Greta pushed through the crowd and knelt by her husband's side. Her hands reached out and caressed his shoulders. “Ye don't mean...mean...from...?”
“I do, aye!”
Heads shook, friends and family embraced whoever was next to them and there was a clucking of tongues ringing out in dismay like a football chant.
“All her life, all her long life long, all me mammy wanted to do was...” Bill choked and couldn't finish the sentence.
“And now she kyanny,” Greta finished, sobbing into her husband's chest.
Paddy stood there with a girl he only knew to see's arm on his shoulder. Though he longed to know what Bill's mother had wanted to do all her long life long, he couldn't demand his friend continue. He looked around him as if the answer might be found on someone's face. He couldn't see it. But from the looks of dismay and alarm and grief in the faces around him, the answer was in all their minds.
Bill tore open the envelope. Paddy leaned forward a bit too eagerly. The girl's hand slipped from his shoulder.
Bill shoved his hand into the envelope. He pulled out something for all to see. A collective moan rose in the kitchen, and reverberated along the refrigerator and the kettle and the washing machine and the taps of the sink. The sitting room had apparently cleared out, and a mass of heads poked through the kitchen door. Even the musicians.
“Och, it's terrible, so it is.”
“A wile shame.”
It was as if Mrs. Ming were dying all over again right there in front of them on the tiles of the kitchen floor, filthy as it was. As much as Paddy peered at the thing in Bill's hand, he couldn't make out what the little book was, and was too embarrassed to ask anyone around him. Really now the outsider, he inched backwards through the moaning crowd, elbowed his way past the throngs at the threshold to the kitchen, and slipped into the hallway and out the door.
What the flimmin feck?
* * *
CHAPTER 11
In the Flood family home, they were bathed in flickering candle light and the weak flames that shot from the fireplace. There was no coal to be found in the coal larder; they hadn't used it in years, and it was too expensive. Siofra and her older brother, Padraig, had broken up some crates that had sat in the back garden next to the rhubarb patch since before Seamus had been born.
Siofra, Padraig, Seamus and Maureen were all wrapped in frayed blankets and huddled around the fire. The empty cans of beans and Brussels sprouts sat off to the side, the four spoons still stuck in them. After Siofra had told them every detail of what had happened in the dry cleaners that day, and shushed Padraig every time he snickered (and he had howled when he heard his mammy had had a babysitter), Maureen had tried to entertain them with three ghost stories. Siofra had quite enjoyed them, especially the one about the noises that sounded like marbles being rolled across the attic floor, but, as they hadn't been violent or gory enough for Padraig, he had been bored to tears. Though Seamus had burst into them. Then Siofra had tried to get everyone involved in a pop quiz, but Maureen and Seamus didn't know who Taylor Swift or One Direction or Avicci or Jess Glynne or Little Mix or Maroon 5 or Galantis or even Sam Smith were, and Padraig hated them all. Then Maureen had given it a go, but none of the children knew who the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tom Jones, Cilla Black, Sandi Shaw, Engelbert Humperdink or even the BeeGees were. Everybody knew Abba, but nobody wanted to have a quiz about them. So the four just sat there. And shivered.
When her daddy rolled through the door, Siofra jumped up.
“Daddy!” she exclaimed, making to wrap her arms around him. She had had a fright that day and needed her daddy's big hands to calm her and make her feel like everything was alright. But her daddy was drunk. And raging at her.
“What,” he roared down at her as she shrank back, “was ye up to, visiting yer mammy? Ye know ye're forbidden contact with her! She tried to kill yer brother, sure! Ye want her to try to kill you and all? One wane in danger a year is all me heart can handle!”
“Paddy!” warned Maureen. She waved her cane menacingly in the gloom. “Leave the girl be! Ye know what we discussed this afternoon, after all. Sure, perhaps it's a good thing—”
“Naw!” Paddy roared. “I've changed me mind about that and all. Not another word about it, Mother. I'm away off to bed. To me cold bed.”
