He folded the paper irritably and went over to the window. It was already lowered as far as it would go though it was making little difference. Just a faint breeze coming across from the Docks would be welcome, but there was nothing. Many of the crews on the vessels that came up the canal from Liverpool would be relishing this heat but he was just sticky, desperately uncomfortable and totally fed up. He rested his arms on the lowered window and watched the children playing noisily in next door’s back yard. They had taken the zinc bath off the yard wall, filled it from the tap, and were screaming with laughter as they hurled cold water at each other.
The backyards of the houses formed into an interesting honeycomb pattern, intersected by the dark line of the entry that ran between them. But the symmetry ended with the shapes. As well as their own backyard, there were half-a-dozen others that appeared to have been whitewashed this year. Others were tired and flaking, whilst a lot had never been touched at all. He could see ladders leaning up against the wall in four of the houses, although he knew that there would be more houses where the ladders were stored on hooks in the wall. He counted nine houses where washing was already hanging on the lines, drying quickly in the hot sun. Most of the frames and doors were painted in rather drab colours of brown, green or black but Harry Jones across the way was already out there, no shirt on, painting his a vibrant red. He worked at the tram depot on Frederick Road.
Callum stared glumly at next door’s children. They now had a short length of hose attached to the tap and were trying to spray the cat which eyed them suspiciously from the top of the wall. As the jet of water approached, the cat took the safe option and scampered off along the coping stones. The dog from two doors down began barking furiously.
He hadn’t really noticed the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony at Central Hall; in fact, he had barely listened to any of the music. He had positioned himself about three rows behind the sparkling young lady and her aunt from the queue, and his head had buzzed throughout the whole of the evening with the brief conversation that they had had. He knew that he had acquitted himself badly with his clumsy explanations of his understanding of the 6th symphony. He must have sounded gauche and Philistine, stumbling in his efforts to express ideas which he had never before been asked to convey. She was beautiful, bright, perfumed, and the brief cool touch of her hand on his had seduced his senses for the whole of the evening.
He heard a thud as the front door was closed and voices coming into the room below. His mother had a visitor, a male. He strained to listen to who it might be but the sounds soon became clearer as they entered the living room. The window was wide open down there as well.
‘Will you be sitting yourself down there, Father, and taking your jacket off?’ he heard his mother say. ‘I’ll put the kettle on and make us a pot of tea. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you a stronger liberation but we don’t have such things in the house, especially with our Callum never touching it.’
‘I’m sorry, I…, ah, a libation, Mrs Murphy. No, no, no. A cup of tea will be fine. I do believe that it helps to cool you down in this hot weather. But I will take my coat off. It does begin to get a little uncomfortable.’
‘You could do with asking your Pal up there to be sending us a bit of a draught down. I am perspirating so much, I feel as though I have been wrung out.’
Callum heard the kettle being filled then his mother’s head appeared through the door below. ‘Callum,’ she shouted, ‘do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Harry Jones across the way shouted as he jumped in surprise, mistaking the shrill call for that of his wife who had gone out shopping. ‘I’ve spilt sodding red paint all down my chest now.’
‘Well that will teach you to be listening in to other people’s conversations,’ Callum’s mother shouted over. ‘And mind your language, Harry; I have the Reverend round to visit.’
Callum smiled at his mother’s slightly disrespectful reference to the padre, who much preferred to be addressed as Father. ‘Well sod the Reverend,’ Harry Jones shouted over the walls to his unseen neighbour. ‘What’s she going to say now when she comes back? Bloody red paint all down me. She’ll start panicking, thinking I’ve been stabbed or something.’
‘You should learn to be a bit more careful. I’m only asking our Callum if he wants a cup of tea.’
‘Well bloody ask him quietly instead of bawling down the whole street, frightening the life out of folk. He’s only up there with his head through the window.’
His mother looked up and saw him at the window. ‘Oh, there you are. Well, I didn’t know where you had got to, did I? I didn’t know whether you were up there or down the yard medicating like you do. I don’t know what you find to do when you go in there.’
