The Chisellers
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Dedication
PART I
Chapter 1 - DUBLIN 1970
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 - LONDON
Chapter 8 - DUBLIN
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART 2
Chapter 11 - LONDON 1975
Chapter 12 - DUBLIN 1974
Chapter 13 - LONDON
Chapter 14
Chapter 15 - LONDON
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18 - LONDON
Epilogue
Praise for Brendan O‘Carroll and his bestselling novel The Mammy
“Cheerful ... as unpretentious and satisfying as a
home-cooked meal ... with a delicious dessert of an
ending.” — The New York Times Book Review
“Reads like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes on
Prozac ...Jaunty, charming.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“How to lose weight: Read The Mammy. You will
laugh your arse off and your tears will do away with
your water-retention problem. It is an uproariously
funny account of growing up in inner-city Dublin — a
laugh-out-loud book with a Dickensian twist to it.”
— Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming
The youngest of eleven children, BRENDAN O‘CARROLL was born in North Dublin in 1955. An acclaimed playright and stand-up comedian, he is the creator of the popular Irish radio show, Mrs Browne’s Boys. The Mammy, the first novel in his bestselling Mrs. Browne trilogy, was the basis for the feature film Agnes Browne, directed by and starring Anjelica Huston. The Chisellers and The Granny are the second and final books in the trilogy. All three novels are available in Plume editions.
“The Mammy is a heartwarming and very funny
book.” — Roddy Doyle, author of
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and A Star Called Henry
“Irreverently comical.”
-Entertainment Weekly
“O‘Carroll has done one hell of a job capturing
the absolute essence of a widowed mother
of seven in working-class Dublin.”
— Anjelica Huston
“Shades of O‘Casey, as well as Brendan Behan. A
story as colorful as Moore Street itself, but there is
also pathos, compassion, and irony.”
-Entertainer
“Hilarious and irreverent. A must-read.”
— Gabriel Byrne
“These Dubliners are irresistibly charming... Tales of
working-class Irish life now fill bookshelves,
but there’s space aplenty for O‘Carroll’s
sturdy contribution.”
-Publishers Weekly
“The Mammy is one of those books which almost
demands to be read in one sitting, and its colorful
descriptions of life in Dublin in the sixties will have
Dublin natives feeling nostalgic and others feeling as
if they were natives ... The Mammy is guaranteed
to make readers laugh. I didn’t want
to let go of Agnes Browne.”
— Irish Voice
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Originally published in Ireland by The O‘Brien Press.
First American Printing, March 2000
20
Copyright © Brendan O‘Carroll,1995
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK — MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
O‘Carroll, Brendan.
The chisellers / Brendan O’Carroll.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-15339-0
1. City and town life — Ireland — Dublin — Fiction. 2. Mother and child —
Ireland — Dublin — Fiction- 3. Gangsters — Ireland — Dublin — Fiction.
4. Family — Ireland — Dublin — Fiction. 5. Dublin (Ireland) — Ficnon. 1. Title.
PRGOGS.C3G C48 2000
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Introduction
Firstly let me thank you for buying this, my second novel. The success of my first offering The Mammy, published in 1994, took me completely by surprise. For this I thank all of you, readers, booksellers and my publishers.
The biggest thrill I have had from the fallout of The Mammy, has been the enormous number of people that have told me that it was the first book they had ever read. If you are one of those, I hope this is your second, that you have discovered the joy that books can bring and go on to entertain yourself with the thousands of wonderful, adventurous, mysterious, scary, and comical books that are lying on the shelves of bookstores right now whispering to all who pass them, ‘Pick me ... Pick me!!’
I was introduced to the beauty of reading when I was just nine years old. A young schoolteacher named Billy Flood gave me a tattered copy of Treasure Island. Both that man and that book changed my life forever. Nothing, ( O.K., with the possible exception of sex!) gives me more pleasure than a good book.
Writing a book is a very lonely task, and yet you do not really write alone, for without my partner and friend Gerry Browne spurring me on, or Evelyn, my secretary, checking over my nightly output (I do all my writing between midnight and 4am) or Tommy Swarbrigg taking the pressure off me just at the right time, or my co-workers in The Outrageous Comedy Show - Gerry Simpson, Shay, John, Bugsy, David Molloy and David Lang — making the extra time for me by doub
ling their efforts while we are on the road, without all of these, there would be no book. You will not see their names on the cover of this book, but take my word for it, their contribution was enormous, as it is in every venture we undertake. I am blessed to be playing with a great team.