And off he went. Siofra wanted to cry, but she wasn't eleven any more, and she certainly wasn't ten. She glared at what she could see of her father's back in the flickering candle light as he stomped out of the room. Then giggled as she heard him fall up the stairs. Padraig sniggered, Maureen couldn't help but smile. She looked up at the ceiling. Siofra knew her granny was thanking the Lord for Paddy getting his just desserts. Seamus looked around him at their smiling faces, and his own little face, which had been scrunched up about to cry over his daddy's loud and angry voice, broke out into giggles too. He clapped his hands, and sprout juice spattered from them.
And, Siofra couldn't have known this, nobody could've, but as Paddy effed and blinded his way up the pitch black stairs, deep in his right hand pocket, next to a five pence piece, three pound coins, a Giant's Causeway disposable lighter and an old betting slip that had been useless, his phone sat still like a dead piece of metal. Which it was. But had it been properly charged, he would've received Fionnuala's call.
* * *
CHAPTER 12
“Och, I never laid a finger on the pervy bastard!” Rory was yelling. “Ye know I wouldn't!”
“From what Anne Marie told me, it was flimmin O'Toole's fingers what was doing the touching!” Dymphna yelled back. “Getting up to all sorts! Kinky, sordid sins against nature! Them filthy fingers of his invading...a...a place the good Lord never designed them to! A place a wife kyanny even touch! And Lord knows I've tried often enough!”
Upstairs, Keanu and Beeyonsay were slumbering in their cribs, Greenornge in his bassinet. They were unaware of the commotion below.
The ultrasonic cold mist humidifier hummed in one corner of the nursery, the vaporizer puffed wafts of hot steam in another. Dymphna had fought against getting the machines, as they seemed alien and unnecessary. They were meant, Zoë had insisted, to combat excessive dryness, relieve discomfort associated with dry noses and skin, help prevent infants and young children from developing breathing problems, and prevent the build-up of static electricity. Dymphna thought they were for parents with more money than sense. And grandparents. Grandmothers. Mothers-in-law. Which is what she considered Zoë sometimes: a mother-in-law with more money than sense.
Dymphna thought the machines made the nursery like a laboratory, and her children like lab rats in some antiseptic environment. According to her, such luxuries didn't prepare children for the real world. Being mollycoddled with swanky machines would make them ultra-sensitive to car fumes and the black clouds that billowed out of factory smokestacks and the huge swathes of cigarette smoke everywhere you went. It was all rather technical, or biological or what have you, but Dymphna recalled her mother telling her that exposure to germs was good for children. It made them stronger adults. It had something to do with the immuno system, or something like that. However, Rory had agreed with the machines, so it had been two against one, and Dymphna had lost out. Again.
How was forcing children to grow up in an unnatural environment (though that's not how she phrased it in her mind) good for them? She had spent a childhood playing in waste dumps, wreathed in asbestos, and it hadn't harmed her. And that had been even safer than the games her parents had played during their childhoods at the start of the Troubles. Dymphna knew her mother's jungle gym had been the barricades of burnt out cars at the end of her street in Creggan Heights, that Fionnuala had played dodge the rubber bullet instead of dodge ball, and her tears were from CS gas, not because Bambi's mother had died on the telly. And that went for her father as well, though here she'd have to substitute 'the Moorside' for Creggan Heights, and tears from 'his soccer team losing the big match.'
And since when, Dymphna
had wondered, was static electricity 'harmful' to children? Exactly what was this mysterious phenomenon that was apparently such a frightful danger? Dymphna wasn't sure if it was the same thing as static cling. They both had static in the name, and so maybe they were. Or maybe one caused the other? If this were so, she didn't think static cling could be harmful to humans, infant or otherwise. She recalled an entire childhood of cheap leggings and polyester mini-skirts, and never once had static cling been a problem for her. But she'd seen ads on the telly, ads for a magical white sheet, where it was a problem for people with clothes that came out of one of those machines called a 'dryer,' another swanky machine for people with more money than sense. A very American machine. The Floods had always had a washing machine in their kitchen at home (indeed, they still had the same one as when Dymphna was an infant), but had always hung the clothes on the washing line in the back garden. The apparent problem with static cling, Dymphna gathered from the ads, was thongs sticking to scarves on job interviews and dresses riding up women's legs in the Underground, but they had no Underground in Derry. Dymphna wondered if it was the same thing as, before they started stocking conditioner on the shelves of the Top-Yer-Trolley, her red curls clinging to the metal bars on the buses, and the lockers at school. Or when she used to walk across the carpet of her Granny Eda's sitting room and got an electrical shock when she touched the metal doorknob. If so, the first had been embarrassing, even though everyone's hair did that back then, and the second had been surprising, not a trip to the hospital.
