‘Queueing up down the bleed’n Labour Exchange waiting to be insulted, that’s how,’ said Harold, joining in from his perch on the other side of the bar. ‘Dunno how they put up with it.’
Joe Palmer took another long swig of his beer. ‘You seen him lately, Harold? Been in at all, has he?’
‘No, he’s not been in here for months.’
‘Well, yer’d be shocked, I’m telling yer. Looks just like an old man, he does now.’
Pat tipped his head back and drained his glass. ‘Drink up, Joe. Let’s have another one.’
Joe did as he was told and pushed the empty glass towards Harold. ‘What’s all this in aid of, Pat? That’ll be two pints yer’ve stood me.’
‘Just to say thanks again for keeping our Danny on. It means a lot to me and Katie to know he’s working, specially during times like these.’
‘My pleasure, Pat. And don’t go getting it into yer head that I’m doing him some sort of a favour. He’s a fine little worker. Willing. It’s good to see it in a kid of eighteen. So yer don’t have to keep standing me pints. Not that I’m saying no, mind yer.’ Joe laughed. ‘And my Aggie thinks he’s an angel, so I wouldn’t dare get rid of him, would I?’ He paused. ‘She’d have loved a kid like him, yer know, Pat.’
Pat nodded. ‘I know.’ He slapped a handful of change down on the counter. ‘Well, if you don’t want me to buy you a pint to say thanks, I’ll ask yer to join in a bit of a celebration with me instead.’ Pat lowered his voice. ‘Don’t let on to my Katie, but I had a bit of luck yesterday.’
‘What, got a tip off of Prince Monolulu, did yer?’
‘Good as.’ Pat held the glasses out to Harold. ‘Two more in here, please, mate, and have another one for yerself.’
Harold levered himself listlessly off his stool ‘Not for me, ta, Pat.’
‘Well?’ Joe was intrigued.
Pat couldn’t hold back a smile as he recalled his good fortune. ‘See,’ he began, ‘we had a bit of time on our hands yesterday, nothing to do again, and I thought I was gonna be well outta pocket. But we kind of fell into having a few rounds of pitch and toss with the customs blokes.’ He leant over the bar to Harold. ‘And you know the feeling when luck’s with yer? Well, I was nearly fifteen bob up by the finish. Fifteen bob for nothing, so I thought we’d maybe up the odds a bit.’ He looked over his shoulder to make sure that Jimmo and Albert weren’t earwigging. Both had wives who were experts in spreading tales, and the last thing he wanted was for Katie to get wind of what he’d been up to. He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘So I said I’d take on any one of ’em. And there was one who was willing – the only one who was willing as a matter of fact,’ he added proudly, ‘who was game enough to take on Pat Mehan in a fight. Great big bleeder, he was, from over East Ham way somewhere. Right fancied his chances with me, he did.’
Harold and Joe both laughed in anticipation.
‘But he weren’t as tough as he thought he was. Aw no. “I could have you,” I said to him, “with one hand tied behind me back.” And that’s exactly what I did.’
‘What?’ Joe nodded towards Pat’s arm.
‘Yep, we went behind the sheds and I took him on with it tied behind me back with a lump of rope. Two minutes he lasted.’ Pat took off his cap and lifted his thick fringe of dark hair from his forehead. A deep blue stain showed through his weather-beaten skin. ‘I got that and another fifteen bob for me trouble.’
Joe threw back his head with laughter. ‘Don’t let your Katie find out or yer’ll have more than a bruise on yer crust, yer’ll have a frying pan there and all.’
Pat joined in with his laughter. ‘I ain’t daft.’
‘She’s a girl, your Katie.’
‘Yeah, she’s that, all right, but she’s got a heart of gold and all, Joe, just like your Aggie.’ Pat dropped his chin and said quietly, ‘Yer know what, even with all us mob to worry about she’s still been taking grub over to the Miltons for the last couple of weeks. I reckon she thinks none of us have been noticing but I’ve seen her.’
‘She’s a rare one, that missus of your’n, Pat. I mean, Aggie’s only got me and her to see to. But your Katie – I dunno how she finds time.’
Joe drained his glass and held it up to Pat. Pat hesitated for just a moment then smiled. ‘Go on then, but just half or yer’ll have me singing.’
