Her mother could never know what Fionnuala kept secret in the Celine Dion/Titanic satchel she had dumped in the hallway as they had carried her into the house, the evidence of the shameful procedure she was meant to follow the next day under her GP's orders. Even Paddy, who she shared everything with, would never know. She would take it to the grave with her, what the doctor expected her to do. Everything told her it was an inhumane thing to expect a human to do. But, fearful of her health and looking to extend the years she had on the Earth, she would have to comply with his orders. Only she and Dr. Chandrapore would know. When the curtain was pulled and she set eyes on him, it was the one time outside a curry house she had been happy to see a Pakistani face—she had seen on the telly they were good doctors—and this was how he had repaid her touchy-feely moment of madness: forcing her to do this disgusting thing!
Fionnuala tried flicking on the telly, but remembered it was on the blink.
“How am I meant to recuperate with no telly, hi?” she, remote dangling in her fingers, demanded of all around her. “Languishing here on the settee as I must, with no end to me illness in sight, and with no entertainment to keep me company.”
“How about a wee singsong?” Maureen suggested. She didn't notice them all recoiling slightly in horror. Nor the alarm as she opened her lips wide and belted out, hand slapping her knee in rhythm: “Armored cars and tanks and guns, came to take away our sons...!”
“Naw, naw, Mammy!” Fionnuala spat derisively. “Christ almighty, ye'll put me back in Altlnagelvin with that racket! Naw, I've a better idea.” She singled Siofra out with a finger. The girl looked like she wished the crust of pizza was as big as her face so she could hide behind it. But there was nowhere in the sitting room to hide from her mammy. “Go on and be a dote, love, and take off yer mammy's socks.”
“Not a massage!” This from Maureen.
Fionnuala snarled contemptuously at her mother. “As if I would, Mammy! What sorta self-centered geebag do ye take me for? Come on, wee girl! Hop to it! Don't sit there with that look of a spastic on yer face! Get me socks off!”
She wriggled her toes inside the monstrous red wool-type things she was fond of. Paddy, Lorcan, Padraig and Maureen looked away, kindly, as Siofra shuffled on her knees over to her mother's feet and, breathing through her tiny nostrils, peeled off the socks. Seamus watched in awe.
“Now what, Mammy?” Siofra asked, fear of the unknown in her eyes.
“Now I want ye to place em on yer hands, one on each, and give yer mammy a wee puppet show. Ye can use the coffee table there as yer stage. Them pizza crusts and them mugs and bottles and whatnot can be yer props. Use yer imagination, love. Lord knows ye're the only one in the family with one.”
A younger Siofra might have blindly followed her mother's bizarre instructions. She had certainly been happy to do most everything her mother demanded in the past, no matter how deranged or immoral. She had been the most sterling of all Fionnuala's children, who she had tried to mold into her own little stormtroopers of hatred. But Fionnuala seemed not to have noticed that the girl was getting older. More independent, with thoughts of her own clicking her brain. She was staring at her mother now with a look she would have never dared give Fionnuala in the past: her mouth creased in disgust, her eyes bright with the threat of insubordination.
“Naw, Mammy! I'm not showing meself up like that in front of the whole family, like.”
There was silence. Fionnuala threw Siofra a thunderous look, and Maureen had half-risen from her chair, Paddy taken a step forward, when she simply shrugged and said, “Just as I expected from ye. Traitor. Seamus!”
Little six-year-old Seamus jumped in shock. Padraig stared in disbelief through his urine-colored specs.
“A-aye, Mammy?” he asked in a voice that was set to bawl.
“Ye're gonny take the place of that selfish wee cunt of a sister of yers. Get them socks on yer hands.”
They were too big for Seamus, but Padraig, either pitying his poor little brother or excited to see the show, shuffled over on his knees across the carpet to help him. The red socks dwarfed Seamus's hands.
“C'mon now, me wee dote,” Fionnuala cooed, “let the action begin! Curtain up!”
Seamus's face, his little eyes and nose and mouth, screwed up as if he were about to cry. He placed his sock-covered hands on the table before him, elbows between the pizza detritus.
“I don't know what to make yer socks say, Mammy. What do socks say?”
