‘I like it when you talk,’ he said, grinning. ‘Keep talking.’
‘Only if you watch where we’re going. You drive like a lunatic.’
He grinned. ‘That better?’ he said, firmly placing his hands on the wheel.
She nodded.
‘But you like it here?’
‘Mostly. I know I’m the unpaid help and sometimes me back nearly breaks because of the chores, but I try to do them without complaining. What choice do I have?’ she continued.
‘You could say no.’
‘Ha ha. Well, if dumb were dirt you could cover an acre.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Means that’s ridiculous. I could never say no!’ she said, laughing and nudging him playfully.
He smiled. ‘Where d’you learn to talk like that?’
‘My mother, I reckon.’
He pulled the car over, switched off the engine.
‘Truth is,’ she said. ‘I look after rag-taggle kids who come here and that’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s the best of it. We go on hikes and bake, go fruit picking and scrumping. Mrs Reilly is mostly kind and even the nuns who make a bit of a living out of selling cheese, jam, and butter, are tolerable – apart from Benny, that’s Sister Benedict.’
‘And what about your mam? Dad?’
Babby blushed. ‘Me dad died. Mam comes and visits occasionally. With my brother and sister. Christmases. Easter. I used to cry when they left, every time, especially saying goodbye to our Hannah, but you get used to it. The journey’s not so bad – boat from Pier Head over to Anglesey – and they all like a day out at the seaside to go crab fishing and winkle picking, and eat ice cream sitting on the harbour wall.’ She tailed off into silence, thinking about the times when she’d asked Violet why she couldn’t go back home with her. ‘It’s complicated,’ Violet had once said, puffing on a cigarette and gazing into the distance mysteriously.
‘Mrs Reilly like your mam now?’
Babby thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose in a way she is.’
‘You like her, then?’
‘Yes. My mam would never ask me to curl up with a mug of Ovaltine and a copy of Woman’s Own like she would. She’s kind to me.’
‘Your mam different, then?’
‘She’d be too busy telling me to do the step, or the coal-hole, or look after my sister, to have time for that stuff. But she’s still my mam …’
Babby hesitated before going on. She thought about the fact that, lately, Violet had begun to complain about Mrs Reilly. Even though at the outset Violet was the one who said she couldn’t look after headstrong Babby and she was the one who sent her daughter away, she blamed Pauline for taking that decision. She blamed everyone. She blamed her husband for leaving her in such a mess because he died on her, and so it followed she had started to blame Mrs Reilly.
‘What about you?’ she asked, pushing the thought aside.
‘Oh, me mam’s dead. And me dad … well, me dad …You ever played Split the Kipper?’ he asked, and that was the end of the matter.
When they got back and Callum had left to help Farmer Parry with the haymaking, Babby went upstairs and took out the little red book with a flower embedded on the front in gold that Mrs Reilly had given her for Christmas. She began to write. ‘Someone arrived today at the farm for the summer. His name is Callum. We did the errands together. He is good with the lifting, bringing the coal bags up from the coal-hole, lugging sacks around. He told me a joke about a man called Doug with a spade on his head. He likes pop music, especially Dean Martin, and a song called “That’s Amore” which he couldn’t help singing, not that well but rather loudly, and a whole load of people like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Chuck Berry that I had never heard of. He asked me what I liked and I told him I liked singing and I played the piano accordion and he laughed. He asked me to sing but I refused. He’s not like the boys in the Kapler Gang. I wonder what Johnny Gallagher is like now? I don’t like to compare them, but if I have to, I would say they are like chalk and cheese. I swear, if Callum asked me to kiss him like Johnny did, I would let him. Callum has a sheath knife and we played Split the Kipper where you see if you can get it to stick in the ground in between your feet, and I won.’
Her eyelids felt heavy and soon she was falling asleep. For so long she had been counting the days until Violet would have her back, and now, in the space of twenty-four hours, she couldn’t think of anything worse. There were too many thoughts crowding her head, tumbling around her brain so much that it hurt. She would finish the diary in the morning.
Chapter Fifteen
There was no electricity at Pentraeth Farm, apart from in the main building, just oil lamps that were burning constantly, and Babby made her way downstairs to stoke the huge, roaring fire that heated the range and provided hot water. She heard the soft click of the latch and Callum stood there in wellington boots and an Aran jumper. He raked his hands back through his brylcreemed hair. He looked like a gypsy with his beginning of sideburns and dark eyes. Brylcreem, a little dab will do yer, but watch out the gals will pursue yer. The words stitched in and out of her thoughts and she worried she might start singing it out loud in an unguarded moment.
‘Right, Babby. You ever done this before?’
She shook her head. They had spent the previous four days working around the farm together, riding the hay cart, stacking the bales, collecting the messages, cutting down the thistles, counting the sheep and moving them from the top field to the bottom field. It had been unusual to have company her own age and she found him beguiling and roguish; every time he so much as touched her, an electric shock had jolted through her body and her nerve endings had felt on fire. She wondered how long she could keep pretending she just happened to be rounding the corner to find him there, free to help him on the errands, asking if he could help her with the coal sacks when she had been perfectly able to cope on her own before. Today was different. He genuinely did need Babby’s help.
