She didn’t open her eyes again until the next morning, when an unexplained feeling of badness and shame was quickly drowned by the calls of siblings asking for her help. She could tell no one. No one knew about the evil that had crept uninvited into her room. When she washed at the sink, she plunged her face into the bowl of water with a force that made Maura shout out at her for splashing the floor. Finally, Kitty got to hug her mother. She flung her arms round her waist and buried her head in her chest. Maura kissed the top of her head and rubbed her shoulders, too busy with the morning routines and the chores of daily existence for procrastination.
What Kitty had suffered that night was the by-product of being poor. It wasn’t the outward signs of poverty or the lack of shoes and clothes that defined a poorer child and brought the deepest lasting misery. It wasn’t even the hidden hunger pains, pale skin and pinched cheeks, an unheated house or broken furniture. It wasn’t having to share a bed with springs protruding from a stained mattress or having to walk on cold, bare, splintered floorboards. What often defined a poor child was shame. Shame not just from being without, but from having encountered something dark that roamed the streets and homes of the vulnerable. An evil that did a greater damage and left a deeper mark than an empty belly. Hunger could be fed, a numbed body could be clothed, but a damaged soul could not be seen or healed. Poverty, gratitude, a sense of inferiority and insecurity made children prey to the things that were invisible and were never spoken of.
Chapter Eight
Time rolled by and life on the four streets altered very little. People still existed rather than lived, and Alice, wallowing in the residual memory of a dream, withdrew into her familiar pattern of isolation.
She had given up any pretence of enjoying Saturday nights at the Irish centre and had no interest in the new band, the Beatles, that Jerry and the others had been raving about since they had played at the pub.
Through her window, Alice watched life on the four streets. She was the first to see Peggy, an unsuspecting follower of fashion, walking down the street with no curlers in and her hair piled up on top of her head like a beehive. Alice thought she looked ridiculous, but she didn’t say that to anyone other than Jerry, because she didn’t communicate with anyone on the street. Instead, she preferred to stand at her window and watch as the world around her went on with its business through a pane of glass, just as she always had.
Alice had been unable to make the leap from her past into her future. She had worked hard and put everything in place for the life she wanted, but she never once accounted for her own social inadequacy or her history to date. Observing life was very different from living it.
She struggled most with Nellie and for much of the time made sure the child was out of the way. She couldn’t touch her and never spoke to her. Throughout her upbringing no one had ever spoken to Alice. She didn’t know how a normal family worked.
When deep in thoughts of regret, Jerry often pondered on how he had ended up where he was. He now recognized that he hadn’t been given much of a chance. How was he supposed to have known what was going on when Alice had arrived at his house only a week after the funeral? But now he knew he ought to have done. He had at last realized that, even at the time, her knock on the front door had created a stir on the street.
The only person who had ever knocked on his front door before that day was the man from the Pru, who collected the sixpence club money every Friday night. The man from the Pru knocked on everyone’s front door. It was an act of significance that highlighted his status and degree of importance in their lives. Most of the people in the street handed over the sixpence without question. The money would pay for a burial when it was needed. This was a big deal. For Catholics there was a stigma attached to being buried in a pauper’s grave, an end met by many in years gone by.
But no matter how much thought Jerry gave to his predicament, the fact was he couldn’t get out of it. And in truth, he and Nellie were finding their level; they were managing, with the help of people he would be grateful to all his life, especially Maura, who constantly gave out to him about Alice.
Nellie never got the chance to talk at home, when her da was out at work. That was why, whenever she found herself in the company of others, she never stopped talking. It was as if all the words she hadn’t spoken in her own house and all the thoughts in her head, unvoiced and unheard, came pouring out. It was impossible to stem her enthusiasm, or to stop her asking questions and laughing. Nellie saved up everything she had to say. She was irrepressible. She was beside herself with happiness in the company of Maura’s noisy family from up the street, and if she didn’t have her da at home, she would have happily lived at number nineteen. Over time, she ended up spending more hours at the Dohertys’ than in her own home.
But now, at five years of age, even Nellie was beginning to sense that Alice was different. Nellie desperately wanted Alice to like her. She wanted to make Alice smile or get out of bed in the mornings. Or to stop Alice snarling and being grumpy to her da. She wanted not to be scared of Alice and for her to be nice, like Maura.
Maura and Tommy often discussed the ‘Alice’ situation. Sometimes it felt as though they discussed nothing else. Maura was concerned by Alice’s behaviour. Even though there were net curtains on the upstairs window, Maura could often make Alice out, a ghost behind the nets, staring down at the street. Neither of them knew what to make of such very odd behaviour.
Over the last few years Alice had retreated into a place Jerry couldn’t recognize. She often didn’t get up in the mornings and, more often than not, he had to see to himself and Nellie before he left for work. Alice did the basics, the washing and cleaning, and there was a meal ready each night when he got home. But she wouldn’t go outdoors any more, so all the shopping fell on Jerry. The last time he suggested that they go into town, to buy Nellie a new coat at C&A, his request had been met with recriminations and tears.
‘Why are you asking me to do that, Jerry, why? You know I don’t like to go out.’
