“God bless us and save us!” Fionnuala roared. “Ye kyanny be serious, woman!”
Mrs. Ming sniffed. “And I kyanny believe ye don't want to give me a discount! All them times I babysat ye, like!”
Fionnuala blanched. How could she have ever forgotten? It was as if she were ashamed she had ever been that young, that vulnerable. Back then, in Creggan Heights, in the Moorside, with each child born having up to seven or eight older brothers and sisters, there wasn't much call for babysitters. It was an American concept, like Halloween. Watching children for money? Never in the Moorside! It was the community looking out for itself, even while some of the community—Fionnuala's brothers—were robbing another part blind.
Fionnuala's heart suddenly went out to the old woman, but that didn't mean she would give her the friends and family discount.
As the seconds passed and the smell grew and the pensioner's trembling fingers continued their search through the depths of the handbag, Siofra finally skipped around the counter.
“I'll help ye find it, Mrs. Ming,” she offered.
“Get yer thieving hands away from me handbag!” Mrs. Ming snarled with a rage at odds with her frailty.
Fair dues, thought Fionnuala. The amount of times she had sent Siofra to the corner store to shoplift fags and tights for her; the girl was a pro.
Then the door flew open again, and Nurse Scadden from the Health Clinic marched in. She was a fat disgrace of a woman with piggish eyes.
“I'm here for me gear,” she announced in her strident foghorn tones, heedless of Mrs. Ming before her in the queue. Her large left arm elbowed the woman to the side. Mrs. Ming clutched the counter corner so she wouldn't topple over, and her handbag spilled its contents onto the floor. Siofra bent to retrieve the lipsticks and tissues and mints and the bits and pieces of religious paraphernalia she always carted around for protection, but Mrs. Ming smacked her head.
“Away! Away from me belongings, wane!”
Fionnuala's face seemed to fume between its swinging ponytails. Bloody typical, the face seemed to say: she spent 78 percent of her time behind that counter without a customer, bored to distraction, and now, when she wanted to pump her daughter for info about the family, all the juicy tidbits of information, they were flocking in in their droves.
“Can ye not see I've a customer before ye?” Fionnuala sniped to Nurse Scadden as Mrs. Ming began the long process of lowering her body to the floor to scoop up her belongings.
“I've to be at the Health Clinic in,” the nurse checked her watch, “twenty minutes. Bejesus! What's in that bag next to the till? Body parts? The stench rising from it be's overpowering, so it does!”
“What do ye want?”
“World peace!” Nurse Scadden snapped. “And now that ye mention it, a smile on that crabbit face on yers and a civil tongue to go with it wouldn't go amiss either. Naw. I'm here for me uniforms. I dropped them off last night.”
“Aye, I mind now.” Mind, remember. “Five minutes before closing. That's practically today, so it is. They're not done yet. Do ye think we toil away all hours of the night when punters can't be arsed to bring their clothes to us in a timely manner?”
“The prices I have to pay here, aye. I'll be taking me custom elsewhere in the future. That Palace of Sudz down Rosemount Way. Or that Rinkle-B-Gone up the Diamond. What am I meant to do now, but? I need me uniforms. The one I've on me now be's splattered with blood.”
“Aye, as was all them ye dropped off last night. Have ye any idea the special care it takes to remove blood from polyester?”
“If ye don't give me me uniforms sharpish, I'll be on to the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Compensation, I'll be demanding!”
“Aye, go ahead and try, love. Troops of lawyers, we've got. There's no way on God's green Earth—”
The bell tinkled, and in swanned Zoë Riddell, the owner of Final Spinz.
Fionnaula's heart fell. There were that many people thronging around her counter, it was beginning to resemble a pub at last orders. All the Moorside be's jammed in here, and now it's the Waterside invading and all! she thought, contorting her lips into something resembling a welcoming smile for the boss.
And her new sister-in-law. Or that's what Fionnuala thought Zoë was, in any event. Fionnuala's daughter had married Zoë's son, so in Fionnuala's mind, Zoë was her new, minted, Protestant sister-in-law. It was an unlikely pairing, both the in-laws and the newlyweds. But love knew no bounds, financial or religious, and Fionnuala's 24-year-old daughter Dymphna was indeed married to Zoë's only son, Rory. Dymphna's three children, Keanu, Beeyonsay and Greenornge, were Zoë's grandchildren, if only by default. Their provenance was murky.
