Coming Home to the Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  ‘Things can’t be going as well as you hoped they would, if Tommy has to find work, helping with the milking.’ Her customer blew the smoke from his pipe in her direction and Maura didn’t dare look up, for her glance would surely kill him.

  ‘Not at all,’ she replied as she pushed down on the wooden mop handle with all her strength. ‘How would that be?’

  Her customer made her wait as he took a long sip on his drink and she pretended she wasn’t waiting for his reply as she swung the mop back and forth, imagining his face on the end of it. He smacked his lips. ‘Well, because Liam hasn’t increased his herd and he was managing very well before. Maybe it is that your man was feeling a bit sorry for Tommy now; like, he wanted to help him out so, because sure, that would be the nature of Liam. He wouldn’t hesitate to help out someone who was in need, so he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Unlike yourself then,’ muttered Maura as she kicked the metal bucket back towards the bar. She guided it expertly through the hatch, behind the counter and into the back as she looked up at the clock. It was gone four. The children would soon be home from school. Having walked the two miles, they would be soaked through by the time they reached the Talk of the no flamin’ Town, as Maura now called it. Very different from the ten-minute march from school gate to home in Liverpool with their lifelong friends. No longer did little Paddy, Peggy and Paddy’s son, run into her kitchen with Scamp the dog at his heels and she missed him and his impish ways as much as she missed her friends. She’d fed him, looked out for him and guided his mother, simple Peggy. How she wished she could have banged that mop on the wall and called in Peggy from next door for gossip about the antics of the O’Prey boys.

  Certainly, gone were the days of worrying about what she would make for tea on a Wednesday night if the money had run out before payday on Thursday, but with that had gone everything else too. Her friends, her life, her sparkle and, most importantly, her status. Here, Maura was an outsider. She heard the side door open and the rumble of feet up the half-stairs to their generous living quarters at the back, and she smiled, a rare occurrence these days: the children, safely home.

  ‘Well, hello you lot. Yes, I’m fine thank you for asking.’ She tutted and smiled again as she turned to walk into the bar – and almost jumped out of her skin as Harry, the eldest from both sets of twins, appeared before her. ‘Jesus wept, Harry. You near frightened me to death! What are you doing stood there? Why are you not away up the stairs? I’ve left the Cidona on the table and the biscuits; did you think I’d forgotten? They will have eaten the flamin’ lot if you don’t hurry.’

  She lifted up her son’s cap and ruffled his hair, then stopped, as she saw a tear run down his cheek.

  ‘Maura, I’m dying of thirst out here,’ a voice called from in the bar as Maura dropped to her knees to face her son.

  ‘Harry, what in God’s name is wrong? Tell me?’ Harry held out his hands and Maura’s own hand flew to her mouth. ‘God in heaven, who did that to you?’

  Harry tried to speak, but his throat was tight and his tongue thick, no words came. Maura stared at the red weals across the palms of her son’s hands and, as she turned him around, across the back of his legs too. Harry was Maura and Tommy’s clever son. The sensitive, helpful, caring boy who had assumed the role of junior parent since Kitty’s death, whenever Angela let him. Maura threw her arms around him and pulled him into her.

  ‘Maura!’ a voice roared from the front. ‘Have I to pour my own fecking drink? If I do so, I take it I won’t be paying for it, will I?’

  Maura pulled back and looked her son in the eyes. ‘Harry, who did this to you?’ she asked again.

  The children attended the school of the Christian Brothers and Harry and the boys were in Mr Cleary’s class, a civilian teacher who made Maura’s flesh crawl. ‘He’s no Miss Devlin, either in looks or nature,’ she had said to Tommy when they had signed the children up at the school.

  Harry took in a deep breath and shuddered. ‘Mr Cleary, with his stick.’

  ‘Why? Why in God’s name would he do that?’

  Harry found his voice. ‘I couldn’t say the Hail Marys in the Irish, I got mixed up.’

  Maura almost swore under her breath. ‘Here, let me wash the blood away,’ she said, turning on the tap. Harry flinched as she held his hands up under the running water and she heard the inn door open and close again, more voices, more demands for her attention, but she would not leave her son.

