“What's all this in the book?” she asked.
“It's about all the different countries of the world. Each country has four pages of photos, and a few bits and bobs of information about it. And the flag and the money and what have you. It's wile fascinating. Did ye know there be's almost two hundred countries in the world?”
“Naw!” Fionnuala's eyes widened.
“Here's what they say our country looks like. Ye know what country ye live in, don't ye? You and yer mammy and yer brothers?”
“Ireland?”
“Aye. Northern Ireland, but. Do ye know the difference, love?”
“We live in the North and others live in the South?”
“Aye. But our part of the country be's part of the United Kingdom. We've different money from them down South, even. There's some as says we're not a country, we're a province or some such nonsense. The Wonderbook of the World, but, knows best. It's given us our full four pages. And rightly so, I should think! Is the book right or wrong? Maybe we'll never know. But this is where we live anyroad. Northern Ireland. I'd like to think of it as a country for the moment. Shall we have a look at what the Wonderbook of the World thinks our country looks like, eh?” Fionnuala nodded solemnly. Mrs. Ming flipped a page. “Here we are, right after Norfolk Island.”
“Where does Norfolk Island be?”
“That's of no concern to us now, wane. Let's see what the book shows us for Northern Ireland.”
The girl's eyes grew round with wonder. The book had been aptly named.
“What's that, Mrs. Ming?” Fionnuala asked, pointing at something on the first page.
“A castle on a cliff overlooking the Irish sea. Lush, verdant fields and a sparkling blue ocean.”
“Does that be somewhere near us? Here in Derry? In Brooke Park, maybe?”
Brooke Park was the only place in Derry Fionnuala had seen such a large stretch of grass. The library there had been bombed in 1973, and then the temporary library that had been built to replace it had been bombed in 1974. Did the IRA have something against knowledge?
“Naw. It's elsewhere. Nearby, but.”
“And what does them creatures be, Mrs. Ming?”
“Sheep.”
“And that odd thing?”
“A harp. It's an instrument. Music comes out of it, like.”
“And that?”
“A leprechaun. It's a wee man. A lucky wee man what has a pot of gold.”
“And why's he wearing them strange clothes?”
“That's his outfit, love. And it be's what some thinks all the men here wears. Eejits, mostly.” Eejit, idiot
Fionnuala laughed into her tiny hand, then together they flipped another page.
“And who does this be, Mrs. Ming?”
“Dana. A wile talented singer from Derry. A lovely voice, so she has. She made history, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970. Have ye not heard tell of her?”
But little Fionnuala had padded to the bay window on her chicken legs. She peered through the grimy net curtains and the filth of the glass to see the street beyond. The gray tarmac, the broken lamp posts, the anti-British graffiti on the walls; if she craned her neck, she'd get a view of the barricade of burnt-out cars at the bottom of their street that she played on when her mother wasn't looking.
“I kyanny see none of them castles or grass or none of them sheep doodahs. Nor any harps or them lucky wee men.” Kyanny, can't.
She couldn't even see Dana.
Mrs. Ming smiled. “I dream of a time when we're back to being the country the books say we are. Without Brit soldiers tramping through our front gardens, without bombs or armored cars or tanks or any trouble or strife. It'll happen. Just ye wait and see, love.”
That was at least one dream that would come true. Fionnuala smiled back at Mrs. Ming. Then Mrs. Ming gasped and said, “Och, could ye reach over and turn up the wireless, love?” Wireless, radio. “I love this song, so I do!” Fionnuala was happy to turn it up. It was that song “One Day I'll Fly Away.” Some woman called Randy Crawford sang it. A Yank, Fionnuala thought.
