The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3)

by Gerald Hansen

  “Am I invisible? Am I invisible, youse?” Ursula roared.

  She looked for support from her fellow passengers, but all at once around her were only spines and backs of heads; even Louella's face had shut down. The smiling and laughing of the trio ceased. Mole boy came over. His face was Soviet-era.

  “What your problem?” he asked.

  “Me problem? Me problem?”

  He tsked.

  “I mean, what the problem.”

  “Naw ye didn't, ye cheeky wee—”

  Her plate fell to the floor. Her purse straps whipped down her arm. She grabbed tight. The purse flew through the air and cracked against his forehead. And rained down on his skull again and again.

  “Ye wee shite ye!” Ursula roared, her purse battering against his raised hands, the wasabi from the bottom spattering his palms, the buckle biting into his flesh. “That's sure to wipe the sarky wee grin offa yer hateful face!”

  While those around her turned to spectate like a multi-eyed creature with many gaping jaws, she burst into tears, her assault waning. She clutched her purse, and pushed through the sea of widened eyes. She shoved past Louella's arms, now outstretched, she noticed, and ran from the dining room.

  CHAPTER 10

  FIONNUALA THOUGHT FIRST about perverts and white slavers—or were they called human traffickers nowadays?—and even about Somalian pirates; her mother Maureen had forced her to sit through a documentary about them one unfortunate evening. Running the vacuum a few strokes around the carpet, she also considered briefly David Copperfield-style magic tricks where a member of the audience disappeared from a box on the stage.

  But as she flicked off the vacuum and wrapped the cord around it as if she were strangling it, she decided it was just her little bitch of a daughter playing up, skipping off and forcing her mother to scour the cabins herself while Siofra...did what? They were forbidden access to the exciting decks of the ship, forced to lurk in the darkened corridors of the underbelly like pariahs, except for these cleaning excursions. Siofra had disappeared out of pure badness. Fionnuala plumped pillows with a palm more accustomed to smacking her offspring's faces and became increasingly upset. As in angry. When Siofra resurfaced, Fionnuala wouldn't give the wee bitch the satisfaction of caring she had run off. She'd put her palm to better use.

  She arranged the chocolates on the pillows and felt a niggling doubt. Weren't mothers supposed to care about their missing daughters? Didn't she watch shows on the tv about it all the time? She stared at the chocolates lounging on the softness of the pillowcases with the resentment of a hollow stomach. Yootha kept count, so she couldn't eat one. But, Fionnuala thought, there's nowhere Siofra could be but on this ship! The girl was at no risk...except from the walloping Fionnuala would give her when she resurfaced. If she resurfaced...?

  Fionnuala cursed the moment of weakness where she had given Siofra a portion of her Snickers. How had her crafty cunt of a daughter had shown her gratitude? By running away. Fionnuala could stand the hunger no longer. It was making her unable to think clearly. She reached into the pocket of her smock, tugged out the map of the ship, and ran her finger over the route that would take her to the galley on Deck D. She snapped off the light, threw the cleaning supplies into the maintenance room next door and made her way towards Deck D to see if she couldn't bag some free food from Paddy in the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 11

  DYMPHNA PEELED THE diaper off the shrieking infant. She looked down and shrieked herself.

  What in the name of God did this flimmin wane eat? she wondered.

  Dry-heaving, she tried to keep the runny mess off the infant's twisting back and the changing table. She failed. Holding the creature captive on the table with one hand, she grabbed a fistful of wipes with the other to clean up the filth. In the corner, Keanu and Beeyonsay gurgled through their pacifiers in the confines of the one-size-didn't-fit-all-but Dymphna-had-made-it-happen stroller and seemed to be inspecting her with either disdain or contempt.

  “Ach, can youse do a better job, hi?” she yelled at them over yet another Katy Perry song blaring from the speakers. Was there no other singer on the planet? Besides Rihanna?

