She kept her eyes firmly shut and played dead. Every muscle in her body was rigid and tightly sprung, ready to do battle if he touched her again. He didn’t say a word. She almost lashed out in terror at the pressure of his leg and let her breath out suddenly with shock as his hand came down to wipe her face and rub and rub at her skin, with what she assumed was his skirt, or maybe a handkerchief he kept somewhere in there, just for this occasion. She was pathetically grateful to him. Removing the slime was a huge relief.
‘Stay quiet now, Kitty, there’s a good girl,’ he whispered in a thick voice, as his breathing returned to normal. ‘Mammy and Daddy will be very angry with ye if ye say anything about this to anyone, even to them. They don’t want to hear a word of this, do ye understand what I’m sayin’, child?’
He knew she was a child.
‘God will be very angry, and throw you into the fire and flames of hell and eternal damnation if ye so much as let the words pass ye lips and upset ye mammy and daddy. Do ye understand, Kitty?’
She nodded. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.
‘What ye have just done, Kitty, was very bad, a bad sin, ye have been a very bad girl.’
She thought she had always been good. She strove to be a good girl. Why had she been bad? What had she done wrong?
He had stopped talking. He was quiet, but he was still there, and although she could now hardly hear his breathing, she could sense him. She still didn’t open her eyes. And then she heard him whisper, asking God to forgive her for her sins and save her from the fire, and then, with a flourish of his vestments, he was gone.
‘I will be away now,’ shouted Father James, as he strode through the kitchen purposefully, on his way to the back door, his black cape billowing out behind him.
‘Ah, thank ye, Father, for blessing the kids,’ said Maura. ‘It is so kind of ye. I know they don’t always go to mass, but they are all good kids.’
‘Aye, they are that,’ he replied. ‘Don’t fret, Maura; if they miss a week I will always pop in. It’s no trouble, but they must make confession and communion now.’
‘Yes, Father, they will that,’ promised Maura to his departing back, as the door closed. She turned to Tommy. ‘Sure he was in a hurry tonight.’
Tommy wasn’t listening, he was somewhere else. He put his hand out to Maura to hold hers and pulled her down onto his knee.
‘Ye know, Maura, as you and the Father were talking tonight, I was sat here, counting me blessings and thinking how lucky we are, ye know. Maybe seeing Jerry’s fall in fortune has made me think, but there was once a time, I am ashamed to say it, when I envied him, as he always had much more than we did. We are always struggling, but look at us now, eh? We are warm, I’ve good work, the kids are fed and all safe and asleep in their beds, and they’ve even been blessed tonight. Life can’t get much better than that, now, can it?’
Maura cupped her man’s face and they kissed tenderly. They were united in their love for each other and for their children, whom they adored and who were their pride and joy. They had little else, but it was enough.
The room smelt funny. Kitty thought to herself that this wasn’t the first time the room had smelt like this. She had woken up on a number of occasions, feeling something sticky and itchy on her skin and smelling this smell. She had thought it was snot. She remembered waking with the itchiness and wiping it away with the back of her hand and the corner of the pillowcase.
Kitty began to cry, quietly. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what had happened. She just knew it was something bad. With brothers to look after, she knew exactly what a langer looked like, but she had never seen a grown man’s before. Tommy was very careful to maintain dignity within the family and none of his children had ever seen him undressed. Something she had never before seen or encountered had been violently thrust upon her and rent her childhood apart.
Father James, God’s voice on earth, had told her she would be thrown into the eternal flames if she told anyone what had just happened, but she wanted her mammy so badly. She could hear her parents laughing downstairs, all the familiar sounds of family. Security and safety in love. She wanted to run down the few stairs that separated them, the few yards of distance between her bed and the kitchen table. To be in the same warm, brightly lit, protected space they were. She wanted to wash the lingering smell from her cheek at the kitchen sink with the distinctive clean and antiseptic smell of the Wright’s Coal Tar soap, which lived in a broken grey saucer on the windowsill. She sobbed quietly until, once again, exhaustion claimed her.
