“God bless us, naw! I’d clatter seven shades of shite outta any fecking poofter trying for a go at me arse!”
A hard, Moorside man was what she had raised. Fionnuala settled back into her chair with a confident nod. Better a hardened criminal at twenty than a nancy boy, she thought. She was proud of the Grievous Bodily Harm which had Lorcan sent down, hammering the crap out of some simpleton in the Craglooner pub who had spilled Lorcan’s pint. Everybody knew drink was very costly.
“Any bars, hi?” Lorcan asked. Any news? He was wondering.
Fionnuala took a deep breath and leaned forward.
“Would ye believe that bitch Ursula has only gone and snatched 5 Murphy Crescent from under wer noses! The years yer granny struggled to keep up them house payments, and then in swans the lady of leisure Ursula, handbag bulging, and snatches up the family home. You know we’ve always had an eye on 5 Murphy, planning to get at a bargain rate from the city council.”
Lorcan struggled to recall a time his mother had ever mentioned wanting to get her hands on 5 Murphy Crescent. He was too much his mother’s son to mention that it wasn’t even his mother’s family home; that was a dilapidated ruin amongst the landscape of torched phone boxes and discarded mattresses that was the Creggan Heights Housing Estate. Her house was peopled by the Heggartys, a terrifying herd of bruisers. He cleared his throat through the fag smog to reply, “You were gonny buy it yerselves, then?”
Fionnuala spat, “Ach, don’t be daft! We’ve not two pennies to rub together Yer faller and me is working all the hours God sends, and even with all them double shifts at the Sav-U-Mor, I’ve still been reduced to taking on another job to put a dent in wer debt. Scrubbing the mingin loos of all the pubs down the town, I am now, and one word outta you and ye’ll be getting a smack in the gob!”
Lorcan fought to suppress a snigger at the thought of his mother on her hands and knees cleaning the filthy bar toilets.
“Does wer Moira not send her check from Malta every week to help ye out?” he asked.
“Am after getting a letter from her telling me she kyanny afford it this month as she’s moving into a new flat. A pure waste of a postage stamp, so it was! She’s herself a new...flatmate. Selfish bean flicker bitch!” Bean flicker: Fionnuala was mortified to have spawned a lesbian. The disgust flashed briefly in her eyes, then she rattled on.
“We’ve had yer sister Dymphna handing over a wee bit from her pay packet from the meat and cheese counter to help us out. Thank merciful Christ she got that job at the Top-Yer-Trolly down the town.” The superstore in Derry’s city center which proudly boasted “Our Prices Are Always Less Than Right!” and stocked everything from porridge to curling tongs.
“And wer Eoin?”
“Legless with drink he staggers home from that Craglooner every night. I haven’t a clue where he finds the funds to be always blootered. That pub must have some drink special for them that kyanny find work. I’ve half a mind that he’s—”
The warden hovered above them. She shifted herself and a brightness affixed itself to her voice.
“I had the headmistress of the school ringing me up the other day saying wer Siofra was caught flinging rocks at Una Murphy in the playground. Silly wee gack hadn’t the presence of mind to duck when she saw them flying through the air at her. Sure, it’s not wer Siofra’s fault Mrs. Murphy’s wane is a simpleton. And, never fear, I let the headmistress know that and all! So we’ve Ursula giving Siofra communion instruction every week, to rein her in, like.”
Lorcan stared, and Fionnuala nodded.
“Aye, I must have been outta me mind with drink to allow yer faller to let yer auntie Ursula less than ten yards from Siofra.”
Fionnuala looked around shiftily before leaning in towards her son’s sallow face.
“What am here for, actually, son, is... Have ye no mates that’s up for release soon? Am looking for some dead hard rowdies.”
“Why, for feck’s sake?”
“To follow that shameless cunt round the town and frighten the merciful Jesus outta her, just.”
“Outta wer Siofra?” Lorcan asked, taken aback. His wee sister was only eight.
“Outta that hateful bitch Ursula!”
