Perhaps a little warm-up? Her bones creaked as she positioned herself prone on the floor. She groaned as the concrete beneath the scant carpeting dug into her spine. She would slip a disk if she didn’t cushion it somehow. She grabbed the cushions from the couch and placed them on the carpet. Then she finally pulled the video out of its case. She was about to slip it into the VCR when she saw it had no label. Had Mrs. Ming placed the wrong video inside?
“Ye’ve got to be joking!”
Maybe a jumping jack or two before the silent television instead? Fionnuala felt herself struck by a sudden lethargy, and she knew her new workout regime had failed before it had begun. She would just slip the video into the slot just to make sure, but already her heart was sinking. She somehow knew whatever was on that tape wasn’t the cure for her beer gut.
There came a knocking on the door, and Fionnuala froze. The only inhabitants of Derry who didn’t use the letter box to knock were the coppers and bill collectors. She threw the cushions back on the settee and hid the tape between two of them, the panic rising within her. She tiptoed to the hallway and peered through the beveled glass of the front door. Her heart sank further. Sure enough, the twats in suits must be from the gas or electric collections agency. Nobody else with suits would ever knock on her door.
She slipped silently away from the front hallway and into the kitchen. She needed cold hard cash more than she needed a workout, both to pay the bills and fund that flimmin trip to Malta. The furious pounding on the door (as it was now) made that more than evident. She grabbed her handbag from the counter and tugged her change purse out. She glumly inspected the scattering of coins inside, then snapped the clasp shut, steely resolve on her face.
She went to the washing machine, before which were piled garbage bags filled with Dymphna’s clothing; her daughter had brought them around as 5 Murphy no longer had a washing machine. Fionnuala delved inside, and her eyes lit up as she scrutinized the regular stitching, felt the thread count and read the labels that spelled Money. There on the kitchen linoleum, she stripped out of her workout gear, hauled her hips into a denim mini-skirt, twisted her breasts into a bright pink halter top with spangly bits, and packed her feet into red stilettos. (How Dymphna thought her mother could wash those was a mystery to Fionnuala, but the girl had never been the brightest bulb.)
She ran upstairs and, before her vanity table, spruced herself up. She slapped on a garish shade of lipstick, brightened her droopy eyelids with sparkly emerald eyeshadow, then slapped some fake tan on her face. She squinted at her reflection in the mirror and gave a satisfied nod. Given the dim lighting of the town’s pubs, she felt sure she would fit into the throngs of teenyboppers that went out of their minds with drink there.
She hummed what she suspected was a pop hit of the day to herself (it was actually “Mr. Vain”) as she made her way down the stairs, wobbling uncertainly in the heels and relieved the knocking had finally stopped. She grabbed her Celine Dion satchel and screwed as many absinthe bottles into its depths as the stitching would allow. She seized the handles of Keanu’s stroller and, satchel around her shoulder, handbag swinging at her elbow, made her way out the front door. Time to finally make money from her OsteoCare visits.
CHAPTER 48
UNAWARE OF SCUDDER and MacAfee staring at the vast expanse of her backside from their van, Bridie clanked the letter box of 5 Murphy Crescent, her pock-marked face slouched under a grimy waterfall of hair. Her smock stank of garlic sauce and cheap meat cuts.
“Outta me way, you!” she panted the moment Dymphna opened the door. “I’m gasping with thirst!”
“And I’m slavering with hunger! Let me at them kebabs! Me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut!”
Dymphna snatched Bridie’s bulging handbag from her elbow, tore at the paper and dug her teeth into whatever happened to occupy its depths. Except for the noise from Dymphna's mouth, the house was deathly quiet.
“Where’s yer granny and the wanes?” Bridie wondered.
“They’ve gone to the pictures to see that new film.”
“Shrek 3?”
“Dear God, naw,” Dymphna scoffed. “Saw 4.”
Bridie scanned the room for the booze. Dymphna pointed at the corner. Bridie ripped off the yellowed newsprint of the bottles, and a look of wonder transformed her pimples.
“I always thought,” Dymphna said, “absinthe was meant to be green. I don’t give a shite, but. It’s sure to be potent.”
