‘Are you stark raving mad, Lil? How many times do I have to say it? I can’t afford Bill Turner’s prices.’
Turner lifted his head, and closed one eye in his efforts to focus on her face. ‘No money involved,’ he said holding out his hands by way of proof. ‘Not a single brass farthing.’
‘D’you still think I’m talking about money?’ Cissie shook her head in wonder. ‘You really must be stupid, d’you know that?’
She took a step towards him, pulling her dressing-gown closer round her. ‘My kids’re gonna be brought up decent. Nothing to do with you, or anyone like yer.’
‘You wanna remember how your Davy made his living,’ Lil said sharply.
Cissie rounded on her. ‘If it hadn’t have been for you, you wicked old bastard, he would never have got mixed up in all that in the first place.’
Lil shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Someone had to push him. But who cares? That’s all in the past now.’
‘That’s right, darling,’ Turner grinned at Lil. ‘I don’t care about him for a start.’
He turned back to Cissie, leant back in the little wooden kitchen chair and stabbed his finger at her for emphasis. ‘But I care about you, sweetheart, and that’s why I’m gonna look after yer, now yer old man ain’t around no more.’
That was the final straw. Cissie flew across the room at him. She was just about to slap the smug smirk from his great, beaming face, when Bernie grabbed her arm from behind.
‘That wouldn’t be such a good idea, now would it, love?’ he growled, twisting her arm up behind her back.
‘You no-good cowson!’ she sobbed, her chin dropping to her chest. ‘Let me go. Just let me go. And get out o’ my house. The pair of yer.’
Turner dragged himself to his feet and stumbled drunkenly towards her and Bernie. He could barely stand.
Suddenly, his hand shot out and he grabbed Cissie’s face. She squirmed as his fingers dug painfully into her cheeks. But Turner wasn’t letting go, and Bernie now had both her arms behind her back. There was nothing she could do.
As her eyes widened with fear, Turner lowered his head and kissed her hard on the mouth, his hand gripping her face like a vice as he forced his tongue between her lips. She felt his other hand pull open her dressing-gown and paw roughly at her breasts through the thin material of her nightdress. Then he pulled his head back and, still holding on to her face, he wiped his lips on the back of his other hand.
After a long, terrifying moment, Turner let go of her as suddenly as he had grabbed her.
‘Out,’ he snapped at Bernie and stumbled his way out of the room.
‘I’ll be back for a bit more o’ that,’ he called from the passageway with an obscene laugh. ‘You can depend on that, darling.’ With that he slammed the street door behind him.
Cissie was still shaking as she heard the car roar away. She staggered over to the back door and threw it open, taking great gulps of air to get rid of the stink and taste of him.
The dawn had broken. It was a lovely autumn morning, but there was a harsh chill in the air.
Soon it would be winter.
Cissie closed her eyes and tried to calm herself by thinking of the children upstairs in their bedroom. They were safe, that was all that mattered.
Slowly she turned round to face Lil who was standing wide-eyed by the stove, her empty glass still clutched in her hand.
‘You. Sit down,’ Cissie commanded. ‘And just keep yer gob shut for once. I’m gonna say something, and this time I want yer to listen to me.’
Lil opened her mouth to protest but Cissie would have none of it. ‘Just sit down, Lil.’
With a defiant little shrug, Lil did as she was told.
‘Now,’ said Cissie, sitting down opposite her. ‘I’ve decided. I’m definitely… Definitely…’
She paused, rubbing her hands over her face. She felt sick, she still had the taste of him in her mouth. ‘I realise that there’s plenty about Davy I never knew and, to be honest, I don’t ever wanna know, and that’s why I’m gonna make a new start. I’m definitely thinking of marrying Sammy Clarke.’
‘That lump o’ lard?’ Lil sneered.
‘I thought I told you to be quiet.’ Cissie raked her fingers through her hair. ‘This going into the grocery business,’ she continued wearily, the vision of Turner looming over her, crowding out her thoughts. She shook her head, angry that she was letting him get to her. ‘… is an opportunity,’ she went on determinedly, ‘what I don’t reckon I can let go. And, if I do, and I mean if I marry him, and you wanna come and live with us, then I’ll think about it. I’ll see how we get on. But I’m warning you, Lil, you’d better watch it.
