Farrelly Take Six; Six Irish Women Writers

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915568-72-4
Verlag: Dedalus Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 298 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus Ireland

blurb Take Six: Six Irish Women Writers features work by six award-winning Irish writers: Mary O' Donnell, Mary Morrissy, Geraldine Mills, Nuala O' Connor, Rosemary Jenkinson and Tanya Farrelly. These writers display great versatility in their work. Between them, in their careers to date, they have produced both contemporary and historical novels, literary thrillers, poetry, plays and renowned short story collections. This anthology includes new short fiction which explores what it means to be a woman navigating life in twenty-first century Ireland. Ranging from dark to playful, and often imbued with a mischievous humour, these stories never shy away from conflict. Whether they are dealing with loss or inflicting it, traversing from lockdown to war zone, communing with the living or the dead, or navigating a dystopian future, the characters who populate these pages rise to meet their challenges head on.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Farrelly, Tanya

Leseproben

UNDOCUMENTED

When the invitation to his brother Brian’s surprise 50th birthday party arrived, Shay was on the afternoon shift in The Maid of Erin on Bergen Street. Once an Irish pub with a definite sense of itself—brown interior, sawdust on the floor, evil-smelling toilets, sing-songs on a Friday night, and a clientele of building-site Paddies—The Maid had recently been made over and though the inside had been tarted up, the exterior remained the same. The haughty profile of Lady Lavery from the pre-decimal pound note was stencilled across the street window, although most of the current customers, new Irish and gentrified Brooklyn locals who came for the Guinness on tap and the back-room pool table, would probably not have been able to identify who she was.

Although it was a letter from home, Shay didn’t recognise the writing because it was from Fiona, Brian’s wife. Fee was a frosty-permed control freak, who steered Brian through life with a nifty line in concealed sadism. If there was one thing Shay knew about his eldest brother—and he didn’t know much—it was that he hated surprises. But Fee had built a pyramid of them into the fiftieth celebrations; caterers, a marquee, a gathering of seventy friends from various eras of his brother’s life, and to top it all, a guest appearance by Shay.

His first response was to throw the invite in the bin and return to work. A lone drinker—one of the old clientele—sat slumped at the bar. He took his irritation out on the counter, wiping it down with venom. What was Fee thinking about? He couldn’t go home on a whim; Fee should know that. Shay was undocumented, a J1 visa-holder gone rogue, illegal for twelve years. But even when he’d torn the invitation card in two and flung it in the bin, it tantalised him. Was this a way out?

His girlfriend, Petra, had just informed him she was pregnant. She’d stopped taking the pill without telling him. He was furious. Petra was illegal too so when she’d mentioned children before he’d always said ‘not before we get a green card’ knowing that was as unlikely as snow in June. He could see the trajectory Petra had in mind—ring on the finger, a house in the ’burbs. That was exactly what Shay wanted to avoid; he’d seen his brothers fall into that trap early—too early. Brian and Dec had gone into the family business, Starling and Sons, the hardware store his father had set up in the Forties. His brothers had added two more shops to the original.

‘We’re expanding the empire!’ Brian had said to him making it sound like the Crusades. ‘And you can be part of it.’

A life trading in nuts and bolts, mixing paint and cutting keys; Shay knew he couldn’t stand it and he wouldn’t be strong enough to hold out against it. That was why he’d stayed on in New York in August ’95, instead of going back for third year business studies. He’d got as far as Departures at JFK when it came to him, his future all laid out. The family business, keeping the books for Starling and Sons, and in time, marriage, kids and the whole bit. If he was going to bail out, now was the time. So he walked out of the terminal, not even bothering to tell his college mates, and got on the subway back to the city. He felt a surge of power retracing his steps; he was in a place where no one could reach him.

Within weeks he’d found a job serving behind the bar at The Maid, and here he was twelve years on, a manager. He and Petra had got together at a millennium party in Queens and their relationship had developed in a lazy, unplanned sort of way. She’d moved in because it was cheaper for her and it meant a cleaner apartment for him. What made it hazardous—and almost like it wasn’t really happening—was that it was New York and he was illegal. It could all disappear overnight in a puff of smoke, so it was a life without consequences. He hadn’t counted on Petra ruining it.

‘I not put life on hold,’ she had declared when she announced she was pregnant, ‘just for the papers.’ After all these years, Petra had an aversion to verbs, particularly the verb to be. All her conversations had a ‘you Tarzan, me Jane’ quality.

‘Well, you can have it on your own,’ he’d snapped at her.

Petra’s lower lip wobbled. ‘From where you coming?’

‘I won’t have a gun put to my head,’ he said.

