Factory Girls Page 3

  “No way!” Paul gasped. “Ah’m getting it!”

  Maeve watched the pair of them wrestle on the floor. Her four brothers slept in bunk beds crammed into a single room. They shared a chest of drawers and shoved the rest of their shit under their beds. Maeve and Deirdre had always felt special, sleeping in single beds separated by a bedside locker and crucifix, with an entire wardrobe to themselves. But Maeve had been less keen on the room after Deirdre’d been stretchered out of it. “So, what d’ye think, Mam?”

  Her mam lit another fag and raised her eyebrows, observing her creed of Whatever you say, say nothing.

  “What’ll it be like, d’ye think,” Maeve went on, “with me out of the house?”

  Her mam took a few quick puffs on her fag, then exhaled. “Ah imagine that’ll free up a bit of space in the bathroom in the mornings.”

  Her mam also believed that Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

  “Ah’m gonna move out the morrow.”

  Her mam raised an eyebrow. Maeve fucking hated being on the far side of that trick.

  “A Saturday flit’s a short sit.”

  “Well, I’m only hoping for a short sit. It’s tae do til I get my results, remember? Ah’ll soon be away tae study journalism in London.” Maeve dried up as her mam looked at her through narrowed eyes. She could nearly hear her saying, “D’ye think I know frig all about university now, d’ye?” She didn’t talk much about her stint in Queen’s back in the sixties, but Maeve knew she was the first in their family to get to university. She’d been studying to be a social worker but had quit after some handling during a civil rights march. She’d ended up in the pig factory where she’d met Maeve’s da. But she hadn’t lasted long there, either. She’d quit the pork processing after she got pregnant with Deirdre, because she couldn’t thole the bokes on the bus to work.

  “Mam! Tell this skitter that I’m getting Maeve’s bed,” Chris said, holding a cushion on Paul’s face.

  “Shut up the pair of yeez. Ah’ll decide what we do after dolly-ann here moves out.”

  Chris released Paul while Maeve tried — and failed — to keep her mouth shut. “But where am I gonna sleep when I’m home at Christmas?”

  Her mam looked up, wearing her may-God-help-your-innocent-wit face. “I’m sure thon Caroline doll’ll still have the flat come Christmas. She’s a Jackson and the Jacksons sit tight. She’ll not go far out of the town, results or no results.”

  Maeve’s throat clenched. Sometimes she felt like she was a female version of Icarus, spending hours collecting feathers, sticking them into wodges of hot wax to make the wings she needed to escape. Only instead of helping her, like Icarus’s da did, her mam kept picking at the wings, plucking the feathers out the way healthy hens peck at a sick bird. “I thought ye’d be pleased,” she said, “that I’m trying to stand on my own two feet.”

  Her mam took a long, hard look at her, interested at last. “Ah’ll be pleased when you eventually learn that ye didn’t lick your notions up off the street.” She ground her fag out and turned back to the telly, where a small male frog was climbing a very tall tree in order to mate with a female.

  David Attenborough was explaining to Chris and Paul how this brave male frog was undertaking an arduous journey in order to impregnate his female of choice, a journey that required a great deal of strength and persistence.

  Maeve wished someone like Oprah Winfrey’d butt in to explain what the poor female frog — who was rapidly running out of tree to climb — might be trying to tell the male.

  In the end, Maeve didn’t flit that Saturday, for Caroline’s mother wouldn’t let them. “No Jackson is after a short sit,” she’d said, her arse glued to a sofa in the county she and her ancestors had occupied since they’d worn animal skins and slept under bushes. So Maeve had spent all day mooching around at home, trying to pack for her move.

  Packing the basics was easy enough, for Maeve didn’t have a lot more than the basics. But she hadn’t counted on dealing with Deirdre’s stuff. Maeve knew from Granny Walsh’s death that you were supposed to sort through the deceased person’s stuff at the right time — not so early that you came across as a vulture, but not so late that you looked rare.

  In the start, Maeve’s mam had said she’d sort everything after the month’s mind mass. But it came and went and her mam didn’t lay a finger on Deirdre’s stuff. Over the following weeks, Maeve’s aunts came and went, one by one, in pairs, and once in a group, but her mam refused their offers to help “sort” Deirdre’s stuff, saying everything’d be of use to Maeve. But the look on her mam’s face whenever Maeve walked into a room wearing one of Deirdre’s T-shirts or skirts told a different story.

