September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

  I crawled across the floor, lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’ A thickened tongue spoiled the word.

  ‘Laura? It’s Anne.’

  ‘Two dozen,’ I said after a short pause. ‘And I’ll do a batch of pasties.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No, just the meat pasties. I’ll make some cheese and onion next week.’

  Another pause. ‘He’s there, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Tattersall. I fell, you see, fell and banged my mouth against the door handle, so that’s why I sound different. No, I’ll be able to cook.’ He was moving towards me, probably preparing to listen to the conversation. ‘Thanks. Happy New Year to you, too.’ I threw the handset into its cradle. ‘Mr Tattersall,’ I said. ‘Wanted to know about the pies and things.’

  Disbelief contorted his features. ‘What’s he doing on the phone at this time of night? Isn’t the shop shut?’

  I gulped, searched for a lie. ‘He’s got a liquor licence. He wants extra pies to sell with the beer.’ Anne would need to be quick. ‘He says they drink more if they eat at the same time and he doesn’t want them going to the chip shop.’ There was still half a tooth in the front of my mouth and it felt reasonably firm. ‘So he’ll make on the beer and on the food.’ If I concentrated on the tooth, if I managed not to think about the children, then I might hang on to my reason. Just about.

  His fingers curled themselves into angry fists. ‘If you’re lying to me, I’ll kill you.’

  I stared at him levelly. ‘You’ll kill me anyway. All your life, you’ve killed things, starting with animals, finishing with your own brother. Or perhaps you haven’t finished? Is it my turn soon?’ I needed to keep him occupied, even if I had to stand on dangerous ground. By drawing his fire, I might save the boys. ‘It won’t work, Tommo. If you do it now, you’ll definitely be caught. If you take me away from here, you’ll never manage to keep me quiet until I’m six feet under. Whichever, you’ll be a long time in prison.’

  His shoulders drooped suddenly, making him shorter, less menacing for the time being. But then he started to cry, great shining tears that chased each other down his face before disappearing into the front of the bloodied shirt. ‘I don’t know how to do it right, Laura. I want to do it right.’

  In that moment, I truly knew his despair. He had beaten me, raped me, threatened my children, yet I almost pitied him. ‘Tommo, you need some help.’ I kept my voice quiet and even. ‘None of this is your fault. If you’ll go for help …’ I swallowed against the bitter taste of bile and untruth. ‘Get some help and I’ll stand by you.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Honest.’ I had never been more dishonest in my life. The thoughts that sat on the rim of my mind were all connected with escape. We could go to America, Australia, Canada. I forced myself to touch his hand. ‘Please calm down. Don’t cry.’ There was a deep pain in my belly, an agony that marked what he had done to me in my state of unconsciousness. There was no cure. He deserved no pity, yet I stood on uncertain legs and nearly managed to worry for his future. ‘Please try to understand me. I’ve been afraid of you, so afraid that I had to run away. When you’re better, we can start again.’

  The tears dried, evaporated in the reborn heat of his devilish eyes. ‘You think I’m bloody thick, don’t you? You’re making the mistake of classing me with our Frank. Now, he was stupid. Yes, he was daft enough to give me a lift that day, daft enough to stop when I asked him to. No, I didn’t kidnap him, Laura. I told him that I’d forgiven him, asked him to drive me out to Belmont. “Let’s look at the water,” I said to him. And he just stood there staring at the bloody river while I battered him.’ Hysteria lurked on the hem of his words. ‘He took you. He gave you a baby. There’s no way he could have been allowed to live.’

  A car hurtled down the hill, squealed against the sudden application of brakes. Doors slammed, then my bell rang and a man shouted, ‘Mrs Thompson?’

  He leapt like a panther, slammed a hand across my mouth, pulled me against his body. ‘Don’t move, bitch,’ he muttered.

  ‘Police, Mrs Thompson.’ A fist hammered on my front door. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Go away,’ yelled Tommo. ‘I’ve got her kids here. There’s nothing I can lose now, so I’ll kill them if I have to. The answer’s in your hands, just bugger off and leave us alone. We’re man and wife, in case you didn’t know.’

