Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. He vaguely recognised the pretty, round face, the huge freckled charms.

  ‘Hiya,’ he said, and it was evident in his eyes that he didn’t know her in the way she knew him.

  She held his embarrassed gaze for a moment, then laughed and let him off the hook. ‘It’s me, Helen.’ ‘El-on’, she pronounced it.

  Helen. Helen. The cogs of his memory spun rapidly, yielded nothing. She laughed again, flirting with him now.

  ‘Irene’s daughter?’

  He saw the unmistakeable resemblance then, and he remembered the bashful chubby teenager who had hung by the small stage at St Stephen’s, desperately trying to catch his eye. She’d grown into a beautiful woman. He half wanted to tell her so. Maybe later he would – he’d tell her just that. For now, he acted like he’d known all along, smiled and half turned himself around to face the club, leaning his back against the bar, eyes glistening as he remembered the Guinness-sloshed floor, the roistering din, the snowstorm outside.

  ‘Mum’s still waiting for you to bring back them fiddle players, you know.’

  Robbie felt a lump in his throat. He turned back to face her. ‘Irene? She’s here?’

  ‘No. She has the Irish club in Runcorn now. Still talks about you, mind.’ She gave him the same bashful smile from all those years ago.

  ‘Hey, Helen. Listen. Give us a shot, will you. The Tulamore Dew.’

  ‘You celebrating, then?’

  ‘Hah! I am, sort of, yeah …’

  He sipped gently at his dram and felt it all come seeping back through him, the feeling, that wonderful, gut-tingling feeling of being here, being home. And, from nowhere, a huge swell of nostalgic grief washed up from inside of him and had him biting on his bottom lip to keep the tears back.

  Eight

  Sheila sat on the living-room settee, holding the letter between two limp fingers. It had been there when she eventually got home, tired, and still stung from her husband’s wrath at the school gates. Instead of making her way straight back to the house and putting out the washing she’d walked and walked. None of this made sense. Robbie was angry, Vincent was more and more reclusive and Ellie, well – Ellie was just Ellie. Bolshie. Resourceful. Inquisitive. She’d be fine, Ellie. But Sheila, she was drowning. All she was trying to do was her best, for everyone.

  Not even the thought of her precious boy keeping watch over his sister on her very first day at school was enough to drag her from the slough of despondency. She sat by Lymm dam, and tried to imagine how it was, life for her Robbie. He loved his babies for sure, if he was not a little hard on Vincent – and he loved her. But she was unable to love him back in the way a man needed to be loved. Occasionally, she would concede to his pleas for sex, but she could never initiate the act herself, not since the break-in and really, if she was honest with herself, not since she became pregnant with Ellie. Was it that important though? Sex? Did it mean so much to a man that it could fill him with sadness and bitterness and ultimately resentment? She felt faintly pathetic that she had no one to confide in, at least whom she could trust.

  Sheila had had a sudden rush of panic and only got herself home with a few minutes to spare to wash – she was hot and tired and sweaty – before dashing back out to collect the children. She swept up the letter with the airmail sticker and the fastidious, unmistakable handwriting – the rigid marshalling of blocked capitals, so precise it looked like typescript. She stashed the letter in her bag until she had time, real time, to take it all in.

  The temperature dropped acutely as the cool September evening drove in and, once she’d got the children off to bed – actually quite relieved that Robbie wasn’t there to witness Vincent’s new, exotic haircut – she’d taken a deep, hot bath, soaked away some of her cares, wrapped herself up in her fluffy dressing gown and gone downstairs, pulled up her chair close to the coal-effect fire and settled down to her brother’s letter.

  She stared blankly into the mottled firelight, her eyes wide and unfocused. It was only the slicing sensation of her skin burning that snapped her from her stupor. Disbelieving, saddened and curiously calm, she digested the news a second time. Amah was dead. She’d already been buried.

