She guided me out and we walked back along the alleyway and out into a bigger space with more flashing lights, where she put her hand on my shoulder to stop me. She handed me a yellow slip of paper with the words GALWAY BRUT across it. Under that was written: 18/1 and £20 to win.
‘It races tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I put the bet on for you.’
‘Is that your writing?’
‘It is,’ she said.
‘Is that your work?’ I asked, and she nodded and then held my hand across another road.
‘Does Mum know?’
‘She does now,’ Eileen said, and I looked up at her to see what she was feeling. Her eyes were clear and solid. She looked back at me. ‘Keeping it a secret was getting boring.’
‘And exhausting.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Eileen?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need to go home now.’
We had to run for the train like galloping horses. We were late because I’d gone into the toilet to put my new clothes on and turn the flannel over. The trainman held up his flag while Eileen wrestled with the handle of the door. She slammed it shut behind us and we sank into a seat that had no springs, but the carriage was empty and all ours, so we sat back and stretched as the train got moving.
‘Did you enjoy that?’ Eileen said.
‘The best day ever.’
‘That good?’
‘Thank you for my cool trousers and shirt.’
‘You’re more than welcome,’ Eileen said and held her look at me.
‘And the jumper. And the album as well.’
‘No problem.’
‘Can we do Big Ben next time?’
‘Sure we can.’ She patted my knee.
‘Maybe some more history.’
‘Of course.’ She got her make-up mirror out from her handbag and put on more lipstick, wiped it off and did it again. ‘You could write a letter about it.’
‘What?’
‘You could write to the Daily Telegraph.’
‘Daily Telegraph?’
‘Or wherever.’
‘Can you pull the window down?’ I said. ‘I still feel sick.’
Eileen jumped up. She wrestled with it; the door rattled and I imagined it flying open.
‘Don’t worry.’ I tried pulling her back, but she wouldn’t give up. ‘Eileen, don’t worry.’
She ignored me and then, with a deep roar, she shifted it down.
‘You could post it. With a stamp.’ She sat back in her seat and let the wind blast against her face and hair.
‘I know how to post letters, Eileen.’
‘Of course. Sorry. Is the air making you feel better?’
‘How come you said Daily Telegraph?’ The train speeded up and the noise through the window drowned us out. ‘What made you say that? About writing letters?’ I had to shout.
She didn’t turn back; she got up and pushed the window shut.
‘You could use your new pen.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Birdy.’ She crossed her legs.
‘I don’t get it. Why are you saying write a letter?’
‘All right, calm down.’
‘I hate it when you say that.’
‘I love your letters.’ She took her handbag from the seat between us and sat it on her lap.
‘What? Not you as well.’
‘It’s no big deal.’
‘You read my letters?’ I said, as she pretended to rummage in her bag. ‘Did you?’ I held my head in my hands to cover my face. ‘I want to get off this train,’ I said through my fingers. ‘I want to get off.’ I looked up. ‘I’m going to throw up.’
‘You read mine.’
‘Shut up. Get me off.’ I thumped the seat.
‘Birdy, stop.’ She threw her handbag down. ‘Birdy, I can sort her for you.’
‘Get me off the train. I need to get off.’
I went for the door handle; she pulled me back like a tug of war.
‘Calm down, Birdy.’ She tried to hold my arms.
‘I really hate it when you say that.’ I gritted my teeth and covered my ears. ‘You opened my tin.’
‘Birdy.’ She tried to hold my hand.
I pulled away. ‘How could you?’ I screamed.
‘Birdy, quiet or we’ll get thrown off.’ She held tight to my arms and forced me to sit. ‘Can I ask you something?’
I didn’t nod or say yes.
‘When you said that . . .’ She paused and took a breath. ‘When you wrote about her making you touch her . . .’ She stopped and waited.
I didn’t look up.
‘Was she? Did it? Did you? I mean, did she really make you do that?’
I did the tiniest nod, then Eileen blasted out, ‘I’m going to bloody kill her.’
‘You can’t, Eileen.’
‘Bloody Hell, Birdy. A woman made you do that? Are you sure?’ Eileen rattled off words and looked into me to check that she believed me. There was no chance for me to speak, but I’d lost all my words anyway. ‘I’ve been trying to ask you, but it didn’t seem real. I know it is. I believe you. I do. I just can’t believe it’s true. She’s a teacher and you’re a pupil.’
Eileen got up and marched along the carriage. I wanted her to sit.
‘Where?’ She stood over me. ‘I mean, when and how?’ Her words started to hurt my head. ‘Does her husband know? She’s married, you know. We need to sort her out.’
‘Stop it, Eileen. Please stop.’ I put my hands back over my face.
‘Let me deal with her, then.’ Eileen sat back down beside me.
‘I’m going to be sick, Eileen. I feel sick. Please stop the train. Stop the train, please.’
Eileen tried to hold me. I shook her off. The train screeched into a station. Two people got on. Eileen pulled me close, as if she was trying to hide me, and I thought about running as the cool air came in, but Eileen held me firmly. I couldn’t move. She said nothing. The people started chatting. Eileen held me firmer. The train started slowly, then got quicker. All the time she held me like a baby and we both breathed long and deep breaths while our bodies bounced in the same rhythm as the train, stopping and starting, rattling over the tracks.
