The unfinished story - Irish Mammy

The story so far: Mammy’s friend, Sally Considine, was about to tell her some juicy gossip about her son, Francie Jr, when Mammy’s husband, Jimmy, walked in. It has been eating at Mammy all week. Relations with Jimmy are strained.

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He could tell I was still annoyed with him because he was all talk.

Jimmy: “I can’t imagine he’s in any kind of a cult. Sure what would the scientologists want with Francie Jr? They’re hardly after his Jobseeker’s.”

Mammy: “We’ll never find out now. I thought we had a signal when you were to stay out.”

J: “We did. You were to say: ‘Did you forget something, Jimmy?’”

M: “Oh would you believe I forgot it. I thought I was to just give you a look.”

J: “You’re always giving me a look – that’s why we’ve four children.”

M: “Scut.”

J: “Anyway there’s nothing in that shed only an old telly that probably doesn’t work now since the Saorview and a pile of magazines.”

M: “What kind of magazines?

J: “Now Anne, do you want me to go into detail on the magazines?”

I put the magazines out of my head as I had a Tidy Towns meeting. Tidy Towns is a bit of a dirty word here after a row 10 years ago. Kilsudgeon’s Got Talent and the Tidy Towns were supposed to put in an application for the same grant and one left it to the other and nothing was done. Some people still aren’t speaking.

Gordon Cooney – he’d be out of the new houses – is after starting it again. He’s not local so I imagine he doesn’t know the history but I’m going to support it anyway. At the last minute, I had a brainwave and sent a text.

“Sally do u want 2 go 2 the meeting about the tidy towns? It would be good to have a catch-up. Anne.”

She was straight back: “im.going..francie.jr.doing.something.at.it.afraid.of.my.life.hell.make.a.show.of.me”

There was a good scattering at it. A few of the usual suspects – you know the crowd that’d be mixed up in this kind of thing. No one was there from the original Tidy Towns fiasco.

Gordon made a bit of a speech. Kilsudgeon, he said, was being overlooked by all this Wild Atlantic Way and Ireland’s Ancient East carry-on. Then he introduced Francie. Francie Jr walked up to the top of the hall and plugged in his laptop. Poor Sally was as tense beside me: “Go out and start the car, Anne,” she said, half-joking.

It didn’t begin well.

“Frighttochristhooringbroadband” were the first words out of Francie’s mouth. I could see him sweating, the cratur. But then he got going: “If we are to maximise Kilsudgeon’s potential, we will have to leverage its past.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard him speak in public before and here he was sounding like that red-haired McWilliams fella, with all sorts of stuff about helping ourselves and how “central Government wanted to kill the countryside”. We were nearly out of our chairs, it was so rousing.

Then he said he had made a little video. Kilsudgeon’s Turbulent History came up on the screen. And there was Francie, all done up in a Viking outfit with an axe and he swinging it in front of what looked like Newgrange.

“From the scourge of the Dane ...” was the caption.

“Green screen,” said Sally beside me. “He bought a green screen for the filming. He said it meant he’d save money on location costs. I didn’t know what he meant at the time.”

“... to the oppression of Cromwell.”

Francie appeared again, looking like an English soldier. Sally had tears in her eyes: “He wasn’t in a cult at all, Anne. He was making history.”

“Mystery solved, Sally.”

Then a woman appeared on screen, dancing behind the caption “Kilsudgeon’s Pagan Druidic Past.” She was fairly skimpily dressed.

“Who’s that girl, Sally?”

“I don’t know, Anne. I don’t know.”

A mystery for another day.