She didn’t open her eyes again until the next morning, when an unexplained feeling of badness and shame was quickly drowned by the calls of siblings asking for her help. She could tell no one. No one knew about the evil that had crept uninvited into her room. When she washed at the sink, she plunged her face into the bowl of water with a force that made Maura shout out at her for splashing the floor. Finally, Kitty got to hug her mother. She flung her arms round her waist and buried her head in her chest. Maura kissed the top of her head and rubbed her shoulders, too busy with the morning routines and the chores of daily existence for procrastination.
What Kitty had suffered that night was the by-product of being poor. It wasn’t the outward signs of poverty or the lack of shoes and clothes that defined a poorer child and brought the deepest lasting misery. It wasn’t even the hidden hunger pains, pale skin and pinched cheeks, an unheated house or broken furniture. It wasn’t having to share a bed with springs protruding from a stained mattress or having to walk on cold, bare, splintered floorboards. What often defined a poor child was shame. Shame not just from being without, but from having encountered something dark that roamed the streets and homes of the vulnerable. An evil that did a greater damage and left a deeper mark than an empty belly. Hunger could be fed, a numbed body could be clothed, but a damaged soul could not be seen or healed. Poverty, gratitude, a sense of inferiority and insecurity made children prey to the things that were invisible and were never spoken of.
Chapter Eight
Time rolled by and life on the four streets altered very little. People still existed rather than lived, and Alice, wallowing in the residual memory of a dream, withdrew into her familiar pattern of isolation.
She had given up any pretence of enjoying Saturday nights at the Irish centre and had no interest in the new band, the Beatles, that Jerry and the others had been raving about since they had played at the pub.
Through her window, Alice watched life on the four streets. She was the first to see Peggy, an unsuspecting follower of fashion, walking down the street with no curlers in and her hair piled up on top of her head like a beehive. Alice thought she looked ridiculous, but she didn’t say that to anyone other than Jerry, because she didn’t communicate with anyone on the street. Instead, she preferred to stand at her window and watch as the world around her went on with its business through a pane of glass, just as she always had.
Alice had been unable to make the leap from her past into her future. She had worked hard and put everything in place for the life she wanted, but she never once accounted for her own social inadequacy or her history to date. Observing life was very different from living it.
She struggled most with Nellie and for much of the time made sure the child was out of the way. She couldn’t touch her and never spoke to her. Throughout her upbringing no one had ever spoken to Alice. She didn’t know how a normal family worked.
When deep in thoughts of regret, Jerry often pondered on how he had ended up where he was. He now recognized that he hadn’t been given much of a chance. How was he supposed to have known what was going on when Alice had arrived at his house only a week after the funeral? But now he knew he ought to have done. He had at last realized that, even at the time, her knock on the front door had created a stir on the street.
The only person who had ever knocked on his front door before that day was the man from the Pru, who collected the sixpence club money every Friday night. The
man from the Pru knocked on everyone’s front door. It was an act of significance that highlighted his status and degree of importance in their lives. Most of the people in the street handed over the sixpence without question. The money would pay for a burial when it was needed. This was a big deal. For Catholics there was a stigma attached to being buried in a pauper’s grave, an end met by many in years gone by.
But no matter how much thought Jerry gave to his predicament, the fact was he couldn’t get out of it. And in truth, he and Nellie were finding their level; they were managing, with the help of people he would be grateful to all his life, especially Maura, who constantly gave out to him about Alice.
Nellie never got the chance to talk at home, when her da was out at work. That was why, whenever she found herself in the company of others, she never stopped talking. It was as if all the words she hadn’t spoken in her own house and all the thoughts in her head, unvoiced and unheard, came pouring out. It was impossible to stem her enthusiasm, or to stop her asking questions and laughing. Nellie saved up everything she had to say. She was irrepressible. She was beside herself with happiness in the company of Maura’s noisy family from up the street, and if she didn’t have her da at home, she would have happily lived at number nineteen. Over time, she ended up spending more hours at the Dohertys’ than in her own home.
