He helped out all that week, studying the maps as he waited for fares, chatting with other drivers, picking up all the tips they offered and being very forthcoming about how nervous he was being a first-time cabbie.
He wasn’t nervous at all, but he knew he would seem less of a threat by being endearing.
This, he had learned.
She’d sent a telegram to say that it was done. He smiled and let the paper and envelope flitter down beside his breakfast of greasy sausages and black pudding.
Job done. He suffered in the end. Heard she was in a bad way. Hoping this pleases you, sir?
He laughed out loud. Old prick Mick, standing with his arms around Winnie, shielding her in court that day.
Well, she was alone now.
You couldn’t betray your own flesh and blood like that and get away with it.
The news put him in a buoyant mood.
The lodgings he had now were much more to his liking. Nothing fancy, nothing to be too proud of, but they were private and his own. He liked that it was on the flat, that there were no stairs to climb and that it was tucked away, nice and neat, not too far from all the train and cab stations, the southside within walking distance.
He got out to the southside as much as he could, taking off over the bridge to look at the big houses and their shiny brass doorknobs and gleaming steps, washed by the hands of a thousand housemaids.
The freedom, the pure joy he felt at being able to go and do whatever he wanted at whatever time of day, still had not subsided. He wondered if it ever would.
There were things he missed about the Joy though. He missed the banter. In the evenings, the stillness got to him.
When that happened, he’d put a few coins in his pocket and make his way over to the Monto. Now that he was getting to know who was who, he had some regulars he liked, but it was always a thrill to get a look at someone new. Especially the younger ones, the innocent ones, with fright in their eyes.
He always liked to find one of them.
Maggie had been on at him to come and visit. She wanted to see him, desperate now that he was out.
He didn’t want to see her yet. He felt as though he needed some time to adjust, some time by himself. The woman had an awful crowding way about her.
He liked the peace and quiet. The time to think. Even if it was a bit lonely.
Maggie brought her own troubles with her. Always did. Always would.
He knew she was trouble the very day he laid eyes on her. He caught her staring at him, out from under that white workhouse cap. She looked at him and stuck out her lip and blew a bit of hair up over her eye, real gamey she was.
“What are you looking at?” he said, seeing what her reaction would be.
“You.”
Cheeky mare.
And asking for a cigarette. Real brazen. He should have known from the set of her to keep away.
The other lads told him that those workhouse women were nothing but bad news. But he couldn’t help it, he liked her, there was something about her that drew him.
It was during one of their embraces, when he was up real close to her and he wanted to take her, there and then, that he told her about his cottage. Not too far from the workhouse at all. Just up the road. If she could get out at all ...
He didn’t actually think she’d find the way to get out, with all the doors closed and barred at night. But that was Maggie. That was Maggie all over.
“There are two big stones,” she told him. “They’re loose – in the back wall. I noticed them up by the yew tree last week when I was playing hide and seek with Kitty. It’s like someone tried to escape before. I tried to pull them out, but they wouldn’t come all the way. If they came out, I could squeeze through the hole. If you go and knock them out, with a chisel, just chip away at them and put them back, then I’d be able to use them. Like a door.”
She looked at him, up out of those dark-blue eyes, blinking.
“All right,” he told her, and that evening just before it got dark, he took his chisel and a little hammer and he found the stones, right behind the yew tree, like she told him. He chipped away until they came loose in his hands, the top one first, and then he put them back.
“It’s done,” he told her the next day, in between loading a cart of starch boxes.
And that was it. The escape artist, his little night-time visitor, standing at the door that very evening and he about to sit down to his spuds.
Red-faced from running. Panting. Wanting him.
He took her in of course and fed her. She was like a starving cat. She ate half his food, munching on the sausages like she’d never tasted meat before.
And when she was fed she was ready for him. Mad for him she was. Couldn’t get enough, all kissing and stroking him and wanting more.
Of course, he went with it, his body responding like any man’s would. But even then, he knew. That she was dangerous.
When it was done, when she lay there, spent, snuggled into him, telling him how she wished she could stay the night, he remembered another woman, older – her name was Maggie too.
He’d even been with her once, when he’d come out of the pub pissed, and she was there, hunching her dress up to reveal a milky-white thigh.
He couldn’t help himself. Whenever any woman was forward like that, it did something, it moved him inside.
So, he’d gone with her, drunk, and she’d taken him back to the little rundown house she was shacked up in. Not that he cared. Mad Maggie was what she was, a whore, offering a good time, if you were drunk enough to go with it.
When it was done and she was fixing herself, he leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette, and he realised there was a ragged curtain, hanging across the bedroom.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a movement, like a little cat, moving behind the material.
A girl. He saw her peeping out, their eyes locked for a second and he said to Maggie, “Is that your little girl?