  The silence outside was ominous. His hand covered my nose, too, so the oxygen was limited. I pretended to faint, went slack and heavy in his arms. He dragged me across the floor, pulled me onto the sofa, kept one hand across my mouth. Something new was troubling him, because he started to mumble, ‘That bloody door. I’ve got to cover … that door … a sheet of wood … that door …’

  A crash from the kitchen was closely followed by Anne’s voice. ‘Laura?’

  Before I could rise from the couch, he had grabbed a tiny but solid poker from the hearth. I jumped up just as the metal rod made contact with Anne’s head. She was in the kitchen doorway, and she fell like a stone after one blow. My brain was refusing to work properly. It wasn’t a real poker, so it shouldn’t have hurt her like that. This little ornament had never riddled ashes, had never met coal, so why had it killed my cousin?

  The house was suddenly full of people. They poured in at the back door, strode over Anne’s body, took the weapons from Tommo and hurled him against a wall. He went down slowly, like a ham actor from some B-movie. Bells rang, lights flashed, someone opened the front door. My cousin was carried out on a stretcher while a policewoman wrapped me in a blanket. ‘Children,’ I said. ‘Take them to Auntie Maisie in Barr Bridge. The shop. Take them to the Turnbull shop.’

  She patted my shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right, love. We’ve got him now, it’s all over.’

  A man with three stripes on his sleeve stood in front of me. ‘Was there just him, Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘Oh yes. He can’t do it right, you see. He told me that he can’t do any of it right. I had to be asleep, so he put a rag on my face. It smelled so sweet. And it’s not a real poker, so she can’t be dead.’

  There was pity in their eyes as I rambled on about Mr Tattersall and his pies, about my Frank and the river, about Gerald’s dislike for peas. ‘Tell them no peas, but he’ll eat a bit of cabbage.’ The strangest thing was that I knew that I was talking rubbish, yet I couldn’t lay my tongue across anything sensible.

  They handcuffed him and dragged him out of my house. They were hitting him, and that was wrong. ‘They’re hitting him,’ I said.

  The man with three stripes had tears in his eyes. ‘God love her, she’s in shock,’ he muttered.

  I stayed in that odd state for several weeks. Everyone was kind, especially the young ones with yellow bands on their caps. A bespectacled man talked to me for hours on end, pulled the whole story from my cluttered mind. When he had separated the wheat from the chaff, I was sent to another place where crocuses and daffodils grew in sweet abundance. Life was easy, because I wasn’t myself. I walked in the grounds, ignored the high wall and the guarded gate, immersed myself in simple pleasures like pottering in the gardens and arranging flowers for the dining table.

  Eventually, visitors came. Auntie Maisie and Uncle Freddie arrived without the children, told me that the boys were well and happy. While my aunt and uncle were there, Anne turned up with bath cubes and scented soap, hugged me and told me how well I looked. This was all very mysterious, because something had happened to Anne, and she should have been with Frank. Auntie Maisie made excuses for my mother, said that their Liza’s stomach was bad. I remembered my mother. She used to hit me and take me to chapel. My father, who was with Frank, had invented some kind of medicine in a barn.

  When they had left, I started to look at other residents of the nursing home. Many were old and unloved, left in this place so that the lives of others might become tidier. The younger ones were examples of all levels of society, some from wealthy families, others with dowdy clothes and accents tha
t had survived the onslaught of education. I agreed to go into group therapy, found myself listening to troubles that made me squirm. The victims of violence jogged my memory, forced me to face the man who had reduced me to a state that had stopped just short of catatonic.

  At last, it all came out in sequence, was driven by my brain out into the open. This time, I needed no doctor’s help, because I was received with love and compassion, was physically pulled into the arms of those who truly understood my plight. The nightmares began in earnest, and I was kept in the home until the bespectacled doctor visited and pronounced me fit to return to the real world. He explained that the bad dreams would disappear in time, gave me some tablets, advised me to take things easy. ‘You know all about what’s happened to you,’ he explained gently. ‘When I first took your notes, I had to sift out the dross. But you’ve made it. We’re very pleased with you.’ He pushed the glasses along the bridge of his nose. ‘There’s still time,’ he said softly.

