‘Oh, hello, Alice, how lovely to see ye. Are ye stopping for a cuppa?’ Mrs McGuire said, before she had even taken her coat off.
Sean’s mother was half the size of her son and a fine-looking woman. On her visit from her village just outside of Galway, she had adopted the Liverpool custom of leaving her curlers in underneath a hairnet. It was not something she did back at home, where they didn’t bother with the curlers. A headscarf was good enough.
But now Mrs McGuire was looking worried.
‘Brigid, Caoimhe does not like that school, I’m telling ye, she does not. I almost had to push her through the door. If ye ask me, the nuns in Liverpool are different altogether from the nuns in Ireland.’
Brigid said, ‘I know, Mrs McGuire, but what can I do? The nuns say she will get used to it soon enough.’
Mrs McGuire was having none of it.
‘Aye, she might that, but if you ask me, those nuns are too cruel. One of them slapped her across her little legs because she was crying for me. Dragged her in through the door by her arm, the sister did. She doesn’t get that at home, Brigid, so why should she have to take it at school? Broke my heart, so it did, to leave her at the gate. Why won’t the nuns let us into the yard to say goodbye? Cruel, so it is.’
Brigid was only half listening as she mixed a spoon of molasses into Joseph’s bottle and handed it back to Alice, full of the dark liquid.
‘Here, give that to Joseph,’ she said, wiping the bottle with a tea towel.
‘I will, thanks, but what on earth is in it?’ asked Alice, as she smelt the teat of the bottle.
‘It’s a bit of molasses, nicked from one of the tankers, mixed with a little warm water and a dissolved Disprin, mixed in with Joseph’s milk to take the pain out of his teeth. He’ll have a lovely morning nap after that.’
Alice nervously tipped the bottle and put it into Joseph’s mouth. His eyes opened as wide as saucers when he took the first mouthful.
‘See, they love it,’ said Brigid. ‘Kathleen will have a jar of molasses in the cupboard; just a spoon and he will be fine, but only a little. You can mix it in with the milk once a day, but be careful he doesn’t get used to it now and want it all the time. The tankers don’t come in every day and we have to take it in turns as to who gets the drippings from the loadings.’
‘My God, that is the first time he has smiled in days,’ said Alice, sitting down on the chair to nurse Joseph, who was sucking so furiously that she was afraid to break his stride.
She was also watching Sean’s mammy, and waiting for an opportunity to talk to her about America. She leapt in almost straight away.
‘So, do you get to visit your daughter in America, Mrs McGuire?’
‘I do, Alice, and sure ’tis a wonderful place altogether. They pay for my fare to go and beg me to live there with them, but sure I can’t, unless Sean and Brigid decide to go too. I can’t leave them behind with all these babies to look after on their own, can I?’
Searching for the molasses had given Brigid an excuse to tidy out the press and wipe out the drawers. She gave Alice a sideways look as she emptied out the contents onto the kitchen table and wiped down the shelves. She had noticed Alice and Sean were in animated conversation about America on Saturday night. The conversation had made Brigid uncomfortable and she didn’t want Alice starting to talk about it again to Sean’s mammy.
‘I have a mammy too, Alice,’ said Brigid haughtily. ‘And I have an opinion, and I’m afraid America is not for me and Mrs McGuire knows that. If the boot was on the other foot, you wouldn’t want me to be dragging Sean away over to America and leaving ye all alone, now would ye, Mrs McGuire?’
The temperature in the room had noticeably dropped and Alice stood to take her leave. She was amazed by Brigid’s lack of ambition and thought how much she wished she could change places with her. She would even have a dozen kids if it meant getting away from Liverpool and on a boat to America.
Later that evening, Sean won three matches in a row. It had been a good fight and he had pocketed seven pounds and ten shillings from each match. More than he took in a week’s wages on the docks.
He was doing better than he had ever dared to hope and his savings were mounting up.
