“Och, fuck this for a game of soldiers,” Dymphna snorted. She tore out the page of the newspaper and slipped it into her pocket. “Where’s that spud peeler?” she roared, and reached for the matches.
They guzzled down.
“Where the bleeding feck have me fingers gone?” Dymphna shrieked even as she stared straight at them.
“I can feel the madness seeping into me brain!” Bridie screamed, gulping down her fifth glass. “The poison’s fairly shooting through all me veins!”
“I’m outta me skull with insanity!” Dymphna whimpered, fingernails clawing at her scalp. “Me brains feel like they’re oozing outta me ears.”
Around their deranged minds and staggering bodies, the sitting room was a chaos of flung sugar cubes, half-smoked cigarettes, rolling empty absinthe bottles. They raced around the room clutching flaming glasses, bumping into the china cabinet, the fireplace, the television shoved to the side. Anything not rooted down by extreme weight due to the pull of gravity had been overturned. The pop hits blaring from the radio had long ago not made any sense to their minds. Deep inside their eardrums rang banging and thrashing and peculiar noises no sane human had ever heard before.
“Arggh!” Dymphna wailed, slurping down and clutching at her eyeballs. “Me eyes kyanny take it no longer!”
“What are ye seeing? What are ye seeing?” Bridie begged to know. “Can ye see the wee green Kylie Minogue fairy?”
Dymphna clutched Bridie for support, fearing for her own sanity.
“Johnny Cash, more like!” Dymphna wailed. “I’m surrounded by a burning ring of fire!”
“These flimmin hallucinations!” Bridie agreed. “They’re bleeding desperate. All of them feel so real!”
“Och, me eyes are scalded!” Dymphna wailed.
“Aye, mines and all!”
“We be’s entering the gates of Hell,” Dymphna cried. “Flames! Burning flames, I’m seeing! All around me!”
She wiped her feverish brow and fanned herself with a hand.
“Wooh!” she gasped. “I’m feeling them flames as if the delusions was real and all! I’m soaked! The sweat be’s fairly lashing down me body! Wooooh!”
“A-aye, me and all. And it’s making me parched!”
Bridie took another swig, then shuddered as a sudden jolt of cold clarity electrocuted her brain. She looked around her, as if seeing their whereabouts for the first time.
“Virgin Mary Mother of God! The carpeting’s on fire!”
“And the drapes!”
“Let’s clear the feck outta here!”
They snapped up their handbags and raced out the door, shrieking with laughter.
“Shall we make wer way down the pub?” Bridie slurred.
“Aye, surely!” Dymphna slurred, staggering across the pavement and thinking she heard fire engine sirens, or maybe they were only in her brain.
CHAPTER 51
“NAW, NAW!” FIONNUALA wailed.
She kicked at their shins with Dymphna’s spiked heels. Fionnuala was a hard-faced cunt, but no match for three teen soccer stars. She clutched her satchel to her chest, screaming and punching and clawing at skulls with no hair to pull.
“Help me! Help me!” she wailed to a group of kids scoffing down from Kebabalicious containers, but they just laughed through their curry chips and staggered around the corner.
“Fecking useless beings!” Fionnuala called out. “Help! Police! The Filth!”
Even as the words exited her mouth, she wished she could retract them. Begging the despised police for help? What would her mother think of her, sinking so low? A hardened Heggarty girl like her!
Fionnuala was using every weapon at her disposal: her claws, her heels, her acid tongue, but they were no match for their wiry, hard limbs, their agility, their youth. With one thrust to the breastplate, she was sent spinning to the cobblestones. They wrenched the satchel from her knuckles, and she gasped for air and lunged for a sneaker, noticing it was one of those expensive Yank ones. Rage overtook her, and she yelled abuse into the darkness at their receding backs.
“Hard men, youse thinks youse be’s? Fecking arse-bandit cowardly bastards!”
“Effin Christ!” Padraig roared, racing from the shadows to his mother.
“After themmuns, wane!” Fionnuala screamed, pointing frantically around the corner. “They’ve nicked the absinthe! And me bag! Me Celine Dion bag!”
