Dignity - A Short Story by Madeleine D’Arcy

 Gateway to Madeleine D’Arcy 

. A version of this story was published in Counterparts - A Synergy of Law and Literature (Stinging Fly, 2018). The anthology was edited by Danielle McLaughlin and all of the contributions were inspired by law reports. 

“Madeleine D’Arcy’s début short story collection, Waiting For The Bullet (Doire Press, 2014) was awarded the Edge Hill Reader’s Choice Prize (UK) in 2015.

In 2010 she received the Hennessy Literary Award for First Fiction and the overall Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writer.
She holds an MA in Creative Writing (First Class Honours) from University College, Cork.

She is also a qualified solicitor in Ireland and in the UK.
Publishing credits include: The Stinging Fly; Necessary Fiction; Long Story Short; Made in Heaven and other stories; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts; Irish Times; Irish Independent; The Holly Bough; Short Story Journal (US); The Penny Dreadful; Unbraiding the Short Story (US); Surge: New Writing From Ireland; Quarryman; Headstuff.org; Looking at the Stars; Sunset Drinking the Black Ocean; Head Land–Ten Years of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize (UK), The Elysian–Creative Responses; Counterparts, A Synergy of Law and Literature and Europe revue littéraire mensuelle (France). Forthcoming publications include Cork Words and Purple Heart Anthology.

Madeleine co-hosts Fiction at the Friary, a free monthly fiction event in Cork City, with fellow-writer Danielle McLaughlin.
She has been awarded bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland and Cork City Council, and has completed her first novel.

Her second book, a collection of linked short fiction, is scheduled for publication by Doire Press in 2021.”

I first began to  read the work of Madeleine D’Arcy during Irish Short Story Month Year Two, April 2012.

Here are my thoughts on her debut collection:

Waiting for the Bullet, the marvelous debut collection of Madeleine D'Arcy, is a beautifully written highly perceptive set of stories about relationships in times of transition, in periods darked by social and economic stresses and personal crisis.  The stories are set mostly in Ireland but they allow us to see the universal in the particular.  D'Arcy has a keen eye for small nuances in relationships.  She helps us understand the built in paradoxes in relationships that often bring them to an end, the tension between the craving for a partner that excites you, gives you a sense of the edge and one that provided stability and affection.  You can see this strongly in the amazing story "The Fox and the Placenta".  In writing on Irish fiction over the last few years I have been guided by the ideas of Declan Kiberd in terms of a post-colonial reading of Irish literature and I see repeated manifestations of the theme of they weak or missing father in these profound stories.   D'Arcy helps us see the humanity in others, one of the greatest benefits of deep stories.  I think another great story teller from Cork, Frank O'Connor, would have been an admiring reader of Waiting for the Bullet.  



“Dignity”  A Short Story by Madeleine D’Arcy

On the Friday when all the trouble began – though I didn’t know that until some days later – my sister Ellie arrived at my house at 7 a.m. as usual. She took the black plastic folder out of her massive handbag – I call it her Mary Poppins bag because you never know what she’ll take out of it next – and put it on my bedside cabinet.
‘I think it’s best to keep it here,’ she said. ‘And Jake might want to check it out when he comes on Sunday.’  
Jake’s my son. He’s working in Dublin now but he often comes down at weekends.
‘Now, let’s get you sorted,’ she said.
‘Absolutely,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s get out of here before Mrs Looney arrives.’
Mrs Looney cleans my house on Friday mornings. I like to be out when she’s in. Bad enough that Mrs Looney has an irritating way of telling me to count my blessings and believe in the power of prayer; but she never stops complaining herself, about her arthritis, her bunions and her old blaggard of a husband. In fact, if you listened to her and you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Mrs Looney was the one in constant agony and that there was nothing much wrong with me. I used to do an impression of the auld bag that made Ellie hoot with laughter, but the joke has worn thin at this stage.

So that’s why Ellie usually takes me shopping on Fridays. We often go to Leevale Shopping City. You can find some decent stuff in the shops there, and the supermarket has nice wide aisles.
There are two disabled parking spaces right near the main entrance of Leevale Shopping City and that’s where we prefer to park, especially since I got the Power Chair. There’s usually only one space free and sometimes none; I’d been ranting about it for ages because every time we went to Leevale, no matter what time we arrived, the same creamy white Fiat 500 with a red interior was parked neatly in one of our disabled spaces.
Rain was pouring from the heavens as we arrived, to see the white Fiat sliding into our parking spot. A young woman in a smart raincoat got out of the Fiat and clicked the car locked before trotting into the shopping centre – not a bother on her despite the high heels – which were gorgeous by the way, possibly Kurt Geiger; I used to have a pair like them.
‘The cheek of her,’ said Ellie, as she opened the back of the Renault and got out the wheelchair ramp.
‘Let’s follow her,’ I said, but by the time I’d manoeuvred my Power Chair down the ramp and motored into the shopping centre she was nowhere to be seen.. We went into Boots the Chemist first, to get my prescriptions, and while we were there Ellie got the notion to ask the pharmacist if she knew the woman who drove the Fiat.
‘That one? She owns the Happy Hair salon.’
‘Is she disabled?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do you know what? She always parks in that disabled space right outside the main door’ Ellie said, and the girl said that would be her alright, and wrinkled up her face and raised her eyebrows in a manner that meant, quite unmistakably, that she couldn’t stand the woman.
I wasn’t much in the mood for shopping, so we didn’t stay long. Outside, the rain had stopped and the white Fiat was still in the same spot.
‘What a lighting bitch,’ Ellie said.
‘We should do something about it,’ I said. ‘You could let the air out of her tyres.’
‘I could. But should I?’
‘Do,’ said I. ‘And we’ll leave her a note.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Ellie. ‘What will we write?’
‘How about “who’s disabled now?” ’ I said.
Ellie nearly exploded with laughter. This is one of the many reasons I love my sister; she’s so steady and reliable most of the time, but when she gets all fired up she turns into a rebel.
‘Hurry,’ I said.
She kept glancing around like a fugitive while she let the air out of both rear tyres. Then she tore the blank bit off our shopping list and scrawled the words on it and added three big exclamation marks and tucked it behind the Fiat’s windscreen wipers before we made our getaway.
As Ellie revved up and drove off she was laughing fit to burst and I started too but in a few seconds I was laughing so hard I started choking. Sometimes this happens when my saliva goes down the wrong way. She had to pull up round the corner and hop out to sort me out. She reached in to pat me on the back and hold my head for a minute until I could breathe again and said ‘Easy now, easy does it,’ and she got a tissue out of her pocket and wiped the dribble off my chin.
‘You gave me a fright there,’ she said.
Then we started laughing again and this time I didn’t choke and for a while I felt almost human again, because there’s nothing like a good laugh, even in the worst of times.

By the time we got back to my house Mrs Looney had been and gone. The floor was still wet, so at least she’d pushed the godddam mop around. It should be easy enough to clean the place. Even now, every time I come home I forget, just for a second or two, that the house is no longer how it used to be. A few years back, Jake insisted on getting the ground floor renovated, thought I told him repeatedly that I didn’t intend to hang round long enough to make all that trouble and expense worthwhile. Jake was always great at organising things, even as a kid. He called in favours, got an architect friend to draw up the plans for free, did some deals and pulled it all together like that DIY SOS programme on the BBC and all I gave him at the time was grief because I had to go to a Respite Care Home while the builders were in and I hated it there. I felt mean about it afterwards and I apologised, because the new downstairs meant that I didn’t always need a carer around, until recently. I’ve almost forgotten what the upstairs rooms look like; they might as well be distant planets now.
It’s frustrating not to be able to take care of things myself. Ellie does a lot. She does more housework than Mrs Looney for sure, and on top of that she’s now my carer as well, but the pay doesn’t cover anything like the time she puts in. Sometimes I get all bitter and twisted thinking about how much she has to do.
That day, though, it seemed as if Mrs Looney had done a half-decent job until we went into the kitchen area, where she’d left the top bits from the hob still soaking in the sink. Ellie sighed, then bent down and opened the oven door. She stared in.
‘She never cleaned the bloody oven. I specifically asked her. She’s hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. We’ll have to get rid of her and get someone else.’
‘It’s hardly worth it, for the sake of a few months,’ I slurred. My speech is getting very bad.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘It sounds terrible when you say it like that.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ She came over and hugged me. Then she looked me in the eyes. ‘You’re going to tell Jake on Sunday, aren’t you? You have to. I’m not going to do it.’
‘Yeah, ‘course I will.’
‘He’ll be upset.’
‘I know.’

