Factory Girls Read online

  Father McGowan and Mouldy Macken warbled their way through “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” and “Be Not Afraid” before working up a lather singing “Faith of Our Fathers” (“Holy Faith! In Spite of Dungeon, Fire and Sword!”)

  Finally, Damien O’Hare brought word that the Brits had cleared off. The congregation promised to go in peace to love and serve the Lord before surging out of the chapel. Linus McMurphy and a few other head-the-balls ran up the road after the Brits for a bit of craic.

  Maeve slid away from her brothers as her mam and dad tramped them outdoors for a round of the graves. She couldn’t bear how they started praying over their longest-dead relatives — people buried years before Maeve’d been born — moving from grave to grave to the most recent, where Deirdre lay. Maeve headed to the shop, bought a bottle of Coke, then sat on the shop windowsill in the blinding sunshine. She cracked the bottle open and put it to her head. It didn’t cure what ailed her, but she knew, from the Lourdes water they’d poured down Deirdre’s throat, that miracles rarely come bottled.

  Maeve eyed her Sunday dinner: some dried-up spuds and a cardboardy Yorkshire pudding, with a lump of beef cooling under a slabber of congealed gravy. Her mam was walloping portions onto plates, while her da was holding a newspaper out at arm’s length. He was in bad need of reading glasses, but it was clear he’d sooner have an arm extension than wear specs. Her mam clipped Paul around the head so he’d remove his elbows from the table, then dumped a plate in front of him.

  Maeve’s da eyed her as she tried not to smell the food squatting under her nose. “How’s the appetite the day?”

  Maeve fired him a dirty look, then picked up her knife and fork before her mam could start into the black babies in Africa who “wouldn’t know what a feed was, never mind a feed of vodka.” She choked her dinner down, grateful it wasn’t her day to do the dishes. When Deirdre’d been alive, chores were easy: everyone had a day of the week for doing dishes, for cleaning the bathroom, for mopping the floors. Even Maeve’s da took a turn at the dishes despite the fact that it wasn’t usual to see a man in the kitchen, never mind one making himself useful in it. But Deirdre’s death had fucked all that up.

  Maeve remembered the first Monday after the funeral, the way her mam had got to her feet after dinner, taken the dishes from the table, and dumped them in the sink. Maeve’d wanted to scrab the skin off her own face watching her mam scrub the plates Deirdre should’ve been washing. But she hadn’t the guts to get up and help. So her mam mopped the floors Deirdre used to clean on a Monday, before bleaching the toilet and scouring the bath. She stripped the beds and rammed the sheets into the washing machine and hung the wet laundry — lighter by a load — out to dry. Maeve’s mam hadn’t been mad about Monday before Deirdre’s death. She was even less keen afterwards.

  “Right,” Maeve said. “I suppose I’d better shift my bags across to the flat.”

  “Yessssss! We can move rooms!” Paul said, jumping up.

  Maeve’s mam pointed a knife at his nose. “Sit yer arse back down in that chair if you know what’s good for you.”

  Paul sat down, his bottom lip trembling.

  “I’m sure that sister of yours left the room a disgrace. So youse bucks’ll move nowhere until I get it redd up.”

  Maeve thought of Deirdre’s clothes, hanging in the wardrobe; her old schoolbooks piled up under the bed. She wondered what her mam’d do. She couldn’t donate the clothes to St. Vincent de Paul for fear they’d meet one of the Dirty Murphys wearing them down the town. But maybe she’d cram everything into the attic, along with the Christmas decorations and Granny Walsh’s old sewing machine. Maeve knew if she’d her way, she’d pile up all Deirdre’s crap in the backyard and set it on fire. Fuck whatever the neighbors would think.

  “Do you have to go right this very minute?” her da asked.

  Maeve shrugged.

  “So sit tight for now. I’ll flit you over the road later, so I will, after the game.”

  Maeve didn’t want to wait that long. She wanted to get the fuck away from their tired-out house, to slam the door shut on the tick-tock clocks, the smell of meat, the flimsy curtains, the wood-chip wallpaper and grit of Ajax scourer under her feet in the shower. But she followed her da into the living room and sat with her brothers as the Liverpool team jogged onto an enemy pitch.