Joe leant across the bar. ‘Two halves, please, Harold.’ He sat back, arms folded across his chest. ‘It’s like how she’s been helping out Frank Barber with that kid of his. Aggie’s been full of it.’
Pat frowned.
‘He must really appreciate it, yer know. Must be murder for a geezer like him bringing up a kid by himself.’
No sooner had Harold put the two half-pints on the bar than Pat had drained his glass. He stood up, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and started walking over to the door. Before he left he turned round to the astonished Joe. ‘Thanks for the beer,’ he said, his voice flat and his face drained of colour. ‘I’ll be getting off home now.’
Harold shook his head at Joe with a look that said: Don’t ask, mate, just keep yer trap shut if you’ve got any sense.
As Pat stepped outside on to the street the warm evening air hit him like a wall. He stood there, breathing deeply, trying to sort out the thoughts that were buzzing around in his head. Frank Barber. Joe had said it, plain as day, she’d been helping Frank Barber. Why hadn’t she said anything to him about it?
In a more rational mood Pat would have told himself that that was Katie’s way: not bragging about what she was doing for people and just getting on with things. But Pat wasn’t thinking rationally. The blackness of jealousy had closed his mind into a single, dark tunnel of anger, rooted in an undeniable, but never spoken fear of losing her. He had seen his mother go off so many times when he had been a child that he had absorbed the perverted lesson without ever questioning it, that that was what women did – they went off and left you, no matter how much you needed them, or how much you loved them. His mother hadn’t stayed away, however. She had always come back, claiming she was sorry for what she had done. But that wasn’t the truth, or so his father had hollered so loud that Pat could hear from his bedroom as he cowered beneath the blankets. The truth was that she was bored as she always was, sooner or later, by her latest man. Next there would be the screaming match with Pat’s parents accusing one another of things that Pat chose not to hear, or at least not to remember, and finally his father would explode into a violent frenzy of punching and kicking, beating his wife until she collapsed from his blows, while Pat buried his head under his pillow, sobbing for them to stop.
Pat had never asked his parents, or even himself for that matter, whether it was his father’s violence or his mother’s straying that had come first, but he had sworn to himself that when he grew up he would never live the life that they had; when he got married he would never let his wife leave him.
He pulled down his cap and prepared himself to walk back along the road to number twelve and confront her, but what he saw going on outside their house at the other end of the street was enough of an excuse to tip his fermenting anger over into a blind rage. There was Katie, broom in hand, rowing noisily with a woman Pat recognised as coming from one of the flats in the tall three-storey houses in Upper North Street; she had the reputation for being a wild street fighter who didn’t mind getting a bloody nose or a thick lip so long as she got her revenge for whatever slight, real or imagined, that she was disputing.
Usually Pat would have raced along the street and been first in the queue to support his wife, whatever the issue, against such a woman, believing implicitly that Katie could never be in the wrong. But after what Joe had just said to him, supporting his wife was the last thing on Pat’s mind.
He strode purposefully towards the little crowd that had gathered round the two yelling women, his mind full of the vision of Katie smiling up at Frank Barber, the widower from across the street at number eleven. He didn’t even not
ice the younger Miltons hanging out of their top window jeering and pelting things at the woman who had the cheek to be rowing with their friend’s mum. Nor did he register that Phoebe Tucker and Sooky Shay were sitting on kitchen chairs on the pavement in front of number seven, looking, apart from the fact that they were togged out in crossover aprons and trodden-down carpet slippers, as though they were in a theatre audience watching a high drama being acted out for their entertainment.
As Pat drew nearer to the rowdy scene he began to get the gist of what the woman from round the corner was shouting at his wife; she was complaining about one of his sons.
‘Your precious little Michael wants his arse tanning, the rotten little bugger. Nearly ripped the sleeve right off that jacket, he has,’ the woman hollered, poking her finger dangerously close to Katie’s mouth. She was either very brave or didn’t know that if anyone had anything bad to say about her kids, Katie Mehan had it in her to bite right through to the woman’s bone.
