‘… just don’t happen to me, Molly. What can I say? I didn’t know how to handle—’ His voice was making her feel at home again, all cosy and comfy.
‘… what came over me but it did and there’s no going back.’
‘So when will you come and get me?’ Molly, having lost the thread, asked woozily into the phone.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Moll. I can’t come and get you.’
‘But you just said you loved me,’ she said, confused.
‘I do, Molly. I do love you. But, God, I don’t know how to tell you this. I love you,’ he said carefully, ‘but I love Tiffini, too. That’s why I married her on Saturday.’
Molly’s shock was halted only by confusion. He married Tiffini and he’s already cheating with Smith?
‘You bastard!’ she said into the phone. ‘You bastard!’
‘Listen, I’m not going to make a fuss about the credit card. I owe you that at least and when you come back maybe we can all sit down and sort a few things out.’
‘I have to go now,’ Molly said.
‘I’m really sorry about Tiff,’ Jack was saying as Molly dropped the receiver and let it hang towards the floor, so his bleating sounded like nothing more than an annoying mosquito buzzing in the background.
Tiff, she thought. Tiff, not Smith. Even worse than cheating on Tiff. He wasn’t cheating on her. They were on their bloody, christforsaken, goddamned honeymoon. It just gets worse, she thought, scrabbling around in the bottom of the rucksack for signs of any of the little vodka bottlettes she had been given on the plane. It just gets worse. Naturally there were no bottles there.
There was, however, after much scrabbling around, a little scrap of paper with Rangi’s phone number on it. He would come and get her, thought Molly, crazily. He would rescue her and take her away from all this. She pushed Jack out of her mind.
She punched in the numbers and waited, in excitement, for her lovely new friend to pick up the phone.
‘Hello, Rangi’s phone,’ a familiar female voice sang. Molly recoiled in shock. Did no male answer their own phone these days? What were they — fingerless? Also, the voice that answered Rangi’s phone sounded a lot like Jess.
‘Is Rangi there?’Molly said, trying to disguise her own tone.
‘Molly, is that you? It’s Jess,’ the voice said. ‘Where are you?’
‘What are you doing at Rangi’s place?’
‘Oh, Molly. Um …’
There was an embarrassed silence.
‘Are you there?’ demanded Molly.
‘Yes,’ said Jess quietly. ‘Look, I know you probably don’t want to hear about this, right, but, Molly, the most wonderful thing has happened to me. I bumped into Rangi again the day after we met him in that bar and he took me for a drink and we got talking and he just — we just — oh, it all just clicked. I’ve been at his place ever since and I have never been so happy in my whole entire life. It is soooo fantastic, Molly, I can’t thank you enough.’
Wonderful … clicked … happy … fantastic … thank you. Molly laughed as she suddenly realised with a warm, welcome flood of relief what was happening — this wasn’t her real life: she was having a horrible dream.
Jess and Rangi living happily ever after? Jack married to Tiffini and honeymooning in Taupo? Of course not — whew.
‘Ouch,’ she yelled, after hitting herself on the forehead with the telephone. That wasn’t good. She felt it. ‘Ouch,’ she yelled again as she hit herself a second time.
‘Molly?’ She could hear Jess’ voice in the distance. ‘What’s happening? Where are you? Do you need any help?’
Molly hung up and crashed out of the phone booth, staggering across the quiet carpark between the pub and the black moonlit water.
She could ring Sheila but she was probably tucked up in bed with Dervla. Her mum was probably engaged to some 17-year-old by now, and her father, well …
The sky was starting to lighten and the twinkle had gone out of the stars. Sitting on the stone wall again, Molly suddenly started to think clearly. Very clearly. She’d had enough and she didn’t care for any more, it was as easy as that.
She stood up straight and walked to the end of the little stone wall. The ramp the fishermen launched their boats from was slippery but her wet socks helped her keep her balance. She walked carefully and slowly to the water’s edge and, without hesitating for even a second, kept going.
Trying to ignore the freezing temperature, Molly kept walking until the water was past her knees, then her thighs, then around her hips, reminding her she had no pants on.
