Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘Filthy scum,’ he growled. ‘We’ve had enough of you Italians round here.’ He turned to the lady. ‘Get the wean into the house, Jeannie. I’m not having any of this.’

  Jeannie stood staring at me, the basket on her hip, but her hand had stopped still inside it. I got ready to duck but I was shaking from my head to my toes and back again.

  ‘She’s looking for her dad, you know? There’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said at last. ‘I’d do the same if you went missing.’

  ‘She doesn’t have a proper dad to find, and they’re all the same, you know. It’s in the blood,’ he said. ‘And look at the state of her. She’s got scars the length of her face.’

  I’d forgotten about my cuts, and this was an exaggeration, but either way I just stared at this horrible man who had spat at me. I couldn’t move.

  ‘It’s not in the blood. What about the wean? He’s a good boy. Look at him. You can’t say the wean’s bad. This wee lassie’s Lenny’s girl. You can’t blame her wanting to find her father.’

  ‘Be quiet and get him in the house.’

  But she wouldn’t and instead they argued about my dad and whose fault it all was and the little boy cried as if he was joining in, until suddenly the lady put down her basket of tatties and took the boy from him. She bounced him on her hip and held him tight, but still he cried. I was rooted to the spot like the gate post.

  ‘It’s your own damn fault not seeing the type of man he was,’ said the father.

  ‘You were happy enough to share a glass of his beer and have him working for you for nothing,’ she replied.

  ‘He was a foreigner. What did you expect? I thought you’d more sense.’

  ‘Foreign as far as England.’

  She turned her back on him and ignored him telling her not to. I pulled my hat down over my ears and held on.

  ‘Your dad was arrested,’ she said to me. ‘We called him Gallus Galluzzo because he was always so cocky. We just never realised how cocky he really was.’ She laughed at this and shook her head but I think she was angry. I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Aye, cocky’s about right,’ said the dad.

  ‘I was left with this,’ she said, and she nodded at the wee boy who was winding up to another scream.

  ‘No,’ I breathed.

  ‘There’s probably a whole lot more where that came from too,’ said the man.

  ‘No, there aren’t. I’d have been told,’ she roared at him. ‘He’d have stayed if it wasn’t for you listening to gossip.’ Then back to me. ‘This is your brother,’ she said to me, ‘your half-brother. His name’s Robert. Wee Bobby. My wee Bobby.’ She chucked him under the chin even though he was bawling and arching his back. ‘If you find your dad tell him not to come back if he wants to live but give him my love and I’ll be ready when he’s able and the war’s over.’

  ‘Give him your love? Are you thick in the head? This lassie’s the proof of the gossip, you stupid eejit.’ Then he turned and started towards me and I bounced off the ground and staggered away from him, backwards and all over the place. ‘Tell your dad to come back for the hiding he deserves, if he’s man enough,’ said the old man. He was big and I could smell him where I stood already. I’d backed off so far I was jammed into a hedge.

  ‘Get away!’ I shouted. ‘Leave me alone!’ My tummy churned and I screamed as loud as I could. ‘It’s not true! That about my dad! You’re lying!’

  But he’d gone back and was shouting at her again. She seemed not scared at all and was arguing back, just as loudly. I pulled myself out of the hedge and stumbled backwards out of the path and watched them in amazement. Calling each other names, yelling and not listening. Until finally they were quiet, glaring at each other while the wee boy howled.

  Then she rocked little Bobby again and sang, ‘hush little baby, don’t you cry’, but not in that nice way my mum used to do.

  ‘Where will he be?’ I shouted once I had some breath, though it was more of a squawk. ‘Where will I find him?’ I blinked back my tears and wiped the snotters away with my sleeve. ‘Please? Where is he? I need to...’

  She was swinging wee Bobby round and back on her hip as if she wanted to shake the air out of him altogether and singing and all the time he wailed and wriggled.

  So I shouted again. ‘Where did he go? Please, just tell me and I’ll go away. Where did they take him?’ Until finally the man picked up his fork and the basket of tatties and went back round the side of the house with the dog.