  Maeve opened Deirdre’s jewellery box and picked up the charm bracelet that their parents had bought for her tenth birthday. Maeve had offered it to maggoty Joe Whelan the undertaker when he was preparing Deirdre’s body for the wake. But he’d said it was too tacky for the coffin, and asked for a pair of rosary beads. Maeve’d gone upstairs, put her hand under Deirdre’s pillow and pulled out the rosary beads that Auntie Mary’d brought back from the Holy Land the time she took the coach tour from Strabane to Jerusalem. Deirdre’d fired the beads on her bed after Mary left, saying, “It’s not a stick of rock ye get from Jericho.” Maeve had hated the way Joe knotted the beads around Deirdre’s cold fingers, as if to keep them from moving.

  She snapped the jewellery box closed and put it back in their bedside locker. Then she pocketed Deirdre’s bracelet, and started to get ready for a night out.

  When she was dressed, she walked into the living room, where her da was sitting on the sofa with one hand tucked behind his head. He gave her a wink while she waited for her mam to say, “What’ve ye got on under that coat the night?” like she always did. But her mam just slouched in her chair, staring at the fag she’d nipped between her fingers.

  “Are ye not gonna check what I’ve got on under my coat, Mammy?”

  “Ye can go buck naked down that town for all I care,” her mam said, flicking fag ash into the fire.

  Maeve didn’t know what was eating her mam alive but she knew she couldn’t afford to care. She turned on her heel and left the house in a rage. She walked the short distance over to Caroline’s house, then rang the front doorbell. Mrs. Jackson opened the door with a loose sort of a smile.

  “Och, now, Maeve how are ye?”

  Caroline’s mam always looked how Maeve’s mam looked when she was on the Valium, but according to Caroline, Mrs. Jackson only ever did the rosary — a drug that totally missed the mark for Maeve.

  “I’m grand, Mrs. Jackson, grand. Not a bother on me! What about yerself?”

  “Och, sure, I’m grand, grand.” Mrs. Jackson ushered Maeve into the living room, where Caroline’s da and Nana Jackson sat in front of the fire.

  “Hiya, Mr. Jackson. Hiya, Nana Jackson!”

  “Maeve.”

  “Och, now, Maeve!”

  The heat wrapped around Maeve and she fought an urge to sink into the sofa, for fear she’d wake up in her fifties wearing an Aran cardigan and a look of mild confusion.

  “Great day we had today, didn’t we?”

  “We did, aye, thank God. Maybe summer’s here at last?”

  “Well, sure, we can only hope, eh?”

  “Well now, wan good day’s better than none.”

  “And the forecast’s looking rightly. RTÉ was giving it good.”

  “Aye, right enough, but UTV was giving showers.”

  “Well now, your man Fish on the BBC was hopeful enough.”

  Everyone in the town triangulated the Irish, Northern Irish and UK weather reports several times a day in order to figure out what sort of rain was coming their way. There was a patriotic consensus that RTÉ had the most accurate forecast, and that the BBC was the worst. UTV was considered fairly accurate for the Protestant majority living east of the Bann, but unreliable for the Catholic majority to the west of it. Maeve’s Granny Murray was convinced that
the wild inaccuracy of the BBC’s forecast was a ploy; she believed that the British wanted to catch Catholics off-guard in bad weather, and so to spite them she wore a good, warm coat, summer and winter.

  “Aye, well, sure — now we’ll see. Cool enough at night still.”

  “Aye. You cuddies’ll have to wrap yourselves up when youse head out.”

  “Aye, we will. Fresh enough out there already.”

  “Aye, it is now.”

  The squat wooden clock on the mantelpiece tick-tocked in the silence. A blinkered china horse strained against the weight of a wooden cart loaded with miniature beer barrels. Nana Jackson stretched her bent fingers out to the fire and sighed. A door slammed upstairs and Mrs. Jackson looked up at the ceiling with affection.

  “There’s our Caroline now out of the shower.”

  “Is she only out of it?”

  “Well, ye know our Caroline. She’d be late to her own funeral.”

  At the mention of a funeral, Nana Jackson blessed herself and shook her head of blue-rinsed curls.

  “Well. Ah’d better head on up,” Maeve said, getting to her feet. She left the room and thumped up the stairs to Caroline’s bedroom. She knocked on the door. “Ye decent?”

  “Aye. ’Mon in!”