Her wedding dress ballooned up around her, making her look like the stamen in the middle of a puffy cream flower. Soon the solid footing of the ramp ran out and she submerged herself in the icy depths.
Keeping her frozen face underwater, she let her arms and legs splay, starfish style, while she waited for whatever was coming next, which she hoped was coming soon because it was bloody freezing in the meantime. So freezing in fact that she didn’t think, no, she couldn’t, not even for another — she lifted her head out of the water gasping desperately for air, flailing around to keep afloat.
Dog-paddling in the icy water, her teeth chattering and her body aching all over, she prayed to God for the strength to end her miserable life. If she cocked this up too, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
Plunging her face into the water again she waited until her body started begging for oxygen and then she fought it, the way she had fought the urge to take her finger out of her throat instead of vomiting during her one-day brush with bulimia in the fifth form.
Her body buckled and thrashed but still she kept her head underwater. Where’s the lovely floaty bit I’ve heard about? she thought. Where’s the dreamy, take me, take me, take me part? Where’s the misty, drifty, fuzzy, cloudy, happy, foggy—
Suddenly she felt an excruciating pain in her head as she felt her body rise up out of the water. This is being dead? she thought. It hurts. Then she felt something lock around her neck as the water around her became frenzied and thrashing. Is this hell? she wondered, clawing at her throat. You drown, and then once you’re dead, you are strangled? Good system. Great help.
The water gurgled and rushed around her as the pressure around her neck got tighter and tighter. She tried to say something but couldn’t. Then she felt her bum hit something hard, and her back and shoulders scrape against a scratchy surface.
Someone, she realised drowsily, was dragging her, lumping her, back up the ramp. That’s a good joke, she thought. So hell is actually back at Ballymahoe with her cousin, the priest. Ha ha. Good one.
Suddenly, her cousin, the priest, the hell version, was slapping her face and looking into her eyes. She blinked.
‘You’re not dead,’ the hell cousin cried, and lifted her head to his chest, hugging her so hard she could almost feel his warmth, but that couldn’t be right.
‘You’re not dead,’ the hell cousin said again, leaning her back so he could look at her again.
‘Yes, I am,’ she told him, astonished to see that he was crying. Really, what was hell coming to?
Chapter 34
Late 1990
It was Monday night and Sullivan’s est. 1654 had a sign saying ‘Closed for Private Function’ hanging on the door.
Inside, the fire roared as Brendan’s sister Rachael and her daughter happily pulled pints for their friends and neighbours. Gerry had moved two barrels and two chairs to one side of the fire and placed the other tables so they faced towards him and could see him clearly. He had a lot to get through tonight and didn’t want the likes of Patricia O’Meara and Betsy Ginty having their own private chatfest and missing what he had to say.
The door chimed and Gerry looked up to see his mam coming in, with her neighbour, Gertie Maguire, Sheila Mahoney’s mother, clutching her arm.
They both looked at him and beamed and he bustled over to them.
‘Come in and sit down, now, will you, we’r
e waiting on you.’
‘Has he told them the plan yet?’ Gertie asked Mrs O’Reilly.
‘Have you told them the plan yet?’ his mam asked.
‘No, Mam, that’s what the meeting’s for,’ he said patiently.
‘No, Gertie, that’s what the meeting’s for,’ Mrs O’Reilly in turn explained to her tiny neighbour, although she was standing just as close to Gerry as his mother.
‘Oh, grand!’ Gertie said, smiling up at him. ‘It’s mad busy in here tonight, Gerry. What’s the occasion?’
‘We’re having a meeting, Gertie,’ he started to explain but the old girl caught sight of the O’Mearas and started shuffling towards them without waiting to listen. His mother raised her eyes to the heavens and followed. She has a glow about her, all right, thought Gerry, proudly.
She hadn’t had much of a life, his mam. Widowed when Margaret Mary was just three months old, she had done a grand job of bringing up her children, if you didn’t count Bernard doing the odd stretch at Wormwood Scrubs and Michael’s trouble with the booze and Martin fathering children all over Kilburn and beyond.