Callum took off his jumper, tied it around his waist, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. The pig was sweating. He opened the pen gate with his foot as he was carrying a churn of water to pour into the troughs. She could hear the sound of the grunting and he sloshed about in his galoshes, ankle deep in mud and pigswill. The stench was awful. Babby pinched her nose with her fingers and when she spoke she sounded comical.
‘You really want me to come in there?’ she asked.
‘Yep. Mind its legs. We need to get her into the lean-to.’
She stepped aside, trying to avoid the pointed hooves as the sow began kicking and squirming.
‘Put some welly into it, Babby!’ he said, laughing. ‘Many hands make light work!’
She stopped, wiped her brow. She would show him. She slapped the pig’s backside and pulled and pushed it back towards the lean-to.
‘Bloody marvellous!’ he yelled, as they closed the door, and then the pen gate.
She laughed back. Her boots were caked in mud.
They sat on a low drystone wall, lifting their sweating faces to the sun. He took out an Embassy cigarette, lit it, and, lifting it to his lips, began to smoke it, the ash curling like a worm from the end of it.
‘Give us one,’ Babby said.
Callum raised an eyebrow but passed her the cigarette, saying she would have to share as it was his last one. He laughed again as she sucked on it, taking a drag, then spluttered and coughed, exhaling smoke, tears gathering in her eyes.
She offered it back to him. There was a pause whilst he inhaled through puckered lips. Babby watched him as he blew smoke rings, his jaw clicking each time he expelled a quivering blue circle.
And then he laughed again, reached out his hand and placed it on her knee. His touch was like a live current shooting through her body.
‘Tell your da I saved your life,’ she said, shrieking with laughter as she thumped him in the chest and pushed him back off the wall, then pulled him towards her with her other free hand, to catch him. Tryin
g to regain his balance, his hand reached out and gripped her thigh.
‘Bloody loopy, you are! Fruit loop, loopy Lou, loop the flippin’ loop!’ said Callum. His hand remained there, her skirt riding up her leg, exposing bare thigh.
‘Look at us,’ he said, and winked at her. She looked down at the hand, flesh on flesh, thigh against thigh.
‘What?’ she said. And there was a moment when Babby wanted to say, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, as she felt his hand going hot on her skin as it moved another inch up her leg. But she didn’t. And she was glad. For now.
The following day, when Mrs Reilly said she should stay at the farmhouse and wait for the grocery delivery whilst Callum off doing his chores, she asked casually when he would be coming back. Mrs Reilly replied that he had gone to the store again, to collect the stone jars of sarsaparilla and he would return later that morning. Babby decided she would waft around and position herself beautifully, smoking the cigarettes she had secretly bought from Dafydd so she could practice blowing the smoke outside the windows, hoping that Callum might come back soon and find her. She would pick wildflowers and make them into chains to thread through her hair, drain elderflowers through muslin nets and stir the mixture into buckets of syrup and lemon, and later spike the sugary cordial with sloe gin and offer him some on his return.
Meanwhile, she opened the diary and began to write.
‘Callum put his hand on my leg. I didn’t want him to stop. He is so handsome, like Johnny Halliday and Eddie Fisher rolled into one and he makes my stomach go into knots just to look at him. He’s like one of those Teddy Boys, and wears a leather jacket. He has a knife that’s really a comb and he gave me a pink coral necklace that he got from Daffyd and a thimble he found in his bedside drawer. When Johnny Gallagher made me kiss him, I didn’t want to and I never would have done. This is different. I would let Callum do anything to me. I know it’s wrong, and that makes me a terrible person, not a good girl at all, but that’s the way it is.’
Callum arrived back early and suggested they go and ride the hay cart and help with the stacking.
‘Look what I’ve got,’ he said, grinning. He went into the barn and appeared wheeling the order bike that was used to make deliveries from the farm. It had a large back wheel and a small front one and a huge sturdy basket mounted on the frame under the handlebars. ‘Get in,’ he said.
‘What?’ she replied.
‘Sit in the basket. It’s strong. I’ll cycle and we’ll get to the fields quicker.’
‘Mrs Reilly’ll kill us.’
‘How’s she to know?’ he said, laughing.
Putting his arms under her shoulders he hoiked her up and guffawed as he plonked her bottom in the basket with her lags dangling over the sides.
‘Callum Lynch, you’re mad!’ she said as he got on the saddle and, with one push, set off down the lanes. They screamed and yelped and felt the wind fanning their hair out from their faces; and as she looked at him as he tossed back his shivering black locks, something tugged at Babby. Happiness? Is that what she was feeling?
Later, as they bundled the bales at the top end of the field into one huge pile, he asked her to sing.
‘Sing for me, Babby. I’d love to hear you.’
They sat together, their backs against the stone wall, gasping for breath. It was hard work, hay baling, but they had put all the energy they could muster into the job, and they would be rewarded. Callum chewed a piece of straw and, as he twirled it in his fingers, he winked at her. When he took her hand and traced patterns in her palm with the straw, she noticed the lines in his palms were etched out with dirt and his fingernails were black from digging in the fields. This close, she also noticed the veins pulsating under his clear olive skin
‘Go on, sing for me,’ he said again.