  Sheila folded the blue letter in two and turned the fire down a notch. She stood up, her shin stinging from the heat, and made her way slowly upstairs. She brought down her large black vanity box from the top of the wardrobe and took out her little Ganesha elephant. Placing it on the dresser and lighting some incense sticks, she drew the curtains, knelt down and prayed, starting with her mother. ‘O Supreme light, lead us from untruth to truth, from darkness to light and from death to immortality …’

  For the last couple of years she had gently relinquished any hope of ever again seeing her family back home. She wrote often to her mother and to Rasa, right up until the move to Thelwall. No answer. No reply. Not a single message, or card, or anything. She’d understood, innately, that this would always be a big ask for her mother – a leap of sympathies and ideologies that, in truth, she hardly dared ask of anyone back home. She had said she’d come home after nursing school and instead she’d fallen in love with an Englishman and let them all down. But still she wrote, told them her news, hoped they’d be happy for her until one day she found herself sitting there, looking at Ganesha, and it suddenly struck her that that was that. And she stopped it all. She packed away her statues and her artefacts and she ceased sending the letters and the pictures of young Vincent and Ellie.

  But what she couldn’t get over, no matter how hard she strived, was the loss of her adored brother, Rasa. She missed him like a hole in the heart. With only eleven months between them, they were inseparable as children. As teenagers they’d behaved more like partners than siblings. She would iron his shirts in the morning, giggle over some foolish thing as she cut his corns or prepared him a simple lunch of roti and dhal to take to work; and he’d meet her off the college bus each evening and walk her home, stopping off at one of the stalls along the way to stand her a mango and lychee milkshake. It was Rasa who’d spotted the advert, insisted she go after the post and helped her apply for nursing school in England. When she was accepted, it was Rasa who unflinchingly plunged himself into debt to present her with her plane ticket. At the airport his face was lit up with smiles as he made her promise that she’d write as soon as she got there, write every single week. Then he turned and went home to break the news to Amah.

  She wrote, regularly, passionately – and she never once heard back from him. Now she realised why. When they came to take away her body, Rasa wrote, they had found all of her letters under Amah’s mattress. Sheila was happy to hear that each one of her letters, he’d found opened. And though the realisation that she’d never made peace with her mother filled her with regret, the fact that she’d seen her two beautiful grandchildren before she passed away gave her hope, too. It was a start.

  She read on. Rasa was married to Usher, a quiet girl from the village who, she now recalled, used to sit and watch their skipping games, knowing she was too young to join in. It seemed impossible to imagine, but she and Rasa were expecting their fifth child! Things were good, he sounded happy – but money was tight. He simply couldn’t afford to bring his family over to visit. He hoped that one day, her rich English husband would bring his niece and nephew to see them. He missed her so much. Sometimes, he forgot and he went to her bus stop to meet her. He hoped she was happy, too.

  The grate of Robbie’s key in the front door made her jump. She tidied up the ornaments, tucked Rasa’s letter away in the casket and slumped on the bed, a Jackie Collins left open, pretending to be asleep. Robbie was whistling downstairs. She heard the fridge door open and close, heard a satisfied ‘aaah’ as he glugged on cold milk. The whistling got closer and closer. She concentrated on keeping her eyelids still and breathing regularly, hoping he’d just be quiet, come to bed, fall asleep. But he didn’t. She was aware of him, leaning over her. For one nasty beat she thought he was about to hit h
er. But instead he started stroking her hair, whispering in her ear, kissing her neck. ‘I’m sorry, She. I’m so sorry, my love. But I promise, I promise … it’s all going to be OK. We’re going to be right as rain, me and you …’

  His breath was sour, his hair fuggy with smoke. She turned slightly, as naturally as possible, sighing and stifling a yawn. His kisses became more urgent. He slid a hand inside her dressing gown, coaxing her nipples, stroking her belly, reaching between her legs. She willed herself to relax, succumb, let it happen. She wanted to, but at the same time didn’t want to at all. She stayed tense and, aware now that it couldn’t work, affected the best, contented grunt she could conjure and rolled away from him, as though dead to the world. She heard his deep, deep sigh of frustration. She heard him undress, felt him drop like a stone into bed. She heard and felt the bed shudder as he beat himself off as quietly as possible.