When I started shivering, she rocked me from side to side and whispered in my ear that everything would be fine. I put my arms around her waist and put my head against her tummy.
Eventually, she whispered, ‘This is our stop.’
We both stepped down and walked in silence along the platform. People carried their jackets and cardigans over their arms and fanned themselves with newspapers. I followed behind Eileen, trying not to hobble, down the steps to the street.
We took the route past the cemetery, then past Londis and the Churchill Army Social Club, and neither of us could speak.
Eileen couldn’t look at me. She walked ahead. I wanted to know what she was thinking. Then I didn’t. I did not want to know. I did not want to think about it or care about it or know that she was capable of thinking at all. I wanted thoughts and thinking ripped from my head. I let her march on – and she did, in a trance. As she crossed the bridge that went over the brook, I did a sharp turn left.
I couldn’t go home. Home was gone. Eileen knowing made me feel dirty and guilty, like everything was wrong with me. Mum would want to scrub me clean. A good wash. A bath. A cleansing of the soul.
I walked along the side of the brook. The bank was littered with empty cans and bottles, some scrunched-up fish-and-chips wrappers. It was always like that after a sunny spell. But the water below, to my right, flowed brightly. There was no oil-inspired rainbow or shopping trolley or old car parts. It looked clean and fresh – and if I could swim, it looked like a swim or a paddle would be lovely.
I was dirty. The blood didn’t stop leaking out of me and the flannel rubbed against me and I needed to change my pants. There was a grimy smell to me.
I sat down on the edge of the bank, and to deal with the cramps I wra
pped my arms tightly around my pulled-up knees. My brain wouldn’t stop mixing with words, like inside it I had TV and radio noises fighting to be heard. Arguments, heroes, villains, battles and wars, torment, struggle. I wanted everything switched off. I wanted it to rain, to stop me sweating, to get me soaked, and maybe the brook would flood and take me through the tunnel. Where the noises switch off. Where you leave the misery behind for others and you relax in peace, and get the last laugh.
At that thought, I moved further down the bank. To the edge of the water. It was deep enough to drown in. If you lay down and let the water rush over you. I saw beside me a small dead bird and it made me laugh. It was a tiny stiff thing, lying on its back with its little round chest turned up to the world. I pulled some reeds from the ground and covered her. I assumed it was a her. The great thing about birds is they are all beautiful, male or female. You don’t need to know which they are.
In the distance there were chants and echoes and the noise of my school spilling out at the end of another day. I moved close enough to touch the water. I put my foot in to feel the flow.
‘That’ll ruin them,’ a voice behind me said. ‘I won’t buy you new clothes again.’
I didn’t need to look round. I knew who it was.
‘Why you sitting there? Why did you run off ?’ She climbed down the bank, nudged me with her knee and sat down.
We sat quietly for a while.
‘You know the Ryler?’ Eileen broke the silence.
‘Kind of.’
‘He arrives home from the Falklands tomorrow. His ship docks into Portsmouth.’
‘He’s a soldier?’
‘A sailor,’ Eileen said, as if that was the same as a film star.
‘Great. Does Mum know you’re canoodling with a British – a Royal Navy – sailor?’
‘Canoodling?’ Eileen giggled. ‘No, of course not. Have you told her about what that bitch done?’ Eileen’s voice was hard.
‘No, of course not.’
‘I think you should,’ she said and threw a stone which reached the bank on the other side of the brook.
‘Why?’
‘You should tell her.’
‘She doesn’t tell me things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like about Noely.’ I turned to face Eileen.
She looked straight ahead.
‘Why will no one tell me where he is?’
Eileen took a deep breath and pulled up clumps of grass.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Because we don’t know. He was in Dublin, working in the theatre with Uncle Declan.’
‘The theatre? And who’s Uncle Declan?’
‘He’s an uncle or a cousin. Anyway, then Noely moved on and his letters to Mum stopped.’
‘Letters? He’s been writing letters?’
‘He was, but he stopped and the phone number we had for him got cut off.’
‘Why did he stop?’
‘Because he never got a reply from Mum, I should have thought.’
‘What?’ I said, trying to understand what she was saying.
Eileen raised her eyebrows.
‘But why not? Was Mum angry with him? Or upset?’
‘That’s what I asked, Birdy.’
‘You asked? When?’
‘A while ago.’
‘So. For what reason then?’
‘For years she wouldn’t tell me. Dad just wouldn’t talk about it and no one else wanted to discuss it, out of respect for Mum.’ Eileen brushed grass off her skirt and I prayed that we would not get disturbed or that she wouldn’t urgently rush off or just change the subject.
‘So, then, what?’ I said.
‘I wanted Mum to help me with a job application.’
‘For the betting shop?’
‘No. It was actually for a proper bank. She kept putting it off, saying that she’d do it another time, but it never happened and I never got an interview and then I’d just had enough.’
‘Enough of what?’
