“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s well for some. He must have a head made of titanium. What were they drinking, at all? I asked Dessie, but he couldn’t turn his head on the pillow to answer me.”
Mrs. Cunniffe giggles breathily. Trey shrugs.
Noreen shoots her a sharp bird-glance, over one shoulder. “He was talking plenty when he came in, but, God help us all. Four in the morning, it was, and him shaking me outa the bed to tell me some mad story about gold nuggets and beg me to make him a fry-up.”
“Didja make it for him?” Tom Pat inquires.
“I did not. He got a piece of toast and an earful about waking the kids, is what he got. Come here, Theresa: is it true, what he said, or was it just the drink talking? There’s some English fella coming to dig up gold on everyone’s land?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “He’s rich. His granny came from round here. She told him there was gold.”
“Holy Mary, mother a the divine,” Mrs. Cunniffe breathes, clasping her cardigan together. “ ’Tis like a film. Honest to God, I’d palpitations when I heard. And will I tell you something awful strange? Friday night, I dreamed I found a gold coin in my kitchen sink. Just lying there, like. My granny always said the second sight ran in our—”
“That’ll be ating cheese too late at night,” Noreen advises her. “Once we had a baked Camembert at Christmas, and I dreamed I was after turning into a llama in a zoo, and I was annoyed ’cause my good shoes wouldn’t fit on the hooves. Leave the cheese alone and you’ll be grand. Now, Theresa”—Noreen abandons her dusting to lean over the counter and point the duster at Trey—“did your daddy say who this fella’s granny was?”
“Nah,” Trey says. “Don’t think he knows.” She can’t see the jam they normally get. She grabs some weird-looking apricot thing instead.
“That’s men for you,” Noreen says. “A woman woulda thought to ask. Myself and Dymphna, that’s Mrs. Duggan, we spent half the morning trying to get it straight who she mighta been. Dymphna reckons she musta been Bridie Feeney from across the river, that went over to London before the Emergency. She never wrote back. Dymphna says her mammy always thought Bridie had gone over to have a baba and was hiding the shame, but I suppose it might be that she just didn’t bother her arse writing at first, and then she married some fancy doctor and got too many notions to write to the likes of us. Or both,” she adds, struck by the idea. “The baba first, and then the doctor.”
“Bridie Feeney’s sister was married to my uncle,” Tom Pat says. “I was only a wee little lad when she went off, but they always said she’d do well for herself. She was that kind. She coulda married a doctor, all right.”
“I know Anne Marie Dolan,” Mrs. Cunniffe says triumphantly, “whose mammy was a Feeney. Bridie woulda been her great-aunt. I rang Anne Marie straightaway, as soon as I got my breath back, didn’t I, Noreen? She says neither her granddad nor her mammy ever said a word to her about any gold. Not a peep outa them. Would you credit that?”
“I would,” Tom Pat says. “I’d say that’s only typical. Anne Marie’s granddad was aul’ Mick Feeney, and Mick had no use for girls. He thought they were awful talkers, the lot of them, couldn’t hold their water—no harm to the present company.” He smiles around at them all. Mrs. Cunniffe titters. “And he’d only daughters. I’d say he told no one, and waited for Anne Marie’s young lad to get old enough that he could pass it on. Only didn’t Mick take a heart attack and die, before he got the chance.”
“And no surprise to anyone but himself,” Noreen says tartly. “I heard his back room was that full of bottles, they had to get a skip in. No wonder he never done nothing about the gold. He’d other things to keep him occupied.”
“And if it wasn’t for this English chap,” Mrs. Cunniffe says, a hand to her face, “the secret woulda been lost and gone forever. And us walking over the gold our whole lives, without a notion.”
“That’s what you get when people do nothing,” Noreen says. Having stood still for as long as she’s capable of, she goes back to her dusting. “God knows how many generations of Feeneys, every one of them doing feck-all about that gold. At least this English lad got sense enough from somewhere to do something. About feckin’ time.”
“You’ll be meeting this English chap, won’t you, Theresa?” Mrs. Cunniffe asks, edging closer to Trey. “Would you ever ask him if there’s any of it in our bitta land? Noreen was telling me it’s in the river, and sure we’re only a few yards away. I couldn’t be digging myself, my back does be at me something terrible, but Joe’s a great man for the digging. He’d have the garden up in no time.”
Somewhere on its way down the mountain, the gold has apparently turned from a possibility into a solid thing. Trey isn’t sure what she thinks of this.
She dumps her shopping on the counter and adds a packet of crisps, as her fee for taking Maeve’s turn. “And twenty Marlboro,” she says.
“You’re too young to be smoking,” Noreen tells her.
“For my dad.”
