Trinidad Street

by Patricia Burns

  He ignored this. ‘So it’s not permanent?’ he persisted.

  ‘Might be. D’you want to make something of it?’

  ‘Somebody ought to.’

  ‘Look’ – she could not believe this – ‘if I want to do a day’s work for Gerry, I can, right? I’m helping a neighbour out of a hole and earning myself a bob or two into the bargain. I don’t know what you’re getting so hot under the collar about.’

  He was silent, holding her eyes as if trying to see past the words to what she really meant.

  ‘As long as it’s just for today.’

  His physical presence made her throat dry and her heart flutter. She wanted to submit, to agree that working for Gerry was foolish, to see his hard gaze soften into a smile. But pride kept her defying him.

  ‘Whether it’s today or the rest of my life, it’s none of your business, Harry Turner.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, and strode off into the crowd.

  ‘The cheek! The blooming cheek of it!’ she said out loud.

  She found her hands were shaking. It spread to her knees. She pulled out the rickety stool from under the stall and sat down.

  The woman from the next pitch came over and put a sympathetic arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Your brother, is he?’ she asked. ‘Think they can run your life for you, don’t they?’

  ‘No, no, he’s’ – she sought to describe the relationship – ‘he’s a sort of brother-in-law. His sister’s married to my brother.’

  The woman shrugged. ‘So what’s he doing up here telling you what to do?’ Then she chuckled. ‘Here – he must fancy you. Lucky girl! Nice, he is. I’d go for him if I was twenty years younger. I like a man with a nice set of muscles. Mind you, young Gerry’s not going to like it much, is he?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You going out with that other feller.’

  ‘But it’s none of Gerry’s business, either.’

  ‘Oh.’ The woman was perplexed. ‘I thought you was – so Gerry’s some relation of yours, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s no relation at all.’

  ‘So he is your young man?’

  ‘No, he’s just a neighbour.’

  ‘Ah.’ A customer was waiting to buy some apples. The stallholder moved over to serve her. ‘Well, dearie,’ she said over her shoulder to Ellen, ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing.’

  It was at that point Ellen noticed a cup was missing from the display. While she and Harry had been arguing, someone had stolen it. Anger welled up again, flooding the churning confusion that Harry had left behind. She held on to it, fed it. Anger was easy and clean-cut; it did not raise difficult questions.

  ‘It’s all your fault, Harry Turner,’ she muttered out loud. ‘Everything was all right till you came along.’

  The fun had gone out of the day. She was glad when Gerry reappeared, full of news of his day’s dealings and eager to hear how she had got on. He was delighted with her sales, dismissing the stolen cup as one of the hazards of stallholding. She did not tell him the circumstances under which it went. She was called upon to admire the goods he had bought, and together they served the last customers and finally packed everything away and carried it back up to the storeroom.

  ‘That’s what I call a good day’s work,’ Gerry said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ellen agreed. She just wished she did not keep hearing Harry’s objections over and over again in her head.

  The effect of the day did not stop there. When she got to work on Monday, her story of illness on Saturday was patently disbelieved. At the end of the soft-fruit season, the casual workers were laid off, and Ellen along with them. She was judged to be unreliable.

  Ellen was horrified. Much as she hated the place, the family needed her income. All the way home, she tried to find words to explain to her parents what had happened. Nothing was good enough. Whichever way she put it, she had got the sack. They would be right back to where they had been before Jack started work, just managing to scrape a living. With all the others who had been laid off also looking for work, jobs would be hard to find. It was going to be back to bread and marge and no hot water again until she managed to find something. She dreaded the look on her mother’s face when she told her.

  ‘Well, that’s their loss,’ Gerry said, when she complained that one day working for him had lost her her job. He did not sound very concerned. In fact, he could hardly hide his satisfaction.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to say that. I got no money coming in at the end of the week,’ Ellen told him. She had been saving up to get the beds back. Now that would have to wait.

  Gerry tried to look worried. He sighed and frowned. Then his face changed.

  ‘I know!’ he exclaimed, as if he had only just thought of it, ‘why don’t you come and work for me full-time? With you doing the stalls and me doing the travelling and the buying, I could really get somewhere with the business.’

  ‘Oh!’ The thought of getting out of factory work was overwhelmingly tempting. Even in the winter, even on days when it poured with rain or there was snow on the ground, the market was better than the grind of doing the same small process a thousand times a day. But she hesitated. There was the problem of Gerry himself – and Harry.

  ‘Do you – er – do you think it’d work, like you being the boss and me being paid?’ she asked.

  ‘Work? We’d be the best! It worked Saturday, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But Harry had not liked it.

  Harry would have to lump it. She thrust aside the image of him demanding to know whether the job was permanent. He had no right to say what she could do.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Gerry was delighted. His face broke into a massive grin. ‘You will? Smackeroo! We’ll be a great success, you and me.’

  Ellen ignored the warning voice inside that told her there was more to this than a working relationship. She needed the money, the job was better than anything else she could hope to get, and she was not going to let Harry Turner dictate to her.

  ‘You bet,’ she said. ‘When do I start?’