She laughed. “Don’t mind them, they’re asleep anyway. They get a good dose of soothing syrup every night, sleep like babies they do.”
But one of them was awake. He’d seen her and she’d seen him.
And he’d forgotten about that, didn’t even ever think of it, until now.
“What was your ma’s name?” he said, his mouth muffled in her hair.
“Margaret, like me,” she said. “Why?”
She pushed up on her elbows, glaring.
“No reason,” he said and smiled at her.
Like mother like daughter. The two Maggies.
Bitch of a whore.
Trouble.
He hated her relying on him.
He should have told her all the way back then, when she first started calling to the cottage, to be away with herself. To leave him alone, to head back to the workhouse like a good little girl and forget all the notions she had about him.
Even the aul’ fella next door started to notice.
“Saw you had a lady visitor last night,” he said one morning to him.
“Mind your own fucking business,” he told him, straight off.
He had to get Maggie to calm a bit. He had to let her know that it wasn’t on to be calling so much.
“The man next door,” he told her. “He saw you. You need to be careful. I don’t think calling nearly every night is a good idea.”
“What do you mean?” she said, her eyes flashing dangerously.
“Well, I’m just saying, if you get caught you’ll get in trouble and if I get caught ... I don’t want to lose my job, Maggie.”
“So what?” she said. “You could get another.”
“Maggie,” he said, pleadingly.
“Are you telling me you don’t want me calling any more?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m worried it won’t end well.”
“The only way it won’t end well is if you betray me, Christy McCoy,” she said, glowering.
He felt trapped. Fucking Maggie.
>
He thought about sealing up the stones in the wall, setting them in plaster, something to end this affair that was getting far too serious.
He thought about skipping it for a while, taking off to Dublin.
But then he had another idea, something that would see her step back, take a break maybe.
He was sorry the way it happened, in the end, with the timing and all. He never meant for it to happen like that.
But it did give her the chance to escape, to get her head straight.
Well, as straight as any head could be on a girl like that.
Chapter 24
The Nanny
She knew Kitty couldn’t remember the before. Not really. She had some memories but it was hard to tell what were her own thoughts and what were the thoughts she had placed there for her, telling her only the good things about their mother.
Because there were good things. She had to search for them and, truth be told, she had to make a lot of them up, but what else could you do with a little girl who didn’t remember her mother?
It was easy to paint a picture of someone when they were gone. She could say anything she wanted, tell her their mother was beautiful and caring and giving and there was nothing Kitty could do but believe her. It wasn’t like she was going to show up there and reveal to everyone that she wasn’t beautiful, caring and loving after all.
That her jaws were so sunken, on account of the teeth that had been punched from her gums, that it made her large nose even more prominent. That her dark eyebrows almost met in the middle, that if you squinted sometimes she really did have the look of a witch about her.
It hadn’t always been like that. She remembered her mother from when she was small, and she didn’t look haggard or tired or witchlike at all.
She looked strong. Handsome even. But that was before.
Before the drink and the snuff and the not eating for days and the being outside, exposed to the elements. Before the men who had taken her and left her bruised, battered and scarred. Before the men who broke her cheekbones and her nose and even the ears in her head, crushing the cartilage, biting and nearly pulling them from her scalp.
No, she hadn’t always looked like that.
She knew now, when she looked in the speckled mirror at Number 43, that there was a look of her mother about her. It had brought it all back, coming to this town – stirring up memories, reminding her of where she had come from, who she was.
She’d inherited her mother’s large nose and heavy brow, but she had a different mouth. A kinder mouth. It made her better-looking. Maybe she had the same mouth as her father. Whatever her father had looked like. She used to search the faces of the men that came to the house, the ones they met on the street, always scrutinising them to see if one of them looked like her.
Her mother said her father was a sailor. But what was truth and what was lies?
“Tell me about Mama.”
Every night. Before they went to sleep, laid out in their narrow workhouse beds, they’d whisper.
“Mama is a great beauty,” she would tell Kitty. “She has dark hair, as black as a raven’s and a mouth as red as a rose. And she was so happy when you came along that we celebrated with tea and biscuits and after that she said she was the happiest Mama there ever was.”
“Will I see her again?”
“I don’t know, lovey. You might. And, if you don’t, I’ll always be here to mind you.”
It made her feel better, telling the child these fibs, making up stories so that she never knew the truth. Of where she’d come from. Of who she was.
Soon though, the other children would tell her. You couldn’t live in a place like this and be protected. She was waiting for the question that would inevitably one day come: Maggie, what is a whore?
And what could she say to that?
She had tried to stay in the rented rooms where they’d been living, in a cold shell of a building. But the authorities were on to them. She shunted the kitchen table right up against the door and barricaded them in. When it was discovered that their mother was gone, that she’d been taken to prison, then that was the end.
