As they approached the car, Roisin clutched Ursula’s arm with a gasp and pointed through the windshield.
“What’s up with me mother?”
Eda’s brittle form was splayed across the back seat, her eyes seething with agony, fingers clawing the glass.
“She’s having a heart attack!” Roisin roared.
“It’s a wee flimmin angina attack,” Ursula corrected. “Had ye been here to see one before, ye would know—”
“Mother! Mother!” Roisin wailed, tugging furiously on the car door handle.
“All she needs is her tablets,” Ursula said too calmly for Roisin’s liking. Two nitroglycerine pills, a sip of water and fifteen minutes of peace and Eda would be right as rain. The last thing she needed was Roisin roaring out of her like a thing possessed.
“Where’s them tablets?”
“At the house.”
Roisin gaped in disbelief at Ursula’s face before screaming into it: “Let me in the fecking car! Let me in!”
“Roisin! Stop the roaring out of ye! Help me calm her down!”
Ursula fumbled with the keys as Roisin snapped open her mobile phone and dialed furiously.
“Me heart! Me poor aul heart!” Eda moaned through the glass with a dramatic clutch at her chest and a gyration of her head across the car seat.
“Who’s that you’re ringing?” Ursula asked, heaving open the door and patting Eda on the her fluffy head. “There, there, Mammy.”
“The ambulance,” Roisin said.
“Ach, don’t be daft, there’s no need, sure.”
“Then get you behind that fecking wheel and get this car down to Altnagelvin Hospital now or I'm having ye sent down for piggin manslaughter!”
Roisin flashed Ursula another filthy look as they exchanged places and she slipped into the back seat of the car. She rolled her fingers uncertainly up and down Eda’s arms and legs while Ursula got into the front seat.
“Ye right there, Mammy? We’re gonny get ye a doctor,” Roisin soothed.
“Me heart, me poor aul heart,” was apparently the only English of which Eda was capable.
“Close that door,” Ursula instructed, reluctantly revving up the engine.
The car lurched through the parking lot.
£ £ £ £
Fionnuala hummed grimly along to a sparkly Kylie Minogue single as she shelved the tins of mushy peas. She possessed all the joie de vivre of a newly-diagnosed mad-cow victim. How she wished she could join her second eldest son, prancing through the pubs of Derry, flinging out handfuls of drugs for pockets bulging with cash. The lottery scratch cards behind her cash register no longer breathed tantalizingly down her neck, however, as with the new source of income in the family, things were no longer as desperate as they had been. It was wild civil of Eoin to have bought her those curling tongs, she thought, and now she was wondering how much longer she should hold off before asking him for that pedicure at Xpressions.
The bell over the door tinkled, and Mrs. Feeney barged in, eyes narrowed with accusation.
“I’ll have you know yer piggin wane was flinging rocks at me the other day!” she roared. “Almost cracked me skull open, so he did!”
Fionnuala attacked a row of baked beans with the price gun as Mrs. Feeney staggered towards the turnips.
“That one's on his way to Magilligan just like his older brother, and them turnips looks as if they’ve gone off, so they do! Yer Lorcan was sent down for Grievous Bodily Harm, if I mind rightly. That’s where the lot of youse Heggarty’s belong, locked up where ye kyanny harm poor decent folk.”
Fionnuala let her have her say. Mrs. Feeney was just another in a long line of pensioners, one slipper in the grave, who would tramp through the door of the Sav-U-Mor, roaring abuse at those who still had a life left worth living.
“The wanes the day live for nothing but malicious crimes, and them hooligans of yers is worse than the rest. Piggin desperate, so it is! Ye’ve no fresh cabbage here?”
“Not the day, naw,” Fionnuala hissed, turning her attention to a case of tinned custard and hacking at the industrial-strength tape that bound it.
“Ye musta been barely outta diapers yerself when ye started popping out the wanes, just to let em roam wild in the streets waving broken bottles and iron bars.”
“Have ye a reason for being here, missus?” Fionnuala finally asked. “other than to roar abuse at me, I mean.”
