Fish and chips and a slice of life

Here is a list of things Majella, the twenty-something year old Big Girl at the center of this novel, likes:

• Eating
• Dallas (except for the 1985-6 season, also known as Bobby’s Dream)
• UK Gold [this TV channel?]
• Her da
• Her granny
• Smithwick’s
• Painkillers
• Cleaning
• Sex
• Hairdryers

Sometimes Majella thought that she should condense her whole list of things she wasn’t keen on into a single item.

Other people.

Majella lives with her widowed, alcoholic mother in Agheybogey, the Small Town of the title, which is in Northern Ireland near the border with the Republic of Ireland. The family fortunes were never very good, and always intertwined with the IRA.

Majella was hazy on the exact details as this stuff wasn’t covered in history class and everyone spoke about it in mutters while looking sideways as if they were under surveillance.

Her paternal grandfather was beaten in a British jail and then released to die at home, to spare the Brits any uncomfortable paperwork. Her Uncle Bobby left school at sixteen, worked as a carpenter by day and volunteered with the IRA in his free time. He was frequently ‘lifted’ (grabbed by the Brits and thrown into prison for interrogation), until one night a booby-trap bomb he was planting exploded prematurely. Her father vanished some years ago, no one knows where (the IRA? the Brits?). And now her grandmother has been mugged in her own house, and has died. Is it any wonder Majella is depressed?

Majella’s plodding days circle between A Salt and Battered! Traditional Fast Food Establishment — the fish-and-chip take-out place where she works — and her home, where she looks after her mother. Much of the novel is set in the chipper, and those sections are very well done: the tedium of frying one thing after another, the cleaning up, the small town where they know every single customer by first name.

the wee O’Donnell cub

young Breda Farren with a man old enough to be her father

wee Roisin Murphy whose “sister” was actually her mammy and the town prostitute

Jimmy Nine Pints, who worked at the chicken-rendering factory in Strabane [..] Six nights a week at ten on the dot, Jimmy rolled in, well oiled by nine pints.

all five of the Daly brothers […] who were someplace close to the top of quite a few PissNI lists, including those related to racketeering, drugs, traffic offenses and domestic abuse. And yet nothing had ever been pinned to them.

(PissNI, the uninformed reader deduces after a while, is the Police force of Northern Ireland)

The book is set a few years after the peace agreement of 1998, but trade around the area has never recovered from the 1970s British army checkpoints and the road closures, when the local market withered and died. Most of the townspeople are unemployed, and many are drunk. Some are hungry — a local kid, Iggy Connolly, does Majella’s marketing in exchange for a small meal at the chipper.

Majella has her own troubles too. She has always been large, and is mockingly called Jelly in the street.

She’d hated the nickname in school and she’d hated being hefty.

She is also a little OCD: she likes routine, cleaning, doesn’t like bright lights or sweating, and hates the nosiness of a small town where everyone knows your business.

Did I not hear you ann yer ma were in the surgery first thing this morning?

The book is structured with each section labelled by time and a good or bad item on Majella’s internal list. (“2:03 am. Good list: Dallas”, or “Tuesday 8:43 am. Item 3.7 Noise”). This was presumably to underscore Majella’s own comfort with organization and structure; it can get a little boring for the reader, but it does not really impinge on the reading experience.

Much of the novel is in dialogue, and it’s quite distinctive, although I cannot comment on whether it’s authentic.

Ah’ll be down in a minute.

Ah’ll bleed tae death.

Will ye quit yer nyammen!

Busy the night?

Are ye sayin that it’s all been orth it and sure isn’t it all grand and let me have a shower a weans coz my life’s been a fucken bed of roses?

And over and over again, the conversation in the chipper:

Salt anna vinegar on your chips?

Bag a chips ann red sauce, Jelly.

What canna get chew?

Big sausage supper and a can a Coke, please.

The repetitiveness of these questions and statements really serves to underscore the tedium of Majella’s days, but also somehow pleasantly punctuates the slow arc of the novel.

Majella reminded me of the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman, which was set in Tokyo. Of course the lingering IRA effects add a whole extra texture to this novel, but there is a similar dignity in the way these unusual women find their place in the world. In both novels, the reader is rooting for the women, who seem like they could be so easily abused, insulted or exploited, but in both novels, the women find stability entirely on their own terms.

A short novel, recommended.