  Dymphna's body throbbed with pain. A purplish bruise snaked up her left forearm, and through the latex she could see scrapes gouged into the knuckles of her right hand. She hadn't a clue how she had sustained these injuries; the end of the night before was a mystery, and her head still throbbed from the remnants of alcohol abuse.

  This infant with the soiled and bulging Huggy was the sixth that had been thrust into those aching arms that shift. Each shriek was like a knife gouging her ear canals. She recognized this baby; she had changed him three times so far. She couldn't understand why they just didn't have a trough in the nursery the staff could place the infants into, where they could relieve themselves to their hearts' content, and then the staff could simply hose them down before they were returned to their parents. Their parents, Dymphna thought grimly as she scoured the kicking legs, swanning around the luxury corridors of the ship, sipping Courvoisier from snifters and cosmopolitans from martini glasses, tinkling with laughter and gazing at the waves and sunsets, not a care in the world, as they had diaper-changing-machine Dymphna to do their dirty work. And it was dirty.

  The diaper-changing stint was the worst part of her shift, a shift that contained many bad parts. Econolux had forbidden the carer's flesh from touching the children for fear of lawsuits (some strange American laws were creeping around the world), so Dymphna had to change the diapers while wearing gloves, the fingers of which were caked with baby powder that became doughy from baby oil and watery feces.

  When they weren't in the diaper changing cubicle, the nursery staff had to wear fluffy outfits with heads, and Dymphna's was a cucumber with swivelly eyes and a beret and arms that had to wave and legs that had to dance and a lipstick-painted mouth that had to sing for the entertainment of the children, all under eight. The French Cucumber outfit made it difficult to breathe and to teach the screaming brats dance steps to the likes of “Cha Cha Slide” and “The Macarena,” as they had to do. There was apparently to be a presentation of syncopated dancing for the parents on the last night of the cruise. How that was to happen when the majority couldn't even walk Dymphna didn't know.

  Dymphna finished the diaper change—she was getting quite good at it, she thought—set the infant on the floor and, making sure there were no witnesses, gave it a push. It scrabbled, gurgling contentedly, over the floor of the cubicle and crawled onto the brightly-colored tiles of the creche where it would have to fend for itself amongst the stamping Jellies and mini-Crocs. The moment it rounded the corner, the diaper popped off, one grip stuck to a tiny calf and trailing behind the infant on the floor.

  Inside, Dymphna sensed another shadow in the doorway and scowled. That pink-dinosaur-with-the-lime-green-polka-dots bitch already had another soiled shrieker to hand over?

  “Deempanah!”

  Dymphna looked up in alarm at the deep voice. She gasped. A bronze god stood before her, arms outstretched, a bottle of whiskey lodged in his armpit.

  “Deempanah!” he said again as she stared blankly at him, wondering what he was saying. It dawned on her it was meant to be her name. His accent was Italian. “Pink dinosaur tell me you here.”

  He took a step to embrace her, saw the state of her gloves and faltered. Dymphna ran her eyes over him, over his quarterback shoulders and spade-like hands, his disheveled curls of jet-black hair and dark eager eyes brimming with sexual hunger, and she felt her lust pot tremble. She fluttered her eyelashes and smiled as she stripped the fetid gloves from her hands. How do I know him, but? she wondered. But she briefly praised the Lord for her consistent good taste.

  They embraced against a jumbo box of sanitary wipes. The belt buckle under his puffy and grease-stained zippered EconoLux workman's overalls pressed against her pelvis, and also, beneath, she felt a monstrous warmth. The puzzle of her most invasive pain was solved, at least.


  As he pounded his tongue down Dymphna's throat and she wondered how to trick his name from him, it all came back to her like slides set at the highest speed on the carousel flashing onto the backs of her eyelids: pipes spewing steam overhead and the rumbling of some industrial machine deep in the hull of the ship, his washboard abs thrusting against her yearning flesh, the bolts pressing into her back, the guttural moans of alien words muttered feverishly into her ear canal...