  She saw and heard the rumour and the speculation spreading up and down the street during the next few days. And just to confirm it, her mother gave her a warning. Gerry was all right, he was a decent sort, but Ellen must be careful. She did not like the thought of the two of them in each other’s pockets all day long. Ellen shrugged off the gossip and assured her mother that it was just a job, and anyway Gerry was not with her a lot of the time. She was not sure herself what he did, but he was out and around chasing after deals.

  ‘Well, I trust you to be a sensible girl,’ Martha said, though she still did not sound too happy.

  It was not the neighbours or her mother’s suspicion that worried her. For all of the first week she was in a state of nerves expecting Harry to turn up at any minute. She was angry with herself for caring so much about what he thought, and even more angry when she was disappointed by his not appearing. She told herself that it did not matter. But when she saw him waiting at the tram stop on the West Ferry Road, her insides turned to water.

  He was waiting for her. He stepped forward and put out a hand to help her down. Once she was on the pavement, he did not let go.

  ‘I’d like a word with you,’ he said.

  Ellen tried hard to appear indifferent. ‘All right. Just don’t take too long, will you? My mum’ll have my tea ready.’

  ‘We’ll go down by the river,’ Harry told her.

  They both maintained an obstinate silence as they walked down the narrow streets. Anger, resentment and something close to fear was winding up inside Ellen with every step. Of one thing she was certain, she was not giving in to any browbeating.

  From a dank alleyway between the high cliffs of warehouses, they emerged on to the riverside. The tide was low, so only the host of smaller craft were moving in the slight evening breeze. The sun, not setting yet but getting low in the sky, lit the water and
the grey flanks of the mudbanks with pale gold. But neither of them had eyes for the peaceful scene.

  ‘So?’ Ellen said, springing to the attack. ‘What’s all this about, then?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what it’s about. You working for Gerry Billingham, that’s what. You told me it was just one day, to help out a neighbour.’ He was keeping his voice reasonable, making her sound shrill and aggressive.

  ‘It was – then.’

  ‘And now it’s changed?’

  ‘No, I’m just working for him all the time, that’s all. And anyway, what is it to you?’

  ‘I don’t like seeing you giving up a perfectly good job to work for someone like Gerry.’

  That did it.

  ‘Perfectly good job, you call it? I call it a blooming awful job. I hated it. And what’s wrong with working for Gerry, I’d like to ask? Gerry’s a good bloke, and he’s paying me more than what blooming Maconochie’s ever did.’

  Anger and suspicion tightened in Harry’s face. He leaned forward until he was nearly touching her.

  ‘Is he? What for? What’s he expecting for this money, then?’

  Ellen felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. So that was it. That was what he thought. Fury at the injustice of it boiled up and erupted in a scream of protest.

  ‘If you mean what I think you mean by that, you can blooming well take it back. What sort of a girl do you think I am?’

  ‘I thought I knew. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’m sure about. I’m sure it’s none of your business. What I do is up to me. You got no right to come telling me what I can or can’t do. Who do you think you are?’

  He ignored this. ‘I’m only thinking of your own good. Do you know what people are saying in the street?’

  ‘I don’t blooming well care.’

  For several nerve-stretching seconds they stood just inches apart, breathing heavily, glaring at each other, Harry trying to get her to back down, Ellen defying him. When he spoke, it was with deadly quiet control.

  ‘So it’s true, then. They’re right when they wonder just what you and Gerry do all day.’

  She gasped. She was too hurt and angry now to consider what she was saying.

  ‘If that’s what you think, Harry Turner, you go ahead and think it.’

  In answer, he reached out and pulled her roughly to him. Ellen tried to resist but she was no match for his strength. His mouth covered hers in a long hard kiss that melted her bones, sending her spinning into a timeless, placeless realm of ecstasy. She was left swaying, breathless, disorientated.

  Then he let her go.

  ‘Goodbye, Ellen,’ he said, and walked rapidly away without once looking back.

  Union membership was at a low ebb. Will found himself recruited into going to meetings with his father, who was trying to rouse the men out of their apathy. It was heavy going. The men could not see that joining the union would do them any good. At times it was painful. They simply did not want to listen. Seeing his father growing desperate, Will was moved to jump up and help him. They made a successful impromptu double act.

  For several days afterwards he basked in the afterglow, hearing his father describe how he took the meeting in hand and turned it round, how men had joined because of what he had said. They both of them conveniently forgot the scores who walked away unmoved. He saw pride in his mother’s eyes as she listened.

  ‘A real chip off the old block,’ she said, hugging his shoulders.

  He tried to describe to Maisie what had happened. She looked at him anxiously. She could see it meant a lot to him, but she did not understand.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that was nice.’

  ‘It wasn’t nice, not nice, it was . . .’ He could not put it into words. He had no way to describe that glimpse of power he had seen.

  Maisie bit her lip. The two toddlers were yelling for their tea and the new baby was crying. She found it difficult to concentrate at the best of times.

  ‘I’m sure it was lovely,’ she tried. ‘If it’s what you want.’

