“What are these?”
“Flowers, Miss!”
“And these?”
“Waves!”
“And these?”
“Creatures of the sea, Miss!” Grainne said. “We’ve jellyfishes and crabs and regular fishes and all sorts.”
“And, ooh, I love this banner! Where is...er...this Hapynnes? Is that perhaps some village in Scotland one of you visited as a family?”
“It’s the Happiness Boat, Miss,” Siofra corrected.
“This is all delightful,” Miss McClurkin said, making a mental note to step up the class’ spelling syllabus. “It shows real initiative. I just wonder, though, how this all fits with your song. And what is your new song, if I may ask?”
“We’ve changed wer minds about the pop song,” Siofra said.
Miss McClurkin’s face fell.
“Irish dancing on the Happiness Boat...?” she chanced with a rising sense of despair.
“We’ve come up with something brand new!” Siofra said.
As she told Miss McClurkin their plan, the teacher’s face lit up. She clapped with joy.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” she marveled. “What amazing, caring girls you are! You have captured the spirit of Fingers Across the Foyle marvelously!”
Siofra and Grainne beamed, but Catherine couldn’t face the teacher’s eyes. She knew they had done no such thing.
CHAPTER 39
JED RACED TOWARDS URSULA’S unhinged shrieks from the living room, expecting to find her atop the coffee table fending off Casino Woman with a lamp. He secured the perimeter from the threshold, his years of military training kicking in, but saw nothing suspect. Just Ursula in a state of disrepair on their Raymour and Flanigan sofa, Biblical Word Search at her side. He and Muffins entered as a team and hurried to her side.
“What’s up, honey?” he asked; he would’ve knelt if his knees weren’t giving him such problems.
“I kyanny take it no longer, Jed,” she said, tears of frustration and fear rolling down her cheeks. “I’ve to get meself to Derry for a visit.”
Jed stared as if she had stripped off her clothes and demanded he take her there on the polished wood. But react first, regret later, that was the Ursula way, and after decades of marriage he was used to it. His face softened.
“Honey...”
“And ye’re coming with me.”
His face hardened. Jed took off his glasses and polished the frames with the bottom of his checkered shirt. He would rather battle Casino Woman than face Ursula’s family again. As unbalanced at Casino Woman sounded (he had yet to meet her), at least with the Floods Jed had the advantage of knowing the enemy. And there was a reason they had cleared out of that hellhole of Derry so quickly their luggage wheels had left skid marks.
“The medication the doctor gave you might be affecting your brain, dear.”
“I’m so afeared for me life. What if that lunatic murders me in me sleep and when me body be’s shipped back to Derry—I’m not to be buried in the tundra here, by the by—and me family celebrates by lining up round me grave just to spit on it? Ye mind how, when me mammy passed on, themmuns tossed the flowers I got her off the grave and danced on em? If me days on this Earth be’s numbered, before I go, I’ve to patch things up with me family.”
Cruel to be kind, Jed forced himself to state the obvious: “Face it, Ursula. It’s never gonna happen.”
A tortured sob arose from Ursula’s throat. “I won’t be able to meet me maker in peace if I don’t at least try while I’m still drawing breath.”
Jed was thankful he heard his cellphone ringing in the kitchen. He grasped Ursula’s hand, the hand he had been so excited to grace with an engagement ring all those years ago, and said: “We’ll discuss it later, after you’ve calmed down at bit.”
At the door, he turned.
“And, honey, don’t book any flights without talking to me first.”
He made his escape.
Ursula’s sobs turned to sniffles, and she inspected the dust on the brass Mayfair Steamer Cube Trunks from Restoration Hardware that served as end tables. She had been too frightened lately to waste energy dusting. Ursula realized how expensive the trunks were and how lucky she was to be able to afford them. Many people in the world couldn’t. She and Jed had a delightful modern home in Wisconsin, but Ursula felt their new American furniture was alien. Muffins licked her toe.
Ursula was surrounded by people and things that meant nothing at all to her, and she secretly suspected the hatred Paddy and Fionnuala threw at her showed some love. She had tried to give her family everything she could, but for the Floods too much wasn’t enough.