But now, at five years of age, even Nellie was beginning to sense that Alice was different. Nellie desperately wanted Alice to like her. She wanted to make Alice smile or get out of bed in the mornings. Or to stop Alice snarling and being grumpy to her da. She wanted not to be scared of Alice and for her to be nice, like Maura.
Maura and Tommy often discussed the ‘Alice’ situation. Sometimes it felt as though they discussed nothing else. Maura was concerned by Alice’s behaviour. Even though there were net curtains on the upstairs window, Maura could often make Alice out, a ghost behind the nets, staring down at the street. Neither of them knew what to make of such very odd behaviour.
Over the last few years Alice had retreated into a place Jerry couldn’t recognize. She often didn’t get up in the mornings and, more often than not, he had to see to himself and Nellie before he left for work. Alice did the basics, the washing and cleaning, and there was a meal ready each night when he got home. But she wouldn’t go outdoors any more, so all the shopping fell on Jerry. The last time he suggested that they go into town, to buy Nellie a new coat at C&A, his request had been met with recriminations and tears.
‘Why are you asking me to do that, Jerry, why? You know I don’t like to go out.’
‘For feck’s sake, Alice, why won’t ye go outside the front door?’ shouted Jerry, more in exasperation than anger.
‘Because no one round here likes me and I don’t want to be seen. I never wanted to live here, I wanted us to be better than this and for you to get a better job, so we could travel to America or somewhere more civilized than these dirty streets.’
Alice wasn’t budging but she also wasn’t being truthful. Stepping outside the front door was something she had found difficult since the day she moved in.
‘I never said I was going to leave either my house or my job when we married, Alice. There was no discussion along those lines and there never will be. If I don’t end my life here, I will do it back home in Ireland, but I am not moving away from the people who have looked after me and Nellie so well!’ By this point Jerry was roaring in anger, hurt by what he saw as an attack on the home he and Bernadette had made. ‘They are like me family and if I live to be a hundred years old I will never find enough ways to thank them.’
‘Thank them, thank them?’ screamed Alice. ‘What about me, what about the sacrifices I have made? I gave up my job to look after you and your snotty kid.’
Jerry stormed out of the door before he did something he regretted.
The women on the street had now, by and large, forgiven Jerry for marrying Alice. Things had moved on. Everyone had accepted that Jerry had to remarry, and quickly, and he was an attractive option for any woman. There was no man in Liverpool as good-looking or as good-natured as Jerry. What had upset them had been the shock of a woman getting her feet under his table and the eejit not being able to see what was going on. Their worst fears had been realized. He would never have sought out a wife and a mother for Nellie, and so one found him.
It was not so easy for Maura. Although she struggled hard to keep on an even keel with Alice, Maura would never accept her. From the moment she had first witnessed Alice’s arrival in Jerry and Nellie’s life, Maura had known it was bad news.
One early morning, she said to Tommy, as she had a hundred times before, ‘That Alice is a Protestant whore, coming to Jerry’s house with her brass neck, Bernadette not yet cold in her grave, and her banging on the door, trying to get into her bed, and him so torn with grief he couldn’t see through her.’
Tommy could not for a second see what the problem was now. They were years into the marriage already, so surely it was time for Maura to move on and change the tune? But always aware of the need to dodge the wrong side of Maura’s tongue, he didn’t dare say it. Anything for an easy life.
Alice had pulled the rug right out from under them and usurped the places of both Maura and everyone back home in Ireland, and to her dying day Maura would never forgive her.
‘Between us, Tommy, after a decent passage of time, we would have found a good Irish Catholic girl for Jerry,’ she insisted. ‘God knows, there’s enough of them to pick from.’