Even now, stuck in my so-called Power Chair, I love to watch the Grand Prix on TV. I’ve always loved cars. Dad was a mechanic, and our mother died young, so Ellie and I spent many hours hanging around his garage in Ballyphehane. Friday nights were best, when we’d sit in the back seat of whatever car Dad was working on, eating battered cod and vinegary chips from Lennox’s, the fried smell melding with the fumes of engine oil. He’d eat much faster than we did so he could get back to tinkering underneath a bonnet, persuading an engine to roar back to life, before wiping his greasy hands on his overalls and declaring that it was time to quit.
I must have seemed a strange little girl. Ellie liked dolls but I far preferred cars. I could drive by the time I was ten and for my seventeenth birthday Dad bought me a bright red Triumph Herald. It was second-hand, of course – 1965 – and it needed a bit of work, but I loved it. Even now, although I like perfume well enough, my favourite scent is petrol.
It was Formula One season again and I was looking forward to watching the Belgian Grand Prix at the weekend. The noise of roaring revving engines and the sight of crazily fast cars zipping around a racing track raises my spirits and comforts me, even on bad days when my bones poke against my flesh like shards of ice and I have to grind my teeth together to stop myself groaning.

Jake arrived on Sunday, at about 3pm. He hugged me gently; he knows by now that big hugs are painful.
‘You’re looking well,’ I told him.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’re not looking too bad yourself, all things considered.’
That made me laugh, in spite of myself.
While Ellie made stuffing for the chicken and prepared a trifle, Jake replaced a bulb in the bathroom and put a new washer on the kitchen tap. All I could do was sit there like a spare part, watching them work.
When it was almost 5 p.m. Ellie got me sorted, toilet-wise, and settled me back in the Power Chair while Jake went out for a cigarette. Then we sat round the television, glued to Sky Sports. For a while I was engrossed in the bustling activity of the mechanics in the paddock, while commentators tried to catch a final few words with drivers and team bosses and the occasional celebrity before the race began. Finally the cars were in position and the red lights turned to green and I could almost smell the petrol and exhaust fumes and every time they showed the camera angle from Lewis Hamilton’s car it was almost as if I was behind the wheel myself, surging ahead, arcing around the chicanes, slowing into the pit lane when his team manager said ‘box, box, box,’ and zipping relentlessly into the lead again, and I could almost forget the bones that pinned every part of me down in pain.
Rosberg won and Lewis Hamilton only came third, for a change, but considering Lewis started from the back row on the grid he did brilliantly. Daniel Ricciardo came second and I was thrilled because he hasn’t the best car so he doesn’t often get placed. To be honest, I’ve a soft spot for him; I love his toothy smile. All in all, it was a fine race and afterwards I figured it was time for a drink before dinner.
‘Can I do anything?’ Jake asked his aunt Ellie. In fairness, he has lovely manners; I’ve always been determined that he wouldn’t turn out like his father.
‘No, the chicken’s in,’ Ellie told him. ‘And everything else is prepped.’ She took her apron off and hung it over one of the kitchen chairs, then ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at her watch. ‘I have to collect Jim and bring him over. I won’t be long. In the meantime you might as well start on the wine. There’s plenty in the fridge.’
Her face was a little flushed. Ellie has always been as transparent as glass. My brother-in-law Jim is the solid, reliable kind. If he’s supposed to turn up for his dinner at seven he’ll be there at seven. Besides, they only live around the corner. When I looked at Jake I knew he was thinking the same thing.
As the front door banged shut, Jake moved to the fridge and took out a bottle of Albarino. He poured some into my pink plastic mug and clicked the safety top on before he handed it to me.
‘Baby cup. I hate it,’ I said and my hands shook terribly as I held it. I knew Jake was wondering whether or not to offer help, but all he said was ‘I know,’ as he poured a glass of wine for himself.
‘So what’s up with Aunt Ellie?’ he said then.
‘You won’t like it. ’ My speech was very slurred. I hate that. At first it happened when I was tired or stressed but now it’s just another part of the damaged package that is me.
‘No matter. Fire away.’
‘I made a decision, Jake.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, the date is set. I’m going to Dignitas at the end of November. After the final Grand Prix.’
‘But, that’s only – is it – ten weeks away? Mam, you can’t.’
‘Look Jake, I’ve held out for thirteen years but it’s too hard. I can’t face another Christmas.’
‘It’s just… I know you’ve talked about it before, but over there in Dignitas… it looks like a factory building. I mean, I’m sure it’s fine inside, but… wouldn’t you prefer to die here at home?’
‘I would, but sure it’s illegal here. What choice do I have?’
Jake chewed the inside of his lip, then slugged back all the wine in his glass.
‘Would you think about leaving it a while longer?’
‘I can’t, Jake. If I wait too long I might be too banjaxed to travel and then I’ll be stuck.’
‘It’s not right Mam. It’s much too soon.’ He shifted in his chair and bit his lip again. Then he raised his head and stared through the kitchen window. I moved my head with difficulty so that I could see what he was looking at. Out in the yard, a robin redbreast perched on a limb of the rotary washing line.
‘That little robin turns up every day,’ I said. ‘Ellie feeds him for me now.’
‘I’m going out for a cigarette,’ he said.
‘You’ll kill yourself with them fags.’
‘Look who’s talking.’ He shook his head and went out into the backyard. If I could have swallowed my stupid words I would have. As I sat powerless in my Power Chair I could see him pacing in the dusk, dragging on his cigarette as if it was a punishment.
When Jake came back in, I could smell the fags off him. I worried that in some small ways he’d taken after his father. When I was young, Lorcan’s edginess and fast talk had fascinated me but he had turned out to be a flawed and faithless man. Still, I’d done the best I could. Ellie and Jim had helped me then too. I could never have done it on my own.
Jake tilted the bottle of wine towards my plastic cup and I shook my head. Then he poured more wine into his glass.  
‘It’s beginning to get cloudy,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no stars tonight,’
‘You had a telescope when you were twelve. Do you remember?’
He half-smiled. ‘That was such a good present. I still love all that stuff… reminds me... Did you know that NASA has discovered a new planet? Kepler 452b. They’re calling it Earth 2.0 because it’s the closest match yet to our own planet.’
He got his iPad out and found a YouTube clip. The planet floated pale in an inky black universe, circling a sun-like star. Its pocked surface looked a lot like Earth.
‘Maybe there’s a whole other race up there,’ he said.
‘I hope it’s an improvement on the crowd down here anyway.’
I liked the thought of Earth 2.0. I never tell other people what to believe and I don’t believe in anything much myself, except that if there’s a God I’m quite happy to meet her and explain myself. I like the idea of God being a woman, though of course if there is a God at all, it might be anything, half and half for all I know, or just a cloud that talks or sends telepathic messages. Or there might be nothing. But if there’s nothing, then there’s nothing. I’ll be dead and I won’t even know there’s nothing anyway and there’s no way I can change that.
‘Replay it for me,’ I said. I wanted to see Earth 2 again. Jake pressed the tab and we stared at the screen.
‘So you’re not going to change your mind?”
‘No.’
‘Who’s taking you there?’
‘Ellie. Jim’s coming too. All the details are in a black folder in my bedroom.’
‘I’ll go as well.’
‘Jake, there’s no need. The less people involved, the better.’
‘Ah Mam,’ he said. He slugged back more wine. Then he got up and hugged me very gently.
‘You can’t come with me,’ I said, into his chest. ‘I already decided that. You have your career to think about – your whole life is in front of you.’
‘Look, it’s about time I copped onto myself. I could fly from Dublin and meet you in Zurich. Where’s that folder?’ He found it and slapped it down on the kitchen table. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll book my flights this minute,’ but he didn’t open the folder. Instead he sat there, and I expected him to protest again, but then I saw tears in his eyes, and all of a sudden he looked about five years old again. I felt my own face getting wet in spite of myself. He found a box of tissues and wiped my eyes, and then his own.

