James looked at his cousin Michelle with alarm. “Aunt Deidre is going to what?”
Michelle rolled her eyes. James was such a fucking drama queen. “She’s going to smack our arses James, calm your tits.”
“Like a spanking?” James had been in Derry for three days and he thought he might as well have gone to freaking Oz. And now he was apparently staying, his mother gone back to London without him.
Michelle looked at him like he was an idiot. “Yeah, like a spanking, except you give a spanking to little kids and I fancy Deidre is going to whack us good with her strap.”
“With her what?!” Maybe James could get back to London on his own? Of course, he didn’t know where specifically his mother had gone.
“Her strap James, her strap. It’s a strip of leather about yay wide, and yay long,” she gestured with her hands. “Stings like a motherfucker when it hits your bare arse. Are you really telling me they don’t smack you English bastards, because that explains why you’re all such shites.”
“I don’t know all the parents in England, Michelle, but I don’t think they smack teenagers! They didn’t in my house.” In fairness, his mum had paid very little attention to what he did, and he didn’t often misbehave, but he was pretty certain if he had, and if she had noticed, she wouldn’t have smacked him.
James sat down on his bed. “Is this what’s going to happen to everyone else?”
Michelle shrugged, sitting down next to him and putting a companionable, if not quite comforting, arm around him. “Ma Mary has a preference for the hairbrush, I’d bet on Erin and Orla catching that. Claire’s hard to say, she keens worse than you do, and it sometimes works on her da, could be just a smacking.”
James put his face in his hands and groaned. “How much does this hurt?” He asked through his fingers.
Michelle squeezed his shoulders a little, feeling some sympathy, even if he was a whingy shite.
“Like hell fire, but it’ll be over quick. Try to keep it together.”
Before James could reply, they heard a throat clear.
Deirdre was in the doorway, strap in hand.
“Alright you two, I won’t stand for bullying, pissin on the floor, or killin’ nuns in this house. Michelle, you can go first and show your cousin how it’s done. Knickers down and over the bed.”
“Yes mammy.” Michelle reluctantly complied. James’d live through it or he wouldn’t, not much she could do, time to worry about her own arse.
James closed his eyes when Michelle’s knickers came down, but they flew back open at the sound of the first stroke. He stared in horror at the red stripe across her cheeks, then squeezed his eyes shut as the second stroke fell. Maybe if he repeated ‘no place like home’ over and over in his head, he’d wake up in London, ignored, but with his arse safe.