An extract from Dolly Considine’s Hotel for you to enjoy

8th September 1983 21:45 - 24:00

Pro-Life champion Mrs Eileen Mitchell studied the artificial orangeness of her squash drink as the youth was ushered out of the Porchester lounge, his nakedness partially covered by a cape taken by Mrs Mitchell's assistant from one of the dancers that had participated in the shameful skit on Irish motherhood. Two other performers squeezed the seven-foot-high papier mâché Mother Ireland figure into the reception area behind him, her skirts lowered over her permanently distended belly and hiding the void from where the ‘baby’ had been disgorged. Another dancer bundled up the bloodstained caul that had accompanied the fully grown infant out onto the lounge carpet, careful to ensure the trailing umbilical cord did not trip any of the referendum victory party crowd as they swarmed into the space vacated by the departing troupe.

Dolly McClean (née Considine) had hoped to enjoy the evening as a guest rather than as landlady of the Curragh House Hotel. But here she was, in a delicate red dress in place of her day-to-day black culottes and matching top, needing to push through the throng to order the hotel’s dogsbody to collect the dancers’ swords and bring them to the first-floor sitting room, and to make sure the Mother Ireland prop was pushed into the vestibule between the ladies and the stairs down to the gents.

Partygoers on their way to their respective toilets would have to squeeze past the figure’s exhausted grey face until it could be returned to the theatre where it belonged. On any other Thursday Dolly would be feeling the exhilaration of having just finished a tough three-setter and be anticipating the white wine spritzer waiting for her in the tennis club bar.

She prayed that, with the shenanigans over, the referendum victory party would settle back into one of the hotel’s normal late-night drinking sessions. Over the next two hours, Mrs Mitchell donned her ‘ready to leave’ look, several times. But whenever she mimed putting on her coat towards her assistant, Giolla-Íosa McClean TD beamed his gleaming politician’s grin at her, making her shake her head and say, ‘Perhaps I’ll have a fresh orange squash.’

The evening had started with Giolla-Íosa, the opposition party’s sitting representative for the Dublin South-East constituency, in which the hotel was located, making a presentation to Mrs Mitchell in recognition of her valuable contribution to the Pro-Life campaign victory. His elder brother Cathal McClean had been standing behind him and heard the words Giolla-Íosa loud-whispered as Mrs Mitchell acknowledged the dying applause with her well-known self-effacing smile. But it wasn’t until he saw the effect his brother’s grins were having on Mrs Mitchell’s attempted departures that he realised it was Giolla-Íosa’s whispered promise that made her go on to suffer an evening of mass drunkenness, perhaps in the hope that if he explained himself before she left, the outcome he’d predicted could be forestalled. ‘My brother Cathal tells me that the Pro-Life Amendment is so badly worded,’ Giolla-Íosa had said, ‘that almost any legal challenge to it will be upheld. The people of Ireland have been sold a pup.’

But no such explanation had been offered by the time Giolla-Íosa’s two young lackeys began rounding up any dancers they could find for a reprise of the performance. ‘Who fucked Mother Ireland?’ a voice was heard to shout when the theme music faltered, having initially hushed most of the shouting, singing, and even snoring drunks, still at the victory party. Dolly pushed through to where a man was wrestling the papier mâché figure across reception towards the Porchester lounge. ‘No more nakedness,’ she said.

‘It’s okay Dollys,’ Mikhail Mayakovsky said in his dubious Russian accent. ‘This time it’s the phantoms pregnancy. We have no baby. Mother Ireland is swollen with nothings but the hot airs.’

‘And no swords. They’re dangerous. Do you hear me? A lot of drink has been taken.’

But the swords were already being held to the lips of the remaining dancers and the lips of Giolla-Íosa's lackeys, now sporting tossed hair and unbuttoned shirts after an evening of forming alliances with Pro-Lifers and anti-abortionists over beer and neat Jameson. The mongrel troupe began to conga randomly rather than circle-dance Mother Ireland, the shape dictated by drunks newly arrived from other referendum parties (and wakes) who were seeing the performance for the first time. Swordless dancers improvised with umbrellas and even the ice tongs grabbed from behind the bar. It was some of the new crowd who, blocking the lounge door, took up the previously shouted question like a rugby squad, and perhaps because they’d been chanting in spontaneous groups all evening they continued now, ‘Who fucked Mother Ireland? Who fucked Mother Ireland?’ timing the chant so it was in step with the music, stamping their feet because clapping their hands was impossible with nowhere to put a glass except between the crooks of their arms and their chests, when clapping would cause spillage and no chance of a refill now that Dolly had managed to push past them into the room and was shouting that service was finished; no last orders. And when the music reached its crescendo this time, even with the relative balance of the dancers guaranteeing Pro-Lifer superiority, each one in turn plunged his or her sword or umbrella point into the papier mâché belly of Mother Ireland, as if the shame implied by the chanting crowd’s question outweighed the importance of either of the two lives notionally involved. Shouts of ‘good on ya’ and ‘fine girl ya’re’ drowned out the music till it hushed and allowed the room to settle into an uneasy murmuring.

Whatever Mrs Mitchell had thought of Giolla-Íosa McClean's predictions, when the swords began clashing over the head of Mother Ireland for the reprise, she was finally reaching a sensible shoe from the lowest of the front steps down onto the footpath and waving at a passing taxi. And while the demands of the music and the rhythm of the crowd were controlling the timing of the plunges into the papier mâché belly, the taxi man was asking Mrs Mitchell if she'd had a good evening, and as the final wound was inflicted on Mother Ireland and her phantom foetus, she replied with her famous smile.

When Giolla-Íosa's lackeys had begun to redistribute the swords, his older brother Cathal had become conscious of having a bad feeling and wished there was a way to get his brother out of the room without anybody noticing. Giolla-Íosa himself was staring at Dolly. She was waving her arms and trying to get into the Porchester lounge, but seemed to be barred from doing so by two men in suede jackets whom Cathal did not recognise, one on either side of her, her hair tumbling as they jostled her between them; the pair of them  laughing as if it was good clean fun.

If you enjoyed this extract, why not purchase a full copy of Dolly Considine’s Hotel?