“Och, for the love of Christ, ye daft bastard! C'mere, have ye no clue that I'm of the mind ye're soft in the head? I don't mean an eejit like we call everyone eejits, but a real eejit, one, like, that be's separated from all the other wanes in school and forced to do lessons they call special, but really be's for them demented ones with only half a thinking brain in their heads. I'll help ye, spastic that ye are. Here's the first thing yer auntie Ursula says, that be's the sock that's yer right hand. Yer right be's the hand closest to that bottle of lager. I'm sure ye didn't know. Here's what she says: Ohhh, they call me Ursula Barnett,” the cringing audience didn't know why Fionnuala was giving Auntie Ursula a weedy falsetto voice, or a British accent, but she was, and not only that, Paddy's face was hard, his left eye twitching as he fought to contain himself, Lorcan's hands were fists, Padraig was staring at his mother in disgusted awe, Siofra eyed her little brother with pity, and Maureen had retired upstairs to the loo, “Move yer fingers, ye daft cunt!” Fionnuala barked at Seamus. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Do I have to do all the work for ye? Move yer fingers when I be's saying what yer auntie Ursula says so it looks like the puppet be's talking!” Paddy wanted to step in when he saw tears welling in Seamus's eyes, but a look from Fionnuala made him step back towards the fireplace again. “I'm gonny begin again, ye daft git, and I want ye to move yer fingers like they was her lips. And wave the puppet about and all.”
“Where's the puppet, but?” Seamus whimpered.
“It be's the sock, Seamus,” Siofra whispered.
“Don't ye dare help him, ye hateful bitch!” Fionnuala barked. “And I'm never asking ye to do anything for me ever again, wee girl! Ye're dead to me! Dead! Do ye hear that?” Paddy feared for his little daughter's safety as she flashed her mother a look that said, “As if I give a flimmin feck,” but Fionnuala was back to staring at the 'stage' and the teary eyed puppet master knelt behind it. “I'll begin again, Seamus. Ye'll burn in Hell if ye don't follow yer mammy's instructions.” All were concerned as Seamus's lower lip trembled and the tears welled in his eyes. “Move yer fingers, now, of yer right hand.” Again the high pitched British accent, and Seamus did as demanded, while Fionnuala warbled out, “I'm a tight-fisted old cow. Me handbag be's bulging with cash, but I'm keeping it all to meself. I've a minted Yank husband, but that doesn't be enough for me. I've won the lottery, but that doesn't be enough for me and all. I moved off to the States as nobody in Ireland can stomach the sight of me. But I travel back to Derry time and again just to flash me millions around so nobody forgets how rich I am. And I want more money. More pounds. Loads and loads of pounds so that I'm the richest woman in Derry. Even though I cleared out ages ago and I don't live here no more. And I'm giving me wads of cash to nobody. I'm eating in the swankiest restaurants and ordering all the food I can shovel down me big fat throat. And would ye look at the state of me! Pig-ugly, so am are! And me hair! Like a purple, what do ye call it? Them things that floated around Nazi Germany I seen on the telly. Back when we had a functioning one.”
“Zeppelin,” Lorcan said.
“Ta, love,” then Fionnuala was back to the British falsetto. Seamus's fingers twiddled inside the sock, his eyes looking up at her, imploring her for a sign, a slight twitch, of approval. “Oh, here's some pizza. Let me grab it and ram it down me throat. Pick up that crust, Seamus!” Fionnuala barked. “It's there in front of ye on the table, sure! Pick it up with the sock and make like she's eating it!” He did. “And, oh, my, who's that nice younger woman I see peering through the
window of the restaurant at me? Och, she's coming inside now, but I don't think they let her type in here. She doesn't look like a nose in the air, me shite doesn't stink bitch like me. She wants to say something to me.” She broke off, chortling with glee. “Now, Seamus, use yer other hand. Now it's yer mammy's turn.”
Seamus struggled to comprehend.
“The other sock be's Mammy,” Siofra whispered, gaining her another glare from her mother. But Siofra seemed made of titanium now.
The others looked on, helpless. None in the prison that was her family dared cross her. They had tried in the past, and the retribution had been relentless. For their own mental and physical health, it was best just to let her get on with it, spewing out her hatred and fear at every turn, every opportunity.
