She launched a pillow at him. Richard the dick was now a condescending prick.
“In the staff canteen if you must know. Clara from accounts told me she heard it from the one who brings the toner for the photocopier. Or maybe it was MI-6?”
“And Clara from accounts knows everything, does she? I've never heard anything so ridiculous. She needs to get herself a life. You know I’d tell you myself if something like that was true. I’ve told you all about the ship’s boiler problems, and that she probably will never pull into her final port, which is still a bit of a mystery to us. Perhaps Puerto Rico, we’re working on it now. But, dear, I can assure you,” he nibbled on her neck as he fought the urge to laugh. “There's nothing cloak and dagger about the Queen of Crabs, no MI-5. Haw! Haw! Haw! Or MI-6 for that matter. Haw! Haw! Haw! Hilarious!”
She hit him with another pillow to stop his horsey laughter. Then they made love again, Anthea this time, definitely, finally, against her better instincts.
CHAPTER 20—SIDIT IFNIN, MOROCCO
THE FLOODS CLUTCHED each other's hands in fear, a buddy system set up from the terror of being sideswiped by the clunky scooters and rusty, dust-encrusted cars from the 70s that came at their bodies from all angles. There were no traffic lights in sight, and absolutely no pedestrian crossings. Dymphna had to be quick with the stroller as one wheel always stuck in the endless expanse of crumbling, rutted muck that passed for their sidewalks and roads. The stroller bucked and jostled as if Dymphna kept tossing it down flights of stairs. The babies shrieked like they were being slaughtered. The adults ignored the noise and craned their necks for snake charmers, belly dancers and men with monkeys on their shoulders. They couldn’t find any.
They tramped through wilting palm trees and traffic cones with the roar of pneumatic drills skewering their brains and the dust flying up, and they clamored over broken bricks and barriers and homemade bridges of planks of wood set up to get the indigenous population over the many ditches. They paused for breath in a circle of cement mixers, the sweat lashing down their wool-clad bodies. Even Dymphna, who was partial to the heat of the tanning bed at home before it got broken, was finding it hard going, finding it difficult to force air into her lungs. She didn’t know if this was due to the hellish heat or the dust that gave the air a brownish tinge. She wondered if she should have worn the bikini her mother had made after all.
Paddy wiped his brow with a well-soiled handkerchief and shoved it back in his pocket. He thought he had entered the land of the insane, men in long dresses mincing by as if it were the natural state of things, and a traitor Arab McDonalds and a matching KFC with their signs in strange foreign letters instead of the real ones. He knew they were McDonalds and KFC by the golden arches and the Colonel’s face. Why the people of this land didn't use letters like normal people Paddy couldn’t comprehend, and there didn't seem to be a way to distinguish a big letter, a capital, from a small one.
Paddy raised his hands imploringly to the sunbolt-ridden air ripe with filth above him. “Why the bleeding hell do they think we'd want to tour the city if it doesn’t be fully built yet?”
There were plenty of hard hats, but they only saw two fezes; indeed, Dymphna grabbed her daddy’s arm and pointed at them, but they belonged to the doormen of the Sheraton that they didn’t dare enter, and which seemed to have the only sidewalk of the city in front of it. Leaving the pavement, they stumbled, literally, into a market next to a row of overflowing dumpsters that smelled like they were stuffed with rotting body parts.
They pushed past stalls bearing fruit and vegetables they had never seen the likes of in the Derry Top-Yer-Trolley produce section. Fionnuala’s lips curled. Her brain wavered between repulsion and fear. She shackled her handbag to her hipbone. She didn’t like this new land. The natives that jostled her to get at look at the bizarre wares were unbathed and unbaptized, their teeth disgusting (!). Vendors thrust items at her she didn’t know were use or ornament. She was well out of her comfort zone in a place she loved, a market, as the scams pulled on this side of the globe were unknown to her. She was away from home with what was sure to be a confusing exchange rate. Math hadn’t been her strongest subject in school, just like spelling, biology, home economics, physical education and making friends, so she was unsure what were bargains and what were rip-offs, unaware how to get in on the action herself. Plus, she had none of the local Monopoly money. Paddy had bagged a tenner of the local currency from one of the kitchen staff, and she didn’t know if it would buy one souvenir or fifty. Though why she might want a reminder of this bedlam of sinners on the fireplace mantel at home next to her good Christian knickknacks like the little bottle of holy water from Knock and the plaster statue of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes she couldn’t now fathom.
