But might have been a little more circumspect if she had but known just what sort of a character she had now permitted herself to stroll alongside in the suspiciously benign city streets! And perhaps might not – if she’d left the village of Barntrosna at least once in her life before having encountered him – have so readily placed her trust in Dermo Slattery. Would, most certainly, have given it a lot more thought when he said:
—Don’t worry, honeybun! I’m the man’ll look after you!, instead of blurting out:
—Oh thank you, Dermo! Thank you ever so much!, right there and then and plunging herself into what was about to become a nightmare with someone who – even if only because of his slender moustache and the absurd cornucopia of gold rings upon his fingers – ought to have excited at the very least a soupçon of suspicion. Not that she would have been expected to cry:
—Oh no! I know your lot! A pimp! I can smell them a mile away!
Of course not. But she would, without doubt, have approached her situation with a little more wariness. Instead of trotting back to his flat with a great big smile on her face, innocently climbing into bed with him and slavishly following his instructions until they were both, as they might have quaintly described it in Barntrosna, ‘at it hammer and tongs’, like they’d known one another all their lives. Central to this, of course, was Dermo’s insistence that she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life. This, perhaps because she heard it so rarely – never before, in fact – proved such a source of delight to Dympna that presently she was insisting to her new-found companion that she would be honoured to do anything for him. ‘And I mean – anything!’ she cried shrilly, her body happily contorting into the shape of a crab as her head tapped out a somewhat primitive musical rhythm on the flock wallpaper.
A statement which, as it turned out, proved to be a lot truer than she thought, for within a matter of days – to her perplexity – she was to be found standing outside the railway station, generously elevating her hemline and offering to accompany men – complete strangers – back to Dermo’s place for a ‘cup of tea’.
How exactly he had managed to secure her agreement continued to remain something of a mystery to her – perhaps he had drugged her? – but within a matter of a few paltry weeks it was as though she’d been standing by the ornamental fountain which was located outside the main city railway station for most of her adult life.
It was only a matter of time, of course, and sure enough, within a few short months, all her old nightmares had returned with a vengeance and it was not uncommon to see her sitting on the concrete surround of the fountain with her elbows on her knees as her cheap mascara (insisted upon by Dermo) intermingled with the tears which now cascaded hopelessly down her cheeks. Now, however, her ‘new-found friend’ did not prove to be quite so understanding. Informing her, in fact, that if she didn’t quit her crying ‘double quick’ and ‘get down to that railway station’ as ‘fast as her knobbly pins’ would take her, that she’d be the sorry girl and just to prove his point shoved his ring-bedecked fist into her face. And so, each day, it was off once more to offer her body (at ludicrously low prices – ‘Turnover! Turnover!’ Dermo would shriek when she protested) to the streams of train-travelling, shifty-eyed men, and endure anew the guilt she prayed had vanished for ever.
But which most certainly had not – in fact was if anything worse than before because on top of the crime she had perpetrated on her ailing mother she was now faced with the enormity of her sins against holy purity. All of which ended up with her pacing the evening streets once more, a crumpled mass of tears and cheap satin clothing, the reedy organ again piping its melancholy tune as she stood longingly in front of plate-glass windows bedecked with flowers, cards and the tiny tokens that lovers exchange.
I am a young girl wandering
Searching through these city streets
For the love I hoped to find
I don’t think I’ll ever find it
Dympna Wrigley sniffed to herself that the likes of Dermo was all that she deserved. Especially after the way she’d behaved. ‘How could I do it on my own flesh and blood?’ she howled as she pummelled the glass in the warm, heartbroken night.
In the end, she became a shadow of her former self, threshing about under anonymous mounds of primeval, perspiring flesh until she had long since lost count, always close by the shadow of Dermo counting his ill-gotten gains. Continuing to insist to her: ‘I love you, my honeybun!’
Lies, of course! she thought as a seventeen-stone man reached for his trousers. Just another instance of Dermo Slattery and his tawdry lies!
Not that she cared any more – she was well beyond that. Or seemed to be, at any rate! Until fate once more took a hand and the path of Dympna Wrigley crossed with that of – it is impossible! Such things happen only in fiction! – one of the city’s most prominent and celebrated citizens, Dr Kiernan McSwiggan! An extraordinary stroke of good fortune, for not only was Dr McSwiggan one of Dublin’s most renowned art buyers and all-round cultured gentlemen, he was also a millionaire many times over and lived in a castle on the outskirts of the city!
When she first heard the words passing his lips, it was all Dympna Wrigley could do not to spit in the face of this so-called ‘refined epicurean’. For the sentence ‘I love you’ meant as much to her now as the tail of a sewer rat. Which was why, in that instant, she turned from him, once more thrusting her clenched fist into her mouth, the red-faced bon viveur proceeding contentedly, rhythmically above her.
