“We kyanny leave her here alone, but, exposed to all the elements, and ye know flimmin well there be's packs of homeless dogs roaming Derry, and ye heard about them wild foxes what've been seen on the outskirts of town, haven't ye? Magella's brother caught one in their back garden and made it a pet. Charges fifty pee for a look at it in the cage. Made that cage himself, so he did, and painted it purple and black. I'm afeared some wild creatures are sure to come upon Mammy and feast upon her if we leave her here all on her lonesome!”
“One of us should go, then. And the other stay here. With the bo—,” he didn't want to torture Siofra any longer, apparently, “Mammy and the wanes.”
Siofra considered this, but a queasiness was spreading. She knew Fionnuala was her mother and she didn't mind being left alone with her mother too much, but being left alone with a maybe dead mother was another matter. And she couldn't be the one who trawled to the motorway, because, from the poking and prodding Padraig was putting their mother's body through, she didn't trust him alone with her body. Once she came back with help, her mother might be stripped of her dangly earrings and wedding band, and who knew how many holes Padraig might have poked into her body, what state it might be in.
“Will she fit in the pram, do ye think?”
She dismissed her own idea even before Padraig's snort. A glance at the size of her mother and another at the stroller sufficed to let her know the idea was madness.
While Padraig continued to prod the body with manic glee, his sister's eyes wildly searched the area that had once been the shirt factory. She was looking for a shopping cart, a trolley from the Top Yer Trolley probably, they were always scattered throughout the town in the most peculiar locations, always getting in the way of Zimmer frames and speeding mopeds. But there wasn't one to be found where they were now. Bloody typical!
In an industrial area like this, there should be one of those flat things with a handle and wheels they always carried things on. A dolly, was it called?, something perfect for moving bulky, oversized cargo. That's what her mother's body now was. She scampered towards a rusty skip brimming with wilting and decayed foliage and looked behind it. She reappeared, dragging a sheet of corrugated tin behind her. She grinned triumphantly.
“This is perfect! Now we're in need some wheels. And if not wheels, something round.”
“Could we not prize the wheels off the pram?”
“And how would we get the wanes up the hill to the motorway? Ye know they kyanny walk of their own accord!”
“When we carry her, themmuns'll be have to stay here anyroad, at the mercy of all them animals ye was going on about.”
She hadn't thought about this, but threw her brother a look which said, 'eejit,' then scrabbled through her mother's satchel. She gasped as she unearthed some toilet paper. “Loo roll! It's round, just like mini wheels!”
She danced with delight, brandishing the rolls aloft as if they were the cure for a horrible disease. Which maybe her mother had. She sobered, then placed four rolls of double ply toilet tissue on the ground in a square, then hauled the tin on top. She gave the metal a little push. The sheet did trundle an inch or so.
“Effin brilliant! This was how themmuns in Egypt built the pyramids! We'll push her until the two rolls in the back come free, then put them in the front and push some more. I learned it in Mrs. O'Donnell's class in primary three! Wile easy to carry heavy weights long distances, it made it, they said. And Mammy's a heavy weight. We've just to heave her onto this doodah here and roll her up to the motorway.”
Padraig stared at her
“Don't be a bloody eejit! The weight will squash the loo rolls, and they'll be useless. And that hill be's steep. Her body's sure to roll off...and roll back down the hill.”
“Ye're the bloody eejit! Have ye a better plan, then?” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Hurry! The more we dally, that closer Mammy's getting to death.”
“If she doesn't already be dead.”
As Padraig looked doubtfully at the corrugated tin, Siofra's conviction faltered. To get their mother on it, they would have to lift it only five or six inches above the ground, but she didn't know how they would have the strength to lift her even that short distance. Padraig must have been thinking the same thing.
“Do ye think we've the strength to haul her on top of that, hi?” he asked. “She's sure to weigh a ton. Dead weight, haven't ye heard about?”
Siofra put her hands over her ears, shaking her head furiously. “Don't ye say the D word again!”