“C’mere youse,” Dymphna said, “there’s a café over there, hi! Let’s have tea outside on the verandah, shall we?”
“Tea?” Paddy asked. “In this heat? Ye’re mad, you!”
“Verandah?” Fionnuala stared at her daughter.
“There be’s a special way they pour it. Fabrizio told me.”
The parents reluctantly followed their daughter through the wrought-iron barrier onto the terrace where a few men sat, each at a table alone, and all wearing sunglasses and staring at newspapers, an espresso cup at their elbows. How could they read their strange script, and with sunglasses? The tepid breeze from the overhead fans and the ashtray on the table comforted them. Dymphna wheeled the stroller of shrieks to a table by a potted palm tree and they sat down. Fionnuala fanned herself with her hand.
A grown man dressed in what looked like women’s silk embroidered pajamas approached them with what they assumed were menus. Paddy tried to hide a factory-floor culture snigger.
“Tea for three,” Dymphna said, smiling brightly.
The waiter disappeared. They lit up and smoked in what silence they could as they swiped fat flies from their flesh. The men at the tables kept glancing at the screaming stroller, annoyed. Dymphna scrabbled in the stroller to locate two pacifiers and forced them between Keanu and Beeyonsay’s lips. The waiter reappeared and placed an ornate silver tray before them, on it a teapot with a massive spout even Granny Heggarty’s best tea service didn’t have. He placed one thin and pagan-looking teacup and saucer in one hand, held the teapot over his right shoulder, and poured. The tea flowed like a waterfall into the cup.
“Moroccan way,” he said.
Dymphna found it sexy. And the waiter too. She loved the look of ‘natural eyeliner’ his eyes seemed to have, and the slicked back jet black hair. She arranged her breasts as seductively as she could in their tattered woolen strands and puckered her lips in a suggestive smile, but, as he poured the final cup, she couldn’t meet his eyes to exchange a look which said ‘let’s meet in a darkened corridor out the back away from me parents and me wanes,’ as his eyes seemed to be watering up. Dymphna also detected the familiar almighty stench rising again off the babies as the rest of the family stewed in the heat and reached for the dainty handles of their teacups. The waiter scurried off indoors.
Fionnuala slipped the disposable camera out of the purse she gripped as if it might fly away any second. She twisted the Quick Snap nervously in her fingers, trying to choose which passing native she might trust to take the family vacation snapshot. It would have to be someone with one foot in the grave, preferably with a walking aide of some sort, as there was no way the infirm would make off with it down the ‘street’ without Fionnuala not catching up with them. She took a sip of tea and considered.
She didn’t trust any of the men, it seemed like they were all wearing eyeliner—she remembered when your man, Phil Oakey, from the Human League had worn it on Top of the Pops on the telly while singing ‘Don’t You Want Me’—she couldn’t believe it was the Christmas Number One of 1981, when there were loads of songs about sleigh rides and mistletoe out there. Disgraceful!—and she had ejected a handful of Brussels sprouts (she had been clearing the dinner table at her mothe
r's house) at the screen and yelled ‘poofter’ at him. And she shuddered when she thought of his New Wave hairdo at the time, long on one side and short on the other. What had he been thinking?!
And the women were even stranger, no not the two tatty dancing slags from the Human League, but the ones parading before her now in Morocco. The female foreign heathens passed them on the dirt sidewalk with napkins wrapped around their heads, and not those cheap flimsy kinds they handed over the counter of Kebabalicious in Derry with such reluctance, but the fancy cloth kind her mother used to have in the family home in Creggan Heights and brought out with such pride for christenings and prison releases and other special family occasions But what use were the napkins wrapped around their heads? Fionnuala wondered. They could hardly reach up and clean their mouths with them. If any of them had any sense of decent Christian cleanliness. Of which she doubted they had any.
“I’ve to use the loo,” Fionnuala suddenly decided.
Her husband and daughter looked stricken.