“Now that ye mention it,” Mrs. Feeney seethed, “I have, aye! I'm raging at that Ursula of yers! Bleedin useless, so she is, and there I was singing her praises to yer wane the other day. Outta me piggin head, I musta been. She canceled me appointment for yesterday, then said she was to see me at half three the day to take me down the town for me messages. Me cupboards is piggin bare! I’ve been waiting for Ursula forty-five minutes, me stomach thinking me throat’s been cut! So now I’ve had to tramp all the way to this manky tip of yers, the feet taking the legs off of me, to waste me pension on yer overpriced shite! I'm gonny be ringing up OsteoCare and asking for another provider! Ye’re bloody useless the lot of youse!”
Fionnuala attempted to hide her glee at Mrs. Feeney’s condemnation of Saint Ursula. Nobody, apparently, was beyond reproach in the pensioner’s cataracts.
“No one asked ye to step foot in here,” Fionnuala managed. Hack! Hack! Hack!
“And they’ve them same fish fingers ye’ve got here for half the price at the Top-Yer-Trolly down the town,” Mrs. Feeney accused.
Fionnuala banged tin after tin of beans on the shelf.
“Aye, and ye’re quite welcome to traipse down the town to fetch them there yerself.”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Ach, ye’re off yer bleeding head, you, the cost of a taxi cab the day! And I wouldn’t step a foot in them mini-buses if me life depended on it! Crawling with stokes and alkies, so they are! The smell of sick from them cushions would fairly turn yer stomach! C’mere till I tell ye, I’ve been putting a wee bit of me pension aside every month, saving up to buy meself a wee motor. Then I can do me messages when I please, go where the spirit takes me. I’ll have no need for that Ursula one anymore, and thank merciful Jesus for that.”
Fionnuala’s eyes flashed with sudden fear at the thought of Mrs. Feeney behind the wheel of 3,000 pounds of processed steel.
The pensioner struggled over to the cash register and plucked a packet of steak and onion crisps out of their box. A promotional square in the right bottom corner screamed 24 Pence!.
“Ach, sure, even the crisps is wild dear here,” she said. “Why this manky tip is called the Sav-U-Mor I’ll never know! I’ll be on to Truth in Advertising about youse!”
“We’ve a special on the prawn cocktail crisps the day,” Fionnuala said, moving behind the register. “Twelve pee, only.”
“Months after their sell-by date, no doubt. Themmuns is the only thing here I can afford, but,” Mrs. Feeney said. “I’ll take em.”
“That’ll be twelve pee then,” Fionnuala growled.
Her fingers tapped on the sticky conveyor belt as Mrs. Feeney fiddled with her change purse, counted out the copper and lined the one pence pieces before her. Fionnuala scooped them up and tossed them in the register drawer.
“And mind,” Mrs. Feeney said, “you keep a lead on them hooligan wanes of yers. Any more bother, and me eldest Sean’s to be paying em a visit. There’ll be hell to pay.”
“Aye, you do that,” Fionnuala snarled as the bell tinkled and Mrs. Feeney exited the shop with her twelve pence packet of prawn cocktail crisps.
Hateful cunt.
Fionnuala snapped an unfiltered Rothman from her pack and thrust it between her teeth. She snapped off the radio and sat stewing in her misery in a silence surrounded by Wine Gums and Jelly Babies. The phone interrupted her self-pity. Fionnuala snatched the receiver up.
“Aye?”
“Fionnuala?” Paddy hollered over the whirr of some machinery on the other end. “I'm after hearing from Roisin. Me mother’s been ta
ken to hospital. That jumped-up cow Ursula’s after giving her a heart attack.”
The alarm on Fionnuala’s face swiftly dissolved into delight.
“Poor aul Eda,” she cooed into the receiver for her husband’s benefit. “That Ursula’ll stoop to the lowest lows to get her claws into 5 Murphy.”
“Ye’re dead right there. I'm on me way to Altnagelvin now.”
“Aye, I'm are and all,” Fionnuala resolved. “I’ll ring Magella and have her take over me shift here. And the wanes?”
“I'm rounding up as many of em as I can find and getting them up to the hospital,” Paddy said. “We need all the help we can get.”
Fionnuala slipped into her jacket as she punched her co-worker’s number into her cell, the excitement mounting, already envisioning the move into the house around the corner and her first evening lounging on the settee in the front room with its central heating and flat-screen telly.