Fionnuala used a husky, but pleading, kindly, voice for herself. “Hello, there, Ma'am. I wonder if ye could help m— Move me! Move yer other hand, ye useless geebag!” Seamus understood now. The socks, one with a crust of pizza sticking out of the 'mouth,' danced atop the table beside the overflowing ashtray. “I wonder if ye could possibly help me, kind woman? I'm a working mother, and yer sister-in-law, and me and yer brother and all his wanes are wile hungry. Starving, so we are, desperate for a morsel from all the food that be's piled high on this table ye're sat at, with that silk tablecloth and heaving with all them wile fancy and wile dear hamburgers and pizzas and vegetables and other food I've never seen in me life before, French or Continental, it must be, dead posh, and I wonder if ye might be so kind as to give us a tiny morsel to eat? Maybe a crumb of that bread stick over there—that fag end be's the bread stick!—if it wouldn't be too much to ask? Now, Seamus, yer Auntie's gonny speak.” The right sock sprang to life. “Naw! Get the feck outta here, ye hateful bitch! What are ye doing in here, anyroad? This restaurant be's reserved for posh arseholes like me. I'm not giving up any of me food. It's for me own massive, hateful, ugly, manky, mingin body! Clear on off outta here before I call the Filth on ye. Ye know I love the Filth. As much as I hate ye and me brother and all them hateful nieces and nephews of mines....”
Fionnuala rolled her prone body on the sofa with glee, laughter spilling from her mouth. The others were speechless. And so the theater of hate continued, to their dismay, line after excruciating line. Thankfully, the 'play' was only one act long. They stood, sat or knelt there, transfixed, until it had reached its surprising climax and was over. “Mammy” had “eaten” “Auntie Ursula,” and Fionnuala had clapped rapturously, “Bravo! Bravo, me lad! Och, ye're a blessing, so ye are!” and had wrenched her massive form off the settee and was all set to wrap the terrified and confused little boy in her arms and hug him tight as Maureen resurfaced and Lorcan mouthed at his father, “Christ, that was brutal,” but then Seamus, giggling happily, had sock “Mammy” erupting with a coarse burp, for which he received a violent smack on the face and a move a notch down her List instead.
Fionnuala settled back on the sofa, eyes shining.
Lorcan cleared his throat. He gently touched her foot. “I've-I've to leave yer side now, Mammy. I've to ring some lads as I've some plans to put in motion.”
Fionnuala's eyes rounded with genuine surprise. Her face crumpled into an exaggerated grimace of agony as she fought to prop herself up on an elbow.
“What've ye got going on, son, that be's more important than tending to yer aul invalid mother? I would expect it from Dymphna and the likes of them,” Fionnuala nodded her head at Padraig and Siofra,
Padraig and Siofra were shocked.
“But, Mammy!” Padraig protested.
“We saved ye from death out in that parking lot, so we did!” Siofra said.
Fionnuala appeared not to hear. “...and from that shameless twat-slurper Moira in Malta and traitor Eoin. Not from ye, Lorcan, but, the strapping young lad first outta me hole as ye were.”
Her eyes were saucered with incredulity.
Lorcan stammered, head bowed in shame. He shot a glance at his father. Paddy looked as if he had just been prodded with a cattle prong. Fionnuala's eyes weren't weak enough with illness to miss the look between father and son. She struggled up on her elbows, face thunderous. A hot water bottle fell to the floor.
“What have youse two been up to behind me back? I seen the look ye give one another. Youse are in cahoots. Ganging up with plans ye've not included me in. Traitors! Bleedin fecking flimmin traitors! And all this while I be's lying on me death bed!”
The three younger children scattered, Seamus bursting into tears. Maureen heard their feet clattering up the stairs, but nothing, not even a chair lift, would make her join them. She had a front row seat to the drama unfolding before her rheumy eyes. She almost clapped her hands with glee.
Paddy cleared his throat. He wiped her head, but she smacked the rag. It splat on the hot water bottle.
“I see the guilt in yer eyes, son! Tell me what ye're up to! Tell me know!”
Paddy put himself in the firing line for his son's sake.
“No use beating about the bush, love,” he said quickly. His mouth twitched with a smile, and maybe this was his little revenge for the shameless 'entertainment' about his sister they had been forced to sit through. “Ye're gonny find out soon enough, anyroad. Lorcan's off to the States. Aye, joining Eoin and Moira before him, going to make a life for himself abroad.”
