She had spent the last three months languishing inside these four aluminum panels. Years of rain (and there had been plenty, both years and rain) had allowed water to seep in through the windows and panel joints. The wooden frame of the caravan was rotting, there was a terrible stench of damp, and outside the panels were ready to fall off at a touch. The little toy windows were so scratched that it was almost impossible to see outside. If there had been much to see. There was a telephone pole, Fionnuala knew this, but beyond that, the long-forgotten caravan park on the edge of the motorway, population one, didn't seem to be surrounded by, well, she wouldn't have termed it luxuriant roadside foliage, even if she had known the words, and nor would anyone in their right mind, if they had. Indeed, what had once been a vacation park seemed to fill the only space on the entire lush island of Eire where dirt could be kicked up. And kick it up Fionnuala's clogs did every evening when she stomped home in exhaustion. For this tin cube with its brown and burnt orange plaid upholstery walls that seemed to press down upon her from all sides was now her home.
How she would love to boil water for tea. But there was no gas. And no electricity. Fionnuala always brought three thermoses to work and made as many pots of tea as she could, then filled the thermoses when she clocked out. She was assured at least one or two cups of tepid tea every evening, but by morning it had always gone cold. So drink cold tea she did. Today she'd have to drink out of a thermos. She had one tea cup, it was true, and a plate, a fork, a knife and a spoon, but there was no running water either, so they just sat festering in the dry sink until she snuck under the cloak of darkness down the lane to the 'neighboring' farm (five miles or so, her aching feet told her) to pump water into a rusty bucket she had found on the side of the road two weeks after she had moved in. She did her laundry weekly in this manner, and washed the dishes also. So she had a clean cup only once a week. It never occurred to her to take the cup with her to the dry cleaners and wash it in the little sink of the break room there every day.
The dry cleaners...She shuddered now as she sat on her 'chair' before the 'table' and thought back to the nightmare that had woken her. A man had been attacking her. A faceless man. With one of those long handled Grip N Grab reaching aids that all the Sav-U-Mors in town had so you could take down the toilet paper stocked on the top shelves. In her nightmare, the snapping metal jaws kept inching closer and closer to her breasts. And she had been working naked, though why, she couldn't imagine, though that was dreams for you. The gripper, she had to admit in the cold reality of this sweltering morning, the sweat drying on her forehead, had been more scary than the trowel and tongs which had actually menaced them. Or perhaps it was because in her nightmare she had been naked. She wiped some sweat from her brow. She felt like she was a sardine in a tin can that someone had tossed into an incinerator. The sun was beating down on the aluminum roof, and she was suffocating.
She poured some cold, watery tea down her throat. Worse than the nightmare now, she couldn't shake the image of Mrs. Ming's dead body slumped against the counter, the old woman's primrose-covered dress riding up her arthritic legs from the static cling. Serves the aul coot right, Fionnuala thought, now an expert in all things laundry; if Mrs. Ming had static cling, she must have a dryer and actually put it to use. Fionnuala considered the wanton waste of electricity shocking. Ostentatious bitch! The only four syllable word Fionnuala used with any regularity. Aye! It served the woman right to be seen by the world and her maker like that, with the hem of her dress clinging to her ladder-ridden tights, the bottoms of her discount knickers on display for all and sundry to goggle at. But the moment she thought that, Fionnuala felt bad.
Decades ago, Mrs. Ming had been kind to her. Had cared for her when her mother couldn't be bothered, her father was dead, and her brothers were out committing their many crimes. True, Mrs. Ming's house had stank—not that the Heggarty house had been flowering with potpourri, but the Ming house had a stink different from their own—and, Fionnuala remembered after all these years, the tea the woman had served was always weak, and the Fruit Pastilles and Jaffa Cakes were always past their sell-by date, as Mrs. Ming bought them from the bargain bin of the Top-Yer-Trolley. And Mrs. Ming always forced her to watch Countdown with her, that afternoon quiz show that dealt with spelling and math puzzles and which Fionnuala couldn't understand. But Mrs. Ming had been kind to little Fionnuala. Now that she was gone, Fionnuala felt her missing. She realized Mrs. Ming was precious to her. She was important. Had been important.
