‘That one has the hots for you,’ Joey said, poking Mel in the ribs as Rita Golden passed them in the foyer. Joey Tate, heavy-set and dour-mouthed, was the senior usher at the La Scala who spoke always in asides. Older than Mel by a decade, he saw himself as Mel’s mentor; he wanted to see him right. He was a betting man; he lived on the vicarious crumbs of other people’s victories and disasters. He took equal pleasure in both. Rita Golden was with Imelda Harris, a tall girl with coppery hair and a green gaze. Even though they had only left the convent three weeks before, Imelda already seemed to Rita like a woman of the world. She had started her hairdressing apprenticeship at Eileen’s (late of New York) salon. Late of New York; it gave the poky shop on Great Brunswick Street an air of glamour and experience, as did its proprietor. Eileen, leathery-skinned and smoky-voiced, who called all of her customers ‘honey’. The girls parted on the street outside, Rita to cross the bridge over the river back to Mecklenburgh Street, Imelda to meet a date on the north side.
It was a June evening, the sun cooling on the cracked pavements. A mild sense of dissatisfaction had niggled at Mel since morning. After he clocked off, he knew that he and the boys would hang around the forecourt of the Mansions as they had done since they were twelve-year-olds, trading boasts and insults. Later, they might have a few pints, a game of darts or billiards, then on to a dance. He might get to walk a girl home; there would be some feverish groping in a doorway, a patch of flesh exposed as a consolation prize. He longed for a break from the predictable mechanics of boyhood companionship and the hot, laboured struggles – but rarely compliance – of a Gladys or Noreen.
‘Go on,’ Joey hissed, ‘dare ya!’
Rita Golden had barely registered with Mel, beyond a vision of a schoolgirl in tunic and tie cycling down Mecklenburgh Street, her fair hair afloat, the wings of her gaberdine coat flying. The notion that she might harbour some feelings for him had never occurred to Mel; he would never know that Rita Golden had nursed a furiously melancholy crush on him for several years. Flattered by Joey Tate’s narrow-eyed appraisal of his chances, Mel looked at Rita more closely. She was a tiny creature (four feet ten inches in her stockinged feet, he was to learn), with a nest of honey-coloured hair which seemed to clamour around her pert, pretty little face. Her eyes were impossibly clear, a blameless, baby-blue. And so out of boredom, and to match Joey’s gruff challenge, he followed her.
Afterwards he would remember every detail of that journey, considering it now like the condemned man’s path to the gallows. Over the stagnant river and down the dusty quays, the golden light of late summer dipping behind the domes and spires, a pink hue in the west. Left through a maze of cobbled alleys; then a piece of open ground, a large rubble-strewn patch. The Court Hotel which smelled of soiled carpets and stale hot dinners. St Xavier’s, set back from the street, only the gable porch visible, old confetti gathering at the kerb and the frocked figure of the sacristan spearing litter with a stick. The Lido Café. Mc Mahon’s the butcher’s, sawdust dragged out on the street, the word VICTUALLER set in brown and beige tiles below the window. Glimpse of the chopping block like the rump of a fossilised mammal and the sheen of the circular slicer. And there at the corner of Mecklenburgh Street, he caught up with her, and brazen as you like, as he told Joey later, he kissed a startled Rita Golden.
What he didn’t say was that he felt she had compelled him. The power of her yearning – the sum of three years’ infatuation – reached out and almost felled him. And Mel Spain, off-guard and seemingly invincible, surrendered. Only when he felt the hunger of that first embrace – for him, the showy flick of a card, find the lady – did Mel realise that Rita’s ardour was more powerful than any lazy affection he might be able to muster.