The MS was diagnosed thirteen years ago, when I was forty-five. It’s the worst kind, and the truth is that I’m slowly and painfully dying with no prospect of even a brief remission. After I got the diagnosis I kept on working and driving as long as I could, even when I finally had to use a walking stick. In fairness, even then I managed okay until I had an unfortunate accident on Pouladuff Road – involving a muscle spasm in my right leg and a lot of damage to the back of poor old Mr. Deasy’s car – and realised my driving days were over. I had to quit work in the University soon afterwards but at least I had a good pension plan. It nearly broke my heart to sell my little Audi TT but Jim found me a Renault with disabled access for a wheelchair so that he or Ellie could take me out.
The crunch came in the early hours after a terrible night when I lay awake, crying. My drug regime was causing complications almost as bad as the condition and my stomach was giving me grief. On top of that I had pruritis again and the itching was excruciating; enough to drive a person crazy. My bones ached as if I was being pulled on a rack and my head was so sensitive that it felt as if the roots of my hair were digging into my brain. I’m not one for moaning all the time but I was in agony. Jesus Christ, I moaned. Fucking hell. Christ Almighty. Oh God, oh God, oh God help me. It’s amazing that all my groaning was to a God I didn’t believe in. I’d given up on Him a while ago. No God of any kind of quality could ever have wished this on me. I knew no sleep would come, so at about five in the morning, with much difficulty I managed to pull myself up and across into the Power Chair and I trundled into the main room.
To distract myself until Ellie arrived, I decided to watch a documentary about Senna again. He was an amazing talent, who sadly crashed and died at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994. He was only 34, same age as my son Jake is now. Senna prayed to God before the race, but God didn’t save him. That’s the way of it. No wonder I’m not impressed with God. Bad things can happen to anybody.
The DVD was easy to spot, not too high up on the shelves, with ‘SENNA’ written in yellow capital letters on the spine. I raised my hand as best I could and reached for it. Almost there, I leaned out of the flipping Power Chair but my right leg went into spasm and I tipped sideways, slithering right off the wheelchair hard onto the floor. That was that. No way could I get up.
As I lay there, my hips and shoulders felt like razorblades and I couldn’t help scraping at my itching parts, all the while knowing that this would only make the problem worse. Under the TV stand, a spider’s web was flecked with dessicated fly corpses, crumbs and other debris … the white… not maggots, surely not? Why hadn’t that bitch Looney bothered to hoover underneath? The stand was on wheels, for feck sake.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked a familiar clicking sound. It seemed to get louder and louder and the sound of it annoyed the hell out of me. My panic alarm was miles away on my bedside cabinet (Ellie’s always at me to keep it round my neck). I tried to drag myself back into the bedroom but I was like a slug on salt, pierced with pain and getting colder and colder. By the time Ellie arrived, on the dot of seven, all I could say was ‘Ellie, it’s time.’

On the Monday after our Friday escapade at Leevale Shopping City, Jake left for Dublin at the crack of dawn and Ellie came in as usual at 7 a.m. I was in a lot of pain that day and I didn’t want to go anywhere. I listened to BBC Radio One Extra and asked Ellie to give me extra pain relief. Before Ellie went home for an hour in the afternoon she put a recording of the July Grand Prix for me – the British one, at Silverstone. It was an exciting race and I wanted to watch it again even though I already knew Lewis had won.
When the front door buzzer rang, I wondered who on earth it could be. Jake was back in Dublin as far as I knew. Ellie, Jim and Mrs Looney had keys. Not many other people came round anymore. I can’t really blame them. Most people, when faced with someone who has an incurable disease, don’t know what to say, so they stay away instead.
I fumbled for the remote control to pause the recording but it wasn’t in my ‘Super Storage System’. The Super Storage System, as I call it, is a a pocketed thing made of grey fleece fabric and held firmly by a Velcro fastening onto one side of the Power Chair. Ellie got it for me so that I could bung things in that I’d need when I was alone, like the TV remote, the DVD remote, my reading glasses, water bottle, tissues and phone, but the trouble is I keep so many things in there now I can hardly find anything right off.
It was a few seconds before I realised the remote was on the small table beside me all the while. I pressed the wrong button first and the race zoomed forward instead of pausing. By the time I managed to pause the flipping recording the front door buzzer had stopped, but then it buzzed again and, thankfully, the intercom thingy was in its rightful place in the Super Storage System so I managed to get it out and press the Talk button.
‘Who’s there?’ I asked.
‘It’s the police.’ The man’s voice sounded tinny and officious through the intercom. ‘Sorry to disturb you but we need to ask a few questions.’
It was ludicrous, I realised, afterwards, but the first thing that came to mind was that myself and Ellie were in trouble over what we’d done on Friday to the Fiat belonging to the Happy Hair girl in Leevale Shopping Centre.

