The Liverpool Trilogy

by Ruth Hamilton

  ‘I shall get a very large dog,’ Rosh threatened. She cast an eye over her scattered breakfast. Winston was not the naughtier of the two felines. Lucy-Furr, pronounced Lucifer, had definitely been booted like the first fallen angel out of heaven by God the Father, who would have needed the assistance of God the Son, with God the Holy Ghost riding shotgun. Lucy destroyed things. She did it secretly, frequently and thoroughly. ‘I noticed extra holes in your funeral mantilla. She even ruined a sacred item.’

  Anna sniffed. Back to the funeral. Again. ‘I’ve sold all me furniture as well,’ she said. ‘So we’ve money to live on until you get back to work. We need just a small new bed for me in the box room. Stuff in there will go into your roof. But you see, Roisin, when you work, you won’t be here for the kiddies when they get out of school. You could be gone already when they leave in a morning. I’ve taken a couple of evening jobs to help out—’

  ‘Mam, you’re doing enough.’

  Anna sat on the edge of her daughter’s bed. ‘Now, you just listen to me, young lady. Phil Allen was one of the best, but he’s gone, God bless him and have mercy on his good, brave soul. I’m still here and not in bad health. We muck in. We’re Irish, so we do what needs doing for the greater good within the family. I know you don’t want me here for ever, but I know also that you love me. Now, don’t start crying again, or we’ll need a boat. Eat. We’re going for me cats.’

  Alone, Rosh did her best with the scrambled eggs and toast. Mother was right about the chest of drawers too near the door; perhaps the room was due for a change. And she must take Phil’s clothes down to church for the poor. Yes, Mother was right yet again; it was time to make an effort. Mother was almost always right; that was the most annoying thing about her.

  Phil had given Mam the name ‘Mother’. She deserved the full title, he had said. Anna Riley was small in stature, huge in soul. Had Rosh needed any proof at all, these past weeks would have provided it. Until the funeral and after that sad occasion, Mam had kept house all day, had sat all night with her daughter, seldom sleeping in her chair, always ready to respond to the moans of a child in another room. And she was right, because a young widow needed to work, while children wanted minding. Energy would have to be found, as would the urge to re-enter the workplace. None of it was going to be easy.

  ‘Roisin?’

  Here came Mam again, door crashing inward once more.

  ‘Open it.’ She held out an envelope and waited while her daughter released its contents.

  Tears surfaced quickly. It was a postal order for twelve pounds from Phil’s workmates at Wilkinson Engineering. ‘Aren’t people good?’ she said. ‘We’ll get your bed with this.’

  Anna produced a second envelope, manila, with a little window on the front. ‘And this arrived along with that one.’ She held it out. ‘There.’

  ‘Oh, heck.’ Rosh dried her eyes on the bed sheet. ‘I don’t like brown letters. You know I hate them. You do it.’ Phil had always dealt with such items. The idea of being responsible for all the workings of a household held no appeal for Rosh. Going back to a full-time job would be enough without all the bills and the budgeting.

  Seating herself in a small rocking chair by the window, Anna opened the envelope. She had learned to read in her thirties, and she was proud of how quickly her eye could cover a page. ‘May the saints preserve us,’ she exclaimed. ‘What a man that was. He was a pearl.’

  ‘Mam?’

  ‘Thought of everyone but himself, didn’t he? I mind the time when he came to me and said—’

  ‘Mam!’

  ‘No, he called me Mother, so he said that, then went on to—’

  ‘Mam!’

  ‘Oh, sorry. It’s from an insurance firm in Manchester. Your man kept his payments up, God bless him. They’re waiting just now on the coroner’s confirmation of the report. But when they have that for their files, and when death by accident is official, you will get ten thousand pounds. Had he died naturally, it would have been just three. But because it was a road accident, well – there you go.’

  Rosh’s jaw dropped. Just three? That was enough to buy two houses and a car. But ten? Philomena could carry on with piano lessons, the old instrument downstairs could be tuned properly or replaced, while Kieran might realize his dream of becoming a doctor. As for Alice – well – she could just be happy. Little was expected of poor Alice, who had been late to crawl and walk, who still seemed to have difficulty reading and writing … ‘Thank you, Phil,’ she said aloud.

