Static Cling

by Gerald Hansen

  He stubbed out his cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing.

  Paddy had worked since graduation at the Fillets-O-Fish packing plant, but it had closed down a few months before. He was grateful to have been given this job, but suspected it had more to do with his daughter Dymphna marrying Zoë's son Rory than any aspect of his work ethic. Here Paddy did himself a disservice. He was a worker. Dependable. Handsome. Even-tempered. Perhaps he drank a bit too much, but then who didn't? If temperance was something you needed in an employee from the Moorside, you'd be hard pressed to find any applicants over the age of twelve. Zoë had clapped her hands when he had showed up for the interview, and had eagerly given the job to him.

  But what was his function in this tiny hut with its corrugated iron walls? Officially, it was to open the gate for, vet and sign up the very occasional new renter and help them unload their boxes and whatnot, and to, again, open the gate for and check the identification of people who drove into the compound to either remove or add to their secret hoards.

  To vet because, though storage units had ostensibly been created for people who had downsized their homes or give space to artists who favored larger canvases that wouldn't fit anywhere else and the like, at Pence-A-Day, they seemed more like hidey-holes for swag that needed to be fenced. And Paddy suspected Unit 32B had been turned into an Ecstasy lab. The shaven-headed renters showed up daily, and there were always strange chemical smells emanating from the unit. Thankfully it was at the far end of the compound. In any event, there was precious little ID-checking going on, as most of the people who lived in Derry Paddy already knew. The Catholics, certainly. And even most of the Protestants he knew to see. And to resent the flash cars they rolled up in, for the journey to the outskirts of town, amidst the green fields where the storage units were situated. The Catholics usually shoved their boxes on the bus, 'appropriated' the van from their work for the day, or borrowed clapped out jalopies from mates of mates.

  The only visitor so far that day—it was late afternoon, gray clouds pressing down—had been Tommy Sheerin, Paddy's old mate from the Moorside. Tommy had taken the bus there four days ago. His wife had kicked him out when she had spied him coming out of the gents of the Rocking Seahorse pub with his Oasis t-shirt on back to front and strange blotches around his mouth, followed three minutes later by a disheveled-looking barmaid doing up the buttons of her white top. Tommy was now living in his storage unit, 17A. There was a stream just past the gates where he did his bathing.

  Tommy had popped into the security hut at noon with a few cans of beer to drink, and Paddy had guzzled down and listened to his tortured, unseemly manly sobs. Paddy hadn't known what to say, and wouldn't dare place a comforting hand on the shoulders that shuddered on the cracked yellow plastic chair before him as Tommy mewled into his hands. A grown man touching another grown man was grounds for knocking the fecking teeth outta the bloody arse bandit. Paddy had grunted noises of sorrow and understanding instead. And he could indeed sympathize with Tommy and his marital problems. Paddy had some marital problems of his own.

  After some maudlin moments, Tommy had wiped his eyes with a rag that had mysteriously appeared in the hut one day and whose function and the provenance of the strange purple stains on it Paddy was unsure of. Then Tommy had excused himself, and Paddy had opened the gate so he could forage in the surrounding fields for berries. Paddy usually shared half of his packed dinner with the man, a sandwich or two that Siofra flung into a used Top-Yer-Trolley shopping bag, but that morning he had forgotten to collect it from the kitchen table where it probably still sat. So Tommy was on his own, as was Paddy, though Tommy had said he would split his find with Paddy. So berries his dinner would have to be. There were no nuts in the surrounding fields.

  As yet another Sam Smith song ended on the radio, a chirpy git with a West-Brit accent announced the weather forecast. Paddy paused in the middle of his solitary dart game to listen. Though it was the middle of August, a cold front was coming in from the North that evening, then it would be sunny and unseasonably warm for the next three days, perhaps even four. Not really unseasonably, more uncharacteristically for Derry, perched on, clinging to, the tempestuous coast of the North Atlantic as it did, a stormy area that kept armies of banshees busy throughout the seasons.

