The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3)

by Gerald Hansen

  “Ye see iPod Girl over there?”

  At the first show and tell session of the school year, Catherine had been fool enough to bring her father’s iPod in, and ostentation was something the children of the Moorside couldn’t stomach. And her father had recently been made an Inspector with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which made her even more hated! Although many show and tells had come and gone, the children still called Catherine ‘iPod Girl,’ usually while they were holding her sputtering head in a toilet bowl of the school restroom, or tripping her as she passed in the playground.

  Grainne nodded haltingly.

  “Ye mind that iPod Girl told us her mammy be’s a journalist for the Derry Journal? Or she used to be, anyroad, before the madness seeped into her brain. Ye mind what she brought for the last show and tell save one?”

  Grainne thought for a moment, then nodded. They had been bored stiff at the sight of the laminated card that iPod Girl blabbered proudly on and on about, and disappointed as well, as calling her Laminated Card Girl would be too much of a mouthful. Now, however, she seemed to remember...

  “I think she called it a press pass. What be’s a press pass when it’s at home, but?”

  “I’m not rightly sure,” Siofra said. “I wasn’t paying her babbling much mind, sure. From what I recall, but, it’s some sort of plastic card that magically opens doors when ye wave it at them.”

  Grainne inspected Siofra.

  “They have cards like that?” she asked. “Ye mean ye can wave it in front of a house door, and it’ll click open so’s you can enter and nick their DVDs?”

  “And their Pokemons, aye,” Siofra said. “Something like that. What I’m talking about be’s, but, that we can wave it to get on the bus to Belfast, then at the backstage door and step right into Hannah’s dressing room and introduce werselves to her. We need to get Catherine to steal it from her mammy and hand it over, just.”

  “And as her mammy’s away in the head, she won’t have a clue that it be’s missing! Bleeding effin marvelous!”

  They clutched each other and squealed and jumped up and down even though they were seated.

  “Siofra Flood! Grainne Donaldson!”

  Miss McClurkin looked at Siofra as if seeing her for the first time.

  “Siofra?” she said. “May I speak to you for a moment in the corridor, please?”

  “It wasn’t me!” Siofra wailed.

  “Don’t worry,” Miss McClurkin said. “It’s nothing bad.”

  The teacher turned to the class.

  “We’ll only be a moment.”

  Siofra scowled as she scraped her chair on the floor and got up, hoping Miss McClurkin wasn’t one of those ‘lesbians’ she had been reading about. She didn’t know exactly what a ‘lesbian’ was, but the letters of the word looked so strange together, and her mammy and daddy spent hours calling her oldest sister Moira one (along with ‘beanflicker’), and her parents were always angry when they said it, so Siofra was certain she wouldn’t want to be alone in a hallway with one. She had tried to research ‘lesbian’ on the Internet, but had only come across one article that explained you could single them out because, unlike ‘real’ females, their ring fingers were longer than their index fingers. She followed Miss McClurkin into the hallway, vowing to inspect the teacher’s fingers.

  Miss McClurkin hunkered down before her, which didn’t set Siofra at ease, and said softly:

  “I want you to feel like you can come to me and confide in me if you are in any trouble.”

  “What are ye on about, Miss?”

  “How are things at home? Is everything alright?”

  She placed concerned fingers on Siofra’s shoulder, and the girl froze against the clanking radiator.

  “I-I don’t understand them questions, Miss.” Siofra squirmed out from under the fingers.

  “It’s just that lately, your schoolwork has been suffering. And your personal hygiene, well, let’s just say that’s an unresolved issue. But today, there is a trace of mud in your hair, your tights are torn, as is your handbag. And I can’t help but notice the welt on your lip and the bruise that is slowly forming on your cheek. Is there something you want to reveal to me? I understand that things can be difficult when money is tight in the household. Perhaps your parents are on edge because they must work so much, or need to take their financial or personal aggressions out on the children. I took a university course in this, you know. So I know. And you show all the signs. So I’ll ask you again. Has a grownup been causing you harm?”

  “Aye, a grownup has,” Siofra confirmed.

  Miss McClurkin brightened. “Yes?” she urged. “Who?”