‘Too late,’ she said stroking the little bump he’d foolishly thought was a charming roundness to her stick-thin figure.

Well, two could play at that game. If he went home for his brother’s birthday, that would be it; he couldn’t get back. That’d show her! He felt the fiery excitement of an impulse decision. He phoned Fee and said, ‘I’ll be there!’

The first surprise was at the airport. His middle brother Dec came to meet him and had a new woman in tow. She was a real looker—long chestnut hair with a fringe that grazed her eyebrows and a gorgeous figure—supple, sexy—sheathed in a leopard print blouse and a black spandex mini-skirt.

‘This is Colette,’ Dec said bashfully. ‘Meet the baby brother.’

‘Hi Shay! Heard a lot about you!’ She held out a hand with cherry-red nails.

‘And I’ve heard nothing about you,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Dec said proudly.

When Shay had left home, Dec had been married miserably to his childhood sweetheart Marian. Shay’s mother had died when he was five so Marian was the closest thing to maternal he knew. She’d practically lived with them in the flat over the shop, keeping an eye on all-comers in case Dec might stray. Which was never going to happen. Dec was big, lumbering, soft-hearted and loyal as a kicked dog.

Five years ago, Marian had left Dec. There’d been no children; maybe that had been the problem, though Dec said simply that Marian had gone to ‘find herself’. He had come to visit Shay in Brooklyn after the break-up. He got sozzled in The Maid every night and after Shay closed up, he’d pour Dec into bed with promises that there were more fish in the sea. He didn’t believe it, though. Who else would have Dec, a forty-two-year-old bloke who smelled of timber and turps, who went to work in a mustard housecoat with the stub of a pencil behind his ear? But he’d been wrong. This rockabilly chick Colette had him. She sat in the front of the car as they drove away from the airport, swatting her lovely mane over her shoulder, and stroking the back of Dec’s bludgeoned-looking neck. She couldn’t be more than thirty, he guessed. Sitting in the back seat, he found himself watching her surreptitiously and thinking… what the fuck!

‘So, how did you two meet?’

‘The shop,’ Colette said, ‘I came in for thumb tacks and nailed this fella instead.’ She smiled indulgently and chucked Dec’s cheek. ‘No more bad boys for me!’

The party was not till the next day so Shay stayed at Dec’s, a three-bed bed semi he’d shared with Marian. It had a large back-garden where the marquee was already being put up. The caterers were arriving with crates of glasses and collapsible furniture. Shay fell into a drugged, jet-lagged slumber in the box room. When he awoke in the late afternoon he hadn’t a clue where he was and had to whip back the curtains to ground himself once more—the white and blue striped marquee was now fully-erected and the lovely low golden sun of a suburban summer’s evening in Dublin brought him back to himself. He was home.

*

The next day was all hub-bub at Dec’s house. Brian’s twins, Claire and Amy, arrived to hang bunting and tinsel and, he suspected, to check out their Uncle Shay.

‘Dad’ll be stoked that you’re here,’ one of them said.

Shay still couldn’t tell them apart. When he’d left, they’d been blonde, pig-tailed kids just starting school. Now they were blonde pouty adults, Claire studying medicine in Trinity, Amy ‘doing fashion’, as she told Shay. They looked like Brian, grey-eyed, rangy.

‘So what’s New York like?’ Amy asked.

‘I manage a bar in Brooklyn,’ he told her.

‘Cool,’ she said without inflection.

Later, Fee came to supervise the caterers. She brought a stack of large presents for Brian, wrapped in garish paper. She arranged them in a shrine in Dec’s living room picture window. She seemed barely to notice Shay.

‘Hi Fee,’ he said.

‘Oh good,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘you got here.’ He could see her mentally ticking a box.

There was no sign of the lovely Colette—so she and Dec mustn’t live together. Shay felt, unaccountably, relieved.

Brian’s party was set for eight. He had been invited to Dec’s where he thought he was having a cosy birthday dinner, just the four of them—Brian and Fee, Dec and Colette. By seven o’clock, a crowd had gathered in the marquee. A celebratory atmosphere had already built up, thanks to Colette who circulated with a tray of drinks. She was wearing a dress the colour of an ocean in a travel poster. It was silk, or something very slinky, with a rucked-up bodice and a flowing skirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a little bun and her lips were scarlet. Brian’s friends from the golf club, colleagues from the Hardware Association, old school pals who’d come early on Fee’s instructions, flirted harmlessly with her. Shay recognised some faces from long ago, but no one he could exactly place. Anyway, he was trying to be invisible. Fee had told him to lay low because he was to be the crowning surprise for Brian, but only after the reveal of the party itself and the champagne toast. Shay found himself lurking...