The police came. The neighbours stood round. A thirteen-year-old and a three-year-old. Left to fend for themselves.
To the workhouse it was.
As they walked there, escorted by a policeman who knew them well, who had often told them when he found them standing out in the cold, to go on home, to get into bed and wrap themselves in their blankets, even though they had no blankets at all, part of her felt relief.
At the workhouse there would be shelter. Stirabout. Maybe even some meat on Sundays. A dry bed, with a blanket. They wouldn’t have to worry at night, about who would be coming into their bedroom, about what state their mother would be in and whether she’d be home at all.
They knew exactly where she was now.
As they walked up the steep hill towards the workhouse, she fondly stroked Kitty’s hair, tied neatly back with the yellow ribbon, her most precious possession in the world.
There would be no whoring any more, not for them. There would be no drinking and carousing and going the way their mother did.
She would look after her sister and she would look after herself and, as soon as she was old enough, she would leave that workhouse and get the two of them settled into a new life.
She took Kitty’s hand as the policeman pulled back the knocker on the great wooden door of Drogheda Union Workhouse. It trembled in her palm, like a trapped butterfly on a hot summer’s day.
They were given new shoes when they arrived, small boots for Kitty and tough boots for her that didn’t even look like they’d been worn that often before. They felt heavy on her feet.
For the first few nights, when the lights went out, Kitty climbed from her bed into hers, creeping under the blanket, wrapping her tiny body around her, as they had always done, as they had always slept.
But with her full belly and all the play during the day, soon she was so tired in the evenings that she fell asleep in her own bed and forgot to climb into hers.
It was a good sign, she thought. Things were improving.
She was assigned to the laundry, where she marvelled at the vast vats of boiling water, mangles and ironing boards.
The room was filled with steam and the scent of detergent and water.
It was hot and heavy work and her brow dripped with the exertion as they swirled sheets and pinafores and cottons. Kitty went to the schoolhouse with the other children. When she was older, she too would be placed in the laundry, to help sort and starch.
Things were better at the workhouse. With segregation, there were no men coming and going. Protecting Kitty had always been her priority, and even though her mother had let some of the men into their bed, some that paid for it while she looked the other way and some that snuck in when their mother was passed out, she had never once let them touch Kitty.
Even though some of the dirty bastards wanted to.
There had been no one stopping them, though, when she herself was that age.
One day, the master of the workhouse, Mr. McGovern stood up at dinnertime, cracking a stick on the table. The room fell silent, waiting to hear him speak.
“Opportunities have arisen for girls that would like to train in domestic service,” he said. “We have a number of good families willing to take you on. You can come to my office tomorrow, to see me.”
And with that he sat down.
All night she thought about what the master had said.
Training in domestic service would give her a head start. The laundry was backbreaking work. In a house, she would receive a wage, board and learn new skills, skills that would see her acceptable and employable, anywhere in Ireland.
A host of girls stood outside the master’s office the following morning.
They were silent, on edge, shuffling and clearing their throats, waiting to be called.
She was left to last, the master overlooking her, not calling her
name, even though she had been there well before some other girls.
When he called her into his office, she felt annoyed to have been left till last.
“Margaret,” he said and he sat back in his chair, showing off his belly, which was round and hard and popped a little over his trousers.
She stood in front of him, bowing her head.
“I would like to put us forward for domestic service, sir,” she said. “Myself and Kitty. We are hard workers – we would do our best, sir.”
“Would you now?” he said and smiled.
She didn’t like the smile. She recognised it. It was a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. A smile full of badness.
“And what makes you think we would find a home for you two girls?”
“You said there were opportunities, sir.”
“Yes, opportunities for decent girls,” he said.
He leaned back even further so that the buttonhole stretched on his trousers.
“What skills do you think you could bring, domestically?” he said.
“We are hard workers, sir. I have the laundry experience. I can cook a bit.”
She racked her brains. She couldn’t sew. Truth be told, she could barely cook either, but she needed to sell herself.
“I can light a fire from nothing, sir,” she said.
It didn’t look at though her words were impressing him.
He stood up, his chair scratching on the wooden floor.
“What makes you think a decent family would have you?”
He had walked around his desk and was now standing over her.
“I ...”
He smelled clean, a scent of soap lingering in the air around him. She noticed his sideburns, which had been neatly shorn with a razor.
“Do you really think we’re going to send two little whores out for domestic service? Do you think anyone around here would want anything to do with you two dirty little bitches?”
His face was next to hers and she could smell his breath now, sour, compared to the soap.
She stood, unable to move and stared at the ground, afraid to raise her eyes to his face.
The Nanny At Number 43 Page 15