  ‘Bloody fools!’ he roared as he went. ‘How would I know where he is?’

  She waited until he’d gone.

  ‘Get on with your work!’ he shouted from out of sight.

  She waited a minute more, then came through the tattie patch to the gate and gestured for me to come back.

  ‘Sorry about my dad,’ she said, with a glance over her shoulder. ‘But listen and I’ll tell you. They took Lenny to the police station in King Street. They say he played cards all night and won all their money and then lost it back to them again before the morning.’ This made her laugh for some reason. ‘Then they put him on a boat to Greenock. I’ve never heard from him since. He knows where I am and I’ll wait. I know he’ll come back to me. You know where I am now too, and now you’ve met your wee brother.’

  I didn’t know what to say and anyway I couldn’t take my eyes off little Bobby, the new wee brother I didn’t even know I had. So like Mavis.

  ‘He can’t be... ,’ I started, but all the breath seemed to have gone out of me, so I just shook my head. What did she mean, little brother? That was stupid.

  ‘We thought your mum was dead until my dad met some man in the pub,’ she said. ‘We thought she’d died in the raid.’

  ‘My mum’s not dead,’ I said, suddenly alert. ‘Mavis isn’t dead either. Neither am I.’

  ‘I can see that,’ she laughed.

  ‘He’s my dad,’ I said. ‘I just want to know where he is. We thought he was dead. Dead presumed missing, I mean missing presumed dead. I heard the old lady say it.’ Words were just coming out without my meaning them to. I gulped them back in. No-one ever told me why my dad wasn’t coming back but I overheard ‘missing presumed dead’ and always thought it was that. ‘He’s funny and kind and good and...’

  ‘I know. Isn’t he great?’ she said, interrupting. ‘Everyone loved him. He worked really hard here and kept everyone cheerful. I miss him so much!’ She gave wee Bobby a jiggle. Bobby was quiet now, sniffing and playing in her hair.

  ‘I miss him too,’ I said, but it didn’t feel right, telling her that. I think she meant something different from the way I missed him. And anyway he was mine to miss and not hers. ‘He’s my dad,’ I said, ‘not yours, or his.’ I nodded at the baby.

  She ignored this and started telling me how they had worked together and a load of other stuff but I didn’t hear much of it. I just looked at her with her little boy who was like Mavis and I thought of my poor mum who looked older than her and who couldn’t have stood there swinging a toddler round when she only had one leg. A knot twisted up my stomach when I thought of my mum. I didn’t understand. This was all wrong. Jeannie must be lying or thinking of someone else, not my dad. It couldn’t be true.

  ‘Jeannie!’ shouted Jeannie’s dad. He wasn’t nice like my dad, but then maybe mine wasn’t nice either. I didn’t know. Maybe I hadn’t understood anything at all. Maybe the world was upside down and inside out again, like when the bombing happened. A great gust blew through the trees and pulled my coat across my legs and then almost immediately the rain arrived. Jeannie glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘Good luck!’ she said to me. ‘I hope you find him. You look so like him. Those eyes. So sweet.’ She hung on the corner of the house a moment beneath the eaves, holding her little one close. Bobby, quiet at last, watched me with his eyes like Mavis’s. Then they both disappeared round the corner and left me standing there in the muddy lane with torrents coming down round my shoulders.

  ‘Jeannie!�
� called the old man. ‘Get that wean indoors!’

  ‘Alright, I’m coming!’ I heard her yell.

  I stood a moment longer and stared at the corner of the building wondering if I’d imagined it all. Then I turned and gazed out through the rain over the tattie fields where people were running to the trees for shelter and I pictured him there lifting tatties or maybe bringing the cows in to milk. It didn’t make sense. The idea of him being there at all, with this Jeannie, with a baby. It was all nonsense. It had to be.

  And why wouldn’t he have sent for us? Of course he would have. Why didn’t we live in one of those houses in a neat little row with tatties growing in the garden?