‘I went on a right rage with her. We had a big row and that was the first time I stormed off and left home.’
‘I remember that. Mum spent hours trying to find you, going through every name in the phone book.’
‘Well, of course. After Noely, she couldn’t stand me leaving as well. But I hadn’t gone as far as him – I was living with Tracy French above the butcher’s on the Sunnyside Parade of shops.’
‘So she found you?’
‘She did, and she phoned me.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said she was sorry and that she’d let me down and that she’d let all of us down and that she loves us so much that it breaks her heart every day a million times.’
‘What does?’
‘And that it was the shame that stopped her talking about it, and what would people think – our teachers, the priest, all the nosy fishwives, the people at the factory, the snotty English whose houses she cleans? I said, “Mum, slow down your speaking.” I could hear her lungs getting sucked in tight. I remember it clearly.’
‘Keep going.’
‘So she took a deep breath, and I could hear the tears stopping her lips from working properly. You know, that bubbling sound. And then she said to me, “Eileen, love. I can’t write or read.” ’
‘She can’t read or write?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’s a big deal.’
‘I thought she was going to say that she’d killed somebody.’
‘Well, in her own mind she kind of had. She’d lost touch with her beloved Noely and she couldn’t help me. She’s never been able to help us with writing.’
‘I suppose so.’ I tried to take it in. ‘But she brings me newspapers home.’
‘But you never see her reading them,’ Eileen said, and I realised that was right. ‘She felt ashamed, and stupid and guilty, and like she was the only person in the world that couldn’t do something simple like read. But she always did her best for us, Birdy. Don’t forget that.’
‘She can’t be the only person in the world?’
‘Of course she’s not. But she felt like she was, and no one in this town told her any different.’
‘No one in our family helped her?’
‘She was too ashamed, Birdy.’ Eileen pulled her legs in and gave herself a hug.
‘Ashamed?’ I said. And inside me I repeated the word over and over again. I got to my feet and climbed back up to the path at the top.
‘Where you going?’ Eileen turned and looked at me.
‘See you later,’ I said and then, like a sprinter in a race, I started running like nothing in the world could stop me.
Chapter 18
I’m not a genius, but I will be clever. My mum can’t read or write but that has never stopped her, ever. Something clicked when Eileen told me that. I saw my mum as the fighter. We never got hungry, we never got cold, she took care of all the Irish in our town, and she never ever moaned.
I ran the quickest route home, with the sun behind me, hot on my back. On the ground, my shadow ran ahead of me. Aunty Marie cycled past; I waved and carried on. I ran over the bridge over the brook, past signs that Mum couldn’t read. Signs that said: No ball games, No roller skates, No cycling. Even if Mum could read those signs, I thought, she would tell me to ignore them.
I turned into our street and stood and caught my breath. Our house looked pure and simple. A white square block with a flat roof. No van, thank goodness, and no bicycles.
I forgot about the keys in the hydrangea pot and hammered the front door.
‘Mum,’ I shouted.
I went round the back but the back door was locked. Back around the front, I looked in through the living-room window.
There was Mum. She was lying on the sofa. Her factory clothes were still on. I tapped. She didn’t stir. I tapped harder, then banged just hard enough so the glass didn’t shatter. She sprung upright and looked around. Like a soldier
who had taken a nap and was disturbed by a rustling sound.
When she saw me, her face changed to panic, and as she got to her feet and ran to the door, I wanted to shout, ‘Mum, slow down, it’s nothing, don’t worry.’
‘What’s wrong, Bernice?’ She jerked the door open. ‘Why you not at school? Where’s your uniform gone?’
‘Can I come in, please, Mum?’
‘Of course you can.’ She stood away from the door to let me walk through. ‘Have you explaining to do?’ Mum gave an almighty yawn, like a lion’s roar, as she filled the kettle and switched it on. She moved about the kitchen like a ghost. As she tried to find her tobacco tin, her lips moved, like she was praying to herself.
‘Mum, will you stop?’ I said.
‘Do you want some milk?’
‘I want to talk to you about something,’ I said, and in mid-yawn, Mum’s mouth closed and her eyes opened up.
‘You have new clothes on. Where have you been?’
‘Up London.’
‘Up London?’ Mum shrieked. ‘Where there’s riots and bombs?’
‘With Eileen. And there was just lots of shops. Anyway, that doesn’t matter, Mum.’
‘But, how?’
‘Mum,’ I said, and she sat down. ‘Eileen told me about . . .’ I thought, How best to say it? ‘About how you can’t read or write,’ I said, and Mum crossed her arms in front of her chest, and by the look on her face I didn’t get it quite right.
‘Did she now?’
‘And I want to tell you that it is OK.’
‘Oh, it is, is it? Grand of you to say.’
‘Mum. I was thinking about how brave you must have been and it’s a silly secret to keep because it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and anyway I’m going to teach you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to teach you to read.’
‘You will not.’
‘I will.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I want to.’
‘I don’t care. You focus on learning yourself, Bernice. I missed my schooling, with coming to England and looking after everyone. Make sure you don’t.’
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