Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  He fought back where he could. He shortened her name to Sheila which, in spite of its primness, she seemed to love. It was one of only a handful of occasions he could think of in recent times when, in spite of herself, she’d given in to that radiant, face-splitting smile of hers. Suddenly she was reaching for the phone they’d had installed, making wholly unnecessary calls to his mother, or Dr Eccles, or Mrs Ling.

  ‘Sheila here,’ she’d say, then try and think of something to justify the call. But they were rare, such moments of levity. Sheila was not Sheila. She wasn’t the woman he’d fallen for. Somehow, somewhere deep within, her light had been extinguished as a result of that break-in.

  Oh, how he lamented it, and he’d do anything to make things right again. But the more she shut him out, the less he could find her, what there was of her – so how could he bring her back? And the more he looked into her eyes, the more he saw and felt her anger; not at a hard and unyielding England, out there, but at him. At Robbie. She hated him. And she was getting back at him any way she could.

  Seven

  A whole year had passed yet the events of that night seemed sorer than ever. The house seethed with triggers that exploded without warning. A sudden noise or the sweep of a shadow along the window and the whole room would foam with her attacker’s presence. That patch of carpet which had been scrubbed and bleached to an abrasive scalp would leak his vile spoor into the air. Sometimes Sheila would walk downstairs into the lounge and he would be standing there, his bestial gaze rippling in the orange glow of the fire. She kept the TV on all through the day, its cathode blue beating a constancy through the morning’s chat shows and the afternoon’s soaps while she waited and waited and waited for a day of reckoning. Secretly, she fantasised they would strike again elsewhere but that this time they would be incarcerated, and this news, like the pulling of a tooth, would cure her completely.

  Days, weeks and months dragged by. The local papers yielded nothing. It seemed she would remain stranded for ever in the horror of that one night. She would never move on. She floated around as if in a dream. At times she wondered if it had happened at all, or if it had only been a break-in, and the horrors she’d imagined were hallucinations triggered by the pre-term shock of pregnancy. Wasn’t that how the body coped in extreme states of emergency? By subjugating physical pain to psychological suffering?

  It was only in sleep when she had no power over her thoughts that the truth would peel back and expose its naked kernel. It would yank her wide awake. It was no hallucination. It happened.

  In her own gentle way Sheila let it be known that she no longer wished – if she ever had at all – to raise her children in Orford. It was time to move on. And even to a local lad like Robbie, who often struggled to see beyond the romance of his gutsy neighbourhood, a fresh start made sense. He yearned to be rid of the pall that now hung above them, and he wasn’t so blinded by his love for these streets as to see how much they were changing. Sheila had a point. It hurt him to think it, but Orford was feral. He shuddered when he thought of the boots and brickbats awaiting Vinnie in big school. And did he really want the young guttersnipes that patrolled the estates pursuing his teenage daughter? The more he thought about it, the more he realised that it was the only way forward. Yes, times were hard right now with only the one set of wages coming in, but if they tightened their belts another hole, for just a little while longer, they’d soon have enough for a deposit on a house.

  Since Vinnie’s arrival, Robbie had been secretly salting off a chunk of his wages each week, building a little nest egg for his son’s future. And then when Ellie came along he was determined to give them both the head start in life that he’d never had. As a boy, Robbie had rarely stayed in one school for more than six months. His father, an itinerant blacksmith, paid little regard for education, and at thirteen, Robbie was sent out to work. Because of this, he could barely read, and his writing – a bespoke system of hieroglyphics legible only to him – as good as determined his job on the factory line. For his babies, though, things would be different. They would see out their education in its entirety. They would be the first Fitzgeralds to go to university. But as Sheila’s depression deepened and her reclusiveness began to impinge on the kids’ well-being – she was afraid to take them anywhere in daylight now without Robbie by her side and even during the long hot summer months they remained tethered to the TV – his thoughts veered more and more towards the rash of newbuilds springing up on the other side of the ship canal.