£ £ £ £
With Roisin blathering down her mobile to Hawaii and Eda groaning in the back seat, Ursula steered with weak hands and bleary eyes into the Accidents and Emergency parking lot of Altnagelvin Hospital.
Ten floors of modernist architecture loomed before them. Once Altnagelvin had overflowed with bell-bottomed lads bloody from rubber bullets, pensioners and primary school children wheezing from too much tear gas, the casualties of tar-and-featherings, kneecappings, skulls cracked from the force of a well-aimed rock. Now, during the Peace Process of the new, Free Derry, they were greeted with the victims of joyriding pileups, drug-related slashings and pub-brawl bottlings. And it was into this milieu that the overworked doctors of Altnagelvin were about to receive their latest patient: Eda Flood and her angina attack.
Gasping from the wheelchair the paramedics had lumbered her into, the family matriarch was ushered by a flank of orderlies through swinging doors beyond which Ursula and Roisin were forbidden to venture. For an electrocardiogram, they were told. Ursula paced up and down a grimy corridor that stank of antiseptic, clenching and unclenching her handbag. Roisin sat on an uncomfortable orange chair, alternatively blowing her sniffles into a tissue, bemoaning the state of the waiting room drapes and glaring with ill-concealed hatred in Ursula’s direction.
The tiny telly in the corner was out of order. There was nothing for Ursula to do but dodge Roisin’s eyes and worry. They jerked as sounds of children in agony echoed through the corridor, and Ursula turned in alarm, wondering if the IRA had exploded a bomb on a school bus, the young victims now being hustled by stretcher into the operating theater. But, no. Ursula gazed in disbelief as the doors flew open, and Paddy, Dymphna, Padraig and Seamus Flood thronged the corridor.
“Granny! Granny?! Where’s me granny?”
Padraig and Seamus were tear-stained. Roisin jumped from her chair in sudden relief and scampered to the safety of their numbers, as if Ursula had held her enslaved the past half hour.
“Where’s me mother?” Paddy boomed boozily with an unsteady lunge at Ursula. “I'm raging! What the feck do ye think ye were playing at, ye bitch, ye!”
It was not the face of a brother at all.
“Ye’ve done it now, Ursula,” Dymphna sneered with shameless glee and a flick of her curls.
“Is me granny dying?” Seamus sobbed at her sister’s knee as Padraig glowered over at his aunt, fists balled.
“She’s well on her way, aye, thanks to yer auntie,” Dymphna said.
Seven steps behind the wanes, Fionnuala galloped calmly into the corridor and reclined against the coffee machine, not wanting to miss a word.
“Clawing at the car windows like a common animal, so she was,” Roisin sobbed into a tissue to anybody who would listen. She had many takers, hands caressing her shoulders, wanes sniveling at her Nikes. “I never seen the likes of it in all me life.”
“I’ll murder ye with me own bare hands, Ursula,” Padraig seethed, “if me granny doesn’t pull through this.”
With the troops summoned and surrounding her, fully armed with rage and resentment, Ursula was helpless to make them see sense. It was a simple angina attack, one of the many Eda had weathered over the years. Or so Ursula had thought.
“Sure, it’s not me fault,” she finally implored, one helpless hand to her bosom. “It could’ve happened anywhere. She could’ve keeled over alone at home and been laying there on the carpeting for days and none of us woulda been the wiser!”
Their faces hardened.
Fionnuala stood by the coffee machine, not a trace of anguish on her face—the old doddery cunt wasn’t her mother, after all—but with pride aplenty prominent on her hardened features. She smirked with the knowledge she had raised her children right and they were responding in kind.
“Physical exertion and...extreme cold...that wan...” Roisin was muttering into her sopping tissue, glaring over at Ursula with regularity. “...air conditioner blaring...only seventy flippin degrees Celsius out...me mammy...hooked up to all manner of machines...”
A very attractive young orderly happened into the corridor, and Paddy hurled towards her, wrenching her arm and flipping her towards him.
“How’s me mother?” he roared into her face, fingers piercing her arm. “Where’s me mother?! Mrs. Flood?”
