December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  ‘Molly,’ she says when I come into the room, my legs and arms sore from the last customer; he was heavy and he was rough. Mr Tubular is sat on the other armchair, one leg over the other, looking relaxed. He has a smile on his face, and he beams even more when he sees me. I sit on a hardbacked chair.

  ‘Mr Cotton tells me he has proposed marriage,’ says Madame Camille.

  Cotton? I want to laugh. Is that going to be my new name?

  I don’t answer Madame Camille. I just nod. And I look straight at her, not at him at all.

  ‘So,’ she says.

  I shrug.

  ‘Well?’

  I shrug again.

  ‘Do you wish to accept?’

  She is acting as though I have the power to. It’s one of the games she plays. That our fate is in our hands. That we control it. Our slates. Our time. Our customers.

  ‘Madame Camille, you know that decision is up to you.’

  There’s that look again, that one of half admiration, half contempt.

  ‘Molly, I am quite happy to keep you here. To have you work out your slate. You’re popular. Fresh. The men like you. You’re good.’

  I know this is a dig. This is a smarting comment to show my future husband, that I am good at being a whore.

  ‘But, Mr Cotton is very keen. He has offered to clear your slate. And more.’ She looks at him now and smiles. I wonder how much I am worth, how much money he is willing to part with to buy me. I remember the market at home in the Fairgreen, the great big cows, lowing and swaying, the farmers slapping their hinds, bargaining over the prices, and spitting in their hands to seal the deal. Here, I am the meat. And I want to know how much I am worth.

  ‘How much is he paying?’ I ask.

  I look at him. Now it’s his turn to shrug.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Molly,’ he says. ‘What matters is that Madame Camille has agreed to let you go. If you are happy, you can finish work tonight and I’ll arrange the wedding in the next few days. Then you can come to live with me.’

  And it was as simple as that. There were no rows, no prolonged agonising from Madame Camille. I left the office, leaving the two of them to discuss business, the transaction that was me, and I went home to Oliver.

  ‘I’m getting married.’ I tell Elizabeth, as she’s preparing to go in for her own shift.

  ‘To who?’ she asks, whipping her head around, red rouge on one of her lips.

  ‘Mr Tubular.’

  She throws her head back and laughs, opening her mouth all wide, ‘Fair play, my love,’ she says. ‘I always said he had a thing for you.’

  As she leaves to go out the door she sticks her head back around and makes a great big honking noise. I laugh too, then grow quiet, there by myself with the baby nestled in my arm.

  I feel happier than I’ve felt in a long time.

  I’m escaping.

  And all I had to do was trade my body from many men to just one.

  * * *

  His house is bigger than I expected. It has a white front door and an ivy creeper curling round the front of it. I didn’t think he’d be the type of man to grow plants, but the small garden at the front is filled with small shrubs and flowering petunias.

  Inside, there’s a smell of smoky coal. I can’t wait to get out a scouring brush and scrub the whole place down, cleaning it for my baby, cleansing it for me. If this is to be my home, I want it to at least smell clean. Even if I still feel soiled.

  The kitchen is a fair size with a black stove and an open fireplace. Above it, drying socks hang limply across a strung-up length of twine.

  He tells me he cleaned up for me, but all around I see clutter, pans that could be put away, tin boxes and newspapers, bits of string and paper here and there. He’s washed the floor but a thin film sticks to it, as though the mop was greasy.

  ‘I thought we could have this,’ he says. He stands at the table and points to a bottle of red wine with two glasses beside it. He’s pushed aside a pile of newspapers to clear the space for it. A small handful of petunias sit in a drinking glass.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  This is our wedding celebration. That morning I had walked from the kip-house, hugging Elizabeth goodbye, and carried my meagre belongings and my son, to meet Tubular. He’d taken my bag with great pomp and ruffled Oliver’s head.

  He hopped from one foot to the other while he greeted me, like a schoolboy about to set off on an excursion. ‘Can you believe we’re getting married today, I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it!’

