How long ago that visitation, those four months, seemed now. Before the Virgin Mary had graced Bridie with Her presence, Bridie had been a different person. It pained her to think of who she had been back then. A desperate slag on a road to nowhere. She had been pining after Rory Riddell. Her ex-best mate's fella. No, not just Dymphna's boyfriend, her BFF's fiancé! But then the Virgin had appeared to Bridie and made her special. Given her life a purpose. And then Bridie had met Damien on the dance floor of Starzz, and she had felt even more special. And he had given her life a goal, as yet not revealed to him: a wedding next year, then three children to follow (two boys and one girl).
Woozy before the stove, Bridie still felt strange and weak, her bones unable to support her weight, and there was an awful lot of it to support. She didn't know if the frailty she felt was from the stomach pumping the day before or the unfamiliar heat of the day. The sweat rolled down her, even though she was wearing her purple cooling sports visor, and had her pink hand-held battery-operated personal fan propped up against the bread box. A feeble breeze caressed the vast expanse of her face and occasionally her left shoulder. There was precious little change in temperature. She had bought the fan when she went to the beach at Buncrana on vacation two years ago; it had been sixty that day and she had almost passed out. How pleasant that weather seemed now! And the visor she had overpaid for when she had started her short-lived get fit regime after the visitation, along with the Pilates mat, a weightlifting belt the salesman had talked her into buying and those strange training gloves with no fingers.
After she had woken up this morning, sopping and gasping for water, she had had to wet the visor and wave it in the air a few times to activate the cooling technologies in the sweatbands. Then she had placed it on her matted, sodden hair, but it seemed the cooling technologies weren't functioning correctly. Just like the machines at the health club. She had lost half a pound, but quit going to the health club—it was too far to walk to and she couldn't make sense of the machines—and had since gained seven more. And she still paid for that gym every month. Indeed, she was locked into a three year contract, so she'd be paying for many more months to come. But paying the extra months for a gym she didn't use soon wouldn't matter. Bridie had it all worked out. The premiere was in four days time, and there were thirteen episodes, which included the two hour season finale, so there were only twelve weeks and four days still to wait. Until she became the envy of all Derry.
Damien Teague was her all. He was hardworking, conscientious, handsome and kind. He cared for her. Of course, she still kept a special chamber of her heart reserved for Mary, and a smaller one still for a hamster, Doogles, she had had as a little girl, but except for those areas, her heart was his. As was her body, the whole kit and caboodle of it, all the hills and valleys and crevices and nooks and crannies and other unmentionable areas that he pleasured like no other man had. And Bridie had had many men. But none of them had been a millionaire.
She peered anxiously at the bread under the flames. She had to get the luster of Damien's toast just right. If not, there would be hell to pay. His bread needed to be toasted a golden brown. An even golden sheen. Then she would have to cut off the edges, slice them into 'soldiers' so that he could dip the pieces into the yolk. She didn't have to take a tape measure to the slices exactly, but they all had to be basically the same size. This morning she would need to make two eggs and two sets of toast. All, she supposed, done to his exacting specifications. She removed the bread and was relieved it was perfect. Some mornings the garbage was overflowing with overcooked, uneven slices he would refuse to eat. He never bought the bread, so he didn't understand waste. She put two more slices under the toaster. She took out the teabags and got the milk and sugar ready.
Well, actually, she thought now as she spread the butter equally into all four corners of the slices as he demanded, Damien used to pleasure her like no other man had. It had been a while. Even when she had taken the bus all the way to Belfast to pick him up from the airport when the filming had ended, she suspected he would ravage her like a newly-released ex-con. But it hadn't happened. They had celebrated, of course, and he blamed the drink. Bridie still owed the pub £75 for that night, and she had no idea how she was going to be able to pay it back. What had she been thinking? Of course she knew. Damien would win the million pound prize. He had told her he had won.