Margaret Mary had done her proud, despite her shite of a husband, and the boy — well, they were all proud as anything of the boy. And if tonight comes off all right, she’ll be proud of me too, thought Gerry. And 46 years isn’t really too long to wait.
Gerry signalled to Brendan to take up his position and banged a spoon on the side of his pint glass to shut everybody up.
‘I’d like to hereby call an extraordinary meeting of the Ballymahoe Progressive Society,’ he said, clearing his throat.
‘Progressive, bollocks, ya gob-shite,’ yelled Mickey O’Meara, who with advancing years was not getting any less cranky.
‘Give the boy a chance, will you Mickey?’ shooshed Betsy, who gave Patricia a break at scolding the old goat every now and then.
‘Extraordinary, me arse,’ the old man said, just loud enough for every last person gathered in the pub to hear him.
‘Leave him alone, Mickey O’Meara, or I’ll tell the whole place about the scabby rash that has your hand down your pants half the day and night,’ Patricia said, catapulting her husband into silence. ‘Go on with you, Gerry.’
Only briefly distracted by the thought of what itchy mess lay in Mickey’s trousers, Gerry started again.
‘Welcome to this extraordinary meeting of the Ballymahoe Progressive Society,’ he said. ‘Now, I’ve brought us all together tonight because after a year in operation I think O’Rellys needs a bit of fine-tuning.’
‘Changing the name would be a start,’ Eamon Ginty lobbed from the back row. ‘What was wrong with O’Ginty’s?’
‘You’ve got to be feckin’ joking,’ said Kathleen Fogarty.
‘Mouth like a sewer rat,’ Betsy whispered to Patricia.
‘Have you ever known him to joke?’ Seamus Mahoney interjected, still bitter about being bitten on the arm by Eamon’s son Thomas Aquinas 30 years before.
Gerry had the patience of a saint, but not all the time in the world. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, tapping his spoon on his pint again.
‘We’ve been through all this before. O’Ginty’s would not work as the name for a relative-finding agency for the same reason that O’Fogarty’s, O’O’Meara’s, O’Mahoney’s and O’Byrne’s would not work. As far as I know, Relly is short for relations, while Ginty is short for—’
‘Besty Ginty!’ yelled Thomas Fogarty, who everyone agreed was thick in the head.
‘Shut the feck up,’ his mother said, reaching across and giving him a good slap.
‘Disgusting,’ Patricia mouthed at Betsy.
‘Brendan,’ his sister called from the bar, ‘what about those cousins on our mother’s side? The ones from Wexford?’
‘What about them, Rachael?’ Brendan said. ‘Can’t you see Gerry has an agenda to get through?’
‘All I’m saying is that if Relly is short for relations, then Cousins is every bit as good and not even short for something. We could have called the agency Cousins. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘The state of her!’ Betsy whispered at Patricia. ‘All that cleavage. It’s no wonder Maureen went the same way.’
‘But it’s not just cousins, is it?’ shot Jenny O’Brien. ‘In fact it’s hardly any cousins at all. Did your mother have relations in Wexford called Great-great-uncle by any chance, Rachael? Or Second-cousin-twice-removed, you know, hyphenated?’
The mood was turning nasty so Gerry raised his spoon to his pint glass yet again.
‘Never mind the name,’ he said, agitated. ‘It’s the state of the thing that has me lying in my bed at night worrying meself half to death.’
The crowd fell silent. Gerry wasn’t one to worry.
‘O’Rellys is currently experiencing cashflow problems brought about by the extreme lack of relations we have been able to find. Now, I’m sure this is a temporary setback but the fact is we have to do something to jazz things up a bit, get the ball rolling, you know?
‘The problem is that a lot of the folk that filled in the Book of Relations don’t know enough about the people they are looking for, for us to get our teeth into.’
He dragged the book towards him and flicked it open at random.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Ivy Kowalski of something-or-other, Nebraska, would like to find her great-grandmother’s Auntie Siobhan Kennedy, from somewhere near Goleen, probably left Ireland in the 1800s.’ He sighed and looked up at the faces glued to his. ‘Without the resources we just can’t track down someone like that.’