  Paddy was looking forward to the three hot days—they probably wouldn't be properly 'hot,' not beach-like, more tepid, or at least not cold—four days if the Lord were smiling down kindly on them. They'd been waiting since June for summer, and finally here it was. Just weeks before the leaves would start to turn brown and a cruel, frigid, damp winter would settle in for six months. The four days, or three, would be Derry's summer. As cold as Paddy was now in the hut without a heater, the bed at night was even colder. He had spent a lifetime of sleeping on that concave mattress, prisoner under the weight of seven blankets, Fionnuala beside him, sharing their body warmth throughout the cold nights. And although her feet had always been frigid, her lumpy bits had been warm.

  At the thought of Fionnuala, Paddy found he couldn't stop the hand holding the dart from twisting into a fist and shuddering with some emotion. Rage? Disgust? He wasn't sure. The dart seemed to fling itself poltergeist-like from his hand. It careened through the hut and cracked against the window. Paddy tried to put his wife out of his mind. He rued the fact he was Irish. Divorce was illegal. Or was he relieved it was illegal? That it would be sin to break up with the woman he had shared most of his life with?

  Since the family decision had been made to send Fionnuala to the caravan, many were the times Paddy's hand had reached for the phone, usually, no, always, with a few pints of lager in him, to call his wife. Why? He wasn't sure. Maybe not to really forgive her unthinkable actions, but to feel her warm lumpy bits one more time.

  Another Sam Smith song came on, and Paddy snapped off the radio. Just how many times were sane people expected to listen to “Stay With Me?” It was like a form of torture, publicly broadcast. He heard a familiar tap-tap-tap that sounded like a cane on the tarmac on this side of the fence, and just as he was wondering how somebody could have gotten in through the locked gate and if that cane could possibly be his mother-in-law's, Maureen Heggarty's head appeared in the door. Paddy took a step back in slight alarm. Her death's head was purple from the exertion of getting to the lockups from the bus stop. Her breath came in huge gasps from her slight chest, the glasses of her blood-red frames were foggy from the sweat from the excursion to the outskirts of Derry. Her tiny skeleton was hidden somewhere in the depths of a purple and green striped velor track suit with a lion embossed on the front, a leopard on the back. I'M A WILD ONE! KEEP CLEAR! it exclaimed proudly on the back. It was her favorite outfit. Because she was. In one gnarled claw was a plastic bag. She shoved it towards him.

  “Yer dinner,” she said.

  “Feckin magic!”

  Paddy grabbed the bag and shoved his hand inside, his stomach suddenly growling at this unforeseen blessing. It hadn't realized it was starving. He was greeted with two malformed pieces of bread hacked from the pan loaf by Siofra's little hand. He could even see her dirty little fingerprints embedded in the bread. At least that showed the bread wasn't stale. It strained to hold within its depths a massive chunk of Murray's cheddar, together with lumpy wads of butter and strawberry jam and Nutella and—Paddy could tell from the color—the pickled onion potato chips his daughter had shoved inside for a bit of a crunch. As he chomped down like something from either the front or back of Maureen's track suit, he dug his hand in the bag for his fruit, but pulled out a raw potato. Perhaps they were pushing the little girl too hard. But he would rather eat a raw potato than do the woman's work of packing his own lunch. No, he'd leave the potato, and perhaps a crust or two for Tommy. His mate always found plenty of berries, in any event.

  “Ye journeyed,” Paddy said through all the cheese and bread and jam and butter and chocolate spread and chips jammed in his mouth, “all the way up here for to give me me dinner?”

  �
��Did I heck! We've a problem to discuss. I woke up after the wanes had all run off somewhere this morning, and when I did, I tried to make meself some tea, as you do. Or as I do, anyroad. I had to heat the hot water in the kettle, ye see. The cooker wouldn't function, but. There was me twisting and turning the knobs in all directions like an eejit til the sweat was lashing down me body. Much as it is now, I must say.”

  Still chomping, Paddy pulled out the yellow plastic chair.

  “Sit yerself down, woman!”

