The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3)

by Gerald Hansen

  “I’ll be happy to work the extra hours until ye’ve located new staff, like. I hadn’t a clue about her shenanigans, sir.”

  Fionnuala leaned against the brick wall in the buckets of rain that now emptied from the heavens. She was drenched in seconds. As the adrenaline coursed through her veins, as she heaved great gasps of anguish, she felt the noose of desperation tightening around the jowls of her neck, now with no source of gainful employment, and all the unpaid bills stretching before her like a long and winding endless road she had yet to climb.

  Sniffling, she looked in confusion at the bright yellow envelope Edna had handed her. She tore it open as a passing truck splattered filth over her clothes. She blinked at the sparkly balloons and dancing bears in party hats on the card. All The Best From One Who Loves You! it exclaimed in colors of glee. Fionnuala whimpered, as tears erupted from her eyes anew and she shredded the mud-spattered card. The pieces fluttered to the sidewalk. She felt the blade of the ax that was her 45th birthday whizzing down to chop her bloated neck in two, and things would only get worse.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ON A DESOLATE BLOCK in the wastelands of the Derry dockyards, MacAfee left his comrade Scudder in the driver’s seat of the van, engine rumbling, and pushed himself through the pelting sheets of rain to the Pence-A-Day storage units office window. He had to ensure the flighty girl he had rented the lockup from the week before wouldn’t see them unloading the gear. There she sat oblivious in her stripy top and dangling earrings, an H-bomb-cloud of red curls hovering over both her head and her massive breasts. She had a cellphone glued to an ear, one eye on a glossy celebrity magazine, the other staring intently through the filth of the window like a tiger ready to pounce.

  The sight of her aroused MacAfee even as it disturbed: another example of the best of the Irish more interested in leafing through British publications, shoveling British crisps between her teeth, rather than joining the cause and freeing herself from the shackles of British cultural imperialism.

  MacAfee turned to see what was causing the traitor such intense interest. The Protestant church across the street was being renovated, and the girl was hungrily taking in the backsides that strained the seams of the construction workers’ overalls as they strut over the scaffolding. Filthy slag, MacAfee thought, probably dying to fiddle with herself under the desk, and doing that with her wane screaming for a much-needed nappy change in its pram not two feet away!

  He crept back to the van outside Unit 12B, the shards of rain biting into his flesh, and nodded to Scudder.

  “The daft cunt be’s too busy staring at them workers’ arses across the street to pay us any mind,” he told Scudder through the unrolled window. “Let’s unload the gear, and sharpish.”

  As Scudder prised himself out of the van, he raised a bushy eyebrow and ran fingers through what was left of his hair.

  “Gagging to get her hole filled, is she?”

  “Fancy yer chances, do ye, boyo?” MacAfee smirked, going with his mate to the back of the van.

  “Let’s see if we can’t invite her for a spit roasting, twisting her round on the ends of wer knobs,” Scudder suggested. He had the key to storage unit 12B’s padlock and unlocked it, while MacAfee opened the back door of the van. “Like yer woman from the Jumping Hare last week.”

  “Shall we not focus on stockpiling the gear first?” MacAfee said, removing the old sheet that covered their load. “And mind ye don’t trip on yer ego.”

  They reached into the back of the van, both smelling faintly of spent cigarettes and the previous night’s drink. Just as their vision was mired in the past, so too were they walking fashion clichés of the decades which had formed them and beyond which they had yet to venture intellectually: MacAfee had a bad bleach job spiky with gel and a skinny brownish-pink leather jacket; Scudder an untidy beard—a regrettable choice when coupled with the few wisps of hair that clung to his misshapen scalp—and a denim shirt, jeans and a Thin Lizzie jacket that looked liked they hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine since the band’s heavy metal had last graced the airwaves.

  “What do ye think the odds are all them workers be’s Catholic?” Scudder said with a nod at the church, taking a crate with Arabic lettering across it from the van. “Putting their skills to use for the Orange scum in the name of earning a few quid.”

  The Orange of the Irish flag had been appropriated by the Protestants as ‘their’ color; the Catholics chose the Green. Neither religion seemed interested in the White. Catholics working for Protestants angered MacAfee to no end as well, but he simply shrugged.