Fionnuala was surprised at this sudden revelation. She hadn't loved many people in her life. But when she gave someone her heart, she gave it to them fully. She knew the list of those who had, at some stage, captured her heart, been her all: first, the Bay City Rollers. Then Paddy. Then her children. She swallowed more cold tea and sighed. They were all dead to her now, or she was dead to them, anyway, though perhaps the Bay City Rollers never knew she had ever existed in any event. (And, in the case of the Bay City Rollers, Fionnuala had gone off them a bit when they released “Love Me Like I Love You,” and then Alan had left the group, and she hadn't been able to forgive him, even though she was proud he had been replaced by Ian, who was from Northern Ireland, but as they were all supposed to be Scottish that didn't make much sense, and after she thought this, many, many hours of her tween years had been spent trying to locate Bay City on various maps of Scotland that she had come across in school and in bookstores and libraries, but she had never been able to find it, and then Mary Fletcher had told her when they were on the teeter totters together that the band had thrown a dart at a world map and it had landed on Bay City, Michigan, the USA, and that's how they had chosen their name. That had infuriated Fionnuala, and then she had turned to hate them, even the lad from Northern Ireland, and she quit wearing tartan pants that didn't touch the tops of her shoes and had started shoplifting 45s from the Sweet instead.) Fionnuala still hated the Bay City Rollers, much as her family hated her now. She still felt betrayed by the tartan-clad band, much as she felt betrayed by her family.
Fionnuala sighed yet again. Final Spinz would be closed for the investigation, so she had no work to go to. There was nothing in her social calendar for that day. Aside from a police interrogation at five PM. And, the idle mind being the playground of the Devil, she found her phone in her satchel and dialed Paddy. Again. It rang and rang and rang. Then she tried the home number. It rang and rang and rang. There was a twitch in Fionnuala's left eyelid. The anger, the disappointment, welled up within her. Surely he had heard about the hold up by now. News spread like herpes in Derry. Maybe even Siofra had told him, revealed she had broken rank and entered enemy lines. Fionnuala knew she had made Paddy angry, but he should still care about her. Shouldn't he? And what about her mother? Had Maureen so totally turned her back on her only daughter as well? Fionnuala couldn't understand why they wouldn't get in touch, if only to see if she was alright. Her anger threatened to dissolve into tears once again. But she had already cried the night before. She couldn't do it twice in a twenty-four hour period. That wasn't her.
For lack of anything else to do, pent-up in the heat, disgusted and angry, she spent twenty minutes trying to locate a writing implement. She found an eyebrow pencil in the depths of her satchel.
She sat back down to compose a list of people she had known who were dead and how much she missed them, as she was interested to see where Mrs. Ming might end up on this list. Probably in the lower rungs of the top ten, Fionnuala suspected. She didn't like many people, living or dead. Few were the people who had been kind to her in her life, and whose passing she mourned.
Number one would be easy. Her da. He had died many years before, and she still remembered his smiling face. Or thought she remembered it, anyway. Number two would perhaps be her second uncle three times removed, Kevin, who had been a bishop and had died the year before. She had always been so proud of having a bishop in her family tree, no matter how weak the twig. She had even taken the bus to Colraine for his funeral and
fought through the throngs of his devoted parishioners to cry tears into the open grave.
And the thought of her bishop-uncle made her think of the shocking newspaper article again. It told of something dangerous that was spreading, coming soon for her beloved Derry. Something that had to be warded off at any price. She rummaged around in the madness of her satchel for the paper, so she could assure herself of exactly what she had read. She found it, wrinkled, torn, covered with tea stains. She wiped more sweat from the flabs of flesh swinging from her upper arms. She was a prisoner in this tin can, a cat in a hot tin cube. The heat that day was bizarre, bestial. Armageddon-like. Fionnuala froze, as much as she could in the heat. As she stared down at the horrifying headline, she suddenly understood. It was...could it be...Armageddon-like?
