by Toni Jordan
‘Actually,’ says Pike. ‘There’s a job going where my dad is. On the line. You should pop your head in, Kipper.’
Mac shakes his head. ‘A problem with that plan, Mr Pike.’
‘Ah so,’ says Pike. ‘The notice says cattle ticks need not apply.’
Cray starts laughing.
‘This is one of them boys?’ says Manson. ‘Master Mick MacMichael of Ballymicksville, eh?’
‘Keep up, Sydney,’ I say.
‘Shall I tell you the story of Kip the drip?’ says Pike. ‘It’s a long and sad tale that reminds me of a storybook. Who was that writer? The old timer, Kipper? He was, I believe, a— what you would call a proddy dog. English. Name escapes me.’
‘That’d be Dickens,’ I say. ‘Nobhead.’
‘Ah yes. Just like Grape Hexpectorations, our story starts with the family in somewhat reduced circumstances on account of the sudden demise of Kipper’s old man. Who dropped off the tram in Swan Street somewhat the worse for a whisky or three and hit his head. Blam, splashed his brains all over the read. A sad end.’ Pike shows his teeth. ‘Goodnight Josephine.’
I can feel Mac’s and Cray’s sticky fingers pressing the flesh of my arms. My heart’s racing like it’s going to pop through my chest. I don’t wriggle. I stand dead still.
‘Those shortsighted men in full and gainful employment who neglect to make provisions for their families in the case of accidental death or dismemberment deserve what they get,’ says Mac, whose father is in insurance.
‘Yeah,’ says Cray.
‘I see the elocution lessons are paying off, Cray,’ I say. ‘Any day now you’ll come out with a full sentence.’
‘Funny,’ says Cray.
‘A bit of respect, Kipper.’ Mac kicks the back of my calf with a thick toecap. It’ll come up in a beaut bruise tomorrow, but right now it hurts like there won’t be one. I turn my head to the side and deliver a huge yawn into my shoulder.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say. ‘Don’t mind me. As well as a face only a mother could love, you’ve got a real knack for storytelling.’
‘With your permission, Fishface,’ says Pike, but all at once I am no longer here in the lane with these gorillas but back in the kitchen those first days when I knew we would never see Dad again. I had been reading that morning before he left, sunk so deep in a book I barely looked up to see him go. His hat would’ve been pulled down over his ears like always, satchel in his hands, nails black from the ink, and when he rested his hand on the top of my head, I barely gave him the smallest glance before he went to work and then that night Ma crying, in shock the doctor said, and Connie red-eyed and running up and down the hall with tea and hot washers and tablets from the chemist’s. I remember the edge of Dad’s hat had some tiny black hairs stuck to the brim. The barber hadn’t brushed him down properly. I thought we should buy him a new hat for the funeral because he wouldn’t have liked to rest through eternity with those little hairs stuck there but I didn’t dare ask Ma, her face was so white before his Mass, and now he’s under the ground and it’s much much too late.
Pike is smirking now and the new boy, Manson, spits a big gob right next to my boot with remarkable precision for such a hefty hoik, clear and frothy white. He smiles. By that I mean the corners of his mouth go up. Cray’s fingers are hot on my arms and I have just one chance and I’m going to take it. No sense worrying about future repercussions if I’m not alive to enjoy them. I lean a little forward. On the bottom of Cray’s chin, a few stray hairs are peeking through.
‘Cray,’ I say. ‘You’re holding me awful tight and awful close. Are you not getting enough cuddles off Mac these days?’
He lets go and pulls his arms back and jumps away and Mac does too. I kick the meat as hard as I can and it goes flying down the lane. The paper unravels and I scoop it up and I lose a sausage or two but I’ve gained a good twenty yards. ‘Get him!’ I hear.
But I’m Jesse Owens, I’m Jack Titus, I’m Decima Norman, excepting I’m not a girl. I fly out of the lane, pounding the cobbles like the Nazi hordes are hot behind me, across the road and they’re breathing hard, and I’m around the Hustings’ into our lane and I’ve taken the corner too sharp and down I go, bang crash, arse over T. My knee and elbow scrape on the bluestones and it stings like buggery but there’s no time for that now, up again, in the back gate and bolt it behind me.
