“And you! She sent that filth to you. Have ye been in contact behind me back? Ye traitorous bitch, ye can stay around the corner at 5 Murphy with yer granny and the wanes.”
“B-but, Mammy,” Dymphna began, tears brimming, “I hadn’t a hand in it. Moira and me was always close, but I kyanny comprehend how she thought to send me the book. And the wanes have told me there be’s no amenities at 5 Murphy left, barely a kettle and toaster, and with a wee infant to care for—”
“Amenities? Catch yerself on, ye jumped up geebag! A few months on the Waterside, living in luxury, and ye’ve ideas above yer station. I don’t know what be’s worse, ye living in sin with an Orange bastard or ye living in luxury with his Orange bitch of a mother. Madness be’s eating at yer brain if ye imagine I’d welcome ye with open arms, the disgrace ye’ve dragged the family through. I kyanny keep me head up when I pass the neighbors, so I kyanny. The thought of yer sister Moira brings the sick shooting up me throat, aye. She had the decency to clear off outta town at least. I kyanny stomach, but, staring at yer bloody face in the same room!”
That face burned out at the family, and Dymphna furiously shredded the scrap of toilet roll she was using as a napkin, the tears streaming into her turnips, while around her the others went back to shoveling the rhubarb and candle wax down their gullets.
“Have ye not a clue what yer traipsing around with yer Proddy fancy man and yer half-Orange cunt of a bastard have put me through?”
“Why do ye hate me so much, Mammy?” Dymphna sobbed.
“Och, would ye wise up?” Fionnuala steamed, smacking her across the face. “I don’t hate ye, ye daft cunt, ye!”
Fionnuala faced her mother.
“How could Moira do it, Mammy? How?”
Maureen, who had long been tortured with her daughter’s antics, knew exactly how, but kept her lips pressed into a circle as if concerned.
“A fine birthday celebration this turned out to be,” Fionnuala barked. “Scatter!”
They did. With the house bathed in quiet and the plates still on the table, Fionnuala led a lager-fueled and strangely skittish Paddy up the stairs, where she would allow him to perform his birthday bedroom duties to calm her down. Her mouth formed a smile of lust, but her Liz Taylor-scented head was already clicking with thoughts of revenge.
CHAPTER 12
BEFORE MOVING TO WISCONSIN, Ursula Barnett had known nothing of crystal meth addicts. One year on, she could single them out as easily as she could someone misquoting scripture: the rashes and receding gums, the chemical stench from their unbathed and skeletal bodies. And she was only too aware of their need for the cash of strangers to feed their filthy habit. The proportion of the state that seemed to be infected was alarming, and she was now sharing the roulette table with at least three.
“Double zero,” said the caller, and expletives erupted from those around her, souls both lost and losing. Ursula had seen that look of desperation in their eyes before, many times, in her husband Jed’s eyes. She glanced over at his stack of chips, and was not surprised to see it was now a smattering. One of the degenerates bumped into her, and Ursula self-consciously brought her hand up to the string of pearls she had draped around her neck for the occasion.
That she was overdressed for the casino on the Indian reservation was an understatement. When Jed suggested the trip, Ursula had visions of tuxedos, jet setters, the ‘in-crowd,’ perhaps a chandelier and a French accent or two. She wasn’t prepared for what greeted them the moment she lifted the petticoat under her black velvet evening gown and sashayed through the battered doors of the crackhouse: sticky carpeting that made every step in her high heels a chore, clouds of cigarette smoke, shrieks of infants as desperate mothers rolled them through aisles of penny slots in their mission to win rent; the only ‘in’ this crowd might ever be was rehab, Ursula thought grimly.
“I gotta shit like a motherfucker,” said the man to her right, pawing at the few chips he had left.
Ursula quietly unclasped the pearls from around her neck and locked them inside her handbag, which she clutched on the cigarette-burned felt before her as if it contained the only copies of her children’s birth certificates. The woman to her left, with scraggly hair and what looked like bedroom slippers on her feet, hacked into a beverage napkin. The caller spun the wheel again.
