Mrs. Mulholland looked up—in the van, he was taller than her—and ran her eyes over the spotty-faced youth in the dingy smock. Was he a teen who too many nights on the lash down the town had made look older, or an adult whose small bones made him look younger than his years? Were the greasy black bangs plastered over the pimply forehead due to the fetid air inside the van or a lack of shampoo and soap? She couldn't tell. He had the face of a small animal, something feral and cunning with tiny, sharp teeth, one of those creatures that didn't instill trust, perhaps a weasel or ferret? She wasn't one to prop her feet up before a nature show on the telly, so she didn't know which was which, but he gave the impression of something undomesticated, in any event. But now his white face with the red splotches was just looking at her with those teary, boozy eyes it had.
“Why are ye stood there gawping at me like a spastic with an algebra problem in front of him? Gimme me me full portion of chips!”
Rory looked down, and his face softened. “Och, that portion does seem a bit...scanty, aye, I'm terrible sorry. I've me mind on other things.”
Rory took the one step to the vat, grabbed the scoop and shoved it into the chips languishing there, filled it to the brim and took the one step back. He towered over the woman, and she half feared he would grab her jaw and force the chips down her throat. But he didn't. She nodded as the chips clattered into the container.
“Ta. And a wee spoonful more curry sauce on top, if ye would. Love.”
He grabbed a ladle from a pot and splatted curry on her chips. Mrs. Mulholland fastened the container with newly-squared shoulders and a smile of personal satisfaction, a small battle won in her day of many such battles waged in her mind. She asked with a lightness in her voice, as if said in passing, only making conversation, “And when do ye think the wee girl will be back here serving in the van? What was it ye call her?” Her face demanded the information.
“Not that it's any of yer business, they call her Dymphna, but.”
If it wasn't her business, Mrs. Mulholland soon made it so. She had spent a lifetime doing it.
“And she'll be back...?”
His eyes shot around wildly. His fingers gripped the counter top. His nails were bitten. “I...She...”
“I'd think it's a bit too early for her maternity leave, like.”
“I'd rather not discuss it, if ye don't mind. All I know is me mammy has me working here, filling in Dymphna's shifts, like.”
“The poor wee soul. Two wee newborn critters, up the duff with another, slaving away here for what I'm sure is a pittance, and not a man in sight.”
He leaned toward her and managed: “I'll have ye know, I'm the father of them wanes of hers.”
She took a step back, hand on her breast and a gasp in her mouth, but the rain beat down on her back, so she took the step forward again. Her eyes were little pebbles of anger. So he was the filthy culprit! And he had the gall to seem proud of his transgressions!
Mrs. Mulholland had, of course, zeroed in on the ring finger of the girl, that hard-working wench she now knew was called Dymphna, and knew the two infants shrieking in the stroller were bastards conceived out of wedlock. Half her brain had always thanked the girl for being kind and generous and cheery, while the other half shuddered at the thought of being served by a shameless, spread-her-legs-like-a-switchblade slapper. She had always longed to know the full story. She was an old aged pensioner with nothing to do all day long but fill time, and gossip, even sinful, repugnant gossip that made her brain bemoan the sorry state of the modern world—she blamed the 60s and Yank telly and films—caused a tingle of excitement in her. In fact, perhaps that gossip was the most exciting kind. And here she had the impetus, the push down the sloping road to eternal damnation the poor misguided girl was on. Her dentures clinked in disgust.
“And ye've not seen fit to make yer way to the altar to—”
But most Lotharios spilled their seed and ran. They didn't pick up their victims' shifts at the fish and chip van. Her brain cells trundled. Her eyes searched him, struggling to comprehend.
“Yer mammy, did ye say? What does she make of this, this unseemly state of affairs? She owns this van, does she?”
“Aye. Zoë Riddell.”
Mrs. Mulholland was lost for words. It seemed a first for her. Finally she managed to get out: “D-doesn't she be, if I've heard tell rightly, the same woman what owns the Pence-A-Day storage units? The woman that be's after opening that Amelia Earhart museum around the corner on Bishop Street? Derry businesswoman of the last three years?”