Three weeks later he took her to a derelict house on Rutland Street. For Mel it was an end, a way to be free of her hypnotic wistfulness. The house was propped up by two wooden crutches, as if it had polio. It smelt inside of damp masonry and a febrile rot. Underfoot, earth and rust-coloured rubble. Thistles sprouted around the shattered windows, the sills were bearded with moss. It was forbidden territory. Haunted. When she was younger, Rita and her friends had dared one another to go in there alone in the dark. A woman was said to have been murdered there, done in with a hatchet. Now Rita was here, but with a man (Mel, being four years older), which made it safe. And lying down on his spread-out jacket, that too was safe. And being stroked, his fingers in the crook of her neck, a hand on her bare thigh where he’d pushed up her skirt, murmuring words that sounded both venomous and sacred. He gasped when he touched her, as if it wounded him. And then … and then, it stopped being safe. Wan light drained from a mauve sky. Above, the rafters gaped …
They were living over her father’s shop on Mecklenburgh Street. Golden’s Boots and Shoes. This only added to Rita’s incredulity. She would wander through the house – the musty, brown, front parlour, rarely used since her mother’s death, the small front bedroom she had slept in for years, the cramped back kitchen giving off on to the shop – touching familiar things to reassure herself that she was on solid ground. The framed photographs on the sideboard, the grandfather clock on the return of the stairs, even the cups and saucers all remained resolutely, and infuriatingly, indifferent. She resented their stubbornness, their refusal to conspire in her transformation. It was hard for her, when she was alone like this, to believe that anything had changed. Only when she stood in front of the dressing table in her old room, and saw herself multiplied by three in the triptych mirror, did brute reality intrude. Then she would wistfully try to imagine herself back in the winter before. Back to a time when she had been Rita Golden. Plain and simple. A convent girl, the apple of her father’s eye, a late and much-longed-for only child. But the singularity of it defeated her, particularly when she looked down at herself, huge and distended, bloated to the size of two, and felt the sudden lurch of a baby’s kick. The morning sickness, her sudden aversion to the smell of shoe leather, even the heaviness of pregnancy had not dampened her euphoria. But the violent struggle she could feel within as if this being was resisting her, terrified Rita; it punctured the sickening kind of dreaminess she had nursed from the moment she had first laid eyes on Mel Spain.
If Rita could not grasp the sudden tumescence of her new life, then Mel felt his world to be shrinking. At night from the front room on Mecklenburgh Street he could see the prow of the Mansions and he felt like a man stranded, an emigrant who has disembarked at the wrong port. He had wanted to get away. But the teeming world of the Mansions, the noisy balconies and stairways echoing with bawling rows and bawdy endearments, the ragged laundry hangdog on the communal lines, the battered playground, seemed huge and certain as an ocean-going liner, while he was becalmed, bobbing uselessly on a lifeboat with a fretful child-bride and a baby on the way.
A TINKER WOMAN had come to the door when Rita was six months gone. She heard the finger on the bell and waited, as she always did, for the hand outside to release the second chime. Once she would have bounded to answer. She always expected an extraordinary stranger at the door – a man, of course – a lost blood relation from the States or the pools man with news of a good fortune. The sandalled Franciscan, bearded and bird-eyed, barefoot even in the depths of winter, who doled out holy pictures, the soot-faced chimney sweep, even the piano tuner, she welcomed extravagantly as lucky emissaries from the outside world. But pregnancy had made her listless, and the smells of the trading street, a mixture of fumes and fetid fruit, left her queasy. She opened the door gingerly. A stout, weather-beaten woman stood outside with a sleeping child swaddled in a tartan rug on her hip.
‘A few coppers for the child, God bless you, ma’am.’
The woman hoicked the child further up on her hip and swayed dangerously.
‘I’d do the pendulum for you,’ she offered eyeing Rita’s bump.
Rita believed in signs. They ruled her life. Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle; never put a new shoe on the table. She had had her
palm read. And sure enough, a tall, dark stranger had entered her life. Mel Spain.
She invited the woman in. She boiled milk for the child and filled the grimy bottle his mother proferred. He fed hungrily, making loud, sucking noises, while his mother swung Rita’s wedding band on a length of thread over Rita’s belly.
