart softened.
“Them gifts was grand and lovely, so they were,” Fionnuala said. In the sitting room the phone began to ring. “An extravagance, mind, especially as we’ve only one income coming in now. Ye weren’t meant to know I’d get the sack before ye bought em, but. How in God’s name ye had two pennies to rub together baffles me still. Ye hand yer paycheck over to me every fortnight. Ye’ve not been down at that betting office again, have ye? Throwing away yer hard earned dosh on them dogs?”
Paddy set his face to one of seriousness, while the house phone continued its incessant ringing. “I’ve something to tell ye,” he said. “I meant to tell ye yesterday, but with all them festivities, and wer Moira’s book showing the light of day and all...”
Fionnuala’s hands, deep in the filthy dishwater, froze. The front door opened, then slammed shut.
“If ye’re telling me that Burberry scarf be’s a cheap knock-off!” she warned, a pink latex glove dripping slime at his nose. “I don’t want to go prancing down the city center looking like one of them chavs!”
“It’s sweet feck all to do with them gifts,” Paddy said, though on this subject he didn’t seem able to meet her eyes. “It’s about me job at the plant.”
“I swear to God Almighty, if ye’ve been sacked and all—”
Padraig interrupted her rage from the sitting room. “Mammy! There’s a call for ye.”
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Fionnuala huffed. “Can I not get a minute’s head peace?” She peeled off the gloves, marched into the sitting room and wrenched the phone from Padraig.
“Aye?” Fionnuala barked. She listened with her right ear for a second as a woman on the other end blabbered on like a mad thing in a West-Brit accent that set Fionnuala’s nerves on edge, and soon found more interesting things to listen to with her left ear. She watched Paddy lean down and hiss at Padraig (as if she wouldn’t hear him! Was Paddy a simpleton?):
“Where did you get the money for all them gifts from, hi? I’m all for shoplifting, especially as the scarf makes yer mammy bearable, but if we’re to have a third son banged up in the slammer—”
“I’m but eleven,” Padraig said, that strange look in his eyes; Fionnuala could see it from where she was standing in the next room. “The peelers don’t lock up wanes at eleven years of age, so they don’t. Set yer mind at rest, but, da. I didn’t nick em.”
“Dealing drugs, then? Following in yer brother Eoin’s footsteps?”
Again that stare.
“Would ye quit looking at me like that, wee boy?” Paddy suddenly roared.
Fionnuala could take the woman’s voice no more. She wailed like a wounded beast into the receiver: “Fionnuala Flood, did ye say? We’re on wer way to her funeral now. Knocked down like a common animal in the street while on her way to Sunday mass, so she was. By a lorry. Ten feet in the air, her body flew.”
She sobbed a few times for good measure, then slammed the receiver down and filed back into the kitchen.
“Another of them collection calls?” Paddy asked.
“Aye,” Fionnuala said. “We’ve the gas people hounding us now. That’s sure to keep em confused for another week at least. I hope I made the bloody minger feel like shite. Imagine terrorizing people like that to bring home a paycheck. Some have no dignity. Now what’s all this palaver about the wane’s strange looks?”
“He’s been doing it for weeks!” Paddy said.
“What way am I looking at ye?” Padraig asked.
“Ye know flimmin well the look I’m on about.”
“Daddy...but, as God’s me witness, I haven’t a clue what ye’re on about!”
“That narrow, evil squint, yer eyes glinting and threatening me with all sorts of malice.”
Fionnuala bent down and inspected her son, really seeing him for the first time in weeks; she had had other things on her mind.
“Aye, ye’re dead right there, Paddy!” she gasped, and Paddy nodded righteously behind her. “It’s not normal!”
She turned to her husband: “I’ve been uneasy about that wane since he started pelting rocks at teetering old pensioners, and I’ve told Father Hogan about it in the confessional and all. So help me Heavenly Father, Paddy, he better not be turning into one of them serial killers like what me mother always be’s reading about. Scundered, I’d be, pure red in the face.”
She faced her son and smacked him across the cheek: “Have ye started torturing wee animals yet?”
“What are youse on about?” Padraig squealed. “I’m doing nothing with me eyes! Nothing, I tell ye!”
“What’ve ye come round here for anyroad?” Fionnuala asked. “To hack into wer sleeping bodies? We’ve been up for hours, more fool you.”
