Fionnuala shirked as the girl, still clutching the gown, thrust her arms around her and plunged her cheek with her lips over and over.
“Mind me face, wee girl,” Fionnuala said, “Them beads is digging into me chin.”
She pulled Dymphna off, uncomfortable at the showering of love from her least loved offspring. But Fionnuala was smiling at the praises that continued to spill out of Dymphna's mouth. And why shouldn't they? She had outdone herself on the sewing machine and iron board this time. All the Moorside, all Derry would be talking about the gown for years to come, she was sure. And she was right about that.
Maureen cleared her throat.
“Now that that's over, can we please fill wer bakes? Surely them ham hocks is done by now. Me stomach thinks me throat's been cut. And them wanes needs their nappies changed and all.”
“Right!” Fionnuala said. And here her mind clicked from the bright and sparkly side of the wedding to the dark, flinty, poisoning revenge side of her heart, “Dymphna, stop yer babbling over that gown and get some plates on the table. Siofra, help yer sister. And where did them lads get off to? And is yer daddy still in the sitting room, glued to that telly? What he could possibly be watching on that flimmin thing, the choice of programs we have on them odd channels, be's beyond me thinking. And missing the unveiling of the gown and all! Anyroad, call them lads and him for their tea. I'll be spooning it out as soon as.”
And then she realized. There were too many people in the scullery. How was she supposed to 'prepare' Lorcan's special ham hock with her mammy, two of her daughters, her youngest son, her grandson and her granddaughter, looking on? Here she cursed Dymphna, as was her wont. If the girl hadn't been getting married, hadn't needed a gown, and hadn't needed a gown spiced up, the scullery would be as empty as the organic food aisle at the Top Yer Trolly. The weapon, the Aquanet, was in the bread box. She had to think of a reason to get everyone to clear out of the scullery for a few minutes. All she needed was thirty seconds to spray the ham hock she would put on a special plate for Lorcan.
“All youse!” Fionnuala barked. Dymphna and Siofra turned around, plates in hand (the gown had been placed reverently on the counter top next to the sink, but its hem flowed into the garbage). Fionnuala was pulling tins of beer out of the refrigerator. “Take these lagers to yer daddy and Lorcan. Give two to yer brother. And I want youse to all clear outta the scullery for a few moments. This be's a special tea. For yer gown, Dymphna, and also it's to be Lorcan's last meal here and all. I want to set the table up nice. And them wanes does need changing, so I'm gonny do it meself. Shocking, I know, aye, but I want ye to rest, Dymphna, as I'm sure the excitement of seeing yer new gown has ye all worn out. And the sight of what be's putrescing in them nappies is one I'm sure none of youse would want to see. Have ye fresh nappies in their pram there, love?”
“Aye.” Dymphna still seemed stunned that her mother would volunteer to change the diapers. But happy.
“Right. Now! Into the sitting room the lot of yous—”
But the scullery was already empty except for the crawling infants. There was a knowing smirk on Fionnuala's face as she closed the door. She wouldn't have been surprised if she had seen skid marks from her mother's cane on the linoleum, such was the speed with which Maureen had fled from the nappy changing.
Fionnuala hauled the infants onto the table, pushing aside the plates which had just been sat there, and set to work. “Heavenly Father!” she moaned, then “Dear Lord!” then “God bless us and save us!” and her fingers shook with disgust and she heaved deep breaths through her lips and Keanu and Beeyonsay kicked and screamed bloody murder up at her. But finally the filthy deed was done. She shoved the infants and their fresh diapers into their stroller, shuddered as she wondered if what she had just put herself through was worse than what she was about to do, then marched to the bread box, flipped it open and grabbed the hairspray.
She prized a few dirty bowls from the sink, piled them atop one another and hid the can behind the pile in case anyone might be fool enough to enter the scullery. She grabbed a plate, Lorcan's plate, from the table. She had gone to the back garden and plucked a weed of some sort that looked enough like parsley to place on his plate as garnish. This was his special meal, his special going-away meal, and the garnish was a special touch.