‘It’s a boy,’ she declared, showing a mouthful of gold.
Rita, splay-legged, rejoiced. This, at least, might make Mel happy.
It had never struck Rita that it would be hard to make someone happy. She thought it would just happen. Tutored by the oiled romance of movies she had not counted on the knotty perplexities of intimacy. The grinding silences at mealtimes, the grim scrape of cutlery. Her father worrying at gristle between his teeth while Mel wolfed hungrily as if there was a danger the plate might be whipped away before he was finished. He mopped up the grease with wads of white bread which he tore into pieces before stuffing them into his mouth.
‘Any more?’ he would ask with his mouth full.
She was afraid of his appetite. No matter how much she cooked there never seemed to be enough; she felt accused, as if she were being a bad wife.
‘Oliver asks for more,’ her father would say slyly.
Rita would stand up decisively and start stacking. For the first time in her life Rita began to resent him. His wronged silences punctuated with deep sighs as if he couldn’t bear the heaviness of his disappointment. He had been like this ever since she had told him about being in the family way (that was how she had said it; not ‘having a baby’, that seemed too terrifyingly concrete). She had expected anger; what she got was defeat. He had denied her the chance to rail against him, to justify her love for Mel.
‘Well,’ he simply said. ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’
It was Lily Spain who had insisted on the marriage; in years to come Rita would hate her for this; she blamed all the messy intricacies of her life on that ill-fated shotgun wedding. She had set up an expectation of respectable happiness which would dog Rita to the end of her days.
‘Never let it be said,’ Lily had warned Walter Golden in the parlour upstairs ‘that any son of mine shirked on his responsibilities.’
She had come around for a ‘pow-wow’, as Mel had put it. Then, Rita and Mel had been able to joke about it. Like children who had outwitted the adults, they had sat together in this very room, racked with stifled explosions of laughter while above them, Mel’s mother huffed and puffed and Rita’s father appeased. Rita remembered how their wicked delight had made them reckless; they had sneaked into the darkened shop and done it again on the polished floor, among the bargain bins and the footstools. It was rougher than the first time; it had felt like a contest, as if they were wrestling with one another to see who would win. He pinioned her to the ground, his hands manacling her arms, his unshaven jaw scalding her cheek. She found herself struggling, while willing him to finish, aware suddenly of the profanity of this coupling within earshot of her father. He planted a love bite on her breast. By morning there was a blossom of a bruise.
‘Did I do that?’ he had asked.
She had expected remorse. But he was proud. Proud that he had marked her.
Except that Walter Golden knew the La Scala existed, he would have suspected his new son-in-law of being a criminal. He kept the hours of one, lounging in bed until noon, leaving the house at dinner time and not returning until the early hours. Like a hotel guest, Mel came and went. Days would go by and Walter would not see him at all, or if he did it was only as a shambling, tousled apparition framed for a moment in the doorway en route from bedroom to bathroom. In the mornings Walter was forced to tiptoe about and whisper; the sanctity of Mel’s sleep was observed reverently as if he was the man of the house. He did not know which angered him most – seeing Mel or not seeing him. His presence irritated Walter, his swagger, his brutal unconcern for the misfortune he had brought upon them. But his absence gave no respite either. Rita’s condition was a constant reminder. Walter had known no good could come of this marriage but he had not raised a word of protest. The child could have been adopted and Rita could have made a fresh start. But, in truth, he had been afraid of opposing her. Love, or whatever the puppyish infatuation she felt for Mel, had changed her. It had given her command. He had seen the mettle of her certainty and was frightened of it. He knew he was no match for her. It was ridiculous, but Mel had made a woman of her.
The workings of women were as mysterious to Walter Golden as the innards of clocks. There were lots of cogs and wheels he didn’t understand the use of but even the minutest of them had teeth. He remembered his late wife’s passionate wilfulness, the sudden descent of a gloomy mood, the equally alarming outbursts of gaiety. He was an ageing man alone, a merchant, a strictly over-the-counter man. He lived by the tenets of modest, honest trade. Quiet and honourable, he was at sea when it came to the stormy wilfulness of emotions. What you see is what you get, he would tell the customers in the shop, a declaration as much about himself as the merchandise.
