Louella's skeletal fingers slipped into her purse.
Ursula turned—
and screamed at the gun in Louella's fist.
CHAPTER TWO—DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND
FIONNUALA FLOOD OPENED the door to the pub and felt her breasts were in sudden danger. She shot a hand protectively to the bright flowers of her sopping shirt, the other slammed shut the door. She heaved the wicker basket up and dragged her startled husband down the cobblestones.
“What's up with ye, woman?” Paddy asked, his breath heavy with the stench of cheap drink. “Was the pub full of Proddies?”
“I never thought me mouth would ever utter it, but a pub of Protestant bastards would have been more welcome.”
She peered around the corner of the city walls and took a tentative step under the Mountains of Mourne Gate towards the drunken roars and screams and sounds of breaking glass. Night was encroaching through the buckets of rain, and with it the usual danger of their neighborhood, the Moorside, next to the city center, but Fionnuala would rather be threatened by a hopped-up hooligan's sharpened screwdriver than...that! She shuddered her disgust and rage, the image of the unseemly mannish women leering at her still burned on the backs of her corneas. She turned, picked up a rock and made to fling it at the pub window. Paddy rushed over.
“Are ye soft in the head?” he yelled, grabbing the flying flesh of her underarm and hauling it back.
“Lemme at the sinful beasts!” Fionnuala snarled into his greasy stubble. “Lemme smash that flimmin window!”
Paddy wouldn't. Fionnuala tried to launch the rock as best her fingers, struggling inside Paddy's fist, could. It toppled to the ground and trundled two inches. Fionnuala's eyes bored their rage into Paddy's like two icepicks.
“Ach, ye're a gobshite, so ye are!”
“Flinging rocks at yer age!” he tutted. “Ye headbin! Do ye want the Filth after ye?”
Fionnuala shook the rain from her bleached ponytails and considered. She had been a spotty, gawky teen when she had last flung a rock; the target had been a British land rover barreling down the street of her childhood, and, yes, a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as the police had been called in those days, had hauled her in to the Filth Shop. She had gotten off with a warning, and hadn't even spent time in a holding cell—they had propped her up in the corridor against a beware-of-unattended-parcels poster—but thirty years later she still winced at the memory of the walloping her mother Maureen had given her arse with the fireplace poker; the extreme punishment had been less for attempting to harm British soldiers than spotlighting the family to the Protestant police. Nowadays, the Filth were called the Police Service of Northern Ireland—the PSNI—and a few Catholics had joined their ranks, but they were still to be avoided like Pet Shop Boys CDs. And lesbians, for that matter.
“Wall-to-wall with unseemly bean-flickers that flimming pub was. I blame the Yanks, so I do.”
Paddy stared wistfully behind him.
“Shall we not count how much we've collected for them bills before we make wer way to the next pub?” he suggested.
Paddy reached to the basket dangling from her elbow. Bills were indeed long overdue, and they had been going pub to pub to earn what they could; except for the packs of Eastern-bloc cigarettes, there hadn't been many takers. Few in Derry seemed to have use for the urinal cakes, fake Fabergé eggs and jam jars filled with homemade toothpaste Fionnuala thought would be must-haves. She had noticed toothpaste had gotten expensive at the Derry branch of the Top Yer Trolly superstore and had gone creative in the family kitchen with baking soda, salt, a few drops of water and the spice rack; she had not only spearmint and cinnamon flavored for sale, but also nutmeg and paprika. The enterprise stank of desperation, and that's because it was.
A trio of surly teens with shaved heads rounded the corner, fists curled, ready for post-pub violence, the more casual and senseless the better. They eyed the basket.
“On the scrounge, are youse?” one asked over the techno music blaring from the headphones around his neck.
Fionnuala yelped as the basket was wrenched from her arm, almost dislocating her elbow.
“Let's see what ye have there, gran.”