She felt her heart pounding in her breastplate, felt sweat peppering her brow, saw her fingers shudder as she turned the heat off all three pots, picked up the tongs and dug into the frothy water of the ham hocks. She pulled out the biggest, meatiest chunk of gristly, fatty pork attached to the squattest bone and placed it on Lorcan's plate. She felt as if she had left her body, was floating next to the fluorescent strip lighting on the greasy ceiling with its patches of damp, and looking down at herself as she slipped the aerosol can from its hiding place. She shook it violently. She popped off the cap. She pressed the button. It hissed its toxins onto the pork. She kept spraying, righteousness etched on her brow. She picked up the ham hock, turned it around, and sprayed some more. And now Fionnuala was no longer on the ceiling but standing on the floor before the plate and watching the spray dissolve into the meat, her eyes watering, the acidity of the spray sticking in her throat, her hand shuddering so much it was difficult to continue pressing the button. The smell of the hairspray, shocking in its familiarity, took Fionnuala back to the days, long long ago, when she and Ursula did each other's make up and hair before they and their husbands had a night out on the town. That would never happen again. Finally the ham hock was dripping with poison. Do Not Ingest. She smiled. That would teach Lorcan to abandon her!
She ladled the vindaloo on the ham hock, grabbed a piece of toast, grilled half an hour before, from the plate piled high, threw the toast next to the pork, and spooned beans on top. She arranged the sprigs of 'parsley.' She inspected her creation and nodded, satisfied. Gordon Ramsay couldn't have been prouder. And then she set to work dishing out the other plates. She remembered just at the last moment, ladle poised, that Dymphna hated curry, so she left her ham hock bare. That was fine. Fionnuala didn't want to poison her. Yet?
She was ready to call them in, then thought of something else. She didn't know what immediate reaction the chemicals might have on Lorcan, but she didn't want him spewing up all over her scullery floor. So she pulled the garbage bin out from under the sink and sat it beside his chair at the table. She didn't know how she could explain it away, but hopefully in their hunger, nobody would notice. It wasn't as if the scullery were an epicenter of spartan tidiness, in any event.
She opened the door and called out, “C'mon, youse! The wanes is lovely and clean and tea's ready!”
There were noises of general celebration, the sounds of feet scrambling from the sitting room, and in they trooped. Lorcan was first at the table. She could see the drunkenness in his eyes. Perfect! They all looked strange: panting, shaking slightly, their eyes glinting with some emotion, and Fionnuala couldn't put her finger on what that emotion might be. Were they really all so hungry it was showing itself plainly on their faces? Here Fionnuala was ashamed of her family. Had they no restraint? They were no better than beasts from darkest Africa! And now it was as if they were descending upon the watering hole to devour the dead carcass of the wild boar. She filed that thought away for inspection later; she had a much more important matter on her mind at the moment. She pulled the chair out for Lorcan, patted him on the shoulder as he sat, feeling all the strength, youth and health in him, and flung the plate on the table before him.
“There ye go, son,” she said. “Them ham hocks ye wanted. Enjoy.”
Twenty minutes earlier, Paddy had been stretched out on the settee in the sitting room before the telly, an Australian lager in one hand, a fag in the other. He drank and he smoked. It had been another draining shift at the packing plant. The fish cakes machine was still broken, and he had spent nine long hours molding the fish, potatoes and seasonings into mounds he hoped resembled cakes. He was on his second beer, and had been
taken aback that Fionnuala was catering to his needs. She rarely did any more. She was wrapped up in a prickly, self-absorbed world of her own, had been for years.
Though tonight she seemed more interested in shoving beer after beer into Lorcan's hand the moment he was finished with one. Lorcan had told him about his plans to catch the flight to Florida later that night. The bus to Belfast left in two hours. Paddy wished him well. He wished he had a ticket for the seat next to his son. But Paddy would never leave his hometown on the River Foyle. He was there for life. And besides, though he loved the idea of the sun in theory, his skin couldn't handle it, typical Derry pale as it was.
Paddy assumed Fionnuala was trying to get Lorcan so drunk he would miss the flight. Good luck to her, but it was a desperate plan destined to fail. He had seen Lorcan play soccer and score goals, build a cabinet for the loo, and win three pub quizzes, all under the influence of six beers or more. There was no way his son wouldn't get on that bus. Or so Paddy thought.