  ‘Wait, can’t you?’ she shouted back. ‘You won’t die of thirst in five minutes!’

  The response was a muted grumbling. She took a clean hand towel down from the shelf above the sink and ripped it down the middle. She pulled Harry’s face into her apron and stroked his hair, muttering a prayer under her breath. ‘You brave little soldier,’ she whispered as she kissed the top of his head, inhaling the scent of him. Then, taking each hand, she wrapped it in the cotton, making a bandage. Her son looked up at her, his eyes brimming with a mixture of pain and love. Her breath caught in her throat. ‘You go upstairs now. Have your Cidona and biscuits and when daddy is back from Liam’s, we will talk about this.’

  *

  It was almost ten when Tommy riddled down the upstairs fire. ‘’Tis a small mercy, but one I’m grateful for that the boats are out in the morning,’ said Maura.

  The villagers lived by the tide and the light. As soon as it was fully dark, they made their way home, ready for an early catch on the boats or to lay the lobster pots, but it was not always so. If the fiddler or the storyteller called into the village, the wives and the children came too and not one of them left; at times it felt to Maura as though they had been taken over by squatters. The villagers drank until they could stand no more and slept where they fell, the wives and children too, with no catch the following day. Maura had resorted to dousing them with cold water, courtesy of her mop and bucket, to encourage them to move and her insistence that they left the inn and returned to their own homes had won her no friends amongst the locals, who knew no end to time, no urgency of need. Life was sun up, sun down, pots and boats out, pots and boats back in. Always, just enough to last until the next day. Life happened at a pace so slow Maura could barely comprehend how it was they existed at all.

  As Tommy went to fetch peat sods to fill up the bucket, Maura washed up their cups in the small rear kitchen. She felt a sadness wash over her as she looked at her reflection in the mirror hanging next to the sink. She was ageing, she thought. Her face looked even thinner than usual. The sound of the wind and rain was so loud she almost couldn’t hear the radio. She half smiled as she remembered how often the women on the four streets complained about the wind that blew up from the Mersey.

  Tommy came and slipped his arms around her waist. ‘Got you,’ he whispered into her ear. She hugged her husband and for a long, still moment they breathed as one.

  ‘I was just thinking to myself, how the women back at home—’

  ‘Here is home,’ Tommy corrected her.

  ‘No, I mean back on the four streets.’ She eased herself out of his embrace. ‘They should try a day living in a house facing the Atlantic. To think how much we moaned about the river Mersey. You can hardly hear yourself think in here for the noise. Do you think the ocean has ever got as far as the front door?’

  Tommy wasn’t listening; his hands slipped down her back and cupped her buttocks as he began to kiss her neck.

  ‘Tommy, stop, would you?’ she protested as she pushed his hands away. On any other night she would have giggled and a play fight, which only ever ended in the bedroom, would have ensued. ‘Tommy, we have to think. What are we to do about Harry and that brute, Cleary? Could you imagine him coming home with his hands bleeding like that if we were still living in the four streets? Sister Evangelista would never harm a hair on a child’s head, even if Miss Devlin had sent him to her office.’

  Harry had been so stoical when Tommy had returned home and applied the iodine to the bleeding, raw cuts on his hands. She’d had
to fight back her own tears as well as wipe away Harry’s. Her brave little soldier had turned a ghastly shade of white and she’d felt his legs buckle beneath him. Tommy had grabbed him and held him fast to his own chest. Maura saw the anger in his eyes as their son tried his best not to cry out again. Now Tommy released his hold and took his wife’s hands.

  ‘Maura, I got worse when I was a kid. The Brothers are brutal, all right, but they make a firm fist of turning us into good earners.’

  Maura knew exactly what her husband was doing and it was no use. He had done it every day since they had moved to the west coast. ‘Save your breath, Tommy. You try to put a gloss on everything that happens here but you aren’t going to make me feel any better. You can’t put a shine on a turd and that man belongs in a midden. This is serious – and anyway, they teach you nothing. You can’t flamin’ read; if you could, we wouldn’t be here. All you know, our Kitty taught you. Are you really such an arse feck?’

  Tommy had the good grace to look embarrassed, if a little crestfallen, and Maura instantly felt guilty.