‘My Michael, you say,’ said Katie, deceptively calm. Crouching forward, she circled the woman, her broom clasped in her hand as though it were an Amazon warrior’s spear. ‘Aw no, yer’ve got that all wrong.’ Katie shook her head, making her halo of red waves quiver. ‘I ain’t having that. It’s not my Michael yer wanna be after. No, if yer looking for the troublemaker, yer wanna look at yer own flaming kid. Yer’ve brought up a right little monster there, if yer can call it bringing him up, the way he’s left night and day while you go out gallivanting Gawd knows where.’
Katie jerked her thumb at the woman’s scabby-kneed child, who was wishing he had never mentioned the name of Mehan to his mother.
‘It was him what picked on my boy. Michael was only protecting himself. He knows better than to start a fight, but he knows he should always be the one to finish it. Just like I’ve always taught him.’
Katie turned to Michael for confirmation of what she had just claimed and, as Michael was far more scared of Katie than of any kid, or any kid’s mother for that matter, he nodded angelically and whispered, ‘That’s right, Mum. It was him what started it. Honest. It weren’t me.’
The woman’s nostrils flared. ‘You little liar!’ She looked round at her audience, making an appeal for truth, just in time to see a lump of slate being pelted along the street with considerable speed and accuracy from the Miltons’ upstairs window. She ducked and it fell at Katie’s feet; the Miltons weren’t doing too well at protecting their champion. ‘Did yer see that?’ the woman gasped. ‘This whole street’s full of bloody hooligans.’
‘Never you mind no one else,’ Katie snarled. ‘It’s me yer’ve got the row with, not them.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ the woman roared, ‘but yer’ve got the sodding nerve to call yerself a churchgoer. Churchgoer, my Aunt Fanny! Yer no good, the lot of yer. And if yer don’t stop him now, that Michael’ll turn out just like that Sean of your’n.’
Katie straightened up from her fighter’s stance. ‘What’s this about my Sean?’
The woman again appealed to the crowd. ‘What’s this about her Sean, she asks.’ She turned back to Katie. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
For the first time, Nora, who up until now had been standing quietly observing, spoke up. ‘Yer don’t have to stand for that, Katie, girl,’ she said, flapping her hand at the other woman. ‘You get yer blouse off and paste her!’
But before Katie could follow her mother’s instructions, Pat arrived on the scene. He grabbed hold of his wife’s arms and hissed into her ear to get indoors.
So shocked was she that Pat would even dare treat her like that in the street, especially in front of the neighbours and her own mother, Katie followed him dumbly into number twelve.
Feeling that honour had been satisfied, the woman from Upper North Street treated the gawping crowd to a scornful smile, stuck her chin in the air and wandered off around the corner, dragging her humiliated son by the collar of the torn jacket that had caused all the trouble in the first place.
Nora, however, felt she had been cheated out of a proper end to the business. Determined to have a row of some kind or other, she stood her ground on the pavement between her and her daughter’s houses, and turned her attentions to her two neighbours who were still sitting on their kitchen chairs, apparently hoping for a second act to the drama.
‘And what are you two old hens looking at?’ Nora demanded loudly.
Phoebe Tucker’s skin was too thick for such taunts to worry her, and anyway she was too busy insulting other people to bother wasting her time being offended.
Leaning back in her chair, she addressed her companion loudly: ‘Like I said, Sook, it ain’t just their kids they wanna keep an eye on neither. That flaming mongrel of their’ns been doing its business all over decent people’s street doorsteps again. Disgusting, I call it, proper disgusting. Mind you, what would yer expect of a family like that? Fighting in the street. Disgraceful.’
Sooky, who always agreed with Phoebe – when she was within earshot, at least – nodded sagely. ‘Yer right there, girl.’
Michael looked aghast at the women’s accusation. ‘Our Rags never did his business on no one’s steps, Nanna. Mum’d kill me if I let him do that.’
Nora very deliberately reached into the deep pocket of her apron and retrieved her purse. Taking out a couple of pennies, she thrust them into Michael’s hand. ‘Go and get some chips and take Timmy with yer,’ she instructed her grandson. Then she pushed up her sleeves and bowled across the street to put Phoebe Tucker and Sooky Shay right about one or two things.
Inside number twelve, Katie was pacing up and down the little kitchen, trying to figure out what had got into her husband, while he sat staring at the scrubbed table top, his face fixed with hostility beneath the peak of his cap.