“Ye’re not wrong there. And, actually, if ye really want to know,” the Wonderbook of Knowledge that was Bridie began, “absinthe turns brown after it ages. It’s to do with the degrading of the chlorophyll, which of course be’s in the herb wormwood, and also the anise—”
“Enough with the blabbering, and let’s get legless, ye daft cunt, ye! I’m gagging to get it down me bake!”
Dymphna tugged the bottle out of Bridie’s hand, pried open the cork and made to guzzle down.
“I’m drinking for two now, after all!”
“Are ye away in the flimmin head?” Bridie gasped. “Gimme that, you. There be’s a special ritual ye’re meant to follow. ”
She tugged a perplexed Dymphna, on her second kebab, into the scullery.
“We’re in need of some sugar cubes, a jug of cold water, some matches and an absinthe spoon of sorts.”
Dymphna’s chewing slowed as her suspicion mounted. She slurped juices off her fingers. Bridie plucked two tea mugs from the cabinet, wiped the filth from them and pried a cluster of congealed sugar cubes out of a bowl.
“What the bloody feck be’s an absinthe spoon when it’s at home?” Dymphna asked.
“A spoon with holes in it. This’ll do grand and lovely,” Bridie decided, wiping away an old skin from a potato peeler. “Fill you that jug there with cold water.”
Bridie gathered the makeshift paraphernalia, then moved back into the front room. Dymphna plodded behind her, jug sloshing water. Bridie threw the glossy celebrity magazines on the coffee table to the carpet, and Dymphna sat one cushion over. Bridie poured the brown liquid into the glasses with the precision of a professional barmaid, balanced the potato peeler on the rim of one glass and daintily positioned a clump of sugar on top, then doused the sugar with a dribble of absinthe. Dymphna could keep silent no longer.
“So what chemistry professor from Magee College have you been shagging, then? If I had known a flimmin PhD was required to dive headlong into a bottle of this manky shite—”
“Och, catch yerself on,” Bridie shushed her. “Sure, I only know meself as...Ye mind that film with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor? Moulin Rouge?”
Dymphna tensed at Bridie’s perfect French diction.
“Ye mean that musical with the song ‘Lady Marmelade?’”
“Aye, and if ye recall that be’s me favorite film of all time. Mind, ye were keeping a lookout for the security for me when I nicked the DVD from the Top-Yer-Trolley bargain bin? The hours I’ve spent pausing almost every frame. Yer man Ewan McGregor has a fine arse, him.”
“God’s gift to women, right enough. Not a patch on me heartthrob Keanu, but.”
“Anyroad, ye mind that scene where Ewan and all his poofter poetry mates guzzle down the flaming absinthe, and the wee green Kylie Minogue fairy appears in front of em, singing and dancing before their eyes?”
“Aye.” Dymphna nodded eagerly. “Outta their bleeding fecking minds, they was. Seeing things that wasn’t there and the like.”
“Well, that’s soon to be happening to us and all,” Bridie promised.
She flicked a match and held it to the sugar. The sugar spit with flames, dissolved through the slit and set the absinthe ablaze. She did the same with the next mug.
“Now pour you the water over the fire to put it out,” Bridie instructed.
Dymphna did, and they held up the broiling glasses and clanked them together.
“To best mates!” Dymphna toasted, and they guzzled down. And spat up. And forced it down again.
&
nbsp; “Tastes like shite,” Dymphna said, shuddering.
“Och, tastes like licorice, sure.”
“Aye, licorice that was pulled from an arse,” Dymphna replied, but held her glass out for another round.
“Speaking of arses,” Bridie said, filling Dymphna’s glass, “this flimmin newspaper has gone up the crack of mines.”
She reached under her and tugged out the paper that had been wrapped around the bottle, while Dymphna focused on balancing the potato peeler and prying a clump of sugar from the mound.
“Och, can we not just drink from the bottle?”
“Heresy, that would be!” Bridie scoffed.
“What the feck does that mean?”
“Never you mind that. What’s yer mammy doing in this paper, hi?” Bridie asked, stabbing the paper with her finger.
“Wise up, ye headbin,” Dymphna snorted. “What would me mammy be doing in an ancient issue of the Guardian? Nobody reads it but intellectual Proddy bastards. Feck knows what that old perv Mrs. Gee was doing with it in her attic.”