  That first time they’d ventured out into the suburbs on his motorbike, Sheila had shouted for him to pull over as they cut through one of the new estates. Robbie took it from her bewildered expression that she was as disgusted by its ready-made uniformity as he was.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘Thelwall,’ he scoffed. ‘I know. Isn’t it just?’ He followed her gaze across the rude expanse of gleaming three-bedroom semis, gobbling up the greenbelt at breakneck pace. But far from being repulsed, Sheila was smiling her wide-eyed smile, utterly impervious to the irony in his voice. She was smitten.

  ‘Oh Robbie! It’s beautiful,’ she purred.

  It was all he could do to bite back his disappointment and return the wistful expression.

  So when she suggested moving somewhere safer, somewhere nicer, a place where people wouldn’t stare, where she and her babies might be accepted, Robbie knew exactly the kind of place she had in mind. And not so long back he would have told her in his half-bantering, half-chiding tone that such places didn’t exist. Not in Warrington, not in England. And contrary to what she supposed, the sleepy backwaters of Thelwall would be even less forgiving to a family like the Fitzgeralds. But now he too craved the sense of constancy that this brash, northern pocket no longer yielded. Robbie was beat. He was miserable and he wanted his wife back. He knew what he had to do.

  Part Two

  Thelwall, Warrington, 1981

  One

  A Sunday, late in August. First light was starting to filter through their meagre curtains, refracting mottled shades of pink around the room. An alarm clock sputtered its fractious buzz, luminous flashing digits clashing with the mellow shades of dawn. For Susheela – Sheila, as she was now known – this creeping daylight signalled the start, not the end of sleep. Since Ellie’s birth, since the incident, she had not slept a whole night, unbroken. Even after the move away from Orford she was still haunted, not so much by their faces, which by now had morphed into one mean-eyed, beastly blur, nor even their deeds, from which she was somehow able to detach herself. No, it was their words that would still drift through her subconscious, sitting her up, turning her soul cold. If she allowed herself to lapse, to drift, to take her eye off the picture for more than a moment, those deathly words would seep back into her thoughts and dreams like a final, deadly verdict. ‘If you carry on swamping this estate with your fucking mongrels, I will knife your fucking womb out!’

  She stifled a whimper and tried to force her eyes closed, fight off the nightmare. The alarm clock drilled on.

  Robbie prised an eye open, reached out and silenced the shrill siren with a slap. He groaned as the first ripples of a migraine hit. The stale, heavy air of the bedroom snagged in his nostrils, air fouled by their slumbering emissions, the sweat and gas of too much food and drink. With an almighty heave of motivation he propelled himself up and out of bed, onto the cushioned fleece of the new carpet. His tongue was thick and dry, his mouth clogged with some glutinous moraine. He coughed up a chunky stool of phlegm, stole a glance over his shoulder at his wife and, satisfied she was still sleeping, spat it into a half-drunk mug of cold coffee. His head ached madly.

  Mornings were no good for Robbie. He could no longer simply lurch out of bed and steam headlong into the day after a night’s drinking. Nor could he get by on the minimal sleep of his teens. As he sped away from his mid-twenties and trudged grudgingly towards his thirties these hangovers intensified. They were spiteful, draining affairs that could no
longer be tempered with a fry-up and a mug of sugary tea. But at least he didn’t have to work today. At least he’d be spared the claustrophobic pall of the factory line pulverising his hangover into a grey and debilitating depression. Soon he would be out there in the wide-open expanses, the lean dawn air pumping his lungs clean, leaching the impurities from his veins. And, without work to drag him down, he could almost relish the scourge of his hangover, that slightly unhinged feeling it gave him, emotions keenly vaulting from one extreme to another. A stinking hangover like this was not without its compensations. Later, he could salt himself away and take full advantage of the next-day horniness that always came after a heavy drinking session. He wouldn’t have to hide himself in the shabby surrounds of the work toilets, calendars so defaced by grubby hands and minds that there wasn’t a nipple to be seen. He’d be able to take his time – hatch up the plot and the cast of his fantasy in advance. After tea, he intended to leave Sheila and the kids with Black Beauty, run himself a hot, deep Radox bath and abandon himself completely to the ancient and venerable rite of self-abuse.