  ‘Jesus, why did God make men such eejits?’ she asked. ‘They turn out good workers, I’ll give you that, but Tommy, our kids spend more time in school on their catechisms and writing in the Gaelic than they do on their tables. This school is in the last century. I know for a fact it’s not as backwards as this in Galway or Dublin. But here we are in the forgotten land, stuck behind the mountains where no bugger comes because the roads are too bad.’

  Tommy bent to switch off the standard lamp by the plug. ‘Aye, well, there’s more to school than maths and reading and the Brothers, they run schools all over Ireland. They know what they are doing.’

  ‘Tommy, are you mad? What more is there?’

  Tommy sighed and gave in. He had been filled with his own rage when he had first seen Harry’s hands and was consumed by an urge to put his coat back on and march down to the schoolhouse to give Mr Cleary a piece of his mind. But breathing deeply, he’d waited for the red mist to pass. The last time someone harmed one of his children, a murder had been committed… What was more, Tommy knew, as did Maura, it would only make things worse. ‘Cleary comes in on a Friday night, I’ll have a word with him then.’

  Maura nodded. ‘Aye, well make sure I’m stood next to you when you do.’ They both knew which one of them the villagers feared the most and it wasn’t Tommy.

  In bed, Maura slipped into the crook of Tommy’s arm and draped the other arm around his waist.

  ‘It’s better than me being on the docks, isn’t it, Maura? Us being here? Better than always worrying when the next ship was coming in and if I’d be taken on. It’s getting bad there, you know; the docks are only half as busy as they were.’ Tommy always spoke more freely in the dark.

  ‘Aye, but you always were taken on,’ she said. ‘You were one of the hardest workers. Like Jerry used to say, you’re small and stocky, built like a brick shite house. You never went without a day’s work.’

  Maura, who set her alarm around the bells for morning mass and the Angelus, knew she should give thanks for what she had and be grateful and this she managed for most of the day, but, when the lights were out and she was lying in Tommy’s arms, it was near impossible. ‘I miss the four streets,’ she whispered and the hot tears that prickled at the back of her eyes broke free and ran down her cheeks.

  ‘Eh, come on, queen,’ Tommy said. ‘Don’t be crying now. Isn’t this what we wanted, to be back in Ireland, running our own business? Home is where the heart is, Maura.’

  She buried her face into his chest to stifle her sobs. ‘But our Kitty’s grave, it’s in Liverpool…’

  And for that, Tommy had no reply. He had left his Kitty all alone in the churchyard, his precious eldest daughter and the best friend any daddy could have. How had he not thought of that on the day they left, when he had taken the flowers he had bought in the market to her grave? It would be her birthday soon and who would be there for her, to lay flowers on her grave now?

  ‘I miss the four streets too,’ he whispered. ‘I miss the craic with the men, the games of footie, darts. And I miss work, I do; you don’t get much conversation from a cow’s udder. And the pub – I miss the Anchor. You are a grand barmaid, Maura, but it’s a fact, Babs is better.’

  Maura gave him a playful jab in the ribs. ‘Oi, you, if that woman cried, there would be a landslide on her face, she wears that much make-up. Would you like me to start doing that, eh, chatting up the fellas in here?’ She could sense rather than see his smile.

  ‘Just think,’ he said, ‘it’s the carnival soon. They’ll all be revving up over there, getting ready. Remember how excited the kids all got with you organising everything and Angela helping Miss Devlin last year with the games and being so full of herself, she was unbearable to live with until the Tuesday after the Whitsun Holiday?’

  Maura didn’t speak; she was lost in her own memories of company and banter. She thought about the Friday nights when they all got together down at the pub, the friendships forged in adversity, the making of the bunting at her kitchen table, half of the women from the streets squeezing in and out of her kitchen, the steam from the kettle permanently boiling for more tea. Babies on breasts, women seeking tea and sympathy or simply a word of advice from Maura who was regarded with the same esteem and respect as Dr Cole or Mother Superior.