Five minutes later I’m still sitting on the step, head between my knees, gulping like a landed fish when Connie comes out of the back door. I see what she sees: dirty meat spilling out of the paper on the ground, me with a knee and an elbow dripping blood on the path, one side of my shorts and half my shirt wet with mud and filth.
She sits beside me and slides an arm around my shoulders and she’s warm and she’s Connie and I’d like to sit there forever being held like when I was little but I know I’d blub so instead I say it’s nothing.
‘Nothing, eh. How did this nothing happen?’
‘I fell.’ I look at the stitching on the side of my boot.
‘I bet you did.’ She doesn’t ask anything more and I’m glad it’s her that’s found me, not Ma or Francis. She sticks out her hand and hauls me to my feet. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’
‘Sorry about the meat.’
She screws her nose up but says, ‘It’ll scrub up all right and what they don’t know won’t hurt them. I can’t, however, say the same for you.’
She helps me limp to the laundry then fetches a wet washer and some soap and that evil red stuff and I bite the inside of my lip while she pats and prods with tweezers and takes bits of gravel out of my knee and elbow and she’s gentle and she talks about nothing, a dress she saw in a window and that Italian family in Tanner Street, and I know she’s trying to take my mind off it like I’m a kid. I’m not a kid and soon I’ve had all I can take.
‘Mr Husting’s shovels,’ I say.
Connie stands with her hands on her hips, looking at my knee. She’s been cutting chokos off the back fence for tea and she’s wearing an old dress of Ma’s and her apron has green stains and her hair has fallen out of its bun and is across her face in black wisps.
She looks different now from when she went to art school. Tired. When me and Francis were little and she used to tuck us in, Connie’s hands were soft and now they’re rough. There’s a red scaly bit across her knuckles. It looks itchy and sore. Her nails are all broken off.
‘My medical opinion is: you’ll live. I’ll finish it after tea. Those stains should come out all right. Mrs Husting’ll have a fit if she sees you like that. Leave your shorts and shirt in the trough and I’ll soak them tonight.’
I do as she says and strip off and change and before I leave the yard I check. The lane is empty. They’ve gone back to Cray’s mother’s for sultana cake, the perfect little angels.
At the Hustings’, I’m cleaning shovels and it’s sweaty work and I put my hand in my pocket for my hanky and it isn’t there which is strange, I took a clean one from the dresser this morning and Ma always says she’d rather we had no breakfast than no hanky.
Of course. These are new shorts. And then I remember. That shilling. It’s in my dirty shorts, in the trough. It’s not that I don’t trust Connie, of course. But you never know about Francis. He’s sworn to God but I’ve had things go missing from my pockets before: a cat’s eye I’d only just won back when I was at school, two pieces of English toffee in foil and the bleached skull of a kitten I found half-buried down by the river. If I get one more shilling I could ask Annabel Crouch to come with me to the Glacerium, but if I don’t get that one back right now I’ll be kissing it goodbye forever.
When they put me in my grave, I know what it’ll say on the stone, if I get a stone, if they don’t bury me like a stray cat at the tip. It was wanting to skate on ice with a girl that caused his so-called life to hit the skids.
Hand on my heart, this is how it happens. I’m home early. Connie’ll be calling me for tea any second and I need to get to the trough, q
uick, in case Francis comes nosing around. The sun drops fast these nights and it’s nearly dark but I could find my way around the laundry blindfolded: roof tilting down on top of me, washing of clothes on the right and washing of Westaways on the left and I lean on the trough to find my shorts. The grey cement is rough and scratchy under my hands, mostly, with smooth patches already where Connie’s rubbed the clothes on it. We bought the trough not long before Dad went. Ma was that proud. Lurking in the corner are the copper and the boiling stick and next to them an old tin bucket and the big brush. In the trough, there’s a pile of dirty clothes and I find my shorts and pocket my shilling quick smart, and then I see a kind of silky dullish green almost the colour of the copper and I wonder what that is. When I untangle it from the rest and hold it up I see it’s a pair of ladies’ undies with white lace along the edges and by crikey, are they big. The bottom that fits these undies must be a bottom and a half. The queen, no, the empress of bottoms. The undies look funny, hanging there in the air by themselves without any lady in them, and I think about Francis at dancing classes and I wiggle the undies from side to side like a big dancing bottom. Then I think about the American parachutists coming for Mrs Husting and I throw them in the air to watch them fall, like being under a chute when it opens, and they drop down on my face.