  Maureen looked at the chair. Paddy didn't know what she was thinking. Maybe she was wondering how long she would stay, and if the time and effort involved in maneuvering her cane and dragging her body across the three feet of floor and grappling the back of the chair and lowering her snapping, crackling, popping bones onto the seat just to haul them back up again was worth it. He could never read Maureen. Or maybe he didn't know that people could be read. He never knew what his mother-in-law was thinking, anyway. Or what her mood might be. Right now, for example, as he wiped crumbs and yellow, purple and brown smears from his lips and the black stubbly bits on his chin, he didn't know if she was telling him this, frankly, meandering story because she was annoyed, amused or angry.

  “Naw. I'm fine stood here as I am. I'm not stopping long, so I'm not. Anyroad, back to the cooker. It was a no-go. I couldn't turn the bloody thing on. So then I tried that swanky electric kettle me sister Mary got for all of us the Christmas before last, mind the one I'm taking about? The one what plugs into the wall?”

  Paddy nodded. The electric kettle had always seemed a bit too artsy for him. Too Protestant. He still boiled his water on the cooker as God intended.

  “There I stood for a full five minutes, snapping the flimmin thing on and off and off and on and off and on again. And it wouldn't work neither. So then I made me way over to the fridge. I opened the door, and the wee light what lights the things up inside so's you can see what be's there, or more likely what's not, wouldn't pop on. And then I noticed there wasn't that infernal godawful hum coming from it as there always is.”

  “Are ye trying to say...”

  “Aye! We've neither gas nor power. Disconnected, so they must've been. For non-payment, I can only suspect.”

  And here Paddy shrunk slightly from her, as perhaps he had detected something like anger flickering in her eyes. It was the magnification of her eyes from her glasses that allowed him to see it.

  “Have I not been handing over three quarters of me pension to ye for the running of the household? I know ye're not me son, well, not me real flesh and blood son, anyroad, so maybe it's not me place to say it, but when I think in me mind that what I've got to go home to after I leave here and take that bus again with its blaring disco music and no shock absorbers, what I've to go back to be's a house where the immersion heater kyanny work and so I kyanny have me mid-week bath, and we've to make use of candles for to see at night, and I've to break out a pack of playing cards for to play solitaire for me night's entertainment as the telly won't function, and ye know flimmin well Wednesday night be's me favorite, that Strictly Come Dancing, and we're gonny have to break out the firestarters and coal for to put that fireplace back into use and make a fire as the central heating's gone, and I heard on the wireless last night there's a cold front moving in from the North set to arrive this evening, back when I could hear the wireless as it functioned when I turned it on, well...what sort of life is that to be living, can I ask ye? Not only for me, but for the wanes and all. I know we've had hard times, and I know without Fionnuala there's no extra income coming in, but...!”

  She grappled the edge of the table and panted a few times. Such a long speech had been exhausting for her eighty-seven years, yet she still had enough strength in her eyes for them to glare accusingly at him. At the empty beer cans strewn across the table, and a few on the floor of the hut as well.

  “Have ye been taking me pension and racing to the bookies for them horse races? And pouring it all down yer bake in the pubs?”

  Paddy didn't know what to say. He had bet on horses, he had drunk in pubs. With his own money, not with his mother-in-law's pension. But that wasn't why the bills hadn't been paid. But he couldn't understand why they hadn't.

  “N-naw.”

  “Why have all the rates not been paid, in that case? Ye've been pouring the drink down yer gullet. I smell it wafting offa ye in huge waves like some cheap tart's scent!”

  “Tommy give it me.”

  Paddy burped. Maureen flinched. Her lips disappeared as if attached to a string.

  “If we've money problems...” she mused. “I'm just thinking...Could we not send the wanes, our Padraig and Siofra I'm thinking of now, not our Seamus, he's still a bit too wee, and a bit too demented, if ye ask me, could we not send them out on a, well, like a wee shoplifting spree? Then we could sell the wares at the market next to the Mountains of Mourne gate at the city walls and pay the rates with the proceeds.”

  “We've the money to pay the rates. Just. Maybe not now, but. It depends on the new fees we've now to pay to get the gas and electric turned back on.”

  “Why was they not paid in the first place, but? If ye're not telling me a porky and ye've enough funds for them, like?”