He was off in hot pursuit, and Fionnuala sobbed on the cobblestones, running jittery fingers over the scratch on her forehead and the bruise forming on her elbow. A trip to the emergency room was out of the question; the coppers would have to be called. Padraig came back a few moments later, panting, his lenses fogged.
“Them bastards is gone,” he said. “Like into thin air. Couldn’t find hide nor hair of em.”
“I’m not a spastic. No need to tell me three times, like. Help me up, lad.”
Padraig did his best, his little hands grappling as much of his mother’s mass as they could, but there was so much of it. Finally, Fionnuala leaned upright against the wall and looked down at her son.
“What the bleeding feck are ye doing trawling the city center at this hour?” she seethed, smacking him around the head. His glasses popped off his nose and clattered to the cobblestones.
Fionnuala exploded with tears as she looked down at his hand massaging his reddening cheek and what she saw in his eyes; now they were bare she could see the hurt.
“I’m wile sorry, son, dear God in Heaven forgive me,” she whimpered, stooping and sobbing into his negligible shoulder. “Themmuns took all the absinthe, but, and me designer bag and all.”
“Ye mean yer My Hate Will Go On bag?”
“Heart, wee boy, heart! All I be’s wanting be’s the funds for to take us all to an exciting new land as a family, like other families does, and get some bills paid but now, now...! I haven’t a clue how we’re meant to get the money together.”
Padraig looked around uncomfortably, hoping none of his mates would happen by.
“Don’t ye worry, Mammy,” he said, patting her mousy flip. “I’ve a load of gear in me room we can sell down the market. X-boxes and Wiis and the like. Wile dear, all them be’s. We should be raking in the cash, and then we can afford the trip to see Moira after all.”
Fionnuala was recharging her palm to slap him for fencing stolen goods—some pornographic ones at that, apparently!—and for mentioning the filthy beanflicker’s name, but she didn’t want to keep apologizing to the Lord. And Padraig had tried to help her, after all.
“Och, ye’re a wee dote, so ye are,” she said, fondling his locks, the color of which she hated so much. I’ve to take a bar of soap to the little minger’s scalp and scrub the filth offa it the moment we get to the Moorside, she thought as he led her over the cobbles, me fingers be’s slick with grease at just one touch. If he’s given me the lice, I’ll throttle his scrawny neck! Wile civil, but, of the wee freak to sell the gear he lifted to help out the family, and to tell me about Paddy and his fancy woman and all. Where the feck, but, am I expected to find another My Heart Will Go On tote?
Fionnuala hurried back ten minutes later to collect Keanu.
CHAPTER 52
“HAPPINESS HIT HER LIKE a bullet in the ba-a-a-a-a-ack...!”
MacAfee’s boot tapped amongst the empty crisp packets to the Florence and the Machine song on the radio. Just as his drink-addled brain was surprised good music had been produced after 1982, the door to the perfectly-intact, non-burning 5 Murphy flew open. Pence-A-Day and Kebabalicious jettisoned out with handbags oscillating and hair unhinged, the lipstick on them like Heath Ledger’s Joker. They ejected themselves through the gate and, clutching each other for support, maneuvered their heels around the corner towards the city center. Their shrieks of laughter lanced the nighttime drizzle.
MacAfee smacked Scudder to life.
“Game’s on, hi.”
Scudder jerked to a semblance of consciousness on the seat, sputterin
g and unaware of his surroundings.
“Och? Eh?”
“Rouse yerself! Them wee girls has finally cleared out!”
Scudder plunged a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands scrabbled across his denim for a light. MacAfee was already out the door, ski-mask on his face. Scudder threw his on as well, prised himself out of the van and joined his comrade, hunched and leaping across the concrete like an orangutan.
They crept through the weeds of the garden, Scudder struggling to quell the fish-beer-chips-nicotine nausea in his stomach. The girls had left the door open, so there was no need for broken glass. They entered the shambles of a house, barely registering the stench of female sweat, spent booze, burnt sugar or delinquent housekeeping. Or the distinctive odor of gas.
“Ye search down the stairs, I’ll search up the stairs,” MacAfee said.
“Right ye are.”
