“Ye see youse doctors?!” Paddy roared at the still-swinging doors. “Fecking Paki bastards the lot of youse! Feck this! Let’s go to the gift shop.”
Dymphna attempted to stay in the waiting room, but Fionnuala grabbed her arm and dragged her down the corridor with them. Roisin tagged along after, stifling her mirth. Ursula stood and watched them go.
“Ye’ve made me a granny at forty years of age!” Fionnuala lied, clattering Dymphna round the head.
“I’ve to pour the drink down me throat every night,” Paddy snarled, “to get some peace and quiet in me skull. Youse wanes is making wer lives a misery. Pregnant outta wedlock at eighteen years of age. Ye’re no better than yer auntie Ursula.”
“Daddy!” Dymphna pleaded.
“It sickens the heart outta me!” Fionnuala put in. “Ye’re a bloody disgrace to the family! And me great-uncle a bishop and all! How are we to hold wer heads up in St. Moluag’s on Sunday with a sinner for a daughter?”
They all trooped into the gift shop, and Padraig and Seamus made for the bin of toys.
“And who’s the father meant to be, that’s what I wanny know,” Fionnuala demanded as her eyes inspected the gladiolas.
“I kyanny tell youse!” Dymphna implored.
“Ye mean ye don’t wanny, or ye’ve not a flimmin clue who the father is?”
“Daddy!” Dymphna protested.
“It’s that Liam!” Fionnuala shot, browsing through the get well cards. “Shifty eyes, so he had. From the moment he stepped foot through wer door, I—”
“Naw, it’s not Liam,” Dymphna cried.
“Then who in the name of merciful Mary—” Fionnuala said, her memory racing through the many fellas Dymphna had trawled through the front door of the family home.
The get well cards were captivating, Fionnuala thought, with views of clowns and lilies of the valley and little ditties that played upon opening and when she saw the price of them she fled.
“A bloody paratrooper?!” Paddy finally snarled.
“Daddy! Naw!” Dymphna said, affronted and heart-scared. Rory Riddell wasn’t a Brit solider, swaggering through their front garden at whim, proudly brandishing an M-16. But, as a Proddy, he might as well be as far as her parents were concerned.
Fionnuala dropped a bunch of grapes.
“Not...yer brother?” she gasped in sudden horror. “Ye see if that Eoin has so much as laid a fecking finger on ye, I’ll—”
“Mammy!” Dymphna wailed, mortified.
Who the flimmin feck could it be, Fionnuala wondered. She fought against a sudden wondering glance over at her husband hovering by the register. Paddy would never have...would he...?
“How much are ye asking for them flowers?” Paddy asked.
“Nine quid, just,” sighed the beleaguered shop assistant.
“Highway robbery!”
Paddy held his hand out to Dymphna. She dutifully reached into her handbag for a tenner.
“Leave the wee critter be,” Roisin said softly with a nod at her niece. “I’ve me credit card, sure. Let’s shop around for a few more things for me mammy. Them might be the last gifts she ever lays eyes on.”
If they were on her credit card, brilliant!, the Floods thought as one.
They started looting the shelves, and in the melee Dymphna slipped out of the gift shop and down the corridor. She would rather finish her shift at the ChipKebab than hear further abuse hurled her way.
Over in the waiting room, the same wee orderly fearfully approached Ursula.
“Are ye with Mrs. Flood?” Lily asked.
Ursula’s head shot up from her handkerchief.
“Aye.”
“The doctor says ye can see her now. Down that corridor, room 25.”
Ursula crept down the corridor and into the hospital room, then sidled up to the bed, a tentative touch on the rail. Eda’s fluffy head propped atop the pillow greeted her with thin-lipped silence.
“Ye know it’s not me fault ye had the attack, don’t you?” Ursula asked hopefully and not a little defensively. Her fingers anxiously kneaded the railing.
No response.
“I did nothing but put ye in the car to get ye out of the house for a wee while,” Ursula said. “Ye believe me, don’t ye?”
Still no response. Tears welled in Ursula’s eyes. “Well...”
