Liverpool Annie (3 page)

'Bread and jam? Jaysus, that's no meal for two growing girls,' Dot said caustically. 'You got better than that in our house.'

'Bread and jam's me favourite,' Marie piped, so Dot said no more, though later, as she steered the pram across the busy main road, she said firmly, 'From now on, your Auntie Dot'll come as often as she can.' Then she muttered, half to herself, 'As for your mam, I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for her, or give her a good kick up the arse!'

Annie started school in September. On her first day. Dad went into work late and took her on the crossbar of his bike.

St Joan of Arc's was in Bootle. Her cousins were already there and could 'keep an eye on her', Dot promised. It was a long walk, but Annie was glad to return to the familiar bombscarred streets, where women sat on their doorsteps on sunny days, and children played hopscotch on the pavements or whizzed around the lampposts on home-made swings. No-one played out in Orlando Street. Most residents were old, and if a child dared so much as kick a ball, they were told to play elsewhere.

One of the best things about school was the dinners. Dinners were almost as nice as lessons. Because she wanted the nuns to like her, Annie paid close attention during class. She was one of the first to learn to read and do sums, but her favourite lesson was drawing. The nuns called it 'Art', and were impressed with her pictures of 'pretty ladies in nice dresses'. One, Sister Finbar, wrote a note to Annie's mam to say she must be 'encouraged with her artwork', but Mam merely held the unopened envelope on her knee till Dad came home and read it.

'Good,' he mumbled tiredly.

Annie's dad was an insurance collector. He went into the office each morning to 'bring the books up', and spent the rest of the day riding round on his bike collecting payments, a penny here, twopence there. He came home at seven, exhausted. This was because he had a gammy leg. Dot told them. He'd broken it when he was little and it hadn't set properly.

'That's why he didn't fight in the war like your Uncle Bert. Poor Ken, he should have a sitting-down job, not be riding round on that sodding bike eight hours a day,' Dot sighed. 'Who'd have thought our Ken would end up like this, eh? Your gran, God rest her soul,' she crossed herself, 'thought the sun shone out his arse. She hoped he'd go to university, him being a scholarship

boy an' all, but he met your mam, and . . . Oh, well, it's no use crying over spilt milk, is it?'

Annie hadn't been at school long when Colette ReiHy asked her to tea. She enjoyed being made a fuss of by Mrs Reiily.

'Our Colette's little friend!' she cooed. They sat down to jelly and cream and fairy cakes with cherries on top. Then Mrs Reilly cleared the table and they played Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Snap.

'When can I come to yours?' Colette demanded as Annie was leaving.

'Don't be rude,' Mrs Reilly laughed. 'Wait till you're invited.'

'I'll have to ask me mam,' said Annie. She pondered over the matter for days. If she could go to Colette's, it seemed fair Colette should come to hers, but she couldn't imagine Mam making jelly or fairy cakes, and she felt uneasy asking someone to the dark, gloomy house which was exactly the same as the day they'd moved in. Although Uncle Bert had offered to decorate - 'A bit of distemper'd go over that wallpaper a treat, Ken, brighten the place up no end' - her dad had turned him down as churlishly as he'd done Mrs Flaherty when she'd offered to help with the washing. 'I like it the way it is,' he said stubbornly.

Eventually, Annie plucked up the courage to approach her mam. 'Colette wants to come to tea,' she said nervously.

Mam was in her dressing gown, the blue one with silk flowers round the neck and cuffs. The red one with the / velvet collar had gone to the dry cleaner's on Saturday. Mam wore her dressing gowns a lot. She looked at Annie, her lovely grey eyes vacant, empty. 'No,' she said. 'No.'

That night when Annie was in bed, Dad came in.

'You must never ask children to this house,' he said in his faint, tired voice. 'Never.'

So Annie never did. In a way, she felt relieved. She didn't want anyone to know her mam couldn't make jelly and wore a dressing gown all day and didn't know how to play Snakes and Ladders.

If the nuns expected another star pupil when Marie Harrison started school, they were to be sadly disappointed. Marie was in trouble from the first day, when she stole another new girl's ball and threw it on the roof where it lodged in the gutter. Annie had been looking forward to her sister's company, but at going-home time, Marie was nowhere to be seen. She was off to play on a bomb site or down a crater or in North Park with a crowd of boys, and came home hours late with grazed shins and torn clothes, though Mam didn't seem to notice.