“Runner up, aye. And it's an interactive center. Ye can sit in a mock-up of her plane and imagine ye're making the flight across the Atlantic along with her.”
Something strange was happening to Mrs. Mulholland's face, and it had nothing to do with the mock-up of Amelia Earhart's single engine Lockheed Vega. She had been moaning and complaining and shouting the odds, yes, but her face had been open, as if haggling over the portion of chips were only sport and they were both enjoying it, though on second thoughts the lad hadn't appear to be enjoying it one bit, so less of the 'they' and more of the 'she.' Now, however, it was as if a steel barrier had slammed down, or perhaps a portcullis of iron spikes had suddenly risen up between them.
“The lockups, aye, and the museum, I knew about and all. And the butcher's. And that swanky café down Shipquay Street. Never step foot in it, and I never will. I hadn't a clue, but, that that Proddy...woman! owns this chip van!”
And...Dreams and Wishes! Zoë Riddell owned that card shop! Mrs. Mulholland still raged about it, though it was three years on. She gave Rory a look that said she felt like spewing up right there before him all the portions of curry chips she had consumed from the van since its inception. It was a sly trick. A sleekit, dishonest trick. A typically Protestant trick. The café and the lockups and the museum she could understand. They were either large or upmarket enterprises, requiring funds to get off the ground that Protestants could supply with ease. The chip van, but! One would approach it safe in the knowledge that one would be supporting a family enterprise, a struggling Catholic family enterprise. That's why she hadn't asked the girl Dymphna about her predicament herself; she hadn't wanted to embarrass a fellow Catholic. And why she paid the extra fifty pence, though she doubted it was really goose fat they were frying the chips in. Now, however...
Mrs. Mulholland knew that, in this town divided by religion, sometimes with barbed wire and barricades of burned out cars, as it had been years before, if Catholics didn't frequent Protestant-run enterprises out of principle, they'd soon die of hunger, thirst and overexposure to the elements, considering who owned the clothing stores. The downtrodden majority was paid Protestant pounds in their pay packets at the end of every week, the pounds of the oppressors were in their hard-working hands and their handbags and wallets and pockets but briefly, and were handed over to fill equally Protestant tills. That seemed to be the way of their world. They did it, but that didn't mean they had to like it.
But Mrs. Mulholland would never have suspected the three pounds—now three pounds fifty!—she handed over the counter of the chip van on a weekly basis went towards remodeling Protestant homes and paying for Protestant flights around the world and flash overpriced gear from the likes of Next and Harvey Nichols. For none other than Mrs. Zoë Riddell, her arch-nemesis. In fact, the Kebabalicious fast food restaurant around the corner had a special of a small chips for 99 pence, and curry sauce for 50 pee, it said so on a poster on the window, but she had wanted to support struggling Catholic businesses.
Did her neighbors and bingo partners, Mrs. Stokes and Mrs. O'Bryan and Mrs. Leech, all know the van's secret? Had their hunger for a fish fillet and a battered sausage made them overcome their sectarian dislike and buy from the van? She knew they visited the van—it appeared to have no name—after a day's shopping in the city center every Thursday; they had all gossiped about Dymphna, wondering who the father was. It didn't seem likely they knew. Mrs. Mulholland hid a smi
le even as she sputtered with moral outrage. She realized she had hot gossip that would soon be spreading through her neighborhood of the Moorside like Protestant sperm through that Dymphna's womb; she would take great pleasure and that sense of moral outrage from 'outing' the van. She seemed to undress the youth before her with her eyes, or at least to disrobe his smock in her mind.
“And does that be a shirt from the Northern Ireland football team ye've on ye there?” she asked. “I can see the green and red colors poking out from under the collar of yer smock, so I can.”
