“Or 16,” Paddy corrected.
“Daddy does nothing, aye, it’s not his job, but.” She swatted away a fly.
Paddy suspected he should have been the one to bring all of this up, not his daughter. But Dymphna was young and in the throes of a new love, no matter how misguided it would probably turn out, and her heart was softer; she wanted to right all the wrongs in the world. No matter what the consequences.
As Fionnuala gasped and spat, Paddy was amazed. His daughter was beautiful, that he knew; his dart team mates back in Derry, back when he had them, never tired of telling him when a night was winding down and too many beers had been drunk. Their lechery and their details of what they’d like to do to her had led to a few flying fists with cigarettes still lodged between fingers, had Paddy staggering home with an aching jaw and a fag burn on many a night. But Dymphna had never looked as lovely as she did right now, sticking up for her long-suffering young sister Siofra, even with her pupils like two raisins stuck in pools of bloodied snow, her hair like the tangle of cords and wired behind the telly stand at home, and the faint stench of a foreign stranger’s spent jism on her tongue (Dymphna’s, not Siofra’s). He should stick up for her. He took a breath: “I agree with wer Dymphna.”
Fionnuala shuddered with betrayal. Her face turned the color of rhubarb, and Paddy didn’t know if it was the heat or the anger, as he couldn’t read her face, so many emotions seemed to be vying for attention on it.
“Honestly, Paddy, I could swing for ye sometimes...!”
“But...ye do!”
Smack! Smack! Smack!
“Take that back now!” Fionnuala barked.
Paddy massaged his cheek, and the men inspecting him with bemusement over their papers angered him more than Fionnuala’s slap had.
“And as for ye,” Fionnuala snarled at Dymphna, “ye ungrateful wee slag...!”
Smack! Smack! Smack!
Dymphna didn't flinch, the flesh of her cheek so accustomed to feeling her mother’s palm that the pain receptors located there scarcely bothered to register it any more. She stood up.
“I’m away off back to the ship.”
Paddy scraped his chair against the floor.
“Aye, me and all. And you, love, are making yer own way back.”
“Heartless cunt,” Dymphna muttered under her breath as she flounced off. Paddy’s hand instinctively raised to strike, as it had been taught to to deal with any insult of his wife (by Fionnuala herself), but realized there was now a New Flood World Order. He lowered his hand and wrapped it around his daughter’s arm.
“Och, daddy, I’ve forgot the wanes,” Dymphna whispered.
She turned and went to the terrace for the stroller, and was delighted to see five or six vendors had swooped down on her mother. All she saw were Fionnuala’s hands grabbing the air around their shoulders. She quickly grabbed the stroller and carved a path through the dirt, racing off with her father.
“Traitors!” they heard Fionnuala wail. “Don’t youse leave me here on me lonesome! There’ll be hell to pay, I’m warning youse! Lemme at youse! Traitors! Bloody flimmin feckin traitors! Don’t leave me here with these foreign cunts on me own!”
They didn't dare turn around at the sound of breaking glass, the tinkling of shards, and the sharp roar of anger in foreign tongues. They were leaving Fionnuala as she had left Siofra, in a strange and scary place, abandoned. Fionnuala’s screams were soon drowned out as the call to prayer rang out again from the loudspeakers on the mosque as Paddy and Dymphna and the stroller passed.
“Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar Allaaaaah-aaah-aaah...”
CHAPTER 21
“IF YOU LIKE EM...PAINTED up, powdered up, then you outta be glad...
“Cause your good girl’s...gonna go bad!”
Slim and Louella finished off their massacre of the Tammy Wynette classic with little bows. There was a smattering of uninterested applause; it seemed that good old country music wasn't to the taste of the mostly hip-hop audience.
As Louella wiped the sweat of excitement from her face, Slim struggled to slip the microphone back in the stand. He ended up just handing it over to the clawlike hand of the bargain bin drag queen MC that reached out to snatch it back. Slim lumbered and Louella skipped off the stage. They squinted into the spotlights that bored into their liquored eyeballs, and managed, with some bumping and feeling around the blackness for horizontal features, to find their table and the drinks that awaited them.
