The Chisellers (2 page)

Brendan O‘Carroll
DUBLIN 1995

Now she stands alone, pregnant and deserted,
What she thought was love has left her broken bearted,
Who are we to say, true love bas what meaning?
In a young girl’s mind, life can be so sbnple ...

From the song
‘Sixteen Years of Age’
by Gerry Browne.

This book I dodkate with all my beart to
Dolly Dowdall
a good mother-in-law for eighteen years
and a mekome frlend for twenty-seven years.

Prologue

LONDON 1970

MANNY WISE READ OVER THE SHORT DOCUMENT once again. He smiled. His weekend visit back to his father’s home in Ireland had not been a waste of time. His father’s business itself was not doing well. But the property the factory was on was located in Dublin’s city centre and without doubt would be of value when the old man kicked the bucket. Everything had worked out very well. He had only intended his short visit to yield him a few pounds from the old man. He needed only two grand to put together this Amsterdam deal that would establish him as one of the major players in the cocaine business in London.

Thankfully he arrived to find the old man very sick and bed-ridden. His doctor had him drugged up to the eyeballs. Manny got his money — and getting his father to sign the document that transferred everything he owned over to his son Manny ‘For love and natural affection’ had been easy, the man was so confused.

Manny read the legal phrase again, ‘For love and natural affection’. He laughed aloud, though nobody heard him as he was alone in the study of his five-roomed apartment on Edgeware Road WC1. What was laughable about the phrase was that there was not one shred of love between the two men.

Manny folded the document and inserted it into an envelope on which he wrote ‘Dublin Papers’, then placed it in the safe below his bookcase, alongside the £10,000 cash that was ready for the Amsterdam people. It would be there for him when the time came, sooner he hoped rather than later. As he closed the door and spun the combination dial he said aloud, ‘Thanks, Pop! You fuck ing loser.’

PART I

Chapter 1

DUBLIN 1970

AS HE SAT ON HIS HIGH STOOL behind the podium, centre-stage, Pat Muldoon scanned the assembly before him. It was an impressive sight. An audience of five hundred at least, all sitting facing him with their heads bowed. The silence was eerie, the only sound in this packed room being the whirring of the bingo machine as it tossed its numbered balls and fed them up the tube at random. Pat Muldoon had been calling the bingo numbers in St Francis Xavier Hall since 1962. In those eight years never before had he seen the ‘Snowball’ reach the massive sum that it stood at tonight. The makeshift sign outside the hall announced the record amount: ’Snowball now standing at £615 and 53 calls!‘ He knew it would be won tonight. The first person to shout CHECK before he extracted the fifty-third number would take it all! He read the number on the ball in his hand and called, ’All the fours - forty-four!‘

The bingo nights at the Francis Xavier Hall each Wednesday and Friday would usually attract an average of two hundred and fifty to three hundred people. It was the size of the Snowball which had doubled the crowd in the last three weeks. Extra chairs were borrowed from the Community Centre to accommodate the influx of strangers that arrived from every comer of Dublin. Still, the regulars who sat on the same chairs every Wednesday and every Friday, week-in week-out, were not discom moded in any way - that was important for they were the ones who would be there when the Snowball went back down to just one hundred pounds.

About two-thirds of the way down the hall, and close to the toilets, sat Agnes Browne and her merry group of six. Next to Agnes was Carmel Dowdall, a neighbour of Agnes’s in James Larkin Court. Like Agnes, Carmel had a thirteen-year-old daughter. Coincidentally, both young girls were named Cathy, and they were best pals both in and out of school. Sitting beside Carmel was a large red-faced woman, built like a man and adding to this by wearing her husband’s crombie coat. This was Nelly Robinson. A long-time friend of Agnes‘s, Nelly was a dealer in Moore Street with a stall no more than fifty feet from Agnes’s own pitch. Sitting facing these three were Nelly’s twin daughters, affectionately known to all the dealers in the market as Splish and Splash. The twin girls had matured well, and although quite pretty, at nineteen had still not managed to secure themselves either husbands or steady boyfriends - probably because, thanks to a lisp they shared, they had an inability to say ’Give us a kiss’ without covering their suitor in spittle. The last of the six was an elderly man. This was Bunnie Morrissey. Agnes and the other women knew Bunnie only from the bingo nights. A long-time widower, Bunnie, like many others, used the bingo as a reason to get out for the night. He would arrive every Wednesday and Friday with a plastic check multi-coloured shopping bag, from which he would remove his bingo board and clip, his two bingo pens-one red, one black-and, last of all, a single tattered tartan carpet slipper.