The night before, Paddy had suffered the misfortune of hearing Fionnuala sobbing and sobbing and sobbing on her side of the bed. “Am I so horrible?” she kept moaning into her pillow and, Aye, ye are, ye vile monstrous madwoman, ye Paddy kept thinking in his head, the one he had shoved under his own pillow to drown out her sobs and moans. He had had to rise at 6 AM to make fish cakes, after all.
He was getting fed up with Fionnuala. Paddy clicked from one unsatisfying channel to another and wondered what was going on with his wife. Dancing black Yanks. Paddy clucked with annoyance and clicked again. And again. Ever since Lorcan had hooked the telly up to the neighbors' system, they hadn't been able to see any of the familiar shows they loved, nor even the familiar shows they loathed. The shows all seemed to be public access shows from around the world, with horrible production values, shaky cameras and tinny voices, hideous people and inanity in a wide array of unintelligible languages that put his hackles up. He clicked. Children on a farm coloring pumpkins with crayons.
Paddy was faithful to Fionnuala, always had been and always would be, though there were plenty of offers from the ladies of the packing plant floor and from a variety of pubs around town (the Church forbade trespassing on his neighbor's wife, after all), and though that passionate love of youth of his had atrophied, they still had the shared experience of decades of raising all those children, those years, not really loving and tender, but the weight of those shared years to fall back on. News in some Arabic language. But now that weight was threatening to stifle him. He was seriously wondering about her. He and Dymphna had spoken about it often. A Japanese game show, not one of the fun ones with colorful and strange props, but what looked like a spelling bee. And he longed to bring Fionnuala's mother, Maureen, into the discussion as well, but he knew only too well the thickness of Derry blood. A Yank evangelist pounding a pulpit with Meatloaf blaring in the background. Even if Maureen agreed with everything he and Dymphna thought—and many times Paddy was sure he saw the disapproval glinting in Maureen's eyes and the tightening of her lips at some of Fionnuala's antics and histrionics, he couldn't trust the woman not to run to Fionnuala and tell her all. And the fallout, as usual, would be catastrophic. Paddy didn't understand what was going on in the bizarre labyrinth of imagined slights and desperate oneupmanship of his wife's mind. He considered leaving her, but it was too much hassle. And now a mysterious illness was invading her body, so he couldn't. But he shuddered at what the retribution might be if he did.
“Mammy! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
Paddy jumped at the sounds of Dymphna's shrieks of joy from the scullery. “It's bloody effin marvelous! Flimmin, flippin brilliant!” He wiped the beer from his chest with the closest throw pillow and smirked. It was about time Fionnuala did something to please someone in the family besides herself. And Lorcan. But it was too little too late.
Fionnuala had always been...opinionated, even when she had been Fionnuala Heggarty. But when Paddy's sister Ursula won the lottery all those years ago, well, her husband Jed, anyway, it seemed to tip Fionnuala over the edge. Paddy had stood by, shocked, as Fionnuala embarked on a campaign of hatred and penny counting that caused Paddy's sister and his brother-in-law to flee to the States. He had even started believing that hatred towards them that spewed from his wife's lips daily, and nightly as well. He had turned on his own sister, and on Jed, who was a right laugh, his mate, and a good man to boot.
He heard footsteps leaving the scullery and clomping up the stairs. It sounded like Lorcan and Padraig. After the cruise last year, Paddy thought maybe things would be different. But when Fionnuala revealed to him she had ripped up Ursula and Jed's wedding invite, he had shaken his head in disgust, though only in his mind. As she was saying it, Paddy's neck stood stock still, and his face had the usual concerned look plastered on it, and all the while his mind was thinking, Ursula be's Dymphna's favorite auntie, but! And ye're going to die a lonely old hag, so ye are. Love. There was always time for reconciliation, maybe there would be with Ursula and Jed, Paddy thought, especially now, as he was getting older, his hair graying, no longer the sexy black sheen of old, and his body finding it more and more difficult to drag itself off to the packing plant every morning. He noticed he was having to drink less every night so that his aging body could handle it. He thought that, for himself, that time for reconciliation might have come.