Now she was a strange-speaking foreigner in the backwoods of Wisconsin, where people sat on ‘sofas,’ not settees, where people had ‘children,’ not wanes, where the meals of the day (in the order they were eaten) were called ‘breakfast, lunch and dinner,’ not breakfast, dinner and tea, and where a decent portion of fish and curry chips was impossible to find.
She had scoured the local food warehouse for turnips and ham hocks, her comfort food, to no avail. Ursula had never seen shopping carts so large. Everything in Wisconsin, and by extension, America, was large. Large and empty. Large and empty and alien. Ursula suddenly realized this is what Jed must have felt like amongst her family in Derry. It was perfectly understandable how he had turned to drink back then; she was feeling quite thirsty herself. Now Jed was getting his life in order (except for that online gambling he had begun), and hers was spinning into madness.
She knew why she had insisted Jed retire in Derry, why she had put up with ten years of the sniping, the sarcasm, the oneupmanship of a people clawing out a living as if from stone, the memory of decades of sectarian violence unable to free itself from their collective memory, why she had tolerated the danger that lurked from hoodies on every corner, the filth, the relentless rain, the shocking price of postage stamps. During her parole in Wisconsin, Ursula was watching Jed blossoming in his late-late-middle age as a small business owner, Slim getting better at cribbage, Louella getting craftier at cheating, and Muffins putting on the pounds. For Ursula herself, there was nothing here but the passage of time and the effects of gravity on her aging body.
She was missing out on the things she thought she would be entitled to as a family member, and a generous and loving one at that; the time she had invested now time wasted. She would miss out on the weekly visits to Eoin’s and Lorcan’s prison and their eventual releases; would never see Padraig’s or Siofra’s or Seamus’ graduations; never be part of Dymphna’s or Eoin’s or Lorcan’s or Padraig’s or Siofra’s or Seamus’ weddings, and now, given the shockingly liberal laws of the EU, maybe Moira’s as well; would miss the births of their first, second, third and fourth children and however many more might come after that; never beam proudly in her Sunday best in St. Molaug’s church at her grand-nephews’ and grand-nieces’ baptisms and First Confessions and First Holy Communions, gifts and cards painstakingly selected, bows carefully tied and xxx’s and ooo’s love Great-Auntie Ursula carefully written. When she had joined St. Molaug’s choir years before in Derry, Ursula had envisioned warbling away and staring down proudly at her family in the pews as the years passed and the hymnals grew more tattered and the lines grew on their faces, the young ones turning into old ones.
Ursula scratched the dog’s head as the tears welled.
“Only me body be’s here in Wisconsin,” Ursula sobbed to the poodle. “Och, Muffins, ye and Jed be’s the only ones I feel love from. Except for youse, I’m all alone in the world, so I’m are.”
Muffins stared blankly at her. Perhaps the dog couldn’t understand her accent either.
And if the Floods wanted no part of her, Ursula thought with increasing resolve, if she were to spend the twilight years of her life in this perplexing and godforsaken place, she wanted to at least see the family home, her beloved 5 Murphy Crescent, one last time. After the Flood’s outrage when she bought it with the lottery winn
ings, she had eventually just seen it as bricks and mortar, an albatross around her neck. Now she realized she had been too hasty gifting it to the Floods before she and Jed had fled to the US. She now knew exactly why she had bought the house and how much it meant: the stairs she had crawled up as a child, the coal bin in the back, the bay window shattered by a rubber bullet in ‘73, the wallpaper stained with tear gas, the boozy laughter nevertheless ringing out from the sitting room within the pebble-dashed walls as the violence raged outside, she and her mammy and daddy and all her brothers and sisters passing around the whiskey and popping open the cans of lager, the ribbing and hilarity and cigarettes lit off one match, the years passing, Three Dog Night, then Rod Stewart, then Billy Joel replacing one another on the radio in the background, the TV shows switching from black-and-white to color—
She screamed as the house phone on the Cube trunk erupted into life. Ursula eyed the receiver with suspicion. Had Casino Woman somehow secured their now-unlisted number? In the brass of the trunk, she caught a glimpse of herself: haggard, a feral gleam in her eyes, the roots of her eggplant-colored bob in desperate need of a touch-up. Ursula answered the phone.