But in the days that followed it occurred to Dympna Wrigley that there had been something about the fine-art connoisseur and the way he had uttered those words – for so long in the mouths of others indisputably hollow – and actually on repeated visits continued to insist upon repeating, I love you! I love you! I love you! O Dimpy I love you!, and always giving her that special look as he did so, that soon she began to soften ever so slightly and reveal her innermost thoughts to him – confidences she had never imparted to anyone! Concerning her mother and the little village where she was born and the many dreams which had so heartbreakingly turned to dust when she came to horrible, horrible Dublin. But most of all, regarding Dermo and the terrible things he had done to her, imprisoning her in bamboo cages and making her dress up in rabbit costumes.
The latter part was essentially embellishment but the instant he heard these words spoken, the change that overcame the normally mild-mannered McSwiggan was quite shocking in its impact. Pounding the wall with his fist, he swore – Dympna feared a cardiac arrest – that if this ‘Dermo’ – this ‘wretched louse from the armpit of the earth’ – ever so much as laid another finger on her she was to proceed without delay to his castle and inform him.
Which was all very well, of course, except for the fact that when Dermo realized that ‘that shitebag McSwiggan’ as he derisively called him – Dermo despised culture in all its forms – was attracted to his ‘honey’, as he put it, not only did he lay a finger on her, he punched her so hard that she went flying across the room and knocked her head forcefully against the fridge, with the result that the next day her eye had swollen up the size of a shining blood-gorged cockroach.
From the moment – the very second – the Modigliani authority (for he was such) set eyes upon that hideous iris, the die was already cast. Dermo, of course, pronounced himself not ‘the slightest bit afraid’ of ‘Bollocky-Balls McSwiggan’, for, he continued, he was nothing more than a ‘useless big hoor with a fat cigar’ and not worth giving so much as a second thought to. Which, as far as the well-known gourmet (his taste and experience were legendary throughout the city) was concerned, might have been true but most definitely was not when it came to his two muscular bodyguards, who, as a consequence of the plentiful wages paid to them each week (not to mention innumerable ‘tokens’ and regular ‘somethings for themselves’), would have done absolutely anything required of them by ‘the Doc’, as they genially called him.
Which Dermo was about to
find out, as he was on his way home from the video shop, with a copy of – ironically! – The Kidnapping tucked neatly under his arm, whistling innocently, when he found the ground giving way beneath him, and the sound of squealing brakes, seeming far away now when in fact the stretch limousine was speeding towards the deserted factory where he was to find himself beaten to a pulp and warned that if he ever approached Dympna Wrigley again what he had just received would be as nothing. ‘Nothing? You hear?’ they snapped at him, as the still-warm cosh was slipped snugly and receptively into a back pocket. ‘Yes,’ croaked Dermo, raising a tattered and obsequious hand, ‘please . . . I beg you! No more!’
After that, Dympna’s life changed dramatically. Now, instead of rambling wet-eyed through the night-time streets pursued by the heartlessly persistent laments of reedy organs, casting her eyes longingly over beautiful silks and satins she knew she would never own, wondering where it was love might be found, she was being driven everywhere in a stretch limousine almost as big as the street she had been born in, with Kiernan showering presents on her and pecking her on the cheek and telling her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes on and how every day he thanked God for ‘sending him his little angel from heaven’. Before, finally, eventually, slipping to his knees to ask her to marry him. A request which, reluctantly, she had to turn down with the words: ‘I’m sorry, Kiernan. But I have evaded my responsibilities for long enough. I must go! Back to Barntrosna where my ageing, abandoned mother awaits!’
Of course she did, which is why three days later the bells were ringing out over Dublin City and a radiant Mrs Dympna McSwiggan was standing in the doorway of a cathedral showered in paper bells and horseshoes, endeavouring without success to stifle her giggles as her new husband kissed her yet again, the boisterous cacophony of tin cans and old boots following them all the way to the airport.
Sometimes, adrift on her lilo in the months that followed, Dympna would fancy she could hear familiar squawks that were not unlike those which had been known to emanate from a certain chimney corner in what was now the long ago. But beneath the hot, burning sun of Tuscany it was impossible to say.
As it was to be certain that the weasly, slender-moustached visage which occasionally formed itself on the blue wobbling water belonged to that of a man she had once known as Dermo Slattery. Which was why Dympna simply put these occurrences down to the heat, and, draping a towel about her bronzed and slender frame, would chuckle softly as she strolled across the terrazza towards the villa and into the outstretched arms of her cigar-chomping, wolf-grinning husband.
The Big Prize
Pats Donaghy had always harboured notions of becoming a world-famous writer but to say that he found himself speechless and utterly flummoxed when it actually happened would be what you might call the understatement of the century. It all began one Saturday some three years ago now when he was coming down the stairs. A letter lying in the hallway caught his eye. His first inclination was to ignore it completely and go on about his business and have his breakfast. But something drew him back. He hesitated for a moment and then began his journey towards the mysterious white rectangle of paper. It bore none of the hallmarks of the customary missives cursorily dispatched to him by the likes of Reader’s Digest and Quality Book Club. Disdainfully, he tore it open. ‘Gasp!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s about my novel!’ And so it was. His latest work, on which he had been labouring for almost two years – A Kalashnikov for Shamus Doyle – had scooped the Buglass-McKenzie Literary Prize!