Writers also need inspiration. Different things inspire different people. I am always inspired by people who succeed against the odds or who refuse to give up even when they are flat on their backs, and then rise to success with only their self-belief and courage as tools. These you will find remain humble people, finding no need to wear the badge of achievement on their sleeves, just content with the results of their endeavours in their hearts. Here are just some of the people who inspire me - some of the names you will recognise, some you won’t: Gerry Browne, John Courtenay, Eamon Coghlan, Moya Doherty, Niall Quinn, Betty Hussey, Eileen Frei, Mary Cullen, Annie Browne, Eamon Gregg, Patricia Hoffman, John Fallon, Stephen Collins, Roddy Doyle, Nell McCafferty, Brendan Daly and, of course, Doreen O‘Caffoll. Every one of them a hero!
Brendan O‘Carroll
DUBLIN 1995
Now she stands alone, pregnant and deserted,
What she thought was love has left her broken bearted,
Who are we to say, true love bas what meaning?
In a young girl’s mind, life can be so sbnple ...
From the song
‘Sixteen Years of Age’
by Gerry Browne.
This book I dodkate with all my beart to
Dolly Dowdall
a good mother-in-law for eighteen years
and a mekome frlend for twenty-seven years.
Prologue
LONDON 1970
MANNY WISE READ OVER THE SHORT DOCUMENT once again. He smiled. His weekend visit back to his father’s home in Ireland had not been a waste of time. His father’s business itself was not doing well. But the property the factory was on was located in Dublin’s city centre and without doubt would be of value when the old man kicked the bucket. Everything had worked out very well. He had only intended his short visit to yield him a few pounds from the old man. He needed only two grand to put together this Amsterdam deal that would establish him as one of the major players in the cocaine business in London.
Thankfully he arrived to find the old man very sick and bed-ridden. His doctor had him drugged up to the eyeballs. Manny got his money — and getting his father to sign the document that transferred everything he owned over to his son Manny ‘For love and natural affection’ had been easy, the man was so confused.
Manny read the legal phrase again, ‘For love and natural affection’. He laughed aloud, though nobody heard him as he was alone in the study of his five-roomed apartment on Edgeware Road WC1. What was laughable about the phrase was that there was not one shred of love between the two men.
Manny folded the document and inserted it into an envelope on which he wrote ‘Dublin Papers’, then placed it in the safe below his bookcase, alongside the £10,000 cash that was ready for the Amsterdam people. It would be there for him when the time came, sooner he hoped rather than later. As he closed the door and spun the combination dial he said aloud, ‘Thanks, Pop! You fuck ing loser.’
PART I
Chapter 1
DUBLIN 1970
AS HE SAT ON HIS HIGH STOOL behind the podium, centre-stage, Pat Muldoon scanned the assembly before him. It was an impressive sight. An audience of five hundred at least, all sitting facing him with their heads bowed. The silence was eerie, the only sound in this packed room being the whirring of the bingo machine as it tossed its numbered balls and fed them up the tube at random. Pat Muldoon had been calling the bingo numbers in St Francis Xavier Hall since 1962. In those eight years never before had he seen the ‘Snowball’ reach the massive sum that it stood at tonight. The makeshift sign outside the hall announced the record amount: ’Snowball now standing at £615 and 53 calls!‘ He knew it would be won tonight. The first person to shout CHECK before he extracted the fifty-third number would take it all! He read the number on the ball in his hand and called, ’All the fours - forty-four!‘
The bingo nights at the Francis Xavier Hall each Wednesday and Friday would usually attract an average of two hundred and fifty to three hundred people. It was the size of the Snowball which had doubled the crowd in the last three weeks. Extra chairs were borrowed from the Community Centre to accommodate the influx of strangers that arrived from every comer of Dublin. Still, the regulars who sat on the same chairs every Wednesday and every Friday, week-in week-out, were not discom moded in any way - that was important for they were the ones who would be there when the Snowball went back down to just one hundred pounds.
