Mondo Desperado (11 page)

And as Dympna Wrigley sat alone there in her carriage – a little tense, it must be admitted, for the furthest she had ever been from Barntrosna was to the neighbouring village of Killyhoe
to visit her Uncle Dan – behind her eyes a thousand tiny worlds of possibility glittered, each one about to expand in all directions into a phantasmagoric universe all of its own. As the
former civil servant pulled her rat-coat about her, she gave a little shiver, consoling herself with the knowledge that soon it would be the finest mink or sable, and that the streets of Dublin
would grind to a halt, stunned into silence as she swept by, then crying:

—My God! It’s Dympna! Dympna Wrigley!

*

Her first experiences were truly glorious, there can be no denying it; with the few shillings she had in her possession, Dympna Wrigley ensured that she had the time of her
life! ‘If I eat another ice-cream cone,’ she exclaimed excitedly to the sympathetic counter assistant in Forte’s Grill in O’Connell Street, ‘I shall surely go up like
a balloon! I wonder what millionaire playboy will want me then?’

Yes, initially, there can be no doubt, Dympna found herself living in a kind of Paradise in Dublin City. But, within days, certain ominous shadows had begun to encircle her and the reasonably
attractive woman in her mid-thirties whose optimism knew no bounds found herself sitting by the window in a dingy café staring out at the emptying streets, the first pangs of guilt beginning
to claw at her, small voices subtly insinuating themselves as they whispered:

—So this is what it was all for, Miss Dympna Wrigley? This is why you left your poor mother? You know that she might be dead, don’t you? You know your poor mother who washed and
clothed and fed you might be dead! She might be dead, Dympna Wrigley! Dead! Dead! Dead!’

It was only a matter of time before they breached her defences, these marshalled front-line troops of undiluted guilt, and finally she placed both her clenched fists against her eyes and began
to sob. ‘Why oh why did I have to go and do it, leave my happy home to come to this awful place where nobody gives a damn whether I live or die? How could you have been so stupid, Dympna
Wrigley! How?’ she chided herself.

After that, she took to walking through the streets with reddened eyes, somewhere close by a reedy organ plaintively piping as she stood staring into shop windows with all their beautiful finery
and jewellery. What was it the song seemed to say to her as a silver tear dried in the corner of her eye?

A question to which, as time progressed, there did not appear to be an answer. Certainly none that Dympna Wrigley could elucidate, at any rate, as now, like some broken doll,
she found herself sitting on the edge of a fountain with her bag in her hand and the waters crashing behind her as she groaned pitifully:

—I am a bad woman. I am a stupid woman and a bad woman to do what I have done. To leave my poor mama alone to die.

As her tendency towards self-laceration grew, her self-confidence began to evaporate in almost equal measure. In fact her confidence now seemed nothing more than a pathetic contrivance in the
face of the ragged, predatory figures who surrounded her as they remorselessly attempted to wrest her handbag and its sad few contents from her grasp. ‘Oi! Miss! Got any odds? Giv’s a
few quid!’ they would harshly call from street corners, secure behind their wet-tipped cigarettes, Dympna’s flat heels clattering onward in a night air shattered by the sound of coarse
and cold-blooded laughter.

All of which might not have overwhelmed her had it not been for the added anxieties induced by the relentless clamour, the forlorn cries that criss-crossed the night as though the heart-rending
pleas of faceless pariahs in some bottomless void, the sudden clang of pinball machines and the swirling phantasmagoria of lights and music which rendered her helpless with a feeling of sickly
dizziness and provoked in her a desire for only one thing – to be back in the tranquil haven of her home village – the place she had so stupidly, callously turned her back on!

And to which she was within days of returning – until that fateful night when her life was irrevocably changed for ever.

—It’ll be all right, honeybun! Dermo said to her, extending his hand as he smiled at her across the formica expanse of the corner table in the San Remo Café (despite her
tears, she managed to discern the words
LOVE
and
MUM
etched upon the brown limb in spidery letters of startling blue) and, with twinkling,
magnanimous eyes enquiring as to whether perhaps she might accompany him to his place of residence for a cup of hot soup – that it might make her feel better?