Mrs. Mulholland knew all the NIFC players were Protestant, or the majority of them anyway. And 97% of their supporters. Wearing such a shirt in public was like a red flag to a bull for Catholics. Just like the red and white of a Derry City soccer team shirt was a red flag for Protestants. And not just shirts. Many a drunken Catholic versus Protestant brawl on the cobblestones had started with the sighting of a Northern Ireland soccer scarf fluttering in the wind from around the neck of a Protestant bastard, shoving his Protestantness in their faces with his scarf. Wearing such things with pride! The bold-faced cheek of it!
“And what if it is?” Rory asked, his cheeks burning, and it seemed to have little to do with the swelter of the inside of the van.
“Ye know flimmin well what that means,” she seethed, as if he had suddenly revealed to her he harbored some horrific perversion—incestuous child molestation or transsexualism or the like. “You and yer mammy be's Proddies! Orange bastards! Pulling the wool over wer eyes with this van of yers and snatching the money outta wer hands! And...you!” She singled him out with a finger stained at the tip with curry juice. “That poor innocent wee girl ye've ruined the life of! Not only has yer mammy got her toiling away here—I've not noticed yer mammy hasn't been forcing you to work here—”
“I'm a student! I haven't the time—”
“—ye kyanny keep yer vulgar wrinkly thing safely locked up in them baggy jeans of yers! It's disgusting, so it is, I'm affronted, so am are, at the thought of it! Populating the world with alien, half-Green, half-Orange creatures what'll have no place in the future, no place and no one to call their own. A disgrace to all that's sacred in the world, so ye are! A flimmin bloody disgrace, I tell ye!”
If she were younger, she would've scooped a rock from the ground and flung it at the van while the sinner gasped and sputtered above her. But she didn't need to, as behind her, three youths under ten, good Catholic ones, zoomed up through the pelting rain. Gravel scattered as their bikes screeched to a halt. “Where's that ginger-haired Orange-loving slag with the big tits?” one screamed. Their hands were full, and they launched their ammo through the air towards the van and the cowering Protestant in the van. Though from the splat of it and the smell of it, Mrs. Mulholland gathered it was not rocks but dog droppings they were flinging. She wiped a speckle from her collar, grabbed her curry chips, and waddled over the cobblestones through the sheets of rain towards the video store, beaming a smile to the hooligans clutching each other with hoots of laughter on their bikes.
Rory roared out: “Clear on outta hear, youse flimmin fecking hooligans!”
Mrs. Mulholland couldn't hear him through the laughter, the clanking of the raindrops on her plastic cap, and the sudden wailing of sirens off to a different crime. Behind her, Rory slammed down the hatch, and, because her back was to it and she was inspecting her crucifix in any event, Mrs. Mulholland didn't see the graffiti over the CLOSED sign. Someone privy to Dymphna Flood's plight had spray painted “CHIPS FROM ORANGE LOVING BICTH!” It seemed the older generation of the town was out of the loop on some things the youngsters of the day knew as gospel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Padraig!” Siofra squealed. “What's gone and happened to Mammy? Do we need to do something like...like...check her pulses?”
The infants, limbs a tangled mass in the one stroller, screamed bloody murder. Siofra's lower lip trembled at the sight of her mother's portly, veiny thighs splayed on the sopping concrete for all the world to see. Her dress had hiked up. Siofra was embarrassed for her. Fionnuala's puffy, pink face, framed either side by the black-rinse ponytails and stretched in anguish, stared up at the dark clouds with sightless eyes. Her Jackie O hat had rolled against a corroded pipe. The beaded black veil danced in the wind. The chimneys which towered over them spewed horizontal black smoke. Soot fluttered down on their little heads.
Siofra turned to her brother, she didn't know if for verification of her mother's death or help. Padraig's eyes glistened behind his specs, but it seemed to Siofra not with the tears of a mother lost, but the excitement of all his Christmases having come at once. He often talked to Siofra in barely contained tones about how thrilling—'magic,' he termed it, it would be to come across a corpse one day; they always seemed to be doing it on the telly and in the movies. Siofra had agreed with him a few times it would be exciting, but she had never imagined that the corpse would belong to someone she knew, let alone her mother.