  Nine

  November arrived suddenly, bringing forth winter’s first cold snap. Robbie stepped out into the factory yard, wincing as his gloveless hands ignited. He stared up at the rinsed-out bitumen of the sky, a monstrous, stabbing pain at the back of his eyeballs. It was impossible to gauge whether it was yet another hangover or the first shards of the vicious influenza gripping the town. Whichever, standing out there with an almighty chill shredding his lungs to ribbons was pure folly. But he couldn’t go back inside. With nothing much to do, the day was dawdling more begrudgingly than ever. He heaved himself up onto the low wall and, fingers numb with cold, set about rolling a fag.

  One of the hoppers had jammed up during the night shift, and all three floors of the Metso plant had stuttered to a halt. Of the twenty-three men who had clocked in this morning, all had been reallocated temporary work. Those who could drive a forklift truck were dragooned to the warehouses and the yard, while the remainder were sent off to the Cormax plant. Robbie had started out his working life there on the Cormax plant, and he hated it: hated the smell, hated the routine, hated the smarting, itchy side effects of the detergent against his skin. In spite of the standard issue rubber gloves, the Cormax always found a way through, chafing at his hands and wrists, leaving him sore and blotchy. Cormax was bad enough at busy times but with orders at an all-time low anyway, and with a spare fifteen men shuffled onto the factory floor, there was no real job for them to do. The day slithered on, crushingly slowly.

  Robbie groaned as he spotted Cohen’s Jaguar turn, tank-like, through the factory gates. Every glimpse of Vernon, every hopeful nod and wink, reminded him that, sooner or later, he was going to have to confront this matter of the curry evening. Sheila was mentioning it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, now. She was obsessed by the idea – or obsessed by Liza fucking Cohen, anyway.

  Locked away in some meeting at head office in Liverpool all morning, Robbie realised that Vernon was yet to discover the pandemonium afoot. Not only was the unprofitable Metso plant on shutdown, speculation that Cohen was away discussing redundancies was rife among the workforce. Wait till he tuned into the anger, resentment and sheer hostility starting to brew up from the shop floor, Robbie thought. He’d be all matey and gurning as he parked up and spotted him out there. Robbie was sat outside on company time, having a smoke, but Vernon would just waddle over and ask for a light. Robbie hauled himself back down from the wall, preferring the drudgery of the Cormax line to the cheesy simpatico chat of Vernon Cohen.

  Vincent ducked his way round to the garbage sheds. He wedged himself between two giant aluminium bins. Too close, the feral screams of the playground pack echoed all around, the other-wordly boom emphasising the huge emptiness of the two containers. The garbage sheds had been his secret lair these last two months since starting back at St Mary’s. It was the only place they didn’t look for him now, its putrid stench warding them off like evil spirits. But always, he had to be on his guard. One over-hit ball, one over-zealous pursuer and they’d smoke him out.

  He was only grateful that Ellie had been spared the torment that had dogged him. That first day back, as the bell for morning break reverberated through the corridor, Vincent had shot up and flown out of the classroom before anyone could get to him, burrowing his way through the raucous throng towards Ellie’s classroom. He’d stuck his face up against the pane. He could see her classmates filing out through the side door, out into the playground. He scanned the diminutive knot of heads and spotted her. He couldn’t help but smile. She’d ditched her cardigan, and her tie knot was pulled tight like a pea, just like the roughs in his class. She was sandwiched between two boys, one of them Liza Cohen’s youngest, a hand gripping each of their shoulders. The three of them were laughing convulsively. Ellie was going to be just fine.

