Liverpool Daisy

by Helen Forrester

  “Goodbye, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said politely to Nellie.

  “Goodbye, Freddie. Ta-ra, Daisy. See you tomorrow.”

  Daisy stood with one hand on the door jamb as Nellie followed the little procession up the street. Freddie watched her uneasily. He knew he should suggest that Maureen Mary stay overnight with her bereaved mother; yet he feared that if he did so she would never return to him. His friends had all warned him how Irish Catholic girls had a tendency to go back to mother once they had a child or two, expecting their husbands to follow uncomplainingly. He knew that he could never live in this rough, bug-ridden home, the very idea made him shudder.

  Maureen Mary wanted to stay the night; she had said so over breakfast, and only his argument that the house was so damp that little Bridie might get a chill there had dissuaded her. He had not mentioned that he had a horror of her bringing back vermin from her mother’s home. He had been careful not to sit down during the wake, but he was convinced that he had gathered an unwelcome visitor — he itched all over.

  “Be all right?” he asked Daisy lamely.

  Daisy sighed gustily. “Yes,” she replied.

  She stood outside the front door to watch the procession of guests and relatives along the road until they turned the corner. Then she stared glumly at the river for a moment. A shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds and gave a soft sheen to the gloomy, heaving water and lit up the Wallasey shore. Then the cloud closed over and the wind nipped playfully at Daisy’s loosely pinned-up plaits. She shivered, and stepped back into the deserted house.

  Inside, she paused, reluctant to shut the door. The silence was oppressive. For the first time in nearly a hundred years there would be only one resident in the house; for the first time in her life she would be alone overnight. Through the residue of her anger at Meg and her annoyance that Maureen Mary had not stayed with her, loneliness began to penetrate painfully. It seemed to creep through her like a paralysis, and her softly rounded cheeks whitened, making the mauve mottles caused by sitting too close to the fire stand out like scars.

  She stood, head bent, in the cold draught and breathed heavily, her shoulders drooping under her black shawl.

  “I got to get used to it,” she muttered, “till our Lizzie and our Jamie finish doing their time.” She did not consider that Michael, her sailor husband, might also return. He was a vague figure in the background of her life who was more nuisance than help when he did have a spell at home. “And I got you, Mog, you old devil,” she added forlornly to the cat, which was sitting on the mantelpiece between two dusty china dogs.

  She slowly shut the weather-beaten door behind her. “I’m the Nan now, Mog. Only there’s nobody here to be Nan over. It’s a proper queer life, isn’t it?”

  THREE

  Daisy rubbed her tired eyes and then stretched herself. Though stout, she was by no means unhandsome and as she clasped her hands behind her head there was a sensuousness about her, reminiscent of women of an earlier age pictured by Reubens.

  She put another shovelful of coal on the fire, and afterwards plonked herself thankfully down on the easy chair her mother had bought at a sale half a century before.

  When she was a little rested she took a pad of notepaper and an envelope from the table drawer. Then she hunted impatiently through the rags, paper and ornaments which were piled on the mantelpiece until she found a bottle of Stephen’s ink and a wooden penholder. She put everything down on the big, brass fender and sat down again.

  To ease the tension within her, she lifted her long black skirt and petticoats up over her fat knees to allow the comforting heat of the fire to reach her thighs, while she considered what she should put in a letter to her husband.

  Mike’s last post card had been from Accra and had carried his usual message, “Doing fine, love, Mike.” It did not inspire Daisy in her reply. Michael had been doing fine as a ship’s stoker on tramp steamers, in between bouts of unemployment, through a world war and twenty-nine years of marriage. Scattered through the house were numerous postcards from him carrying cancellation marks of ports all over the world.

  Daisy nibbled her wooden penholder thoughtfully. Mike had seen so much and was so good at telling stories about his adventures — after he had downed a couple of pints of bitter, of course — that he had convinced their first-born son, John, that there was no better occupation than that of seaman; and the boy had run away to sea the day he was fourteen. He had never been heard from since. The memory of him made Daisy heave one of her mighty sighs. It was hard on a mother to lose a boy at fourteen, just when he could be sent to work to earn a bit of money.