  ‘Amen to that.’ Anna waved the letter. ‘And this is a sign, Roisin. You don’t need to rush out to work, don’t need to—’

  ‘Oh, but I do. That nest egg is for my babies, Mother. I can get a tutor for Alice, someone who can get her learning. Kieran needs books, and Philly could use a new piano.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m coming with you. For the cats.’

  Inwardly, Anna thanked the saints with all her heart. Money had never held a high position on her daughter’s agenda, but the policy had made her think about a future, about the children, even about the cats from Satan. It would all take time, but life was about to be reclaimed by the beautiful Roisin Allen, God help her. Because men noticed her, and there was no Phil to guard her now.

  Half an hour later, two women could be seen walking the short distance from College Road to Lawton Road. The smaller pushed a coach-built pram, while the taller held down a tied-on sheet of glass under which two cats spat and scratched with great ferocity. ‘What would they have been like if you’d never had them neutered?’ she asked.

  ‘There would have been more of them,’ was Anna Riley’s smart response. ‘They’ve no rules about incest. Heathens, they are. Hell will be full of them, so it will.’

  ‘They keep managing to scratch me at the edges of the glass,’ Rosh complained. ‘They’ve claws like needles.’

  ‘Well, don’t let go of that glass, whatever. I know it’s tied on with the rope, but it shifts and slides, so hang on to it. These cats are all I have of your father now. I mind the day when he brought all four into the kitchen. They were half drowned, and we had to feed them through a little glass dropper with a squeezy bit of rubber on the end. Ah, his neck was scratched to bits when he fetched them into the house, bless him. Two dead now, and just the angels from Hades to remind me of a very fine man.’ She sighed. ‘We were both fortunate in the husband department, Rosh.’

  ‘There are no angels in hell, Mam.’

  Anna winked. ‘Just wait. Just you wait and see.’

  They buttered the cats’ paws and sat watching while the pair of miscreants licked avidly at their gilded pads. Lucy-Furr, after studying her new surroundings for a while, jumped on Rosh’s lap and curled into a ball.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Rosh said.

  ‘She’s comforting you. She knows you’re in pain.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘You’ll learn, missy. Oh yes, you will learn. Cats have more than one personality, you see. Like the facets of a diamond, they throw out all kinds of light.’

  ‘You mean they’re insane?’

  Anna chuckled. ‘They very well might be. But it’s our kind of craziness, so they could be Irish.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘See, I’ll go now and get the older two from the library and Alice from her friend’s house. You peel spuds and carrots, and I’ll pick up some cutlets on the way home.’

  So Rosh was left with two schizophrenics of the feline persuasion. She topped a carrot, and the green-fringed end shot across the table and landed near the cooker. Winston was on it within a split second. He batted it at Lucy-Furr, and she tried to eat it. Her male counterpart, taking offence at this offside behaviour, became referee and dashed across the room. In a blurred ball of fur, half ginger tom, half black queen, they rolled round the kitchen at a fair rate of knots. Their language was coarse; Rosh knew immediately that they were swearing in Cat-ese.

  To confuse the issue further, she threw a few more carrot tops into the field of
play. Madness of the very finest quality ensued. Lucy grabbed two tops and sat on them. Winston picked up a third, held on to its green bits and waved it about under his nose. The female, infuriated by this uppity boy-cat type of behaviour, displayed confusion that put Rosh in mind of Alice, her younger daughter. It was clear that Lucy-Furr had no idea what to do next. If she stood up and went for him, she would reveal her hidden carrot tops. If she allowed him to carry on tormenting her, he would continue to feel superior. So she meowed at Rosh, who picked her up, removed the treasures and placed them in a pocket.

  The wrestling match continued. Lucy leapt from Rosh’s arms, and pandemonium resumed. They were funny. But potatoes and carrots needed peeling, and the cats would have to get on with life. ‘Just leave my walls and chairs alone,’ warned the head of the household. ‘No plucking, no picking, or you’ll end up Manx, because I’ll cut your tails off. In fact, I’ll have your whiskers, too.’