I zoomed too fast into the hall, bumping my wheelchair against the doorframe and cursing under my breath. Then I hesitated for a moment. Sometimes this blinking MS makes my head addled, so I tried to force myself to think clearly. I’d admit nothing but I’d point out that if a young woman in the full bloom of her health was mean enough to park in a disabled parking space, she deserved what she got. I spoke through the intercom.
‘Show some ID,’ I said.
I peered through the spyhole, which Jake, bless him, had made sure to place low in the door, and then I pressed the Open button and invited them in.
Two Gardaí stepped into the hall. The man, a tall thin fellow in uniform, had hardly any chin. He was what my Dad used to call ‘a chinless wonder’. The female Garda was fair-haired and looked no more than sixteen, in spite of the fact that she wore an engagement ring and a wedding band. Her perfume smelt of woods and flowers; it was probably Issey Miyake
The Garda looked down at me past his almost non-existent chin. ‘Is your name Mrs Siofra Sullivan?’ he asked, very slowly.
‘Mizz. Is there a problem?’ My words came out a bit blubbery and I felt spit seeping onto my lower lip. It always gets worse when I’m anxious.
‘I’m sorry for the intrusion,’ said the female cop. ‘We just want to ask you a few questions.’
‘You might as well come in,’ I said. Without waiting for them, I reversed backwards and then drove left through the door that led into the living area. I bumped into the table as I turned the wheelchair round to face them.
‘I wish they didn’t call it a Power Chair,’ I said. ‘This damn thing is more like a bumper car.’
The female officer nodded and the chinless wonder didn’t seem to notice that I’d spoken.
‘Can you tell me the nature of your disability?’ he said, slowly, pronouncing each word as if he were speaking to a child.
‘There’s no need to talk like that,’ I slurred. ‘I’m no Stephen Hawkings but I’m not a vegetable either.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the female cop. ‘Today’s one of his slow days.’
‘Sorry,’ he blushed.
’It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m used to it. Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis is what I’ve got.’
‘It must be tough,’ the girl said.
‘It is. There’s no cure and in my case there’s no remission. Would you like to sit down, while you’re here?’
They placed themselves awkwardly on the couch.
‘Is Ellie Sullivan Gould your sister?’ the chinless wonder asked, this time in a normal voice.
‘Yes. And she’s my carer as well.’
‘There’s been a report that she’s taking you to Switzerland. To Dignitas.’
‘What… who told you that?’ I felt stricken. A line from a poem came daftly into my head. The best laid plans of mice and men…
‘Assisting a suicide is a criminal offence under section 2 of the Criminal Justice (Suicide) Act 1993, so we’re obliged to investigate.’
‘No one is assisting me to do anything. I can’t go anywhere on my own. I always need someone to travel with me.’
‘I’m terrible sorry, Mrs Sullivan,’ he said, and he did seem sorry, in fairness. ‘I don’t want to alarm you but there’s a possibility that your sister will be charged if she brings you to Dignitas,’ he said.
‘But it’s in a different country. It’s legal there.’
‘Unfortunately, the law in this country hasn’t changed, Mrs Sullivan …’
‘It’s “Mizz”, I said. ‘And I won’t answer any more questions without a solicitor present.’
‘Sorry. Make a note of that,’ he told the girl cop. She didn’t look at him and she didn’t look at me either. She just stared at whatever she’d written in her notebook.
‘We’re very sorry to bother you,’ he said. ‘I hope we don’t have to follow this up but we’ll have to file a preliminary report before we know any more.’
‘We’ll let ourselves out,’ the girl said and they got up and left.
I could hardly believe it. I was raging. So much planning. The agony of filling out forms and getting up-to-date medical reports and psychological reports. I’d had my will drawn up and witnessed. I’d bought Christmas presents to be unwrapped after I was dead. A special parcel for Jake on his wedding day if he ever got married – I hoped he’d tie the knot with Sarah… The waiting… Four months it took to get Dignitas sorted and I had only six months to take up the place or I’d have to update the blasted reports and start all over again.
On the TV screen, the front of Lewis Hamilton’s silver Mercedes was freeze-framed on the silent racing track. I stared at the back of his white helmet and his white-gloved hands on the steering wheel as he sat there, going nowhere.
Then the doorbell rang again.
It was the girl cop’s voice on the intercom this time.
‘Sorry, I left my notebook behind.’
‘Ah feck off,’ I muttered but all the same I pressed Open. The girl came in. Her face was flushed.
‘Actually, I didn’t leave anything behind,’ she said. ‘I’ve come back to apologise. I’m really, really sorry. Sometimes I hate my job.’
She left before I could think of anything to say, and, mercifully, before I soiled my incontinence pad. I sat in despair for some moments, before driving myself into the bathroom. Exhausted at the thought of the slow unsavoury cleansing that lay ahead, I couldn’t help breaking down in tears. That’s how Ellie found me when she arrived a few minutes later.
‘We’re busted, Ellie,’ I wailed. ‘And I’ve shat myself.’
‘I know,’ said Ellie. ‘Don’t worry about that now. Let’s get you sorted.’

Ellie helped me undress and sit in the shower. She washed and dried me and helped me put my nightclothes on. She poured a glass of the good brandy and folded my hand around it.
‘The police just called me. That’s why I’m late.’
‘How did they find out?’ I slurred. ‘I bet it was that old wagon Mrs Looney. Always banging on about prayer and offering it up...’
‘I brought the folder over here last Friday,’ said Ellie. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

Given that my law-abiding brother-in-law Jim has never even been done for speeding, his attempts to keep us all calm and pretend he wasn’t worried were almost convincing.
‘It’ll all work out in the mix,’ he said. Jim used to be a sound engineer, back in the day. ‘Don’t worry about it.’  
Ellie wasn’t calm at all. She phoned her solicitor and hounded him for information on possible outcomes and worst-case scenarios. Jake’s name didn’t come up at all, which was the only scrap of comfort for me.

Finally, weeks later, the police heard back from the Director of Public Prosecutions. No charges would be made. There was ‘no realistic prospect of conviction’.
‘Side-stepping the issue,’ grumbled Jim. ‘But at least that’s that, for now.’
‘You’ll just have to plough on a while longer,’ Ellie said to me. ‘We’ll have to leave it for now. I’m glad you’re still here, to be honest.’
‘I’m stuck, Ellie.’
‘No, you’re not. We’ll sort something out. You’ll see.’
I nodded, but I knew in my heart I couldn’t put them through all that again.

The final Grand Prix was on Sunday 29th November. Jake came down from Dublin again, to watch it with me. I tried not to show how grim I felt. I took more pain relief than usual. Nico Rosberg won and Hamilton came in second. Jim arrived afterwards. We ate a very fine beef stew and drank champagne and I talked a lot and told them I loved them, and they thought it was because I was drunk, and I was, but it wasn’t, and it was a great day but that night I hardly slept at all and I woke in the early hours with a horrid sensation of internal shakiness and my whole being in endless pain.

The package didn’t arrive on Monday. It was supposed to arrive for definite that week, so I’d struggled to get up by myself at 7 a.m. It took ages to put my dressing jacket on, and my pad was soggy. It was taking me longer to manoeuvre myself into the Power Chair, but I was not completely incapable yet.
The last thing I wanted was for the postman to rush off without delivering the package and leave one of those notes telling me to collect it at the sorting office. If I missed the delivery the sorting office was way out beyond the Kinsale Roundabout and I’d have to ask Ellie or Jim to collect it but I was determined that no one would know about the package or find out what was inside. I’d pleaded with Ellie to stay home until noon all this week. I claimed I was sleeping better, later, in the mornings, that I needed time alone.

By 7 a.m. on Tuesday I was struggling to ready myself once more. When the doorbell finally rang, just after nine, I was terrified I wouldn’t reach the front door on time, but I made it. Alan the postman was outside, holding a package. The stamps looked foreign. When he asked me to sign for it my hands were so unwieldy that all I could manage was an illegible scrawl. He handed the package to me but I lost my grip and it fell to the ground.
‘I’ll bring it inside for you, will I?’ he asked. He came in and put it down on the kitchen table. ‘You want me to open it for you, love?’
‘No thanks, Alan. I’m fine now,’ I said.
It was difficult, but I managed to slice at the sellotape gently with a serrated knife for ages until the end of the package came loose – scissors were way too difficult. Then I tore slowly at the cardboard until the contents were revealed.
It was a shock to see a shiny purple box with the words Catch Me… Cacharel written in white, below a cluster of circles in pink, white and puce. It seemed to be perfume or body lotion. How could this be? I’m such an ejit, I thought. The one thing I’d not imagined was that I’d be conned.
It hadn’t been easy sending $450 to the company in Mexico; hours of pecking away at my computer, making mistakes, fumbling and foosthering during the increasingly rare times I spent alone.
But maybe, just maybe… I tried to open the perfume box. Feck. Tore it. But... oh joy. Inside, two glorious bottles of Nembutal. 200 ml in clear liquid form. Now to manage pouring a cup of the good brandy – to wash it down. That worked well, according to the blogs. I’d done my research.
But then I was afraid. I didn’t want to die in secrecy. I knew exactly what I wanted. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. A calm, quiet letting go, with my loved ones around me.  But here I was, terribly alone.
I tried to think about Earth 2.0 and what it might be like there, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t picture it.


Madeleine D’Arcy

End of story

I offer my great thanks to Madeleine D’Arcy for her willingness to share her art and knowledge with us.  I look forward to featuring her many more times.