“Here?!” Dymphna squealed.
She withered under her mother’s glare and inspected the liquid in her teacup.
“Ye should’ve gone before ye left the ship, love,” Paddy said, a pat on her hand.
Fionnuala snapped it away and stood, fuming at the insensitivity of her husband and Dymphna. It was a natural bodily function that needed to be performed when necessary, after all. She made her way through darkened corridors searching for a door that looked like it might contain toilet bowls. She adjusted her peacock feathers. She found a likely door, but it was locked. She stood in misery for a few minutes. The door finally unlocked, but when she saw who came out, she was afraid to go in. She decided to wait until she got back on the ship. The glimpse of a dark hole on the floor she was meant to squat over didn’t help. She was horrified. Back on the terrace, she plastered a look of content on her face as if she had done her business.
“C’mere til I tell youse,” she said, the content now a sneer. She sat back down on her chair at an angle, the urge still desperate between her legs. “Themmuns have misspelled all their English, so they have. Foolish fecking foreign cunts. Ye should’ve seen how they've spelled toilets, for the love of God! T-O-I-L-E-T-T-E-S. Eejits! Eejits, I tell youse, and what the bloody feck does them SORTIE signs be’s pointing to with arrows all over the place? I kept going through them SORTIE doors to see what sorties be’s, but themmuns only leads outside!”
Dymphna remembered something from history class, old Mr. O'Leary babbling on and on about Chapter 15, called The Age of Colonialism and Empiricism, in the coma-inducing textbook, about Morocco belonging to the French in the past. The only thing of use she had learned from the chapter, and it still rankled, was that Derry was somehow caught up in history...still! due to a crumbling British Empire. And though she had flunked French twice, she knew that sortie meant ‘exit’ and toilette was ‘toilet,’obviously.
They screamed and spilled their tea as a unit as three natives clambered past the wrought iron that kept the Floods pent in safely. One seemed to be selling shoe shines, another, a box hanging around his neck, a supply of tissues, imitation designer watches and belts and scents and sunglasses, travel kits with toenail clippers and Q-Tips. The third pointed eagerly at a camel chewing in the heat. The Floods were three pale people with arms clasped around them. The men smiled down at them.
“I am Haddou.”
“I am Youssef.”
“I am Abderrahmane. I am Berber from Agadir.”
“And what the bleeding feck is that meant to mean?” Fionnuala wanted to know. It was English she had never encountered before.
“I shine your shoes,” Youssef said, pointing to the table under Paddy. “You need.”
“Naw, ye’re alright, mate,” Paddy said. He knew he needed, but he didn’t know if the tenner would even cover the tea.
“You want Rolex, lovely young miss?” Abderrahmane asked Dymphna. “Or Calvin Klein One?”
Dymphna stared longingly, but knew she had no money.
“I give you camel ride?” Haddou asked Fionnuala.
“Are ye flimmin deranged? Riddled with diseases, that beast looks.”
“Or tour of city? Best tour of city for best price. I promise. From my heart.” Haddou beat his chest. “Bismillah!”
Paddy’s ears perked at Bismillah. Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was one of his favorite songs, even after he had learned the shocking news the lead singer was an arse bandit. His arms fell to the table. He could tell his daughter fancied two of them, if her fluttering eyelashes and positioning of female parts was anything to go by. They seemed nice people, and a tour of the city on a camel would be exotic and fun. But he was too embarrassed to admit he didn’t have the money for anything.
“Special price, city tour, three for one,” Haddou said.
“How about swab for ear?” Abderrahmane asked.
He sidled up to Fionnuala, his box next to her cleavage.
“I know you want Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds.”
“Och, sure, that’s me mammy’s fav—”
“Clear the feck off, ye cunts!” Fionnuala cut Dymphna off. Yes, White Diamonds was her favorite, but she was penniless in this land, and the anger of her destitution got the best of her. “I’ll clatter the living shite outta youse if ye doesn’t leave us in peace! Waiter! Waiter! Themmuns is trying to grapple me private parts!”
The merchants scattered, taking the camel with them. The men at the tables grunted and pulled their newspapers closer to their noses.