“Mrs. Barnett?”
“Aye?”
“Eric here from the credit card fraud department. I hear you’ve been having trouble with some of our operators?”
She had hung up twice when people from the Indian subcontinent had answered. Then she had called back to demand somebody who spoke real English phone her. This Eric seemed like he spoke English the way God intended, at least in the American section of His creation. Ursula reeled in her accent as best she could to be understood.
“Have ye me details before ye?”
“Yes, I do. You are claiming some suspicious purchases?”
“Indeed I am, aye. Some woman stole me driver’s license the other week and opened a new card in me name, then maxed it out $5000 worth. I’ve been wanting to know what’s been purchased on it. Could ye help me out with that?”
“I can indeed. Let’s see, I’ve got it before me now. We’ve got a $300 X-Box 360 here.”
“A...Does that be something pornographic?” Ursula dared to ask; she knew Casino Woman had stolen her identity, but she was suddenly thinking of Jed.
“Oh, not at all, ma’am,” Eric said with a condescending laugh. Ursula wanted to hang up a third time. “It’s a game console for kids. I also see here a Wii purchased on the same day.”
“A...?” Why had the miscreant opened this credit card and purchased items that were no part of any sane person’s life? Well, perhaps it was understandable. “What be’s that?”
“Another game console, this one for $400. That accounts for $700.”
Ursula couldn’t bring herself to ask if these games things could be played with foot-long fingernails.
“And then there’s a computer, a flat-screen television, five iPods, that’s another $3000. If you don’t mind me saying, these are all things very popular with teenagers. We find that many times, credit card fraud is perpetrated by members of the immediate family between the ages of twelve and eighteen, kids with no jobs who want to be like every other kid on the block, so they somehow secure credit cards from wallets or purses laying unattended around the house. Or while the owner is in the shower or bath. Do you have teenagers?”
“Me sons and daughter be’s grown, and their wanes be’s but toddlers. And it wasn’t any of themmuns anyroad. It was some aul lunatic who tried to attack me in the ladies’ of a casino.”
“Maybe some nephews or nieces?”
Unease began to fill Ursula; she had plenty.
“Not to speak of,” she said in a stilted voice. I think most of them be’s banged up in prison, anyroad, she thought
“And then, oh! This is strange.”
“Aye? Aye?”
Ursula suspected the next purchase would be for an elaborate weave or nine fingernail piercings.
“After all those high-gadget things a teen would buy, I see here a large purchase a few days later of Dead Sea bath salts, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion perfume and the matching body scrub, her Sparkling White Diamonds perfume and eau de toilet, and then a Burberry scarf. The scarf is the deluxe cashmere mega-check that retails for $500. All items for the more, er, mature woman.”
Ursula asphyxiated the phone with her fist. She knew only one mature woman who loved Elizabeth Taylor scents more than she, and she wasn’t from a ghetto, at least not the American version of one. She silently counted to ten, then asked:
“Was them items bought, by any chance, around April the 20th?”
“Why, yes!” he exclaimed. “April the 20th exactly.”
Ursula never forgot Fionnuala’s birthday; it was the same as Hitler’s.
“Does this mean you know who might have opened the card?”
“Naw,” Ursula insisted. Trouble in the family remained in the family; she had it ingrained in her from an early age. “But could ye tell me where them purchases was made?”
“It looks like it was, hmm, it looks European. Um, LeDerry. Perhaps France?”
“Le..?” Ursula felt uneasy. “That wouldn’t be Northern Ireland, would it?”
“Uh,” She heard clicking on the keyboard. “Yeah!”
“That’s not LeDerry! That’s L’Derry. Londonderry!”
“If you say so, ma’am. Are you sure you don’t have a suspect we might check out?”
“Ye’ve been most helpful,” she barked in the phone, then slammed the receiver.
Ursula immediately felt ill. She crouched on the sofa, rocking and moaning and thinking pains were attacking her organs. For weeks she had lived a misery in her electrified fortress, too terrified to even leave the house for a trip to the beauty salon, and all along the danger hadn’t been from the ladies room of a casino. She had been attacked by the usual suspect, Fionnuala extending her claws across the entire length of the Atlantic to snatch the straps of her handbag. The Flood-free life Ursula had envisioned when trudging across the rain-drenched runway to board the plane at Belfast International Airport had been suddenly snatched from her. Even in Wisconsin, USA, she wasn’t free from Fionnuala’s greed.