  Maeve entered the room and quickly shut the door to keep the heat in. The curtains were closed and the bedside lamp was lit. Caroline was wrapped in a towel, finger-drying her hair in front of the blow heater. Her bed was heaped with clothes, make-up and perfume, while Nana Jackson’s bed lay neat as a fresh snowdrift, under a figure of Christ being crucified. Maeve’d heard Nana Jackson snore when she fell asleep on the sofa after dinner. She wondered how Caroline slept through that racket at night. And she’d no clue how Caroline faced the ever-increasing chance of finding Nana Jackson lying dead in the bed next to her each morning. Maeve shuddered, then removed her coat in front of the mirror. She was wearing black trousers, a purple bodysuit, a black corduroy jacket, a black choker with a purple jewel at the throat and Deirdre’s purple fourteen-hole Doc Martens.

  “Ooooooo, look at you! You look deadly!”

  Maeve sucked her belly in and pushed her boobs out. “I’m not bad the night, sure, ah’m not?”

  “Ye just need to get the warpaint on and the hair sorted. Sure, sit down on Nana’s bed and crack on.”

  Maeve didn’t like sitting on Nana Jackson’s bed — she’d a fear that the old-lady smell would seep into her knickers and shrivel her flaps. Luckily, the doorbell rang. Maeve raced downstairs and opened the door. Aoife stood there, wearing her Nirvana T-shirt. “Awwwwwwk! Love that Nirvana T-shirt.”

  Maeve didn’t really love Aoife’s Nirvana T-shirt. She was pure jealous every time she saw it. Aoife’d seen Nirvana when they’d come to Belfast back in ’92. Maeve’d been willing to sell her left tit to buy a ticket, but then Deirdre died and she was forced to observe something called mourning — an experience she felt was not far off being buried alive in a mass grave.

  “Awwww, thanks!” Aoife did an awkward sort-of-bob-almost-a-curtsy thing.

  Maeve kept smiling while cringing inside. She often had to remind herself that one of the main benefits of being friends with Aoife was that it allowed her to practice speaking with a fancy accent, eating posh stuff and tolerating gamminess — all skills she hoped would come in handy for living in England.

  She did wonder, as they climbed the stairs, why Aoife was friends with her.

  When they got into the bedroom, Maeve stuck some Smashing Pumpkins on the stereo, then poured three glasses of vodka and Coke. She loved that Mrs. Jackson still believed that they were mad for Coke at their age — even going to the length of bringing up a tray of ice cubes for them on hot evenings.

  “Any craic, Aoife?”

  “Not really. James is home for the weekend. Him and Daddy are fixing up the boat.”

  Maeve smoothed a blob of Rimmel’s Pale Porcelain across her forehead while thinking about Aoife’s big brother. He was up in Queen’s, doing medicine. Maeve liked James, though he wasn’t for the likes of her. He was like the good china she saw in John the Jook’s jewellers with the snotty wee sign saying “Don’t Touch What You Can’t Afford.” Maeve hoped it would cost her nothing to look. “Is he heading out the night?”

  “Nope. We’ve got feis tomorrow. I’m taking it easy. He’s staying in.”

  Aoife and James had been on the trad scene for years before Aoife became a grunger. Now she was wild for anything Kurt Cobain–related, and always had James on the hunt up in Belfast for B-sides or rare recordings. He was the sort of big brother Maeve dreamed about having — nothing like the four hallions she lived with, who grunted instead of speaking, and stank of Lynx sprayed over a week’s worth of wanking.

  Maeve took a gulp of vodka, then stood in front of the mirror holding her fag like she was Kate Moss (if Kate Moss was a couple of stone heavier, and shopped at Primark). Her nylon trousers cut into the podge of her belly, her bodysuit was wedged up her hole and her boobs were straining against the too-small bra she’d inherited off Deirdre. But Maeve knew, despite the odds, that she looked well and was wasted on the cubs she’d meet down the town. Some filthy urge wormed its way down through her guts and into her crotch, making her wish she could waste herself on Andy instead. It was the same impulse that made her fantasize about getting caught by Father McGowan while sucking off a uniformed Brit at the back of the barracks. She suspected it wasn’t a particularly wholesome desire. She turned her attention back to her vodka and before long, they’d finished their quarter bottles. Maeve passed around some chewing gum, then they traipsed down to the living room.

  “Och, now, youse look lovely!”

  “Took youse long enough!”

  “D’ye think those wee jackets are warm enough?”