  Caroline was hanging a pair of pink polka dot curtains in her bedroom when Maeve and her da arrived at the flat.

  “Hiya, Caroline!”

  “Och, hiya, Maeve! Hello, Mr. Murray.”

  “Nice curtains!” Maeve said.

  “Och, Mam got me them as a wee housewarming present,” Caroline said proudly, smoothing the material with her hand.

  Maeve waved down the hallway at Mrs. Jackson, who was cleaning the kitchen. Then she gleeked into the living room, where Caroline’s da was peering up the chimney. Nana Jackson was sitting on the sofa gazing at the spot where the telly should be, humming the theme tune to Coronation Street. Maeve wondered how they’d got Nana Jackson up the stairs and, more to the point, how they were going to get her back down.

  She went into her bedroom and dropped her bags. Then her da came in, set down a box and took a slow look around the room. He stared at the double bed for an excruciatingly long time before turning his eye on Maeve. “Thon bed looks like it could do with a good sleep,” he said, firing her a wee smile.

  Maeve licked it up, for she loved having her da all to herself. Then they went through to the living room, where her da settled himself in the armchair by the window. Caroline was cozied up on the sofa beside Nana Jackson, while Mr. Jackson stood nodding out of the window.

  “Some view, eh?” he said.

  “Only the Brits see more,” Maeve’s da said.

  “Well, our blades are damn near as high as a helicopter up here. Haven’t they done well for themselves?” Mr. Jackson asked.

  “Though with a bit of luck, now, they won’t clock long here,” Maeve’s da answered. “Won’t be long before these exam results are out and youse’ll be away!”

  Maeve’s heart contracted as the fear came on her again. What if she didn’t get good results? What if she ended up stuck in the flat, working in a factory? What if everything she’d worked for fucked up and she became just another scald to her mam’s heart?

  “Well, there’s not much we can do now other than wait,” Caroline said.

  “Aye,” Mr. Jackson said, sighing. “It’s a different world youse girls are headed towards. There’s more opportunities for young people nowadays. Youse won’t spend your life on the dole like we did, or throw yourselves away in thon factory.”

  “Y’know, Daddy, the factory’s not that bad, so it isn’t!” Caroline said, frowning. Her da tossed his head back the once, not quite agreeing or disagreeing, which was the closest the Jacksons ever came to open warfare.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the factory if it’s your choice. Ye can thole manys a thing if you choose it.”

  “And that’s the difference, cuddies,” Maeve’s da said, nodding. “Youse have choices. We’d none.”

  After they’d half carried, half slid Nana Jackson to the bottom of the stairs and out the door, Caroline and Maeve unpacked. Then they set up the stereo and lit tea lights in the living room. But when Maeve sat down, she got the trapped feeling she used to get when queuing up for confession with nothing to distract her except for her list of made-up sins.

  Father McGowan’s heart wasn’t fit for real sins since the Mother’s Day bomb.

  “Y’know,” Maeve said, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in a house without a telly.”

  “Oh, my God. Me, too. It’s wild, isn’t it?”

  There was no Top of the Pops or Doctor Who. No Lois and Clark or Cagney & Lacey. No Golden Girls or MacGyver. No EastEnders or Coronation Street. Just the pigeons cooing on the roof, weans screeching on the pavement below, and a jeep hooring up the street. Maeve panicked at the thought of what she’d end up doing all summer
without a telly to keep her occupied. Her mam’s generation had been mad for the civil rights and the marching before the TV mast had boosted its signal and the improved reception settled their heads.

  Suddenly, the doorbell rang. Maeve and Caroline exchanged an oh-my-God look, then Maeve gleeked out of the window. “It’s Aoife.”

  “I’ll get her,” Caroline said, jumping to her feet.

  When Aoife came in, she leaned, grey-faced, in the living room doorway.

  “Well,” Maeve said, “how was the head this morning?”

  “Not good. I missed mass. I just about managed the feis.”