After the way you behaved in here tonight—’
‘I don’t believe this,’ Lil interrupted. She was quivering with indignation. ‘I thought you’d got all that rubbish out o’ yer head. That it was just some stupid idea. How can yer even think of marrying Sammy Clarke when yer could have Turner keeping yer?’
Cissie felt an hysterical giggle bubbling in her throat. ‘You ain’t got a clue, have yer? The bloke was ready to rip me clothes off, right here in front of yer and that animal with him would have—’
‘You take things too much to heart, girl,’ Lil dismissed her. ‘But Sammy Clarke? Yer’ve just gotta look at him. How could you even think of going with someone what looks like him? That great pink baby face.’ Lil shuddered, disgustedly.
‘It don’t all come down to “going with” someone, Lil. And, anyway, I ain’t saying I’m in love with the bloke, am I? I dunno if I’ll ever be able to love anyone ever again, not after what yer told me about Davy. But Sammy’s decent. If it hadn’t have been for him, I don’t know how we would’ve managed. It’s like that money. He wouldn’t hear a single word o’ thanks for it.’
‘What money?’ Lil was worried she might be missing out.
‘You should know. You spent enough of it on gin.’ Seeing she still wasn’t getting through to Lil, Cissie spelt it out. ‘The money what he stuck through the door.’
Lil rolled her eyes. ‘That weren’t from him, yer dozy mare,’ she shouted, flinging up her hands at her daughter-in-law’s simple-mindedness. ‘That weren’t from Sammy. It was from yer mum and dad.’
Lil’s mouth snapped shut like a letterbox. Shit! She hadn’t meant to say that.
Cissie blinked as though trying to clear something from her eyes. ‘Me mum and dad?’
Lil said nothing, she just poured another drink and lit herself a cigarette.
‘It couldn’t have been them. And anyway, where would they have got that sort o’ money from?’
When Lil still didn’t answer, Cissie snatched the glass from Lil’s hand. ‘I’m warning you, Lil, if you wanna keep a roof over your head…’
Lil snorted contemptuously and took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘When the stupid sods heard that their dear little daughter had been widowed they worried about yer, didn’t they? So they went without so that you could have all their dough. Silly bleeders.’
It took every ounce of Cissie’s willpower not to wrap her hands around Lil’s throat and choke the life out of the vicious, wicked old bag.
She ran from the room and started up the stairs. ‘Matty. Joyce. You awake, kids?’ she called. ‘Come on, up yer get, we’re going out.’
* * *
Within five minutes, Cissie and her two children were at the street door.
‘I know it’s early,’ she whispered gently to them, as she tied the strings of Joyce’s hat under her chin, ‘but this is like a big adventure, ain’t it?’
‘How about school, Mum?’ Matty asked, his little face contorted with concern as to what new problem might be facing him.
‘Don’t you worry yerself,’ Cissie answered him, planting a soft kiss on the top of his little fair head. ‘Now, you two stand there for me. Mummy won’t be a minute.’
As Cissie stepped back in the kitchen, Lil hurriedly shoved the tea caddy back on to the top shelf of the dresser.
�
��It’s all right, Lil, yer might as well take the lot, cos yer’ve taken everything else off o’ me. Well, nearly everything. At least I’ve still got the kids, thank Gawd. But before I go out, as one mother to another, I just wanted yer to know what getting your son involved with Turner really meant.’
Lil shrugged dismissively.
‘Have you got even the first clue about what Davy really got himself involved in, Lil? And have you got even a tiny little idea about what happened to him cos o’ your stinking, rotten greed?’
The crepey skin on Lil’s left cheek began to twitch convulsively. ‘What you going on about now?’
Cissie closed her eyes, took a deep breath and then let it out in a long slow sigh. ‘Nothing, Lil,’ she said with a weary shake of her head. ‘Well, nothing that’d make you see any sort o’ sense anyway.’
