A Liverpool Girl

by Elizabeth Morton

  ‘Aye. She has. Now it’s your turn to be good to me.’

  And leaning in to her, he pushed her up against the wall and started to kiss her.

  ‘No!’ she cried. But not before he took her breasts in his hands. And she knew from his face when she winced and shoved him away because they were swollen and tender, that he understood why.

  ‘You’re having a babby? Our Babby is having a babby? You’re in the bloody club?’

  ‘N-no,’ she stuttered. ‘No, I’m not – i-it’s just …’

  He stood back and looked at her, with a mixture of shock and amusement.

  ‘Whatever you say, love, secret’s safe with me,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose, and winking.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she cried. ‘Bloody leave me alone!’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Violet was on her way to town. She had a new job on the cheese and meat counter at Grassington’s grocers and hated it. Her hair smelled of cheese and her fingers of meat and the worst thing she had to do was wash the bacon slicer at the end of the week. Today, she had decided to make a start on it but there was a queue of customers already building up when she arrived. It was there that Sister Agnes found her, deep in bacon fat and sweat breaking out on her forehead. The fat made her feel a little nauseous just to look at it, but not as nauseous as she felt when she saw the nun standing there, brows knitted together in a frown.

  ‘Mrs Delaney, I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ said a flustered Sister Agnes.

  ‘What, Sister?’ She felt that sinking feeling, a dull ache weighing heavily on her chest. She knew it must be something to do with Babby.

  ‘There has been a misunderstanding. Your daughter …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your daughter has … well, we thought you had given her permission to leave Saint Jude’s. She’s gone. I’m sorry …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of our girls, Collette O’Brien, told us today that it was your daughter who wrote the letter sent to us saying she had decided to keep her child, not you. Never underestimate what girls like these will do if they think it will win them a favour as it has Collette – she’s been allowed to visit her sister and no doubt is having a grand time in Blundellsands. But if it’s any consolation, the other girl responsible for colluding with your daughter has been severely reprimanded.’

  ‘What?’ Violet exclaimed, aware of the queueing customers. Why couldn’t you have told me this at my house? she wanted to ask. Had she deliberately come here to embarrass her so she couldn’t rail at their incompetence? ‘Where is Babby?’ she demanded to know.

  ‘I’m sorry. We thought that she would come back. They usually do. Usually they go back to their lovers, then return with their tails between their legs when they realise they really have no other choice to make. These chaps … Married, was he? The father?’

  Violet could feel her skin pricking. She was fuming. She herself could say what she liked about her daughter, but one thing she wasn’t going to put up with was someone else blackening Babby’s name in public. She was aware the people in the queue were stirring. They had the whiff of a bit of gossip in their nostrils, something they could take back to tell their friends and husbands to liven up their day. Ooh, you should have been there. Violet Delaney being torn to shreds by some nun. Her daughter has only gone and got herself knocked up. Well, what would you expect from the Delaneys? You heard what happened at the Boot Inn as was?

  ‘So how long has she been missing?’

  The nun shrugged.

  ‘How long?’ repeated Violet, undoing her pinafore ties, pulling it over her head. A man in the queue shouted a complaint. They’d been waiting for half an hour and now what were they supposed to do? ‘Climb over the counter and help our bloody sens?’

  Violet turned to the queue and apologised. ‘Sorry, my daughter’s in trouble,’ she muttered. And the woman standing behind the angry man told her to hush his mouth, couldn’t she see Violet was upset? The nun looked like she wasn’t to be trusted, muttered the woman, and the man agreed that that was about right.

  ‘Two weeks. We assumed she had gone back to you. It said so in the letter.’

  ‘What exactly did Babby say?’ asked a trembling Violet. ‘And how did she get out?’

  ‘She just left, Mrs Delaney – we’re not a prison. She has chosen the path she wants to walk and we can’t do much about that, I’m afraid. God loves a sinner, but your daughter is trying the Almighty. And she was a bad influence on the other girls with her pop music and preposterous notions about love.’

  ‘Move out of my way,’ said Violet. ‘MOVE out of my bloody way!’