Although she lived six times zones away, Ursula didn’t even need to do the math to know what time it was in Derry; she was always on Derry time in her mind. And it was 9:00 PM. Coronation Street, the Flood’s favorite nighttime soap opera, had just ended, so they were sure to answer the phone.
She dialed Paddy’s number. She got Fionnuala.
“Aye?!”
“Fionnuala? It’s Ursula.”
“That’s all I bloody well need!” Ursula heard Fionnuala mutter, and she steeled herself against the spitting sarcasm sure to erupt.
“I was hoping for Paddy.” Each word was a chore.
“Hope all ye want. He’s doing overtime at the factory as we’re in desperate need of it. What are ye on the line for? For to gloat? Or for to snatch more bleeding food from wer fecking mouths?”
Fionnuala still had not forgiven Ursula for claiming Caretaker’s Allowance for Paddy’s mother, Eda, while the Barnetts were luxuriating in their lotto win. Conveniently forgotten in the peculiar maze of Fionnuala’s memory was everything Ursula had done for Eda while Fionnuala had never lifted a finger.
“I’m calling to inform youse that I’ll be visiting Derry, just,” Ursula said.
“And why the bloody feck would we give a cold shite in Hell about that?” Fionnuala demanded to know, although inside herself she was pleased at Ursula’s stupid sense of fair play; in war, surprise is a great advantage, but Ursula apparently wanted to fight on an even battlefield, letting her in on the movements of the troops. More fool her, the silly aul cunt. “I’ll be surprised if ye find a pilot that’s willing to man the plane to take ye here. Nobody wants ye in Derry! We was all dancing with glee to see the back of ye. Sit on yer fat arse in Yank-land and rot, ye grabby bitch, ye!”
“Speaking of—”
Fionnuala slammed down the phone, steam
ing, and turned back to the sewing machine. Her hand clutched for the mug of tepid tea, and she gnawed at a slice of burnt toast piled with pats of butter. Ursula coming to visit was indeed important news, but she would have to file it away for contemplation later on.
At the moment she had the next night’s drinks reception at the school to think of, hobnobbing with the movers and shakers of Derry, the majority sure to be Protestant cunts and bastards who would no doubt be desperate to look down their noses at her. Thank feck she had her Burberry scarf. The rest of her outfit was the problem. She had arranged rhinestones on an old black jacket and was about to sew them on. She kept staring at the rhinestones under the harsh strip-lighting of the kitchen. They spelled out D-Y-N-K, and something about that didn’t look right to her, but she ground her foot to the pedal. She still heard Ursula’s voice in her ear.
The click-click-click of the sewing machine mirrored the click-click-click of Fionnuala’s mind. She feared what Ursula might look like when she marched back to Derry after her months spent in the mythical land of verandahs and heated swimming pools. Ursula would no doubt be desperate to claim the victory of aging with grace.
In America, they had the institutions and plastic surgeons and exercise plans to keep youth eternal. Fionnuala had seen it before. Paddy’s older sister, Roisin, lived the life in Hawaii, and Roisin had shown up in Derry a year earlier, her bronzed, oddly-taut body matching the youthfulness of the cornrows that had clanked against her pristine face. Nothing could hide the crevices in Fionnuala’s forehead, nor the droopy eyes of exhaustion framed by spidery crows-feet And Fionnuala didn’t even want to contemplate the state of her gut splayed under the sewing machine.
Fionnuala knew Ursula had the funds for a transformation to make the decades of the pull of gravity upon her body disappear. She probably had a personal trainer in some flash Yankee health club with carpeting and shiny state-of-the-art machines. In Fionnuala’s world, gyms were curiosities, healthy eating unnatural.
She held up the jacket and nodded with satisfaction. It looked like the genuine article. She could pass for Protestant in it! She peered past the sparkling rhinestones and flinched at Padraig glowering at her through his yellowish-opaque frames. The look from him would’ve struck the fear of the Lord into anyone who hadn’t given birth to him.
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 51