  “Waste of their bloody time, so it is,” he said, hauling out a carton of ski masks and placing it in the space. “Maybe we should blow up that Proddy church and all.”

  “When are we meant to receive that shipment of Semtex, then?” Putty-looking explosive material.

  “Held up, so it was; some palaver about a spot of trouble in flimmin Budapest or Bucharest or feck knows where. Haven’t spoken to yer man from the market in ages. Meant to be delivered in a case camouflaged as assorted tinned vegetables, it is. Let’s deal with what we have now, and worry about that later, but. We’ve weeks until we need it, sure, for wer, what would ye call it?” His brain struggled for a moment as he hauled the detonators into the storage unit. “The pièce de resistance of wer operation.”

  “Piece de...Feck off, ye smarmy git, ye, or I’ll shove the barrel of one of these assault rifles up yer intellectual hole. Next ye’ll be telling me ye actually read books for pleasure.”

  The crate of AK-47 assault rifles thumped to the ground of the storage unit, and MacAfee slid a case of Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades beside it.

  “Ye know full well what I’m on about, but,” he said.

  “Och, aye surely. Blowing up the Top-Yer-Trolley during the annual sale and plastering wer names all over the dailies.”

  Scudder rubbed his hands in anticipation of the destruction of Derry’s premier superstore, the carnage it would cost, then he struggled to pick up a rotting crate of ammunition rounds. The crate broke and the ammo scattered across the wet concrete.

  “Christ almighty on a cross!” MacAfee wailed, scrambling for the rolling bullets. “Gather all them up before that wee girl in the office clocks us! One glance at wer gear, and we’ll have to kill her before we’ve even had the chance to shag her.”

  They jumped for the ammunition, while inside the office, 19-year-old Dymphna Flood yelled down the phone:

  “An hour, I’ve been waiting for ye to bring me some salve for the flimmin wane’s nappy rash! Roaring out of itself with grief, so it is, and it’s doing me head in! What would possess ye to guzzle down the drink at that swank Proddy pub with yer mates at,” she glanced at her watch. “Half eleven in the morning? Aren’t ye meant to be in one of yer classes?”

  “Australia v. England, that’s what,” her fiancé Rory said through the roaring and laughter and clinking pint glasses. “I was passing the pub on me way to the chemists for to get the salve, and me mates inside caught sight of me. I had to join em for a pint. Only the one, mind. It’s not me fault the match is being held in Sydney, and it’s half-three there.”

  “If ye don’t get yer drunken arse over here with that salve, it’ll be the last match ye clamp eyes on, I swear to the merciful Lord. I’ll gladly throttle the life outta yer son and all. And the next time ye have yer way with me in the bed, make sure it’s more than a grunt and it’s all over!”

  She clacked the phone shut and seethed silently for a moment. She looked across the street and cursed the torrents of rain that had made the construction workers lumber out of her line of sight. Compared to those big-boned Catholic laborers, her Rory Riddell was an emaciated Protestant rake. Instead of their broad, cheery faces, she was saddled with a weasel: beady black eyes poking out from under the bangs of his greasy black bowl cut, the scraggly growth above his thin upper lip that was meant to be a mustache, his spindly limbs drowning in the oversized athletic jer
seys—Umbro, Italia, Real Madrid, Brasilia—he never left the house without. Big bones and big grins was what she longed for; Rory had neither.

  Dymphna kicked the stroller that held the bastard child responsible for the ludicrous engagement heading toward a mixed-marriage made in Hell. Six-month old Keanu erupted into another cackle of wails.

  Ten months earlier, Dymphna thought all her Christmases had come at once: she had nabbed the engagement ring, vacated her slave-labor job shelling out fast food at the ChipKebab, moved from the decrepit Flood semi-detached council house in the Moorside into the swank bungalow on the Waterside, and anticipated a future lolling on a chaise lounge before a muted TV screen, nibbling Belgian chocolates and painting her toenails hot pink while she hummed along to something foreign—perhaps Yanni—as she imagined cultured people did.