  He gave up. It was no use talking to her. She had no idea. ‘Tea ready, then?’ he asked.

  With relief she turned to the range. This she could do. ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s just coming. You sit down, I’ll get the plates.’

  A week later, his father told him there was another meeting. They were hoping to get support from men in other docks. If even a small group of union men could be formed in each dock, that would make a basis for expansion. Eager now for a second taste of leadership, Will agreed to go, arranging to meet him there as his father was seeing the union leaders first.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ his father said. ‘I’ll tell them my son’s coming.’

  Will was just walking up the West Ferry Road when he spotted Siobhan at the tram stop.

  She looked breathtaking. With the money she earned from singing in pubs, she had more than the other girls to spend on herself, and it all went on clothes. Now she was wearing a primrose-coloured dress that stood out against the brick and cobble and dust like some exotic flower on a rubbish heap. On her head was a confection of a straw hat with flowers on it, and beneath its brim her cornflower eyes danced in her sweet round face. She was fresh and young and beautiful. She stopped him in his tracks.

  He stood staring at her. The man who had addressed a crowd of dockers and swayed them with his words was gone. He was as tongue-tied as a fourteen-year-old. He just waited, desperately hoping that she would notice him, and in noticing, smile. He never knew where he was with Siobhan, though he was well aware that she only looked at him when she had nothing else to do. All the men at Morton’s were wild for her. Rumour had it that one of the foremen had asked her out. But she never stayed with any of them for long.

  She was gazing along the road, watching for the tram, detached from her grubby surroundings, a different species from the other people at the stop or the passers-by in the street. She made him feel gross, ugly, dirty.

  And then she saw him. Her eyes flicked over him, bringing him out in a sweat of longing. Miracle of miracles, she smiled.

  Will stepped forward as if pulled by strings. ‘Hullo, Siobhan. Not at work?’

  She looked down at herself, then around at the busy street. ‘No, I don’t think I am.’

  He went hot. He hated it when she mocked him. He tried not to let it show.

  ‘Where are you off to, then?’

  She smiled up at him, teasing. ‘Now that’d be telling, wouldn’t it?’

  There was an air of barely suppressed excitement about her. She was fair buzzing with it, it made her whole body vibrate.

  ‘It’s something special. I can tell.’

  ‘Well, who’s the clever one, then?’

  Men passing by in the street stopped to look at her. Delivery drivers whistled.

  ‘You shouldn’t be going alone, wherever it is,’ he said. ‘You need someone with you to look after you.’

  ‘Is that so? And I suppose you think it should be you?’

  A wonderful possibility opened up in front of him. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And what makes you think I’d agree?’

  ‘Because you know I’d protect you.’

  A McDougal’s van trotted by. The driver flourished his whip. ‘Wotcher, darling! Coming my way?’

  Siobhan ignored him.

  ‘You see? You do need someone with you.’

  The tram was approaching, the two horses straining against the heavy load. Will flagged it down and Siobhan jumped on to the platform. She turned to look down at him.

  ‘You coming, then?’ she said.

  He was beside her in an instant.

  It was only as they passed by the western end of the docks that he remembered he was supposed to be going to the meeting. But with Siobhan sitting beside him, almost touching him, the meeting did not seem to matter.

  She would not tell him where she was going. She kept him guessing, would not say whether he was close or
not. They left the tram and caught a bus, Will saying goodbye to the last of his money without a second thought, and finally got off by a small theatre crammed between the shops in the Commercial Road.

  Siobhan’s excitement had turned to nervous tension. She scanned the red and gold sign outside. Sullivan’s Musical Theatre it declared.

  ‘I think I need the stage door,’ she said. The usual confidence had gone out of her voice.

  ‘So . . .’ Light dawned for Will. ‘You’re going to do it, then? Go on the stage? I always said you should.’

  ‘I’m going for an audition,’ she told him.

  ‘Stage door’ll be round the side.’ Will took charge, grasped her elbow, propelled her along the filthy alley between Sullivan’s and the next building and opened the peeling door. It was so dark inside after the sunny street that neither of them could see.

  ‘We’re closed,’ came an unwelcoming voice out of the gloom.

  ‘Miss Siobhan O’Donaghue, come for an audition,’ Will said loudly.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw an ancient man peering at them from a cubbyhole by the door.

  ‘Another one of ’em. Never learn,’ he muttered, whether to himself or to them, Will did not know. He gestured impatiently at the interior of the building. ‘Go on up there. Up the stairs, turn left, turn right, second door.’

  ‘Thanking ye kindly,’ Siobhan said, but for once her charm failed. The man merely grunted and retreated into his lair.

  Naked gaslights showed the way along twisting corridors and up dusty stairs. Their footsteps tapped hollowly on the bare boards. Following the old man’s instructions, they found themselves in what felt like a large space, though there were high partitions in front of them and a clutter of ropes, while around their feet were weights and boxes. Strong artificial light flooded through a gap.

  Then quite near to them, a piano chord was struck. Will felt Siobhan jump and catch her breath. Just the other side of what Will now realized was a wood and canvas stage flat, a man’s voice broke into a patter routine.