  Now, Mike had been sailing up and down the coasts of Africa for a year and a half. Eighteen bloody cold months, thought Daisy, without a man to warm you occasionally.

  She stabbed the pen into the ink and scratched carefully across the lined notepaper, “Nan died on Monday, God rest her. She was laid to rest today — St. Michael’s Day.” Mike would think his patron saint really cared about him, she reflected acidly. The nib spat suddenly and made a blot as she crossed a t.

  “Blast!” she ejaculated, and dabbed the ink dry with the corner of her apron, which was already dingy from many washings. The ink smudged. She clucked irritably and again dipped her pen into the ink.

  “The man from the Prue paid her burial money prompt and O’Toole did her funeral real nice. Her burial money will be enough for Bill Donohue to wallpaper her room as well.” She stopped and chewed the end of her pen, pressing her toothless gums against it so hard that it cracked. She spat the small sliver of wood into the fire. Mike would resent good money being spent on the redecorating of the room. Slowly and firmly she added in scrawling round letters, “Like he always done it.” “Bugger him,” she murmured crossly.

  She had a fixed belief, handed down through the generations, that nobody should sleep in a room in which someone had died without it first being redecorated. She sighed sadly. So many people had died in the front bedroom of her home — the wallpaper must be inches deep. It was the only room in the house which had ever had anything done to it, as far as she remembered.

  “Hope this finds you in the pink as it leaves me, Daisy.” she added to her letter. Then she picked up an envelope from the dusty rag rug beneath her feet and put the letter into it. In large capital letters she addressed the letter to Mr. Michael Gallagher, Stoker, s.s. Heart of Salford, c/o the shipping company’s Liverpool office. She never knew until he came home whether he had received her letters, but she supposed this one would catch up with him eventually. He had been away such a long time that she had begun to forget him; for weeks at a time she never thought of him.

  She heaved herself out of her chair and moved slowly to the oilcloth-covered table. The roses on the cloth stared back at her through a greasy film, where they showed between dirty mugs, wine and rum glasses. Among the glasses lay the sliced white loaf on which iddy Joey had stood; its slices were half out of their wrapping and were scattered and squashed. Beside them lay their inevitable companion, a mangled open package of margarine.

  Impatiently she swept the clutter to the back of the table and laid the letter in a prominent position, so that she would not forget to buy a three-halfpenny stamp and post it.

  She removed the glass from a small oil lamp, struck a match and lit the wick. Carefully she replaced the glass.

  The lamp’s weak rays did little to cheer the forlorn room. The walls and ceiling, blackened by a hundred years of coal fires, made it seem even smaller than it was. Generations of spiders had spun thick webs, now laden with dust in every cranny. The window curtain of cheap lace was so tattered and so grey with dust that it looked as if the spiders might have spun it, too. An old chest of drawers stood in one corner, its surface piled with odd sheets of newspaper kept for lighting the fire, and bits of rag which Daisy thought might come in useful for lagging the pipes of the recalcitrant water closet in the yard. Two straight-backed kitchen chairs stood in the middle of the room where they had been ab
andoned earlier by her visitors, and mechanically she pushed them under the table. Then she stood in silent contemplation of a crumpled newspaper in the hearth on which lay a few lumps of coal. She knew she should get some more coal up from the cellar ready for the morning, but she felt too weary.

  The silence and the hollowness of the house made her uneasy. She was normally a cheerful woman, though often aggressive, and her hearty laugh would make her great breasts shake in unison much to the amusement of the male patrons of the Ragged Bear. Deep-set blue eyes looked out at a tough world, but she feared nobody within the confines of the streets she frequented. As far as she was concerned, all wickedness lay outside her own district — where you never knew what might happen to you, she would sometimes remark darkly to Nellie.

  But an empty house was a new phenomenon to her.