“Woo hoo! That was great, Lou!” Slim chucked some beer down his throat. Louella fixed her hair and sipped her guava daiquiri, now watery.
It had been, Slim thought, a very copacetic day, and it was turning into a fun night. Except for the songs that every other passenger rapped instead of sang, the existence of a drag queen, and the strange malfunction that attacked the ship when they were on the gangway coming back; Louella had almost been thrown over the handrail. Steering clear of Ursula and Jed for once, they had taken the excursion to Sidit Ifnin, and were now in the ballroom. Out on the deck, they had clutched sweat-drenched palms (their hands, not the trees) and strolled the promenade in the romance of a moonlit night, the lure of exotic foreign fruit in the air, the sloshing of waves against the rotting hull of the ship as it drilled a path through the Atlantic Ocean.
“What a way to see the world, hey, hon?”
Slim nuzzled his jowls against the excessive perspiration of Louella's neck.
“Not in public!” she snapped in her Lutheran propriety, pushing away the advances that were more alcoholic than amorous. But, she had to admit, bubbly with rum, “I loved Morocco! All those palm trees everywhere you looked, and those guides were so fantastic! What were their names again? Haddou and Youssef and...?
“Something foreign.”
“So friendly, and they knew everything about the city! And their American was great! I understood almost everything they said. That foreign church, that mesquite, or whatever they call it, all those pretty designs everywhere, and everyone in the market smiling at us. And they weren't like those ugly Arabs you see on the news after some terrorist arrest. Very handsome! The women, I couldn't tell, with those things on their heads. And I can't wait to hang all those fridge magnets I bought on the fridge back home, especially the one of the red pointy slippers. Pennies, they cost me. Pennies! Everyone that walks into our kitchen's gonna be jealous. And that big square, with the snake charmers and the dancing with tambourines and singing and clapping, and the monkeys dancing along! And the food! What was that mushy stuff that I loved so much?”
“Koo-koo.”
“Yeah, the koo-koo. I want the recipe! And that camel ride! Oh, Slim, you shoulda gotten on it as well! Don't look at me like that, I don't mean at the same time as me, but afterwards. It was so much fun. When I finally got used to how the damn animal walked. And, you know what, Slim, I worked it out on my calculator when we got back. I thought those guys were ripping us off when they told us how much of their money they wanted us to pay. But that whole tour of the city only cost us $7.50! Can you believe it? What a bargain!”
“Maybe I shoulda tipped them more.”
“Like hell you should've! Everything they need to buy's cheap in their country. What are they gonna do with extra money?”
She slurped the last of her daiquiri, grabbed a passing waitress and slurred for another.
“And get him another beer too. Put it on cabin 342's tab.”
The waitress slouched off through the bass beats and second-rate rapping.
“Do you think we should be putting all this on Jed's tab?”
Louella waved drunken, dismissive fingers in the air.
“Aw, they can afford it. Plus, I'm teed off about all that jewelry Ursula keeps getting on her pillow every night. As if getting invited to the captain's table for dinner isn't enough! She already showed me a pelican brooch, a pearl earring, an amethyst choker and a damn weird Egyptian necklace. Why do I only get stupid dang chocolates? And mine from last night was squashed,
and it shoulda been a chocolate-covered cherry, but the cherry was missing.”
“Maybe we shoulda forced Ursula and Jed to come out with us tonight.”
“What did you put her name first for?” Louella's voice was like an ax. Slim shrank slightly from the fierce glare. Her arms folded before her scanty bosom.
The waitress arrived with the drinks, thankfully, and Slim gulped down.
“If you wanna know,” Louella said, her eyes trying hard to focus on his, “if you wanna know, I'm trying hard not to picture the two of you in bed together. I keep trying to get it outta my mind, but the picture keeps coming back.”
She shuddered, her lips, curled with distaste, clamped around the straw and slurped greedily. Slim was shocked.
“Are you outta your mind? Ursula and me? You're nuts!”