  Her heart lurched slightly. She had gone five or more minutes without thinking about Phil. Guilt and hunger combined to make her stomach ache. How shallow she was, how uncaring. She didn’t want cats, yet she had allowed them to distract her to the point where she had forgotten the love of her life. You liked carrots, didn’t you? And lamb cutlets, though you always said a man-sized belly needed about twelve of the buggers to feel even half full. And mint sauce. We often had lamb at Christmas because you loved it with mint sauce and roasties and parsnips … oh, Phil. Come home, sweetheart.

  ‘Mum’s crying again.’ Thirteen-year-old Kieran had entered the kitchen before his two sisters. They stood behind him, Philly with a protective arm across Alice’s shoulder. Alice was five, and she couldn’t stand change. She needed the same routine every day: socks, underclothes, blouse and skirt laid out in that order on the landing ottoman. Shoes, highly polished, had to be placed on the floor near the landing window. Her cardigan or jumper must be folded and left downstairs on the hall stand, with her coat hanging to the right of it, little satchel under the coat. Philly, at twelve, often opined that Alice said little because she couldn’t be bothered with niceties.

  ‘I’m not crying,’ Rosh lied. ‘I’ve laughed till the tears came.’ She dried her face on a cuff. ‘Mother, your cats have had me helpless. They ran off with bits of carrot, and we nearly had World War Three.’

  The two older children smiled, but Alice displayed no emotion.

  Rosh continued with her peeling, hoping against hope that Alice would react. Since Phil’s death, the little one’s patterns of behaviour hadn’t altered; they had stopped completely. A huge part of Alice’s backdrop had disappeared. Her father, knowing that his baby was special, had treated her like a little princess. She had almost listened to him. In his presence, she had carried on in her own little world, a place from which she had occasionally paid a visit to the here and now. It was almost as if the child had stopped existing since the loss of Daddy.

  But, as the saying went, where there was life, there was hope. And here came Alice with one of her precious habits. She picked up carrots and put them in the cream colander, potatoes in the silver-coloured pan. This had been one of her chosen jobs since she’d been able to reach the table top. She was a strange child. Ten steps to the garden gate. Her legs were growing, but she continued to need that decade of paces from door to pavement. Rosh had explained about longer legs, but that idea involved development, which was change, and Alice did change at her own speed, and usually not at all.

  ‘Twenty-seven in there,’ the child said, a finger pointing at carrots cut lengthwise. ‘And twenty-three in here. Spuds.’ She stalked out of the room. The occupants of the kitchen stood open-mouthed, listening while Alice hung up her jacket. ‘Alice hook,’ she said. Then she started to laugh. It was a rusty noise, as if it needed a squirt of oil. ‘Stoppy, stoppy,’ the child yelled.

  Rosh crept to the doorway, her right arm held out to order the rest to stay where they were. Alice could count beyond the ten paces, and she could do it quickly. Rosh had noticed on several occasions the child’s lips moving while vegetables were transferred – for how long had she been counting? Since babyhood, this youngest one had ‘talked’ to her inner self, but was she absorbing knowledge, was she learning? If she was learning, then someone, somewhere, was getting through to her.

  The newly widowed mother stopped in the doorway and watched the scene in the hall.

  It was Winston. Sunlight, split by a crystal figurine in a window, deposited spots of colour all over the walls. Rosh held her breath. Phil had bought her the crystal angel after the birth of Alice. He was here. She could almost feel him breathing next to her. Winston, too, was here; so was every colour of the spectrum.

  Mother’s male cat was determined, arrogant, but far from elegant. To describe him as overweight would have been a kindness, since he was roughly the size of a three-month-old St Bernard. He leapt up the walls, tried to capture and eat a bit of green, a drop of orange, a slice of blue. His tail wagged more furiously with each failed attempt, and Alice was helpless on the floor. Here was a child who noticed just three or four objects in her own room, who failed to hear the honk of a vehicle’s horn, who seldom responded when her name was called. This was a miracle, and Phil had made it happen. He had returned to look after Alice. She would be all right.

  The cat gave up his fruitless fight. He landed badly, rose to his feet, shook himself and twitched his tail twice, as if sending a vulgar signal to the audience. They could bugger off out of it, because he didn’t care.