They pounced on the basket. Fionnuala screamed her rage and anguish as they broke the jars of toothpaste against the wall and stamped on the eggs. A third shoved Paddy to the ground as he tried to intervene.
“Outta wer way, gramps.”
“Would youse look at that, hi? Free fags!” one 'marveled' from his hood, scooping up the remaining packs of cigarettes. “Ta for the fags, youse.”
“The rest be's useless shite, but,” the third said. As Paddy struggled to prise himself from the slivers of egg, he pushed him back down and spat his contempt all down the front of his lapels.
And then they were gone. Paddy roared abuse at their disappearing backs and, looking down at the spittle, figured the rain would wash it away. Alternately saddened and furious at the sight of all her hard work dripping down the walls in mint and spice globs, Fionnuala gathered up the now-soaked urinal cakes.
A gaggle of roaring, lager-infused girls, feeding on styrofoam containers of soggy chips and looking to inflict pain on anyone who looked at them the wrong way with the heels of their stilettos, swam past, casting Fionnuala looks as if she were a hooker and Paddy a john trolling on a budget. The girls erupted with the cruel laughter of the young.
“Would ye look at the state of yer woman's hair? Piggin wile-looking, so it is!”
“I wouldn't let me granny step foot in the street dressed like me, so I wouldn't.”
“Has she no mirrors in her house, hi?”
“Aye, and yer man the wannabe Elvis with her.”
“Shakin Stevens, do ye not mean?”
Their hoots of mirth echoed as they rounded the corner, singing and clapping along to “Green Door.” Paddy and Fionnuala looked at each other. While Paddy wondered how the girls knew of the UK #1 by the rockabilly artist of the early 80's, let alone the lyrics, another thread of his jumbled thoughts made him think his drink intake was causing him to hallucinate. In the dim yellow of the lamppost yards away, and even with the raindrops spattering his wife's face, Paddy thought he could make out tears rolling down her cheeks. He stood in shock. Fionnuala was usually unflappable.
He knew the city center was a magnet for the youth of the day, but there hadn't been such violence and contempt from youngsters when Paddy had been one three decades earlier. He and Fionnuala were hardly the aged, after all!
“Let's make wer way to the city walls,” Paddy suggested with a pat on her shivering shoulders, “for a wee bit of privacy.”
They had been avoiding the Moorside stretch of the City Walls on their selling spree, as they wanted to avoid the twin dangers of slipping on stale vomit and maneuvering through lakes of fresh urine. But now they seemed a refuge. After the Free Derry wall, the world-famous icon of a violent past, the city's historic Walls were the second stop on a disappointed tourist's itinerary; the third stop was usually a pub. Winding around the inner city and resplendent with bastions and bulwarks, battlements and parapets, an artillery of cannons poking out, they were built in the 1600s to protect against invaders. During the Troubles, they had been a no-go zone imposed by the invading British troops as they were a marvelous vantage point for snipers, festooned with barbed wire in the 70s, razor wire in the 80s. Since the Peace Process of the mid-90s, when the hated British troops had gone home, the walls had been restored and polished, and now rose proud and masterful to carry on the tradition of protecting their citizens. They were now open for public use, not only historic and beautiful, but also functional, and put them to use the public did with a vengeance. While in other areas of the city they were fine, here in the hardened and deprived Moorside they were a delightful, romantic location for the ingestion of recreational drugs and underage drinking, and excellent for muggings. And in some corners the use was more pubic than public.
Mounting the ancient
steps and climbing up the ramp, Paddy and Fionnuala wound their way through droppings they hoped were dog, not human, and declined the wares of the two drug dealers that approached them from the darkness in quick succession. Fionnuala headed to the cannon against which she had lost her virginity decades earlier, and around which other acned, drunk and sopping teens were now in various stages of doing the same.