She slipped out the forms from her handbag and presented them to her mother. No time like the present, with the acrimony of the Floods simmering in every direction, to claim the money that was so rightfully hers.
“Mammy, I'm after learning that Paddy and Fionnuala’s been nicking money that’s rightfully mines,” Ursula said, her voice shuddering. “I don’t really need yer approval for what I’m to do, but I’m letting you know anyroad. They claim they’ve been taking care of ye all this time. Now, Mammy, ye know it’s me that’s always there for ye. Don’t ye?”
Ursula searched her mother’s milky eyes for any flicker of acquiescence.
“Mammy?” she implored.
A nod of the head, a simple up and down motion with the neck was all she was searching for. It was the story of her life; Ursula was a wee girl again, doing her best to please Mammy and Daddy but always getting it wrong somehow, the best intentions leading her down a miserable path to heartache, an unending disgrace to the Flood family name. She blinked away tears of frustration. Ursula sighed.
“Just you sign here, Mammy,” she instructed, her voice hard.
She wrapped her mother’s fingers around the pen and forced them to move around the paper. The moment the signature was complete, Ursula jumped as the door burst wide and the Floods poured into the hospital room, laden with tins of Quality Street chocolates and bunches of bruised grapes and bouquets of flowers and handfuls of those horrid metallic balloons shaped like hearts that Ursula hated so bouncing against the walls. How and if they had paid for them Ursula hadn’t a clue. She slipped the form into her handbag.
“Granny! Granny!”
“Mother!”
They surrounded the bed, nudging Ursula from her mother’s side. Fighting her way through the balloons, Ursula slipped out of the hospital room. She scuttled on trembling legs down the dingy corner, dodging electrical wires, a firm grip on her handbag, a victorious if slightly guilty smile on her lips.
£ £ £ £
Bridie’s eyes swam with chemical love, thanks to Eoin, as she swept up the fag ends and greasy kebab baguette wrappers from the front of the ChipKebab. She glanced across the city square, past where the public loos had once stood, toward some commotion under Magazine Gate. A new shipment of contraband pinched from the back of a passing lorry must be going cheap. Always up for a bargain, she leaned on the brush and peered beyond the ramparts. Siofra Flood stood under the arch next to the stalls, surrounded by a pack of raver teens who were passing fivers and tenners into her hands in exchange for Eoin’s gear. Shocked that a pack of hooligans hadn’t already knocked the child to the pavement and snatched the stash from her, Bridie dropped the brush and raced across the square.
“Disco sweeties! Fifty pee each, just!” Siofra sang out, displaying the tablets in her sticky hot child-palm as young mothers wheeled their prams of squealing wanes past.
“Go on and give us ten there, hi,” said a dreadlocked youth.
“Right ye are,” Siofra said. She looked up from her careful counting of the now gooey treats and eyed him warily. “I wanny see the money first.”
“Away from that wee critter, you!” Bridie bellowed.
The youth slunk off down the cobblestones as Bridie barreled towards Siofra.
“What’s up with ye, hi?” Bridie demanded to know. “Where the feck’s yer brother?”
“The Filth hauled him off in a car, and he gave me these sweeties.”
“To sell on the street like a silly wee gack?” Bridie asked.
“Trouble’s on its way, youse’uns,” interrupted the fag salesman (who had bought twenty), nodding up the alleyway.
They tu
rned, and Bridie stiffened at the sight of the copper plodding towards them, cursing herself for not having snatched a few freebies from Siofra’s palm before he arrived. She scuttled a few feet away from the tiny drug dealer.
“Well, well, well,” said Police Constable McLaughlin, towering over Siofra. “And just what have we here?”
“I'm selling disco sweeties,” Siofra said. “Ye want some? Fifty pee, just. Wile tasty, so they are.”
The cop inspected the tablets in Siofra’s hand and his bemusement turned to alarm. He set his lips and faced Bridie. Gone was the dance in his eyes.
“Does she belong to you?” the cop asked.
“I don’t know her from feck!” Bridie announced, sidling backwards through the gate. “And I wasn’t gonny buy from her!”
The copper turned back to Siofra, his face hard.
“Who gave you these?”