The water for the eggs was boiling. She set the egg timer to three minutes, twelve seconds, as experience had shown her that it would take about seven seconds for her to get his egg from the fridge and put it in the boiling water. His eggs needed to be cooked for three minutes exactly. Something about the consistency of the yolk. But today, as she occasionally had to, two eggs needed to be cooked, and so she gave herself a few more seconds for the extra egg.
She felt her stomach rumble. She was hungry. But she couldn't eat, and it had nothing to do with getting her stomach pumped the day before. They had told her eating might be difficult, but Bridie was sure her throat and stomach could handle bacon, sausages, eggs and toast. No, she couldn't eat because Damien needed to eat before she did. He insisted on it. It was what a woman did. Fed her man. Then tended to her own, less consequential needs.
When she made his breakfast, and every morning she had to, Bridie always wanted to gorge herself on the food as she prepared it, but didn't dare. She couldn't eat until he had been served. She hadn't really believed this silly rule of his, and once she had nibbled on a piece of black pudding. He must have seen a crumb on her chin, or perhaps he could tell from some look on her face that she wasn't ravenous. And most mornings she woke up ravenous. Woke up ravenous? She spent most of the hours of every day like that! When Damien had seen the black pudding crumb on her face, or whatever, he had flung his plate at her, then roared abuse at her. She had had the misfortune that day to cook baked beans also, and they had spattered all over her face and neck.
As Bridie stood there now with the steam wafting into her face, the eggs poised over the water, one eye on the timer, she realized she was still a bit tense, still a wee bit scared after the night before. There had been a terrible to-do. She gently urged the eggs into the water at exactly three minutes on the timer.
Damien had been furious when his tea wasn't on the table at 7:00 PM sharp. No amount of explaining in a croaky voice that could barely utter words that she had been in the hospital had quelled his rage. She had been drunk, he had told her, so it was her fault she had ended up in St. Blanchard's. And he had roared with cruel laughter when he found out that was where the ambulance had taken her. “Fitting,” he had said. Then demanded she call up Balti House and order his favorite delivery.
“I was in Final Spinz fighting for to get ye yer job back, actually,” she had dared to tell him as she placed his beer in his hand. He was watching soccer.
He had pried his face away from the screen long enough for her to see a look of horror overtake it. Startled, she whipped her head around to see if a man with a knife were standing there, but saw only the wallpaper and the Robbie Williams poster taped to it.
“Are ye deranged, ye daft cow? What makes ye think I need that fecking job back?! Any fecking job?!” he had roared.
Damien had punished her for speaking out of place, then sat back down, glugging the beer she had bought him while he waited for the papadum, the samosas, the mulligatawny soup and the shrimp jal frazie she had paid for to arrive. Perhaps he'd grace her with a few of his leftovers, but the hospital told her she shouldn't eat in any event. Maybe she'd have been able to take a few tentative sips of the soup, but he had eaten it all.
Actually, Bridie considered as she scooped the sausages and bacon onto two plates, Damien didn't seem to be so hardworking any more. He had no job. So she paid the rent, paid the electricity, the gas, the cable, the internet. And she loaned him money. And more money. And more. For his nights out without her, for his soccer matches, for that Eminem concert in Belfast, which she didn't really want to go to, even if he had asked her
, as she didn't like hip hop. Every time she opened her money purse to delve into it for him, Damien always said, “I'm good for it. Sure, ye know that.” And he would move his eyebrows up and down. Eight times. Those eyebrows were saying to her, “I won Safari Millionaire.” Eight syllables, eight movements of the eyebrows. Because the producers wouldn't let him tell her he had won. He was sworn to secrecy. But Bridie knew Damien was using a secret code to tell her without telling her: I-won-Sa-fa-ri-Mil-lionaire.
She knew she had been drunk the afternoon before, and that probably explained why she had marched into Final Spinz to spit abuse at Fionnuala Flood for taking Damien's job away from him. Bridie wondered if some small part of her brain, a part that only revealed itself when she was legless, felt hard done by for supporting her fella. But in twelve weeks he would be paying back all he owed her, and more. Lavishing gift after gift upon her. Maybe they'd even travel the world. She had always wanted to see Paris. It was like knowing in advance you were going to win the lottery. The house was littered with brochures of things she wanted to buy.