Fionnuala sat on the cannon and cried into the urinal cakes, huge alarming sobs that seemed better suited exiting the jowls of an injured animal of large stature. Paddy stared at some slate. He didn't know how to comfort his wife. She wasn't one for coddling or cuddling. His fingers reached out nevertheless through the rain towards her shivering shoulder. She smacked them away and wrapped her drenched cardigan around her. She reached into her stocking for the money hidden there and counted it. Her sadness dissolved to anger.
“Seventeen pound fifty-eight pee. We're never gonny make them bills. And now we've nothing left to sell. What didn't help us, Paddy, was that every pub we went in, ye ran over to the bar and bought yerself a pint. Slipping through wer fingers, the money be's.”
Paddy wavered back and forth before her.
“What was I meant to do? Stand there with nothing in me hand?”
“Aye!”
Fionnuala didn't fault her husband for being drunk; many people she knew often were. But he could've controlled himself in places where the markup of lager was so high, and should've taken along a flask of whiskey or waited until he got home to the cheaper beer sitting in the family fridge.
“Ach, Paddy, what's become of wer town? ” Fionnuala moaned, sucking back the mucus that trickled from her nostrils. After the flicker of rage, the sadness was back. Finally, it seemed, the fight had gone out of her, the misery of life evident on her overbite. Paddy tried to focus on her face below him, his black hair slicked back with grease and rain. A raindrop fell from his nose. Fionnuala fondled some wicker as she continued: “The holes in me tights be's repaired with nail polish, we've the gas and electric and phone and telly people breathing down wer necks every hour God sends. And Lorcan and Eoin showing up at the same time like that. They could've had the decency to stagger their releases. It be's as if the prison service be's making fun of me, wer two sons suddenly materializing in me house like that, strangers to us all after their time locked up at her Majesty's pleasure.”
The older, 21-year-old Lorcan, had been sent down for grievous bodily harm, and the former altar boy Eoin, 18, had turned drug dealer. When they were fresh convicts, their mother had been all for visiting them in prison, but the novelty had quickly worn off. And then she had been barred for smuggling Vicodin in for Lorcan to either use or sell. She thought she'd be pleased, excited even, to have them back home. But, no.
“Unemployable, them eejits be's, and I kyanny believe the bloody size of em both after their stints banged up. And we've the other three wanes and me mother thrown into the mix and all, crammed into them two beds, sleeping heads against toes. And when they're awake, stomachs insatiable, jaws gaping wide, ready for mounds of food to be thrown down em. And expecting us to provide for the lot of em! Yer paycheck from the fish packing plant can stretch only so far.”
Fionnuala thought for a second, trying to add up how many teeth Seamus, 6, Siofra, 9, and Padraig, 12, had between them in those mouths of theirs, then realized she'd have to subtract her mother's from the total, as they were fake, and then add the teeth of Lorcan and Eoin also. She gave up. Her eyes flashed with anger.
“That hateful sister of yers, Ursula, be's to blame for wer current woes!”
Paddy blinked. He couldn't think how his older sister was responsible for anything now, especially after Fionnuala had persecuted Ursula so much she had fled with her American husband to his homeland the year before. “...Ursula?”
“Aye! The cunt! Torturing me across the miles! I had time to go through it in me mind the other day while out hanging up the washing. Wer lives have been spiraling ever downward since she won that lotto years back—”
“It was Jed that won the lotto. And do I have to remind ye, they paid wer mortgage off for us, then gave us the family house and all—”
“Aye, that's what I'm on about. A false sense of security, her lotto win gave us. And moving all the wanes into 5 Murphy Crescent around the corner got me and you used to the luxury of living two to a house. I wouldn't have forced me mammy to up sticks and move into the extra house to look after the wanes if we hadn't been given it, like. And when the house burned down, back they all tramped, me mother included, into space we'd gotten used to living in alone! If ye hadn't let them insurance payments lapse, we might've got a windfall out of the accident. Naw, but—”
As she babbled on and on further details about the injustice of Ursula not handing over all the Barnett's lotto winnings to her and how useless he was to her as a husband, how useless he had been for the 23 years they had been wed, Paddy reflected on the year before, when Fionnuala demanded he pass the picket line and become a scab at the fish packing plant where he worked. He still had no mates in Derry because of it, and the men on the factory floor—they had come back to work after three weeks on strike without any of their demands being met—still put salt in his tea, sugar in his sandwiches in the canteen, and elbowed him in the ribs when he passed them to get to a mixing and grinding machine. They had dyed his work overalls pink, and his locker was sprayed with anti-Paddy graffiti. But that was preferable to the persecution Fionnuala would have put him through if he hadn't crossed the picket line. He had seen what his wife put his sister Ursula through.
