The Disenchanted Widow

by Christina McKenna

  So, when finally the mechanic bumped down the lane in her Morris Traveller, its paintwork shining, its windows agleam, she’d a proposition to put to him. She invited him in for a cuppa.

  “Have you ever thought of renting this house out?” she asked, pouring tea and turning on the charm like a floodlight. “So heavenly here after the bustle of the city, and such a lovely part of the world.” She’d changed into her best frock—to oil the wheels—and applied generous dabs of Sweet Honesty scent to those all-important “pulse points”: behind her ears and on her wrists.

  “Rentin’ the place? Well now, I never thought-a that,” said Gusty Grant, trying to ignore her creamy cleavage by concentrating hard on one of the open-billed storks his aunt had so painstakingly embroidered on the tablecloth. “Come tae think of it now, I nivver thought of it atall till ye mentioned it, like.”

  “Excellent!” Bessie said. “Shall we say a month to start with? Belfast is not safe, as you can imagine, given what these terrorists get up to. And now, with this hunger strike about to get worse, our lives would be in danger…no doubt about it.” She proffered a plate of chocolate teacakes.

  “God, aye, I know what yer sayin’. Must be wild there now with the hunger strike, as ye say. Ye’re far safer in the cawntry right enough, so ye are. If them boys die—and Sands is gonna die any day now, by the looks of it—all hell’s gonna break loose.”

  Bessie, quick as ever to reach for the low-hanging fruit, moved swiftly to clinch the deal. “So glad you see it that way, Augustus. How does five pounds for the month sound?”

  “Aye, that’ll be grand,” he said, the words coming out and the cake going in on a tide of butter-melting surrender. Overwhelmed at hearing his first name from the lips of such a sophisticated city woman as Mrs. Hailstone, the mechanic-soon-to-be-landlord had agreed to the ridiculously low sum without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Excellent!” she said again, reaching into her handbag for one of Gusty’s fivers from his “lost” wallet. She felt bad about the deceit, but desperate times meant desperate measures—for now, anyway. She slid the banknote across to him. “It’s always better to have a house occupied, I feel. Deters thieves, don’t you know. And I’ll take very good care of your aunt’s things. You’ll have no worries on that score. How much do I owe you for the fan belt, by the way?”

  “It would usually be the ten pound, but the five’ll do it. I’ll not charge ye for the time, ’cos I don’t like tae see a wommin like yerself stuck, so-a don’t.”

  “That’s good of you, Augustus. How can I thank you?” She had a fair idea as to how the mechanic might like his generosity rewarded. She caught the flicker of hope behind his big glasses. What was it people said about eternal hope and the human breast?

  “D’ye mind if I ask ye something, Mrs. Hailstone?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Where would…where would Mister Hailstone be?”

  “In heaven, I hope,” said Bessie, adopting what she felt was a passable imitation of sadness: head tilted, eyes cast down.

  “I’m very sorry tae hear that.” The mechanic’s heart fluttered in expectation, shifted up a gear. “What way—”

  “Still, such is life,” Bessie cut in, fetching his remaining fiver and handing it over. “As I say, it’s terribly considerate of you to help us out.”

  That evening at supper, Bessie broke the news to Herkie.

  “Och, Ma, I don’t wanna stay here a month.” He was sitting at one end of the kitchen table, slurping from a glass of milk and cramming a fairy cake into his gob.

  Bessie sat opposite, one hand under her chin, the other resting on the stork-patterned tablecloth, holding the ever-present fag.

  “Well, I’ve decided, son, and that’s that. I’ve gotta get us some money for our passage to yer Uncle Bert in Hackney. Mr. Grant’s givin’ us this place for nothing—”

  “Och, Ma, thought we were goin’ tae Amerikay tae see the Statue of Liberry?”

  “He doesn’t know that he’s givin’ it for nothing, and he won’t if we play our cards right. And ye can give over ’bout the Statue of bloody Liberry for now.”

  “But, Ma, it’s borin’ in this oul’ place. I wanna go back till Belfast.”

  Herkie was missing the toys he’d had to leave behind and his friend Seanie McSwiney. He and Seanie would regularly clod stones at army jeeps. They dreamed of one day knocking a soldier out stone cold and making off with his automatic rifle.