  ‘Time for what?’

  He inhaled deeply, held onto the desk with the ends of his fingers, prayed, no doubt, that I would retain my fragile sanity through the next few seconds. ‘You could have the abortion. Given the circumstances, there should be few difficulties.’

  I stared through him, past him, concentrated on the garden. ‘No, thank you.’ Somewhere inside, I had always known about this baby, had been aware right from the start, as soon as I awoke with the cloth on my eyes. ‘No abortion,’ I said. Three children, I would have, two of them born of rape.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s not the baby’s fault.’

  ‘But … he or she will perhaps remind you of—’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the child.’ I placed a hand on my belly as if to reassure its sitting tenant. ‘Tommo’s in prison, isn’t he?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Life.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They got him for his brother at the same time. It seems that your father-in-law had words with a young woman and the alibi was exposed as perjury.’

  I thought about this. ‘Did she get into trouble?’

  ‘No. She insisted that your husband had some kind of hold over her – over both of those twins. They were put on probation, I think.’

  ‘Good.’ He had a kind face. ‘Tommo’s a frightening person, you see. He can make people do things and say things.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  He stood up, came round the desk and shook my hand. ‘The breakdown’s over now, Mrs Thompson. It has been a bitter time for you, but you must regard this as a learning experience. That is not to say that you need to go through life in a state of fear. The fear of breaking down can be almost as bad as the real thing. But many who collapse under pressure early in life become strong. Learn your limits. Consider it this way.’ He walked to the window and pointed to a rain barrel. ‘Look at that container. It’s large, but when it’s full, it’s full. As the water reaches the brim, all those extra drops of rain overflow. We’re like that. People can take so much and no more. At least you have learned your own capacity.’

  I rose and walked to the door. ‘Yes, I suppose I understand how much I can take, doctor. But how do I calculate for other people? How will I recognize another Tommo?’

  He smiled. ‘Believe me, you will. If you meet his like, you’ll run like a deer until you’re out of his sights. Go on, now. Go home and start your life.’

  I paused, a hand on the doorknob. ‘I want to get right away. There are three children – well – almost three. Two are his, one is illegitimate. My children are brothers and cousins, you see. The story of their beginnings will be widespread throughout Bolton, especially now that one of their fathers is a recognized criminal. There must be a completely fresh start.’

  He followed me, placed a hand in the centre of my back. ‘It’s all been discussed, Mrs Thompson. The welfare people have intervened, and you will move to Liverpool very soon. Your home in Bolton will be sold, but as its value is low, you will be awarded a corporation house. In return, the Bolton authorities will accept a family from Liverpool.’

  ‘Displaced persons moving round in circles,’ I commented. ‘How sad.’

  He patted me, made a tutting sound that was meant to be comforting. ‘Get out there and live. Take each day as it comes, remember my advice no matter how trite it sounds. There may be times when a day is too long, when you may have to get through the next few minutes, or the next couple of hours. You’re an attractive young woman with much to live for and—’

  ‘With a false tooth.’ I tried to make light of the situation.

  ‘A crown. And it matches in very well. Listen, when the adrenalin flows for no obvious reason, go into that panic happily, know that you are alive. You’ve been very insecure, but you do have insight into your own make-up, and that’s your strength. I can’t take you back in time. I can’t give you a loving mother and a father with a nine-to-five job. But I do hope I’ve managed to teach you how to believe in yourself.’

  It was going to be a struggle. I had to pick up my boys, gather our belongings, go forward into a city I hardly knew, make a life for us and for a person who was not yet born. But I couldn’t stay, didn’t want to put my children through any pain. ‘His dad’s your dad’s brother and you’ve both got the same mother’, ‘Your dad’s in prison’, ‘Your dad got life for killing your brother’s dad’, and so on. They deserved better than that.

  ‘You’ll make it,’ he said softly.

  ‘I must. There’s no real choice, is there?’