“Don't think I don't know,” Louella wiped guava bits from her chin, then pointed a drunken finger in what she thought was the location of his face, “I know what sinful shenanigans you two have been up to behind my back.” It was a grunted whisper of revelation.
“Don't be ridicul—ow!” Slim winced with pain and his hand shot from the beer glass to somewhere behind his mass.“Hell's bells!”
The drunken finger still wavered accusingly below his nose.
“Don't try to change the subject.”
“No, really, honey, there's something wrong. Ow, ow! The pain in my back's been killing me ever since that boat trip.”
He would've doubled over if the table top weren't in his way. He whimpered like a forest animal caught in the metal claws of a trap. Louella's glazed eyes flickered to show she realized something serious was happening.
“Ain't there a hospital on board?” she asked, reaching out and massaging his shuddering shoulders. “There is. I remember on the floor plan. The dispensary, they call it. Oh, my poor Slim. My poor, poor Slim.”
Her coos in his ear weren't going to cure him. His chair legs scraped across the carpet as he struggled to stand.
“We better get there.”
“Can you walk?”
Slim's face was beet red and slick, but relief washed over it as all at once the shooting pains dissolved into a dull ache in his spine. He gripped the edge of the table and moaned with joy, but still his limbs were shuddering from the attack.
“It's gone,” he said.
“I don't care. We're getting you to the doctor and getting you checked out. It was that belaying you had to do on the boat. Oh, Slim! If anything happens to you, I'll wring the neck of that scrawny tour guide! And if there's permanent damage, I'll scream blue murder and sue this ship for everything they have! Just see if I don't!”
“Get the case, hon, and let's go,” Slim instructed. Louella picked up the little suitcase of samples with one hand. Slim had brought the hot sauce along to drum up some business, but there had been no takers. She picked up her daiquiri with the other hand.
“No sense letting this go to waste, after we paid for it.”
She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse, scooped the complimentary peanuts from the dish on the table into it, zipped it tight and forced his beer into his hand.
“And that'll dull the pain if it comes again.”
She wrapped her arm around what she could of his waist, and he leaned in toward her as they made their way through the tables toward the exit.
They staggered down the corridor towards the ship floor plan, clutching the walls for support. Slim realized that, deep within the largeness of his body, the pain in his lower back had started the day after he had been forced to hold the rope for all the others climbing the cliff at the Savage Islands. It was constant, but sometimes flared up as it had just done. Alcohol should have dulled the pain, but it seemed to be making it worse. His bones in that area felt like they were scraping up against each other in places they weren't allowed to.
“I've felt a crick in my neck ever since climbing that cliff,” Louella bellowed at his side. “I need to get it looked at too. It feels like my head's gonna snap right off my neck when I turn it to the left. Now where's this damn doctor?”
They pulled up to a map of the ship far too complicated for their eyes. They had difficultly locating the You Are Here dot amongst what looked like the original blueprints.
“I swear, the staff here's like taxis,” Louella said, “Never one around when you nee—There! There is it! Next to the...” she snorted. “Mountain Climbing Room and the...Death Room? What the heck? Anyway, three decks down, and over...one, two, three, four, five doors.”
En route to the elevator, Slim stopped and took a gulp of his beer.
“Lou, hon, I think I'm fine now. Really.”
“No, ain't! You're gonna see the doctor if I have to drag you there myself. I've got my neck too, don't forget. And if we're gonna sue, we need official records.” She gripped his arm in excitement. “Oh, Slim! If we sue and win, we'll be just like Jed and Ursula after they won the lotto! We could take it to Judge Judy. I wonder...” Her fingers dug deeper. “Do you think I'll have to do my own hair and makeup, or will they have someone there in a dressing room in the studio to do it for me? I'm sure they will. I'll have my own personal makeup team! Though they got a dang $5000 limit on the show...”
There was a ping! and the elevator doors opened. Louella hustled Slim inside. She couldn't press the button with the daiquiri sloshing over one hand, the case in the other, and a purse clanking from her elbow. Slim pressed it. It didn't take long. They peered down the hallway of the new floor.