Ping! As she carefully spooned out the eggs and placed them in the egg holders, she shook her head at her stupidity the day before. Why would Damien want his job back, want to work when he was going to be receiving a check for a cool million from the...TV channel? The producers of the program...? Bridie didn't know who would be giving him the check, where the money would come from.
“Briidiee!”
That was him now. There was a sharp intake of breath as she jumped.
“Ye fat feck!! Where's me eggs? Me tea?”
Thankfully, everything was ready. Perfect timing. She felt a weight lift from her sweaty shoulders. She placed the two plates, the two mugs, some folded napkins and the cutlery on the tray. It was metal and showed cows grazing in a field. She carried the tray up the stairs. And...hmm. He wasn't really kind. And now that she thought of it, he had never been kind. The first night at Starzz, he had professed undying love to her, then had laughed at her outfit.
Conscientious? She really didn't know if he was that or not. She actually wasn't sure what the word meant, even though she had studied for a while at Derry Community College. But she had overheard a woman in the line at Kebabalicious talking about a man she had just met on the bus down to the city center, and she had used that word, and the woman she was with had cooed, so Bridie figured it must apply to her Damien as well, as he was the best man in Derry. But whether Damien actually was conscientious, or even had been, she didn't have a clue.
Bridie knocked on the door to their bedroom, then opened it. She set the tray down on his legs under the covers.
“Bejesus!” Damien moaned, eying her with his bleary eyes. “Have I just woken up in Hell?”
Bridie froze. Her mind went blank, like she had eaten ice cream too quickly. Was he talking about her? Saying she was a demon? After all she did to make him happy?
“Am I in a crater of Venus, a crater closest the Sun?”
She deflated. He was talking about the hot spell. Or the heatwave, maybe it was called. And his comment made her smile, though nervously, and made her remember...he was also terribly clever! How could she have left that out? He had explained to her once that although, as every schoolchild knew, Mars was the closest planet to the sun, Venus was actually hotter. It had something to do with clouds of acid and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. How had she forgotten that? Maybe because he always harped on about how knowledgeable he was, and, therefore, what a stupid cow she was.
As he propped his pillow on the headboard and eyed the tray to make sure everything was as it should be, he snorted to himself. “What am I on about? Compared to Amazonia, this heat be's nothing. The air there, ye could feel yerself trudging through it.”
Bridie had heard it all before: torrential downpours every day at four o'clock; anacondas dropping from the trees and slithering around their feet; alligators racing through the muddy waters towards them when they tried to bathe; giant hawks called gaviões, and urubus, birds that looked like vultures but were bigger, circling overhead, waiting for the contestants to die so they could pick their bones clean; massive rat-like animals with huge heads called capybaras that would burrow into the shelters while they were sleeping and scare them shitless, microscopic insect-like creatures, micuim, apparently, that weren't really insects but burrowed into you and bit you.
“Sure,” Damien had said many times, “everything over there be's bigger, the leaves, the fruit, and the creepie crawlies were all as big as me fist.” And Bridie knew from sad experience just how big his fist was.
Giant armadillos called tatus, huge monkeys called macacos, one sighting of a jaguar called an onça pintada: on and on the list of exotic and dangerous animals with strange names went.
The cameramen, who had read up on the wildlife of Amazonia before they were flown over, had explained the creatures to him and given him their strange Amazonian names. But Bridie wasn't sure whether to believe this or not. Were the cameramen even allowed to speak to the contestants? She didn't imagine they were. And, just as she was about to doubt Damien had even taken part—perhaps the state of his body had been from acne or a month-long drugs binge—she had seen the first television ad for the new season. And there Damien was in all his glory on the screen. A shot of his elbow in a canoe, then the camera panned and she, and the world, had seen him clutching an oar and, as the camera moved in for a close-up, his scraggly beard, the filth on his face, staring, eyes bulging with fear into the screen, mouth wrenched open, twisted in a scream of horror.