  The nun humphed. Violet was in no mood for an argument, especially with half the store gawping and seemingly enjoying the spectacle of a woman in distress and a nun sneering at her. Violet, in a fluster of skirts and tossing back of hair, ran to get the girl on the fish counter to step in for an hour then swept away and left. When she found herself sobbing outside George Henry Lees, leaning on the plate glass window, looking behind it at a bed with a mink cover for sale for two hundred pounds, she thought how ridiculous the world had become to pay two hundred pounds for a bed … and wondered what on earth she was going to do now.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The sun rose as if it had a hangover. Seven more days had passed and Babby had asked Florrie if she could have a day off. She tearfully counted out the money that she had been keeping in a small jar beside her bead. Exactly twenty-one pounds. She slipped it into her pocket in a tissue. The woman’s anonymous voice at the end of the phone in Lydiate that she had called three days earlier had been practical but unfeeling. The last resort, Mary had said. And it really was the last resort, she thought, as her legs shook and a lump rose to her throat, and the voice answered yes, they could fit her in, she should meet the car outside Lewis’s department store, and don’t forget the money – the ten pounds. Babby wished she could have afforded to do this properly. There had been talk amongst the girls at Saint Jude’s that if you had a hundred and twenty pounds, you could go to a doctor who would sign a paper saying you were mentally unstable, unsuited to have a baby, then to a second who would say the same. It was safer and half-legal. But they had all agreed a hundred and twenty pounds was an absurd amount of money. So for Babby, it would have to be Mary’s last resort.

  Babby got off the double decker bus that pulled into Skelhorne Street bus station and made her way past the black cabs lined up in rows along the pavement, the drivers casually glancing up at her as she passed, her cheeks burning with shame each time it happened. She stood outside a café, trying to nonchalantly gaze at the Kit Kats arranged in a pyramid on a dusty coronation plate, whilst surreptitiously checking the time. Eleven o’clock. Down past the Adelphi Hotel and underneath the statue of the naked man outside Lewis’s, then she should find the alleyway.

  Her stomach was somersaulting and tying itself in knots at the thought of what she was about to do. Normally the twenty-foot high bronze figure of a man proudly stepping out in all his glorious nakedness would have made her smile, but today she fixed her eyes to the cracks in the paving slabs.

  ‘Are you looking for gold down there?’ a passer-by said. ‘You won’t find any, sweetheart.’

  ‘Sorry?’ she answered, startled.

  ‘Are you looking for gold …? Never mind.’ The passer-by could sense something was wrong and felt a twinge of sympathy for this girl, who seemed to be spinning into dust in front of his eyes.

  She turned away and didn’t answer. Raise your face to the sun, she thought.

  That’s what her Da always said. She was almost glad he wasn’t here to see this mess she had got herself into. But that was a terrible thought and she pushed it away. She pulled her coat around her. What if someone she knew was to see her? Even those who had never set eyes on her before could probably tell by the look on her face where she was heading.

  The shame. That was the worst. Perhaps worse than the act itself. Bloo
dy Christie – she’d hated him, teasing her like that. But as the moment approached, with Mary’s bit of paper turning damp in her sweating palm, she started to think about her baby. Being in the club, or having a bun in the oven, or up the duff – those phrases bore no resemblance to the thing itself, her actual baby growing inside her. She tried to push these thoughts out of her mind. When she passed a woman and her infant child, the faint sound of mewling coming from inside the beautiful Silver Cross pram squeaking on its springs and with its chrome glinting in sunlight, she felt a pang of sorrow for what she was about to do. Was it wrong? Of course it was. But what choice did she have? And Mary’s piece of scrunched-up paper? Well, this at least would give her a choice. And the money she had worked so hard to save. Was that so bad? To choose which direction her life would take?