About two-thirds of the way down the hall, and close to the toilets, sat Agnes Browne and her merry group of six. Next to Agnes was Carmel Dowdall, a neighbour of Agnes’s in James Larkin Court. Like Agnes, Carmel had a thirteen-year-old daughter. Coincidentally, both young girls were named Cathy, and they were best pals both in and out of school. Sitting beside Carmel was a large red-faced woman, built like a man and adding to this by wearing her husband’s crombie coat. This was Nelly Robinson. A long-time friend of Agnes‘s, Nelly was a dealer in Moore Street with a stall no more than fifty feet from Agnes’s own pitch. Sitting facing these three were Nelly’s twin daughters, affectionately known to all the dealers in the market as Splish and Splash. The twin girls had matured well, and although quite pretty, at nineteen had still not managed to secure themselves either husbands or steady boyfriends - probably because, thanks to a lisp they shared, they had an inability to say ’Give us a kiss’ without covering their suitor in spittle. The last of the six was an elderly man. This was Bunnie Morrissey. Agnes and the other women knew Bunnie only from the bingo nights. A long-time widower, Bunnie, like many others, used the bingo as a reason to get out for the night. He would arrive every Wednesday and Friday with a plastic check multi-coloured shopping bag, from which he would remove his bingo board and clip, his two bingo pens-one red, one black-and, last of all, a single tattered tartan carpet slipper.
This last item had an interesting history. Two years previously, while coming down the stairs of his tiny pensioner’s flat in Dorset Street, Bunnie slipped and twisted his ankle. The subsequent swelling meant that Bunnie could not get his right shoe onto his foot. So that evening Bunnie had arrived at the bingo wearing just one shoe, on his left foot, and on his swollen right foot this carpet slipper. After fifteen years of bingo-playing, that night was the first time that Bunnie ever won anything - he collected £15 for a full house, and for the couple of seconds it took him to call ‘Check’, he was the focus of every eye in the hall. Since then Bunnie never started a night of bingo without first slipping off his right shoe and putting on his tatty ‘lucky’ carpet slipper. Sadly, since that night Bunnie had failed to win a single penny, and each session would end with him firing the slipper into the plastic bag, grunting, ’Lucky slipper, me bollix!‘ Yet, before every game every night of the bingo, out would come the lucky slipper again.
‘One and seven — seventeen.’ Mr Muldoon called out the twelfth number.
Suddenly a cry of ‘Check’ went up and all heads lifted simultaneously and looked in the direction of the hand in the air holding the salmon-coloured bingo book and claiming the line prize.
‘Only twelve calls? That’s early,’ mused Agnes aloud.
‘Yeah, it is, very early,‘ replied Nelly, as the two stared over at the upraised hand.
‘Who is it?’ asked Carmel.
‘Yer woman with the yellow teeth from Sheriff Street, Clarke I think her name is. Her husband does the telegrams, rides a motor bike,’ Agnes informed the group.
‘I hear that’s not all he rides,’ remarked Nelly, and they all burst into laughter.
The burst of laughter brought a look from the line winner, Mrs Clarke. Agnes caught her gaze and waved to her with a smile. ‘Have it and you’ll get it!’ she shouted. The woman smiled and waved back.
Bunnie was to
o bothered to laugh with the others. ‘I hardly have a fuckin’ mark at all!’ he grumbled.
The twins, too, were preoccupied.
‘Ma, did he call tirty sisks?’ asked Splish, spraying Agnes’s knees.
‘No, not yet. I don’t think so.’
‘Bunnie, d’you know, did he call tirty sisks?‘ Splish tried again.
‘What are yeh askin’ me for?’ snapped Bunnie, still annoyed about his bad luck. ‘Sure I hardly have a fuckin’ mark at all.’ He spoke as if Splish were to blame for his lack of marks.
There now followed a short interval during which the claim for a line would be checked. With only twelve numbers gone it was looking very likely that the Snowball would indeed be won this evening. Agnes used the interval opportunity to light up a cigarette, as did most of the other bingo players. The room was a-buzz with anticipation as everyone realised the early call on a line meant that most probably the Snowball would go.
Agnes blew out the match and exhaled the first drag, then, picking a piece of tobacco off her tongue, she turned to Carmel.
‘You know,’ she announced suddenly, ‘your Cathy’s language has gone to the dogs.’
‘Wha’, Agnes?‘ Carmel asked, not catching Agnes’s drift.
‘Your Cathy - her language has gone to the dogs.’
Carmel thought for a moment, then began to nod her head. ‘D’yeh know, Agnes you’re right. It’s fuckin’ dreadful. And she’s an imperint little bitch as well. I think she gets the bad language off the O‘Briens in eighty-one, fuckers they are.’