She recalled the night her mammy had sat her and Seamus down on the settee and instructed them to never, ever tell the Filth the truth.
“No one. I found them in a bin over there,” she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction the Guildhall where there was no bin.
“I’m afraid I have to take these from you, young lass,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“Naw!” Siofra screamed, clamping her fingers around the drugs. “Themmuns is mines!”
He pried her fingers open and confiscated them.
“Have you any more?”
“Naw!” But Siofra had not yet learned how to lie with her eyes, and they flickered down to her Power Puff Girls handbag.
The constable secured the handbag and snapped open the little golden lock as Siofra kicked him in the shins and pummeled him with her little fists, her squeals echoing down the city walls. PC McLaughlin was alarmed at what he saw inside the handbag: an S Club 7 tape nestled between Pikachu and Wurmple, and a polythene bag bulging with Class A stimulants. He hadn’t known they still made cassette singles. This wee girl must come from a deprived family, he thought.
“What’s yer name? Where do you live?” he asked.
“Siofra Flood’s that wan’s name, from the Moorside,” Bridie said helpfully, always eager to assist the RUC if it got her off the hook.
Siofra scowled over at her, then glared up at the copper, defiantly silent.
“Where’s yer mother? If you don’t tell me, she will,” he said, nodding over to Bridie.
“She’s working cleaning the jacks of all the pubs in town,” Siofra finally conceded.
His heart went out to her. A very deprived family indeed.
“These are very dangerous tablets, lass. Have you taken any?”
“I was dying to. I couldn’t, but, as I had to sell em all.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Who told you you had to sell them? Is someone forcing you?” He looked over at the market sellers, who were all folding up their tables and stealing away.
“Naw, nobody told me to sell em,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “I gotta sell em, but.”
“If nobody’s forcing you, why do you need to sell them?”
“Because me communion gown’s a pile of manky shite!” Siofra sniveled up at him. “I had to sell the disco sweeties to buy a new one meself, as me mammy says we’ve too many bills for her to afford me one of me own! Both me sisters wore that boggin frock already, and one of them’s a bean flicker and the other’s a filthy boggin trollop!”
PC McLaughlin debated his options. They could never prosecute a child so young for drug dealing, and her apparent motive seemed to prove nobody was coercing her to sell them on the street. Perhaps she really had found them after all.
“And if ye don’t leave me be, I'm telling me mammy ye interfered with me private parts!” Siofra sobbed, quoting verbatim what Fionnuala had told her to say in such an eventuality.
His eyes widened.
“I’ll take her home,” Bridie quickly intervened. “Her sister’s a mate of...a mate of mine.”
PC McLaughlin wanted to race home and disinfect his hands.
“I-I’m letting you go with a caution,” he decided. “You understand what that means?”
“Aye,” Siofra said, “if ye catch me again, ye’ll send me down to Magilligan Prison, which is grand by me, as me brother’s already there for GBH and he can look after me, so.”
The little stoke glared boldly up at him. Her revelation didn’t surprise PC McLaughlin. They didn’t do themselves any favors, these families infected with the criminal element.
“C’mere you with me now,” Bridie said, taking Siofra’s hand and hoping she could lick the reside of Ecstasy off the wee palms once they were safely back in the ChipKebab.
PC McLaughlin watched them storm off, heard the young one scream, “I hate that bloody frock, hate it, hate it, hate it!,” and shook his head with sorrow.
£ £ £ £
Ursula peered in the mirror of the ensuite bathroom, giving her face a critical once over. The carefree child of her youth, loving and eager to please, called out to her reflected self: “Have you forgotten me?” Those times were not decades but parallel universes away.
She had sealed the form for the caretaker’s allowance in an envelope and dropped it in a post box the moment she had left Altnagelvin. She had no doubt the National Health Service would switch the benefit from the Floods to herself, especially with Francine urging her case through the system. An extra £38.50 would be coming her way weekly, but Ursula suspected she had won the battle and lost the war.
She ran lipstick over her mouth, and thought it made her look wild hard. When her image became too painful to peruse any longer, she turned her attention to the toilet bowl.