Padraig grabbed a mangled windshield wiper that was at his feet and poked Fionnuala's lifeless left arm with the tip of it. The tip disappeared into the fleshiness of the upper arm. He moved it to other parts of her body, prodding in wonder. But for all his death-obsessed nascent-adolescent bravado, he was keeping a distance, and Siofra suspected it was out of fear rather than respect. He squatted down and hovered over the body as close as he dared, inspecting Fionnuala's emotionless face with wonder. She couldn't yell at them now. The wiper inched towards her face.
“Deadly, aye?” he said.
This was the wrong choice of words for little Siofra, who burst into tears, her wails joining those erupting from the jowls in the stroller.
“We've to get Mammy to Altlnagelvin!” she sobbed, wrenching the wiper from her brother's grip and imploring him with all the force her little eyes could muster. She threw the wiper to the ground. “We've to call the amulance!”
“The amulance won't be much help to her if she's dead. They can only dump her body in the back of it. They won't even turn on the lights and sirens.”
“Don't ye be calling it her body! It doesn't be a thing! It's a mammy! It's still Mammy! Wer mammy!”
“If she be's dead, but—”
“Naaaaw!”
“—we should ring that funeral place, like where Mammy told Mrs. McDaid we've just come from to see wer Dymphna at. Serves Mammy right. Spreading them lies about wer Dymphna dying, then she goes and snuffs it herself. I think God did it to teach her a lesson, like.”
Siofra didn't know if God had done it or not. She didn't even know if her mother was dead or not. Even though, in a corner of her mind, she remembered that not a long time back Fionnuala had left her for dead in the hull of the creaking cruise ship they had been working on, she still hoped her mother wasn't knocking on the Pearly Gates even as they stood there around her body. She couldn't understand what Padraig was saying or why. But she knew he wasn't helping. Her little heart raced and her thoughts spun.
“We've to take her somewhere, anywhere. Outta here. To get her help. There's no help round here. Only buildings. And dog shite.” She indicated the latter with a halting nod. She twirled her black locks with trembling fingers, stuck some in her mouth and began to gnaw frantically.
“We've no phone, but. That'll serve Mammy right for not getting me one.”
“Mammy's got her own mobile, but!”
Siofra sobbed as she bent down and gingerly slipped her hand into the pocket of Fionnuala's jacket. She avoided touching the squelchy places underneath the polyester which were her mother. Padraig picked up a stick and resumed poking. Siofra tugged the phone out and punched numbers at random, Something popped up on the screen. The mobile was a pay-as-you-go, and Fionnuala hadn't topped it up, according to the message. It had run out of minutes. The phone sat in the palm of Siofra's hand, a useless, dead thing. Just like...
No! She wouldn't believe it, wouldn't accept her mother was dead! As she stood there and inspected from afar the monstrous f
orm before her for signs of life—a breath, a twitch, a throbbing vein—she frantically searched the compartments of her brain for all the fun moments they had shared, mother and daughter smiling and laughing as one. She drew a blank. There was nothing but an endless stream of outstretched palms zooming towards her naked face, insults spewing from her mother's mouth. Desperate, she thought instead of some times she herself had been happy and her mother had just happened to be in the vicinity. She was pleased her brain could conjure up a few of these. They flashed on the backs of her eyelids like trailers in the cinema that were more exciting than the main feature: shimmying before the mirror in the flashing tiara her mother had broken down and bought her for her First Holy Communion, the family holiday to the beach at Buncrana, across the border, where there was no sand, only pebbles, and it had been drizzling, but there was a donkey and you could ride it if you paid, though they claimed it was a Shetland pony, but Siofra knew a donkey when she saw one, and she had begged her daddy for the five pounds so she could ride it, and her mother had snapped a photo of her on the beast, waving (Siofra, not the donkey). All this took seconds to recollect.
“If we're gonny help her,” Padraig reasoned, “we've to make it up to the motorway over there and wave for a car or a lorry. A lorry, most likely.”
He pointed up the hill. They could see the tops of trucks zooming by.
Best Served Frozen (The Irish Lottery Series Book 4) Page 6