“For the use of the loo. Dymphna’s been in wers for ages, so she has, and I’m bursting for a slash. And I’ve a wile bad headache and all. Have youse any paracetamol? We’ve nothing round ours.”
“Yer granny’s a walking chemist’s, sure!” Fionnuala said, flabbergasted.
“Aye, she told me she’s nothing for wanes, but.”
“Ye think we’ve the dosh to splash out on tablets for headaches we might have in the future? And surely yer sister’s outta the jacks by now. Get yerself back round the corner. Ye’re giving me the heebie-jeebies. And don’t ye turn around and flash me one of them unnatural looks of yers on yer way out.”
The moment the door slammed, Fionnuala’s hand whipped though the air and connected with Paddy’s face. He yelped and clutched at the pain.
“Are ye mad, woman?”
“I didn’t want to show ye up in front of yer son. Where’s me birthday gift? I heard ye talking to that mental creature about how ye hadn’t a clue where they come from. Had I known ye had no hand in procuring em, ye sure as bloody hell wouldn’t’ve had yer way with me last night.”
“Och...” Paddy wavered before her on the peeling linoleum, still massaging his cheek.
“Out with it, man!”
Fionnuala inspected his mouth that was like a goldfish’s on a floor, then clutched his arm as a sudden, terrifying revelation hit her.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” She made an impromptu sign of the cross. “God bless us and save us!”
“What’s up with ye?” Paddy asked.
She hesitated. “Och, ye’ll think me a wile eejit...”
“Come out with it, woman.”
“That look in yer son’s eyes...it was...unchristian, so it was. Paddy, ye don’t think...should I be contacting Father Hogan at St. Molaug’s?”
“What are ye on about?”
“So’s the priest can...” She looked around the kitchen appliances for eavesdroppers, then mouthed: “Cast out the demons?”
His laughter was sharp, her fists sharper.
“Sure, all the wanes the day be’s giving looks like that,” Paddy said, fending off her blows.
“Sign of the times, me arse!”
“Catch yerself on, woman. Take wer Padraig to the Health Clinic before ye show yerself up taking him to St. Molaug’s.”
Fionnuala seemed unconvinced and dismissed her husband to the soccer on the TV as she had much to think about and many dishes still to slog through. She shuffled in misery to the sink, irritated that Celine Dion had been replaced by Gwen Guthrie’s “Ain’t Nothin Goin On But The Rent.” She snapped the radio off and dug her fingers into the dishwater. Music was but window dressing to mask the misery of their lives anyway.
Is this me lot on this pigging Earth? she thought. Scrounging and scrimping and—
Something sliced into her flesh. It was glass from the broken window.
That bitch Moira and her flimmin book—
She located the beans pot where it had fallen the night before. She made sure Paddy was still glued to the telly.
Perhaps a wee look inside...
But the book was gone.
“Where the bleeding hell? What spastic in their right mind...?”
Before the TV, Paddy jerked at the sud
den appearance of Fionnuala hovering over him with a glare. Beer splattered from the can over his jeans.
“Ye get on that mobile of yers and ring up yer man Callum Sheeney from the Fillets-O-Joy,” she intoned.
The blood drained from Paddy’s face as he jumped up from the cushion.
“What are ye on about?” he asked, fear flashing in his eyes. “Ye mean ye kn—”
“Or whichever of them lads be’s responsible for the roster at the plant. Ye’re to phone whoever and demand all the overtime that be’s going.”
“A-a-a-as ye’ve been sacked? To help with paying the bills, ye mean?”
“Aye, that and all,” Fionnuala said. “As well, but, to fund the holiday we’re going on.”
“H-holiday?” He looked at her as if she had just announced she was pregnant. Again. “August is months away, sure.”
“I mean the trip we’re taking to Malta.”
“Where the bloody feck be’s Malta?”
“No filthy beanflicker of a daughter is going to show me up for all the world to read and then live to tell the tale. We’re heading up to Malta the lot of us, even that devil-child of yers and Dymphna, for that do Moira be’s throwing. Rocks, I’m gonny be throwing at her gacky skull with them flimmin intellectual specs perched on the end of it. I kyanny wait to rip them smarmy, snide specs off her fecking jivin face and rip into her with me tongue. She kyanny get away with it unscathed, Paddy. She just kyanny. Ye mind the likes of me when I heard them Barnetts wouldn’t hand over some of their lotto win to us?”
Paddy blanched at the memory of Fionnuala’s face as it had been, stretched in rage for months.
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 40