This was a relief. He had to train hard and, what with his job, it meant he was hardly ever at home. Boxing was a means to an end. He didn’t enjoy working on the docks, but at least with the boxing he fought for the money and it was his. He wasn’t lining the pockets of the thieving bastards over at the Mersey Dock Company.
As Sean walked home, it occurred to him that there were many things in his life he wasn’t happy with, other than having to work every moment God sent.
One of them was Brigid’s constant reluctance to talk about the day he was saving for, when they could pack up and leave for America, and join his family in Chicago. He wanted to work hard for himself and his family. To be in charge of his own destiny.
In America, he knew his efforts would be rewarded with a better life for them all.
In England, he struggled to save. Each week he made the dock company wealthier and had his head punched in every Friday night. Life had to be better than that.
His sister’s letters were full of the most innocent yet enticing details.
His mother could not stop talking about the opportunies for those prepared to take a risk and put in the graft.
Already his sister and her husband were earning a small fortune, enough to buy their own home and pay for his mother to sail to America twice a year. This summer they had been to Florida for a holiday and had sent him a postcard. It made his stomach crunch to think how much easier and more prosperous life was for them.
Sean decided that he would talk to Brigid again when he got into bed. He would wake her up if he had to. Brigid had to stop this ridiculous, small-minded clinging onto what she knew and realize that emigrating to America was for the good of the family.
‘Jeez, what is up with the woman?’ he said out loud as he shook his head.
He loved home as much as the next Irishman, but even in Galway there was nothing for Sean other than poverty and then more poverty for his kids too. He punched the entry wall with his fist as he turned the top corner and, for the first time that night, his knuckles bled. Lucky that he had another week for the skin to heal over.
As Sean looked up he was shocked to see Alice standing by her back gate. He had enjoyed talking to her at the Irish centre. She had none of Brigid’s reserve. They had spoken most of the night about America. Alice had told him she had kept all the brochures she had found that had been left by guests staying at the Grand before taking their passage across the Atlantic, and that sometimes she still read through them.
God, Jerry doesn’t know how lucky he is, thought Sean. I wish I was married to someone who had a spirit like Alice.
‘Everything all right, Alice?’ Sean asked.
‘Yes, everything is fine, Sean. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I want to know so much about how to get to America, and to try to persuade Jerry that it would be such a good idea. I wondered if we could talk again some time?’
Alice felt a thrill that came only when she was in her own secret world. Talking out her fantasies with Sean, without Jerry or anyone else being aware, was exciting. She wanted to know Sean better.
‘Would you mind not telling Jerry or Brigid that I asked, though?’
‘Aye, of course, and don’t worry, I won’t mention anything. If Jerry is as stubborn as Brigid, I know exactly what ye mean.’
Alice glanced up at the bedroom window, where Jerry had been sleeping for the last hour. As she looked back at Sean, her eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Sean noticed there was something different, unusual about her. Was she wearing lipstick? Unlike the other women, Alice never ever wore a hairnet and she had styled her hair in the fashion of the girls who worked in the offices in town.
Her deep fringe swept almost over her eyes, with the rest of her hair hanging loose on her shoulders.
>
Alice had experimented with changes every day for weeks. Sean had noted that she was always a little smarter than the other women on the four streets, in a very English kind of way. No one had seen much of her for years and yet suddenly it was as if she was everywhere.
This was the third time he had seen Alice in as many days.
Alice noticed the blood running down Sean’s fingers. She reached out and took his hand in hers, examining it and dabbing his knuckles with her apron, making him flinch.
‘Oh, my goodness, is that from your fight?’ She looked up at him, holding both of his huge hands in hers, her eyes wide, and turned over the damaged hand to search for further signs of injury.
Alice now took her handkerchief out of her pocket and, wetting it with her saliva, began dabbing away at the open graze.
‘No, Alice,’ Sean laughed. He had knocked three men out cold tonight without a scratch. How could he tell her it was from punching the entry wall? ‘I skimmed my hand on the wall as I walked past,’ he said, pulling away.