Recently, the song had gotten close to hitting number one but hadn't made it. Fionnuala had watched the Randy woman singing it on the telly a few nights before. But she sung the song before the microphone without opening her eyes, and it had annoyed Fionnuala slightly, and her brothers, who had been jammed into the sitting room with her, jeered at the TV screen and called Randy some names Fionnuala wouldn't understand until years later (those names seemed to deal with Randy Crawford's color, which was black). Secretly, Fionnuala thought the singer was exotic and beautiful; she had never seen a black person in real life, though they existed everywhere on the telly. She thought black people exciting. But she would never reveal such a thing to her brothers, or her mother, who also joined in with the name calling. Kelly Marie with her disco hit “Feels Like I'm In Love” had kept the song from the Number One, and then that song came on, so it must have been a countdown on the telly. Even Kelly Marie had two black dancers with her, two men on either side who wore white gloves. Fionnuala thought they looked nice. But her brothers had pointed and laughed at them also, calling them not only those words they had called Randy, but also adding poofters, arse-bandits and nancy boys. She didn't know what those might be, but suspected they were words for dancers, or maybe people who wore white gloves.
Anyway, they stopped to listen to the song, and Mrs. Ming began to hum along—Fionnuala supposed the woman didn't know the words—and on and on the wistful song went, its yearning woodwind and soothing strings and Randy's soulful, hopeful voice spilling from the filthy slits of the radio that were the speakers, and then Mrs. Ming gripped the book in her lap, and she went all misty-eyed.
“Och, sure, life here has been a terrible trial, so it has,” the woman sighed. “It didn't always used to be, but. It was grand and lovely when I was yer age, wee girl.” She looked like she was going to cry.
Fionnuala was scared. She looked over at Biddy on the floor beside the fire to make her feel safe. Grown ups didn't cry, did they? They weren't supposed to, anyway. Crying was for wanes, for children. At least that's what her mammy always told her.
“I tell ye, Fionnuala, one day I am gonny fly away from here. Oh, I don't mean forever. I mean for two or three weeks, or maybe four at the most. I love our Northern Ireland, I love where we live, as I'm sure ye do and all. Nowhere on our Earth is better, though we've no sheep or castles right here in Derry. But Dana lives here in the city limits somewhere. Or she has a house here, anyroad. What I'm trying to say, but, is that as wonderful as Derry is, I wanny see someplace else. Somewhere where nobody knows me and I can prance around in, oh, I dunno, a bikini, if ye know what one of them is. Not much use for them around here. Experience another country, another world. That's me dream. It's terrible expensive to get a plane, so it is. And ye need a passport, and that be's terrible dear and all. One day, but...one day...!”
As Randy Crawford continued warbling, Fionnuala raced towards Mrs. Ming on the settee. Mrs. Ming looked a bit fearful at first, but when Fionnuala got on her knees before her and grabbed her hand and said up at her, “I wanny fly away one day, too! I wanny fly away too, Mrs. Ming,” then Mrs. Ming was less fearful and more grateful.
An idea suddenly struck her. “At the back of the book here,” she flipped to the back, “there's a map of the world. All the other countries of the world. Shall we...shall we...?”
“Shall we what?” Fionnuala asked.
“Let's both close our eyes together, circle our hands in the air, and point at a country. See where the Lord decides to take us. Where we'll fly away to one day. Shall we?”
“Aye!” Fionnuala said. She clapped her tiny hands with glee. “What fun!”
Thankfully, “One Day I'll Fly Away” was a five minute and one second song, so it was still playing in the background as Mrs. Ming and Fionnuala Heggarty exchanged an excited, hopeful look, closed their eyes, circled their hands in the air, and brought their index fingers
—splat!—down upon the map.
“Och, I'm so excited!” Fionnuala bubbled. “I don't wanny open me eyes first! You go ahead, Mrs. Ming! And if me finger be's on some horrible country, go on and move it for me!”
“Are ye sure, love?” Mrs. Ming asked.
“Aye. Go ahead. Quick, Mrs. Ming! I'm gonny wee meself with the excitement of it all!”
“Not on me carpet, wane,” Mrs. Ming warned. “Okay, I'm opening me eyes now...”
Fionnuala's finger was on Syria. Mrs. Ming gently nudged it to Greece. Her own finger was on—
It should have been a memory etched in Fionnuala's young brain forever, but when she was picked up by her mother and brought home to a house packed with TVs and microwave ovens and all her favorite albums, 45s and even cassette singles, and as one visit to Mrs. Ming followed another as she turned nine, ten, eleven and twelve, Fionnuala forgot all about it.