  I had not slept either, although it wasn’t excitement keeping me awake. Oliver had been burning up and I feared that he would catch a fever that I would not be able to treat. His health was my constant worry in the cold and draughty board house. I hoped now, with moving to Mr Tubular’s, that he would at least keep warm at night.

  We walked to his house, which was a well-built semi-detached property, inherited from his parents. They were both dead he told me, his mother only dying last year. He had one brother, who lived in Scotland. He was as alone as I was.

  He held the baby, making a big fuss and being over the top in his chatter with him, while I went to his bedroom to leave my bag and put on the dress he’d laid out for me. He’d picked it up in a charity shop, telling me it wouldn’t have been right to get married in any of the clothes I’d worn as a working girl.

  I lifted the brown, speckled dress he’d left on the eiderdown and examined the collar and cuffs. Under it, lay a black negligee, stockings, and a garter with a frill around the edges.

  The sight of them made my stomach curl - it was clear he was setting out our arrangement from the start. I was used to seeing underwear in the kip-houses, the girls prancing round in half nothings like a uniform, but I’d hoped to escape it in my home, where Oliver was sleeping.

  Sighing, I dropped the clothes I was wearing and dressed in what he had laid out for me. The stockings felt too big and loose around my thighs.

  When I came downstairs, I was surprised to see a woman sitting there. She smiled at me and stood to say hello.

  ‘This is Mary,’ said Tubular. ‘She’ll look after young Oliver for us.’

  I’d presumed we’d be bringing him with us to the wedding and it pained me to hand him over to a stranger, in this smelly house and turn my back and walk away.

  But I did. I could feel the resentment building in me already as Tubular took my hand in his on our walk to the register office.

  ‘That dress looks lovely on your figure,’ he said and he leaned into me as we walked, almost inhaling me.

  It was warm outside and there were plenty of parasols about, stemming the rays of the sun. It was Tuesday and I was struck by the thought that my mother had married Mr McKenna on a Tuesday, another marriage of convenience, one which I never thought I would find myself in. I remembered how I once told my mother over tea that I would never get married. How foolish the young are, with no knowledge of life.

  ‘Mary’s a decent neighbour,’ he told me as we walked. ‘Never had children of her own. She’ll be delighted to take care of little Oliver whenever we need.’

  I didn’t like him using the word ‘we’. Oliver was mine, only mine. I didn’t like that Tubular was considering pawning him off whenever he wanted, just like that. I would have liked him at the register office, today.

  But I said nothing. I couldn’t offend him, not yet. I had to find my way, work out how to behave with this man. I knew nearly every curve of his body and yet very little of his mind, of his ways, of his thinking.

  There were three other couples getting married that day. We watched two go in ahead of us, their families and friends with them, the brides with flower arrangements in their hair and pretty bouquets in their hands. I should have snatched a bunch of flowers from Tubular’s garden - I should have made an effort to look the part.

  I felt plain, pale, the brown dress swimming on my figure. I’d never have chosen it to wear myself, it was something a much older wom
an would wear. There were bare patches under the arms and fraying around the cuffs. I couldn’t help but think Tubular had borrowed it from his dead mother’s wardrobe and the charity shop was just a lie.

  We stood alone, no friends to welcome us, no family to bear witness. The registrar brought two council workers in while he read our vows in a monotone voice and they signed the register that legally declared us married.

  There’d been no clapping, no ceremony, not even a kiss to seal the union, just the words and a nodding of our head, then the signing of the paperwork that meant we were now man and wife.

  Marriage had never been something I’d thought about. Not when I was younger and Nora was chattering on about who she might marry and what her children would look like. I had always presumed it wasn’t in my future, that marrying was for the weaker woman, a woman who couldn’t make it on her own.

  If I ever had imagined my wedding, it looked nothing like this. I closed my eyes for a moment as we left the council buildings and told myself I had done the right thing, by myself, by baby Oliver.