  Maeve loved how the Jacksons never said stuff like, “I can see what you had for breakfast in that skirt,” or “Black’s wild draining on you, fer you’re the color of yer Auntie Mary.” She loved how Mrs. Jackson let them out the front door and then shuffled to the porch window to wave them off. She loved waving back before linking arms with Aoife and Caroline for the walk to the pub.

  As they passed the garages, Mickey Campbell shouted “Lesbians!” at them. Maeve turned, raised her middle finger and shouted “Smell your ma.” She dodged the stone he sent flying and walked off laughing towards the Old School Bar.

  The next morning, Maeve’s mam jerked her bedroom curtains open saying, “It’s half nine.” This was shorthand for, “Get your lazy arse out of bed for ten o’clock mass before I do something we’ll both live to regret.”

  Maeve hid her head under her pillow. She was pure dying. But getting up for mass was like standing for the Irish National Anthem: non-negotiable, no matter how drunk, disabled, fucked up or horny you might be.

  When the toilet flushed, Maeve hauled herself out of bed and went to stand guard at the bathroom door so she’d get in before her brothers. The smell of toast wafting up the stairs set her stomach heaving.

  The door squeaked open and Maeve’s father looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Up late socializing?”

  “Och, Daddy . . .” Maeve leaned her head against the wall.

  “Warmed the seat for ye!” he said, patting her on the shoulder with a heavy hand.

  She ducked into the bathroom and locked the door. She avoided the mirror and settled her arse on the toilet seat. Her stomach was swirling. Mass was going to be even worse if she didn’t sort that out. After pishing what felt like raw vodka, she grabbed her toothbrush, took a deep breath and stuck the handle down her throat. She boked stringy yellow bile and grey peas into the toilet — there were more peas in the bowl than Maeve could remember seeing in her curry the night before. She shuddered, then flushed the toilet. She reversed her toothbrush, squeezed out a maggot’s worth of toothpaste, and started to scrub her teeth.

  * * *

  Maeve somehow made it through the standing, sitting, kneeling and p
rocessing, the “Amening” and “Thanks being” in mass with everyone else. But by the time Father McGowan started droning out the parish announcements, she was fading. Then, in the mouth of the final blessing, Damien O’Hare came speed-walking up the aisle. He genuflected in front of the altar, and sidled up to Father McGowan. There was a rustle of excitement as the priest inclined his ear towards Damien’s lips: last-minute announcements were usually something interesting or useful, like a sudden death or a bomb alert.

  Father McGowan waited until Damien had sat back down before clearing his throat. “I have been informed that there is a British army checkpoint at the chapel gates.”

  The whole congregation sagged. They could be trapped in the chapel for hours. Father McGowan gave a meaningful glance at Mouldy Macken, the organist, who was quivering like a dog waiting on a bone. “Miss Macken, while we’re waiting, perhaps we could go through ‘Seek Ye First’? All three verses.”

  Mouldy Macken nodded and struck the opening chords on the church organ.

  The BBC’s Songs of Praise had left Maeve with the impression that church organs were the Protestant equivalent of a hair vest, a genteel instrument of torture. Organs put Maeve in mind of ruddy-cheeked English people lustily singing about how much the Good Lord loves Sheep, England, the English and Wet Weather. Everyone in the town preferred Peader Breen on his guitar with the folk singer choir (whose repertoire outside mass included an impressive range of rebel songs).

  “And now perhaps everyone can stand up and join in?”

  Maeve hauled herself to her feet, relieved that Father McGowan had chosen a hymn everyone knew by heart. Only choir members had hymn books, so things got shaky when they went beyond the first couple of verses. Prods, of course, had hymn books not just for their choir, but for everyone in the congregation. Maeve had discovered this on a cross-community visit to a Protestant church down in Enniskillen. The Prods had glowered at Maeve’s class as they marched up the aisle and slouched into the pews opposite. While the priest and vicar demonstrated how to play nicely by taking turns preaching, Maeve had flicked through a hymn book. There was page after page of posh hymns she’d never heard before. And the hymns she did recognize had slightly different words to the version she knew, or extra bits, like the Proddie “Our Father.” Stuff like that rattled Maeve on her “Meet a Protestant” excursions. These compulsory trips weren’t part of the curriculum and weren’t graded, but she always felt she was being tested. During the forced interactions, she’d do whatever she’d been taught to do since she was a wee toot of a thing, but then the Protestants would go and do something slightly different and she’d be left feeling like someone’d taken her chair from behind her just as she’d committed to sitting down, sending her sprawling on the floor.