  The rain thundered through the trees and even though I was already completely drenched I went down the road with my legs stiff like logs to the nearest chestnut for what little shelter it offered and wondered what had just happened and whether I wasn’t going completely mad myself to have dreamt up such a terrible thing. He was so like Mavis, cute and yummy like Mavis was, the same eyes. How could that be? I sank onto the chestnut roots and held my head in my hands and put my thumbs in my ears to cut out all the horrible thoughts. But it didn’t work. It had never worked, and I was left with a million stupid explanations without proper questions, and absolutely no answers.

  Chapter 21

  A bomb had gone off in my life and no-one had sounded the sirens. Everything was blown to pieces and all those pieces flung to the many winds, far beyond anything I could understand.

  I squeezed my eyes and thought about my mum, but all I could see was little Bobby and his apple, Jeannie in the garden and her dad’s spittle landing by my foot. They seemed to be a bubble inside my head, completely separate from anything else, and I wondered whether it had really happened. Perhaps I had imagined it, a dream, the whole thing. But there was Rocco and his friends. They must have known. That’s why Rocco wanted to come with me.

  I wished I hadn’t come. I wished I was home with Mavis, Rosie and my mum, wherever home was. I wouldn’t care as long as I was with them. My dad didn’t matter. I didn’t want my dad now. I wanted him to go away and never have existed at all. I wanted Mr Tait never to have made me look for him. I wanted Mr Tait.

  A gust shook the chestnut and a flurry of leaves flew off towards the town and did cartwheels along the road. Three rooks swooped down and bounced back towards me. One came close and put his head on one side, the way dogs do, as if to say, ‘What is that sitting there? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You and me both,’ I thought. ‘This doesn’t make sense.’

  It couldn’t be true. I mean, why would he go and have another wife when he had my mum at home waiting? Why would he make another baby with someone else? I’d have been over the moon with a new little brother, but this made my heart hurt trying to understand. Bobby was so like Mavis it was easy to love him, but he wasn’t mine to love, same as my dad wasn’t Jeannie’s to miss.

  You see, I knew then, roughly, about that unmentionable thing that made babies happen and I knew that men seemed to like it a lot and obviously that my dad was a man. I stared at his photo. He seemed so certain and dependable and fun. I wished it wasn’t true. But that was silly thinking. That was like wishing Mr Tait wasn’t D-E-A-D dead, which made me close my eyes and wish it all over again. I’d rather have wished my dad was dead, which made more sense. I threw a stick at the rooks and they squawked and flew away.

  ‘Bastard!’ I heard bad George say in my head, which is something he often said.

  ‘Bastard!’ I said out loud, but it felt silly, saying bad words with no-one listening, so I put the photo away, pulled my collar up, wrapped my arms around my knees and sobbed and rocked.

  After a bit the rain stopped and I ran out of tears. The rooks were back. They had brought several of their pals and were digging about in the mud or swirling above me in the tree. They seemed to be laughing, but there was nothing funny about this.

  I squeezed the photo in my fist and wanted to tear it up, but knew I had to bring it safely back to my mum. Then I remembered she knew he was alive. Maybe she even knew about Bobby. Why hadn’t she just told me? I tried to remember things she’d said. Maybe there were clues. But I couldn’t think of anything except little Bobby and his eyes like Mavis’s.

  It was time to get back to Clydebank.

  I wobbled to my feet, squeezed out my hat and set off quickly in the hopes of warming up or at least drying out. Luckily it was all downhill.

  ‘I had a good job and I left... left... left,’ I sang under my breath to drown out other thoughts as I marched along, though I kept muddling the words.

  Back in Helensburgh I went straight past the police station and the town hall and into the railway station. There was a queue at the ticket desk, two sailors, an old lady and a dog, and they all seemed to have trouble buying their tickets. Suddenly it was my turn.

  ‘Yes,’ said the ticket lady at her little window.

  I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  I bit my lip and shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just a minute.’ I ran away from the desk and threw myself against a wall outside.