She refused at first, but with a little cajoling and persuasion, she cleared her throat and began haltingly at first, but grew in confidence when she saw his rapt expression.
‘In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone …’
He began tracing more patterns, now slipping up her skirt an inch or two, so he could do it on her bare thighs with a piece of grass. She thought that, for a teenager, he had beautiful strong hands.
‘Oh God, that was gorgeous. Sing it again, Babby,’ he said. ‘Sing it again …You’re making me go strange in me legs …’
She did. But she only got halfway through one verse before he kissed her gently, leaving her gasping for breath and wondering what on earth had taken him so long and how she had never wanted anything more in her life than this boy.
‘Callum … Cal,’ she said, pushing away the hand that was creeping up towards her breast.
‘Jesus, I love you,’ he said. ‘I bloody love you Babby …’
He sighed and enclosed her with his arm. Beneath his shirt she could feel his ribcage rising and falling as his breathing grew heavier. She looked back into his decisively boned face, symmetrical and engaging, and his black eyes with eyelashes like brushes.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘You looked like you were going to say something.’
‘Not really …’ she said.
And then, without warning, he kissed her, long and hard and passionate.
The next day she woke early. She padded down to his room, knocked gently on his door. He answered the door in his pyjamas, scratching his tousled head.
‘Shh!’ she said, a finger to his lips. ‘Mrs Reilly’ll kill us if she knows I’m here.’
He grinned, reached out and planted a firm kiss on her lips. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘Hold your horses,’ she said, pushing him away. ‘It’s my turn to give you a job this morning. Never mind the pigs, I can beat that any day,’ she said, laughing. ‘Meet me on the top field in half an hour and bring a bucket – there’s spades down there. And wear old clothes.’
He grinned and made a saluting gesture. Half an hour later he found her sitting on the gate of the field, smiling, her legs hooked around the bars, the bucket dangling between her knees.
‘Where’s your bucket?’ she asked, thinking how tall and strong and handsome he looked, with his black hair blowing off his face.
‘Couldn’t find one.’
She raised her eyes, hit him playfully. ‘Good job I brought you one, then.’ She laughed, produced one from behind the low wall. ‘Right. Here you go.’
‘I don’t think I can stand the suspense. What are we doing?’
‘Collecting the cowpats,’ she said. ‘We collect as many as we can, then we mix them in barrels with rainwater and Mrs Reilly uses the stuff to spread on the tomatoes.’
‘You’re bloody joking! The cowpats? But there’s cows in there!’ he said, pointing towards the field where cows were mooing and snorting and eyeing them suspiciously.
‘They don’t mind,’ Babby said and laughed. ‘Come on!’
She jumped off the gate and handed him a spade. ‘Last one to fill their bucket is a big girl’s blouse!’ she yelled.
Callum followed her with a smile on his face. She was a good sport, this girl, he thought, as she ran on ahead, arms and legs flailing, knee-deep in cowpats, skirting in and out of the cows with their swishing tails from the top to the bottom of the field, whooping all the way, screaming with delight, then returning, triumphant, with a bucket of manure and a splash of muck on her face.
‘Race you back to the farm,’ he said laughing.
After they wiped the soil away from their hands, then washed them under a pump, they dumped the buckets of cowpats in the barrel of rainwater and gave it a good stir with an old broom handle. They were exhausted.
‘I’ll clean myself up properly and meet you in the shippen. We stink to high heaven, Babby!’
‘Right y’are,’ she answered. ‘It’s a good smell though, isn’t it? And it’s worth it to taste those tomatoes, any road.’
Half an hour later, washed and wearing a pretty print tea dress, unwrapping
the squashed squares of jam sandwiches that Mrs Reilly had prepared for them, she looked up and saw him standing in the shippen. His brows were knitted together and a worried smile creased around his mouth, so she knew something was wrong. He was panting, trying to catch his breath.
‘Mrs Reilly says you have to go back to Liverpool.’ Babby went pale. ‘Someone’s died.’
‘Mam?’ She could feel herself trembling.
‘No. Your aunt. I’m sorry.’
She had so many aunts, only one of whom was real.
‘Which one? Kathleen?’ she asked.
Mrs Reilly bustled in. ‘You told her, Callum?’
‘Is it true?’ asked Babby.
‘Yes,’ replied Mrs Reilly. ‘I’m afraid it is. But it’s not your Aunty Kathleen. It’s Pauline. Heart attack, they think. One minute she was in a chair, peg rugging, then she was dead.’
Babby could picture that, all right. Pauline, cutting up strips of old clothes and sewing them on to a hessian sack to make a hearthrug. Make do and mend had always been her motto. It seemed fitting that, whatever it was that had killed her, peg rugging might have played its part.
Mrs Reilly continued, ‘Must be a bit of a shock. And your mother would like you on the boat this afternoon.’
‘Oh.’ A rush of emotions surged through Babby. She didn’t want to go back to Joseph Street and she felt guilty for being annoyed with Pauline for the timing, and angry at Violet for ruining everything once again.
A Liverpool Girl Page 10