“I can help ye there, Mammy. Ye see themmuns over in the corner?”
Fionnuala stole a glance at two thugs in track suits, swallow tattoos on their necks, surrounded by a selection of hardened mothers and sisters and pregnant girlfriends. Her heart went out the poor souls, incarcerated in the prime of their youth.
“I do indeed, aye. What about them?”
“Do ye mind that touristy bastard from South Africa that was beaten senseless with lager bottles and a lead pipe down the Strand a few months back?”
“I do mind, aye,” Fionnuala said, nodding eagerly. How could she ever forget? It had been a particularly heinous crime. The victim had been shipped back to Johannesburg in a wheelchair, his knees done and his head battered in.
“Themmuns is the perpetrators. Liam and Finbar, they’re called, inside for malicious fires and all. Themmuns is to be released in three months, and they owe me. Do ye maybe want Ursula caused some bodily harm and all? Liam and Finbar is sure to be up for it.”
Fionnuala grazed on her lip for a bit, brain cells trundling, but reluctantly shook her head in the end. She didn’t want the police rung up.
“Naw, we don’t want the peelers involved; am only wanting the fear of the Lord put into her. Do ye think themmuns can contain themselves with a wee bit of threatening and menacing behavior, just?”
Lorcan shrugged.
“We can but hope,” he said.
They shared a laugh, then Fionnuala sighed and clutched his hand.
“Ach, it’s a terrible sin sending themmuns after yer auntie Ursula, and ye must think am a hard-faced cunt, son, doing this to her. She always puts on a show she’s the Lord’s right hand woman, what with her singing in the choir and volunteering as an OsteoCare provider and all. If ye only had the slightest clue, but, how she made us all feel, staring down her nose at us after she paid off wer mortgage, and never shutting her mouth up about it. Am heart-scared she’s gonny toss us all out on the street. I know she’s always been yer favorite—”
“No worries there, mam,” Lorcan said with a shake of his head. “I’ve learned me lesson. She’s as quare as a bottle of chips, that wan.”
A lunatic, in other words. And he said this although Ursula had always been first at their door with gifts on birthdays, had phoned him and even visited him there in Magilligan once.
Fionnuala was grateful; Lorcan might be saddled with the Flood surname, but his loyalty lay with the Heggarty’s.
He smiled. Fionnuala leaned back and memorized him until even that bored her and was grateful when the bell finally rang.
“Ach, that’s me away off,” Fionnuala said, affecting a pout.
She kissed him on the cheek and promptly snatched her remaining smokes.
“Cheerio, then, mam,” Lorcan said. “Till next month. You’ll tell the others I was asking after em?”
“Right ye are, son.”
Lorcan was escorted out. At the other end of visits room, Fionnuala received another bag of his dirty laundry.
Sending hooligans with such a pedigree of violence to terrorize her sister-in-law was a mortal sin, and three months was such a long time to wait, but Fionnuala had the satisfied smile of a day’s hard work completed. This had little to do with putting the hit out on Ursula, more the £5 she had passed her workmate Magella to punch her time card in and out at the Sav-U-Mor.
£ £ £ £
The numbers of his demise were 7, 9, 12, 20, 24, 29 and Bonus 36. The day after the lotto win, they had bought matching Lexuses. Ursula’s still smelled of new Coach leather; Jed’s reeked of Marlboros and stale booze.
Jed Barnett swerved past the British Army watchtower in his new Lexus and barreled down towards the Moorside, a maze of terraced pebbledashed houses piled atop one another with staunch Catholic
s heaved inside. He fought a shiver of claustrophobia. He was an American, dammit, used to the huge lawns and sprawling back gardens of his home county.
He passed the lone wall announcing You Are Now Entering Free Derry. The house the wall used to prop up had long since disappeared. Bombed by British soldiers? Set ablaze during a common street riot? Jed didn’t have a clue, nor did he care.