  He pulled the covers back over his wife’s bare shoulders. She lay dead still, a globe of white eyeball staring out from a half-closed lid. Even now, his heart lurched when he found her like this, stone asleep with her eyes open. The first time, soon after Ellie’s birth, he’d sincerely believed she’d died in her sleep, and still he wasn’t used to the sight. As gently as he was able, he took up her wrist in his hand, slid two fingers across the faint green vines that fed her palm and felt for a pulse. Feeling nothing, he pressed down harder, this time shocking her awake.

  ‘NO!’ she screamed.

  Realising she was safe, that it was Robbie, she looked relieved, then foolish, then moved to anger in swift succession. She snatched back her arm, muttering as she flipped herself over and away from him, burying her head in the pillow. Robbie stuttered his apologies. He stooped, kissed her brow and stole softly out of the room. When he looked back on her from the doorway she was already sound asleep again, her slender shoulders once more exposed, juddering with the horror of her dreams. He hung his head in sorrow for her. The move to Thelwall was supposed to help medicate all that – the horrors, the flashbacks, the nightmares – and perhaps it would, in time. He hoped so. Without the gigs to beef up his pay, the mortgage was already more than he could afford. But the sight of Sheila lying there, tiny and scared, bore out the wisdom of his big decisions. No way could he leave her alone at night. Not even here.

  Time was moving quickly – the sun would soon be rising, sloughing off the last vestiges of dawn. There’d be a brief lull, a beautiful suspension of nothingness where nature drew breath before it roused the new day. Robbie cranked up his pace. They’d need to move quickly, he and his little girl, so they could be out there, racing through the damp fields to meet it head-on.

  He went to get their uniforms – ‘yoomifors’, as Ellie called their romping outfits – two sets of identical jeans, cotton vests and lumberjack shirts hanging in the immersion heater cupboard. He grinned at the thought of his pretty, boyish girl as he slipped into his jeans and vest, leaving Ellie’s clothes to warm a while longer. He continued dressing as he ran down the stairs, pausing halfway to kick his arms into the sleeves of his already-buttoned shirt and pull his head through. The cool expanse of the kitchen’s floor tiles shocked his bare feet, jolting him with gentle fire like the electrified fences of his boyhood. He glugged two full glasses of water, flicked the kettle on and ran the blind up. A gust was shivering the branches, pinning leaves to the window, still green. Somewhere down the road a shed door was slamming and slamming. Robbie smiled again. Ellie would be beside herself. She loved the wind. Once, last year, they’d seen a hawk, hovering on the thermals of a gust, then plummeting a hundred, two hundred feet, falling like a stone before soaring up to the clouds once again. She was entranced by it. He’d told her it was an eagle and for months that was all she could think about. Every book, every story had to have mention of the mystic golden warrior birds, preferably those that could talk and were inclined to give Ellie Fitzgerald rides around the world. Soon she’d be out there, arms spread out against the squall as she ran down the hillocks, pretending she was ‘a ego’. His heart swelled with his love for her.

  He squatted down and lit the oven with a match. The gas hissed, resisted the flame then, reluctantly, caught fire, limp and blue for a moment before flaring up and sending Robbie jumping from its fierce cobalt furnace. He stayed there for a moment or two, warming his hands till the heat sapped the chill from the marrow of his bones. He took a foil-clad tray of pre-baked horse chestnuts and slid it into the lower cradle of the oven. While they were warming, he filled a plastic bag with the vegetable shavings Shelia collected throughout the week, then went to wake his girl.

  She was snoring gently. She slept in the way that only a child can, with her head nestled in the palm of one hand, smooth legs bent at the knees and splayed out at right angles and her mouth tilted up at the ceiling, wide open. Robbie was smitten with a strong paternal impulse to leave her sleeping. But in that strange way that one’s active thoughts often seem to infiltrate the passive recesses of a slumbering mind, Ellie was suddenly wide awake, dragging her little head up, her eyes large and accusatory.