She lit the sugar, watched the flames rise and crammed alcohol down her throat.
“I’m serious, but! Go on and have a gander at that photo, would ye?” Bridie said, filling her glass and chucking the drink into her throat. “It be’s yer mammy as sure am I’m sitting here!”
Dymphna saw a woman with a shaggy bleached perm and an off-the-shoulder Flashdance top draped around a man in army fatigues. The eyes of both were concealed behind black bars to keep their identities hidden, and the woman was laughing for the lens. Dymphna nearly spit up the wormwood again.
“Mary mother of God!” she gasped. “Them...them teeth. That smirk. And them calves. Yer woman does look like me mammy, right enough. What would me mammy be doing with a paratrooper, but?”
Dymphna squinted at the headline as another flaming shot razed a trail into her gullet. Orange Camouflage and Green Lace—They Slept With The Enemy! It was an exposé of shameless Derry girls from the staunchly-Catholic Creggan Heights who had engaged in filthy relationships with the occupying British forces as the Troubles in Northern Ireland had dragged wearily on through the 1980’s.
As the nausea of such forbidden pairings instinctively swept through her, Dymphna glanced at the date of the newspaper: ten months before she was born. While she struggled to do the math, a niggling sensation of unease swept through her, and the absinthe wasn’t to blame.
She had long wondered at her mother’s contempt of her, her constant put-downs and inability to compliment. The moment Fionnuala had discovered Dymphna couldn’t abide the taste of curry, her mother had embraced the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent. Dymphna had labored through dinners of rice and curry, curry and chips, goat curry and, right before payday, just plain curry.
Dymphna had always put it down to typical maternal jealousy: as she had blossomed into a gorgeous young woman, Fionnuala with her sagging love handles and thinning bleached ponytails couldn’t help but envy her daughter, as, Dymphna thought, she was now a more wrinkle-free, more intelligent, and more sociable version of her mother. But...if the real reason for the spite was that Dymphna was the product of a secret tryst with a British Orangeman? The filthy spawn of a hated Proddy paratrooper...?
She thrust the absinthe into her and demanded another.
CHAPTER 49
THE ORANGE GLOW OF Fionnuala’s face lit up the grayness of the city center streets. The Titanic sank under the weight of the absinthe bottles, and a slumbering Keanu jolted in his stroller as she hauled it over the cobblestones. The bouncer of the Craiglooner pub couldn’t hide his shock as she wobbled in her heels towards him, apparently seeking entrance. She was his niece’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s aunt, he knew, and twenty-five years too late for the pub.
“Are ye right there, Mrs. Flood, ma’am?” he managed.
“Don’t you fecking ‘ma’am’ me,” Fionnuala seethed.
He waved her through warily, holding open the door for the stroller to fit through. Fionnuala slipped into the pub, skirted the wheels over a pile of sick on the entrance carpet and scoured the teeming teenaged masses within. Bright young eyes all around her shone with boozy glee, the bass of the senseless techno music hammered into her skull, and the slurred shrieks of hooligans mindless with drink battered her ears. She ducked as a fist came hurdling through the air in her direction, tripped over a broken pint glass and found her nose buried in some bared cleavage.
Three old ones in a corner smiled and waved in her direction through the fog of cigarette smoke. Fionnuala was mortified. They had some nerve to think her one of their crew. She was oblivious to the looks of hilarity shooting her way from the youngsters around her, the drunken sniggers behind sweaty palms.
She fought to carve a path with the stroller through the jerking limbs, grateful to have had the good sense to lace the infant’s pureed apricots that evening with her supply of OsteoCare barbiturates. She plowed into a quintet of teen girls with dangly earrings and pleather mini-skirts and smeared blood-red lipstick writhing against the jukebox, bottles of lager clutched in their claws. Fionnuala had to lean forward and shriek into their ear canals to make herself heard.
“I’ve some absinthe going cheap!” she hollered, the grin on her as fake as their IDs.
Their glazed eyes moved in her general direction.
“What are ye on about?” slurred one.