  He wanted to be a soldier when he grew up and often fantasized about lying in position on a rooftop, picking off unsuspecting pedestrians as they trod the city streets—especially men wearing donkey jackets and flat caps, and who talked with a fag in their mouth, because his father had worn a donkey jacket and a flat cap to cover his bald spot and kept a fag in his gob even when he was screaming at him and his ma.

  “I know, son. I’m bored, too, but it’s only for a wee while.”

  Through the cloud of cigarette smoke, Bessie eyed him dotingly: the only good thing that had come of her marriage. She loved her son dearly, in spite of everything, and hoped he wouldn’t turn out like his da. But, for now, she fattened him up with her own insecurities—usually deep-fried, sugarcoated, and served up on a plate called “love.”

  Poor Herkie: so much like herself. Born with a tin shovel in his gob, as opposed to that fabled silver spoon. With a father not much better than her own. Where had it all gone wrong?

  And oh, the dreams she’d had, the dreams! Kept alive through grim necessity from her earliest days.

  Five years in secondary school had given her a pass in cookery and a fiery attitude leading to a succession of dead-end jobs: cleaning for the grand Mrs. Lesley Lloyd-Peacock on the Malone Road, cooking at a home for the mentally impaired, before legging it up a rung to the more refined surroundings of the Plaza hotel.

  Ah, the Plaza. What days! Mixing with the upper classes. Well, ironing their percale sheets and dumping spurned food was mixing, in a way. Who might she not have met there if things had worked out differently? What rich gentleman might not have swept her off her feet if stand-in barman Packie Lawless hadn’t got there first, making her pregnant and ending her brief career?

  Her wedding day had been a fiasco, with Packie in a borrowed suit, still drunk from the night before, slurring his way through the vows, and she trying to hide her four-month bump under a cream two-piece from Mrs. McStay’s Nu-to-You secondhand ladies’ fashion store. The sheer misfortune of it all, pulling down the curtain on a Technicolor dream of mirrored ballrooms and glittering frocks, and being whisked away to foreign lands by a handsome millionaire.

  She crushed out the cigarette in her Seamus the Fireman ashtray, and all at once a vision of Packie appeared, his brutal face contorted with rage, his fists raised in the waning light of evening. The alcohol had done that to him. It ran in the family genes as surely as young blood pumped through arteries.

  But Herkie wouldn’t suffer as she had. Packie had done them both a favor by checking out early.

  “I’d luv another wan-a-them, Ma,” Herkie said, pulling her out of her brown study.

  “Now, Herkie, that’s another thing I wanna say. You can’t talk like a docker in a new place. It’s not ‘wan-a-them, Ma’; it’s ‘one-a-them, Ma, please.’ You have to start practicing now in the house, d’ye hear me? No more of that unmannerly lip ye got away with in Belfast.”

  “Och, Ma, I wanna go back tae Belfast. I wanna play with Seanie McSwiney.”

  “Now, you listen tae me, son!” Bessie dropped her pose, finally losing her patience. “We’re not going back tae Belfast. So get that into that wee curly head of yours. And forget about Sean McSwiney, too. There’s plenty more wee boys ye can make friends with. We’ve a chance now tae start over. A couple of months here and we’ll be on our feet and on a boat tae England. Nobody knows us round here, so we can be whoever we like. And the more posh we can be, the more the locals’ll look up till us. And talking proper is where ye start. Them that ta
lks proper get on better in this life. Just look at the Queen of England. D’ye think she’d be sittin’ in a big gold coach with all them diamonds hangin’ round her gizzer if she’d been comin’ out with the likes of ‘aye’ and ‘naw’ and ‘Canna have another wan-a-them, Ma?’”

  “What’s a ‘gizzer,’ Ma?” Herkie sat, blinking his innocent eyes, knowing he probably wouldn’t get an answer, but using the tactic anyway, in the hope that he’d stall his ma, and she’d simply shut up and let him have the bun.