How fortune could have seen fit to smile on her in such a compassionate, yielding manner, Dympna Wrigley could not understand, and as she took Dermo’s arm, now accompanying him through the
glittering streets of night (in which she all of a sudden felt herself so utterly comfortable and ‘at home’ that it actually astonished her) she was so happy, in fact, she felt like
addressing the entire city of Dublin! Felt like crying out: ‘At last! At last! Dympna Wrigley is happy!’ For the simple reason that she wanted everyone to know! Know that she, Dympna
– who had once been the most miserable girl in all of Dublin City – was now as close to bursting with contentment as she had ever been, or hoped to be!

But might have been a little more circumspect if she had but known just what sort of a character she had now permitted herself to stroll alongside in the suspiciously benign city streets! And
perhaps might not – if she’d left the village of Barntrosna at least once in her life before having encountered him – have so readily placed her trust in Dermo Slattery. Would,
most certainly, have given it a lot more thought when he said:

—Don’t worry, honeybun! I’m the man’ll look after you!, instead of blurting out:

—Oh thank you, Dermo! Thank you ever so much!, right there and then and plunging herself into what was about to become a nightmare with someone who – even if only because of his
slender moustache and the absurd cornucopia of gold rings upon his fingers – ought to have excited at the very least a soupçon of suspicion. Not that she would have been expected to
cry:

—Oh no! I know your lot! A pimp! I can smell them a mile away!

Of course not. But she would, without doubt, have approached her situation with a little more wariness. Instead of trotting back to his flat with a great big smile on her face, innocently
climbing into bed with him and slavishly following his instructions until they were both, as they might have quaintly described it in Barntrosna, ‘at it hammer and tongs’, like
they’d known one another all their lives. Central to this, of course, was Dermo’s insistence that she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life. This, perhaps because she
heard it so rarely – never before, in fact – proved such a source of delight to Dympna that presently she was insisting to her new-found companion that she would be honoured to do
anything for him. ‘And I mean –
anything
!’ she cried shrilly, her body happily contorting into the shape of a crab as her head tapped out a somewhat primitive musical
rhythm on the flock wallpaper.

A statement which, as it turned out, proved to be a lot truer than she thought, for within a matter of days – to her perplexity – she was to be found standing outside the railway
station, generously elevating her hemline and offering to accompany men – complete strangers – back to Dermo’s place for a ‘cup of tea’.

How exactly he had managed to secure her agreement continued to remain something of a mystery to her – perhaps he had drugged her? – but within a matter of a few paltry weeks it was
as though she’d been standing by the ornamental fountain which was located outside the main city railway station for most of her adult life.

It was only a matter of time, of course, and sure enough, within a few short months, all her old nightmares had returned with a vengeance and it was not uncommon to see her sitting on the
concrete surround of the fountain with her elbows on her knees as her cheap mascara (insisted upon by Dermo) intermingled with the tears which now cascaded hopelessly down her cheeks. Now, however,
her ‘new-found friend’ did not prove to be quite so understanding. Informing her, in fact, that if she didn’t quit her crying ‘double quick’ and ‘get down to
that railway station’ as ‘fast as her knobbly pins’ would take her, that she’d be the sorry girl and just to prove his point shoved his ring-bedecked fist into her face. And
so, each day, it was off once more to offer her body (at ludicrously low prices – ‘Turnover! Turnover!’ Dermo would shriek when she protested) to the streams of train-travelling,
shifty-eyed men, and endure anew the guilt she prayed had vanished for ever.

But which most certainly had not – in fact was if anything worse than before because on top of the crime she had perpetrated on her ailing mother she was now faced with the enormity of her
sins against holy purity. All of which ended up with her pacing the evening streets once more, a crumpled mass of tears and cheap satin clothing, the reedy organ again piping its melancholy tune as
she stood longingly in front of plate-glass windows bedecked with flowers, cards and the tiny tokens that lovers exchange.

Dympna Wrigley sniffed to herself that the likes of Dermo was all that she deserved. Especially after the way she’d behaved. ‘How could I do it on my own flesh and blood?’ she
howled as she pummelled the glass in the warm, heartbroken night.