  Her reality was somewhat different: Rory’s mother, Zoë, greeted her with a look behind her harsh Burberry frames as if both heels of her Christian Louboutins had just trodden in dog shit, and promptly put her to work at the family business for a slave-wage. Dymphna was a stranger amongst the high-end knickknacks she couldn’t understand in the house in the Orange neighborhood, where she rolled the stroller past curbs painted the colors of the British flag and dodged rocks the neighborhood children threw her way; Rory was “doing a course” at MacGee University, which, as far as Dymphna could tell, meant getting bladdered with his mates at all hours of the day and night and little else. They shared an uncomfortable bed; he hadn’t touched her flesh in weeks, which actually didn’t come as a relief; she had needs of the flesh that needed tending to. And then there was the child. Keanu suffered from a long and winding list of infections: urinary and ear, impetigo, gastroenteritis, and a smattering of cold sores. The only part of his biology that seemed to function properly was his lungs.

  Dymphna glared at the present she had bought for her mother’s birthday. She punched numbers into the office calculator and worked out how many hours of her own hard graft it had cost. Her resentment grew. Why was it so bloody expensive? She picked up the box and read it. She learned all about the foot spa’s six rotating hydro jets to pamper tired, listless feet, its soothing heat source, and, her interest increasing, the reflexology rollers and splash guard. When she got to the massaging gel pads and toe-touch controls, she was on the verge of gifting it to herself, but knew Fionnuala deserved it, after all the torture following the Barnett’s lottery win the year before, and then Dymphna shaming her mother further by moving in with Protestant bastards; plus, if Dymphna kept the foot spa for herself, what else could she possibly give Fionnuala for her birthday?

  Dymphna had tried the sentimental route the previous Christmas, with a framed photo of her and Fionnuala’s first grandson Keanu posing in Santa caps, but her mother had seen it for what it was: cheap. And Fionnuala had spared no breath pointing this out after one brandy too many during the Queen’s Christmas speech. It didn’t matter what Dymphna gave her; Fionnuala never seemed overjoyed. Dymphna was actually intelligent enough to realize she wasn’t Fionnuala’s favorite child; that honor was always reserved for boys, especially those in prison, and the Flood family had two, Lorcan and Eoin—their incarcerations, one for grievous bodily harm, the other for drug dealing, had done nothing to dampen Fionnuala’s love for them; in fact, their absence seemed to make her heart grow fonder. Dymphna even suspected that young Padraig and Siofra, and maybe even Seamus, who was only five and still didn’t have a personality as far as she could tell, came before her in the queue. Even the eldest, Moira, who was a degenerate—

  Dymphna jumped as the text on her cellphone pinged. She saw with some trepidation it was from her mate Kate, a receptionist at the Health Clinic. Dymphna had paid a frantic visit there a few days earlier. Kate had access to the confidential test files patients normally needed to trek to the clinic and hear the results of from the mouth of the doctor herself, but Dr. Khudiadadzai was a Pakistani who, of course, couldn’t be trusted, and also cast disapproving glances down her stethoscope. Dymphna had asked Kate to fill her in when the results were ready.

  She read the text, her eyes darting helplessly from side to side. She bit into her fist as the whimpers of a small forest animal escaped her lips. Forgotten was the foot spa.

  She lit a cigarette and puffed it to the butt, then punched her best mate’s Bridie’s number into the phone, her fingers fluttering with panic and distress. The phone went straight to voicemail. As usual, lately.

  “Right, ye feckers! Bridie here,” Bridie’s hearty and friendly, if slurred, voice said. “I’m filling me gullet with drink at the moment and kyanny be arsed to take yer call, hi, leave a message ye slaaag, cheerio!” Beep!

  “Och, Bridie, it’s terrible, so it is!” Dymphna wailed down the phone. “I kyanny get me head round it! Kate from the clinic’s after texting me and letting me know I’m six weeks up the duff. With another half-Proddy bastard, would ye credit it! Am about to slit me wrists here, I’m desperate for someone to talk to, and me fingers be’s bloody from dialing yer number. Phone me, would ye, ye daft bitch?!”

  She clicked the phone shut, feeling somewhat guilty for having lied to her best friend. She wasn’t pregnant with a second half-Protestant child, because the father of Keanu was really—

  Dymphna squealed as the door flew open and an alkie staggered in, eyes crazed with cheap gin, hair finger-in-a-socket-like. He brandished a sharpened screwdriver in his left fist.

  “Lemme at me lockup!” he seethed.