‘Are yer gonna say something, or are yer just gonna sit there with that face on yer?’ Katie demanded, spinning round to confront him.
‘Yer was causing a scene in the street,’ he accused her. ‘And . . .’ He smacked the flat of his hand hard against his thigh, ‘and yer’d think there’d at least be a bit of bread and cheese on the table for a man when he gets home from the pub.’
Katie was at a loss. She started her pacing again, thinking that if she stood still she might just have to take a saucepan to her husband’s thick, stupid head. He was acting like that day he had seen the feller from the market slip some extra tomatoes into her string bag; he had insulted the man, and her, by accusing him of trying to buy his way into Katie’s affections with a few overripe vegetables. That was typical of Pat’s jealousy, but she honestly couldn’t think what had made him so wild this time. It couldn’t really be about bread and cheese, he never got worked up over things like that. No, all that ever set Pat off was the idea that some bloke might have noticed she didn’t look like the back end of a number sixty-five tram.
She took a deep breath, stopped her pacing and looked at her husband. ‘Pat, yer’ve not long eaten yer tea. You ain’t hungry. So, will yer tell me what this is all about?’
‘Did I say I was hungry?’ Pat shouted. ‘Did I say that? No, I didn’t, did I?’
Katie pulled out a chair and sat down at the table opposite her husband. She spoke as evenly as she could manage, although her mouth was dry and her hands were trembling. ‘Look, Pat, I ain’t having this. Yer acting like a madman. Now will yer tell me what’s really up with yer?’
Pat bowed his head. His chest rose and fell as he breathed rapidly in and out. ‘Forget it, all right?’
‘No, Pat, that ain’t good enough.’
Pat rubbed his hands over his face, the work-worn skin of his fingers catching on the thick blue-black stubble that covered his chin. ‘All right, 111 tell yer. I’m worried. Satisfied? I’m worried that when I go in on Monday the work’ll have dried up completely. That there’ll be nothing left for no one.’ He lifted his face towards the door. ‘When yer see the likes of them Miltons and what it’s done to them, it gets yer down. It’s enough to get anyone down
. Can’t yer see that?’
Katie stood up again. Her hands were now shaking almost uncontrollably as she picked up her chair and slammed it down hard under the table. ‘No, Pat. I won’t have it. Yer lying to me. All right, yer worried about work, but we both know there’s something else up with yer, don’t we? And from the way yer leading off, I reckon it’s another one of them bone-headed ideas yer get stuck into that thick bonce of your’n.’
Now Pat was standing too. He towered over her, but she stood her ground, fists thrust into her waist.
‘Well?’ she demanded.
‘Yer really wanna know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, 111 tell yer. Yer was talking to Frank Barber. Joe Palmer said so, so there’s no use you denying it.’
Katie threw up her hands. ‘Why would I deny talking to Frank Barber?’
Pat leant forward and thumped the table top with the side of his fist. ‘Because he’s a sodding widower, that’s why,’ he bawled.
‘Yeah,’ Katie snapped back, ‘that’s right. Yer know, yer must be a flaming genius, you. His wife’s dead, so that’s what he is, he’s a widower. Now why didn’t I think of that?’
Pat said nothing.
‘And,’ Katie went on, practically vibrating with temper, ‘it’s ’cos he’s a widower that I was asking if there was anything I could do to help with that poor little kiddy of his.’
‘What’s that gotta do with you?’ Pat was blazing. ‘He’s got old girl Evans living upstairs for that.’
Katie almost laughed. ‘You are kidding, ain’t yer, Pat? Nutty Lil, with all her ghosts and spirits and hymn singing? Not to mention her gin. Everyone knows she’s half barmy.’ She shook her head in baffled wonder.
‘Kate, I couldn’t care less if she was Nutty Lil or Fag Ash Lil.’ Pat was losing track of what had seemed like a totally reasonable argument to him as he had strode along the street from the Queen’s, determined to put a stop to whatever his fevered mind had fixed upon. ‘And anyway, a feller looking after a little girl like that – well, it ain’t manly, is it? I don’t want yer mixing with him.’
Just Around the Corner Page 6