  “Her gizzer isn’t the point, son,” the mother continued, clearly not about to stall anytime soon. “That grand lady I used to work for on the Malone Road knew how to talk.” She’d had a fitful night and was in a snippy mood. “So I’m going to be talking like her from now on. Yes…Lesley Lloyd-Peacock didn’t talk the way every eejit on the Shankill and the Falls talked, even though she had every right to, being born in the toilet of the Horn and Hound Arms to a ma barely fifteen, with a club foot and a hare’s lip and a da nearly ninety if a day. No, she had the gumption to make something of herself. And d’you know how she did that, son?”

  “What’s a club fut, Ma?” Herkie had heard the story more often than he cared to remember. And always at times like this. Experience had taught him that his best ploy was to distract her when she was in full flight—as she was now. “When canna have me Action Man? Canna have another bun, Ma, pleeeeease?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you how she did it. She got the hell outta Belfast the minute she could walk in a pair-a high heels. And she never looked back, and only went back when she knew she could live in the richest part, and not among all the dog’s arses she’d been reared with.”

  She drew another cigarette from the pack, afire with the image of the indomitable Mrs. Lloyd-Peacock. She recalled the fox fur slung over one shoulder, the little beady eyes of the beast peering down a smooth décolletage. The feathered hat cocked jauntily. The champagne flute clasped daintily between manicured fingers.

  “Take another bun from that tin over there, son. And only one, mind.”

  Herkie breathed a sigh of relief and grinned. So she’d heard him after all. “Thanks, Ma!” He slid down off the chair and seized the tin from the dresser.

  “I’ll tell you when you’ll get your Action Man: when we get a bitta money together, son. How d’ye think we’re gonna manage that?”

  “Take it from oul’ Grant,” said Herkie, not thinking.

  Bessie slapped the table and Herkie nearly dropped the tin. “Are you gonna turn out like your thievin’, good-for-nothin’ da, are ye?”

  “Naw, Ma. I mean no, Ma.”

  “Good! ’Cos you and me’s gonna do what your da was allergic to: work! Now, here’s the plan. I’m seeing the parish priest the morra about a job. He needs a cook, and we need money, and we need it badly. We’ll never earn our passage if we don’t work. So that’s what I’m gonna do—besides other wee sidelines we can pick up.”

  “Ma, why did the banana go till the doctor?” The boy had a store of jokes memorized from the Cheeky Weekly. At times like this, when Bessie was in a bad mood, he’d trot one out to try and put her in better form.

  “Pay attention, son! You’ll drive me bananas, so you will. Now, here’s one of the wee sidelines I’ve in mind for you. I’ve been watchin’ the activity at that big house down the hill. I wanna know who lives there. There’s a washin’ out some days, so there might be a woman about, but I’m not sure. I never in me life knew an Irishman who did his own washin’. They’d wear the christening robe to the bloody grave if they could get away with it.”

  Herkie replaced the tin on the dresser and returned to the table with a chocolate éclair protruding from his gob like a Churchillian cigar. He struggled up onto the chair again, relishing the fact that his ma, too engrossed in her commentary and in the process of lighting her fag, hadn’t noticed his naughtiness.

  “We’ve got to start somewhere, so it might as well be with what’s-his-name. You go down the morra and hide in the back field, and you see who lives there and what they get up to. If ye happen tae get the chance, slip in and see what the story is. Then bring a report back till me. D’ye unnerstand me, son?”

  “’Cos it wasn’t peeling well, Ma!”

  “What in God’s name are ye sayin’?”

  “The banana! It went tae the doctor ’cos it wasn’t peeling well.”

  “Are you listenin’ tae me atall, son?”

  She stood up and leaned over the table. Herkie knew she meant business. She rapped her knuckles on the breadboard, making the supper things shiver.

  “Now, the morra I want ye down there, to see what the story is in that big house. There’s money about that place, if I’m any judge. So see who lives there and offer to run messages for them. D’ye hear me, son?”

  “Och! When are we goin’ away? Can I go out and play, Ma? When am I gettin’ me Action Man, Ma? When will I be seein’ Seanie McSwiney—”

  “You’ll be getting a warm ear if you don’t do as I say, son. Now, get up them stairs and get yer parjamas on.”

  The timbers of the house creaked as Hercules, full of saturated fat and bad faith, trundled up the stairs to do her bidding.