“I can't tell, do we go right or left?” Louella asked.
“Left, I think.”
They counted the doors, and wavered before a black one.
“This must be it,” Louella said. She tried the handle. The door seemed locked. “You gotta be kidding me!”
“Let's just go back to the cabin. If the doctor's not there, there's nothing we can do.”
“I know you men. Hating doctors. I think they're inside just taking a break. Lazy good-for-nothings. Probably laughing at us on the other side of the door while they leaf through magazines or play video games or something. But, Slim, if we miss this chance for a lawsuit, I'm never gonna forgive you. Never. You can forget ever eating my meatloaf again.”
“Let me try the door.”
He grappled the handle and put all his weight behind it. He grunted and shoved down. There was a strange clunk, and the handle buckled under the pressure. It hung at an odd angle. The door creaked open. They peered into the darkness. They took tiny steps inside. Slim felt up and down the length of the wall for a light switch. He couldn't find one. Their nostrils clenched in unison at an acrid antiseptic stench mixed with that of unbathed tramp. Their goggled eyes detected the outlines of long metal boxes in rows before them.
“Hello?” Louella called into the metal and stench, her voice a weedy, shrill, rum-infused shriek. “Hello? Is the doctor there?”
“Let's go—”
“Hush! Did you hear that? Like a...a scurrying sound, it sounded like.”
Slim strained to listen. He froze as he caught sight of something half-human, half-feral clawing along the inky blackness toward them. He clutched Louella's bony shoulder and screamed.
From the glow of the hallway lights behind them, they could make out more and more of the creature as it slithered its way towards them. Slim knew they should run. But he now understood why, in horror movies, the dumb kids at the campground didn't run as the slasher approached. They were rooted to the spot in terror.
It made its way to the edge of the triangle of light and struggled to get up on its hind legs. It whimpered and grabbed the edge of one of the metal boxes for support. And then it came towards them.
CHAPTER 22—FIVE HOURS EARLIER
HOT ON THE TRAIL OF Agent Matcham's clacking heels, Jed staggered towards the emergency exit door behind the poker table, the door that warned NO PASSENGERS BEYOND THIS POINT, the door beyond which he was sure he would find opportunity and excitement. An age-appropriate woman with
legs up to her armpits, the promise of action and protecting a country he loved. It was a living, breathing Tom Clancy novel. What hot blooded male in the dusk of his years (and not a member of the Third Sex) could resist? It all seemed too good to be true, but Jed was ready to give it a chance; he was a gambling man, after all.
The further they moved from the casino, the more his nerves jangled. Here in the private areas of the ship the walls weren't brightly painted, hell, some weren't even painted at all, it was all tarnished metal with big bolts sticking out, no velvet or gold to be seen. Agent Matcham spoke as they descended into the depths, her voice crisp in the air that stank of sweat and oil and ancient filth:
“I’m sure, given your age, you spent the majority of your time fighting in the Cold War. So did I. Truth be told, I pine for the days when our adversary was the Soviet Union. Today it’s all so...chaotic and, not to mince words, sordid. A rather DIY attempt at world domination, if you like. The Reds somehow seemed a more worthy adversary, with the might of the world-wide communist regime behind them; they were people in uniform, and very attractive ones at that.”
The people or the uniforms? Jed wondered as he gripped a handrail and followed her down the steel steps.
“Take MI-6's new recruitment process, for example. Oh, I don’t mean you, you’re an exception, in fact, you hearken back to the old days. Since 9/11, it has switched from those Eton- and Cambridge-trained to coarse but racially correct youngsters in the know on the streets, and rather grim streets at that, streets of doner kebabs and chicken vindaloo. Recruits who are rather, how shall I put it? Declassé? Yes, that will do. Declassé.”
They passed a door where the aroma of burnt grease made Jed woozy. A sign on the door said it was the galley.
“I blame the permissiveness of the Sixties, if you understand. Remember the split in society? Crew cuts and skinny ties on one side, long hair and kaftans on the other. This is why, actually, this mission is awakening in me some of my old...ah, here we are.”
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 81