Scudder skipped over what he suspected was a pile of sick on the carpet and scanned the overturned furniture of the sitting room. No joy. He made his way to the spartan kitchen. He gripped the door frame as his head suddenly spun. Was it the alcohol or the sight of the way they lived? He couldn’t imagine dining in such filth.
He realized through the fug of his mind he was still chomping the unlit cigarette, and went to the stove to light up. He pushed aside the dirty pots and rags, some sopping with the stench of licorice and liquor, to locate a burner. As he turned the knob and leaned in to the gas flame, turning so his face wouldn’t erupt into flames, he spied through the eyeholes of his ski-mask a case of canned vegetables in what he guessed was their ‘garbage corner.’
“MacAfee!” he called, making as much of a bee-line as his drunken feet would allow.
He pawed through the cans, but the labels were in English. He had seen the cans with the Semtex, and they had godless foreign letters which real people had no use for.
Perplexed, he turned and—
—shrieked like a schoolgirl.
“What the bleeding feck—?” MacAfee roared from the door. “The cooker’s in flames!”
Scudder whimpered at the fire spitting across the top of the stove, the plumes of smoke pouring from the absinthe-soaked rags and the oven.
“Gas fire—water or no?” MacAfee wailed, running back and forth to the sink in indecision and sweat.
They screamed as the fire leaped from the oven and attacked the grill above, devoured the grease-spattered wallpaper behind and lunged for the ratty curtains above the sink. The curtains dissolved in sputters and flames as the oven door burst open and spewed fire onto the linoleum, slick with spilled absinthe. Amidst the bubbling of plastic and popping of wood, fiery trails raced through the kitchen and nipped at their toes, then bit at their kicking, stomping boots. The fire gobbled up the hallway carpet.
“Let’s clear the feck outta here!” MacAfee wailed.
Yelping as his fingers clawed the scalding backdoor knob, MacAfee spilled into the back garden, Scudder on his rear. Behind them, 5 Murphy Crescent danced with flames.
Scudder turned to MacAfee as they tore through the sopping bedsheets on the clothing line and trampled through the hedges into the neighboring garden.
“I guess we’ll have to use that new shipment of Semtex I picked up from the market yesterday,” he said.
MacAfee stared, the flames of the house sparkling in his eyes of disbelief.
“Ye mean ye picked up more explosives and didn’t tell me?”
“Aye, they was delivered in a case of pregnancy tests from Albania.”
“Why the bloody feck did we just risk life and limb to— Ye eejit! Ye flimmin eejit!”
Scudder cowered as MacAfee’s fists rained down upon the dullness of his skull.
Four and a half hours later, Dymphna and Bridie clomped through the dusk yelling out the chorus of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Bridie wore one shoe and the inside of Dymphna’s handbag was sopping with sick, someone’s or her own she’d never recall.
“Ak, I luv ye, Bdie, ye’re de bess maten th world, so y’r, an donche mind wha tht mingin geebag in de club loos ws sayin boutye. In...intnsv care, she’s now, so...”
“Dmna, but...Dmna, luk a th state o yer hous!”
Bridie’s finger poked through the air as if it were treacle. Her boozy eyes ballooned as much as they could to comprehend what they were seeing.
“Hw’re we ment t sleep ther?”
Her mouth weeped with paralytic laughter.
“Hly Mary, muther o God!” Dymphna gasped, stunned before the charred frame of the house. “Dd we brn th hous dwn? Ws tht not a hllucnation, bt?”
“Yr mammy’llbe ragin!”
“Ak,” Dymphna said with a shrug. “A wee xtra hous, soit ws. W’ve nother right round de cornr.”
They held each other up from falling down from the force of their laughter as they staggered around the hedges to the remaining Flood family home.
“Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa!”
CHAPTER 53
FIONNUALA, PADDY, DYMPHNA, Padraig, Siofra, Seamus and Maureen trudged around the corner toward the stench of carbon, the water from the fire hoses, and the rocks the children had thrown at the fire engine. Standing before the shell of the Flood family home, Maureen made the sign of the cross and muttered an expletive-laden prayer to the Virgin Mary. Paddy bit his knuckles, and a strange whimper escaped his throat. It caused them all alarm.