  Chapter eleven

  Lorcan Strong dragged himself up the stairs of the dank house, his insides churning. Even though he’d been to the squalid place several times already, familiarity did not lessen his distaste. It was a house of horrors, where nightmares were real and death stalked the rooms.

  No one who knew Lorcan the conservator would have recognized him as he mounted the stairs. He’d traded the bohemian garb for a brown gabardine overcoat and a dark cap. The uncustomary attire was necessary. Nansen Street, just off the Falls Road and within bawling distance of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, was dangerous territory; he couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. He would willingly have done a deal with the Devil rather than make these visits to the appalling house and keep company with its odious occupants. But he had no choice in the matter, for his life depended on it.

  On gaining the first floor, he heard voices: one low and deliberate, the other raised and pleading. They were coming from a room at the end of the corridor. He headed toward it with great reluctance. At the door he took a deep breath and gave his signal double-knock.

  The voices in the room fell silent.

  Lorcan waited.

  “It’s only the fuckin’ artist,” he heard a voice say. “Come in, Strong.”

  He warily turned the doorknob.

  His entrance had mixed effects on the men gathered inside. It was a big room, and because it contained very little furniture, it seemed almost cavernous. It was actually two rooms of the original Georgian house, knocked into one.

  The drapes on the tall windows were drawn so that no light intruded from the outside. The windows, Lorcan had been informed, enjoyed triple glazing. He soon discovered why such an extreme form of insulation was necessary. This was just one of several IRA torture chambers in West Belfast. A redoubt where “informers” screamed themselves to death in the dead of night while the street’s other residents slept on, in blissful ignorance of the horrors being enacted in their midst.

  There were three chairs in the room and two lights. Along the back wall sat a hostess trolley, incongruously laid out with a selection of surgical instruments and drill bits of varying sizes. Beer cans and cigarette ends littered the floor. A solitary low-wattage bulb hung from a ceiling fitting. In the normal run of things, its light would not have been sufficient.

  But the second source of illumination was a huge arc light on a tripod. Lorcan reckoned it was emitting more than five hundred watts of electricity. Its beam was concentrated on a chair. It was a dentist’s chair, not unlike those to be found in any dentist’s surgery. The only difference was that it had built-in clamps for the wrists and feet. A man, naked save for his underpants, was seated in the chair and cruelly restrained by the clamps. In the harsh glare of the arc lamp he appeared white and terri
fied.

  Two tough-looking men stood guard on either side of him. They were clad in jeans and sleeveless T-shirts that exposed sets of bulging biceps. One of the thugs had his face pressed close to that of the victim.

  “Aw’right, Donal,” he growled, his voice a gargle of rockery gravel. “Tell us again. Where did you and Lawless stash the readies?”

  “I told ye! I told ye before and I’ll tell ye again: I don’t know where the bloody money is! Lawless took it all.”

  The victim’s words had been aimed in Lorcan’s general direction, even though in the glaring light the terrified man couldn’t see who’d entered the room. Lorcan hung back in the shadows, wishing he could do something to help the wretch. He recalled the news item he’d heard the previous day concerning an IRA kidnapping. This Donal, most likely, was the hapless victim…yes, Donal Carmody: That was the kidnap victim’s name. The harsh lamplight was picking out every rivulet of sweat running down the man’s face.

  Abruptly the door burst open.

  The room fell silent again.

  A powerfully built man strode in, allowing the door to crash shut behind him. His head was shaved nut-clean, and a portion of his pale scalp was disfigured by a burgundy birthmark. He was carrying an expensive briefcase, yet his clothing was not that of a gentleman. It was more suited to a tradesman or dockhand. Those acquainted with the Dentist in a former life knew that he had indeed worked for several years in the Belfast docks, helping to unload many cargoes—and not all of them of a legitimate nature.

  The Dentist: Fionntann Blennerhassett, head of the Internal Security Unit for the Provisional IRA. Torturer-in-chief, he’d earned his stripes due to his dexterity with the rotary hammer drill.

  Taking his time, the bald man hung up his biker jacket and opened his briefcase. He donned a white coat and buttoned it up. It bulged in many places, giving him the look of an overstuffed bolster. He snapped the case shut and went directly to the man named Donal.