She pressed a knuckle into her mouth to choke down a scream. She knew all about the skies turning dark with locusts, and earthquakes and plagues, certainly, but couldn't remember if hot weather was another sign of the End of Days. She would have to brave the Asian hordes at that internet cafe again to read up on it. Suddenly fearful, she would've reached for her Bible and held it to her sagging breasts for a few minutes, but she had neglected to pack it when she had thrown the things in the bag she had brought with her, a bin bag, with all the family around her, staring down at her, including Jed and Ursula.
Fionnuala jerked at the shriek of an animal outside. It sounded like no animal she had ever heard in Ireland before. She wondered if it were a jackal.
Now as feverish as her flesh, Fionnuala's mind went into overdrive. It really was as if the air of the damned, fetid air from the actual Hell itself, were seeping through the cracks in the Earth's crust and rising up to poison them all. Or all the sinners, in any event. So perhaps she was safe for the moment. Fionnuala was relieved she had gone to confession the week before, but she felt afraid to breathe suddenly.
She tried to peer through the scratches of the window to see if she could see any clouds of locusts descending upon her, but couldn't.
She looked down at her notepad. 1. my daddy 2. Bishop Uncle Kevin
Maybe it was because Kevin had been a bishop and in the Church, she wasn't quite sure, and never would be, but something, divine intervention, it might have been, took hold of her. It was as if the good Lord Himself had shot a bolt of inspiration into the cracks of her brain from Heaven above. She almost whimpered with excitement. Now she knew how to stop the insanity the headline of the newspaper screamed out. She knew how to save the world, at least those parts of it which were, or had been, decent and proper and God-fearing.
She tore off the page. Who knew where Mrs. Ming might end up on the list. Now Fionnuala didn't care. She had another list now to write. No, not the list of her favorite children, because at the moment she hated them all. An even more important list. A list that became more important and necessary with each bead of sweat that rolled down her bloated body. A list of necessities for her next, and now very, very pressing, venture. With fingers shuddering so much they could barely hold the eyebrow pencil, she struggled to write:
MY PLAN
Then she underlined it.
MY PLAN
It looked more official like that. She nodded. She thought for a few moments, then continued, and as the thoughts popped into her head, the writing became scribbling:
THINGS I NEED FOR THE PLAN 1. stick things poles 2. a map maybe 2 maps? 3. guide books 4. white fabric, cotton, red felt, and gold. sewing machine 5. Stencils. Lions? Draggons?? 6. Holy Water 7. Bottle for Holy Water 8.
What else? Och, aye! People. She wrote 'people' after 8. How would she get the people?
9. Megaphone
Then, and she gasped as the idea came to her, she wrote: 10. horses
Before the numbers, she drew little boxes. As she appropriated all the items, she would put a check mark in the corresponding box. She stared with pride at the list. She shuddered with excitement, trembled with anticipation. Suddenly the day didn't seem as hot as before. Maybe it was all the cold tea she had drunk cooling her vitals. Perhaps the list wasn't complete, but she could always add to it later. It wasn't like sitting an end-of-school exam, where you only had one chance from the score to map out your entire future. This list was Fionnuala's future. She would save the world from eternal damnation. She would become famous, maybe even more famous than the Bay City Rollers. More famous than the Bay City Rollers, the Sweet, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sam Smith and Adele combined. Written about in the history books. She hoped they would spell her name correctly; she had had problems with that occasionally.
She trotted off to the bucket in the bathroom closet for a much-needed pee.
* * *
CHAPTER 17
Dymphna spent more than a few moments pleasuring herself in the shower with the seven heads set to massage, even though Rory had done much the same, given her pleasure, in their queen-sized bed two hours earlier. As usual, Keanu, Beeyonsay and Greenornge had woken them up with animal-like shrieks around 6:30 AM, and after bottles and pacifiers and stewed whatnot had been shoved into their gawping maws, Dymphna and Rory had been unable to go back to sleep, and as they didn't like the Breakfast Show, there had been nothing for the relative newlyweds to do but paw each other, also animal-like. Then Rory had shit, showered and shaved, and gone off to work.