  Maureen's eyes searched Paddy's face for an answer, but it couldn't be found on his face, and it seemed it couldn't even be found in his brain.

  “I...I've a feeling the rates haven't been paid as I...as I'm not used to doing that. Sure, Fionnuala took care of all that. I forced meself the past few months to learn how to do it, where to go, how to fill out the forms and so on. But it's just not me. Fionnuala, as ye well know, always handled the paying of the rates.”

  Maureen made a noise with her tongue and rolled her eyes.

  “Useless, so youse men are! Aye, I know what ye're on about, but,” she conceded, somewhat kindly. “When me dear Frankie was still here with us, I did all that for our house and all. How are we gonny resolve this problem, but? I kyanny see a thing, so I'd be just was useless trying to pay the rates as ye seem to be. And Siofra, bless her, be's a bit too wee to take it up.”

  There was a silence as they stood before each other. A husband. A mother. Between the corrugated walls of the security hut. United in their distrust of Fionnuala, their disgust of the woman and the depths she had stooped to where Lorcan was concerned.

  Maureen made a show of clearing her throat. She said with an unusual lightness, “Could we not...Ought we not to...” Then her face, which had drained of the purple color it had been when she arrived and was its usual pale because she had been standing still for a while, broke out in pink blotches. “Naw. The Lord'll never forgive me.” She said it quietly, head bowed. Her hand snaked down to the cross around her neck.

  “What?” Paddy said a bit too quickly.

  He took a deep breath. His heart pounded in his chest. They eyed each other. Like undercover cops on a mission. Or, more apt, like partners in crime about to commit a felony.

  “Could we what?” Paddy asked again. His jaw ached from the tension “What are ye thinking, Mammy?”

  Maureen, too, was breathing deeply. He could almost see the old woman's heart pounding beneath the velor. It stood unsaid between the two of them, momentous and slightly dangerous, yet compelling and as yet undecided.

  “I've been going over and over it in me mind. Ye know that bus takes almost an hour and a half to get here, so I had time enough. More than enough. Why should we be living a life of scrimping and saving for the essentials of life? How is any of this our fault? What have we done wrong? Why shouldn't we go back to living the life we were used to before? The money before was little enough as it was. Now there's even less in the household. I haven't bought meself a new pair of tights since...since...”

  Paddy made his face as serious as he could. He placed a hand on Maureen's shoulder, and she stiffened as if the touch had pushed her over the edge into a chasm that led to madness.

  “Are ye saying what I think ye're saying?” />
  “Might we not have been a bit...hasty...”

  “...in banishing her to the caravan, do ye mean?” Paddy forced the horrible words out of his mouth, but couldn't bring himself to say Fionnuala's name. It was as if saying her name would bring with it all the stress, the craziness.

  “Ye know I was all for it at the time,” Maureen sniffed with a vague righteousness. “Her actions was an affront to the Heavenly Father and all the Church stands for. Imagine, trying to...” She shook her head, unable to mention Fionnuala's final crime. “Ye kyanny keep rewarding bad behavior. But...”

  “Are ye saying ye want me to make the call, Mammy? Do ye want me to dial her...and ask her to come home?”

  Maureen couldn't bring herself to say yes.

  “Things would be so much easier if we had an additional income, ye see, love. And our Siofra's trying her best. But...ye should've seen the state of the delft the night before last.” Delft , dishes. “The wane hasn't a clue how to wash dishes. And did ye see the state of yer sandwich and all?”

  It was now a cannonball in Paddy's stomach.

  “Right!” said Paddy, with a quick clap of the hands. He had decided. He felt a weight lifting from his shoulders, but a dark cloud forming over his head at the same time. He searched through the beer cans on the table for his cell phone. Maureen kept sighing and wringing her hands, her elbow on the cane to hold her upright. Then she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She nodded, ashamed as she did.

  “Aye, go on, love, and ring her. Tell her to come back home.”

  “All's not forgiven, mind,” Paddy warned.

  “Och, sure that we understand. She's never to be forgiven. She can never be forgiven. That's between her and the Lord to sort out. She can, but, help out. Help us out.”