He steered past huge murals, memorials of the Troubles: kids in gas masks, working class Catholics racing from clouds of tear gas let loose by Protestant paratroopers, the victims of Bloody Sunday. Driving through the massive stone walls that had surrounded the city center for 400 years, he had never felt so trapped.
He jumped out of the car and headed toward the bookies and salvation.
Seven years earlier, Jed had found himself stepping off the plane at Belfast International Airport, alone with his shrew of a wife and her misery-stricken working class family in that war-torn afterthought of a rain-drenched town on the edge of a decaying British Empire. Now Jed had to get the hell out of Derry City. Permanently.
Flopsy Dun, a horse currently at only 50/1 odds but certain to win amongst those in the know, was running the Wolverhampton 2:40 race and was his ticket out. Literally. If the horse won, he could finally afford that flight back to Wisconsin. The ticket would be one-way.
For months Jed had been plotting to abandon Ursula. Not that he wanted to, but she refused to leave her family. So what else could he do?
During thirty-odd years of marriage, it had been a trial putting up with a woman who expected more out of her life, and lately it was becoming impossible to love one claiming the upmarket life she thought she deserved. When the £500,000 had landed in their bank account six months earlier, it recast her as the lady of the manor. If only in her mind.
Now she and the family were at each other’s throats like rabid ferrets, and Jed was in the middle with a silly grin plastered on his face.
Even after his lotto win and taking out the second mortgage on the house behind his wife’s back, he still couldn’t afford the plane fare back to his hometown in Wisconsin, let alone the lump sum he would have to leave Ursula to tide her over before he could send her a portion of his retirement checks.
He opened the door of the bookies and darted inside before anyone he knew saw him. He pushed past the swallow tattoos, glazed eyes and soiled clothing of the drunks within. All around him, breath struggled to escape congested lungs. Jed sidled up to the counter and, with a mixture of embarrassment and desperation, whispered his horse and race.
“To place, aye?” the bookie asked.
“To win,” Jed said.
The bookmaker glanced down at the huge wad of cash, and his eyes never met Jed’s again. Another soul lost, the bookie thought.
Jed left the alkies and druggies, skirted past a pile of vomit on the curb and made to steal back to his Lexus, hungrily clutching the betting slip. He would listen to the race on the radio in his car. He bleeped the locks open and tugged at the door handle to plunge inside.
“Ye right there, Jed?”
He froze and forced his lips into a smile. He stuffed the betting slip into his pocket, well-hidden. It was Paddy, Ursula's brother and the only thing he had resembling a friend in that town. Paddy was with his mates from the fish-packing plant—a horde of men thirty and beyond who still thought they were teenage delinquents. Trailing behind them was Paddy’s youngest, Seamus. What a five-year-old was doing with his drunk father, Jed didn’t wonder about anymore.
They descended upon him, stinking of fish in their overalls covered with innards and scales, and the usual strange greetings and Derry accent spewing from their mouths:
“What about ye, hi?”
“Any bars, mucker?”
“What’s the craic?”
Jed couldn’t reveal he had just squandered more money on a horse race than any of them earned in a week of hauling dead fish into crates.
“I’m going to try out that new café over there,” he said, motioning vaguely and knowing they would be in the mood for lager, not food, so they wouldn’t want to join him.
“Ach, catch yerself on! That Magella who works there is a right scaldy geebag.”
“Aye, dead narky and crabbit, so she is!”
Had he just stepped off the plane, Jed would have stared at them with a cocked head and a quizzical smile, but he had been observing the Derry dialect and slang over the years, at first with a wry detachment, but lately with slight unease.
One of the few reasons, and there were very few, why Jed had tolerated life with Ursula in Derry was the people. He had found them a never-ending wonder, their wit sharp and their passion all-consuming, and this came through in their language. Recently, however, Ursula’s family had begun circling the wagons, and his wife was finding herself the target of their acid tongues and exhausting obsession.