Fionnuala opened her eyes and was delighted to see she was on Greece. Mrs. Ming's country looked exciting too.
“Greece!” Fionnuala bubbled, and finally the song was ending.
“One day I'll fly away...!” Mrs. Ming warbled as Fionnuala ran upstairs to the loo and an indignant newscaster cut off the ending to rant about the explosion, and there was a conviction, a certainty in Mrs. Ming's voice. One day she would fly away. She was sure of it.
But she never did.
For that matter, except for ten days when she had been conned into slaving away for a pittance on a cruise ship, neither did Fionnuala.
* * *
CHAPTER ONE—TODAY
Fionnuala Flood was shocked to discover she—and the world!—had been deceived all these years. Now that she, at 46, was head counter person at Final Spinz on the Lecky Road, she was privy to the dirty little secret of the industry: dry cleaning wasn't dry.
It was as wet as the normal cleaning she herself did in the ratty, clunking, lopsided washing machine in the kitchen of the family home. Or had done. When she had lived there. When she had been the woman of the house. The matriarch of the family. The mother to her seven children. The wife to her one husband, Paddy. She was now an outcast, a pariah.
Having been banished to the family caravan on the outskirts of Derry four months earlier, Fionnuala had praised God she was at long last spared the need to pay rent. That was one bill, one misery of life, no longer hanging heavy over her horsey head like the blade of a guillotine. But Fionnuala had slowly discovered with a growing sense of dread she still needed money. For cigarettes. For bottles of generic gin. For food. For bus fare into the city and civilization. For shampoo. After a few futile attempts at shoplifting from the closest corner shop, the Sav-U-Mor, and some unsuccessful haggling in the city center market with bits and bobs she had snatched up from sidewalks under the cloak of darkness—a pile of scratched Milli Vanilli and Jason Donovan CDs, a typewriter, a coffee machine with a cracked pot and no plug—she realized she needed a job. No stranger to hard graft for a pittance her entire long life, she had quickly found one. She had only been living in the caravan for a week.
The contract with a no-pay-raise-for-a-year-at-least clause signed, the area manager of Final Spinz had taken Fionnuala on a tour of the premises her first day on the job, guided her through the mysterious area beyond the partition of the front counter, and Fionnuala couldn't believe what her eyes were seeing. Denny pointed out the strange pressing machines, the bizarre drying machines, and just as Fionnuala was wondering why they would need drying machines, he showed her the rows of washing machines that were, although industrial-sized and much newer, suspiciously like the one she had back home. She knew then why there was always a partition behind the counter up front: to hide the deceit.
She couldn't now imagine what she had thought went on in the back of a dry cleaners before the revelation. She had never had the affectation, or the funds, to step through one of their doors.
Fionnuala had always thought there was something sneaky about dry cleaning, something disingenuous. Dry cleaners were only for those with money to flash around, to waste. Probably Protestant. Even when her daughter Dymphna had spewed up cider and curry chips all over the couch and the curtains in the bay window on her sixteenth birthday, Fionnuala had scrubbed the curtains, the cushions and their covers in the sink herself.
Now Fionnuala knew dry cleaning was not only disingenuous, but insidious. The evening after her first shift, a question burning in the cortex of her brain, she had gone to the internet cafe around the corner (she had no computer in the caravan, of course). She had flashed all the Asians huddling around one computer there a filthy look, wondering where they had all come from and what they could possibly be doing in her beloved Derry. Then, after shelling out a hard-earned £5 for a milky tea with four sugars and fifteen minutes access, she had perched herself with the air of a lady of the manor before her own computer as the Asians yapped away in their non-word language. She logged on to see if the inventor of dry cleaning had been Protestant, but there a further shock awaited her. The tea curdled in her throat, and a gurgly gasp escaped it. The truth was worse than she had anticipated.
Thomas Jennings. They called him an African-American on Wikipedia, but Fionnuala knew from his photo what that really meant, and her lip curled with distaste before the screen as she thought it: a wog. A coon. A nig-nog.