Ursula configured her eyes across the bets to beg Jed for release from this torture. She couldn’t meet his eyes, hidden under the shadow of his cowboy hat and glazed with excitement and free casino liquor as they were, following the ball clattering round and round on the track of the wheel. Ursula noticed he was clutching the pint-sized Baileys and cream as if it might grow wings and fly away any minute, yet was allowing next month’s mortgage payment to fly from his fingers, right back into the croupier’s bank.
“Thirty-three black!”
The man beside her scooped up his chips and staggered, not to the restroom or to cash them in, but to the adjacent craps table.
“Let’s pray ye take some of them winnings and purchase yerself a bar of soap,” Ursula sniffed, happy to be able to breathe freely again.
He fixed his bloodshot eyes on her as best he could, but Ursula knew the secret weapon of her Derry accent: she could insult people all she wanted, and they wouldn’t be able to understand a thing. Bedroom Slippers Woman lurched forward and ejected a torrent of foamy bile into the bev nap.
Ursula could stand it no longer. Feeling soiled and in desperate need of a toilet, she scurried off and made her way frantically through the endless rows of slot machines. Tears welled in her eyes, whether in sadness at the sorry state of humanity around her or her own despair or the smell, she didn’t know. She asked a youthful couple for directions to the restroom. They told her to go to Hell.
Ursula bit her fist to stifle a cry, and on she pushed, trying to look as dignified as the passage of time and the gaining of weight could make her (though compared to the indigenous population that wasn’t drug addicted, she was slender). She hurried through a row devoted to ‘luck of the Irish’ nickle slots, and the leprechauns, claddagh rings, harps, pots of gold and rainbows mocked her. This was nothing like the Ireland she had left behind: even before the tragedy of their lottery win in Derry, harps and rainbows had been in short supply. And after...
Jed had ‘only’ won £500,000, but once they bought their dreamhouse and matching Lexuses, there wasn’t much left. Ursula’s family refused to believe this. The Floods’ endless demands for handouts the Barnetts couldn’t afford had driven them mad.
What was more of a misery: surrounding herself with a family who resented her, or nobody? Ursula was now an uprooted stranger in an even stranger world. Her time in Wisconsin seemed to be spent sitting in the car doing Sudoku, pencil in one hand, calculator in the other, Aida on the CD player, and Jed digging them out of the snow of the endless winter. Then putting on her parka and helping him push.
Ursula and Jed had used the money from the sale of their new house in Northern Ireland to fund their escape to Jed’s hometown in the middle of nowhere, where the only visitors to their depressingly functional home were Jed’s brother and business partner Slim (a most ironic nickname) and Slim’s wife Louella. Jed seemed fine with the fields of wheat? barley?—Ursula hadn’t a clue what surrounded them. But if she glanced at another cow, she was going to spew. Ursula needed people, apparently even ones who hated her. Her family were vicious people who resented and hated her, to be sure, but people nevertheless.
A sign announced WOMEN. Ursula inwardly thanked the Lord for finally guiding her to a restroom, yet wished He had supplied her with a pair of tongs to touch the door handle. Desperation made her wrench the door open with the exposed flesh of her fingers and, out of the corner of her teary left eye, she was vaguely aware of a figure brushing her elbow. Ursula pushed inside and was taken aback at the stench of antiseptic and stringent homelessness.
The door flew open behind her.
“...Hell you think you are? Shoving your w
ay in before me? The days of the back of the bus are over.”
Ursula looked back at the woman in alarm. The glare from her goggled eyes invited Ursula to brawl. The right hand on the hip of her brown corduroy culottes trembled with the excitement of inciting a scene, and the left hand scratched her forearm incessantly. Ursula tried to look anywhere but at the pink cowboy boots littered with rhinestones and floral print top with love handles spilling over, but that brought her eyes directly to the horror of the woman’s fingernails. They were huge, clawlike things painted garish shades of purple and blue, covered with glitter and stenciled with Gothic lettering. The right index fingernail was pierced, and a little golden ring dangled from it.
“I-I’m wile sorry,” Ursula said apologetically, her eyes unable to pull themselves from the fingernails. “I didn’t see ye at the door.”
“Because I was too dark? You wouldn’t push your fat ass in front of me if I was one of your people! I know how your white people’s eyes see me, ghetto trash, a second-class citizen!”
“Me people?” Ursula asked, pointing to herself in puzzlement. How did the stranger know she was Irish? It dawned on her the woman meant white people.