  “Bloody ghosts in the place,” she said to Moggie in a voice that trembled slightly. Then she shrugged her plump shoulders and added with forced firmness, “It’s me nairves, Mog. Just me nairves.” Even the home’s single water tap in the scullery, which had dripped for weeks, had suddenly stopped its irritating tap-tap. A cinder falling from the miserable fire made her jump. There was not even the usual clatter of boots and vehicular traffic in the street; the poor weather must have kept everyone indoors.

  She trailed over to the front door and opened it. The night had closed in and solid blackness met her; she could not even see the light at the top of the steps that ran down to the Herculaneum Dock. She peered the other way. The street lamp seemed almost obliterated by fine rain. The dampness carried with it a searing acridity; it caught in her throat and made her cough. Hastily she slammed the door and took her black shawl off the hook at the back of it. She wrapped the garment round her shoulders and tucked it across her breasts. She returned, shivering, to her chair by the fire. From time to time, she coughed and cleared her throat.

  The cough bothered her. “Maybe it’s T.B.,” she thought fearfully, “like our Tommy.”

  Tommy had coughed himself to death, at the age of twelve, in the room upstairs. The memory still brought a tear to his mother’s eye, though it was eight years ago and the cabbage roses on the wallpaper put on after his death, were blurred and torn in places.

  She sighed lustily. She had had no luck with her boys and very little with her girls. John, born when she was seventeen, had run away. Little Mickey had toddled into Grafton Street when he was three, and had been trampled under the hooves of a pair of Shire horses pulling a wagon of beer up to the Ragged Bear. He was dead, his tiny body mangled and broken, before the carter managed to put on the break and shout to the rearing horses.

  And then there was James, the pride of her heart. There was a lad! How she wished he was with her now. But he was doing seven years for stabbing an Orangeman.

  The very thought of the Orangemen made her face darken with venomous wrath. Serve them right if they got stabbed. She reckoned they should know by now that to parade on July 12th was asking for trouble. A pack of bleeding Protties going over the river to New Brighton to celebrate the anniversary of King William winning the Battle of the Boyne, to the ruin of all Catholics. And they carried church banners and all. Enough to make a good Irish Catholic puke.

  In a fight with the members of a homeward bound procession, James had broken a beer bottle and accidentally cut the throat of an opponent.

  Daisy, a soggy mess of tears, went to see him when he came up for trial for murder.

  “I never meant to kill him, Mam,” he assured her. “Just a good scratch. But his throat got in the way.”

  Daisy had been sure that James would hang. Through the trial she had, until she was finally ejected, wept loudly in the Court, beating her breast and exclaiming from time to time, “Jaysus Mary! Me poor boy! God spare him!”

  In the depth of despair, she suddenly remembered St. Jude, kind patron saint of lost causes. She fell to her knees on the stone floor of the scullery, and prayed. She promised St. Jude a three-line advertisement in the Liverpool Echo if he would only save the life of her beloved son, James.

  Apparently, St. Jude heard the impassioned plea, because the charge was reduced to one of manslaughter, and James did not hang. Two days after James went off to serve his sentence, there appeared in the Personal Column of the Liverpool Echo an advertisement, which read: “Grateful thanks to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, for help in great trouble, D.M.G.” It did not make up three lines, but Daisy could not think of anything more to say, and she hoped St. Jude would understand. She would make it up to him some other time.

  “Ee, Mog,” she addressed the cat, as it climbed on to her knee. “I could use a bit of help now, I could. The house is so empty.”

  FOUR

  The quiet of the house became a miasma which oozed out of the walls and wrapped itself around her. At times she would shiver uncontrollably despite the warmth of the fire. She crouched over the failing flames and wondered what she had done to deserve such desolation.

  Despite her feeling of being deserted, she did not grudge Maureen Mary her fancy home with its shiny painted windowsills and brass-edged doorstep — at least the girl seemed to eat plentifully and have more clothes than her mother had ever dreamed of, proper coats instead of a shawl, and rayon stockings instead of cotton or wool. And she was proud that Margaret was a nun. Of course, Elizabeth Ann had been very careless in allowing herself to be caught while shoplifting in Woolworth’s; but then all young people were careless, you had to expect it.