‘What madness is this?’ he asked himself. ‘Pats Donaghy, are you in your right mind at all? Who with any wit is going to give you all that money for a bit of a book?’
He feared that all those nights wrestling with the formless shadows of his fevered imagination had finally taken their toll.
He went inside and bit his nail as his mammy poured him a cup of tea. He resolved to make no reference whatsoever to his momentary delusion in case she might say:
—Will you stop this nonsense now, Pats, or you’ll get what’s coming to you!
But just then the door burst open and his sister Nabla burst in.
—Mammy! Mammy! Did you hear the news? she declared hoarsely. Pats has won a big prize in England!
She threw her arms around her brother and cried:
—I’m proud of you, Pats Donaghy!
Pats reddened a little and lowered his head.
—Would you look at the cut of me! his mammy cried out. I can’t go to England like this!
But that night in bed she said that she was proud of him. She tickled his ear and whispered:
—Maybe one day you’ll write a little book about me, will you, Pats?
—Oh, Mammy, Pats said and she laughed and he laughed and then all he could remember was Mammy in his dream coming charging down Charing Cross Road with all her Fenwick’s bags shouting:
—Yoo hoo! Wait for me, Pats!
*
At last the big day came and they were off to London. Shoots McGilly with the one eye drove them to the station. He said he had met plenty of English people and in his opinion there was nothing wrong with them. Nabla said:
—Oh, Pats! I think I’m going to have a fit in this aeroplane!
But she didn’t. Didn’t it turn out she knew one of the hostesses – a Maureen Fletcher from Blessed Martin de Porres Avenue.
—God, isn’t it gas! exclaimed Maureen with her hands on her hips. The places you meet people!
—I’d say there’ll be a big crowd in London tonight, mused Nabla, and Maureen agreed.
—There will indeed, Nabla, she said.
Meanwhile Pats and Mammy went on chatting away about all the things they were going to buy in London. She told him she had always known he was going to be a famous writer ever since the time he got nine out of ten for his composition ‘Gathering Blackberries’. (The Angelus Bell was ringing as we came over the hill, our faces smeared in purple blackberry juice and our billy cans glinting in the sun.)
—Laws! cried Pats. When I think of it!
—I was always proud of you, son, she said, but I won’t rest until you write a little book about me.
—Don’t worry, Mammy, Pats promised, and she gave a little wiggle, I will.
And would you believe it – ten minutes later they had landed in Heathrow!
*
Mammy and Pats were in room 245 and Nabla had a room to herself on the second floor. Pats hadn’t been so excited since the day of his first communion. Outside, the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue winked at him and said: ‘Wotcher, Pats – you’re in the dosh now, ain’tcha?’
And it was true, wasn’t it? All thanks to two people – Mammy and Shamus Doyle.
What was it the Times Literary Supplement had said about him?
The modern Irish novel is in safe hands at last – take a bow, Mr Donaghy!
They had even printed a little piece of his humble effort. It was the part where Shamus vows to Cait that he will never kill again.
Cait tossed back her flame-haired locks angrily and spun away from him.
—Oh you! she snapped, and he went to her, gripping her by the shoulders.
—You don’t understand, he cried, you’ll never understand, Cait Maguire!
She winced.
—I do understand. I understand more than you’ll ever know, Shamus Doyle! I understand that there were twenty-two small schoolchildren on that bus! Twenty-two little boys and girls who never stood a chance!
Doyle lit a cigarette with trembling hands.
—I told you that was a mistake! he hissed.
—She spat contemptuously.
—A mistake? Is that what you call it? You have a nerve calling yourself a human being, Shamus Doyle!
It goes on and on like that and then in the end Shamus says:
—I promise I won’t kill any more people, Cait.
And she says:
—Oh, Shamus!
Meanwhile, however, his old friend One-Shot Danny McClatch
ey has been dispatched by the organization to see that he is terminated with extreme prejudice – but listen! What am I talking about! thought Pats as he munched the duvet.
*
—And now – the winner of this year’s Buglass-McKenzie Prize, Mr Pats Donaghy!
Pats was as nervous as a kitten, making his speech. He kept thinking of the whole town in front of their tellies going:
—Would you look at Donaghy! Just who does he think he is!
So he made sure to thank everybody in the town and especially Shoots McGilly for driving them to the station. He said it was wonderful to be in London: ‘The city that never sleeps!’ he said. ‘And I can assure you I didn’t sleep last night – ha ha!’ he laughed.
He went on to talk about Madame Tussaud’s and how much his mammy had liked being in Selfridge’s and John Lewis and all the places they had been that day. And he especially thanked the sponsors Buglass-McKenzie for making it all possible. When he said that, they all began to clap, and one of the critics took over and said that Pats’ writing was at the cutting edge of the new Irish urban realism. He said that A Kalashnikov for Shamus Doyle was a bullet up the backside of literary complacency. When she heard that, Mammy said,
—The language of him, Pats!, but she was only joking.