  ‘What would you say to a wedding breakfast?’ asked Tubular as he clutched my hand.

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  ‘Fish n’ chips?’

  I look at him to see if he’s joking. I’ve had fish and chips before and sometimes, when I was coming home late from the kip-house and the whiskey was in my stomach, I’d stop and get a newspaper full of battered fish.

  It was a treat, but not a wedding treat.

  He looks ever so pleased with himself as he pulls my hand and takes me along a number of streets until we reach a row of cafes and small bistros. At the end is a fish and chip shop, with a small diner to the side. There are shiny emerald tiles on the outside and wooden slats as decoration on the inside.

  We sit down and a burly waitress comes to take our order. I’m reading the small printed menu when I hear Tubular ordering two fish and chips, without asking me what I want.

  I say nothing and sit back and tell myself to smile. This is married life now. I have to get used to it.

  I watch him eat the chips. He uses his hands, not even picking up the fork - the grease coats his fingers and settles in his nails. He makes a slurping sound as he eats the battered fish, as though he’s sucking the flesh from the batter, his tongue dashing outside his mouth to catch the remnants that fall.

  I am married to a man and this is the first time I’ve ever seen him eat.

  When we’re finished, he pays the waitress and leaves a meagre tip under his plate. He puts his hand on the small of my back as we walk back home.

  When we get inside, an acrid smell of burnt fat hits my nose in the hall. He points to the wine and tells me to sit at the table.

  ‘We should go fetch Oliver,’ I say. ‘He’ll need feeding.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he says, as he twists a corkscrew into the wine.

  I watch him manoeuvre the cork out; it makes a light pop as he eases it from the bottle.

  He pours two generous glasses and hands me one happily. We clink our glasses and he looks at me and smiles.

  ‘To my wife,’ he says and I look at his teeth which are yellowed from smoking.

  ‘To my husband,’ I say cordially, raising my glass.

  I take a sip, then another and put the glass on the table. I’m anxious to see Oliver, to check that he’s not making strange with Mary.

  ‘Now,’ says Tubular, I notice his eyebrows narrowing and that he’s looking below my face, to my breasts, which are full of milk. ‘I think it’s time we officially consummated the marriage, what do you think?’

  The last thing I want to do is to go to bed with Tubular. It’s half four in the afternoon and I can hear birds twittering outside.

  He walks around the table and stands in front of me, reaching down to unbutton my dress. I don’t move as he reaches the middle buttons and with a jerk, pulls down the shoulder. I feel the air on my skin and his touch on the strap of the negligee.

  ‘You got my wedding present?’ he asks and smiles, looking to my eyes and then back to the strap.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you,’ and force a half smile to my face.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘You make a lovely wife, Molly Thomas. You were born to it.’

  I look over his shoulder at his socks hanging on the twine, as he kisses the skin around the strap, licking and darting with his tongue.

  It will be over soon, I tell myself. Then I can bring Oliver home and start our new life, with our new family.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MOLLY

  I often think about the night I murdered Flann Montgomery. I think about how he didn’t expect it. How he never saw it coming. How I’d surprised him. How he never would have thought a girl like me would have the strength like that. Not that I knew I had a strength like that either. It seems I had a power hidden in my hands and a violence, lurking.

  Never once did he appear in my dreams or the part of my consciousness where I found things wouldn’t leave. The part that crept in just before I went to sleep at night. The part that was there like a lion in the room, when my eyes opened in the darkness to Tubular’s breathing beside me.

  No, I never thought about Montgomery in the dead of night when the shadows fell across the room. I only thought about him when I was awake. When my mind was clear. When I was fully conscious.

  When I thought about that day, I thought how pathetic I must have looked. Lying there in Mr McKenna’s shed, crying, the pain and stinging flowing from my pelvis to my legs, head still on the bench, letting the tears flow, sobbing, in shock at what had been done to me, in fear that he might come back and have a go at me again.