“It must’ve been them gas pipes, Daddy,” Dymphna offered. “Or some leak from the cooker in the scullery.”
They inspected her with their eyes.
Fionnuala took charge and chased away the pre-pubescent scavengers who were picking over the remains of 5 Murphy, and then the family marched through the smoldering threshold to do just that themselves. They poked their heads into the sitting room. The only thing not burnt was the fireplace.
“Mammy, everything’s burnt!” Seamus said, lower lip trembling.
“Ta for stating the obvious, ye daft git,” Fionnuala snapped.
“Me clothes! Me toys!” Siofra whimpered, eyes brimming with tears.
“I’ve to save them electronics of mines!” Padraig said, disappearing into the sooty gloom up what was left of the stairs.
“Aye, me and all!” Fionnuala agreed, following him with a speed that made the others marvel.
The damage doesn’t be too bad up here, sure, Fionnuala thought to herself. The fire had petered out as it reached the second floor, and as Fionnuala squelched up the fire-ravaged stairs carpet, she could make out more and more primroses in the wallpaper, until at the landing it seemed as new as it had fifteen years earlier. Siofra ran into her room, Dymphna to hers, and Maureen and her cane were on the second step but making progress.
“Them wanes from the neighborhood has nicked all me gear,” Padraig seethed, inspecting the dust bunnies and much worse under his bed.
“Och, for the love of—!” Fionnuala despaired, Malta receding and disconnection notices looming.
They reconvened in the hallway, Dymphna holding a brown rattle that used to be orange, Siofra her Barbie that hadn’t had a head in months, but now was headless and burnt. Maureen clutched her heaving chest and sobbed into the charred pant leg of the purple velour track suit she saved for special family outings and Holy Days.
“All me clothing!” Maureen sobbed. “Fit for the bin. What am I to wear now?”
In their misery, the others couldn’t help but stare at the woman; they were all sick to the back teeth of the green tracksuit that left Maureen’s body only for the half-hour of her thrice-weekly bath.
“M-mammy, ye never change them clothes of yers, but,” Fionnuala pointed out.
“That’s as may be,” Maureen sniped, her arms suddenly a fortress around the offending green item in which she was clad. “It’s nice to have the option, but. And now that’s been ripped from me.”
“Thank the Virgin Mary I took me gear round yers for to be washed,” Dymphna said, then bit her fist as they all glared.
Fionn
uala, sick of their misery, hurried into each of the bedrooms, tore open the drawers of the wardrobes and made a quick inventory. The clothing inside all was crusty with sooty bits, smoke-damaged or waterlogged, or a bit of all three. She stepped back onto the landing, holding up the best clothing from each person.
“Grand and lovely, they’ll be, after a spin in the washing machine and some love.”
“I kyanny wear that minging gear,” Padraig said. “A laughing stock, I’ll be. Even more so than now.”
“Och, we can get werselves down to Oxfam. The charity shop has loads of lovely—”
“Naw, Mammy, naw!” Siofra screamed, tears of frustration pouring down her sooty face. “Not clothing from Oxfam!”
“Watch yerself, wane,” Fionnuala said, hand hovering to strike.
“It’s not fair, but, Mammy!” Siofra sobbed with a stamp of the foot. “Why hasn’t all yer gear and belongings gone up in flames? Why was we shunted to this house with no telly or radio while you and me daddy lived with all them things all others has.”
Fionnuala pinched her lips.
“Ye mind the squeals of joy from youse wanes when we suggested youse move around the corner here? Like Christmas morn round Richard Branson’s, so it was.”
“That was before ye sold all the things what makes a house livable in, but,” Padraig said. “We’ve not even toothbrushes that works now, Mammy.”
Fionnuala was in shock.
“Catch yerself on, wane! When have youse ever gladly brushed yer teeth?”
Siofra touched her mouth; it suddenly seemed overflowing with filthy teeth.
“I want a non-burnt toothbrush now!” Siofra sobbed. “Now!”
“Dear God in Heaven give me strength,” Fionnuala muttered. “New toothbrushes be’s last on me list of necessities at the moment.”
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 56