‘He probably goes in there to read the paper like I do,’ Harry Jones shouted across. ‘It’s the only place that you can get a bit of peace and quiet in our house.’
‘No thanks, Mam,’ Callum said. ‘I don’t want a drink. I might go out in a bit.’
He moved from the window and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She had turned her head a few times, scanning the audience, before she spotted him and waved brightly. Even after two weeks, he could still feel the cool sensation of her hand holding his; it had become a dominant force in his head, reducing everything else to irrelevances. As the music had played, his mind had raced with apposite sentences that he could have used to make himself sound less of a buffoon. She had seemed so friendly but he realised that it would all have been pleasant superficialities. Her aunt had been less reluctant to show her distaste, anxious to usher her ward forward. There was a gulf, an unbridgeable, unspoken gap that had not escaped the exacting scrutiny of Aunt Agnes. No matter how much he loved his concerts, relishing the music as the sounds insinuated every fibre in his body, the brief and fascinating conversation was all he could ever aspire to. The fact remained, and was marked by the slight but clear distaste in the face of the aunt, that he was working class and they, very definitely, were not. He would have more chance of courting a Catholic girl.
Rolling off the bed, he searched in the dark space under the iron frame for his shoes. The padre’s visits had become more frequent as his mother’s attendances at the Sunday services and the women’s gossip groups had reduced. He was anxious that one of his flock should not stray but Callum felt no need to listen to his ministrations. He would take a walk up to Buile Hill Park and watch the dancing. The park, a leisure resource for the more aspirational community in Seedley, was also a natural boundary to the affluent areas on the Height. It was as near to them as the people of his class could get.
Chapter 11
Liam pushed on the heavy door and stepped into the cavernous space of the Cathedral Church of St John’s. There was a lingering smell of incense that strangely unsettled him. He remembered the haranguing sermons, the incomprehensible Latin incantations, the tedium of the mass, the mysticism of breaking bread and taking wine. Standing in the doorway a few seconds to let his eyes adjust to the gloom after the bright sunlight of the outside, Liam read the notices on the board. A palm leaf cross was pinned above a list of names on the flower rota, a timetable giving details for the times of worship throughout the week, a note lamenting the sudden death of Mr Simeon Greatorex and another announcing the illness of Mrs Millicent Langan.
Straightening his jacket, he patted down his hair and polished the toes of his shoes on the back of his trousers. It was many years since he had stepped through that door and he felt nervous and apprehensive. Outside, workmen had been busy taking down the turrets on the front of the building whilst trucks and trams passed noisily up and down Chapel Street. Here in the nave there was a tranquil, embracing silence. Powerful fluted columns, around which they had chased each other after choir practise, rose majestically to pointed arches. He stepped into the central aisle and looked down to the raised marble dais, in the background, the magnificent stained glass window. Endless representations in coloured glass segments of magnificen
tly robed men presided importantly over the church. Were they saints, bishops, maybe popes or kings? He had never known.
There was just one other person in the church – a woman kneeling, deep in prayer, near to the front, her shawl pulled over her head. Easing himself into one of the seats, he lowered his head and closed his eyes briefly, quickly opening them again when he heard a chair scraping on the tiled floor. The woman was lifting herself to her feet and collecting together her shopping bags. She smiled at him as she passed. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Murphy. Are you keeping well?’
‘Ah, yes, thank you Mrs erm…’ The door thudded into place behind her and the deep silence prevailed. He closed his eyes again. The words would not form easily into coherent sentences; he felt uncomfortable with the thought of serious praying after all this time and tried to remember the modes of address that had been used by Bishop John. He wished that he had paid more attention at the time but there had always been too many distractions. Picking itchy scabs off football injuries; dropping coins onto the marble floor during a tedious sermon; bringing caterpillars to church in matchboxes and racing them along the backs of the seats, a prank which later brought a severe reprimand from the fearsome Sister Maria.