  “You! Ye haul me out of the class like this to talk about me tights again, and I’ll tell all of the Moorside ye’re one of them secret lesbians!”

  Miss McClurkin blanched as she recoiled from the little beast.

  “Siofra Flood! That is a very serious accusation.”

  “And ye’re harping on and on about me mammy and daddy clattering the shite outta me!” That happened often, but it was none of the nosy parker’s business.

  Miss McClurkin folded her arms, which afforded Siofra a good look at her fingers. The girl relaxed.

  “Not doing yourself any favors, I see,” Miss McClurkin said stiffly. “Your own worst enemy. Fine. I only wanted to offer the hand of assistance. I understand defensiveness, and I understand wanting to protect people who you think love you. I really do. But if I see further signs of what I suspect is physical abuse, I will have to inform the headmistress Mrs. Pilkey, who will then have to inform the police. Don’t be alarmed. I’m only doing this for your own good, you know. Back to class, now, and I’ll be keeping a look out for you, Siofra. I’m really, really here to help.”

  “Help yer hole,” Siofra muttered, stomping back into the classroom and glaring menacingly at all heads that faced her way. They whipped around to their computer screens. Siofra would have been more angry, but as Miss McClurkin’s fingers seemed normal, maybe her teacher really was only being helpful. Siofra would rather eat fruit than reveal she had been attacked by a Protestant bitch, however.

  Grainne passed her questioning looks that Siofra shrugged off angrily. Siofra made a show of inspecting a ferret on the screen for a moment. When Miss McClurkin was back at her newspaper, Siofra clicked onto the WeBKidsInDerry social network site. She poked around for a while, her anger subsiding, then it rose again as she read a message. She clicked onto a link and stared, disbelieving, at a photo of herself splayed across the pavement. Her eyes shot down to the uploader’s name: PinkPetals. Siofra jabbed desperately at the delete button, but the picture wouldn’t go away. In fact, with one jab, the photo exploded to full-screen, and she was stuck staring at her pained, vulnerable expression displayed almost life-sized for all of Derry and, indeed, the world to see. She didn’t give a shite about the rest of the world, but the thought of all her classmates seeing her...!

  Her face burning with humiliation, Siofra scanned the room to ensure nobody had seen, then switched over to another page, seething with thoughts of revenge against PinkPetals. Siofra knew sooner or later she would meet the girl on the streets of Derry; there were only so many streets. But even more than a retaliatory beating, Siofra hoped that, once she had a photo of herself posing with her arm around Hannah Montana, she could shove it into PinkPetals face, as proof she was just as worthy to breathe the air as any Protestant cunt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PADDY DIDN’T NOTICE her until his third trip back from the loo. She was sitting with two mates and their shopping bags in a darkened corner of the Sheepshank pub under the sign that warned Don’t Abuse Our Barstaff; it was often ignored. Beyond the heaving, roaring masses, she was guzzling a vodka and Coke and devouring him with her eyes, a swizzle stick sliding suggestively in and out of her lips.

  For months, Paddy hadn’t seen the inside of the Rocking Seamaid, the Fillets-O-Joy workers’ pub of choice. Once word spread through the packing plant that
the Floods owned an extra house, invites for a pint after work, for a game of darts, for Secret Santa at Christmas, had abruptly stopped. There were sudden silences when Paddy approached a group clustered around the tea kettle, glares over the dividers of the staff urinals. Having an easy life was a social sin on par with wishing a police officer a pleasant day.

  Paddy now did his daily post-shift drinking at the Sheepshank. It was probably the only pub in Derry he wouldn’t run into people who resented him, as the management had once tried a gay-friendly evening, and custom had fled, horrified. The madness was quickly abolished, but three years on, anyone Irish caught entering or leaving the pub was regarded with suspicion. The immigrant workers of Derry, mainly Poles and Filipinos, seemed not to know the pub’s shameful history, and it was their pay packets that kept it afloat.

  Paddy had guzzled four pints of lager and two shots of whiskey in a nook that gave off a feral smell, dreading the scene that would unfold at home, and fretting that he might be sitting right where the arse of a mincing queen once had. Around him as the alcohol seeped into his brain, the strangers of Derry huddled in corners, their clothing odd and their tongues odder, the Poles barking, the Filipinos yapping their secrets.