Tommy, as usual, wasn’t listening. Instead he was worrying about Kitty, who was becoming more and more withdrawn with every day that passed.
‘What’s up with our Kitty?’ he asked Maura, as Kitty passed through the kitchen, without a word or a glance in his direction.
‘I think she’s about to start, but she’s too young really she is,’ Maura replied in hushed tones. Tommy understood, without her having to spell it out, that Kitty’s period was about to begin. ‘She’s so sour and miserable, so she is, I can’t get a word out of her.’
‘No, nor can I,’ replied Tommy, who was more worried than he was letting on.
He and his Kitty had a special bond. Sure, he loved his twins. Not many men could boast two sets of twin boys, surely a testament to his virility. There was no better joy than playing footie with his lads on a Sunday morning on the green, or going up to Everton on a Saturday afternoon to watch a home game. He always walked the distance to the match with one of them perched on his shoulders on the way, singing footie songs and hooking up with other match-goers. But it was different with him and Kitty. She was his first-born and they had a great rapport with each other.
Kitty was clever and liked to talk about everything she had heard on the radio, or read in a book. Her mind was inquisitive and probing, though Tommy had no answers for any of her questions.
‘Da!’ Kitty would squeal in exasperation. ‘Why don’t ye know about Africa? I want to know who lives there. I heard the man say on the radio that there was summat called apartheid in South Africa, tell me, da.’
Kitty would playfully shake her da’s shoulders, as though she could shake the knowledge out of him. But instead of feeling inadequate, Tommy burst out laughing.
‘Kitty!’ he would splutter out through his laughter. ‘I can’t even say it, Queen, never mind know what it is, for God’s sake.’
Kitty would laugh too and stamp her feet in exasperation, often pulling a face, which told Tommy she thought he was useless, but she loved him anyway.
Tommy was relieved to take on board Maura’s explanation that the way Kitty was changing was to do with her monthlies. There was none of that with the lads, thank goodness, and he reflected on the fact that with Maura, Kitty, Angela, and now Niamh, one day he would be living in a house where at least one woman, out of his wife and daughters, would be out to murder him as soon as look at him.
Telling this to Jerry one day, he told him how lucky he was. ‘Can ye imagine anything worse, four of them all out to
kill me? You should think yeself lucky, mate, you only have Alice and little Nellie.’
Jerry smiled. He had confided in Tommy many a time that he would now like another child. He thought it might be what Alice needed, to bring herself out of her shell.
Tommy, in turn, confided in Jerry about Kitty.
‘Ye expect Angela to be miserable, she’s been fucking miserable since the day she was born. If Angela had been the first, we would have dreaded the second, but our Kitty is different and I’d hate to see her good nature disappear.’ His face creased into a worried frown. ‘When I came down this morning to light the fire, she was already sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She wouldn’t tell me what was the matter and I must have asked her ten times. All she made me do was promise that I wouldn’t tell Maura. Why would she ask me that, eh, Jerry? Why wouldn’t she want her mammy to know she was upset?’
‘Women,’ replied Jerry. And that was it. Neither knew what to say. Women were as unfathomable as the ocean itself. They hadn’t got a clue.
Tommy had no idea how to deal with the problem of Kitty, or how to make it better. He had promised he wouldn’t tell Maura. Kitty was the one child he wouldn’t betray in that promise. He put to the back of his mind the sight of her crying quietly to herself at the kitchen table and got on with the routine of his life. Almost.
Kitty felt as if she was dying inside. As though each day a part of her crumbled away. Father James had taken to coming upstairs to ‘bless the children whilst they be in innocent sleep’ about once a month. Whereas once she was the first to fall asleep, now Kitty lay awake every night, until she heard her parents switch off the kitchen light and rake down the fire. That blessed sound, that familiar click, the sound of her mother washing their cups in the sink and her father closing the outhouse door, before he came up the stairs to bed: all those familiar bedtime noises told her that now she was safe for the night and she could sleep.
The Four Streets Saga Page 14