‘For feck’s sake, Alice, why won’t ye go outside the front door?’ shouted Jerry, more in exasperation than anger.
‘Because no one round here likes me and I don’t want to be seen. I never wanted to live here, I wanted us to be better than this and for you to get a better job, so we could travel to America or somewhere more civilized than these dirty streets.’
Alice wasn’t budging but she also wasn’t being truthful. Stepping outside the front door was something she had found difficult since the day she moved in.
‘I never said I was going to leave either my house or my job when we married, Alice. There was no discussion along those lines and there never will be. If I don’t end my life here, I will do it back home in Ireland, but I am not moving away from the people who have looked after me and Nellie so well!’ By this point Jerry was roaring in anger, hurt by what he saw as an attack on the home he and Bernadette had made. ‘They are like me family and if I live to be a hundred years old I will never find enough ways to thank them.’
‘Thank them, thank them?’ screamed Alice. ‘What about me, what about the sacrifices I have made? I gave up my job to look after you and your snotty kid.’
Jerry stormed out of the door before he did something he regretted.
The women on the street had now, by and large, forgiven Jerry for marrying Alice. Things had moved on. Everyone had accepted that Jerry had to remarry, and quickly, and he was an attractive option for any woman. There was no man in Liverpool as good-looking or as good-natured as Jerry. What had upset them had been the shock of a woman getting her feet under his table and the eejit not being able to see what was going on. Their worst fears had been realized. He would never have sought out a wife and a mother for Nellie, and so one found him.
It was not so easy for Maura. Although she struggled hard to keep on an even keel with Alice, Maura would never accept her. From the moment she had first witnessed Alice’s arrival in Jerry and Nellie’s life, Maura had known
it was bad news.
One early morning, she said to Tommy, as she had a hundred times before, ‘That Alice is a Protestant whore, coming to Jerry’s house with her brass neck, Bernadette not yet cold in her grave, and her banging on the door, trying to get into her bed, and him so torn with grief he couldn’t see through her.’
Tommy could not for a second see what the problem was now. They were years into the marriage already, so surely it was time for Maura to move on and change the tune? But always aware of the need to dodge the wrong side of Maura’s tongue, he didn’t dare say it. Anything for an easy life.
Alice had pulled the rug right out from under them and usurped the places of both Maura and everyone back home in Ireland, and to her dying day Maura would never forgive her.
‘Between us, Tommy, after a decent passage of time, we would have found a good Irish Catholic girl for Jerry,’ she insisted. ‘God knows, there’s enough of them to pick from.’
Tommy, as usual, wasn’t listening. Instead he was worrying about Kitty, who was becoming more and more withdrawn with every day that passed.
‘What’s up with our Kitty?’ he asked Maura, as Kitty passed through the kitchen, without a word or a glance in his direction.
‘I think she’s about to start, but she’s too young really she is,’ Maura replied in hushed tones. Tommy understood, without her having to spell it out, that Kitty’s period was about to begin. ‘She’s so sour and miserable, so she is, I can’t get a word out of her.’
‘No, nor can I,’ replied Tommy, who was more worried than he was letting on.
He and his Kitty had a special bond. Sure, he loved his twins. Not many men could boast two sets of twin boys, surely a testament to his virility. There was no better joy than playing footie with his lads on a Sunday morning on the green, or going up to Everton on a Saturday afternoon to watch a home game. He always walked the distance to the match with one of them perched on his shoulders on the way, singing footie songs and hooking up with other match-goers. But it was different with him and Kitty. She was his first-born and they had a great rapport with each other.
Kitty was clever and liked to talk about everything she had heard on the radio, or read in a book. Her mind was inquisitive and probing, though Tommy had no answers for any of her questions.
‘Da!’ Kitty would squeal in exasperation. ‘Why don’t ye know about Africa? I want to know who lives there. I heard the man say on the radio that there was summat called apartheid in South Africa, tell me, da.’
Kitty would playfully shake her da’s shoulders, as though she could shake the knowledge out of him. But instead of feeling inadequate, Tommy burst out laughing.
‘Kitty!’ he would splutter out through his laughter. ‘I can’t even say it, Queen, never mind know what it is, for God’s sake.’
Kitty would laugh too and stamp her feet in exasperation, often pulling a face, which told Tommy she thought he was useless, but she loved him anyway.
Tommy was relieved to take on board Maura’s explanation that the way Kitty was changing was to do with her monthlies. There was none of that with the lads, thank goodness, and he reflected on the fact that with Maura, Kitty, Angela, and now Niamh, one day he would be living in a house where at least one woman, out of his wife and daughters, would be out to murder him as soon as look at him.
Telling this to Jerry one day, he told him how lucky he was. ‘Can ye imagine anything worse, four of them all out to kill me? You should think yeself lucky, mate, you only have Alice and little Nellie.’
Jerry smiled. He had confided in Tommy many a time that he would now like another child. He thought it might be what Alice needed, to bring herself out of her shell.
Tommy, in turn, confided in Jerry about Kitty.