  So, I’d pulled up my clothes, turned around and grabbed a little gardening fork that was lying on the bench. I held it out in front of me; a girl with a tiny pronged sword, listening for him to come back. But he was gone.

  When I came out of the shed, snivelling and breathing fast, I opened the back door and looked in the kitchen. There was no sign of him, but I went straight to the drawer and pulled out the middling kitchen knife, the sharp one we peeled potatoes and cut the fat off the stewing meat with. I dropped the gardening fork on the counter and I held the knife out in front of me.

  Quietly I opened the kitchen door and went up the stairs, waiting for him to jump out on the landing or something, but I knew by the silence in the house that I was on my own, that he was gone. In my bedroom, I took off my underwear, blood had seeped through. I ran a facecloth under the stream of water I poured from the jug stood in the enamel bowl and bathed myself with it, feeling the water against the stinging, willing the pain to be soothed by the cold, damp cloth. A sticky liquid ran down the inside of my thigh, something I’d never felt before, something so disgusting it made my stomach heave.

  I dressed and picked up my spare dress, hairbrush, and undergarments, and I went to the boys’ room to fetch the small travel case. On top of the clothes I placed the knife, tucking its small, brown handle into the folds of the clothes in the case.

  Then I took a look around the boys’ room and imagined them in their beds tonight and thought of how they might be missing me, looking for me, knowing I wasn’t there, and wondering when I would come back. I didn’t know when I would see them again. I walked carefully down the stairs and out the front door, slamming it good and hard, thinking how I wouldn’t be rubbing it down for dust tomorrow.

  Trinity Street was busy, the regatta stragglers now milling around, heading into their local for more drink. I kept my head down, not wanting anyone to see me. I was glad that the roads had people on them and I blended in; just another girl coming from town. Not to be looked at. Or noticed.

  It was sore to walk, my legs aching and my insides hurting, but with each step I took, I felt a little more relief that I was getting away from him. That I was walking away. That I was escaping.

  At the top of the hill, the crowds had petered out and the cottages were quiet. I felt the warmth of the sun on my neck
but I kept going, through the sweat, through the small patch of damp blood I could feel soaking into me below.

  On the Slane Road I had to rest, to sit down and take some breaths, I was dizzy and the pain was so bad I thought I might faint. I knew Mr McKenna would have gone back down to the regatta, making some excuse about having met someone very important. No one would put him and me together, or realise he’d had time to get back up to the house. He’d taken a chance, coming back like that. He didn’t know I would be there for sure. He’d be sitting with my family now, smiling, an arm around my mother, satisfied with himself.

  I closed my eyes in the dropping sun, breathing in and out and reassuring myself over and over. If I could just make it to the river, to Curley Hole to sit and think, it would be quiet there and I could rest.

  Tell me what I should do, I don’t know what to do, Daddy.

  I made it to the river. It sparkled between the tiny gaps in the blackthorn hedges, glistening through the brambles like ice in the sun. I began to feel calmer as I walked beside it, something about the soft flow of the water, the fresher air, the feeling that I was going home.

  When I got to Curley Hole, I went further than I normally would, past the path I would usually turn down, all the way to a deserted patch, half covered by the branches of a low hanging Alder tree. I put my case on the ground and I sat. Before I knew it, I was crying again.

  This time I let myself cry. With no one to hear me other than the birds, I let it all come out. I couldn’t go back there and live with him. I couldn’t tell my mother and see her homeless again, not with the boys and her new dress and her new, fancier life. I was on my own. And maybe, I thought, maybe it’s all my own fault.

  I thought back on different things Mr McKenna had said to me. The way he looked at me, lingering sometimes. That night when he’d come home drunk in the kitchen. Had his idea formed then, that he was going to have me? What if I’d never had that sherry?

  My eyes were bulging with the crying. I could taste salt on my lips. And all the while, the river flowed in front of me, louder here and rushing, nature continuing on, not giving a damn about what was going on at any part of its banks.