Chapter 22
Matty clambered up into the truck. He was hollow-eyed with tiredness; it was barely six o’clock in the morning and he had hardly slept. He’d been woken up when all the noise had started downstairs and hadn’t been able to go back to sleep again.
There’d been the man shouting, and his nanna telling off his mum. And then he’d heard what sounded like his mum’s own voice, but that was much quieter so he couldn’t really tell, and then another man had said something, and then one of them had started laughing. Horrible laughing. Just like the bogey-man that Tommy Godwin had told him about.
Then his mum had told him and Joycie to get up. And Matty didn’t understand any of it, but he knew it scared him. And he knew that because he was only five years old people wouldn’t explain to him what was going on. But he really wanted to know, not for himself – he had been taught that it was rude to be nosy – but so that he could help his mum. He wanted to help her because he hated her looking unhappy.
It was just like when his dad had gone away. It was so much better when his mum had told him all about it. He was still sad after she told him, but he was also glad when she explained that his dad hadn’t left them because of anything naughty that he or Joyce had done. That had really worried him for a while.
It was hard being little. He really wished he was a grownup.
He slid his bottom along the bench seat to make room for Joyce. ‘Where we going, Mum?’ he asked. If he at least knew that then he would know what to expect.
Cissie set her daughter carefully next to Matty and put her finger to her lips to warn her son to keep his voice down. Joyce had gone back to sleep as Cissie had carried her the short walk from number seven to the waste ground where the truck was parked, and she didn’t want her to wake up in strange, cold surroundings that might frighten her.
‘We’re gonna see Nanny and Granddad,’ Cissie whispered, taking off her coat and draping it across Joyce and Matty’s legs.
‘What, the nanny and granddad what you’ve got?’
Cissie nodded. ‘That’s right, babe. My mummy and daddy.’
That satisfied Matty for the moment and he settled back in his seat to think about what these people he had never seen before might be like. He hoped they weren’t like Nanna Lil.
Cissie was also thinking about what they might be like, not as people, but how they might have changed physically during the six and a half years since she had last seen them. But even though Cissie had not so much as set eyes on her parents since she had decided to marry Davy, she had never said anything bad about either of them to her children, and had actually made a point of referring to them occasionally. She had not gone so far as talking about the happy times she’d had with them when she’d been a girl, but had done her best to establish them as people who existed, a way of keeping them alive in her own mind, and for her children. Matty and Joyce had, after all, a right to know that they had two other grandparents whom they might, one day, want to visit. She’d always felt that it was important to know those sort of things and not to keep secrets from your family.
She nibbled nervously at the inside of her cheek. Secrets. The trouble they had caused. And not just the big, terrible, cruel secrets that Davy had kept from her, but the other type of secrets, the ones you even kept from yourself. The ones that you daren’t even think about. Ones such as whether you really did have any idea as to why your family was doing so well while all the others around you, decent families like the Millses, were struggling just to survive.
And secrets that you kept locked away, secrets such as the way Cissie really felt about her mum and dad. And how, apart from on the day of the funeral, she had never, ever admitted to herself, let alone to anyone else, that, at times, she missed her parents so badly it was like a physical pain in her guts.
She had never got used to not having them around. And now Cissie was beginning to admit it – along with all those things she didn’t much like about herself. If she had been more honest with herself, maybe the story of her life might have been very different.
She sighed wistfully, but it was no good feeling sorry for herself, that wouldn’t get the engine cranked.
She shivered in the cold, early morning air and rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them through before she set about starting up the truck.
* * *
As Cissie eased off the brake and pulled the truck off the waste ground on to Linman Street, net curtains twitched and sharp tongues began to wag.
* * *
‘Back home then, guv?’ Bernie asked optimistically.
Bernie Denham had finally plucked up the courage to ask Turner what he wanted to do next. Well, he had more hinted at what they should be doing rather than asked, because Bernie knew exactly what his thoughts on the matter were.