The sensation of another woman holding his hands made him uncomfortable. Not because it was unpleasant, in fact it was just the opposite. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced for a long time.
He had enjoyed talking to Alice on Saturday night. He had noticed that she had become prettier as the months went by. Since Kathleen had moved into the four streets, Alice had filled out and was no longer the skinny wretch she had once been.
There was an air of aloofness, of reserve about her that Sean quite liked. She wasn’t like the Irish girls at home who were apt to be overly friendly in their search for a husband. Alice had a detachment, which he now realized was quite exciting.
‘It will be fine. I will run it under the tap when I get in.’
Sean gazed down. He could smell the warmth of her hair and was overcome by a sudden compulsion to bend down and kiss her.
The entry was asleep. Dark and deeply quiet.
‘Sure, Alice, I am fine,’ he said. ‘It is no problem, really.’
Alice, resigned, pushed the handkerchief up her sleeve again and, drawing her cardigan across to keep out the night air, lifted her face to Sean.
‘Sean, I think I said too much in front of your mother when I visited this morning and I really hope I haven’t caused a problem. It’s just that nothing pleases me more than talking about the prospect of living in America and Jerry won’t even hear about it. I feel very lonely sometimes and would love to talk to someone who feels just as I do.’
Sean looked down at Alice’s hand, which she had placed on his arm whilst she leant forward and whispered to him. She had made the same gesture when he had seen her outside of the shop. It was friendly and intimate. The sensation burnt through his coat sleeve. A warm hint of perfume wafted upwards and distracted him. He realized that never, in all the time he and Brigid had been together, had he smelt the feminine scent of perfume.
Alice was no longer the plain Protestant English girl. She was now almost pretty and, to Sean, in the midst of an assault on his senses, she was certainly very sexy.
Not because of what she wore, or how she looked, although that did play a part. But because of what she said.
She was talking his language and it was playing with his mind.
‘I am working the graveyard shift tomorrow. Why don’t you come down to the café on the Dock Road and we could have a chat, before I walk home?’ Sean suggested.
‘Great, that’s fantastic, I would love to. I will see you there ten minutes after the klaxon then.’
Alice put her hand on the back gate and lifted the latch.
He smiled. She smiled. They lingered.
The moon glinted from the wet cobbled pavement whilst millions of stars shone and bore witness to the silent messages that flew from one pair of eyes to the other.
Nothing either of them could now do would erase those first few moments.
It had begun.
Sean had already had sex once that day.
Brigid was so scared of becoming pregnant yet again that she often slipped into the bedroom when Sean was washing after work and went down on her knees to satisfy her husband, in order to avoid full sex later.
She regarded it more as a daily task to be completed, rather than an expression of love or intimacy.
An act of efficiency. Two jobs in the time of one. Sean sorted. All finished and done in ten minutes.
The women talked openly and graphically about sex. Their jokes were as ribald as the men’s. Each knew exactly who had sex and when. Every woman in the four streets often knew when another was pregnant, even before her own husband did.
Sex provided a reason to complain. An excuse to be ill.
The detail of conversations was always explicit and uninhibited.
Brigid was the only woman on the four streets who undertook this ungodly act and she was frequently besieged with questions from the others, appalled by what she did. Following the third child, they would never willingly volunteer to have sex of any description and went to imaginative lengths to avoid it, all except Maura.
Enthralled, they pressed Brigid for details each time they met in Maura’s kitchen for a cuppa and a gossip.
‘What does it taste like?’ asked Maura, more curious than disgusted.
‘It surely has to be a sin, Brigid. Do ye pray for forgiveness?’ asked Sheila.
‘Sure, I do. I never miss six o’clock mass, Sheila. I’m only a sinner for a few minutes. The father is fabulous and kind, so he is. He asks me for all the little details and I mean every one, to guarantee I am fully absolved, because, sure, we both know I will do it again,’ said Brigid. ‘He always asks me do I enjoy meself and I always answer, not at all, so that makes it all right, I reckon.