This last item had an interesting history. Two years previously, while coming down the stairs of his tiny pensioner’s flat in Dorset Street, Bunnie slipped and twisted his ankle. The subsequent swelling meant that Bunnie could not get his right shoe onto his foot. So that evening Bunnie had arrived at the bingo wearing just one shoe, on his left foot, and on his swollen right foot this carpet slipper. After fifteen years of bingo-playing, that night was the first time that Bunnie ever won anything - he collected £15 for a full house, and for the couple of seconds it took him to call ‘Check’, he was the focus of every eye in the hall. Since then Bunnie never started a night of bingo without first slipping off his right shoe and putting on his tatty ‘lucky’ carpet slipper. Sadly, since that night Bunnie had failed to win a single penny, and each session would end with him firing the slipper into the plastic bag, grunting, ’Lucky slipper, me bollix!‘ Yet, before every game every night of the bingo, out would come the lucky slipper again.

‘One and seven — seventeen.’ Mr Muldoon called out the twelfth number.

Suddenly a cry of ‘Check’ went up and all heads lifted simultaneously and looked in the direction of the hand in the air holding the salmon-coloured bingo book and claiming the line prize.

‘Only twelve calls? That’s early,’ mused Agnes aloud.

‘Yeah, it is, very early,‘ replied Nelly, as the two stared over at the upraised hand.

‘Who is it?’ asked Carmel.

‘Yer woman with the yellow teeth from Sheriff Street, Clarke I think her name is. Her husband does the telegrams, rides a motor bike,’ Agnes informed the group.

‘I hear that’s not all he rides,’ remarked Nelly, and they all burst into laughter.

The burst of laughter brought a look from the line winner, Mrs Clarke. Agnes caught her gaze and waved to her with a smile. ‘Have it and you’ll get it!’ she shouted. The woman smiled and waved back.

Bunnie was too bothered to laugh with the others. ‘I hardly have a fuckin’ mark at all!’ he grumbled.

The twins, too, were preoccupied.

‘Ma, did he call tirty sisks?’ asked Splish, spraying Agnes’s knees.

‘No, not yet. I don’t think so.’

‘Bunnie, d’you know, did he call tirty sisks?‘ Splish tried again.

‘What are yeh askin’ me for?’ snapped Bunnie, still annoyed about his bad luck. ‘Sure I hardly have a fuckin’ mark at all.’ He spoke as if Splish were to blame for his lack of marks.

There now followed a short interval during which the claim for a line would be checked. With only twelve numbers gone it was looking very likely that the Snowball would indeed be won this evening. Agnes used the interval opportunity to light up a cigarette, as did most of the other bingo players. The room was a-buzz with anticipation as everyone realised the early call on a line meant that most probably the Snowball would go.

Agnes blew out the match and exhaled the first drag, then, picking a piece of tobacco off her tongue, she turned to Carmel.

‘You know,’ she announced suddenly, ‘your Cathy’s language has gone to the dogs.’

‘Wha’, Agnes?‘ Carmel asked, not catching Agnes’s drift.

‘Your Cathy - her language has gone to the dogs.’

Carmel thought for a moment, then began to nod her head. ‘D’yeh know, Agnes you’re right. It’s fuckin’ dreadful. And she’s an imperint little bitch as well. I think she gets the bad language off the O‘Briens in eighty-one, fuckers they are.’

The bingo ball machine began to whirl again and as the audience prepared themselves, Mr Muldoon called. ‘Here we go for the full house, and the Snowball. Eyes down and your first number is ... ’

Every pen in the hall hovered and the electricity of anticipation was so strong you could almost hear it hum.

‘Two fat ladies - eighty-eight.’

After a further eight numbers, Agnes was able to mark off seven. Nelly, noticing the constant moving of Agnes’s pen half-whispered to her, ‘Jaysus, Agnes, you’re flyin’.‘

‘I know. Shut up, you’ll put the mockers on me!’

‘It’s well for yeh. I haven’t a fuckin’ mark at all,’ piped in Bunnie.