Zoë Riddell, Derry's Second Best Businesswoman of the year last year and the year before that, was the owner of a wide array of Derry enterprises in addition to her takeover the month before of the dry cleaners, from the Pence-A-Day lockups to the fish and chip van in the city center, to the butcher's on Shipquay Street where her son and Dymphna had been married. Zoë was wearing, Fionnuala saw, a new Chanel suit in navy, a classic, thought Fionnuala, and her boss was eying her with suspicion.
“Goodness!” Zoë said, her eyes shooting around the scenes playing out before her, and struggling to make sense of them: the old woman on the ground, smacking away the hands of the little girl who seemed to be trying to help her, the big-boned nurse's face stretched with rage, and Fionnuala's mechanical grin across the counter from it. “What's all this noise? This talk of compensation? I was just passing on my way to the office, and thought I'd collect the takings from the hotel contract when...” She whipped out a two-ply tissue with little daffodils printed on it from her Louis Vuitton bowler bag and pressed it to her nose. “Wh-what's that...odor?” She peered in alarm at the bag on the counter.
“I'll never forgive our Joe for putting me through this mortification,” Mrs. Ming moaned, struggling to upright herself.
“Serendipity!” Nurse Scadden cried, and Fionnuala wondered what new language the nurse was suddenly speaking. “Are ye not Zoë Riddell? The owner of this tip?” Tip, dump. “I demand ye get me me uniforms this very moment or there'll be a tribunal!”
Zoë looked taken aback.
“I wouldn't have said tip. We remodeled when I bought the place.” She stepped confidently towards the counter, but faltered the closer she got to the bag on it. “I'm sure we'll be able to make right whatever wrong you think might have been done to you. It's our mission to make you happy. What, Mrs. Flood, seems to be the problem here?”
Fionnuala opened her mouth to reply, but was cut short as Nurse Scadden barked out: “Och, sure, the entire town knows the two of youse is in cahoots! Disgraceful, so it is! A Catholic betraying the community and pairing up with an Orange Proddy bitch! The best of mates, the two of youse is! Sure, everyone's seen the two of youse together in restaurants! That marriage, that...unseemly, vulgar pairing between yer offspring...it makes me stomach churn to think of it! What is the world coming to when a Catholic girl and a Proddy bastard can make a mockery of the holy institution of matrimony? There's no way, between the two of youse, youse can ever make me hap—”
They all yelped and heads turned as something, they each presumed a rock, clattered against the window and bounced off it. The door was wrenched open and Bridie McFee staggered in, eyes swiveling and shoulders swaying from the affects of drink.
“You! Fionnuala Flood!” Bridie slurred, an accusing finger pointed somewhere in the general direction behind the counter. Fionnuala barely recognized her without the cold sores. They seemed to have cleared up, though a stye was now pustulating under her left eye. “Ye've some bold-faced nerve! First yer Dymphna stole Rory from me, and now ye've stole me Damien's job here! I'll have ye for that! Gone from Derry for four weeks he was, I know, aye, and without giving notice. He had to, but. The telly program, ye know. That Safari Millionaire. It wasn't Damien's fault he was picked up for the program, shipped away to that land of Amazonia. Now the filming's over and he
be's back, but. And his job is gone. To you!”
Any place Bridie McFee appeared, drunk or not, her entrance was greeted with a few hurried crosses, a bowed head or two, the occasional genuflection and a moment of silent reflection, and here in Final Spinz was no exception. Siofra curtsied, Mrs. Ming crossed herself and tried to reach for her rosary there on the floor, but it was too far away, Nurse Scadden genuflected and even Fionnuala seemed lost in silent reflection. Zoë seemed immune, just standing and staring, jaw slack, at the girl.