“Looks like you’re loaded. Gimme a fiver.”
Ursula stepped back in shock at the woman’s breath. She clasped her handbag to her breast, hiding her giraffe brooch of cubic zirconia. From the woman’s stance, it was clear she thought the world owed her a living, and from her outstretched palm, that she considered Ursula the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ursula had only brought $25 with her, and that she had lost at the bingo session two hours earlier.
“I don’t have it.”
The woman snorted.
“Yeah, right, you don’t. Rich white bitch. Nothin but lazy trash from the ghetto, you think we be. Yeah, I be from the ghetto, but ain’t nothin lazy bout me. I be poundin the pavement every day lookin for work, got blisters the size of golf balls to prove it. White man won’t give me no job, give em all to his white ass friends. Bet you never tasted dogfood. Or shit in a bucket cause the asshole slumlord won’t fix the plumbin. I be looking for work.”
Ursula wondered where this ‘ghetto’ of hers might be. She had lived on the plains of Wisconsin for a year and hadn’t seen anything resembling a town, let alone a city. For all the woman’s claims to poverty, Ursula knew she must have afforded the gas to get to the casino. And she struggled to think of a task in any job description that might be performed by hands with such nails; they seemed custom-made for only opening envelopes containing welfare checks.
“Ye had funds enough to get them nails done, I kyanny help but notice,” Ursula sniffed.
“In membrance of my son De’Kwon, taken to the heavenly Lord at sixteen.”
She thrust the stenciled nails under Ursula’s nose so Ursula had no choice but to read the Gothic font. R-I-P D-e spelled the right hand, ’-K-w-o-n the left. Ursula saw as well the henna tattoo in need of a touch-up on the flab of the woman’s upper left arm, her son’s face in its do-rag glaring out with menace, and R.I.P. on a scroll underneath what looked like what might have been in the past two hearts. Ursula’s own heart went out to the stranger, as no mother should have to grieve a child’s death. She was on the verge of touching the woman’s shoulder, but fear of infection made her relent.
“Och, I’m wile sorry—”
“White man drugs killed him,” the woman announced.
Ursula’s lips disappeared as if pulled by a string, her compassion waning.
“An overdose, are ye telling me?”
“Samplin a batch to sell in the hood, then keeled over.”
The kindness dissolved from Ursula’s eyes.
“A drug dealer, then?”
The woman shrugged.
“Spend a day in my nails,” she said, “and then talk to me about a hard ghetto life you sure as hell ain’t never stepped foot in. Let’s see what you got in that designer purse of yours.”
Ursula had bought it at the Target Labor Day sale. She knew, knew, knew that she should just turn around and walk away from trouble. Isn’t that what Judge Judy always said? But anger flashed through her, as it so often did, and, after months of being holed up in the tundra with nobody but the parish priest who didn’t understand her to talk to, the frustration bubbled over, and she could hold her tongue no longer.
“Och, for the love of God, catch yerself on, miseryguts. Me life was spent in a poverty-stricken war-zone. Did ye grow up with a telly? A microwave? A car? Heat in the winter? A phone?”
The woman’s dreads bobbed up and down, and she was staring at Ursula as if she were a lunatic: of course she had grown up with those necessities; it was the USA, after all.
“We hadn’t any of them luxuries. There be’s people worse off in the world, and by the standards of the rest of the world’s poor, ye’re rolling in it. So don’t ye be whinging on at me about this fantasy ghetto of yers. C’mere a wee minute while I tell ye about me life in a war-zone, rubber bullets flying through the air, soldiers trampling through wer front garden with rifles, barricades of burnt-out cars at the bottom of wer street, tear gas clouding the air, friends and family shot down in the prime of life, not because of drug-related drive-bys, but as we were born in the wrong location. When ye take a gander outside yer door into a war-zone, then ye can start telling me about a hard life! Can ye look me in the face and tell me ye’ve had a life as full as misery as mine? Ghetto, me arse!”
The woman peered at Ursula as if seeing her for the first time.
“What language you speakin?”
“Och—”
“Open the bag, bitch, or I’m gonna beat you down!”