“Have ye lost yer way, hi?” slurred another. “The bingo’s on at the church club down the street.”
Fionnuala cursed them under her breath, and the stroller trundled on through the stomping slingbacks.
Finding a quiet corner of the pub to conduct her business deals would be useless, so she parked Keanu by the broken karaoke machine, scuttled into the seedy corridor of the toilets and entered the ladies room. Someone had vomited in the sink. Her teeth ground at the sounds of drugs and sex coming from the stalls.
“Would ye look at the state of these loos,” she tutted; even she was repulsed.
She quickly reentered the corridor, where three shifty-looking lads in Derry Football Club jerseys and shaved skulls were staggering out of the men’s room, tugging up their flies. All of them had smirky faces she would never tire of kicking, but needs must.
“Psst! C’mere a moment, lads,” Fionnuala hissed. “Go on and have a wee gander at what be’s inside me bag.”
They gave her a look as if she had just tugged up her skirt and invited them to sample her wares, but one decided to humor her, nudged a mate, and gave a tentative glance inside.
“Loo roll?” he asked, confused.
Fionnuala tsked impatiently. She had swiped all the free standing toilet paper from the ladies when she had glanced inside. Every penny counted.
“Naw!” she snapped, shoving aside the toilet paper, unearthing a bottle and shoving it under his nose. He recoiled at the sight of it.
“What the bleeding feck be’se that?”
“One hundred percent genuine absinthe.”
They exchanged a look.
“It’s gone off, so it has,” one said. “It’s meant to be green.”
“It turns brown when it’s aged,” Fionnuala snapped. “Makes it more potent. I learned it on the Internet.”
“One moment, there,” another said.
He grabbed his mates by the elbows and led them a few feet away. They had a hurried discussion in the corner, then turned to face her.
“Sorry there, missus,” the first one said. “One sip of that and we’d be off to Altnagelvin Hospital, not to help with the hallucinations, but to get wer stomachs pumped.”
“Och, go on away and shite, youse,” Fionnuala hissed.
She slapped the door open, wrenched the stroller from its parking place, and tramped through the masses in a dejected fury. She would’ve had better luck shifting Ricky Martin CDs to a construction crew. The stroller caught on the leg of a bar stool, and Fionnuala shoved a girl to the side. She decided she had to address the odd looks the barely of-age bar
maid was giving her over the shaved heads and waterfall hairdos that bobbled at the bar; Fionnuala knew solicitation in pubs was frowned upon if it was not fresh meats or vegetables.
“Och, would ye shove yer eyes back into yer skull,” she barked. “I’m on the search for me daughter, just. Silly bitch lifted twenty pounds from me handbag and made her way down the town to fill her gullet, so she did.”
She rolled Keanu out of the pub and braced herself in the silence of the cold night air. She adjusted the sagging satchel on her scrawny shoulder and looked around for the bouncer. Perhaps she could tempt him. But the bouncer had disappeared, and before her stood the three hooligans from the toilets, menace glinting in their eyes. Fionnuala snorted derisively at the sharpened screwdriver aimed at her eyeball.
“Have youse no idea who I am?” she asked. “Who me brothers are?”
Of course they did; it was Derry City.
“Give us that absinthe, ye filthy minger!” one growled.
“Och, catch yerselves on,” Fionnuala said. “I’ll set me brothers onto youse, the few brothers of mines who’re not already locked up for grievous bodily harm in Magilligan Prison. They’ll give youse a clattering so youse’ll be whistling outta yer arseholes.”
As they wailed with laughter, Fionnuala’s slow-churning brain cells couldn’t realize a corner in her life was being turned: after decades of threatening and menacing and clawing and slapping those against her all her life, the passage of time was now gleefully turning against her and casting her in the new role of victim.
“Ye haggard old crone!” seethed one with a spiteful cackle.
And then they pounced.
CHAPTER 50
DYMPHNA FOUGHT THE urge to spew as she siphoned another gulp. Her fingernails scrabbled over her flesh, the skin which encased her now seeming alien and bizarre. She felt more unclean than she usually did. She couldn’t look Bridie in the eye, which was fine by Bridie, as the drink had taken effect and she was now rocking back and forth in a corner, wondering what people were.
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