Mel u

Waiting for the Bullet - Short Fiction by Madeleine D'Arcy (2014)

Short Listed for The Edge Hill 2015 Prize for Short Fiction

"A story is an apocalypse, served in a small cup".  Hortense Calisher

My Q and A With Madeleine  D'Arcy. Author of Waiting for the Bullet

Doire Press - Publisher of the Best of Contemporary Irish Literature 

Waiting for the Bullet, the marvelous debut collection of Madeleine D'Arcy, is a beautifully written highly perceptive set of stories about relationships in times of transition, in periods darked by social and economic stresses and personal crisis.  The stories are set mostly in Ireland but they allow us to see the universal in the particular.  D'Arcy has a keen eye for small nuances in relationships.  She helps us understand the built in paradoxes in relationships that often bring them to an end, the tension between the craving for a partner that excites you, gives you a sense of the edge and one that provided stability and affection.  You can see this strongly in the amazing story "The Fox and the Placenta".  In writing on Irish fiction over the last few years I have been guided by the ideas of Declan Kiberd in terms of a post-colonial reading of Irish literature and I see repeated manifestations of the theme of they weak or missing father in these profound stories.   D'Arcy helps us see the humanity in others, one of the greatest benefits of deep stories.  I think another great story teller from Cork, Frank O'Connor, would have been an admiring reader of Waiting for the Bullet.  

I find reviewing short story collections very challenging.  Often the stories were written not for the collection but simply placed there.  When we read the stories as a group, one impacts the other, stories bleed into each other.  Most reviewers of short stories simply use a few metaphorical terms to apply to the collection and then write a line or two on a few stories.  To me this is not really a much service to potential readers or fully respectful of the artist.  I try to give enough coverage of at least half of the stories in a collection to convey a sense of the work.

I endorse without reservations of any kind Waiting for the Bullet to all lovers of a suberbly crafted short story.  The stories are beautifully written, at times nearly heartbreakingly sad, funny and not without some interesting sexual scenarios.  There is Irish slang in the stories and I enjoyed that a lot.

"Clocking Out"

"Then I see it trailing along behind me, slithering along the foot path like a big slug"

"Clocking Out", the lead story in Waiting for the Bullet, does superbly what first rate fiction at it's best does.  It forces us to see the humanity in people we try not to notice as we make our way around the city.  In just a few masterful pages Arcy takes us deeply into the life of a still young woman, not very smart, not too pretty.  She had a job nobody would take if they could get anything else, working in a factory as an assembler.   She overhears her mother tell someone she is lucky to have the job.  I really don't want to tell more of the plot of the story.  Their is a very visual scene where we are on the tube 

(the subway or city train) with the woman.  She looks at a smartly dressed couple and her thoughts brought me a great feeling of sadness when you feel the inferiority society has forced her to internalize.  

There is a starkly brutal event at the heart of this story, one that made perfect sense.  "Clocking Out" is a wonderful story fully in the tradition, as my limited knowledge sees it, of the Irish short story.

"Hole in the Bucket"

"It's 5.32 PM and I'm going home on the rattaling oxygen starved Piccadily Tube Line"

"Hole in the Bucket" makes an interesting pairing with "Clocking Out".  A good bit of both stories takes place on a London Tube ride, for starters.  "Hole in the Bucket" is about a woman mentally and financially secure people try not to notice on the tube.  "Hole in the Bucket" tells us what happens when Leanne, an office worker who recently ended a long relationship, see a woman she has has not seen for eight years or so.  They were teenagers together.  The other woman is now begging for money in the tube, singing horribly.  Leanne wonders if she should speak to her on slip off the train.  She makes the mistake of speaking and we see how different they now are when her old acquaintance turns on her.

We also sense an emptiness in Leanne's life, both women have their involvements with unreliable men.  Drink is a big factor in the story.  In just a few pages D'Arcy takes us into two very different lives.  

"Salvage"

"Salvage", like the prior two stories, focuses on someone recently out of a relationship and on how the breakup impacts them.   Only in this case our subject is a man.  Vincent's wife was a doctor.  She was not just successful she was beautiful.   At the start of the relationship Vincent made great money as a fire hazard inspector.  He was riding high on the rise in the Irish economy, the Celtic Tiger.  When the construction trade dropped way down, his income collapsed.  His wife basically got tired of paying all the bills and told him to leave. After some looking he finds a place in a  house with a room to rent.  This story is really a slice of a few days of life, not a problem solving life changing story.  Vincent adjusts to life in the house and becomes friends slowly with the land lady.  A cat plays a part in the story and that is a plus.  Alcohol, ever present in Irish literature, plays a part.  "Salvage" is an excellantly done story and the ending is moving.  I liked it a lot.

"Waiting for the Bullet" 

"I told myself that relationships were like economies, that they were cyclical things, with peaks and troughs".  

"Waiting for the Bullet", the title story of the collection, centers on a married couple aged about forty, going through a bit of a recession in their relationship.  You can see reflected in the literature of this century the impact of the decline of the Irish economy on relationships.  The couple are comfortable financially, the husband, the wife narrates the story, is in the building trade.  One day he brings home a very real looking toy gun.  His wife is shocked until she finds it is not real.  It makes a sound like a real gun when fired.   Compressing a bit, one evening they have couple over for dinner, the husband's clients, and the gun becomes the center of focus.   I don't want to tell too much more of the plot but the close  is very powerful.  D'Arcy does a suberb job of letting us see the dynamics of the marriage and gets us inside the mind of the wife.  Like the other stories, alcohol plays a big part in "Waiting for the Bullet".   

"Wolf Note"

"Wolf Note" is a very well done story about a married man cheating  on his wife for the first time.  Eddie is forty and owns his own company.  Christmas is approaching and his wife sends him a text message saying he needs to play Santa at the party for their children.  He and his wife exchange some texts as he doesn't feel like doing it but he agrees to do it to avoid an argument.  In the mean time his bachelor man about  town friend with a reputation as a ladies' man  invites him for a night out with the guys.  He wants to go but of course his wife does not like the idea.  The plot action is very interesting, a bit erotic, and I certainly learned something about cellos I did not know.  The story was a lot of fun to read and it is a good portrait of a marriage that still endures but might have seen better days.  Alcohol helps fuel the action.  

"Housewife of the Year"

"Housewife of the Year" is a fascinating rather frightening story that totally drew me into the world of the narrator, an Irish woman we first meet when she is in high school and with whom we part ways with at twenty nine.  Every year there is an Ireland wide contest for the title of "Housewife of the Year".  Her mother, a widow who runs the family hardware store, pretty much hates her five kids but she puts on a good act on the TV show finals and wins.  As soon as the children can, the narrator is the youngest, they leave home and move either to America or Australia.  The mother tells the narrator she cannot leave but she gets a civil service job, finds a man, and moves to Dublin.  I jus rio not want to spoil this story for first time readers but it takes two and I see a third shocking turn coming.  The very real power in this story comes from the brief undercurrents from which we must try to understand the narrator's actions.  This can be seen as another story about the missing Irish father.  This is a disturbing look at the dark side of family life.  We wonder what terrible memories destroyed so much.

"The Fox and the Placenta"

"The Fox and the Placenta" had me at the title.  There are two main onstage characters, a woman nine months pregnant and due right now and her boyfriend, who may or may not be the father of her baby.  I learned something I did not know from this story, that London has a lot of wild foxes.  The foxes are a nuisance as they knock over garbage bins.  

Marilyn's current boyfriend Brendan is solidly reliable, considerate and decent.  Her old boyfriend Sam was a "bad boy" sort.  We can see Marilyn kind of wishes for a fusion of the two characters.  In a very cinematic scene, Marilyn goes into labor.  I just cannot spoil this story but Brendan kind of becomes a bit of the wilder man Marilyn craves in a conflict with the foxes of maybe Marilyn just sees more into him.

Author Bio from http://www.madeleinedarcy.com/

Author Bio

Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal legal aid solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son. She began to write short stories in 2005.

In 2010 she received a Hennessy X.O Literary Award for First Fiction as well as the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.