Not to be outdone, Annie began to wander the streets of Bootle and Seaforth, staring in shop windows or through the gates of the docks, where dockers unloaded cargoes from all over the world. Her imagination soared, visualising the boxes of fruit and exotic-smelling spices being packed in sunny foreign climes. As the nights grew dark, though, and the cruel Mersey winds whipped inland, her adventurous spirit wilted, and she wished she were at home in front of the fire with someone to talk to and something to eat. Since both girls started having school dinners. Mam didn't make a meal till Dad came home.

One day in November, when it was bitterly cold and raining hard, she went down the entry and in the back way, and was surprised to be met by Auntie Dot, looking extremely fierce. 'Where the hell have you been?' she demanded. 'It's gone five. And where's Marie?'

Dot was growing fat again, but this time Annie knew it was because she was having another baby. She jealously hoped it wouldn't be a girl. Dot mightn't love them so much if she had a daughter of her own.

Her aunt grabbed her arm, full of angry concern. 'Look at the state of you! You'll catch your death of cold. Get changed this minute and put your coat in the airing cupboard while I make a cup of tea.'

When Annie came down in a clean frock, she found Pete, now eighteen months, playing happily with wooden blocks. She glanced at her mam, and was surprised to see her cheeks were pink and she was twiddling with the belt of her dressing gown. Dot came in with a cup of steaming tea.

'Get those wet shoes off and put them on the hearth,' she barked. 'And I'd like an answer, madam. Where have you been till this hour, and where's your sister?'

'I went for a walk and Marie's gone to North Park.' Annie thought it wise not to mention the bomb sites and craters.

'Really!' said Dot caustically. 'It's not what I'd call walking weather, meself. As for the park . . ,' She shook her head as if the situation was beyond her comprehension. Annie fidgeted uncomfortably.

'Do you know what day it is?' Dot demanded.

'Tuesday,' Annie replied, adding, 'the seventeenth of November.' She remembered thinking when Sister Clement wrote the date on the blackboard that it had a familiar ring.

'That's right, Marie's birthday! Nice way for a five-year-old to spend her birthday, in the park in the rain -isn't it, Rose?' She turned on the hunched woman in the corner. 'I come round with a cake and presents from us all, thinking there'd be a birthday tea, and what do I find? You've forgottenl Forgotten your own daughter's

birthday! Not only that, there's no food in the offing of any description.'

This was said with such derision that Annie winced. For some reason she feh guilty. Her own birthday had fallen on a Sunday in October and they'd gone to Dot's for tea. Mam didn't answer, but began to shake her head from side to side. Dot, well into her stride, continued, 'Even worse, the girls aren't even in, and you're sitting here in your sodding dressing gown and don't give a shit, you selfish cow!'

Annie gasped. Her mam's head turned faster and faster and her eyes rolled upwards. She started to moan, and Dot leaned across and slapped her face, hard. 'Don't put on your little act with me. Rose,' she said in a low, grating, never-heard-before voice. 'You've had me fooled for years, but no longer. You're taking our Ken for a ride. If he's idiot enough to be taken in, that's his concern, but you're not getting away with it with these two girls. They're little treasures, the pair of them. I love them as if they were me own and you'll look after them proper or I'll have them taken off you. Do you hear?'

To Annie's surprise. Mam stopped moving her head and nodded. For a while, her mouth worked as if she were trying to speak, and perhaps she would have if Marie hadn't come bouncing in. Her shoes squelched and she was soaked to the skin and covered in mud, though she gave Dot a cocky smile. The smile vanished when Dot removed the shoes none too gently, and ordered her upstairs to change.

Then Dot turned to Mam, and in a gentler voice said, 'This can't go on. Rose. Two little girls wandering the streets, it's just not right. God knows what sort of trouble they could get into. In future, I'll get our Alan to stand by the gate and make sure they go home.'

Poor Alan, thought Annie, he'd have a fit. Dot

dropped to her knees, somewhat clumsily due to her big belly, and grasped Mam's hands. 'I know what our Ken was up to that night, luv, but it's time to forgive and forget, if only for the sake of your girls.'