  Nobody trusted these recent arrivals to Derry City, where for generations the only non-Irish encountered were the occasional Yank tourist willing to overlook the reputation Derry still had of being a war-zone and come searching for their roots (they were sitting ducks for casual knifings and muggings), and the Chinese family who ran the takeaway down the Strand (chicken curry and chips was always the order; the moo goo gai pan and crab rangoon were too foreign). The new Poles and Filipinos were seen as cagey bastards and sleekit cunts, eyes searching for work and housing, brought to Derry for the first good economy in recent history. They had taken the jobs the Irish were happy to be rid of, but now work was in short supply, and resentment was starting to grow. When Fionnuala had been caught nicking toilet paper and urinal cakes from her job of scrubbing pub toilets the year before and fired, her position had been taken over by a Filipino grandmother. Fionnuala had retaliated months later: a quick elbow to the foreign creature’s ribs, and she fell into the new fountain in front of the Guildhall. Fionnuala scampered off up Shipquay Street with a lightness in her step and a smile on her face for once.

  The arses and crotches around Paddy jerked with the bass beat as another Eurodisco tune came on the jukebox—the Poles seemed to favor this genre—and his pint glass jumped on the table. He scribbled unsteadily on a beer mat how much the household’s overdue notices totaled, and how much the next month’s bills might swell to. He soon ran out of space. His wages for the next week, which he now wouldn’t be collecting, had already been long since spent in his mind.

  It might have been the whiskey, but Paddy was surprised he was thinking of his brother-in-law Jed Barnett, and regretting the events of the previous year which had sent Jed and Ursula fleeing to Wisconsin after the lotto win. Jed’s friendship could always be relied on, as could, more importantly, a handout when necessary. Jed had always been up for a round on the golf course or many drinks in the pub, his easy manner and general kindness sorely lacking in anyone else Paddy knew. Jed always seemed content as long as there was a one-stop-shop for all his vices: booze, smokes and lotto slips. The Floods had turned on Jed the moment he hadn’t splashed out the majority of his lotto ‘millions’ on them. Under threat of Fionnuala, Paddy had betrayed his best friend in Derry the past decade. But, Paddy considered, Jed Barnett was a Yank and therefore someone to be treated with suspicion, no matter that he had lived amongst them for ten years; Jed was a stranger as much as the economic migrants that now surrounded Paddy, and as he had been hounded back to his rightful country, a handout wouldn’t be forthcoming.

  Paddy finished the dregs in his pint glass and pushed his way through the strange-tongued beasts, made his way down the seedy corridor to the toilets and, inside, clutched the stained wall as he zippered down and a moan of drunken misery escaped him. Coming back, his wavering steps trampled on the trio’s shopping bags, and he ignored their squeals of alarm.

  “Bloody foreigners,” he muttered by rote, without pausing to wonder if that was actually what he really thought. “Get yer foreign arses back to yer own land.”

  Paddy felt resentment swell as he staggered to the bar for another pint and eyed the Next, the BodyShop, the Sephora bags filled with quality not quantity; resentful that those foreigners had the advantages of youth (of a sort), friends, and, by the amount of shopping bags and the names on them, disposable incomes, resentful that he had to drink in this pub of degenerates and aliens, resentful that the Fillets-O-Joy job had been taken as something to tide him over after he left school at 16 until his real career began, and that that stop gap had lasted 28 years.

  Then, as he handed over the coins for his pint to the frazzled barmaid, he noticed the look. The Polish women Paddy saw around town were blonde and shapely, and although the unfortunates in the corner would never grace a catwalk, he knew they must be Polish because they weren’t Filipino. He couldn’t see the two other women; their polyester backs were to him, one pink paisley, the other dalmatian spots. The bad case of static cling of the woman in question’s low-cut zebra-print top revealed the curve of her ample but sagging breasts, and her eyes seemed locked on something of intense interest as she glided the swizzle stick in and out.

  Paddy turned around to see what she was ogling, but there was only what looked like a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper behind him. It was one of many, so that couldn’t be what caught her interest.