Dymphna was still squealing in the scullery. That must be the gown of the century, Paddy thought. A Goth chat show.
“Och, what the feck are these flimmin shite programs?” he asked himself, suddenly disgusted. Where was the boxing? The football, the Match of the Day? Deal Or No Deal? Gardeners World? Coronation Street? Doctor Who? Casualty? He pressed buttons on the remote control he had never tried before, and was sat staring at static, then a blue screen, then a screen of many vertical lines of color, then static again. Irritation growing in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol entering his system, he pulled himself from the settee and went to the back of the TV. He fiddled with the cable, tried to press it further in, then twisted it off and twisted it back in. He jiggled it.
He sat back down, swigged some beer, pressed more buttons, and finally found something that looked vaguely entertaining, well, not quite that, but not deathly boring. It seemed like a Yank quiz show. And as he heard the scullery door open, and steps approaching the sitting room, his eyes were arrested by the television. “Christ almighty!”
More beer spilled, but as Dymphna, Siofra, Seamus and Fionnuala's mother entered and another beer was forced into his hand,
“Och, Daddy! Ye should see the gown me mammy made! Lovely, so it—!”
Paddy couldn't even acknowledge their presence. Feeling like he was caught watching some guilty pleasure or pornography, he tried to flip over to another channel, jabbing frantically at the remote, but such was his shock that his finger kept missing the channel change button.
Lorcan and Padraig came into the room, and Paddy could only point a finger at the screen. He was in shock at what had suddenly appeared there. No, who had suddenly appeared there.
All seemed to gasp as a unit, including Lorcan and Padraig, who weren't in the habit of gasping. Paddy understood. He had gasped himself. All eyes were fixed to the screen, unable to make sense of what they were seeing, unable to trust their eyes, their brains struggling to comprehend.
“I-is that...?!” Maureen finally chanced.
“Can it really be..?” Dymphna wondered.
“Aye, it is,” Paddy verified. “On wer own telly screen! Of all places!”
Siofra clapped her little hands with glee. Padraig wiped his glasses and placed them back on. He blinked and blinked at the screen, but he still kept seeing what he couldn't believe he was seeing. Seamus gurgled. Siofra ran into the hallway, and Paddy thought it was as if her 10-year-old body just couldn't stand still with all the excitement. But then...a horrible thought came to him.
“Siofra!” he inched. “Back here now!”
A few seconds passed, during
which all jaws remained slack and all eyes remained saucered towards the screen, then Siofra came back in. “I hope ye didn't leave for to tell yer mammy about this?”
Paddy indicated the TV.
Siofra shook her head.
Paddy appealed to them all. “Breathe not a word of this to yer mammy. Do youse all understand? Youse know what it'll do to her. It'll derange her.”
“I'm not for stirring up trouble!” Maureen said, hands spread before her as if in defeat. “Lord knows there be's enough of it around to add that,” she nodded to the telly, “to the mix!”
Lorcan, Dymphna, Padraig and Siofra all nodded, still shocked at what they had witnessed, what they were still witnessing. But their father had no reason to fear. A deranged Fionnuala was the last thing any of them wanted to encounter.
And then, when it was all over, perfect timing, the door to the scullery opened and Fionnuala yelled, “C'mon, youse! The wanes is lovely and clean and tea's ready!”
They trooped out of the kitchen, the family secret safe from Fionnuala for the moment. As amazing as what they had seen was, they were ravenous.
The nights were still chilly. The hot water bottle was now a tepid, squelchy mound at her frigid feet. The windup alarm clock with the glowing hands on her nightstand was ticking away the small minutes of the night. No, it was counting down. Bernadette Mulholland wiggled her toes to get some heat into them. She would have been tossing and turning all night long, but she was captive under the many lumpy blankets pinning her down, a prisoner upon the mattress. Heating was expensive, and why waste the money when ten blankets would do? So instead of tossing and turning, she was only able to stare up at the ceiling, watching the occasional car lights that moved across the ceiling from one patch of damp to the other.
Best Served Frozen (The Irish Lottery Series Book 4) Page 30