A while back, Bridie claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in the lard of a chip fryer at the Kebabalicious where she worked. Many in town thought it a scam, or perhaps mental instability, a hallucination, but there were those who wanted to give the girl the benefit of the doubt. And Bridie's cold sores had disappeared soon after the visitation; they had been ever-present before. This seemed to signify something, and gave them hope. They wanted to believe. And so they did, because one never knew what deeds on Earth God was tallying up on his scorecard way up there in Heaven.
Siofra passed Mrs. Ming's rosary beads to her. The woman took them gratefully and clutched them tight, her arthritic fingers working over the beads as she stared in marvel at one of God's chosen.
“What are ye playing at, wee girl?” Fionnuala said, though calling the looking-much-older-than-her-29-years Bridie a 'girl' was a bit of a stretch, and 'wee' an outright lie. A glance at the straining seams of her Bjork World Tour 2009 t-shirt and her knockoff jeans revealed there was nothing wee about the lumpen creature, and the whole town knew this included her sexual appetite. “Flinging rocks at the window and shouting the odds like some headbin! I think ye've dented the window. Do ye want me to call the Filth, Mrs. Riddell?” She reached for the company phone on the counter.
This enraged Nurse Scadden to no end, and even Mrs. Ming gasped in shock.
“Bringing in the coppers?!” Nurse Scadden shrieked. “The Proddy Filth? Aye, ye see you, Fionnuala Flood,” her finger pointed accusingly as Bridie's had moments before, “ye've definitely gone over to the dark side. No Catholic in good standing, no Catholic who would hold their head up proudly as they stepped into St. Moulag's on a Sunday, would ever consider ringing the Proddy coppers! And windows kyanny dent.”
Bridie groaned and collapsed across the three yellow plastic chairs under the window. Mrs. Ming crossed herself again, the rosary dangling from her fist. Nurse Scadden whipped around to Zoë. “Can I not just get me uniforms back from this...this...this den of heathenism? I'll snatch them out of the machines meself. Let me back there, just. Let me back there now!”
Zoë grabbed her shoulder as Nurse Scadden flew past Fionnuala and made to shove her way beyond the partition.
“The secret!” Fionnuala wailed. The last thing she wanted was for Derry to learn dry cleaning was wet.
Siofra stuck out her foot, and Nurse Scadden fell against the partition.
“Right!” Zoë said, her lips thin. “Call the police, Mrs. Flood. That's trespassing.”
Just as Fionnuala picked up the phone, the door burst open for the final time that fateful afternoon. They all gasped, except Bridie, who had passed out, dead to the world. Three men propelled themselves inside. Three men in ski masks, balaclavas. One with a rusty pitchfork, one with what looked like a garden trowel, and one who had drawn the short stick and brandished a set of gold plated coal tongs from a fireplace set.
“Hands up, youse!” Pitchfork bellowed. “This is a stick up!”
Pitchfork raced to the counter, and Coal Tongs towards Zoë, waving their weapons. Mrs. Ming shrieked as Pitchfork kicked her walker to the floor. Trowel guarded the door with his body and sliced his mud-caked tool through the air as if he had been watching a kung fu movie marathon, or maybe jiujitsu?
As Fionnuala lunged for her flip-top pay-as-you-go phone and Pitchfork knocked it from her hand, Mrs. Ming clutched at her heart. She toppled against her overturned walker, banged against the counter and slid down it. The rosary fell from her fingers. The beads clinked and the cross clunked as the rosary hit the tiles. A sputtering and a moan escaped her withered, undulating lips. Her talons clawed the air. Then her frail limbs collapsed in a lifeless heap on the floor.
But unlike Bridie, Mrs. Ming wasn't dead to the world. She was
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About the Author
Best-selling author Gerald Hansen was a Navy brat, starting school in Thailand, graduating high school in Iceland, with Germany, California and his mother's hometown of Derry, Northern Ireland in between. He attended Dublin City University, and also lived in London and Berlin. The first of the five-part Irish Lottery Series, An Embarrassment of Riches, was an ABNA semifinalist in 2011. He loves music, spicy food, traveling the world (still!), and wearing Ben Sherman. He now lives in New York City.
Photo by Marcin Kaliski
Read more at Gerald Hansen’s site.
The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3) Page 98