He flashed a hopeful glance in the rear-view mirror to gauge his boss’s reaction to the idea of going home. But it was difficult to tell whether he was capable of thinking at all, the state he was in. He looked barely conscious. And it was no wonder, the amount of booze he’d put away. Bernie ran through the previous eighteen hours with a resigned sort of disbelief at the drink the man had actually consumed.
It had started when Davy’s missus had said no to the shop lease and had buggered off, and Turner had called him and Chalkie in to give that idiot Clayborne another hiding.
Turner always had to blame someone if he failed in any way, and this time it was the luckless accountant who Turner decided should take the blame for the fact that Cissie Flowers had dared to turn him down again.
After that, Turner, already a bit the worse for wear from the night before, had swallowed a few large measures of scotch by way of a typically unpleasant sort of celebration of Clayborne’s punishment, and then they had left the office in Fenchurch Street, and had taken the short drive to the Grave Maurice pub in Whitechapel. The idea of going there was that Turner would collect his cut from one of the spielers – the illicit gambling clubs – he ‘looked after’, they’d have a few more drinks, and then they’d all go home.
At first it was fine: a few beers had been bought — beating blokes up was thirsty work, Turner had joked – laughs had been had, and dues had been paid. Within the rules of their world, it was all very civilised. But then a big winner had turned up, he’d made a packet on whist of all things, and he was flashing his wad like a right bloody idiot, buying round after round for everyone, and loving the idea of mixing with the likes of a notorious hard man such as Big Bill Turner. Turner had gone back on to the scotch. And his mood, as it so often did, had suddenly switched from back-slapping, hand-shaking camaraderie to vicious- tongued anger.
His mood deteriorated further and he became nastier and nastier; ever more convinced that Flowers’ old woman was just playing hard to get, jerking him around like a spiteful kid with a runt-of-the-litter puppy on a bit of old string, thinking she was getting one over on him.
Bernie had almost cheered with relief when they’d finally left the pub at about midnight – no landlord would ever call time when Bill Turner was drinking – but his hopes of getting home even then had been dashed when Turner announced that they were moving on
to a drinking club in Bethnal Green.
More hard drinking had gone on. And on.
At about four o’clock, Turner had got it in his head that if he went to see Davy’s missus, there and then, she wouldn’t be able to resist him; she’d throw herself into his arms and he’d have her in bed before either of them knew what was happening. Although it was the last thing he felt like doing, Bernie had had to drive Turner to the little terraced house in Poplar where she lived with her kids and Davy’s mum.
He’d waited outside in the car, glad at least for the opportunity to close his eyes for five minutes – he felt like an overused dish-cloth that had been wrung out once too often – but even his few moments of shut-eye had been snatched from him. He’d been woken up and dragged inside the house by Flowers’ silly cow of an old woman. It was beyond Bernie why the dopey mare didn’t just drop her drawers and get on with it. All right she was good-looking and probably had plenty of other offers to consider, and, yes, she was playing it very clever acting all uninterested – that was always a sure bet to get Turner going – but why Turner didn’t just give the cocky, big-mouthed sort a slap, as he would have done, was something Bernie could definitely not understand.
He’d stood there in the stuck-up tart’s back kitchen like an idiot, while Turner hollered and hooted and the old lady, Davy’s mum, had carried on, and while Davy’s missus acted like she was the bloody queen of the May. And the way she’d had the cheek to threaten him, Bernie Denham! If she wasn’t careful, she’d wind up like her stupid old man.
Then they’d got back in the car and Turner had told Bernie to start driving. Again. He’d been driving for bloody hours, and he was just about sick of it.
It must have been getting on for half past six by now and all Bernie wanted to do was go home and get his head down for a bit. And that was another thing, he could just imagine the rucking he’d get when he pitched up on his street doorstep. His old woman, Queenie, had a worse tongue on her than that Flowers bird. He didn’t know why he was bothering with all this old nonsense. Queenie was doing very nicely with the moneylending, he had a good little line in taking side bets, and he was also earning more than a fair screw from the dog-flapping over on the Marshes. He had every reason to get away from Turner, not least of which was the fact that being around the bloke was doing his head in.
The Flower Girl Page 28