  She fumed for a little while when she considered that her sisters had also deserted her. It would not have hurt one of them to lend her a daughter to stay with her, she thought bitterly. Winnie or little Mary would have been most welcome guests. But then she remembered that she had had a fight with Meg, which Meg would not easily forgive, and she had reduced placid Agnes to tears, and Nellie, dear frail Nellie, must have taken it for granted that Maureen Mary would keep her company for a few days.

  Daisy gave a great trembling sigh, as she stared moodily at the massive collection of Woodbine cigarette butts tossed into the hearth by her guests. A beam in the roof gave a sharp creak and made her jump. She looked fearfully up at the dark shadows at the top of the stairs. Somehow, she had to get up enough courage to go to bed, to clamber into an empty bedstead without even the comfort of knowing that her mother was only on the other side of the wall. She shuddered.

  Then she remembered the bottle hidden under the brass fender beneath her feet.

  She leaned forward and picked up a glass from the top of the oven. The dregs had dried in it. She felt around under her feet, found one bottle and then slipped down on her knees to reach the three others. She drained all four of them into a tumbler and sipped the mixture of rum and wine. It tasted good to her and warmed her.

  The cat cried to be let into the oven, where it usually slept the night. She leaned forward and lifted its heavy latch. Moggie leaped into its womblike darkness.

  Daisy got up and lit a stub of candle stuck on a saucer among the debris on the mantelpiece. Then she blew out the oil lamp.

  Glass in one hand, candle in the other, she staggered up the hollowed wooden staircase, which led directly from the living room to an open space above which was known as the landing bedroom. From it, a door led into the front bedroom which had been occupied by her mother.

  Two double beds took up practically all the floor space in the landing bedroom. One had only a lumpy horse-hair mattress on it, heavily stained by generations of incontinent children; the other bed had lying in the middle of it a mixed pile of old bolsters, a discarded overcoat and an old, horse blanket. Daisy did own a pair of blankets but they were in pawn and looked like staying there, unless Michael came home with some money. She had been paying the interest on them to the pawnbroker for months — Michael could use a belt with good effect across her back when he was angry enough; and the loss of the blankets, with the consequential chilly nights he would suffer while home, would be quite enough to raise his Iri
sh temper.

  She stood looking round this noisome den while she drained her glass. The chamberpot under the bed had not been emptied for a couple of days and was adding a finishing touch to the stench. The silence was as absolute as that of a church on a Monday.

  Slowly she trailed through the door to her mother’s room. A shaft of moonlight illuminated the empty, stripped bed. Mixed with the smell of bugs was a faint odour of flowers and of death.

  She walked almost fearfully round the bed and put the candle in its saucer down on the mantelpiece. In its dim light she stood looking down at the pillow which still showed the indent of her mother’s head.

  Suddenly a great bellowing wail came from the bereaved woman. She flung herself on to the bed and, lying spread-eagled upon it, she beat the thin mattress with her fists.

  “Oh, Mam!” she shrieked, “Mam!”

  FIVE

  Daisy was awakened by a steady tapping on the front door and a bright, little voice shouting, “Mrs. Gallagher!”

  Daisy opened her eyes slowly; the lids were swollen from weeping and felt sore. She became aware that she must have slept for a long time and she turned to look through the undraped window. Though overcast, the sky was light and a wind was rattling at the dormer window, which Great Aunt Mary Devlin had left ajar.

  The sharp tap-tap on the door was repeated.

  “Come in,” shouted Daisy, “Door’s open.” Then she realised that someone was tapping with a coin or other metal, not with a fist, as would one of the family or a neighbour. “Be down!” she cried.

  She rolled slowly off the bed and stood for a second shaking out her skirts and pushing her loosened plaits back from her face. She sighed with a slow sobbing breath and then stumped down the stairs, little jabs of pain going through her head at every step.