  Tommy, wandering in his own thoughts, recalled the O’Prey boys, the fastest runners in the north-west, who helped him to run around the streets and houses with sacks of potatoes that had fallen off the back of a ship, tipping out an enamel washing-up bowl’s worth to each house that was short of money, his heart pounding in case a bizzie walked up the road and caught them because he couldn’t run as fast as Callum or Jimmy. But most of all, he missed visiting his Kitty.

  Moving to Ireland had absorbed all their time and energy and it had occurred to him that, since they had got here, Kitty had faded. Even the sharpest of the pain in his heart, all that had remained from those dark days, had gone and he even missed it because it was this pain that kept his Kitty alive and, even though the priest was dead and gone, even though Kitty and all she had suffered at his hands had been avenged, he still didn’t feel as though he had done enough.

  As she so often did, Maura read his mind. ‘I miss our Kitty so much,’ she said.

  Tommy placed his hand on top of Maura’s shoulder and, feeling the coolness of her, pulled the blanket up and tucked it in around her. ‘You’re cold,’ he whispered and rubbed her shoulder lightly over the top of the blanket. ‘I miss her too, every single day,’ he said as his hand casually slipped under the blanket to the familiar rise of her breast and rested there. ‘There’s no one here who really knew her other than Liam and Maeve and I hate to remind them of what happened. I know they feel responsible, even though they aren’t. We will never know, Maura, how or what; we will only know that someone wanted Kitty dead. She knew, we knew, but they didn’t dare come after us.’

  There was a long silence, broken at last by Maura. ‘Kitty isn’t here…’

  Tommy stroked his hand along her breast. ‘Aye, because we don’t talk to the same people Kitty did since she was a babby, the people who watched her grow. There’s nothing here, no one, to bring her to us. Not one person who watched her play in the streets or knew her in school. She won’t know this place, out here, won’t be able to find us. One day I was visiting her grave and sat on the bench, the next I was gone. She won’t know where I am.’

  He felt a familiar pain rip through his heart and Maura felt it too and was instantly compelled to soothe it. Her husband, her lovely Tommy, was a man who had been through so much. He carried a guilt in his heart and she could only imagine how heavy it felt. There was no atonement to be found for the murder of a priest, no church in which to make confession. Redemption and the pathway to heaven was blocked for Tommy and they lived their life aware that there would no longer be a together forever. She shifted her weight and her lips found his. Her hand moved swiftly
down to the inside of his thigh and slowly upwards as she gently caressed him. As was always the case, Tommy responded instantly, and their kisses held an urgent, life-affirming intensity. He would warm her shoulder when she was cold – and she would always be there, to take away his pain.

  Chapter Three

  On one day each week, Maura travelled all the way into Ballynevin to collect the post and to pick up butter, meat, sewing or mending. Other food was delivered to her from the shop in Ballynevin on the back of a van every other day. When they had moved to Ireland, she had never thought she would miss queuing outside the fish shop on a Wednesday morning, or the butcher’s jokes and ribaldry as much as she did. Her weekly trip out now was reliant on one of the farm carts passing by, or the weekly delivery with the Guinness dray to hitch a lift back.

  Her last stop of the afternoon had been to Mrs Barrett at the tailor’s where Maura discussed the cuts Cleary had inflicted on Harry’s hands in detail.

  ‘Well, we can have that sorted in no time,’ Mrs Barrett said. ‘I have just the thing in my press for your Harry’s hands. We are used to Cleary around here. He should be retiring soon, the age of the man.’

  ‘Not soon enough for me,’ said Maura as she placed her overladen basket down on the floor and flopped onto the wooden chair on the customer side of the counter. No one just walked in, conducted their business and left. That would have been considered very rude.

  ‘Shall I wet the tea?’ Mrs Barrett asked. ‘And while I’m at it, I’ll find that medicament.’

  While Maura waited, she gazed out of the window, past the wooden mannequin in the window wearing a man’s suit that would only be bought for a wedding, followed by a lifetime of Sundays. She felt tears prick at her eyes and brushed them away with the back of her hand, irritated at her weakness. Pull yourself together, woman, she thought to herself. What the hell is wrong with you? Her thoughts returned to Harry and the cuts across his palms which were turning nasty. Every morning when she took the dressings off, she’d hoped to see an improvement, but this morning the hands had been hot, the wounds yellow and angry-looking.