She glanced over at the shrieking stroller, wondering how Keanu and Beeyonsay might help, but dismissed the thought as soon as it came. They were too small. And then the heavens opened and rain clattered down from the sky. Huge, hail-like boulders that bounced up from the cement at their feet and splatted into their faces and eyes. Siofra squealed, the infants roared more, which she hadn't thought was possible, but clearly it was. Padraig bellowed up at the sky: “Christ almighty!”
“Now!” Siofra barked through the curtain of rain. She flung the infant's blanket over their heads, then rushed to her mother. “We've to move now! Go ahead you and grab a hold of Mammy's head. I'll take her feet.”
He inched towards Fionnuala's head and looked down. The thought of clutching his mother's dead head in his hands was making Padraig queasy, if the look on his face under the red hair plastered to his skull was anything to go by. Siofra was surprised.
She reached through the stinging rain and grabbed her mother's shoes, awkward, clunky things like clogs, but with strappy bits for the ankles and in a crocodile pattern. Now slick, they slipped from the feet and clattered to the ground. She threw them into the stroller under the blanket. The infants gnawed on the straps.
Siofra grappled her mother's stockinged feet and hunched over for leverage. Her mother's lumpen, misshapen toes were inches from Siofra's face.
“Ready, steady...” Siofra said. Padraig avoided his mother's head and grabbed her shoulders instead.
“Go!” they said as a unit.
They grunted. They tugged. Their little faces scrunched with effort. But Fionnuala's body didn't budge.
“I'm gonny haveta slide me body under her back to be able to budge her an inch even,” Padraig decided.
“Do what ye have to.” Panic rose within Siofra's breast. If they couldn't get help for their mother, if she died here in the middle of nowhere... It would serve her right, a not insignificant part of Siofra's mind thought, but then another part was consumed with guilt at the thought. She gripped the heels with all her little might and tried to shove all thoughts out of her mind.
Padraig got into position on the concrete, the rain clattering down, dragging up his mother's shoulders and shoehorning his spindly legs under her back.
“Go on,” he said. “You tug her towards the metal now. I'll follow.”
“Ungh!” Siofra heaved. “Ungh! Ungh!”
She saw Padraig's face melt into anguish, bright red and drenched, heard his grunts and moans, as he clamped his fingers into his mother's shoulders, used his knees to lift her chest from the ground, and twisted his whole body to thrust her up the six inches and onto the corrugated tin. He roared with delight, and Siofra's heart danced as the top part of their mother's body thudded onto the tin. Her lolling head banged atop two curves.
“Now move you her bloody feet!” Padraig moaned.
Siofra bit her lower lip and grappled the feet. She heaved and—
wailed as her fingers slipped through the wet heels. Her little body flew backwards through the air. Her head cracked against the stroller. It toppled, stood diagonally on the concrete for a second. Wobbled. Then plunged to the concrete. The infants shrieked as they spilled out into the rain. Keanu's diaper popped open and brown juices sprayed into the air. A baby bottle sprinkled with brown droplets rolled between Siofra's legs. A clog/shoe hit her head.
As Siofra straightened the stroller and reached for one of the infants (she didn't know which), Padraig jumped backwards,
roaring with a shock greater than that of the infants. He scrabbled backwards from his mother half on the tin and half off.
“Bejesus! Her foot's after moving! And one of her eyes rolled and all!”
Siofra wiped dirt off a cheek and placed flailing limbs into the darkness of the stroller.
“Mammy doesn't be dead after all!” Siofra marveled She clapped her hands with glee. Padraig looked too shocked to be disappointed. They hovered over Fionnuala's prone body. Then they heard a noise like a malfunctioning garbage disposal come from her cracked lips.
“Dial the fecking ambulance, ye bleedin eejits!” their mother croaked. “999 calls be's free! Flimmin bloody useless, so youse wanes are!”
How could Siofra have known? She was only nine, after all, and didn't have a mobile phone. She wasn't American. She dialed as her mother, drenched but alive, thrashed and moaned on the tin and concrete. Siofra was relieved.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The building that housed Xpressions beauty parlor had been built during the dark days of the Troubles, when the streets outside were a battle zone of barbed wire and tear gas, and construction materials limited to unsightly cinder blocks. Back then, it was the lone outpost for hair care in the middle of the Moorside ghetto, scene of the worst sectarian violence in Derry and home to at least seven barricades of burnt-out cars.