And was this bizarre 'static' electricity different from the everyday electricity that came out of the little holes in the walls? Dymphna didn't dare to wonder. Until, finally, irritated at the questions, she had dared to wonder, and had tried to look it up online to see if it really could be harmful to her children, and then justify the machines in the nursery.
Google had guided her to graphs and arrows and little circles with pluses and minuses in them, and words like adhesive forces and electrons orbiting a nucleus and unstable outer atom shells, and ions, positive and negative, and she was none the wiser. Static electricity was something to do with 'opposite electrical charges,' whatever that meant. She thought charges was something to do with credit cards, but they never seemed to have static cling. Not that she had ever owned a credit card; it was a luxury she had only seen on the telly when she'd been growing up. Then she got older, and she had handled some at her previous jobs at the Top-Yer-Trolley and Kebabalicious, and when a poncy git or minted cow slipped one out of his or her wallet, the cards never seemed to stick together, never gave her a little electrical shock when she took it out of their hands, usually over-moisturized or -manicured. She loved to wipe the superior smirk off their faces as they handed the cards regally across the counter, when she told the minted arseholes there was a twenty pound minimum, and she always saw their eyes shifting from side to side, and their hands grabbing at whatever unnecessary item they could, whatever purchase would take them over twenty pounds. Little did Dymphna now realize, she really did have the last laugh, as, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008, those who had been lucky enough to be thrown credit cards by the banks were probably all drowning in debt at the moment. But back to static electricity.
She gathered, somehow, that it made 'unlike charges attract,' and though she still couldn't understand this phrase, still thinking of charges as if they were credit cards, 'unlike whatevers attract' made her think of her and Rory. He was Protestant and she was Catholic, but they were attracted to each other. Perhaps not at this very moment, as they were yelling at each other, but usually. Was that what static cling was all about? Two very different people liking each other? But what did that have to do with electricity? Ah...electricity seemed to her a branch of...chemistry? They always talked about the chemistry between the stars of the latest romantic comedy and other films. Or the lack of it. Richard Gere and Julia Roberts had it in bucket loads (Pretty Woman was her favorite movie of all time), and Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, of course, and even Keanu and Sandra in Speed (though that made Dymphna a bit jealous); Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie didn't have it in The Tourist—which surprised Dymphna—and Adam Sandler had it with nobody in any movie she had ever seen him in—which didn't. Were static electricity and static cling part of that? Chemistry? (Physics never entered her mind, as she thought physics was psychics.)
While sparks were flying downstairs, the children were slumbering away upstairs, static-cling-free, to the tunes of the lullaby CD in the nursery with its tasteful yellow and orange walls. Jumping Serta sheep and Ugly Dolls were stenciled on the walls. When the room was being designed, Grandmother Zoë had insisted on the Ugly Dolls; she had apparently done some research and discovered they were the most 'in' toys for infants and toddlers, but the children had seemed terrified of their pointy heads, wings, horns and menacing teeth, so Dymphna had plastered posters of the Teletubbies over the Ugly Dolls, but then the kids had been more terrified, so she had taken them down. The Ugly Dolls toys Zoë had purchased to match the wall design—Ice Bat, Uglycorn, Money Bags Ox and Kiss Demon—Dymphna had hidden in the back of a closet, but then Keanu found them one day and had screamed bloody murder, so Dymphna had thrown them out. Keanu played mostly with his Bob the Builder, Beeyonsay with her pink Care Bear, and Greenornge didn't play yet, only gurgled and cooed through his pacifier (or dummy, as they called it). As their parents kept on roaring at each other downstairs, the toddler, the baby and the infant didn't wake up. They kept sleeping. It wasn't some child sleep cycle responsible for this, more the Kahlua Dymphna had put into the bottles and/or stewed prunes (depending on the child).