That’s when I see the light go on inside and hear the scream. A long, loud scream. I take the undies off my head. The kitchen bulb is swinging on its chain and the glow looks like a halo around her head and there in the doorway, Mrs Keith is holding her hands to the sides of her face like she’s got a toothache, and she’s screaming and screaming.
Francis and me are lying on our tummies along the hall, just out of sight. There’s been tea and hysterics and a fainting spell and a glass of sherry for medicinal purposes and all kinds of argy bargy. Connie’s lit the fire, but still Francis and me have pulled the blankets off the bed and we’re wrapped up like mummies, resting our heads on our hands, looking at each other.
Dad used to think it was funny to play like this when we were little. We’d face each other, move our arms, stick out our tongues, turn from side to side. Dad would say ha! and do it again and scratch his head and say buggered if I know which one’s the mirror! But now I know. Francis is the real one and I’m the comic-book version. The one who shouldn’t be allowed out by himself.
‘You’re dead,’ says Francis. ‘All over red rover.’
My tongue feels thick and my knee and hip still ache from when I came a cropper this arvo and my ear hurts from where Ma pulled me all the way to the bedroom. I feel like climbing out the window, jumping the fence and walking. I could leave and never come back, live like Huckleberry Finn, wild and without grownups.
‘Sssh,’ says Francis, even though I’m a mouse. We can hear them talking clear as anything. We’d have had Buckley’s figuring out what was going on if we’d stayed in the bedroom with the door closed like we were told.
‘Not one more night, not one more moment, will I stay under this roof. It’s perversion, that’s what it is. Disgusting. I should be calling the police.’ I don’t need to see Mrs Keith’s face. I know she’s sucking down her top teeth with her tongue until they are suspended halfway down her mouth then letting them go with a clack.
‘Oh my Lord,’ says Ma in a weedy voice.
‘And for how long? His face. I can’t even say it,’ Mrs Keith says. ‘I cannot even say it.’
‘You said it all right this afternoon,’ says Connie.
‘My blessed Saviour,’ says Ma.
‘It turned my stomach,’ Mrs Keith says. ‘I had a distinct gurgling.’
‘This is all over nothing,’ says Connie. ‘He’s a boy. He was playing some game.’
‘Wake up, girl,’ says Mrs Keith. ‘Menace all around us, abroad and right in this house. Wait until he’s fully grown. He’ll be a danger to decent women. He’ll be strangling them in their beds. Disgusting, he is.’
‘Cor,’ whispers Francis. ‘If you end up a strangler, we’ll get in the Argus.’
‘Keep talking,’ I whisper back. ‘The odds of me strangling get shorter with every word.’
‘Strangler’s brother tells all,’ whispers Francis. ‘My years of living with a maniac.’
‘He is not disgusting. Ma. Tell her,’ Connie says, from the kitchen.
‘Story of survival against incredible odds. Courage and wit kept me alive, strangler’s brother says. Letters from pretty girls pour in to handsome youth who shared bedroom with strangler his whole entire life,’ whispers Francis. ‘Photograph of handsome youth, page six.’
‘Photograph of dead youth after his brother the strangler got to him, page seven,’ I say.
For an instant, unless it’s a trick of the light, Francis looks sorry. He leans towards me and pats me on the shoulder. ‘The whole thing’s dee-ranged. Why would anyone want some old lady’s undies?’ he whispers. ‘You didn’t really do it, did you?’
‘Course not.’
‘Then tell them what happened. Just tell them.’
I turn my head on the side and bump it against the floor. I think about Mr Husting’s hand in mine. ‘I can’t. Gentlemen’s honour.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘You are an insult to cretins everywhere.’
I’m thinking what would be the worst that Ma could do to me if I’m caught out of my room and whether it’s worth clocking Francis for when I hear Ma say, ‘I don’t know what to think.’
That can’t be right. She’s my ma. She knows what to think.
‘See? Even your mother knows. He’s a menace,’ says Mrs Keith.