  ...and, before that, her mother and father and sister sleeping in exhaustion atop the bunk beds around her, she slipping out of the threadbare covers and prying open the door that warned: NO STAFF BEYOND THIS POINT, sneaking into Phun, sauntering in, casual-like, as if she had ever right to be there. Guzzling down shots of peppermint schnapps and flagons of cider and keeping a watchful eye through the flashing dots of the disco ball for Yootha or one of her henchmen. Not quite trusting herself to approach any of the guys there, as they seemed to be either rich Yank tourists or a bit too young for her. And this Italian stallion sidling up and, with a few basic techniques of the mime, conveying to her that they should leave this party and mate.

  And they had. Somewhere in the depths of the ship where passengers were forbidden to tread.

  “You have break, no?” he asked. “You say last night one o'clock.”

  Dymphna looked up at the clock. It was indeed break time. She was allotted forty minutes. She reached under the counter and grabbed her purse, which contained two Cup-O-Soups she bought with work tokens from the staff mini-mart for her lunch. She felt slight dismay she'd probably have to share one with him, as she didn't see any food in his hands.

  She ran her fingers through her red curls, found a replacement for the changing room—the alligator with the bendy tail—and led him to the beanbags piled up in the reading area where no child dared to go.

  They made a pretense of civility, engaging in conversation as normal people were meant to do over meals, when all they really hungered for was mindless physical instantaneous gratification. They greedily guzzled whiskey from the bottle. Their libidos simmered as they babbled on, Dymphna's face strained from trying to understand, about the current pop hits of the day, the sad state of the ship's engines, and his strange obsession with serial killers. His favorite was British harridan Myra Hindley, who, with her lover Ian Brady, had abducted, abused and murdered at least five children in the early 1960s, and whom he talked about at great length and with an intense gleam in his eyes that unsettled Dymphna but also set her quim more atingle. She slurped her Cup-O-Soup. It was chicken noodle, he had a cream of mushroom one. He fiddled with a few of the barely-perceptible little gray granules that were meant to be mushrooms.

  “Not mushrooms!” he said contemptuously, looking down at three granules on the tip of his finger. “Not like Grandmama pick and serve when I child. Big and fresh. She make special rice dish with them always. Grandmama Homemade Mushroom Risotto, she call it.”

  “Eh?” Dymphna called through the roaring of children outside, the Katy Perry and the alcohol churning through her brain. “What are ye on about? What did else did Myra do?” She was one conversation behind.

  He smiled and shook his head and slurped another spoonful. He waited for the shrieking to die down, then said, more loudly:

  “She go to wooded area behind our house every weekend for look for them.”

  Dymphna stared.

  “Behind yer house? She lived close to ye? Ye knew her?”

  “It'sa my grandmama I tell about. You not can hear?”

  “Yer...granny...?” Dymphna felt weak. This gorgeous hunk's grandmother was infamous serial killer Myra Hindley, for decades the most evil and, indeed, the most hated woman in the United Kingdom. To Dymphna, she was ancient history, but she recalled her mother tutting and spitting at the screen every time the actress playing Myra on a tv mini-series the year before appeared. And apparently this deranged murderer had found more little victims in the back yard of this hottie's family home in Italy! Had Myra Hindley even lived there? Dymphna hadn't seen it on the tv show, but she supposed they couldn't show everything.

  He went on: “Grandmama, she find many under trees always, but Grandmama wanna special ones, she wanna...” He struggled with either the vocabulary or the morality of it, Dymphna couldn't decide which.“She wanna ones with...big heads and fat bodies. Capisce?”

  Dymphna shivered from the chill up her spine.

  “She havea the eyes of eagle, that mean is she find them always and she pick them up, and she wrap inna plastica and she take home.”

  “P-plastic?”

  He nodded eagerly, and sidled closer to her as if revealing something not many people knew: “Sì, sì. Mama say put in basket, but Grandmama not listen. The plastica, she say, it make them...how you say...?” He paused to find the right English word. “...more softer.”

  Dymphna stared in horror. He got more excited, his hands flying around with Italian gestures. “Grandmama take them inna kitchen, rinse with water.”