  “Och, Mr. Tomlinson,” Dymphna said, deflating. “I near shite meself at the sight of ye.”

  “Ye’ve changed the lock on me unit, and I kyanny get at me belongings.”

  Most clients of Pence-A-Day were Protestant, as it was on the Waterside of the town, but Zoë Riddell, her bleeding heart quaking with the liberalness of it all, had arranged a scheme with the City Council so the financially-challenged would be subsidized by the government and pay pennies on the pound. Mr. Tomlinson was one such client, and even though he had touched Dymphna up on the playground once when she was a primary schoolgirl and was sputtering his frustration all over the foot spa and waving the screwdriver close to her nose, Dymphna relaxed: he was one of her own.

  “Ye’ve not paid the rental in months, but,” Dymphna said; she knew his case. “Ye’re seven pounds in arrears.”

  “I told that daft Orange mother-in-law of yers—”

  “She’s not me mother-in-law yet,” Dymphna said through gritted teeth. She swiped at the wavering point of the tool. “And get that flimmin thing outta me face, or I’ll swipe ye in the gob. Would ye look at the state of ye! Wild looking, so ye are. Why’ve ye let yerself go so?”

  He was torn between weaving back and forth in anger and ogling her shapely bosom.

  “Gimme the key,” he pleaded.

  “I kyanny,” Dymphna said. “Mrs. Riddell keeps em locked up.”

  He began to sob, and suddenly her heart went out to him, startling herself with the realization that some people’s lives might actually be worse than her own. Plus, he was Catholic.

  “Och, I don’t give a flying feck,” Dymphna decided, getting up from the desk and grabbing the lock cutter. “I owe no allegiance to that smarmy Proddy bitch with them two dots over her name. Can ye imagine such airs? C’mere you with me, and I’ll let ye in. What do ye need with such urgency from yer lockup, anyroad?”

  “Me methadone!” he barked, scampering after her as best he could on his jittery legs.

  “Yer...?” Dymphna’s step faltered, seeing him as diseased.

  They had almost reached the door, and Tomlinson turned to mutter his gratitude but spit up all over Dymphna’s top instead. She screamed down at the mess splattered over the stripes, the tears stinging her eyes from the stench of gin and bile.

  “Terrible sorry, love. Let me clean ye up,” Tomlinson sputtered apologetically.

  Dymphna was about to protest, but couldn’t shake from her mind a vision of deadly viruses coursing through his bo
dily fluid. She didn’t want to put a finger near it; let him reinfect himself.

  “Aye, right ye are,” she grimly gave in, passing him an oily rag. “Mind ye go gently, but, over me fun bags.”

  His grunting and the glazed look in his eyes as he brought the rag towards her cleavage, plus the memory of that playground visit made her think better of him pawing her—

  “Hold on a wee moment there.”

  —and also, to her dawning horror, the liquid was seeping through the polyester of her top. Her hands flapped helplessly at her sides as squeals of panic stuck in her throat. She was terrified of Tomlinson smearing his bile into her flesh and causing his disease to seep into some unknown pores of her skin. She couldn’t embarrass him by letting him know why it was gripping her with such fear.

  “Get it off me, just! Get me top off me this minute!” she begged, her feet stomping wildly, and in the corner Keanu erupted with new shrieks.“Get it offa me, ye mindless geebag!”

  Tomlinson’s glazed eyes danced with sudden glee, and he tore the top from her, Dymphna’s breasts spilling out like the screams spilled from her mouth.

  Through the window, Scudder and MacAfee stood in alarm at what they thought they were seeing: a shambling, sex-crazed tramp tearing the top off the girl, tears of fear rolling down her face, her trying feebly to ward him off with a lock cutter. They were all for group sex, but not forced. They flew inside the office, roaring with rage.

  “Hands offa her!”

  “Away from the wee girl, ye minging alkie nonce perv!”

  “I’ll clatter the fecking shite outta ye, ye fecking rapist!”

  Scudder hauled Tomlinson’s grimy hands off Dymphna, MacAfee’s fist landed in his stomach, and Tomlinson reeled as their steel-tipped boots shot toward him.

  “Naw! Leave the aul one be!” Dymphna pleaded. “He’s helping me, just!”