Rory was staring at Dymphna in shock. “Are ye saying...saying...ye're jealous?! O'Toole...he didn't do anything, but! It was the Tannoy, the PA system,” he now insisted.
Their dinner, ham hocks and mashed turnips, sat before them on the plates, uneaten. Partly their anger, partly Dymphna's cooking. Their wine glasses, however, a wedding present from from Zoë's sister, hand-cut Waterford crystal, were drained.
Dymphna lit a cigarette and puffed away. She eyed Rory archly as she dumped more wine into her glass and threw half of it down her throat. She wiped her lips, then hissed across the rim, “I was playing that devil's advocate game, just.” She knew this phrase only from the film of the same name, the one with her heartthrob in it, Keanu Reeves. “I know youse didn't do anything on that desk of his. Naw, ye pleasure me good enough in bed. Before I met ye, I thought foreplay was taking on four lads at once! Or that yer man thrust four times and that was it. Now I know better, but, so I know ye're no nancy boy.” Somewhere in a cranny of her brain, however, she remembered hearing on a radio phone-in show that bisexuals were the best lovers. She filed that away for later. “What I want to know now, but,” and here her voice rose to a shrill cry, “be's why ye was there in the first place?! What made ye go see O'Toole? Sure, ye've no reason to step foot in the Top-Yer-Trolley. I do all the messages! Why was ye there?”
Rory's face was like a freshly-peeled beet. “I got lost on me way to the loos. O'Toole's office is right beside them, like.”
Dymphna stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette and crossed her arms. “And ye expect me to believe that, do ye? I'm not daft, so I'm not!”
“I was on me dinner break, and I had to take a slash. Ye know them public lavs in the city center be's crawling with germs and pervs. And I remembered there was ones in the back of the Top-Yer-Trolley. If ye must know. And I lost me way.” His eyes were shifty. She knew he was lying. “I never thought I'd have a wife who didn't trust me.”
“And I never thought I'd have a husband who would spew bold face lies outta his mouth as if they was gospel! Who would creep around behind me back, poking his nose into the private affairs of me youth!”
Rory stared at his wife across the ham hocks, and his face seemed to say that, though all of Derry thought Dymphna dim-witted, they were wrong in some respects.
“B-but, how...? How do ye know—?�
��
“Sleekit!” Dymphna roared, slamming her fist on the table. The ham hocks jumped, the turnips stayed put. “Sly! Full of deceit and lies! Just like all...all... youse Proddy bastards!”
“Why the bloody hell,” Rory protested, shocked, “are ye bringing religion into it?” He looked at her empty wine glass. That was why.
“Why not? You brought the opposite into it! Sin! Sins of the flesh! Into our home! And now it's all over town!”
“I'm not sure, love, that sin be's the opposite of religion.”
“Aye, it is. Sin be's bad, religion be's good. Sure, even our Seamus knows that!”
“Ye're terrible religion-y tonight, hi. The good Lord, the gospel, sins of the flesh, and now I'm a Proddy bastard.”
“I've always been wile religious,” Dymphna sniffed. She reached for the crucifix nestled in her ample bosom.
Rory rolled his eyes. “Ye certainly wasn't being religious or good when ye—” He controlled himself. “Aye, whatever ye say, love.”
Resigned, he took a swig of wine. They seemed at an impasse. They heard a car roll by outside and the tinkle of an ice cream van. Music Box Dancer. If the house had had an old-fashioned clock, a grandfather one, they would've heard it tick. Was this the eye of the storm?
Dymphna sighed. “We already talked ourselves until our faces was blue about this, but. Ages ago. I know ye had yer doubts about O'Toole being Keanu's da. I thought that was laid all to rest, but. What did yer man O'Toole say?”
“Denied Keanu was his.” Rory took another swig. “What about this Italian gigolo, but? From the cruise ship? I felt a right gack when I heard. Not a clue did I have. Is he Greenornge's da? Or what about Eamonn? Is he Greenornge's?”
Static Cling Page 14