Quick, throw-away prayers in the mayhem of the trench were not the same as coming into His house and trying to collect confused thoughts into a plea for help. Would God even remember him? He moved his position and sat in a shaft of dusty sunlight. ‘Dear God…’ Where were the words, for goodness sake? He had been a proud man the last time that he had walked out of a church, Bridget on his arm, the future full of promise. Now he came as a bumbling failure. Was he being punished for what had happened in the war and was it fair to make his family suffer as well? He needed words to explain how he never used to actually pull the trigger. Not at first, anyway. Would God understand that, in the end, he had had to? When he had seen Alfie Armstrong and Mick Hibbert, both choirboys from this church, Dear God, falling in Gallipoli, he knew that he had to. Because then he had realised that if he had fired in the first place, the Turkish gunner might have been put out of action and Mick and Alfie could still have been alive. What else could he do, Dear God? He was a nothing in that big machine, a nothing with orders to obey, told that he had to fight for his country. It was an honourable cause but, Dear God, it was dog-eat-dog out there. And when they came over into your trench, screaming, bayonets raised, wild eyes, and you looked them in the face before…’
The stillness in this cavernous, quiet space was calming, the glowing sandstone warming. He relaxed as the sturdy strength of the stone structure embraced him. This church had provided a framework of unquestioned authority in his young life, curbing the mischievousness of his boyhood and the excesses of his youth. It had imbued him with a strong sense of community, an awareness of the fruitful interdependence between young and old, a supportive interlocking of all who came through those doors. He had missed it as his life had moved away from the church: yearned for it in the mayhem of the battlefield.
Liam had been troubled about coming here, fearful of the damning judgements that might fall on him, desperate for that supportive strength. But now, sitting in the soothing quiet of this protective womb, he was calmed.
Walking down the aisle towards the transept, he was preceded by a long shadow as shafts of sunlight flooded through the west window. Suddenly faced by the Pieta, he was stunned by the hurt on the face of the Virgin Mary as she cradled the bleeding body of Jesus in her arms. As a boy, he had walked and run around this statue so many times, but it had been no more than a painted stone carving: cold, shiny, meaningless. Now he saw her anguish, the pain of her loss as she clutched this precious body from which life had so recently been brutally vanquished. Jesus was calm and serene in death, the face of a man in a healing sleep. Was it the deliverance from his persecution or the fulfilment of his prediction of crucifixion then resurrection? Liam had seen that same look on the faces of men in the trenches who had died after suffering agonising wounds. But he had also seen contorted bodies of intertwined soldiers, drawn faces locked into the agony of their final suffering.
He felt some chord moving deep within him at the sight of the blood pouring from the side of Jesus; they had pierced his chest wall with a spear to ensure that he was dead before they took the body down. Did the German soldiers whose sides had been pierced by the bayonets of the British Army have the same sense of deliverance? And did their families and friends suffer the same pain that tortured the face of the Virgin Mary? Did it make her pain more bearable, having the chance to hold his body, delivered at last from the scourging, the torment, the torture? Why had Jesus chosen this pathway of suffering as a means of dying? And was his death any more significant than that of any of the men who had died over the last five years? Or than that of his little Lizzie?
He hadn’t come here intending to question the planks of his faith: he had done it so often over recent times and found himself remaining more confused. For a long time in the trenches of France, he had abandoned his beliefs, despite feeling an increasing need of them. But then he had had the Army and its command structure to order his life. Now, he felt exposed, isolated and vulnerable, in need of help and hope.
He walked over to the metal framework that held the votive candles, placed a coin in the offertory box, made the sign of the cross and lit the candle. He was surprised at how easy that was and remembered the act was a prayer in itself. Retiring to a nearby seat, he watched the candle spluttering slowly into life. The tiny flame flickered, casting a gentle glow into the dark shadow of the corner, stuttered into a near oblivion before returning with a renewed vigour to throw a warm light on the face of the Madonna standing in a recess behind. He stared into the flame of the candle as it threw a halo of light around the glass container. He remembered the symbolism; the light of the world. Dear God, he could do with a bit more light being cast into the dark shadows of his life just now. He was getting weary with the fruitless searching for work; diminished by his inability to provide for his family; crushed by his failures. Where, God, did he go from there?