‘What did he say about sauces?’ Gertie Maguire asked Mrs O’Reilly.
‘Resources, me arse!’ yelled out Mickey O’Meara before being punched in the shoulder by three different people.
‘Without more people and the latest computer technology, which would cost us all a small fortune, it’s going to take us too long to find these relatives. Sure, the people who’re looking for them will be dead and gone themselves by the time we can put a finger on who they’re looking for. And they’ll be being looked for themselves by a whole different generation by then.’
‘Well, that’ll give you a head start,’ quipped Jenny O’Brien.
‘Oh, I’ll be well and truly dead and gone by then, Jenny,’ Gerry said sadly, ‘and so will the whole of Ballymahoe.’
‘Dead and gone, me arse!’ yelled Mickey, bringing his ancient spindly arms up to protect his head from the hail of blows that followed.
‘Just our luck,’ said Gerry, ‘Mickey will outlast the lot of us and sell his body to science for a million pounds to boot.’
Daniel Mahoney had been sitting quietly, his eyes glued to Gerry O’Reilly the whole time. Keen to turn his parents’ general store into something worth inheriting, he was well aware just how much of Ballymahoe’s survival up to this point was thanks to Gerry’s entrepreneurial skill.
‘Do you have something else in mind, Gerry?’ he asked in his strong, quiet voice.
‘That I do, Dan, that I do.’
Gerry looked around the group and prayed to God they would go for it, just as Gertie Maguire let off the loudest fart he’d ever heard in his life.
Thomas Fogarty roared with laughter while those closest to Gertie sprang out of their seats and staggered away, waving their hands in front of their noses.
‘What have you been feeding her, Sheila?’ Betsy demanded, holding her nose with her fingers.
‘Only the same as the lot of them but it has a peculiar way of going down with her,’ Sheila said, red faced and embarrassed.
‘Ah, it’s only wind and we all have it,’ Mrs O’Reilly said, patting Gertie’s hand.
‘What’s all the fuss for?’ Gertie wanted to know. ‘Has he told them the plan yet?’
‘Would yis all sit down and shut up and let Gerry tell you his plan!’ Brendan had popped a cork and was standing behind his barrel looking fit to explode. ‘He’s only trying to save the whole town and all you can do is moan and complain about Gerti
e’s rotten guts. You should be ashamed of yourselves, so you should.’ And Brendan, the veins in his temples pulsing wildly, sat down in his chair and stared at the floor.
The crowd shuffled sheepishly back to their chairs and sat down.
‘You were saying, Gerry?’ said Dan, as though nothing had happened.
‘I was saying that the way we are going about tracking down these long-lost loved ones is taking up too much time and money to leave us with any real profit, let alone get hordes of people here for the reunions, which was after all the idea.
‘So in the absence of the necessary resources, but mindful of the fact we all need to earn a crust, what I am suggesting is that, quite simply,’ he stopped to clear his throat, ‘we improvise.’
All eyes were glued to him.
‘We improvise, Gerry?’ Dan asked.
‘That’s right, Daniel. I wonder if over the past year we have been sticklers for the details and perhaps it has slowed us down a bit too much. What I’m thinking is that if we were to take a slightly more generous approach to the details, that maybe there would be a whole lot more reuniting going on.’
The group was silent as they tried to comprehend what Gerry was saying.
‘So exactly what details would we be taking this new generous approach with?’ asked Betsy, getting an encouraging nod from Patricia.
‘Well,’ he answered, ‘take Ivy Kowalski of something-or-other, Nebraska. At the moment we can’t quite place her great-grandmother’s Auntie Siobhan Kennedy, from somewhere near Goleen, right?’
They nodded.
‘But we could probably place a great-grandmother’s Auntie Siobhan Kennedy from somewhere near Goleen.’
They nodded again.
‘And we could definitely place the descendants of a great-grandmother’s Auntie Siobhan Kennedy from somewhere near Goleen. Sure, there’s probably a handful living just over the hill. And they would be Ivy Kowalski’s cousins, wouldn’t they? And mad to meet their new relation all the way from Something, Nebraska, right here in Sullivan’s est. 1654.’