Flinching from the stench of drink erupting from the madman’s throat, Lily McCracken glanced around at the gang of hooligans that suddenly surrounded her from all sides. She had seen the likes of these tramp into the A & E through the years: shifty best mates of bottling victims roaring drunken abuse at the receptionists, cousins of the victims of bloody slashings from drug deals gone bad, hardened slappers of girlfriends of overdoses roaring out of them through the corridors and sucking down fags in the no smoking sections, street thugs menacing the snack bar hoping for a chance to terrorize their kneecapping victims as they lie in their hospital beds.
Lily’s eyes suddenly widened. This was the father of her first lesbian love, Moira Flood. Paddy’s eyes suddenly lurched as well.
“Wait a wee moment! You’re the filthy perv we caught sneaking outta wer Moira’s bedroom that New Year’s morning!”
The Floods recoiled from her as a unit. After that hungover morning, none of them had been able to look Moira in the eye again, with the exception of Seamus, who was too young to understand the sins of the flesh. Glancing up to be sure the security cameras were blinking, poor Lily shook Paddy’s hand free and scurried through the swinging doors.
Paddy sputtered after her, “Ye hardened bean flicker bruiser!”
“I'm never checking meself in here!” Roisin said, wrapping her arms around her abundance of silicone. “Ye never know what palaver the staff’ll be up to with me unconscious form!”
Ursula could contain her anger no longer.
“Of all the foolish carry-on! Dry yer eyes, the lot of youse!” she finally spat out. “This is wile daft, dragging the poor wanes all the way up to the hospital for a simple angina attack, making em heart-scared, terrorizing the poor hospital staff. I'm pure red, so I'm are.”
“Ye’re a fine one to talk, you!” Paddy said.
“And I'm sick, sore and tired of this constant persecution!” Ursula announced.
“Ye see you, Ursula,” Dymphna snarled as Seamus sobbed at her side. “Ye deserve every ounce of persecution ye get, ye hateful aul slapper!”
Ursula whipped around to Paddy and Fionnuala. “She’s a mouth on her, that wan! Kyanny keep a civil tongue in her head!”
Although Ursula was shaking, somewhere inside her she felt as hard as stone as she came out with it:
“If the two of youse only knew what yer precious daughter’s been up to! Up the scoot, she is! She came begging to me for money for a termination, so she did!”
“Ye promised, Ursula!” Dymphna gasped sadly.
“Ye hateful—!” Fionnuala leaped from the coffee machine towards Ursula, and Roisin’s eyes grew ablaze at the glorious drama of it all.
The doctor rounded the corner. His brow furrowed as he was suddenly bes
ieged by a gang of school uniforms clutching at his legs. Shrieks demanding to know the condition of Eda Flood echoed down the corridor. The doctor pleaded for some semblance of civility.
“Well, as I’m sure you’re all aware, if you’ve been looking after...” He glanced down at his clipboard. “...Mrs. Flood for some time—”
“Aye, aye, we have,” Roisin said. Ursula longed to smack her bobbing head.
“An angina attack is not a heart attack, and these episodes seldom cause permanent damage to the heart muscle.”
“Aye, aye!” Roisin said breathlessly, lapping up the pearls of wisdom.
“Of course, because of her condition, Mrs. Flood is certainly more susceptible than the population at large to heart attacks. There is a danger that if the pattern of angina changes, if the episodes, for example, have become more frequent, have lasted longer, or have occurred without exercise, the risk of a heart attack in subsequent days or weeks is much higher. I gather Mrs. Flood was not exercising when the angina attack took place?”
“That evil cow there had her locked up in the car with the air conditioner blasting on her poor aul bones,” Roisin said, pointing an accusing finger at Ursula.
The doctor shot Roisin an odd look, then turned back to Ursula.
“As I was saying, Mrs..?”
“Barnett,” Ursula said, relieved she wasn’t tainted with the Flood surname.
“Just to ensure her condition isn’t worsening, we’d like to run a few more tests on her and keep her in the hospital for the time being, for observation,” the doctor said.
“Can I have a wee peek at her?” Ursula asked hopefully.
“She’s being transferred to a hospital room this very moment. Once she has settled in, you’ll all be able to visit.”
And off he escaped down the corridor.
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 13