Paddy suddenly knew what to do. It was the alcohol affecting his judgment, he was somehow aware, and he knew he would regret it in the harsh bright light of sobriety when he woke the next afternoon, but it was time a few home truths were told: Fionnuala tainted everything she touched and everyone she met. And he had had 23 years of wedded hell to analyze her and knew why the lotto win had rankled as it had. Fionnuala was always aware in the back of her mind that she was disadvantaged. The lotto win had spotlighted it. And, as a family member, even though she was only an in-law, she figured she was entitled to a piece of the action. She insisted on a life she would never have, an entitlement to which she was not born, the Heggarty clan of thugs and petty criminals, always feeling in her mind she would claw her way from abject poverty to the glossy spreads of the lifestyle magazines she loved so. Not only that, she needed to put herself on a workout regime as well. The Lord alone knew he had difficulty keeping down the sick when the pull of his libido demanded he take her at night. He parted his lips to tell her everything.
CHAPTER THREE
URSULA SQUASHED THE fritter in fright as the gun inched towards her nose. She backed into the china cabinet. Muffins leaned forward and licked the barrel.
“W-what have I ever done to ye?” Ursula blubbered, a look on her face as if she were struggling to comprehend why Louella would want to shoot her point blank, so she would die there in the living room on the verge of their getaway. “Are ye soft in the head?”
Louella clacked her teeth in scorn, though part of her brain knew exactly why she might want to shoot Ursula, her husband's secret paramour. “I'm not shooting you, sweetie. I'm just showing you the weapon I'm bringing along, protection for our trip. I was thinking more of shooting out the tires if a cruiser started chasing us down the highway. To give us more time to get away sort of thing. I ordered it online from the store's suppliers when Slim and Jed weren't looking.”
They were partners of a store, Sinkers, Scorchers, Shooters and Beef Jerky, which sold fish tackle and bait, hot sauce, guns and, of course, beef jerky (a recent addition). The gun was a feminine, slimline pistol that no macho hunter would be caught dead with.
“Och,” Ursula spat, softening her grip on the fritter and Muffins' paws. “Don't be daft. It's crimes of the past that be's giving us such grief, and now ye be's wanting to engage in new crimes the coppers can persecute us for? The clicking of time be's wer only chance
of escape. And, anyroad, ye've only half a brain if ye think we can smuggle that past all them security checks at the airport.”
Louella's face fell; she quite liked the heft of it in her hand. And the fright it had given Ursula.
“And,” Ursula continued, pulling out the plug of the Ionic Breeze air purifier, “if that was yer plan, ye could've had a lend of the Glock Jed got for me last year. Ye mind he give it me when I thought that madwoman from the casino was stalking me?”
“Come on, girls!” Slim called from the hallway. “The car's loaded.”
Ursula grabbed the pistol from Louella and plopped it inside a replica Ming vase. She shoved Muffins in his cage, then the two raced into the hallway, where Ursula paused to grab her keys, her purse, the bags from Dunkin Donuts and her well-thumbed copy of Lotto Balls of Shame. And they were out the door.
Fumes plumed from the station wagon’s exhaust pipe. Jed and Slim had heaved up the suitcases and suffered through the sleet to the station wagon, yelping at the icy bits pelting their faces. Jed had had to chase after his cowboy hat when it blew into the circle of garden gnomes Ursula had demanded he install.
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