She had fled from the computer and the cafe, damning the £5 it had cost her to find out this outrage. There had been no mention of Thomas Jennings' religion, she thought as she raced to the bus stop, but she had seen a few of the darkies' strange church celebrations on the telly. She didn't know if whatever alien religion they practiced was worse than Protestant, but suspected it was probably equally as bad. She already knew dry cleaning wasn't dry, but now, with a darkie as an inventor, she thought with a sense of panic as she boarded the bus, how could it even be clean? She couldn't have been more disgusted if the inventor had been Jewish.
Fionnuala had gotten used to working for the dark side, in all senses of the word, she thought. There were now eight curtains, two raincoats, a three-piece suit, uncountable sweaters, loads of white office shirts and a bridal gown sloshing around at 78 degrees amidst the toxic solvents in the industrial-sized machine out back. Soon they would have to be dried on the drying machines, puffed up like strangely-shaped balloons. There were 27 buttons that needed to be sewn on shirts and 12 zippers to replace. Fionnuala would soon make short work of that. She was a marvel at the sewing machine; she had only Dymphna's wedding dress to think back on to know that. Except for the deception Fionnuala was a part of, she had had worse jobs.
The buttons and zippers would have to wait. Fionnuala sat at the counter staring down in disbelief at an article in the day's Sun newspaper. Her drooping head with its bleached ponytails and overbite, and her arched, manly shoulders were framed by half the partition and, beyond that, a vista of endless rows of plastic-wrapped coats, shirts, gowns and sweaters that hung like lynched bodies.
She had found the newspaper on the seat beside her on the bus. She wasn't one for reading; indeed, it was a chore, but the journey from the caravan site into town was forty-five minutes long, and Fionnuala had memorized every field, every tree, and recognized many of the sheep they passed daily. She read out of desperation. When she could nab a free newspaper. And the article she was reading now caused her more horror, more shock, than the discovery of the inventor of the non-dry, non-clean dry cleaning. Had the world finally gone mad? She was so outraged at what she was reading, she didn't hear the bell of the door tinkling.
An irritant, a remembered noise that both repelled and enticed her, sounded in her ears from the other side of the counter. She forced her eyes up from the newsprint and saw, as if in a horror movie, her 12-year-old daughter Siofra's decapitated head sat there on the counter before her. Fionnuala screamed, and the eyes of the head widened with shock, and then Siofra took a step back from the counter, and rage bubbled up in Fionnuala as she realized it was only her daughter, her living daughter, though tal
ler since the last time she had seen her, standing at the counter before her. I have to get me eyes seen to, Fionnuala thought. But was the girl a spastic? A tall spastic? What would make her risk her life visiting her mother?
“Mammy! Come home!” Siofra was saying, and her voice was filled with such emotion and longing, her little eyes brimming with tears, that Fionnuala's heart welled. She had long wondered who would be the first of her offspring to crack, brave enemy lines, realize the care and love Fionnuala had bestowed upon them all, and at no charge.
“Mammy! Come back home! Please!”
Tears sprang in Fionnuala's eyes. Though her daughter's eyes were sunken, though her One Direction shirt was tattered and stained, though her limbs were like twigs, and her multi-colored leggings were littered with ladders, Fionnuala loved her. Unconditionally.
Somewhere in a cavern of Fionnuala's brain, the troubling thought that her children were growing up out of her sight stung her deeply. Growing up without the mother who loved them.
“Och, get you around here, would ye, love?” Fionnuala said, choking back the tears. “How ye've shot up!”
Siofra skipped around the counter. After a quick check for lice, Fionnuala held her daughter's head to her sagging bosom. She sighed mournfully into the black locks that could've done with a shampoo.
“Would that I could come home, love. Yer daddy won't let me, but.”
“They've me doing all the cleaning, all the cooking, all the messages”—the shopping— “and they lounge around doing nothing. Daddy knocking back the drink and staring at the telly! Granny tries to pitch in, but with her cane and all, it ends up being more graft for me rather than less. I'm knackered by the end of every day, Mammy! Dead on me feet! Me poor wee feet! Me arms fairly aching. Slaves had it easier, I'm sure. We watched a video on them in class the other day. Not that I saw much of it, but, me eyeballs aching from exhaustion as they were.”
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