The black wick of the candle glowed with a tiny red tip, a bright white flame with a darkly hollow core, tinged blue round its lower edge, crested above the fluid top of the white column of wax. The flame arced and twisted, its tip flickering restlessly. Liam rose from his seat, went over to the candle and extinguished the flame. Returning to his seat, he watched the smoke drifting up from the black wick, the fading remnants of the vigorous life that had so recently illuminated the corner, the Madonna gone.
He stared for some time as the liquid wax whitened, imparting a lustrous shape and form to the stem; white, waxy, lifeless, like the body of Jesus in the Pieta. He rose quickly and relit the candle, then watched as the flame glowed with its new life; resurrected from its smoky extinction. He stared into the wavering, shimmering core as shafts of white flared up from the dark wick, living, vibrant, dancing in the whispers of his breath passing over the rim of the glass. The white light washed over him, the dark core drew him down into its glowing depth. He saw the face of a child, pretty, dark curls. She was smiling at him, holding up her hands; he felt her clasping round his neck, squeezing him, secure in his embracing arms.
Chapter 12
Like misshapen, drab buntings, the lines of washing stretched across the street; a predominance of white sheets and dreary male underwear. Ducking his head slightly to avoid full facial contact with a pair of damp long-johns, Liam edged his cart carefully under the first line. An abandoned chipped mug stood on a step alongside an unoccupied rocking chair; a crocheted shawl was thrown over the back. The morning’s copy of the Daily Herald lay open on a frayed cushion.
It had seemed a long two weeks since Chopper had mentioned to him that Gasping Griffiths was giving up on his rag and bone round and wanted to sell his cart. Liam had realised that it wasn’t much of an opportunity, but it was something, and if he didn’t take it then somebody else would. The wheezing hawker had been happy to explain t
he nature of the business, where to source the donkey stones and how to sort the clean whites out of the rags because he got paid more for those. He told him where to take the bones, which were ground up for glue and fertiliser, and who would give the best prices for metal, if he was lucky enough to get any. What he had not told him was that he would go home each night weary, frustrated and largely unrewarded and that, these days, people didn’t have anything to spare to exchange for donkey stones.
The warm early July air was heavy with the smell of bleach, washing soap and boiled cabbage. The smell of singed cobwebs and woodwork, blending with the rotten egg smell of sulphur candles outside some of the houses, suggested a weekend spent in the ritual spring cleaning; the annual war on the hated bed bugs. ‘Bloody Mondays,’ he muttered vehemently, pulling his cap back into place and stepping carefully round a steaming heap of horse manure, ‘I’d be better just staying in sodding bed.’ Parking his cart at the side of the cobbled road in a convenient gap between two lines of washing, he looked at the terraced houses on either side. Two stone steps led up into the living rooms of the flat-fronted terraced houses on the left. Some of the doors boasted recent coats of gleaming paint but most were rather tired, flaking brown or green. He exchanged a brief nod with an elderly man who was sitting outside his house on a bentwood chair. Wearing a dark grey waistcoat buttoned tightly over his brown cardigan and collarless white shirt, the old man sucked thoughtfully on his pipe as he watched Liam. His bright eyes were enjoying the unsteady arrival of the clearly uncomfortable trader into his street. He took his pipe from his mouth and wiped his nose and brown-stained white moustache with a large white handkerchief, replacing it then into the pocket of his grey flannel trousers.
‘Rraaag annndd Bones,’ Liam bellowed, cupping his hands to his mouth and wincing slightly as the sudden effort caused a pain in his head wound. ‘Fetch out your old rags for some cleaning stones,’ he added in a slightly more modulated tone. He straightened the three piles of white, cream and brown stones that had fallen as he had struggled under the washing line. He felt slightly dismayed to see that the brown stones had patches of water on them. The trailing legs of the longjohns doubtless now bore the evidence of his passing.
Rags, Bones and Donkey Stones (Sequel) Page 8