Chapter Nine #3
“This is great,” Lena says, sliding onto the banquette.
“Thanks.” Sooner or later someone is going to bring up her fact-finding excursion with the jam, but not yet.
It’ll take a while and a couple of drinks before Rachel is mentioned.
The funeral was more than anyone could take; they need to catch their breath before they head back into that territory.
It’ll come. When Yvonne grabbed Lena’s arm, probably she was genuinely glad of the chance to bring Lena back into the fold—the two of them always got on—but that was incidental. Ardnakelty wants to find out why Lena Dunne, after all these years, has been taking an interest in local affairs.
Lena is grand with that; she has her answers ready. What she wants to find out is whether anyone around here knows what Eugene was doing that had Rachel worried.
These women won’t tell her. All of them were born wearing the prime directive like a birthmark: say nothing.
Talk plenty, keep the chat flowing, but when it comes to anything that has weight, saying it would only lead to trouble.
Everyone here will say nothing expertly, but Lena is still fluent in her mother tongue, even if she refuses to speak it.
She’ll know, by whether they warn her off, if there’s something they’re keeping unsaid.
“Jesus,” Philomena Doherty says, inspecting Lena up and down. Phil is still short and square, she still drinks pints, and she still looks like she’s brandishing a camogie stick even when she’s not. “Why do you look ten fuckin’ years younger than I do?”
“It’s ’cause she’s got no kids,” Yvonne explains. “I usedta be all fresh-faced as well, no eyebags or anything, up until I had the kids. Remember that?”
“You can have one of mine,” Phil tells Lena. “Have Jack. I’d a pound of mince in for the dinner last night, and the little shite came in from training, fried it up, and et the lot. Between slices of batch bread. He’s a fuckin’ savage.”
“At least he fried it,” Julie Quinn says.
Julie has big brown eyes that always look worried; back in school, she was the one constantly anxious about getting in trouble, whether she’d done anything or not.
“That’s a step in the right direction. Niall woulda put it in the microwave.
He did that with sausages once, and all the skin peeled off. ”
“Step in the right direction, me arse. He didn’t bother his hole salting it or anything, and when I got in he came to me complaining that it tasted like shite. I nearly took the head off him.”
The conversation swings into horror stories about things people’s kids have done.
Lena could offer stories about Trey that would stop the other women in their tracks, but she has no intention of doing it.
She knows fine well that she’ll have to part with some currency here, if she wants anything useful, but Trey isn’t currency.
Noreen is eyeing Lena across the room, the way she’d eye a dog that probably shouldn’t be off the leash.
Lena gives her an angelic smile and a finger-wave.
She’s safe: Noreen can’t rush over to supervise her, because she’s stuck dancing attendance on her mother-in-law.
Between her weight and her arthritis and her sciatica, Mrs. Duggan hardly ever leaves the house; Lena can’t imagine how Noreen and Dessie got her into the car, let alone into the church and up the hotel steps.
But when Mrs. Duggan wants something, people get it for her, and nothing would have convinced her to miss out on today.
She’s throned in the middle of a banquette, draped in yards of purple velvet, a little purple hat clamped to her twist of black-dyed hair, with Noreen and Dessie firmly staked down on either side of her.
“I could smell it from out on the landing, I’m not joking you,” Melanie says.
Everyone has started laughing, pressing their hands over their mouths to hide it, Julie hissing at Mel to stop.
“When I pulled it out from under his bed, it was green. I thought it was going to reach out and grab me. I told him, next time I’m taking him up to Dublin Zoo and leaving him there.
Where he belongs.” Lena finds she’s laughing too.
Somewhere along the way, she forgot that she likes these women.
“I’d say you can smell Sophie’s room from here,” Yvonne says.
“The perfume, my God. Some influencer had it, on TikTok, and now they’re all drowning themselves in it.
Didja ever leave an apple in your schoolbag till it went squashy, and then spray the bag with air freshener to stop your mammy finding out? That’s what she smells like.”
Everyone is laughing too hard, rocking in their seats with the effort of keeping it down.
Lena has heard women bitch about their kids plenty of times, but this has a different edge, sharper and more urgent.
These women are brandishing the stories the way they’d hang amulets and scrawl symbols, masking their children’s preciousness from whatever malevolent thing weaves through the air scanning for prey. This is protection.
“Sure, the girls’d melt your head just as bad as the lads,” Phil says.