Just as every punch in that town was dealt with a disarming smile, so the delightful upward inflection of their tone meant an insult or threat could be delivered with such charm that a tourist would be smiling right as the fist was heading toward his face. As an objective observer, Jed had found this fascinating. Now he found it worrying.
“Go on and join us for a pint,” Paddy said.
Jed motioned helplessly to his stomach and the café.
“Ach, ye daft gack,” Paddy said. “Right ye are. See ye in the Moorside Inn the tomorrow for a game of darts.”
Off they staggered, Seamus squealing as his heels scraped against the cobblestones. Jed scampered into the car and flicked on the radio, hoping he hadn’t missed the race. The race was in full swing.
“Flopsy Dun,” howled the commentator, “breaking from the back and coming on ever so strongly on the outside...”
Jed stared in excitement at the radio dial. He couldn’t believe his good luck. He wrenched open the glove compartment and scrabbled around for a flask of Jim Beam to celebrate.
“...Flopsy Dun starts to kick on, up two or three lengths, and Flopsy Dun is away!”
Shoving aside messily folded maps and Ursula’s lipsticks, he grappled the flask and tugged it out. Two tattered pieces of paper, photocopied and stapled together, covered with ketchup stains, fluttered to the floor of the car. As the Jim Beam burned down his throat, Jed bent and picked the papers up.
“Holiday Man in second place three lengths behind, Sunshine Sam falling off, In the Wind neck and neck with Holiday Man...”
As the excitement welled, he unfolded the paper and almost burst out laughing. It was the dictionary of Derry-speak that an old American friend had handed him when he first arrived in the city. How Jed had pored over the two pieces of paper, memorizing every word. He would take it with him on the plane and burn it with great glee when he touched down in Wisconsin.
DERRY-SPEAK DICTIONARY
A
afeared: afraid
affronted: offended
and all: also
anyroad: anyway
arse: butt
arse bandit: gay
male
arsified: drunk
away in the head:
crazy
aul: old (an aul one...an old one)
B
bangers: Ecstasy
bars: news (“Any bars, hi?”)
beanflicker: lesbian
bleedin: damn
bog: toilet
boggin: filthy
blootered: drunk
C
carry-on: commotion
catch yerself on: wise up
civil: polite
clarty: filthy
crabbit: crabby
craic: fun
cuppa: cup of tea
D
drawing the
brew: collecting unemployment
dole: unemployment
dote: sweet child
E
E’s: Ecstasy
eejit: idiot
eff-off: f*ck off
effin: f*ckin
F
fancy man: sexual partner (partner for affair)
fear-hearted: scared
Fenian: supporter of the Cause
Filth: police
flash: showy
flimmin: damn
flippin: damn
frock: dress
G
gack: idiot
gacky: stupid
gaspin: thirsty
geebag: horrible
person
git: idiot
gobshite: contemptible person
grabby: greedy
grotty: vile
Green: Catholic
H
hard man: thug
headbin: lunatic
headcase: lunatic
heart-scared: scared
hi: you. Used in many greetings
J
jacks: toilets
jumped-up: pretentious
K
kyanny: can’t
L
legless: drunk
(to) lift: steal
loo: toilet
M
magic: fanstastic
manky: filthy
(to) mind: remember (I do mind, aye...I do remember)
mingin: filthy
minger: slut
mucker: friend
N
wee nadger:
small child
nancy boy: gay male
narked: annoyed
narky: irritable
nick: prison
(to) nick: steal
O
(it’s no) odds: it doesn’t matter
other: other
Orange: Protestant
P
paladic: drunk
palaver: commotion
pansy: gay male
peelers: cops
piggin: damn
(to) pinch: steal
poofter: gay male
Proddy: Protestant
Q
quare: very
quids: £
R
raging: angry
right: alright (“Are ye right there, hi?”)
rowdie: thug
S
sarky: sarcastic
sausingers: sausages
scabby: vile/greedy
scullery: kitchen
skint: broke
slapper: slut
(to have a) slash: to urinate
sleekit: crafy/sly
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 2