Even as Ursula wondered when ‘beat up’ had been replaced by ‘beat down’ in the current vernacular, the woman raced toward her, menacing her up against the door of the toilet stall. Ursula’s eyes shot towards the frustratingly still restroom door, and she wondered feverishly why this restroom was as unvisited as the High Limit lounge outside; weren’t the bladders of the multitudes bursting from all the free liquor they were guzzling down on the floor? But Fionnuala Flood had spent the previous year trying to get her claws into her handbag, and Ursula hadn’t let that happen. Ursula looked well-fed and content, but the harshness of the Derry Troubles and the acid tongues of her relatives had given her a steely constitution to combat danger.
“Ye kyanny scare me, woman!” she said, her purse flying through the air and smacking the crack addict in the face.
The purse flung from Ursula’s hand, and the contents sprayed onto the floor. The woman wobbled over and collapsed on the filthy tiles. Ursula scrabbled to collect her belongings: the rosary beads, the Minnie Mouse bingo stamper, the pearls, the wallet with her credit cards and coins scattered on the tiles.
“I’m gonna find you and kill you!” the woman promised from her location of the floor, fingernails clacking on the tiles. “I’m gonna find out where you live! I’m gonna hunt you down and slit your throat while you sleep in your bed!” She was too high, drunk, fat or lazy—Ursula couldn’t decide which—to raise herself from the floor.
Ursula raced out of the restroom onto the floor of the casino, desperately searching for a security guard. There seemed to be one at the bar laughing with an aged cocktail waitress with a ladder running up the left leg of her pantyhose and lipstick on her front teeth. She hurried over and pointed frantically in the direction of the restroom.
“Some aul crone has just gone and clattered me in the ladies’ loos! Outta her mind with drink, so she was! Och, I’m afeared for me life, so I’m are, pure heart-scared.”
The guard stared at her uncomprehendingly. The waitress took a step back. They exchanged a glance at the strange words coming out of Ursula’s mouth, then looked at each other conspiratorially. Ursula ground her teeth, as she had no doubt they thought the wit had seeped out of her brain from alcohol.
“If you’ll just come with me, ma’am,” the waitress twittered, placing a kind hand on her
shoulder. “I’ll be happy to take you to the food court and get you a coffee, nice and black and free.”
“Och, get yer hands offa me. I’m not deranged with drink, that’s how I was born talking. It’s not me head that needs examining, it’s that lunatic creature in the ladies loos ye should be after.”
She was about to threaten a lawsuit, if only to see some alarm on their faces over more than her accent, but she realized that that was the Fionnuala Way (and perhaps the Way of the woman on the tiles).
“Can youse not come to me aid?” Ursula pleaded, wringing her hands.
She was relieved to see Jed’s cowboy hat winding its way through a maze of cocktail waitress trays towards them, bobbing through the craps tables.
“Och, I’ll handle it with me husband, here he comes now. Go on away off, youse,” she dismissed the two. They gratefully hurried off. “Jed! I’m over here!”
“Hi, honey,” Jed said. “I was looking for you.”
“Och, it was a wile terrible trial, so it was,” Ursula said, but suddenly stopped her blubbering as Jed placed a hand in worry on her shoulder. She felt safe now he was by her side, even drunk and probably out of funds as he was.
“What is it, dear?” Jed asked, genuine concern in his voice. His big, strong hands stroked her own.
“It’s over now,” Ursula decided, the danger now definitely gone, and the thought of further confrontation making her ill. Judge Judy would have been proud. “What made ye come seek me out?”
“Uh, yeah, could you write me a check for a hundred?” Ursula now kept tabs on the bank account to ensure there was at least some money in it.
Ursula had to indulge Jed. He had tried to sacrifice his life for her the year before, after all. Plus, Jed Barnett was damned with constant good humor, which irked Ursula to no end at times, but which endeared him to almost everyone else, and which comforted her now.
She guided him to the very long line of the cashier’s, twiddling her giraffe brooch and shaking her head, bemused, at the panic she had felt minutes earlier. With Jed slouching by her side whistling the theme from The Jeffersons, she was no longer gripped with fear; the casino employees’ annoying looks and suspicions were forgotten, and the ghetto beast and her empty threats already a thing of the past. In this world of many people, Ursula was certain she would never set eyes on the woman again.
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