  But yet again the thought of this child crowded her head – not a pregnancy, but a baby, a toddler now wheeling around in circles, like the one bowling towards her, tugging his mother’s coat – and now taking shape as a small boy of her own, or like the children she had passed earlier with their paper boats made out of newspapers, floating them across the pond in the gardens behind Saint George’s Hall. And then not a child any more, but a young man at school, wearing a back-to-front cap and a blazer and tie, weighed down by his schoolbags. Would her child have hated school as much as she had? Would he speak out of turn like she did? Would he be the kind that would be caught stealing crab apples and scrumping from Croxteth Hall, sneaking in over the wall after dark like her brother did, and her father and his father before that? And then the child became a man in her imaginings, like the two men with the Liverpool Echo under their arms, who stepped aside on the pavement to allow her to pass, heads bent in studied concentration. Her young man … She imagined him carrying the coal scuttle for her, then later, returning home with his sweetheart like the couple holding hands as they came through Lewis’s revolving doors, happy and in love, and laughing and excitedly discussing their new pop-up toaster. Finally, as the old man at the flower stall offered her roses, she imagined herself old too, with her boy planting a tender kiss on her greying head. All the possibilities of what this child could become came flooding into her head, crowding her thoughts in vivid technicolor. If only … if only …

  She snapped back into the present. On the opposite corner of Lewis’s she saw a man pause from cleaning the plate glass window and glance in her direction. Was it so obvious? She shivered in her coat and turned up the collar, and she could feel her legs trembling. How had this happened? It wasn’t fair. But life wasn’t fair. Violet had drilled that into her since the day she was born.

  And so she stood under the naked statue at the foot of the alley running down the side of the Lewis’s building, in pestering rain, and waited for a black Morris Oxford.

  The car pulled up exactly at eleven fifteen. She saw an image of herself, a fat liquid reflection on the bonnet, and it was as if she was looking at someone else. The man sitting in the driver’s seat got out, opened the rear door, and indicated to Babby to get in. He handed her a red spotted cravat. ‘You need to let me tie this around your eyes,’ the man said. ‘Got that? Have you brought the money?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  She handed him the tissue and he counted the notes and coins carefully. Then he leant over and tied the cravat around her head.

  ‘That’s a good girl. Now, put your head down, don’t draw attention to yourself,’ he said as they pulled away from the kerb. She could feel the backs of her knees, sweaty and sticky, flesh prickling against the cracked leather seat.

  He hadn’t quite tied the blindfold tightly enough and she twisted it slightly, hoping to get an idea of where they were going. She was sure they were driving north, uphill, past the hospital and the university; she heard the rattle of a tram and the hiss of a steam train, children chanting a skipping rhyme and booting a football against a wall, probably a school, then after about twenty minutes, out towards the countryside, where the fresh air heightened her senses. Finally, she decided they were probably heading to Lydiate, an area where she had once been strawberry picking, where there were fields and ditches, isolated farms, and rows of squat cottages. Wherever they were going, she was certain that she would remember this place forever. She was also certain she would remember the smell of the man’s aftershave, thick and musky and, right now, making her feel she was going to be sick, actually vomit in the car.

  Pulling outside a small house with a plume of lilac smoke coming from the chimney, the man said, ‘Take the blindfold off. Now get out and follow me, but keep looking at the ground.’

  As they got out of the car, she noticed he was glancing back over his shoulder, presumably worried that he was being followed.

  She stood for a moment, gazed at the dark-blue door of the cottage at the side of this road that had no name, the number six painted on the gatepost. There was a pigeon pecking about in the gutter, a small hole in the roof. There was absolutely no sign to indicate what went on inside. She wondered if it was just known as ‘the house with the blue door’. Did people gossip about what went on behind the closed, moth-eaten curtains and the occasional nervous young woman going up the step to ring the bell?

  The man pressed it, hard, with the heel of his hand. The door was opened by a thin woman wearing a paisley-patterned housecoat with pencilled-on arched eyebrows that made her face look like an exclamation mark and her hair in rollers under a chiffon headscarf. She led Babby into a poorly lit, cheerless kitchen. It smelled of cabbage and damp. It was stuffy and there was condensation on the inside of the grime-laced window, and Babby undid the top button of her shirt in order to breathe. The man who had driven her came in, finished a cigarette, then disappeared. The woman directed her through a low doorway to a smaller, airless, room. It was a kind of an outhouse, with whitewashed walls and a linoleum floor; a curtain patterned with pink flamingos was on a wire that curved around what looked like a gurney with wheels, pushed up against the wall.