In the end, she became a shadow of her former self, threshing about under anonymous mounds of primeval, perspiring flesh until she had long since lost count, always close by the shadow of Dermo
counting his ill-gotten gains. Continuing to insist to her: ‘I love you, my honeybun!’

Lies, of course! she thought as a seventeen-stone man reached for his trousers. Just another instance of Dermo Slattery and his tawdry lies!

Not that she cared any more – she was well beyond that. Or seemed to be, at any rate! Until fate once more took a hand and the path of Dympna Wrigley crossed with that of – it is
impossible! Such things happen only in fiction! – one of the city’s most prominent and celebrated citizens,
Dr Kiernan McSwiggan
! An extraordinary stroke of good fortune, for not
only was Dr McSwiggan one of Dublin’s most renowned art buyers and all-round cultured gentlemen, he was also a millionaire many times over and lived in a castle on the outskirts of the
city!

When she first heard the words passing his lips, it was all Dympna Wrigley could do not to spit in the face of this so-called ‘refined epicurean’. For the sentence ‘I love
you’ meant as much to her now as the tail of a sewer rat. Which was why, in that instant, she turned from him, once more thrusting her clenched fist into her mouth, the red-faced bon viveur
proceeding contentedly, rhythmically above her.

But in the days that followed it occurred to Dympna Wrigley that there had been something about the fine-art connoisseur and the way he had uttered those words – for so long in the mouths
of others indisputably hollow – and actually on repeated visits continued to
insist
upon repeating,
I love you! I love you! I love you! O Dimpy I love you!
, and always giving
her that special look as he did so, that soon she began to soften ever so slightly and reveal her innermost thoughts to him – confidences she had never imparted to anyone! Concerning her
mother and the little village where she was born and the many dreams which had so heartbreakingly turned to dust when she came to horrible, horrible Dublin. But most of all, regarding Dermo and the
terrible things he had done to her, imprisoning her in bamboo cages and making her dress up in rabbit costumes.

The latter part was essentially embellishment but the instant he heard these words spoken, the change that overcame the normally mild-mannered McSwiggan was quite shocking in its impact.
Pounding the wall with his fist, he swore – Dympna feared a cardiac arrest – that if this ‘Dermo’ – this ‘wretched louse from the armpit of the earth’
– ever so much as laid another finger on her she was to proceed without delay to his castle and inform him.

Which was all very well, of course, except for the fact that when Dermo realized that ‘that shitebag McSwiggan’ as he derisively called him – Dermo despised culture in all its
forms – was attracted to his ‘honey’, as he put it, not only did he lay a finger on her, he punched her so hard that she went flying across the room and knocked her head
forcefully against the fridge, with the result that the next day her eye had swollen up the size of a shining blood-gorged cockroach.

From the moment – the very second – the Modigliani authority (for he was such) set eyes upon that hideous iris, the die was already cast. Dermo, of course, pronounced himself not
‘the slightest bit afraid’ of ‘Bollocky-Balls McSwiggan’, for, he continued, he was nothing more than a ‘useless big hoor with a fat cigar’ and not worth giving
so much as a second thought to. Which, as far as the well-known gourmet (his taste and experience were legendary throughout the city) was concerned, might have been true but most definitely was not
when it came to his two muscular bodyguards, who, as a consequence of the plentiful wages paid to them each week (not to mention innumerable ‘tokens’ and regular ‘somethings for
themselves’), would have done absolutely anything required of them by ‘the Doc’, as they genially called him.

Which Dermo was about to find out, as he was on his way home from the video shop, with a copy of – ironically! –
The Kidnapping
tucked neatly under his arm, whistling
innocently, when he found the ground giving way beneath him, and the sound of squealing brakes, seeming far away now when in fact the stretch limousine was speeding towards the deserted factory
where he was to find himself beaten to a pulp and warned that if he ever approached Dympna Wrigley again what he had just received would be as nothing. ‘Nothing? You hear?’ they snapped
at him, as the still-warm cosh was slipped snugly and receptively into a back pocket. ‘Yes,’ croaked Dermo, raising a tattered and obsequious hand, ‘please . . . I beg you! No
more!’