  I still wanted to find him. He was my dad, for goodness’ sake. Of course I wanted to find him, if only to tell him how furious I was and ask him for the truth. Maybe Jeannie was lying. Maybe she meant a different Lenny from my dad. Maybe my dad didn’t know about the bombing and my mum’s leg and losing Mavis, or he couldn’t find us because we went to Carbeth. I thought of Jeannie standing there with her baby and I stared at the rainwater rushing down the gutter, the way it bounced off a stone that was lying there and ran on round it and the stone didn’t move. It didn’t make sense. Maybe my dad could explain.

  But I had to find my dad. Even Mr Tait wanted me to find him, didn’t he? I mean, why else would Mr Tait tell me to look under the bed? My dad was my dad. I had a right. He wasn’t going to hide from me. I was going to find him if it was the last thing I’d do. And he’d better be ready. Maybe he’d even come home with me.

  I went to the police station. The doors were dark wood with brasses on them so shiny I could see my face. I took a deep breath and went in. A huge tall policeman was standing behind the counter holding a piece of paper as far away from his eyes as he could manage, which was quite far because his arms were so long and his head pulled back on his neck. Only his eyes were moving, side to side, across the paper.

  I stood so long I thought I might burst. And while I stood, he read. And then he turned to a set of drawers and started rummaging. When he found what he was looking for he looked at the paper again, clutching it as before at the end of his arm. I looked at the poster beside him: ‘Deserve victory!’ it said, with a picture of Winston Churchill, the prime minister. Okay, I thought, I’m trying, really I am. At last he noticed me.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, young lady?’ His quiet voice seemed to fill the room. He leant on the counter and gazed across at me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for my dad.’

  ‘Your dad?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was here. In Helensburgh I mean, not in the police station. Maybe he came here too, I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Gillespie,’ I said. ‘Lenny Gillespie. Same as me only he’s Leonard and I’m Leonora. He’s my dad.’ My mouth seemed to be working but wasn’t attached to my brain.

  ‘Why do you think he came here?’ he said softly, and he smiled.

  So I explained about the postcard and I said he’d been on a farm, or maybe a farm camp. It seemed safer to be vague. I didn’t show him the photo or tell him about being Italian because I suddenly ran out of courage.

  He stood up so straight I thought he’d go right through the ceiling. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name,’ he said, at last.

  Relief was what I felt, perhaps only because I was breathing again. I was just about to say goodbye and thank you very much when
he leant forward once more.

  ‘But we’ll just check the register, shall we? Lenny. Something familiar about that. Not so common a name, is it? When would he have been here?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s no postcard on the mark, I mean, no mark on the card.’

  So he said he’d do some checking and I should come back later in the day. Then he smiled again and I knew it was time to go.

  ‘Lenny,’ he muttered. I turned back. But it was himself he was talking to, not me. ‘Lenny Gillespie.’

  I came out feeling sleepy and confused. Perhaps I should go back and show him the photo. Scared and unsure, I bumbled along the street until I was back down at the sea wall staring dumbly across the water at all the boats lingering there at anchor. The long pier ran out towards them and a single boat lay at the end of it. I guessed it was early afternoon. I ought to have gone home. I was still only half dry and the wind was racing through me. I’d catch cold. Another giant rain cloud was hovering, even though the sun was suddenly out.

  A man was leaning on the wall close by.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Is that boat going to Greenock?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘and I can’t tell you where it is going either. That would be against the law.’

  ‘Of course not, sorry,’ I said.

  He took out a pipe, poked his finger into it then lit it with a match, his hand drawn carefully against the wind. ‘But it’s not going to Greenock,’ he said. ‘I doubt you’ll get across there today.’ He nodded out over the water. ‘Mind you, you could practically walk over, there are so many boats. ’ He poked the air with his pipe. ‘It’s Craigendoran you want, the beautiful Lucy Ashton, but she’s not going to Greenock either.’ He winked and one side of his face squidged up like a prune. ‘You’ll need a pass, of course. Leaves in thirty minutes.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I said and started to run. Greenock. That was it. She said he’d been sent to Greenock. I wasn’t ready to give up. I screeched to a halt. Mr Tulloch said not to go there. Then I sped on again. What else could I do?