“What?!” Fionnuala admonished Paddy and Dymphna with a glare that make them cower. They glumly inspected their tea. “The only reason I haven’t gone back to the safety of the ship long ago be’s I know I’ve nothing there waiting for me but corridor after endless corridor of rooms to scour. By meself.”
She saw next to the barrier a native girl the same age as traitor Siofra pawing the dirt with a stick, a form of play, she supposed.
“Away, away with ye! Shoo! Shoo yerself outta here!” Fionnuala waved her off like the mongrel she thought she was. The girl scampered away. Fionnuala turned to husband and daughter. “What does her mammy be thinking anyroad? Sending a wee wane out on the streets like that to scavage amongst the danger and the filth.”
Dymphna’s head shot up. She didn’t know if it was the heat or the hangover or the fear her maidenly delights were waning. A relentless stream of dark male eyes had been inspecting her as they passed without even a lecherous grin. She had heard there was no alcohol in this land, but did the men also not have casual anonymous sex? Was that possible? Her brain couldn’t comprehend what she was feeling. Should she cover herself up or strip off? So deranged were her thoughts at the moment, she challenged her mother.
“Ye mean just like ye do to wer Siofra? The poor wee 9-year-old wane that should be here with us now, seeing the world? The daughter of yers who ye couldn’t give a cold shite in Hell about?”
“I’m sick to me back teeth hearing ye yammering on about the clarty wee toerag!”
“I’m only looking out for ye, sure, Mammy. Child Protective Services, and all that.”
“Look somewheres else.”
As Paddy looked on, amazed, Dymphna tried to make her mother see the sense of alerting the authorities. Fionnuala was having none of it.
“Ye know the problems I have, we all have, speaking to them what has uniforms on. And I don’t want to disturb the smarmy pricks, as after all their effort, after finding wer Siofra, the wee bitch just says she run off just to spite her mammy! I’ll never live down the mortification, burning red for weeks me cheeks’ll be. Everything that wee geebag does be’s to spite me!”
“We could at least search for her.”
“If ye think I’d get down on me hands and knees and crawl through pipes and bang me head on other innards of the ship searching for the mindless gobshite, ye’ve another think coming. Not after a hard day’s graft scouring away the remnants of seasickness and irritable b
owel syndrome from strangers’ loos. I’m knackered. If ye want to find wer Siofra, look for her fecking yerself. But ye won’t, will ye, and I’ll tell ye why, shall I? Ye be’s too busy spreading yer legs for any male of the species what comes near ye. Ye think I didn’t see ye making eyes at wer waiter? And ye’ve not left that Fabrizio cunt’s bed not half an hour since. God help any man that comes within ten feet of ye, Dymphna, as yer twat be’s like a Venus fly-trap and them strangers todgers be’s the flies ye ensnare, luring em in and snapping down on their bollocks. I’ve spent manys a night wondering about that Beeyonsay of yers. They says wanes born of weemin riddled with syphilis turns out to be spastics, and that Beeyonsay shows all the signs. I've not a clue what perverted winding road to Hell ye think ye're traveling I blame video games and the pop music of the day. I dread the day ye walk through the door of wer family home with yer arm draped around the arm of a filthy coon. Aye! I said it! I'm only saying out loud what we all be's thinking in private and kyanny say in public anymore!”
Dymphna thought of the siblings snatched away from her during her few years on Earth, two brothers to prison and one sister to the altar of Lesbos, her mother’s delinquent child rearing and housekeeping somehow responsible for Lorcan and Eoin turning to crime and for Moira growing up into a pervert. Lorcan and Eoin had just been released, she knew, but they had been hauled off by the coppers as loveable boys and come back strange men. With nothing to do but visit the prison gymnasium, the young ones she had helped her mother raise had been transformed into a hulking, gargantuan creatures the likes of she had only seen on the telly every four years during the Olympics wrestling matches, and even then only from Hungary and Romania.
“I know ye despise me, and maybe ye’ve good call to, like. But ye’re useless as a mother. Aye, useless! Wer Lorcan and Eoin were happy to go to prison. In they went like...like...praying mantises, and out they came as yaks! It’s yer upbringing that to blame. The good Lord knows, ye didn’t think to ask where I was out to at all hours of the night at 14, 15 or 17.”
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