  Alice stood up, walked past the cat and up the stairs. She would doubtless position herself on her bed with Teddo. Teddo, a one-eyed bear passed down by Rosh to Philomena, by Philly to Alice, was the little girl’s constant indoor friend. Rosh remembered sewing on a new eye, an item Alice had removed immediately. Teddo had one eye, and that was law.

  Rosh returned to the kitchen and related what she had seen. ‘It has to be Hans Asperger’s illness,’ she told her captive audience. ‘Leo Kanner’s paper was about the truly autistic. We can find a window into Alice. A real autistic would not have laughed like that. Well, from what I’ve read, I mean.’

  Anna placed her shopping basket on the table. ‘Mrs Green said Alice and Beth were playing swap dollies, but there was no talking.’

  ‘She’ll improve,’ Rosh insisted. ‘She spoke just now, didn’t she?’ There was no point in mentioning her own certainty about Phil’s presence in the hall. Such declarations would serve only to upset Philly and Kieran. The latter had assumed the role of man of the house, and it was he who had gone to the doctor to ask about the papers on autism.

  ‘Both Austrians,’ he said now. ‘As was Hitler, I believe.’

  Anna blessed herself hurriedly. ‘Wipe the name from your lips, Kieran. Think of what he did to the Jews, and to Liverpool.’

  ‘They’re very advanced medically,’ the boy replied. ‘Kanner discovered autism in 1943, and Asperger wrote his paper in ’44. They leave us standing when it comes to medical research.’

  Anna began to prepare the meat and boil water for the vegetables. The two older children abandoned the kitchen and went up to their rooms. Rosh left the meal in the capable hands of her mother; she was going to spy on Alice. But someone knocked at the front door and distracted her. She knew who it would be; she also knew that he would have seen her through the frosted glass in the door. ‘I wonder if I can get heavier frosting?’ she asked of no one, since she was alone in the hall. Yes. It was Roy Baxter. He had deposited a basket at one side of the step, and was on his way back to the gate.

  ‘Oi,’ she shouted.

  He stopped and turned. ‘Sorry. I just left a few things from my allotment – onions, spuds and stuff. Oh, and a bunch of flowers. From the allotment. I didn’t buy them …’

  He hadn’t changed. A tongue-tied lad had become an awkward man. Did he really think he had a chance because Phil was dead? No. He was just being kind, she supposed. ‘Thank you, Roy. Please don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right, I�
�m sure.’

  He opened his mouth, delivered no more words, raised his cap and turned away. Stumbling over something or other, he crossed the road at a pace that was uneven, to say the least. Why was he such a damned fool? She’d turned him down fifteen years back, had chosen Phil Allen, and that should have been an end to it. It wasn’t his fault that the Allens had moved into Lawton Road during the war. Phil’s job had been listed as essential, because he’d been in charge of a unit at Wilkinson Engineering that made stuff too special to mention. The Official Secrets Act had been involved, and rumour had it that Phil and his friends had been involved in the manufacture of electronic equipment that had played a part in code-breaking, though no one was sure.

  Roy’s reason for non-participation in the battlefield was less glamorous, of course. He’d broken a leg during a football lesson at school, and had lost an inch of bone after surgery performed months later because the limb had refused to mend. So he’d sat the war out with Mum and Dad, had tried to ignore the people across the road, had never married. He needed a lift in his left shoe, would always be a cripple, and she would never look at him. No one would look at him.

  Dad was waiting, of course. The usual sneer was in place as he addressed his son. ‘She’ll not glance at your side of the road in a million years, so I don’t know why you bother. Knocked you back the first time, married a man with a good trade, so what would she want with you now?’

  Occasionally – no, frequently – Roy felt like killing his dad. Every time the bully had beaten Mum, Roy had wanted to kill him. She’d died relatively young, of course.

  ‘Look at the state of you.’ Joseph Baxter threw back his head and laughed. ‘No guts, no sense, one leg.’

  Roy stood his ground on both legs. Normally, he would have been upstairs or in the kitchen by now, but this time he seemed to be glued to the floor. And he’d been so excited yesterday, as his boss had promoted him, and he’d felt proud of himself. The war had been good to him, because a shortage of manpower had allowed him to progress and, after years of dogged determination and exams, he was now an articled clerk. He knew the law; he knew if he hit his dad, he would end up on the wrong side of a locked gate.