That damn loo had been flushing and reflushing itself lately, and it was driving her off her head. A few months ago, Ursula would have blissfully called a plumber, but now they couldn’t afford the extravagance, and she’d have to tackle the refill valve and flushing rod herself. Ursula wrenched open the top and peered inside the tank. A chill ran down her spine. Against the chain nestled a flask. It may as well have been a human head. She was about to pluck it out of the water and examine it when the phone on the nightstand rang. Fearing it might be bad news about Eda’s condition, she hastened to answer, leaving the flask unstirred.
“Aye?” she asked feverishly into the receiver.
“And ye call yerself an OsteoCare provider?” Mrs. Feeney brayed. “That’s a right laugh! Ye almost had me eating me own two feet for sustenance. Covered with blisters, so they are now, from all the traipsing up and down the town I had to do to fill me larder!”
They were coming at her from all angles.
“Please don’t berate me, Mrs. Feeney,” Ursula pleaded in a small voice. “I'm sorry I forgot to ring ye; I had to take me mother to Altnagelvin.”
“Likely story, that,” Mrs. Feeney sniffed.
“I’ve tried me best to accommodate ye over the years.”
“And them has been years of pure torture. I’ve no need for yer services anymore, ye lazy effin toerag, ye.”
Ursula slammed down the receiver. Years, she had carted that woman around town, and this was the thanks she got? The way Ursula had been thinking of the human race lately, Mrs. Feeney’s betrayal came as no surprise.
She trailed, shoulders slumped, back to the bathroom to inspect her discovery. She pulled the flask out of the water, unscrewed the top and took a tentative sniff. It smelled like nothing, which could only mean one thing: vodka! She hoped for Jed’s sake it was at least a name brand.
He was obviously desperate. Ursula was pained that her husband hadn’t come to her for help, resented that he had whittled away all their lotto winnings and was keeping it from her. Hadn’t they married for better or for worse? Did he no longer trust her? Did living with her bring him to such measures?
She passed through the Queen Anne foyer in a tizzy, the symbol of Jed’s desperation in her hand, and when she entered the lounge she immediately took in the heavy rings of sleeplessness and the
faint whiff of alcohol from him. How had she not noticed them before?
“Jed!” she shouted, displaying the flask. “What for the love of God is this? Is it meant to tell me I'm driving ye to drink?”
“And I never had the courtesy to thank you?” Jed finished off, a flicker of mortified anger on his face. It was as if she had just stripped him down to his Fruit of the Looms there before the bulging eyes of the gargoyles. “What were you doing poking around in the attic anyway?”
Ursula set her lips.
“I found this in the tank of the ensuite loo,” she clarified. “Ye’ve another in the attic, do ye?”
“If you must know.”
“Do ye mind telling me exactly how many flasks of drink ye have scattered around wer house?”
He did mind.
“What do you want me to do?” Jed pleaded. “You dragged me off to this godforsaken hellhole where I can barely understand what anybody says, where the sun shines three days a year, where the city center is crawling with thugs wielding broken bottles after dark so I have to do all my drinking during the day, where the dollar’s so weak against the pound my retirement checks disappear before they’re even cashed. And after this crap with the lotto, there are the car payments, the mortgage...yeah, the second mortgage, to pay off, all those stupid taxes we have to pay and the stupid standard of living these people put up with. I’m an American, goddamn it, and I don’t wanna throw away my money on basic human rights that are priced as luxuries in this lunatic country. The price of the heat in the winter, the AC in the summer, a tank full of gas and a pack of smokes is absurd!”
Ursula hung her head in shame. She had seen the bills.
“And you forced me to live here to be with your family, but, let’s face it, they all hate you now. If they ever even liked you in the first place. And, Ursula, I can understand it. Since we won the lotto, I’ve barely been able to look at you myself without wanting to strangle your stupid neck.
Is it any wonder I need to guzzle down the alcohol as quickly as I can?”
She couldn’t look at him. She took a deep, shuddering breath and plunged ahead in a tiny voice. “I’ve been trying me best to live me life as selflessly as I can, helping the aul ones at OsteoCare, singing in the choir, going to mass every Sunday, confession every Wednesday—”
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 14