  ‘Is it time now?’ she asked, springing out of bed.

  Robbie took her tiny frame in his arms and hugged her tight. He planted a kiss on her forehead and helped her dress. She wriggled into her tiny jeans and grinned her gappy smile at the toasty warm touch of her socks and vest. But when it came to the ritual of her shoes, his little caramel kid had a point to prove. She pushed him away, and head bent studiously to the task, her careful little fingers picked at the laces of her imitation Nature Trekkers. ‘My can do it-ah!’ She twisted her head round to it, seeking his approval. ‘My am a big boy!’

  Again, Robbie’s heart swooned as he fished up his little girl in one arm and blew raspberries all over her tummy. ‘Big girl, Ellie! Yes? Ellie is a big girl!’

  The partners in crime tiptoed downstairs, shushing each other theatrically at each creak of the floorboards.

  They shut the door quietly and headed off. The light was still weak as Robbie squinted up to see what the day had in store, the first strains of sunlight presaged by lean skies and streaky cloud, stretched chewing-gum thin by the receding winds. A milk float whirred past and Ellie raced to skip alongside it, a bag of chestnuts and a bag of shavings flapping from either hand. These early morning adventures with Ellie were the very best thing in his life right now, but they always came with a heady, heavy nostalgia, a sense of the best already galloping by. Not just a mourning for his wild youth, but a realisation that these golden moments with Ellie were priceless, too. Even as they crossed the main road and headed for the fields, he squeezed her little hand, keenly aware that this couldn’t last for ever.

  Vincent perched on the sill of his bedroom window tracing tentative shapes in the condensation. He made a heart, then changed it into a flower. He watched his father and sister head off down the street, bruised yet vaguely happy for them. They’d have much more fun together, just the two of them. He’d only hold them back. If it wasn’t his asthma it would be the hay fever, or his pungent allergy to horses or some other ailment sure to blight their progress. He watched the balmy summer wind breathe softly into Ellie’s carrier bags and smiled for his little sister, feeling a faint but heroic throb of martyrdom. She’d been born lucky, Ellie. She wasn’t even brown – not really. Whereas Vincent had always felt the sting of the glares, or the mere frisson of curiosity his mother and he provoked with each trip out to the shops, Ellie’s colouring was subtle, exotic, beautiful. She was going to be a beauty – if ever she’d let herself. With her grazes to the knees, her bruised shins and bitten nails, her hacked, boyish haircut, self-styled and delivered of her own blunt scissors, Ellie Fitzgerald was a tough little tar baby. Yet with her pale green eyes, her father’s button nose and her long, slender, Caramac limbs, she had it
all. Vincent’s eyeline stayed with them right to the very end of the road where they faded into finger puppets and slipped out of sight. He wiped the flower away and stepped carefully down from his sill, lying on his back on his bed, hands behind his head, deep in thought.

  Robbie and Ellie passed through a battery of newbuilds, each identical to their own – streets and streets of three-bedroom semis, neat and compact and safe. All the curtains were drawn. Apart from the low moan of the morning wind, everything was still. Ellie chattered gaily, pausing only to take breath or wipe a slug of snot from her nose, sending carrot and apple peel spilling from the carrier bag. Her father listened solemnly, fists shoved deep in his pocket, his head bowed in deference to the rising sun.

  They picked up the ship canal path, the water black and fathomless as though the night had sunk into it. They followed the lichen-strewn path through the stinking shanks of factory land where the ground was flat and charred, littered with crushed cans and burnt-out bonfires, the detritus of another Saturday night. They passed under the motorway bridge where the air was cooler and the water rippled with each passing rumble from the carriageway above. A little further on, the path curved away from the canal, and the landscape shook itself free from the dirty grip of Warrington’s industrial heartlands. Ahead, a green and yellow counterpane of fields led gently up to the knoll and the woods beyond, which, to Ellie, were heaven.