  I walked out of that home, stood at the gate until Anne came, listened to the world and knew how noisy it was, how peaceful life had been until this morning. Giving up could be easy, I thought. How simple life might have been had I stayed in the care of others. Meals prepared, dishes washed, clothes laid out each morning. For many weeks, I had made no decisions, taken no responsibility for my own existence.

  Anne pulled up. ‘Climb in, you look lost.’ She bore his mark on her forehead, a thin line that was turning to silver.

  I climbed in. ‘I am lost. And I’ll definitely be lost in Liverpool. They talk funny, you know. If I ask for directions, I’ll not understand the lingo. And my kids will grow up to be Scousers.’

  She drove off, left tyre marks in her wake. ‘There’s nowt wrong wi’ Liverpool folk,’ she said mockingly. ‘It’s still a Lanky town, not foreign soil.’

  ‘They’ll call me a Woollyback,’ I said.

  ‘Sod them.’

  ‘They’re very quick-witted,’ I moaned.

  ‘Then give as good as you get, and give it before you get it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  She turned slightly, allowing me another glimpse of the silver scar on her forehead. ‘You’re thick, Laura. You deserve to be called a Woollyback.’

  I had thought that places such as this had been eradicated before the 1960s, yet I stood in a filthy room with boarded windows and ancient oilcloth sticking up in patches all over a stone floor. There was a living room and a kitchen at ground level and, so far, I hadn’t dared to look at the kitchen. I was trapped in a time warp, had somehow got stuck in the fourth dimension with gas mantles and a pulley line above a black iron range.

  The kitchen – not much more than a scullery, really – was no better. A meatsafe hung open, its meshed door crippled due to a missing hinge. The unmistakeable perfume of boiled cabbage hung in the summer air, mingled listlessly with dust motes in shafts of light. Lead piping emerged from the outer wall, leaked where it joined a brass tap. Cold water only, it seemed. Beneath the tap sat a slopstone, just a shallow brown trough held up by two walls of pitted brick, no plug to the sink, no frills here. Oh heck. Was this to be the start of my new life, then?

  Anne came in, muttered something about car springs and cobbles, froze like a statue when she saw the house. ‘Bloody hell’, she finally managed. ‘Well, you were only a stride from the pavement in Maybank Street, but at least there was electricity. W
hat the hell do we do?’

  I rolled up my sleeves, picked up mop and bucket. ‘Go and buy white paint and a small bag of coal. I’ll fill this copper and get moving. Have you any change for the meter?’

  ‘You’ll get moving?’ Her eyes were round as she stared at the ancient copper that perched to one side of the fireplace. ‘You’re not moving in here, Laura. Who the hell do they think we are?’ She marched into the kitchen, trotted back straight away, an expression of anger distorting her features. ‘Get back in the car. Do you realize that the only source of water is in that so-called kitchen? To make a bath, you’ll be carrying buckets through here, traipsing back and forth like a chain gang with only one member. You are not staying in a house without proper plumbing. Come on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll go on my own.’

  ‘Where?’

  She dragged a hand through her hair, dislodged most of the chic French plait. ‘To the housing, of course. They can’t put you here, not in a place like this. You’ve two children and another on the way. This is no place for a young family.’

  I sat on an old orange box, folded my hands around my knees. ‘I never expected the Savoy, Anne. We’re here under sufferance, you know. Do you think that some displaced Liverpool family will be given a brand new council house in Breightmet, three bedrooms, bathroom, south-facing rear garden? Will they hell as like! Bolton Council has a list as long as the Nile, so whichever poor woman has gone to my town will be no better off than I am. We’re as good as homeless, Anne. I’m a misfit, a woman without a man, without a fixed abode and I’m a mother whose children have no father. This is the best I’ll get to begin with. After a while, I can start crying, plead overcrowding and move on.’

  She stamped a foot, looked petulant and childish. ‘I wish you’d try, Laura. I wish you’d stir yourself and stand up for your rights, because—’

  ‘I’ve no rights, not in Liverpool.’

  ‘You’ve human rights, woman! You’ve a duty to those boys as well, a duty to find them some decent accommodation.’

  ‘Safety will do,’ I mumbled. ‘Safety is a luxury.’