  ‘Take your coat off, love, and go behind the curtain and slip your knickers off, there’s a good girl.’ Babby did just that and stuffed them in her pocket. She stood waiting, watching the shapes move on the other side of the curtain, listening to a tap running, a bowl being filled with water, hugging her arms around her for comfort, nudging up against a table with a metal band running around the edge of it and legs that stuck out at a slight angle.

  ‘You’ve no need to be frightened,’ said the woman, pulling back the curtain.

  A second woman came in. She wore half-moon spectacles that sloped upwards like cat’s eyes. ‘Jeanie Delaney?’ she asked, peering at Babby over the top of her glasses. Babby nodded and swallowed hard. ‘Mary sent you?’ the woman asked. Babby nodded again. ‘Come with me, dear.’

  When she went into the next room, she felt a rip tide of worry. The first thing that struck her was that it was full of steam and heavy streams of condensation ran down the sweating walls. This room had faded wallpaper, with a Chinese pattern of bamboo shoots. Some parts of it were peeling, curling up at the skirting boards and the corners. On a sideboard was a stainless-steel kettle and she caught sight of herself in it, her distorted face grimacing back at her. The woman gave her a sheet of paper and a pen and asked her to sign something that said she was agreeing to the ‘procedure’ with no recourse to action. Her hand shook as she scrawled her name on the dotted line. The letters undulated as she tried to focus on the smaller print on the other side of the page. There was a sink, a table covered with an old red chenille cloth draped over it, a towel on top of that, and a bed with no headboard. The woman told her to lie down, pull up her skirt. She laid her hands flat on Babby’s stomach. She was kind, told her it wouldn’t hurt. Well, only a bit. She measured her belly. ‘Four months, looks like,’ she said. ‘Shame you haven’t time on your side. One day – and let’s hope soon – this will be legal. Parliament are close to passing a new law. Amazing, really. You’ll be walking in through the front door of a hospital or
a clinic and no one can say a thing.’

  Babby didn’t really know what she was talking about, but she thought she meant that this was about as bad as it would ever be. The metal-pointed instrument lying on the table caught the light of the oil lamp and flashed as the woman moved it aside. ‘You’ve tried the mother’s ruin and the hot baths?’

  ‘Mother’s ruin? Oh, you mean gin?’

  ‘Yes. Never works. Unless you take it with a dash of quinine – and then you’d most likely end up dead, like some girls I know of. Desperate. We’ll sort you out, chicken …’ Chicken. The word turned strange in Babby’s mouth. She felt sick; partly nerves, partly because of the large glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey she had gulped down before she left the pub.

  The woman saw her looking at the instrument. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t use that unless it’s necessary. We’ll use the soap and the syringe … Now, take this pill first and you’ll drift off. Lie there for a minute and keep yourself calm – we need you to feel as relaxed as you can …’

  Babby covered herself with the blanket the woman gave her. She began to feel woozy and wondered what the pill was that she had just taken. She could hear a tap being turned on in the kitchen and there was the sound of gurgling pipes, a car engine fading away. Her eyelids became heavy and, as she closed her eyes, she had an image of the needle going in to her. Stab, stab, stab. Fainting with tiredness, a shape began to form in her head. She saw someone. Someone blurry, opalescent in the light, soft around the edges. It was her father. And then Violet. And then the statue of Our Lady at Saint Hilda’s smiling at her. She guessed Christie would be waiting. And Mary had made her promise to send her the news. She saw the headline in the evening paper. ‘Republican march ends in violence’. A great big brawl, petrol bombs, bonfires reaching the sky. Mary and her man would be celebrating that night. She would be dancing around the flames singing songs for her beloved Ireland, and causing merry hell with the rest of them. Thoughts rearranged themselves in her head. Sister Agnes was looking into a mirror and the mirror shattered into a thousand pieces. Violet again, now; she was drinking gin, thumping the glass on the kitchen table to the music of the accordion, but then the door slammed open and she cried out for Babby and begged forgiveness, blamed her husband for the lump of sadness in her heart. Callum, he wasn’t sleeping either, in her dreams. The bedclothes slid from his limbs, no matter how hard he tugged at them, and she was looking down on him as he was left shivering on the bed, with the faint sounds of singing in his ears – ‘That’s Amore’.