Chapter Seven Looking back a few hours later, Felicja wondered if she had actually witnessed what she knew she had witnessed.
A bloodbath.
–You bitch!
Quite a small bloodbath – four women, three knives and a baseball bat.
–You copied my kitchen!
–Fuck you, Monica! I went retro years before you!
–Retro?! Hah! That’s called middle age!
A war with resentments as deep and as dark as any that had fuelled a Balkan conflict, and causes that went back to a time before the current recession and the purchase of hens, a time long before Felicja left Poland.
It was a war she didn’t fully understand. She had never seen mothers fight with knifes before. Yet, she’d been in the middle of it. She had the evidence; she had the stitches, and the bruise on her cheek.
–He left me because of you!
–He was leaving you anyway, coke-nose!
Felicja sat in her bed now, exhausted and elated, still shaking, and tried to type, to recall exactly what she’d seen and heard. But her fingers slid from the keys or just missed them, her arms were shaking so badly – as if she had been carrying heavy items for many hours. I saw Monica staring at Dee and I knew that this was not a new fight. They stared, and then they attacked.
Felicja did not know if Monica was still alive. Maeve, she felt certain, was dead. Dee had promised to text Felicja but Dee was, perhaps, also dead. There’d been so much blood, so much noise, at least one life had had to cease. No other conclusion was possible.
Yet, Felicja, so recently the witness of such Shakespearean violence, sat in her bed and laughed quietly. I am alive, she thought – she did not write this. I am alive. She’d been the witness, but also an actor. Felicja, after all, had stabbed Monica the second time. The police would be calling in the morning, to interview her. And yet she laughed.
–I got the Aga before you!
–And you fucked my husband on it!
These words were exchanged before Maeve climbed over the wall and joined in. Maeve fell off the wall and pushed me into Monica. But Monica was already bleeding to death before my knife entered her. I turned in time to see Dee bite Maeve’s neck.
Dee snarled as she bit, like a fox – or a wolf – attacking one of her hens. But Maeve must have sensed that war was imminent when she’d dressed that morning, because her neck was protected by two high collars and a scarf that had cost what Maeve had recently come to think of as a fortune. The baseball bat was a present from her ex-husband, his parting gift to her. ‘It’ll keep you company through the dark, dangerous nights.’ These words Maeve had told Dee, in friendlier times, and Dee had told Felicja.
Felicja watched as Maeve calmly choked Dee with the baseball bat.
–Take the angora out of your mouth, Dee!
Dee obeyed, so she could free her tongue.
–Marks and Sparks do angora, do they?
She pushed as she spoke and stepped back, which allowed Maeve a clean swing. It hit Dee’s shoulder and caught Felicja’s cheek on its way back. Now, in bed, Felicja felt the bruise. It was not so very bad; she quite liked it. The police would also like it, she thought. Evidence – I was provoked.
Felicja hit Maeve, twice, with the butt of her knife when she saw Maeve preparing to swing her bat again at Dee. She wasn’t happy with the first knock; Maeve hardly seemed to notice it. So she grabbed Maeve’s head with one open hand – Felicja’s fingers were long and slender – and knocked her senseless with the knife butt in her other hand. Dee – beautiful, crazy Dee – slashed with her knife as Maeve fell. Felicia was certain – but perhaps not so very certain – Maeve’s head was no longer part of Maeve by the time Maeve’s body landed in the snow.
I watched calmly as Maeve fell. I also watched calmly as Monica’s knife cut through the lining of my jacket, through my sweater and my skin.
Felicja was not frightened. She had murdered – or, she had helped to murder – a woman only hours before. She might spend many years in prison. But Dee would be there too. Felicja had already checked on Google: there was no death sentence in Ireland.
Infidelity and furniture – these were the true causes of the chicken war; husbands and retro lamps, Aga ranges, the collapse of the Irish economy, and the chickens too, of course. In 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. In 2010, the chickens invaded Dublin.
Felicja stopped typing. She lay back on the bed. Her arm hurt, and her cheek. She’d never felt happier.
© Roddy Doyle 2010