“Louise came in to me this morning, right, waving some top in my face, and she said she couldn’t wear it ’cause her arms look funny.
She was annoyed with me. Like her arms are my fault, or it’s my job to fix them.
There’s nothing wrong with her arms, and if there was, what the fuck am I meant to do about them?
Shove her back up there and start over?”
Yvonne splutters on a mouthful of her drink. The laughter has reached a suppressed intensity that sounds painful.
“D’you know what,” Phil says to Lena, whacking Yvonne on the back, “just take the lot of them.”
“Ah, don’t be saying that,” Julie protests, dabbing under her eyes where her mascara is running. “You’ll miss them once they’re gone.”
There’s a splinter of silence. The laughter is wiped away like it never happened. No one turns to look at Claire Holohan.
The room swirls like water, groups eddying together and apart, people carried from one to the next on the current.
The mood has the same ceaseless ebb and flow: surges of weeping, talk, laughter, silence, all sweep across the room, dissipate, and re-form into something else.
Everyone looks stiff and weird in their good clothes, and the whole afternoon has the queasy, rudderless sway of a nightmare.
Cal feels like he’s been here forever, but the flat gray outside the windows hasn’t changed.
“Now,” Francie says, arriving back at the table and putting down his precarious handful of pints.
“About fuckin’ time,” Senan says, reaching for a glass.
“Were you waiting for the horse to piss?” He’s snapped out of his dark mood and turned loud.
He’s nowhere near drunk—Senan is big enough, and practiced enough, to hold a lot of booze without showing it—but his eyes skid too unpredictably and he puts his glass down too hard.
He looks like he might welcome an argument.
“I’ve had plenty,” Cal says. “I gotta drive home.”
“Don’t we all, sure,” Mart says. “No Guard’s going to pull anyone over on a day like this. Sure, that’s the sergeant over there, lookit, at Tommy’s table. With the pint in his hand.”
“Sandwiches,” says a teenage waitress who’s clearly been dragged in for the day by her mama. She shoves a tray of wilted triangles at them.
“What kind?” Bobby wants to know.
The waitress examines them. “Egg?” she says doubtfully. “And those ones are ham.”
“Don’t be tempting us,” Mart tells her, slapping away Bobby’s reaching hand.
“We’re all on a diet here. So we’ll fit into our bikinis for Christmas in Tenerife.
” He pats his scrawny middle. “I’m going great guns, but some of these fellas, naming no names”—he wiggles his eyebrows extravagantly at Bobby and Senan—“they’d go through those gourmet yokeymajigs for a short cut, and then where would we be on the beach?
Man-boobs galore. ’Twouldn’t be a pretty sight. ”
The waitress is trying to figure out whether he’s yanking her chain, and whether or not he wants sandwiches. “Wouldja have any lettuce?” Senan asks her. “I’d murder a lettuce.”
“Don’t be making demands, you; this lady’s got enough to be doing.
D’you know who’d only love a few egg sandwiches, but,” Mart tells her, struck by the thought.
“See that table over there? The big fella with the gray hair, he’d sell his mammy for the sniff of an egg sandwich. Give him our share, go on.”
The waitress looks doubtfully back and forth between their table and Tommy’s. All the guys give her encouraging nods, and in the end she drifts off, still glancing back dubiously over her shoulder.
“Now,” Mart says happily. “That lot won’t be able to say no. Tommy’d ate slurry, sooner than look snobby in front of the populace.”
“He’s a braver man than me if he eats them sandwiches,” Senan says.
“I do love a good game of Russian roulette,” Mart says. “When ’tisn’t my own guts on the line.”
“I’m starving,” Bobby says dolefully. At a long table at the end of the room, a scrawny kid with an unconvincing mustache is ladling soup from a tureen into bowls, for a line of the kind of old women who can’t be killed by anything short of a lightning strike.
Bobby eyes him wistfully. “I’d eat the hind leg off the Lamb of God. ”
“We’ll bring you for chips after,” Francie says. “You big baby.”
“Here,” Senan says to Cal. “Is your young one going into the politics as well, is she?”
“Huh?” Cal says. “She’s gonna be a woodworker.”
“That’s what I thought. What’s the story there, so?”
Cal follows the angle of Senan’s chin to Trey, who has paused by the Moynihans’ table on her way somewhere and is having what looks like a chirpy chat with Tommy Moynihan.
“What the hell,” Cal says.
“Exactly,” Senan says.