One of her stories came joint-second in the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Competition 2011. Her work has been short-listed and commended in many other competitions, including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize (UK), and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition.

Publications in which her work has appeared include: Sunday Tribune; Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories; Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, Ireland); Irish Examiner;Necessary Fiction; Irish Independent; Irish Times; The Penny Dreadful; Long Story Short; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts;Short Story (University of Texas, Brownsville); and Unbraiding the Short Story (Ed. Maurice A Lee, University of Arkansas). Other stories are scheduled for publication in Surge: New Writing From Ireland (O’Brien Press, November 2014) and in The Quarryman (Bradshaw Books, April 2015).

A short film of Madeleine’s story ‘Dog Pound’, featuring the distinguished Irish actor Frank Kelly, was premièred at the Hennessy Literary Awards in April 2014 and will be screened at Waterfordand  Film Festival 2014.

She has been awarded bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland and by Cork City Council, and was the scholarship student on the inaugural Masters Degree in Creative Writing at University College Cork.

I loved Waiting for the Bullet and look forward to reading much more of the work of Madeleine D'Arcy.

"Natalie and the Speedballs" a short story by Madeleine D'Arcy A Short Story

"Natalie and the Speedballs"

by

Madeleine D'Arcy

I stubbed my cigarette out on the pavement with the heel of my black office shoe. I hitched up my tights under the skirt of my second-hand black suit. It was raining lightly and I didn’t have a coat or an umbrella.

‘Feck it, I better go in,’ I muttered to myself. I picked up my briefcase and took a yellow post-it note out of the pocket of my jacket. Alright. Okay. Calm down. The name of the client, according to the note, was Natalie Aka Matilda Bright. What kind of name was that, anyway, I wondered. Maybe the client was some mix of English and Chinese? Or maybe Aka was a Nigerian name?

I’d only started work that morning. A junior solicitor in a law firm in Soho, London. I’d comem from Ireland, straight to London. I was a qualified solicitor, on paper. I could write my practical experience on the back of a packet of fags but Hobbes, Dervish & Co., Solicitors, didn’t know that.

‘Ms Keane, would you be so kind as to attend an established client of mine who unfortunately finds herself at Holborn Police Station,’ my new boss, Mr Hobbes, had said. ‘She is rather a character, knows more about criminal law than I do. I’ve rung the arresting officer to say you’re on your way. Demand to see her alone. Take cigarettes.’ He handed me the yellow post-it note. ‘And do not tell the piggie wiggies anything, Ms Keane. We do not like the piggie wiggies, Ms Keane. Always remember that.’

He smiled at me and I thought of Lord Emsworth, a PG Wodehouse character. Lord Emsworth was obsessed with pigs too, but the kind with four feet.

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I get it. We do not like the piggie wiggies – at all.’

Mr. Hobbes looked pleased.

I got to Holborn and found the police station after a bit of confusion and marching the wrong way down a couple of streets and some chain-smoking and some panicked consultation of my A to Z. After stubbing out my final cigarette, I strode into the police station, in what I hoped was a masterful way. The Desk Sergeant was eating a bun behind his glass window.

‘Hobbes and Dervish, solicitors,’ I announced. ‘To see Natalie Aka Matilda Bright.’

The Desk Sergeant seemed a nice, podgy sort of man. He smiled. ‘Ah, working for the Late Mr. Hobbes, are we?’

‘I am,’ I told him, slightly puzzled. (I later learnt that my boss was known as the Late Mr Hobbes because he was almost always late for court.)

‘Well then, you must be here to see Natalie Bright, also known as Matilda Bright,’ he said in a kindly way. ‘I’ll buzz DS Bates for you.’

Damn. That ‘Aka’ wasn’t a surname at all. It was a.k.a. ‘Also known as.’ Eejit. I should have guessed.

‘He’ll be out in a mo’. Take a seat, Miss,’ said the Desk Sergeant.

DS Bates was a handsome and smarmy bastard. I mentally filed him under the category of ‘unpleasant piggie wiggies’. He filled me in on his version of the case. My client had been caught shoplifting. She’d been bailed last week from the same police station on another shoplifting charge.

‘Smack addict,’ he added, casually. ‘Lots of previous.’

He led me to an interview room, bare and windowless. Grey. Not unlike my office back at Hobbes & Dervish, Solicitors. In fact, it was so similar that I could predict in advance that the tinny chair on my side of the small formica table would made a scraping noise on the floor when I pulled it out. I did – and it did. I sat down and took out my A4 pad and a biro.

Moments later the door opened and a statuesque woman swept through it, in a cloud of expensive perfume with an underlay of something like vinegar.

‘Make it fast,’ said DS Bates.

‘Very quick. Just like you, darling,’ drawled Natalie. ‘And I’ll have tea with five sugars.’ She put two fingers up at DS Bates’ back as he turned to leave. ‘Bastard,’ she said, once he’d gone.

She was a fair-haired woman, with the long limbs of a model, and a face that could have been beautiful, except for a kind of vacancy about the eyes and a scar on the left cheek about two inches long.

‘Cigarettes,’ she demanded, still in that high class drawl of hers. She sat there blowing a cloud of smoke over the table, holding her cigarette high. She looked like Marianne Faithful’s first cousin, or maybe Nico’s sister, I thought.

‘Are you my brief?’ she said. ‘I asked for Hobbes, why isn’t he here? And,’ she continued, ‘why are you staring at my barbiturate burn?’

I didn’t know what a barbiturate burn was. I told her so. She relented. She’d been addicted to barbiturates and had taken too many, once upon a time. She’d fallen asleep and when she woke up she had a scar on her face where her head had rested on a cushion. No more barbies. They were out-moded, apparently. She loved heroin now.

‘You’ve still got a beautiful face,’ I said. ‘The scar adds character.’

She looked pleased.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ I said.

Back at the office, I tried to locate all of the files on Natalie. Also known as Matilda. Also known as Rosemary. Also known as Sophie. And Alexandra. Surnames varied too. Bright, Bolan, Young, Dylan, Baez, De Winter. Alexandra Baez was a nice choice, I thought, as I flicked through the files. Then I began to get very anxious. There seemed to be six different outstanding cases, all in different names. And it seemed she had at least thirty-seven previous convictions.

—Prostitution (and lots of it).

—Cheque fraud (known as kiting).

—Shoplifting (her clothes were wonderful).

—Obtaining money by deception (I later learned that one of her best tricks was to promise high-class sexual action to Japanese businessmen. She would ask for the deposit for the hotel room from them. Then, blowing kisses, she would stride into her favourite hotel in Piccadilly and walk quietly out the back door, leaving her new friend to wait in lustful mode until he realised he’d been gypped).

—And of course, possession of Class A drugs (‘I just loooove heroin’).

My first client was a very busy lady. Mr Hobbes said if she worked as hard in a normal job as she did in petty crime, she would be a director of a multinational by now.

***

Natalie was on remand. She told me her story, smoked all my cigarettes and demanded I bring her chocolate next time I visited. In Holloway prison, the interview rooms were little cubicles and the walls between each cubicle were glass from the waist up, so the warders could see what was going on, and we could see all the other solicitors with their clients. She interrupted her tale to point out some of the more infamous inmates to me. She had the enthusiasm of a B-list actress at an Oscar ceremony, revelling in her proximity to the stars.

‘See her?’ she hissed. ‘That’s the one who buried the axe in her husband’s head. I know her. She was right to do it. He let other men screw her and do the most vicious things, you know, while he watched.’ And again. ‘Look, she’s the one who brought all that smack through customs in the dead baby’s body. I don’t speak to her.’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I can’t turn round and stare. I’m supposed to be a professional.’ But I couldn’t resist. I turned around in what I hoped was a subtle kind of way.

‘I knew you’d look!’ Natalie laughed, and I laughed with her, as if we were long-time friends.