Had the children heard their mother's unearthly squeals in the pulsating streams, they might well have burst into tears again, but they were safely locked up in their laboratory. Dymphna growled “Ye filthy, dirty bastards, ye!” down at her fingers as they took her over the edge to orgasm. Then, panting and sated, she rinsed the conditioner out of her hair and turned off the spigots, or whatever made the water shoot from the heads.
She thought back to her trip to the family home the night before. She had been so fearful for the lives of her loved ones, but now she understood everyone was safe, and that the problem had been the lack of electricity. She had been shocked at the state of the family home, and it wasn't because mother-in-law Zoë had arranged a cleaning woman—'staff,' as Zoë termed her—to pop by once a week to do Dymphna's own hoovering, dusting, and even the buffering of the parquet floors. When Dymphna was growing up, Fionnuala's delinquent housecleaning had left much to be desired (not that that had roused Dymphna into action to help her), but now the remnants of the Flood family were living in true squalor. As Dymphna had been talking to Siofra and her granny (her daddy was passed out in bed, Padraig and Seamus were lost in the clutter of the house), she'd been unable to focus on their chattering faces. She kept stealing glances at the stains on the peeling wallpaper, the grime of the net curtains, once white but now suitable for a funeral parlor, gray swiftly turning black, the fireplace used as a garbage dump, and whole yards of the carpeting a vista of mold-congealed takeaway containers, crushed beer cans, empty soda bottles and she knew not what. She had actually had to shuffle through garbage to make her way towards the telly, the screen of which was covered with so much dust and what looked like Seamus's jam-covered hand prints that she wondered how they could make out what was on. X-Factor and Doctor Who must've looked the same. She'd not dared to enter the kitchen, and she hadn't wanted to imagine what the loo might look like. As Siofra twittered on about the hold up and the dead body she had seen and how her mother had seemed shorter, Dymphna was thinking that perhaps moving to the Waterside had changed her, Dymphna, changed her perception of what was clean and what was dirty; that there were some insidious, barely-perceptible changes in her worldview. But, no. The Floods were living like homeless alkies in a squat.
With a shudder, Dymphna had promised to pay off the bills when she got home. She had the household credit card. Post-wedding, Dymphna was left rather like the Queen of England, wandering through streets, handbag swinging from her elbow, but it was only for show. She had no cash to her name. Another reason she needed a job. But Zoë had given her a limited credit card she could use for the children's ice creams and entrances to bounce houses and so on, and for any household e
xpenses, emergency loo roll and the like. The limited funds on the card would just about cover the gas and electricity bills. But, Siofra and Maureen explained as Dymphna fought the urge to retch from the stench of decomposing food and unwashed bodies, they didn't know the account numbers, nor if there were online accounts set up for payment. Dymphna still had to get that information from her father. Maybe he would know. She'd ring him at the Pence-A-Day security hut. It must have a phone, surely?
She was toweling her hair dry before the mirror and wondering how she would find the number when the bathroom door burst open. She screamed. But it was only Rory.
“Rory!” she gasped. “Ye flimmin arsehole! I near shite meself! And I've only just scrubbed me body clean! What the bloody hell are ye doing back home at this hour?”
“Making yer day, love,” he said. He hurried over to her and kissed the nape of her neck through the seaweed-like tendrils of red hair. “What would make ye the happiest woman alive right now?”
“David Beckham's cock up me hole?” She even gave a little hopeful look beyond Rory into the hallway as if Rory might have brought David to their home to make her dream reality. With Zoë's millions, you never knew.
Rory tsked as his eyes rolled. They had discussed this before, fantasy sexual partners. He had countered with a young Angelina Jolie. “Aside from that, like.”
She considered this for a moment, then a few moments more. Rory looked at her as if he were hearing the clicking of the cogs of her brain. He shifted impatiently from one foot to the other. She finally replied. “I dunno. Beyoncé hasn't a new album out that I'm aware.”
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