‘The trouble with you Wally, me boy,’ his brother, Bartley, had said at the wedding, ‘is that if it were left to you, nobody would be good enough for your Rita.’ He let out a beery guffaw, hot and stale. ‘So it might as well be this young lad Spain as anyone else.’
His wife, Gracie, shushed him. ‘Poor Connie would have been very proud,’ she said gazing regretfully at Walter.
Poor Connie, Walter thought, poor Connie indeed. Rita’s mother would be turning in her grave; three years before she had collapsed in the shop, a blood clot to the heart. He marvelled at his sister-in-law’s provocative insincerity, a delicate balance of sympathy and venom. Her intention was to wound – but politely. Long years in trimmings had made her a woman who examined everything; the stuff of Rita’s dress, the table settings, the bridesmaid’s bouquet; she had already calculated the cost of the reception. She fingered the pillars on the tiered cake and changed the subject.
‘Are these edible?’ she asked.
Rita Golden was lost. Her own name seemed strange to her, like a faint tinselly echo, or a glittering promise withdrawn. Rita Golden had no history. No sooner had she taken flight, a shaky fledgeling on a short, tentative foray from the nest, than she had been preyed upon. She no longer knew herself, a married woman, a mother-to-be. Rita Golden, or the notion of her, was fading away. Rita felt a mournful kind of pity for this motherless girl, roaming the summer streets full of a vague and tender optimism. For a brief time Rita Golden had lived and then she’d been killed off by getting what she had always wanted. The boy from the Mansions.
THE BABY CAME early. Rita woke, paralysed by some instinct, and listened to the ticking of her own body. That was how she saw it now, as something separate and wilful, which, if she moved gingerly, would not cause her grief. She knew something was wrong, or rather she was aware of an imminence, a bracing alertness in her limbs. She felt them crouching, ready to leap. The knowledge her body had, which she did not, frightened her. She ascribed this extra sense she seemed to have gained to the baby. She imagined it as a wizened old creature, wise in the ways of the world, wiser than she was. She listened to the throb and gurgle as if she had turned to liquid and then, almost as soon as she had thought it, the waters broke in one big glop. The sudden gush made her feel as if she had lost all her substance. She expected her belly to shrivel up like a balloon while she, having abandoned her gravity, would drift away high into the corner of the room. She lay for a moment, revelling in this sensation of release, before alarm registered.
‘Mel, Mel…!’
His face was buried in the pillow as if to shut out all trace of her. He complained about sleeping with her. She was too big, he muttered. He groaned and opened a sticky eye. ‘It’s the baby, Mel, it’s coming …’
All she could remember was the pain of it. A sluggish, damp pain alternating with a searing clenching in her groin as if her body wanted to keep its prize. She felt herself at sea, rolling and heaving on crashing waves, her bro
w drenched, sweat dripping from the tips of her hair as she battled with ropes to keep her boat afloat. But it was too heavy for her. She could feel the swell of an angry tide tugging beneath her, dragging her down.
‘Push, push,’ the voices roared above the din of her pain.
But she was too weary. Her shoulders ached, her hands were slippery from clinging to the edge. She felt she was going to be split in two, she and the boat alike, sliced into two halves.
‘It’s in distress …’ she heard them say.
The crew rushed forward, a practised jailer’s arm on each of her limbs.
They were going to throw her overboard. Women and children first … they cut her open.
She caught a glimpse of a bloodied little bundle, raw angry skin, a bloated head with a sodden down of black hair. She struggled to rise but they pushed her down. Someone mopped her temple. It was deliciously cool. It made her head feel as if it was floating above her body, which was throbbing viciously below her somewhere, lost in the depths.
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