  Dymphna struggled to comprehend.

  “Why in the name of God would she do that?”

  He snorted with derision.

  “You not know? Very dirty. Then she chop them up, and put them inna pan with the butter, the garlic, and sauté, put on plates with rice for alla family to eat.”

  Dymphna gasped. She could barely get the words out at his face, which was beaming with pride and memory: “Ye're telling me...youse...youse ate em?”

  He gave her a strange look.

  “Certamente! That'sa why the good Lord put them onna this earth, for us to mangia!” He smacked his lips.“Grandmama make with the pasta and with shrimps and with spinach and for the Christmas, she stuff with hard bread bits and romano and little mint trees. Alla family eat like, how you say?...wolf. Delizioso!”

  “Stop! Stop!” Dymphna implored, fingers in ears.

  He pouted. “You not like grandmama story?” he asked, but his was a pout that could make many women's knickers drop, and, if the liberal left were to be believed, 10 percent of men's boxers. He shrugged, tossed aside his plastic spoon and enveloped her in his arms. “What is the talk anyway? Now we make the love!”

  It was difficult, but Dymphna shoved away in a compartment of her brain for reflection later on the horror and sympathy she felt for Myra's gobbled-up little victims and spread her lips. Their bodies pressed against whatever is inside beanbag chairs. His sausage-like fingers grappled those parts of her body that were exclusively female, and they did make the love. And in which compartment of Dymphna's brain were thoughts of her fiancé Rory Riddell, whose spermatozoa was responsible for Beeyonsay and, ostensibly, Keanu? In a compartment that only sobriety and a return to Derry would pry open.

  CHAPTER 12

  URSULA WISHED SHE HAD thought to bring Muffins along for company. Growing up in a family with nine brothers and sisters as she had, she used to long to be alone, and now that she was, she found herself consumed with loneliness. She adjusted the fox-stole on her shoulders and made her way to the promenade. She could just make out the setting sun on the horizon through a bank of menacing clouds. Her group would take the excursion to the Savage Islands soon, then in two days the ship would be in Morocco. Exotic Africa. If she blocked out the pounding hip-hop bass from Phun and a variety of cabins which caused the ship to shudder slightly, and if she squinted her eyes to obscure the garbage that swirled on the promenade and the couple behind the deck chairs who seemed in the throes of offspring-making, and if she ignored the humidity that seemed to increase as the knots passed and made the sweat trickle more furiously under her armpits the closer they got to Africa, and if she shoved the reason they were on this ship into some hidden corner of her brain, she could just about let herself get swept away in the romance and excitement of this trip. She compelled her ears and eyes and armpits and brain to do what she wanted. As the ocean spray sprinkled her face, she felt the decades slipping away, and she was indeed stood on the promenade of the most glamorous liner of the day,


  She was safe. She held her hand up to her mouth and breathed into it. She needed a TicTac. She opened her purse and clawed through the depths, and was startled at the sight of urgent flashing lights from her cellphone. Perplexed, she hauled it out and stared at it. She was surprised. She didn't know she had a plan that allowed her phone to function internationally. She didn't know anything about ariel towers and signals, but it seemed a miracle that her cellphone could function miles from civilization. Was it the hand of God? She had 17 voicemails. She scrolled down the calls received list, and saw one from Muffin's kennel and 16 from a number she recognized with a sudden weak heart as Detective Scarrey.

  She wondered if, with each subsequent message she hadn't answered, she and Louella were moving further from being “people of interest” to being formally charged with the crime. She was about to pound the keys to listen to the messages, but couldn't.

  She continued looking at the display as if she had just discovered a handful of human teeth. Ursula bent over to the railing and, ensuring nobody was looking, tossed the phone into the ocean. She tearfully swallowed a TicTac, then dug into the compartments of her purse again, found a Xanax, and threw that down her throat as well. She needed to find a confessional.

  CHAPTER 13

  “DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN above,” Paddy muttered into the potato peels, “strike me down now and put me outta me misery.”