“I'm sorry, Mam, but I was suspended from the plant today for a punch up, and I kyanny see any point in—”
As Maureen's ears cringed at the shriek erupting from Fionnuala's mouth, she thought her daughter now a dead ringer for Munch's The Scream, and that she herself had seen one too many episodes of Art Treasures of Europe: The Ones The Nazis Didn't Get on the telly of late.
The shriek kept spewing from Fionnuala's withered lips, as if the thought of Lorcan deserting her terrified and enraged her more than any sudden mystery illness could.
Lorcan looked pained. He inched towards the door.
“Sorry, Mammy, but—”
Fionnuala wrenched her limbs from the settee, robe trawling open, and lurched after him. Paddy was knocked to the floor in a pile of pizza shreds and cheese bits. Maureen giggled into her hand.
“Over me dead body!” Fionnuala screamed, shaking her fist at Lorcan's quickly retreating back. He leaped up the stairs to safety. “Ye're not leaving me here alone in this shitehole! Over me dead body, I'm warning ye, son! Aurgh!” She gripped her heart at a sudden strange pain, tried to clutch at the door jamb, missed, and slid down the peeling wallpaper between the settee arm and the ironing board. Tears welled in her eyes. Paddy hurried over to her side, but she clawed his hands away and roared like a mental patient.
“Over me dead body!” were, again, Fionnuala's last words moaned up the stairs as Lorcan finally reached the landing. But with the sudden new plans that were shooting through her brain even as she fought off Paddy's hands of comfort, perhaps 'over yer dead body' would be more apt. If she couldn't keep her beloved son, her most loved, her gorgeous, charming, fit golden boy, in Derry on his own accord, she would fix it somehow so he wouldn't be able to leave.
CHAPTER 14
Plastered, Dymphna was again alone in the nook, £100 lighter, and fighting the urge to check out the arses around her, when her goggly eyes zoomed in on the last person in the world she wanted to see. Bridie McFee!
The splintered walls of the nook receded. Dymphna's heart froze, at odds with the bass beat from Pitbull and Ke$ha on the jukebox that shook the rest of her body. It's goin down, I'm yellin timber!
Once her best mate in the whole wide world. Now her mortal enemy. Propped up between the fruit machine and the dartboard, next to the entrance to the loos, in bulging leggings and mud-spattered Doc Martens. And glaring across the bobbing throngs of the pub, shooting daggers at her with a menace that would strike fear into any of the McDaid lads.
The drunken synapses of Dymphna's brain flew. Chilled in the sweaty depths, she wrapped her arms around her and searched wildly for her girlfriends, safety in number
s. But a rap song earlier, they had staggered to the smoking area (the street outside); Dymphna had stayed behind, not because she wasn't smoking, of course she was, pregnant or not, and not because she loved Tinie Tempah's rapping, she didn't, but to keep the nook theirs. Her bridesmaids were nowhere to be seen. Dymphna's only comfort was the silver open-toed stilettos she was wearing; their heels always made her feel equipped with two deadly weapons for whatever a night on the town might bring, and she had put them to use twice before.
She was terrified because Bridie seemed many pints past reason. Under hair of no color or discernible style, the glare on her face dissolved into a sneer that shot through the masses towards Dymphna. The bloody lipstick jumped out across the room. The sneer turned to a smile, which was somehow more terrifying because Dymphna didn't know if Bridie was smiling at something in real life or in some fantasy of her mind. She remembered a night the two of them had hallucinated on absinthe, and feared suddenly Bridie might have grown fond of hallucinations and had begun popping strange pills from the 60s. Bridie struggled to remove her shoulders from the fruit machine and take a step in Dymphna's direction.
Dymphna whimpered even as her drunken stupor sought to lull her. She took in Bridie's purple hoodie with LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU emblazoned on it. Her brain thought it a shame nobody was taking Bridie up on the offer right now—only a lad sniffing around her crotch could distract Bridie from her hatred for Dymphna. But it wasn't difficult to see why there were no offers. Few were the faces that lit up at the sight of Bridie approaching them. Her body was like an aging sofa you'd want to dump in a skip, shapeless and uncomfortable, with lumpy bits you couldn't comprehend what they might be sticking out in the most alarming spots. Pimples, early wrinkles from misspent teen years and cold sores that never seemed to heal despite the passage of time vied for attention on her bitter mug. And then there was her personality.
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