  It sickened Maeve’s shite that Aoife’s parents treated Sunday mass like an elective social engagement rather than a holy rite. They weren’t like her parents, who believed that missing Holy Communion put you at risk of Burning in the Fires of Hell for all Eternity and that mass itself was a fit punishment for being hungover.

  “This place looks great now you’ve moved your stuff in,” Aoife said.

  Maeve tried not to look pleased. “Well, we took the bare look off it, anyway.”

  “Can I see your bedroom?”

  “Work away.”

  Maeve wondered what Aoife would make of her Che Guevara, Rosie the Riveter, Gandhi and “Smash the H-Blocks” posters. They’d not been hung up since Deirdre’s first — and last — year in university. Aoife herself had three big, framed black and white photos of Kurt Cobain hanging from the picture rail in her bedroom. She had posters of KD Lang and Sinéad O’Connor stuck up inside her wardrobe, because Mrs. O’Neill didn’t like Blu Tack stains on her walls.

  “Love your posters!”

  “Och, thanks!”

  “You’ve no curtains yet?”

  “Naw. But I’ll stick some newspaper up for the time being.”

  “Would you like me to bring you over some of Daddy’s papers?”

  Maeve cringed. Having The Times plastered to her window would be like writing a giant sign saying BRIT LOVERS LIVE HERE PLEASE THROW ROCKS.

  “Och, naw, you’re alright, Aoife.”

  Caroline bustled into the room with three mugs of tea. “Sorry, cuddies. We’re out of biccies.”

  Aoife reached into her bag. “I suppose it’s just as well Mummy sent over a housewarming present, then.”

  Aoife called Mrs. O’Neill “Mummy” instead of “Mammy,” and still called her parents “Mummy” and “Daddy” out loud, not just in her thoughts. It did Maeve’s head in that nobody laughed in Aoife’s face about any of that. That nobody dared.

  She watched Aoife bring out a big tin of biscuits, the sort that their relatives and neighbors — white-knuckled and tight-lipped — had dropped off, one after the other, during Deirdre’s wake. Maeve remembered her mam eyeing them piled up in the kitchen. “Enough for a barricade,” she’d said, and Aunt Mary’d gripped her mam by the forearm and said, “Och, now, the barricades.” It’d taken them months to work their way through the biccies, and Maeve’d never felt the same about a jammy dodger since.

  “Oh, my God! A whole tin of biccies!” Caroline said, clapping her hands.

  “And I got you both a present too.” Aoife clattered a bagful of mix tapes onto the sofa.

  “Celine Dion!” Caroline said, pouncing.

  Maeve fired a what-the-fuck? look at Aoife as Caroline knelt in front of the stereo.

  “It was in Mummy’s collection,” she said, pink-cheeked.

  Aoife not only owned a CD player, she’d an actual CD collection despite the fact that CDs cost sixteen quid a pop. Her parents and James also had CD collections. The O’Neill house had more books and better music than the town library.

  Maeve reached for a fag, got to her feet and lit up out of the window. She blew a tunnel of smoke towards the locked-up factory below as Celine Dion began warbling about distant lights and storms tonight. “So, cuddies. Tomorrow we start under Andy Strawbridge.”

  “I’ll not be under him if I can help it!” Caroline said, laughing.

  Aoife didn’t laugh.

  “Wonder what jobs he’ll give us?”

  Maeve tapped some ash out of the window. “My guess is we’ll be put on the sewing machines.”

  Aoife wrinkled her nose as if she’d smelt something on the turn. Maeve knew she was about to say something daft. “I’d rather service the machines.”

  Maeve did her och-would-ye-now? face. Aoife was weird. She wasn’t just weird because she was so smart. She was weird weird. She loved maths and computers and machines and taking things apart and putting them back together. Maeve loved playing games on Aoife’s computer the same as anyone else, but Aoife did shit like coding her own games. She read manuals and computer magazines. The year before she learned to drive, she mastered how to strip down a car engine. For all the size of her, she could jack up a car and change a tire. She was down for all As on her exams and had offers on the table from every university she’d applied for. But Maeve often had to state the obvious to her.

  “The men’ll be at the machines, pet.”