‘Shush,’ said Agnes as Mr Muldoon called out the next number.

‘Was she worth it? Two and six - twenty-six.’

Agnes didn’t have twenty-six - and she didn’t have the next six numbers either. But over the next fifteen calls she steadily marked off a couple of twos and threes called in a row, until she suddenly realised her card was starting to fill up, and with just four calls to go she had only one number left. The number seven.

Jaysus — I have a wait!‘ Agnes said to nobody in particular.

‘Agnes has a wait,’ echoed Carmel, passing on the news.

‘Oh Mammy, me nerves!’ mumbled Splish, picking up the sudden tension.

‘Come on - number seven,’ said Agnes fervently, as if she were in prayer.

‘Two little ducks - twenty-two.’

‘Number seven, number seven — come on, number seven,’ Agnes was intoning now.

‘Pull it, mister ... Pull it! ... Oh Jaysus, Agnes.’ This was Carmel.

‘Shut up, shut up! Come on, number seven.’

‘There’s only two calls to go,’ says Bunnie, ‘and I’m still waiting on three more numbers. I’m out of the runnin’.‘

‘Top of the house - ninety.’

Agnes held her hand up to her now-perspiring forehead. ‘Ah what’s wrong with yeh, mister! Come on, number seven.’

‘And this is the Final call for the Snowball ...’

‘On its own, number seven, please God. On its own, number seven,’ Agnes groaned.

‘On its own ...’

‘Yes! Yes! Call it - seven!

‘ — number four.’

There was momentary silence and a collective intake of breath in the hall as everybody waited for the inevitable call of ‘Check’. But it didn’t come. Hardly anybody except those in her company heard Agnes’s groan. The non-event was met with a mixture of sighs, moans and then giggles in the knowledge that the big Snowball would be there yet again this coming Friday - only even bigger, and with the calls moving up to fifty-four, it had to be won!

Mr Muldoon moved on, wondering at the back of his mind where he was going to get the extra chairs he would need for Fridays session.

‘Unlucky for some - thirteen.’

Still no call. Although the Snowball was now gone, the full house would still be worth fifty pounds. Not to be sneezed at, not to be sneezed at at all.

‘One little duck - number two.’

Bunnie Morrissey’s attempt to jump straight up was thwarted. The pushing of his full weight onto the back of the chair in his effort to spring up split the cross member of the chair and as it splintered and collapsed he fell backwards. His right leg shot up like the blade of a flick-knife, sending his lucky slipper flying across the room, where it caught an elderly woman full in the face, mashing her Woodbine against her heavily lipsticked mouth and sending sparks in all directions. As the back of Bunnie’s head hit the ground a barely audible gurgle of ‘Check’ came from him.

Mr Muldoon, not realising what was happening and thinking there was just a slight commotion, exclaimed, ‘Keep it quiet there, please.’

To which Bunnie, now spread-eagled on his back, his bingo pen lying ten feet from him and his right arm stretched upright, perpendicular to his body and clasping the bingo board, screamed, ‘Check! For fuck’s sake, check.’

‘We have a check down the middle of the hall.’

Agnes looked over at Bunnie and stood up. For a moment Bunnie thought she was going to give him a hand up, but instead she put her hands on her hips and exclaimed, ‘Bunnie Morrissey, yeh auld bollix!’

In the three years since the untimely death of Redser Browne, his widow Agnes and her seven children had flourished. Mark, the eldest boy, continued his training as a carpenter. Frankie was a handsome sixteen-year-old, though it was difficult to see it sometimes, for he’d had his head completely shaved, wore a tartan shirt and wide parallel denims which were cut between the knee and the ankle to reveal tartan socks over which he wore a pair of blood-red Doc Marten bower boots. This was the fashion for ‘skinheads’. The fad had begun in Britain with groups of white youths who spent their evenings drinking cider, dancing to reggae music, and then, like packs of wolves, would hunt down and beat Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians, and homosexuals of any creed or colour. Frankie and the gang of thugs he hung out with were starved for targets. Dublin did not have a population of Indians, West Indians or coloureds in general, so the homosexuals took the full brunt. Failing an encounter with a homosexual, these gangs would use anyone that looked weak — at least weaker than they were. He didn’t even realise it himself, but Frankie Browne was a neo-Nazi.