As she looked at him digging into his egg now like a famine victim tearing at the carcass of a hyena found on the roadside, she wondered...handsome? Perhaps before the trip. Even then, though, there had been something strange about the shape of his head. It was like a cube. And his eyes had seemed too small and squinty. And he had those strange sideburns—orange, even though the hair on the top of his head was brown—that he grew all the way to the tip of his chin in pointy bits. But he had come back worse, emaciated, ribs poking through his skin, his tender pale flesh covered with healing blisters from the Amazonian sun. When she had finally got the clothes off him, she had screamed at the sight of his arms and legs and feet and ankles and wrists and elbows and neck and torso and buttocks and genitalia. As if the malnourishment weren't awful enough, his entire body, the entire thing, was covered with blotches and bites and oozing pustules from those micuim things. His skin had mostly cleared up since, but there were tiny scars peppering his body that would always remind him of his time in the Amazon.
So the scream-inducing state of Damien's body this was another clue that he had won the million pounds. If you were voted out, they put you up in a lodge and fed you like a normal person. The thinner you were when you came back after the four weeks, the more likely it was you had won. Bridie had weighed him before he went, and she had weighed him when he came back. He had lost fifteen pounds. While she had gorged herself with worry. Thinking of him in that tropical rainforest. And she had wondered if that were the same thing as a jungle. Why didn't people talk about jungles any more? And where was Peking? She knew the duck from the Chinese takeaway, but could never locate the city on a map. Jungles and Peking seemed to have disappeared.
So Damien wasn't hardworking, wasn't kind, she didn't know if he was conscientious, he was no longer handsome. But he was still dead clever. And a millionaire.
As Bridie stood there with her arms folded watching him eat, another arm appeared from underneath the bed sheets, followed by a tousled mane of blonde hair and bared nubile breasts. His bit on the side from the night before. He had called up one of his ex-girlfriends and told her he was gagging for a shag. That was Bridie's penance for not getting him his tea on time the night before. At least he hadn't forced her sit on the edge of the bed and watch, as he had last week with that Filipino girl from the asbestos factory. But even then, Bridie had been glad to do that, actually, so she could determine if what Damien told her was true: he never kissed
any of these tarts on the lips. And he hadn't kissed the Filipino, at least not on the lips. So Bridie was satisfied. His lips were for her lips alone. That showed he loved her. After the Filipino had reached orgasm, Bridie had had to trudge to the sitting room and sleep on the settee. Where she had slept last night.
She grinned down as the girl reached for a slice of toast.
“I hope ye enjoy it, love,” Bridie said.
“Feck off, ye mingin toerag, ye,” she replied.
Bridie was surprised to see it was the girl from the market stall, the one that sold hip hop cell phone cases and those sticks for selfies. Bridie continued to smile. That was another rule. She had to treat his 'guests' like guests. With a smile and a pleasant, cheery manner. “Ye don't want themmuns to think I'm shacked up with a bitter bitch, do ye?” he had warned her on many occasions. So smile and be cheery to his latest fancy woman she did and was.
Damien dipped a soldier into his egg, warned her, “Not so brown next time, ye flimmin useless cow,” wiped yolk from a sideburn and waved her off.
Bridie closed the door and trudged down the stairs. She went back to the kitchen to begin her own breakfast. She'd get her hands on that million. And then she'd wrap her massive farm laborer hands around Damien's scrawny neck and throttle the life out of him. After the wedding and the three children, of course.
* * *
CHAPTER 16
Fionnuala had gone to 'bed' the night before with chattering teeth. She now stared about the sopping ends of her pillow, shocked at the heat she had just jolted awake in. Trying to shake off the remnants of the nightmare, she kicked away the damp sheet that clung to her legs like Saran Wrap. She was happy for once the sheet was threadbare. She staggered the two steps across the matted purple and pink shag carpeting and wound up in the kitchen corner of the caravan.
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