‘Ye expect Angela to be miserable, she’s been fucking miserable since the day she was born. If Angela had been the first, we would have dreaded the second, but our Kitty is different and I’d hate to see her good nature disappear.’ His face creased into a worried frown. ‘When I came down this morning to light the fire, she was already sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She wouldn’t tell me what was the matter and I must have asked her ten times. All she made me do was promise that I wouldn’t tell Maura. Why would she ask me that, eh, Jerry? Why wouldn’t she want her mammy to know she was upset?’
‘Women,’ replied Jerry. And that was it. Neither knew what to say. Women were as unfathomable as the ocean itself. They hadn’t got a clue.
Tommy had no idea how to deal with the problem of Kitty, or how to make it better. He had promised he wouldn’t tell Maura. Kitty was the one child he wouldn’t betray in that promise. He put to the back of his mind the sight of her crying quietly to herself at the kitchen table and got on with the routine of his life. Almost.
Kitty felt as if she was dying inside. As though each day a part of her crumbled away. Father James had taken to coming upstairs to ‘bless the children whilst they be in innocent sleep’ about once a month. Whereas once she was the first to fall asleep, now Kitty lay awake every night, until she heard her parents switch off the kitchen light and rake down the fire. That blessed sound, that familiar click, the sound of her mother washing their cups in the sink and her father closing the outhouse door, before he came up the stairs to bed: all those familiar bedtime noises told her that now she was safe for the night and she could sleep.
Kitty was reaching adolescence and the first sprouting of tiny breasts had begun to appear. Embarrassed and bemused, she had been shocked when they appeared almost overnight. Maura noticed them too and assumed the physical signs of womanhood were the source of her moodiness.
Maura wasn’t the only person to have noticed the changes in Kitty’s body.
She always pretended to be asleep when he came into the room. He had begun fumbling around under the bedclothes to feel her breasts. When his hand found one, it didn’t move, just rested there for a while, deadly still, before he removed it and began his fumbling. His jerking and panting and gasping.
As the years moved on, she had learnt to roll over, pretending to be asleep with her head buried in the pillow, and thankfully she had never again had to endure him wiping her face. Even if she were lying on her front when he came into the room, he would still push his hand under her slight frame to find her breast. He couldn’t risk being heard trying to wake her up.
Kitty screamed, not only in her head, but in every nerve of her body. But she lay there rigid, not moving a muscle until she heard him rush down the stairs. Then she could cry her silent sobs into the dark and to no one else.
What could she say? What could she tell anyone? No one would believe her. They would think she was away with the fairies. They would call her mad Kitty and send her to the mission, where the old people who had lost their minds and who had no family went to be looked after by the nuns. Father James was the most important man in the whole of Liverpool, wasn’t he? Even the head nun in her school, Sister Evangelista, had him come in every week to take prayers at the assembly.
Only last week, Kitty had been putting out books for the geography lesson to help the teacher when Sister came into her classroom.
‘Kitty, Father James has asked especially that you make his cuppa tea and take it to him in my office,’ said Sister Evangelista.
Kitty froze to the spot.
Sister Evangelista began talking to Kitty’s teacher. ‘The Father’s a saint, he’s so many families to look after he must work all the hours God sends,’ she said.
Sister Evangelista thought Father James was a saint? Kitty felt as though she lived on a different planet from everyone else in the world. She was remote from everyone and everything that made any sense.
‘Father James is going to stay after prayers and help with teaching the Bible to the little ones in the infant section. I’m sure they could have no better teacher. He’s so devoted to the Word.’
‘Aye, that he is,’ said Kitty’s teacher. ‘He lives and breathes “suffer the little children”; he sits
each child on his lap when he is reading the Bible to them, such a loving Father.’
They were both teachers, both women Kitty looked up to and respected. Kitty knew that some of the girls didn’t like Sister Evangelista, but Kitty did. Both women, just like her own mother, revered, respected and adored Father James. Father James was untouchable. Kitty was lost.
There was no one and nowhere she could go to for help with this blight on her life. This miserable torment, which robbed her of her sleep, her peace and her innocence, was something she would have to bear and could not share. This shame that made her feel disgusting, dirty and unwhole was hers alone. Kitty was quite sure that if she did confide in someone, they would think it was Kitty who was to blame, not the saintly Father James. She could not cope with that on top of what she had to bear now.
‘Kitty!’ shouted Sister Evangelista. ‘What is up with ye, girl, get away with ye now and make Father James his tea, he is waiting for it in the office.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ said Kitty dutifully, as she made her way to the kitchen.
As she walked into the office, she did not look up. Her eyes were focused on the table in front of her, fixed on the dark wood grain of the desk. She didn’t even know if he was there and listened for his breathing. He was there. He watched her carefully, as she moved towards the table where he was sitting, waiting, with the Bible in his hands open at the New Testament.
‘Ah, Kitty. Thank ye for the tea. I just wanted a quick word. I wondered, was ye interested in stamp collecting?’
She didn’t know how to reply. Even if she had known what to say, the fear in her stomach would have prevented her and stopped it coming out. How could he talk to her so normally? He was the man who did strange things over her, when she lay in her bed and her parents were downstairs. How could he talk as though none of that had happened? He had put his cold, smelly, wet, fish-like hand over her breast and felt it.
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