Many women want to look their best, even during a civil war, and in the Derry of the 70s, this probably meant getting a shag, bowl, wedge or pixie cut, and, as the fighting dragged on into the 80s, feathered wings, teased poufs, and those styles that seemed to come from a crimping iron in the hands of a madwoman. For these transformations to occur, they had to venture through the reinforced door next to the butcher's and haul themselves up a steep staircase with concrete steps and no hand railing that stunk of relaxing agent, black sausage and urine. And sometimes, during periods of particular unrest, hearty souls raced on their haunches through tear gas, past singed picket fences, alcohol-soaked handkerchiefs pressed to their faces to quench their coughing and crying, to get their hair done. There was nothing heroic or desperate about this to the women who did it, and there were many, even pensioners in need of a rinse and set, who never missed an appointment. It was just the way life was.
The junior stylists of Xpressions today knew little of this. The British occupation of their city had happened in another time, and, it seemed to them, another place. But they saw the colorful murals that had been painted on the Moorside walls as they trudged through the cracked pavements to their shifts, monuments to those bloody, grim days—and they had heard plenty about it from their mammies and daddies, and even more from their grandas and grannies.
Decades later, the walls of the salon still hadn't been plastered over, let alone painted, but glossy posters showing off the latest styles of the 2010s had been taped to the unsightly cinder blocks, the only remainder of that harder, harsher era, though the butcher's was still next door and the stairwell still stunk. Now that stairwell was littered with graffiti, broken cider bottles and hypodermic needles. Derry might now be a showcase of Irish charm, indeed, the European City of Culture for 2013, but the forgotten neighborhood of the Moorside, once a military no-go zone, was still, the Tourist Board suggested, a no-tourist zone.
The owner of the salon, Molly Harris, had been a toddler during the Troubles, and knew danger still lurked around every corner of the area. Broken lamp posts gave off no light and the panorama was more distressed industrial than Celtic charm. The danger now was homegrown rather than shipped in from Britain, different battles fought on the same front, danger now not from paratroopers but from druggies searching for handbags and hooded teens searching for mindless violence.
Molly had tried to spruce the salon up to make it inviting, not only hiding the cinder blocks with the posters, but also buying a plant for the windowsill. She had added a touch of class, a neon sign over the cashier's head that spelled Xpressions and blinked, one letter lighting up at a time, each a different color, then the entire word blinked three times. The 'p' and the 'i' had burned out years ago. Under the sign and to the left of the cash register, there was a sad selection of salon products on a shelf hanging from the wall, their boxes covered in dust as they were twice as expensive as the same things down at the Top-Yer-Trolly. But Molly served free tea and, for those who wanted to put on American airs, coffee, and even had a plate of biscuits on the table between the chairs of the waiting area between the chairs.
Now, a plate of HobNobs in one hand, a curling iron in the other, phone clamped between her neck and shoulder, she read a client back the details of an appointment and fought the urge to shriek. Two junior stylists had called in 'sick.' She suspected that meant they had too much drink the night before and couldn't be bothered to drag themselves out of bed. And she was fully-booked! Every ten minutes the door flew open, and Molly tensed as another old one staggered in. The biscuit plate was empty, she was out of teabags, she was even out of coffee, and they were almost sitting atop one another in the waiting area, cackling in a circle.
The trainee was close to useless. Molly had told her to drag the shampoos out as long as possible to give her and the other stylist, Magella, time to stagger the appointments. She suggested the trainee make them quasi-massages, and now Mrs. Devlin had been under the water so long she was casting the trainee glances like she suspected lesbianism in those playful fingers. Molly hung up, noting the dryer next to the window had gone off. She sputtered in exasperation. Mrs. Heggarty seemed to have dozed off, so Molly decided she could rest there under the helmet while she finished off Mrs. Breeney's highlights. From what Mrs. McDaid had said when she came in, Mrs. Heggarty would need her sleep. A terrible shame what had happened to the old woman's granddaughter, Dymphna. Molly rushed over to the tinfoil strips atop Mrs. Breeney's skull.