  Aoife tipped her head like she’d water in her ear. “But I’m good with machines. I’d be better fixing them than sewing with them.”

  “Och, Aoife,” Caroline said. “Women do the sewing. The fellas do the other stuff. That’s how it works. I don’t mind, though. I wouldn’t mind learning to sew.”

  Maeve looked out over the top of the grey factory, towards Donegal where the sun was sinking behind the hills. She was keen enough on learning to sew, but she wished she didn’t have to. She knew she’d be content to sit all summer long in the flat, listening to music, reading books and talking shite. But sooner than she liked, Aoife yawned and announced she was going to head on home. Maeve let her out the door, then went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. After she said “Night, night” to Caroline, she went into her bedroom. She picked up the Mickey Mouse alarm clock that Deirdre’d saved up all the Cornflakes tokens for and set the alarm for half past seven. She wriggled into her sleeping bag and hugged her pillow, which smelled of fags, fire and roast beef. She gazed at Rosie the Riveter glowing fiercely under the orange street lights, listening to Deirdre’s clock ticking off the seconds before the jaws of the factory gates would open.

  Monday, 6 June 1994

  70 days until results

  Maeve’s nerves woke her at half six. Her bedroom was too bright, and she was foundered with the cold even though it was — at least celestially speaking — summer. She got up and went to the living room, where she huddled under her sleeping bag in the armchair. She loved being three storeys above the town with the sky stretching like a well-washed blue sheet all the way to the sea. She watched Donal McGrath dander up the street to open the shop. Aideen O’Neill and Donna Shiels arrived five minutes later for their shift. Howling dogs betrayed a Brit patrol behind the barracks. A tractor chugged down the street and stopped in the middle of the road. A farmer jumped out and strode into the shop, emerging minutes later swinging a heavy blue plastic bag. Heat seeped into the flat as the roof warmed under the rising sun.

  But every time Maeve looked at the factory, her skin twitched. She’d a feeling that a bomb was ticking nearby. She could picture the whole building shattering around her, collapsing into a heap of rubble. Suddenly Deirdre’s alarm clock triggered. She leapt up and ran to switch it off, then tramped into the bathroom. She fired a bit of water around her face and rubbed a stick of deodorant in her pits to freshen up, then went back to her room and threw on a T-shirt, fleece and jeans. She opened her make-up bag and considered her options. She decided to keep it low key and patted some powder on her face, drew a flick of black eyeliner over her eyelids and brushed on mascara — just enough make-up to keep her from feeling buck naked. When she was ready, she went to Caroline’s door and knocked. “C’mon, Caroline. Time to get up. Got the factory.”

  She didn’t answer, so Maeve put her head around the door. Caroline shrank away from the light like a slug recoiling from salt, giving Maeve an insight
into how her mam’s approach to waking teenagers had evolved. “Right. I’m putting breakfast on. But I’m not dressing ye. Ye need tae get yourself up.”

  When Maeve brought the tea and toast into the living room, she found Caroline hunched over on the sofa, staring at the carpet, zipped up tight in a fleece and jeans. She grabbed a slice of toast and began to chew without saying a word. Maeve wasn’t fit to eat. She sipped her tea, wondering how she’d ever get up the nerve to head to London if she was this frigging scared of starting in Strawbridge & Associates. She wished she could whinge to her mam about work so she’d give her a clip on the lug to buck her up. Instead, she bit her index finger until it bled, which felt like a smarter choice than jumping out of the window.

  At five to eight, the doorbell rang. Maeve got up and followed Caroline down the stairs. Aoife was waiting outside, wearing jeans and her Elastica T-shirt under her black leather jacket. Maeve was raging that Aoife — a total gam — had managed to look cool for working in the factory.

  As they crossed the road, Maeve turned her eyes away from the sunlight bouncing off Andy’s Jag. His car wasn’t just the fanciest one in the car park, it was by far the fanciest motor in the town. She wondered what the interior smelt like. What it’d feel like to sit on the leather seats. She imagined Andy driving too fast down the country roads, blaring his horn at tractors. She knew he’d never be held up for hours at an army checkpoint or starfished against an army jeep while his car was searched from back bumper to front bonnet.