I could smell her faint vinegary smell, even above the heavy clouds of nicotine and perfume. I guessed she was getting enough heroin, even here in the nick, because she hadn’t complained of withdrawal symptoms. I was getting more familiar with the ways of Natalie’s world. I hoped she would not tell me anything I didn’t need to know.

***

Natalie’s story: Once upon a time she was a young and pretty girl, the daughter of a wealthy English businessman, whose wife had died young. She had been a lonely, abused and rich kid. She fell madly in love with Muff Hack, a rising young pop star. She toured the world with him. London, New York, Tokyo, Berlin… They developed a fondness for barbiturates and various other drugs before deciding to settle down with a huge heroin habit. His manager got Muff into an exclusive drug rehabilitation unit, and got Muff to dump Natalie and her expensive habit. Her father disowned her before he died. The only assets she was left with were: some leather clothing; her life experience so far; and the bit of Japanese she’d learned in Tokyo where she’d spent a few months while Muff was recording a seminal album there.

The leather clothing was long gone. The bit of Japanese came in handy for the Japanese businessman trick. The huge heroin habit was a liability.

Her subsequent boyfriend, with whom she was madly in love, had been killed by the police by mistake. She had lots of previous convictions but had never done any physical harm to anyone but herself. Muff Hack, established pop star, would not acknowledge her existence, even though she had assisted him in his meteoric climb to fame: end of Natalie’s story.

June, the secretary, typed up my dictated definitive version of Natalie’s life. ‘It’s all lies,’ she said. ‘Muff Hack was married to that actress, Betsy Miller, wasn’t he?’ She handed me a copy of Natalie’s life so far.

‘You wouldn’t want to believe a word out of that Natalie,’ she said.

I was inclined to agree, but I didn’t.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘this is different to the other story she gave Mr. Hobbes three years ago. Well, not entirely different. Just a bit.’

***

I liked Natalie. She seemed self-aware.

Other junky clients were scagged out of their brains. Some of them had arms like sieves. Not her. She must have smoked, not injected.

Some of my clients nodded off in the tinny chairs in my office while I tried to take instructions from them and talked to the air.

One of them, little Veronica with wounded eyes, was a hostess in the topless bar down the street. I feared that she would go to sleep opposite me and never wake up again.

Grifters, dippers and kiters came to the office. So did shoplifters. So did burglars and thieves, swindlers and conmen, drug dealers, drug addicts, drug barons, prostitutes, pimps and madams. Others were charged with assault causing actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm, with blackmail, rape, manslaughter and murder. The clients who bothered me least of all, and of whom I was fondest, were a bevy of confused transsexuals, who desperately grafted in the streets to make enough money for their operations.

And of course, there was Natalie.

***

Natalie did some time, got out, and was almost immediately re-arrested. Yet again, I got a phone call. She was at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court. At short notice I sent the unfeasibly handsome young barrister, Mr Jeremy Lascelles, to represent her. He rang me afterwards, a bit flustered. He’d unwittingly misled the court, he said. He got bail for Natalie but after the hearing, he had spoken with her and realised all was not as straightforward as it seemed.

‘You see,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know she had all these other outstanding cases. And a bench warrant out for her arrest, in a different name. But of course, nor did the police, this morning.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I know it’s confusing. The good thing is that everyone is confused. Not just us.’

I was unable to keep track of all of Natalie’s cases. All those different names. The courts, the prosecution, the police, me, Jeremy, we were all confused.

‘She may even have another solicitor dealing with another dozen cases, for all I know,’ I told Jeremy. ‘I mean, the court can hardly accuse us of misleading the court when the court and the prosecution and the police don’t know what’s what, any more than we do. Can they?’

***

June, the secretary, was wearing a very expensive-looking tan leather jacket. When I admired it she told me Natalie had given it to her.

To my horror, I discovered that Natalie had turned up at the office at 10 a.m. though her appointment with me was not until 3pm. She had given the jacket to June. Tina, the other secretary, had received another. Natalie had left some plastic bags in the office too. She told June and Tina that she’d collect them later, after her appointment with me.

‘We can’t keep her bags here! It’s knock-off stuff.’ I said.

June and Tina didn’t care. They were pleased with their jackets too, and didn’t seem bothered when I pointed out they could be ‘done’ for receiving stolen goods.

When Natalie arrived she looked faded and tired. I told her off for bringing stolen goods into the office.

‘Don’t be mad,’ she sighed. ‘It’s just a few bits and bobs.’

She took a rather nice leather jacket out of one of her bags and offered it to me across the desk. Pity I couldn’t accept – it would have suited me. She had stolen well.

‘If anything like this happens, ever again, we can’t represent you,’ I told her, emphatically.

‘Alright, keep your hair on.’ She looked a little worried then, and told me that in future I’d have nothing to worry about.

***

Call from Vine Street Police Station. ‘DC Peters here. Got a right one here for you Ms Keane.  She’s been kiting up and down Oxford Street all day.’

I wrote the details on a Post-it note.

‘Calls herself Patricia O’Connor. She won’t have the Duty Solicitor, says you’re her brief. Refuses to be interviewed until you come.’

Sod it, I had loads of case preparation to do. I wished there was someone else to send. She had be Irish, I thought, but I didn’t recognise the name. Off I went, walking as fast as I could through the busy streets. Smoked a cigarette on the way. Stubbed out the fag. Strode into the station all masterful. By now I figured I knew how to deal with piggie wiggies.

‘Ms Keane of Hobbes and Dervish’, I said, efficiently and held out my business card. ‘Here to see my client, Patricia O’Connor.’

The client was in the interview room already, the Desk Sergeant said. I went in.

‘Top of the morning to you,’ said Natalie, in an atrocious brogue.

‘Jesus, Natalie. No one talks like that where I come from.’

‘Thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Thought you were in Clouds Rehab, like you’re supposed to be,’ I sighed. I’d put so much work into getting her a place in the Rehabilitation Centre, and Jeremy had worked valiantly to persuade a judge to send her there instead of jail. All a waste of time now.

Business as usual.

***

Natalie burst through the door of my small grey office.

‘I couldn’t stop her,’ shouted June.

Natalie slammed the door behind her.

‘What …’ I began to say.

Tears were streaming down Natalie’s face. She was heaving, trying to breathe. She unzipped her jeans and tore them down around her knees. Her knickers too.

‘Holy fuck!’ I said.

‘Pubic lice,’ she managed to get out. ‘Have I got …’ She seemed to be having some kind of panic attack. ‘Have I got pubic lice?’

‘Jesus, Natalie, I’m not your fucking doctor.’

No need to curse, she panted. Alcoholics were dirty creatures. She had to sleep with this guy. He was an alkie. Alright, so she was a heroin addict but heroin addicts were clean. Alcoholics were filthy people. She felt an itch. It must be pubic lice. She was always so clean. Why had she sunk so low? She sat on the tinny chair with her jeans and knickers around her ankles, her head in her hands, weeping in a low weeping moan. There were needle marks on her arms now, where I was pretty sure none had been before. Then I noticed track marks on her legs.

June the secretary used to be a nurse, and nothing could surprise her. ‘June, come here please,’ I said. I left them in my office while June had a look. No public lice. No sexual assault, apparently.

I looked up the address of a Soho sexual health clinic and made an appointment for her, but guessed she would not bother to go.

***

I was in Holloway Prison again. Natalie was in custody for selling speedballs to a cop. To DS Bates actually.

‘This is unfortunate,’ I said.

‘I’m innocent this time.’ She was looking slightly better since the pubic lice incident. This time she’d suffered withdrawal symptoms in the nick and now she was clean, she told me. She’d put on a little weight but it suited her, and her eyes were remarkably focussed.

Natalie insisted again that she was innocent. She wanted to go to Crown Court. Judge and jury.