‘Confessing to the father takes almost as long as keeping Sean happy. I spend longer on me knees praying for forgiveness and saying Hail Marys than I do with Sean’s langer in me mouth. But I’d rather that than have another baby in me belly just now.’
All the women laughed at this, some with genuine mirth, others in utter amazement at Brigid’s audacity.
‘Ye can still get pregnant doing that disgusting thing, so ye can,’ said Peggy when they had all calmed down. ‘Ye might think ye is being clever, but ye will still end up with another babby. Do what I do. Just tell Sean to feck off and stop bothering ye.’
‘Oh my God, has Sean tried it on with you too, Peggy? That’s disgustin’, the man is a fiend,’ squealed Deirdre from Tipperary, who always got the wrong end of the stick.
‘Jesus, no,’ screamed Peggy. ‘Sean may be the big man around here, but he’d know what a fist was, to be sure, if he tried anything on with meself.’
Brigid often wondered if she would ever one day tell them how she had discovered the way to keep Sean happy and to stop herself from becoming pregnant more often than she already was. Brigid knew she never could. It would be a betrayal and, besides, it was a sinful thing to do to speak in such a way of the dead. Bernadette and Brigid had shared many secrets and her special way to keep Sean happy had been one. Let the leaves of the sprawling oak tree, each one as big as a lady’s hand, fan the summer breeze across her grave. Let her be in peace, with the daffodils, tulips and wild primroses in the spring. Red roses and lilac in the summer. Burnt-orange chrysanthemums in the autumn. All provided by the old woman, selling her flowers for sixpence a bunch, from a metal pail at the cemetery gate which Brigid placed in the old, discoloured jam jar at the foot of her headstone.
Often, when running back from six o’clock mass, Brigid would notice that the old flower woman had left for the day.
Having taken the remaining flowers from her pail and shaken the slimy water and strings of bright green moss free from the naked stalks, she would lay the tired blooms with drooping, sleepy heads against the gate railings, for the gravediggers to collect and lay on some lonely and forgotten grave.
Brigid would pick up a few of the blooms (she never took them all) and then, running up the path, she
would take the flowers to the friend she had not forgotten, Bernadette.
Brigid never confessed to the other women that, when they were all gathered in Maura’s kitchen together, Bernadette was sitting at the table with them, too. She was sure of it.
Laughing and smiling with them.
When they banged their mops on the walls to summon each other to a powwow, they were also waking one of the dead.
They would think she was mad.
Maybe she was mad. Maybe it was her mind playing tricks. Over the last week Brigid had felt strongly as though Bernadette was trying to send her a message. It made Brigid uneasy, in a way she could not put into words, nor did she want to.
Maybe she hadn’t seen her, but she was sure she had.
At first, Sean had enjoyed Brigid’s routine.
An act, provided by his loving wife, thought to be in the domain of prostitutes alone, had been exciting. It had thrilled him. He knew he was lucky and that there were many men on the four streets who would die happy if their wives would do the same just once in their lifetime.
But now it had become robotic. He had his allotted few minutes, amongst her tightly choreographed domestic tasks, and it was the same every single day. His needs were just another item on her domestic checklist, slotted somewhere between dishes, mopping the floor and mass. He resented it.
But not tonight. Alice had stirred him.
Tonight he wanted full and proper sex. The kind that was normal between a man and wife. He would whisper to Brigid that he would jump off at Edge Hill and that she wouldn’t become pregnant. He needed her closeness. To feel her in intimacy and warmth, like it used to be. He was desperate for reassurance that they were a team.
Like Jerry, Brigid had been asleep for over an hour when Sean slipped into bed, began kissing her neck and slowly lifting up her nightdress.
She was exhausted. Between teething toddlers and nursing babies, she had achieved only three hours’ sleep the previous night.
‘What are ye doing that for? Stop it now,’ she whispered, as she clambered up through the layers of sleep and looked at him with bleary eyes. She knocked his hand away. ‘You’ve already been sorted today and ye will wake yer mammy, sleeping downstairs below us.’
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