The dryer had gone off a few moments earlier, but Maureen didn't mind sitting there on the plush chair breathing the oxygen in and out. It gave her a break from her six-year old Seamus. He was jumping up and down and shrieking like a spastic next to the relaxers and surrounded by strollers and screaming infants in what was called the 'wanes' corner.' Crayon scrawled up the length of the corner's wall. He banged his sippy cup, filled with fizzy lemonade, on the wall. Maureen continued to breathe in and out. The radio was blaring some mindless pop hit of the day (it sounded like Africa Gone Mad to her), but her ears strained, on the hunt for juicy gossip from the crowded waiting area.
“And there was them expecting me to put me bladder's needs before them of me daughter's! When Hell freezes over!”
Maureen smiled and discreetly reached to her lap for the celebrity magazine whose pages had long since lost their glossy sheen and feigned interest in the old gossip before her—Britney Spears dropping her child but not a drop of her drink.
“I found them down the market stall for fifty pence cheaper...”
“...A face like a busted cabbage, so he had, when he found out yer woman had a fancy man of her own...”
“...She told the inspectors, why should she pay for a telly license for a telly she stole?...”
“...When they came knocking on my door, I told them I was barred from the corner shop to make the payment because they had caught me shoplifting there...”
“...I told them I just used the glow of the telly to read by. Didn't work, but...”
Far from juicy. Maureen flicked a page and drifted off, thinking back to her trip to the lavatory in the salon and the note written on a scrap of paper and taped to the wall over the toilet roll dispenser: Please Use Sparingly. Now she knew where her daughter Fionnuala had gotten the idea from, as a similar note had appeared in the lavatory of their house a while back, though without the 'Please' (and Fionnuala had spelled it Spraingly, and Maureen hadn't had a clue what the note was supposed to mean. Now she understood).
Then she thought about her grandson Eoin, once an altar boy and a source of pride for the family. He had grown up and turned into one of those drugs dealers, getting
himself locked up in Magilligan Prison and making the family more proud. He had been two cells down from his older brother Lorcan, in for Grievous Bodily Harm. A few months ago, they had both been released.
Fionnuala had secretly fumed to her mother; she was happy to have her sons back, what mother wouldn't be, but wished the prison service had seen fit to stagger their releases. Two mouths demanding to be fed had suddenly shown back up in the household. And Fionnuala had gotten used to the extra space in the house.
But during the drunken tail end of the hastily-thrown together celebration for their homecoming—a banner on the fireplace mantel that read “TWO FINGERS TO THE FILTH,” a carton of bootleg cigarettes, cans of lager, a gin and tonic for Maureen, a hot and spicy pizza, a sweet and sour chicken (but with chips instead of rice) and a few packets of potato chips, assorted flavors—Eoin revealed he was off to the States. As they gawped, he explained he had bought one of those knockoff passports from the Mountains of Mourne stall...with a working visa attached. They didn't want to ask where he had gotten the money from, fresh from prison as he was. Those passports with the visas were very expensive.
Maureen was surprised at Eoin's decision. There had been an economic upturn in Ireland recently, it had to do with something called software, if she had heard it correctly, and though most of this software stuff had happened down South, the feeling had trickled up across the border to the North as well, instilling in the young ones of the day a feeling of confidence and pride in their country, no need to rush to the airport for greener pastures abroad, Ireland had all the green pastures, forty shades of green, folklore had it, but... Well, the planes from Belfast to the States were bulging...
Three weeks earlier, the family had walked Eoin down to the bus depot to wave him off for his ride to Belfast International Airport, his flight from the country for Yank dollars. Fionnuala had sobbed as the doors hissed shut, but Maureen saw the relief dancing in her eyes through the crocodile tears. One bottomless pit gone. This Maureen could understand, as Fionnuala had to supply the food for them all, while Maureen just ate whatever materialized in the fridge and larder shelves.
Best Served Frozen (The Irish Lottery Series Book 4) Page 7