‘I’ve had about enough of this, you old cow,’ says Connie.
‘Holy Moses,’ says Francis. ‘She’ll have her mouth washed out for that.’
‘What did you just call me, missy?’ says Mrs Keith.
There’s a noise—maybe a chair scraping along the floor.
‘It’s a good thing you’re leaving,’ says Connie, ‘because you’re not welcome in this house.’
‘Please, please,’ says Ma.
‘Go on then,’ Connie says. ‘Good riddance.’
Me and Francis scarper to shut the bedroom door—well, as close to a scarper as I can manage while keeping my knee straight so it doesn’t start bleeding again and my hip aching like it’s been hit with a pile-driver and a whopper of a corkie on my calf courtesy of Mac and pulling the blankets behind us—and we shut it as soft as anything. We lean against it from the inside: me with my ear flat, Francis with his eye stuck to the keyhole.
Sure enough, in half a mo I hear Mrs Keith coming along the hall and slamming the door to her room next to ours. Everything is quiet then I hear another funny noise. I open the door and Francis is hissing at me to get down, that they’ll see me but I don’t bother. The noise is Ma, crying.
‘You had no business speaking to her like that,’ Ma says, between great gulps of air. ‘We won’t get another boarder in a hurry. Where will the money come from? Answer me that, Miss Smarty.’
Connie says nothing and that’s the worst noise of all. For a long while there’s quiet except a muffled stomping and slamming from Mrs Keith’s room. Francis is telling me to get back but I walk down the hall and there they are in the kitchen, Ma sitting with her dress lifted up to her face, Connie on her knees beside her, holding her arms, cooing soft like Ma is a baby. They don’t notice me at all.
‘There’s nothing for it,’ Ma says. ‘We can’t live on my wages. Francis will have to leave school.’
I feel someone at my shoulder and it’s Francis in my ear. ‘If I have to leave school,’ he says, ‘I’ll break every bone in your body.’
‘No,’ says Connie. ‘I’ll get a job. If we’ve no boarder there’s no need for me to stay home. I can do the housework after I knock off.’
Ma lifts her head out of her skirts and wipes her eyes. ‘And who’ll give a girl like you a job, exactly. I begged your father to find you a good government job. It’d be more useful than drawing, I said. Some
thing to fall back on. He wouldn’t have a bar of it. Who’ll give work to a picture painter?’
‘I’ll go in to the Argus, see some of Dad’s friends,’ Connie says. ‘They said at the funeral. Gave us that lovely basket and said I should come and see them if there’s anything they can do.’
I can see Ma and Connie looking at each other. I can see the outline of their faces, the parts that are the same, like the shape of their lips and their brows, and the things that are different, like the wrinkles around Ma’s eyes.
‘Shows what you know.’ Ma sniffs. ‘People say things like that at funerals. It makes them feel alive, like they can still do things, not like the poor bugger in the box. Words are cheap. I wouldn’t give you tuppence for words.’
CHAPTER 2
Stanzi
MY TWO O’CLOCK has daddy issues. She chooses the big red chair with the view of the park, not either of the simple black and chrome chairs opposite me. You don’t have to be Freud to figure that out. She’s cheating on her fiftyfive-year-old husband with a man in his mid-sixties. And she’s younger than I am. That, together with her eating disorder and history of kleptomania, gives us plenty of behavioural weaving to unpick. It’s as if I was running a monthly special: three issues for the price of one.
‘If I could remember my dreams,’ she says. ‘That would help, wouldn’t it?’ She’s twirling in my red chair like an undernourished child on a swing. Her legs kick back and forth, back and forth. It’s hypnotic.
Counsellors are not so interested in dreams. That’s for psychiatrists with prescription rights and psychoanalysts with unconscious rights. She’s been seeing me for over a year; surely she knows this.
‘I’m wondering why you say that, Violet,’ I say.
She doesn’t answer right away; instead she curls up with her legs under her, naked feet rubbing against my leather. I can see her toes. Her pedicure is perfect, glossy peach moons sparkling, but it’s the confidence with which she slipped her shoes off that’s telling. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the intimacy this assumes. Go on, Daddy’s Girl. Make yourself at home. Someone else has to sit there tomorrow, but don’t give it a moment’s thought.