  The Polish stranger ran aqua fingernails through the sadness of her straw-like hair and revealed the smile of a tobacco-stained overbite over the rim of her vodka and Diet Coke at him. Paddy felt a stirring that had been dormant from years of Fionnuala slapping his drunken, groping hands away from her tattered nightgown at night. He self-consciously picked at a stain on his jacket and swaggered haltingly to the nook as something base and animal urged for release beyond his crumpled denim.

  That she was no spring chicken was obvious, and the passage of time hadn’t helped a face already disadvantaged in youth. The makeup troweled on made her look more harsh than an obviously difficult life had, classic mutton-dressed-as-lamb, but she was certainly younger than him. And her body made up for her shortcomings. Paddy never sought things out in life; he took whatever happened to come his way. This is perhaps why he was still saddled with a mirthless job, and why Fionnuala was the mother of his seven children. And as the woman’s two friends turned slightly to inspect him out of the corners of their eyes, and they pressed in together and giggled in their strange language, Paddy—

  —yelped as his right pocket vibrated. He tugged out his pay-as-you-go cellphone and saw a text from his daughter Dymphna: Hve u 4gttn mams bday???!

  “Bloody Christ on a cross!”

  The alcohol fled his brain in a state of shock. The sense of something of life-or-death importance had been nipping at a distant corner of his mind, but the shock of the impending strike had dislodged it. The jangling coins in his pocket wouldn’t be enough to buy the gift Fionnuala would be expecting, and she had been dropping hints for a month. Gripped by panic, Paddy looked around him, searching desperately as if the pub were the Quayside Shopping Center. Time was of the essence, as Fionnuala clocked off from the Sav-U-Mor at three, the shops in the city center were all shuttered up, and he had enough presence of mind to recall that Maureen and the children were planning a surprise dinner at five. A matching set of pint glasses? A collection of beer mats? Fionnuala loved her gin; perhaps he could distract the barmaid long enough to reach behind the bar counter and—

  —then he spied it. Paddy had reached a state of drunkenness where the ridiculous seemed logical. To his drink-soaked brain, it was the perfect gift, and it seemed to be barely hanging on the wall. If he could pry it off and make out the door with it unseen, the price would be perfect as well. A horde of construction workers had just
piled into the pub, and the bar staff was frenetic with the orders barked out at them. Paddy grabbed his workbag and sidled up to the dartboard, stealing glances over at the bar. The staff wasn’t watching, but someone else was.

  The dartboard hadn’t been used in years, and Fionnuala had won the darts championship at the Sav-U-Mor Christmas do the year before and proudly dusted the plastic trophy on the mantelpiece when she could be arsed with housework; Paddy could almost hear Fionnuala’s squeals of delight when he presented her with the dartboard (he was deranged with drink). A few rusty darts lay on the shelf of the case like museum exhibits. Paddy scooped them up and slipped them into his workbag. The case hung by mangled hooks to the wall. As he reached up to dislodge the case from the nails in the wall, the Polish woman got up, revealing skinny acid-washed jeans paired with ruby stilettos that marched towards him.

  To Paddy’s alarm, he felt a pair of hands slip under his sweaty armpits to assist in the theft, and the warmth of something akin to deflated airbags against his back. He heard whispered in his ear: “Pozwól, że ći z tym pomogę.”

  “Eh?”

  “I help, yes?”

  “Right ye are,” he said.

  They slipped the case off the wall, and Paddy reached into his bag for a filthy pair of overalls to drape over the case so he could hustle it out of the pub unnoticed.

  “Jesteś bardzo seksownym facetem.” she said with a giggle younger than her years, much. “Mean in our language is sexy man. Ładny tyłek. Nice arse.”

  Paddy’s bloodshot eyes weren’t sure where to look. Belonging to a hot-blooded man as they did, they wanted to gawk at her breasts, but red flags sprung up at the sorry state of them beyond the static cling and zebra print, they wanted to peruse her lips, but those were in need of Chapstick. This Pole had a skewed concept of personal space, and his body felt the warmth of hers dangerously close. Blood pulsed into regions long relegated to those of long-lost adolescent dreams.