‘You know I’m always pleading guilty because I’m guilty,’ she said. ‘Not this time.’

I explained if she contradicted what the police said, the Prosecution counsel would then be entitled to attack her own credibility, by listing all her previous offences in open court.

‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell the jury myself. But I didn’t do this one.’

‘Alright,’ I said.

I decided to instruct Jeremy Lascelles, the unfeasibly handsome young barrister, once again. A while back, he had gotten two of her cases dropped on technical grounds. He was good at all the nit-picking, date-counting stuff that careless prosecution lawyers paid no heed to. He’d also persuaded a judge to send her to a drug rehab for the second time. We worked hard to make that happen, but by the time I went to see her she’d absconded once again.

Jeremy was a perfect English gentleman, who treated every criminal client I sent him with the utmost civility, so that they always asked for him again. Not even the most skanky saddo lowlife seemed to faze him. I only ever saw his upper lip curl (slightly) once, and that’s another story. And he’d done a lot for Natalie already. He could handle her on the witness stand. At least I hoped so.

At the client conference in Holloway, Natalie lurched from shouting to Jeremy and I that she was innocent, to being unnaturally quiet and nodding a lot.

‘Ms. Bright,’ said Jeremy politely, ‘Rest assured, I will do my utmost on our behalf.’

I stayed behind for a minute after Jeremy left.

‘Happy then, Natalie?’ I asked.

‘He has a lovely ass,’ she said.

***

The jury were sworn in. They looked a decent bunch. DS Bates and his colleague gave their evidence. They’d been on plainclothes patrol in Ingestre Place, just off Soho Square, when a woman, identified as the Defendant, had offered to sell them a Class A drug. When DS Bates arrested her she had struggled and made abusive remarks.

Natalie took the stand. I felt tense.

But Natalie was the queen of the hour. She stood tall in the wooden witness stand and drawled and trawled her way through her life, assisted by Jeremy. She cut a romantic and a tragic figure all at once. A beautiful loser, a woman prepared to admit how and why she sank so low as to become a heroin addict and a prostitute, a lowlife criminal. The loss of love was the first step on a downward spiral. The jury was entranced. Jeremy got a copy of Natalie’s previous convictions and gave it to her. He led her through the list, while she explained how each and every conviction came about.

One nice-looking elderly lady kept her eyes glued on Natalie while she testified. A younger woman had tears in her eyes. The men in the jury sat up straighter when Natalie got round to explaining some of her prostitution charges. Another female member of the jury had her eyes fixed on the handsome defence counsel. For the jurors, this was the business. This was what they’d imagined jury service would be like. This was a story to take home.

‘I am guilty of all of those charges,’ declaimed Natalie. ‘But I am NOT guilty of the crime I am charged with here today.’

‘Thank you, Mizz – ah – Mizz Bright,’ said the elderly judge. He directed the jury. Simple. You believe DS Bates and his colleague, or you believe the defendant.

The jury filed back in. They all looked happy. The foreman stood up and announced the verdict.

‘NOT guilty.’

Natalie was flushed with pride. I turned around to look at DS Bates and his sidekick. They were red with annoyance.

The judge rose and left the Bench. Before anyone had time to move, Natalie jumped down from the dock and towards the policemen.

‘I’ll have your testicles for my meatball stew, Andy Bates!’ she spat out, as the jailers grabbed her and hauled her down to the cells.

I wondered why she was roaring at him. What was the problem? She’d won, hadn’t she?

We went to see her in the cells before she was released. Jeremy slipped her a tenner.

‘I did it, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘That bastard. I should have recognised him.’

‘What?’ said Jeremy, looking puzzled.

‘I shoulda’ recognised him. I was off my head. I really must have been out of it that day.’

‘So you mean you DID try to sell him drugs?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ she drawled. ‘Even you believed me. You both believed me. Shoulda’ been an actress.’

Jeremy and I looked at each other. He let out a deep breath.

‘Well, I suppose we’re done,’ I said.

Jeremy phoned me later. ‘She’s the feistiest drug addict I’ve come across so far,’ he said.

‘You got to admire it.”

He agreed. He’d been a bit worried about the case though, but he’d checked with colleagues and we had not done anything improper according to law.

‘Because she didn’t tell you she was guilty, did she?’ he said. ‘And she didn’t tell me she was guilty.’

‘No. I actually believed that she wasn’t guilty. I can’t believe I believed it, now. If you know what I mean.’

‘I do know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I guess she deserved to win. It was quite a performance.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘She may be dead soon, if she carries on like this,’ he said. ‘I almost wish we hadn’t won.’

***

Shortly after Natalie’s ‘Not Guilty’ verdict, a woman was found dead in a posh house in Primrose Hill. A scandal. An overdose in the house of an anorexic film star and the film star’s much younger, drug-addled boyfriend. A star-studded party gone wrong. The tabloids published confused accounts. The police investigated. The celebrities were not happy. The photograph in the newspaper looked a bit like Natalie.

It took a while to confirm. Three weeks later DS Bates rang to tell me that, yes, it was Natalie Bolan, a.k.a. Matilda Bright, a.k.a. Alexandra Baez.

Afterwards, I sat in my grey office and wept. The Late Mr Hobbes patted my shoulder kindly and said that I should take the afternoon off. Jeremy rang to offer tea and sympathy so we met in Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street.

‘I hadn’t seen her in a while,’ I said. ‘Only twice after the Crown Court case. She shouldn’t even have been out on bail.’

‘What was the beef with DS Bates?’

‘As far as I could gather, he didn’t pay her for sex. He expected it for free.’

***

I bought a CD the other day. Muff Hack, The Best of. It was on sale, very cheap, and the music was lame. I looked at the booklet inside. A brief history of Muff Hack and his band. Some black and white photographs of the good old days before Muff fell off a motorised lawnmower in his own garden and had a brain haemorrhage. Not really a Rock and Roll sort of death.

I looked a bit closer at one group photo. Surely that was Natalie. There. It was hard to see. In the background. One of those peaked caps people wore in the Seventies. Longer hair. No barbiturate burn. Looking upwards. Chin at an angle. Proud. Surely it was her. Not all of it was lies. Something had to be true.

End of Guest Post

Biography of Madeleine D’Arcy

Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal law solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son.

She began to write short stories in 2005.

In April 2010 she was presented with a Hennessy X.O Literary Award 2009 in the First Fiction category for her short story ‘Is This Like Scotland?’ and also received the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.

One of her stories came joint-second in the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Competition 2011 and another was short-listed for the 2012 prize.

She has been short-listed in the Fish Short Story Prize 2008, the Bealtaine Short Story Competition 2008, the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competitions 2009 and 2011, the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition 2009 and the Bridport Prize 2009 (UK). She received commendations in the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competitions 2009 and 2011.

Publishing credits include: the Sunday Tribune (April 2009); Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories (Cork County Library and Arts Service publication, May 2009); Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, October 2010); Etherbooks Mobile Publishing (October 2010); the Irish Examiner (Holly Bough, December 2010); Necessary Fiction (US literary webjournal, March 2011); the Irish Independent (5th October 2011); and the Irish Times (26th November, 2011).

Actors Jack Healy and Cora Fenton have read Madeleine’s stories on stage in Theatre Makers fundraisers in 2011 and 2012.

Madeleine has read her work in Toronto at the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in English (2010), at Cork International Short Story Festival (2009 and 2010), in the Working Man’s Club, Dublin (2010), at Dromineer Literary Festival (2012) and at various other events. She will be reading at Listowel Writers’ Week in May 2013.

Her short film script, ‘Dog Pound’, was a finalist in Waterford Film Festival Short Screenplay Competition 2012.

This story is protected under international copyright laws and cannot be published or posted online without the permission of the author.

Mel u