  When Vincent wasn’t reading or writing in his hideout – although the recent blast of cold weather was making this an impractical and painful diversion – he was deep in thought. Often he would be thinking about how it was, how it had come to pass, that a boy as clever and good-natured as himself came to be stuck here – hunted and hiding – in these fetid surroundings. He reflected that since moving from Orford, life had only become more unpleasant for him – and it wasn’t just on the school front, either. His father’s feelings towards him were now rudely conspicuous. He was embarrassed of him, that much was true. What he coveted was a son like Simon Blake, a ‘rum ’un’ who could stand his own with the guttersnipes that came over the locks and gathered on the wasteland flicking their baby wedges and pulling on ciggies. What he’d got was Vincent. Shy, bookish, reclusive and physically incompetent. A son who cowed at the first sight of such boys. His father wanted a miniature version of himself; a son who took an interest in their local rugby team, the Wires; someone with whom he could horse around on the rug before hunkering down to watch the big fight on Sports Sunday. That first Christmas they’d moved here was surely testimony to that. Robbie had ignored Vincent’s pleas for a desk with an inkwell and instead bought him a punch bag. He’d hung it from the roof of the shed and in the blitz of a snowstorm he’d dragged him outside and had him dance around it, jabbing left and right till the gloves on his hands fell like weights from his wrists. But a combination of the plunging temperature and the rare exertion had precipitated a monstrous asthma attack and put paid to the brute bonding session. The bag hung there for the rest of the winter like a stuffed animal, soaked through with his father’s crushed aspirations until one day Vincent came home from school and it was gone.

  But at least he was free from the nightmares that had tortured him in Orford, jolting him awake and forcing his fevered head to relive the night of the break-in again and again. In the aftermath of that evening, his mother had probed him often and rigorously, and he’d told her the truth, kept nothing back: the sound of her screams had woken him, it was dark and unfamiliar and he couldn’t work out where he was. He’d pushed open the door and there she was, on the floor, his father stooped over her as the wail of a siren carried close above the rooftops.

  But then the nightmares came, distorting everything he held true about that night. In them, he’d edge out of the cubbyhole, curl up behind the couch and watch it all happen. And it wasn’t his father bent over his mother but a man with a mean piggy face and an ugly hand. Even though his mother had been adamant, right from the start, of there being only one intruder – a masked intruder – there were four of them in this dream, their hideous, beastly faces leering down at her in the fire-flushed glow of the room. The nightmares were so lurid, so persuasive, that at times they were impossible to separate from his own lived version of events. But since moving to Thelwall, the regularity and intensity of the dreams had eased up. The simple reframing of space seemed to cure them completely. He stopped wetting his bed. He slept right through. And now, with the clarity of hindsight, Vincent was satisfied that that’s all they ever were. Bad dreams. And he was no longer afraid.

  *

  Robbie came to. He’d been sat there, in a trance, staring at the engraved design on the ornamental mirror above the ri
ckety old cast-iron till they still used in the club. Something about the cosy Celtic bonhomie of the imagery – a blissful, ruddy-faced, fattened-tight pig dancing on its hind legs as a trio of fiddle-playing felines urged him on – chimed with Robbie’s recent and growing nostalgia. He’d been let off just after lunch and had come straight here. The Metso line would not be up and running till tomorrow and Cohen had used this as an opportunity to curry favour with his disenchanted floor. ‘No point kicking your feet, comrades. Might as well get yourselves off.’

  Comrades! It was said in jest, punctuated with a stentorian wink – just in case you didn’t get the gag first time round – but it only made Robbie hate him all the more. He tilted his head back and opened up his throat to demolish the sour dregs of his fourth and final pint. Darkness shrouded the windows but Robbie could tell by the procession of headlights sweeping past that it was still early.

  The odd assortment of daytime drinkers killing time and suspending reality drifted out in ones and twos after the five o’clock horn. Greenhalls had been laying off men by the hundred, and the Irish Club was, more and more, a daytime refuge for those who couldn’t quite digest that their job for life was no more. Robbie could well understand the lure of the club’s womb. Everything in here seemed constant, somehow harking back to better times. He examined his empty pint glass, reluctant to leave. Should he have another? Probably not. Probably best get off. Helen was whistling and bustling around, holding glasses up to the light, checking their rims for stains. He picked up a limp newspaper, damp and stained with the blackened rims of countless pint glasses. He turned to the back page, vaguely taking in the photo-action from the Wires’ weekend win while his animus overrode his conscience and drove him on to order another drink.