About Troubles

by GS Wiley
26 pages / 10000 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-761-9, 1-60370-761-1
Available file types - html. lit, pdf, prc, epub, Sony-optimized pdf

At the beginning of 1992, the world is gripped by an economic recession. Donal Cassidy is feeling the pinch at the London club where he works, and is in the midst of planning a truly memorable Valentine's Day to try and drum up business. He's distracted from his goal when his mother's next-door neighbor dies unexpectedly, and her handsome nephew Diarmit Tierney moves in.

 Diarmit is an Irish Catholic, which is less a problem for Donal than it is for his Protestant mother, who lost her husband to an IRA bomb. Donal's convinced he and Diarmit can make their relationship work, until Diarmit reveals a secret which makes Donal rethink everything.  

Sample

February 1992

Aoife O'Hanlon lived next door to my mother for over ten years, and they never spoke a word to each other because she was Catholic and we were Protestant. 

“It’s ridiculous,” I told Mam when I came to visit one night in early February and heard that Aoife had passed on. It had happened a few days earlier although the body hadn’t been discovered until yesterday, when Aoife's home helper came back from her holidays. Mam sat in her front window and watched the mask-wearing paramedics wheel out Aoife's body on a stretcher. “You’d think the pair of you were back in Belfast, for Christ’s sake.” They were, in fact, in east London, the only Irish families surrounded by a neighborhood of Jamaicans, Indians, and Africans.

“Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, Donal,” Mam scowled at me. “Anyway, they’re as bad as us. Aoife could have told me if she was ill, but she preferred to die alone rather than speak to me.” 

“Fucking ridiculous,” I repeated. Mam had made me a raspberry jelly for dessert, the kind of wobbly red ring I’d loved as a kid, and it shimmied satisfyingly as I stuck my spoon into it. “What’s going on over there now?” I nodded at the wall that separated Mam’s house from Aoife’s. “Has she got any family or what?”

“How would I know?” 

I knew she did. She was only fifty-eight, but Mam watched out her window all day long, like a curtain-twitching pensioner. She knew everything that happened on that street, even if she didn’t speak to her neighbors much. 

“I don’t remember there ever being any kids over there.” There had been four of us living on our side of the house at one time, even more when my sisters Katie and Siobhan brought their ever-changing boyfriends over. 

I remembered Aoife staring out her window with her beady black eyes. I was never sure who scandalized her more: my sister Siobhan fist fighting with her cheating ex-husband Mark, my sister Katie snogging one after another of her endless stream of Rastafarian boyfriends, or me holding hands with one of the few guys I’d brought home to meet the family.

The only one of us who lived with Mam now was my little sister Katie, who was also the only one who’d really made anything of herself. She worked as a resident at Guy’s Hospital. She was hardly ever home, and for her part, my older sister Siobhan usually only stopped by when she wanted Mam to baby-sit for her three fatherless sprogs. It wasn’t unusual for Mam and I to be alone in the house like we were tonight. 

“Someone will turn up,” Mam told me, as I spooned the jelly into my mouth. “Relatives who never troubled to visit the poor cow when she was alive will come crawling out of the woodwork now Aoife’s dead. It’s always like that, folks sniffing around after an inheritance when it’s too late.”

“See,” I said, smiling, “that’s why I’m spending all this time with you now.”