At this. Mam's face grew tight and she turned away, just as Marie came running downstairs.

Dot sighed and got awkwardly to her feet. 'Where's the ration books? Keep an eye on Pete for me while I get some cold meat, a few tomaters and half a pound of biscuits from the corner shop. There'll be a birthday tea in this house today or my name's not Dot Gallagher.'

Dot stayed till Dad came home, and after the girls had gone to bed there came the sound of a big argument. Annie crept onto the stairs to listen.

'I've told you before. Ken,' her aunt said loudly. 'If you can't cope with the girls, Bert and me will have them.'

'They're my girls. Dot,' Dad said in the quiet, mutinous voice he often used with his sister. 'They're my girls, and I love them.'

Things improved, but only slightly. There was a meal waiting when they got in - beans on toast, or boiled eggs - and Mam was dressed properly. Their normally curt and reticent dad gave them each a front-door key, as well as a stern lecture on coming straight home, describing the bloodcurdling things that could happen if they didn't. A girl had been murdered during the war, he told them, strangled with a piece of string in a back entry a mile away. Marie, easily frightened, rushed home panic-stricken, clutching Annie's hand.

But Mam stayed enclosed in her own private, grief-stricken world, hushed and uncommunicative. She only showed signs of life in the minutes before her husband

was due home, when her head would be cocked Mice a bird's, waiting for the sound of the latch to be lifted on the backyard door, the signal of his arrival. During the meal, she sat watching, noting his every move, her listless eyes lifting and falling as he ate.

The meal finished. Dad would turn his chair towards the meagre coke fire and read the newspaper, the Daily Express, his wife still watching with the same hungry, melting expression on her face. No-one spoke. After a while, Annie and her sister would go upstairs and play in the chilly bedroom, and later on they'd go to bed of their own accord, and Dad might put his head in to say goodnight if he remembered.

Except for the occasions when Dot and Bert came round, this was how every evening passed; there was never any variation.

As the years went by, Annie became protective of her mother. She lied when Dot asked questions. Although her aunt only had their best interests at heart, she'd hated seeing Mam slapped and bullied.

'Mam made a cake for tea the other day.'

'We play Snakes and Ladders nearly every night.'

Anyroad, Dot didn't come round much nowadays. As soon as she'd had the new baby, another boy called Bobby, she'd fallen pregnant again and Joe was born a year later. Now she had six boys, 'Three little 'uns and three big 'uns', as she cheerfully put it. 'By the time afternoon comes, all I want to do is put me feet up.' It meant it was Dad who took Annie to the shops to buy a white dress and a veil for her First Holy Communion. The same outfit did Marie the following year.

Auntie Dot insisted the girls visit on Sundays. They did for a while, until Annie, conscience-stricken, decided she should stay at home and help her dad. Despite the long hours he worked, he spent all

weekend doing housework. At eight, Annie was doing the week's shopping and even wrote the list herself. 'Poor little mite,' Dot said sorrowfully. 'She's old before her time.' Annie learnt to iron, and, as she knelt on the chair in front of the table, she couldn't help but wonder what the hunched, helpless woman in the chair by the window was thinking. About Johnny, her brother? Did she know she had two daughters? Once, Dot said Mam should be m hospital, but that was silly, thought Annie. Where would they put the bandages?

On the Sundays her mother could be persuaded to go to Mass, Annie felt proud as they walked along Orlando Street, just like a normal family. Mam looked so pretty in her curly fur coat, her long hair tied back with a ribbon, though Annie couldn't help but notice curtains twitching in the windows of some houses as they passed; curious neighbours watching 'the funny woman from number thirty-eight' on her way to church - which was how she'd once heard her mam described whilst she waited, unnoticed, at the back of the corner shop.

It would be nice to have a mam who wasn't 'funny', Annie thought wistfully, and a cheerful dad like Uncle Bert. One day, she found a wedding photo in the drawer of the big black sideboard. She stared at it for quite a while, wondering who the handsome couple were; the bright-eyed, smiling girl in the lacy dress clutching the hand of a young man with dashing good looks. The pair stared at each other with a strange, intense expression, almost sly, as if they shared a tremendous secret. It wasn't until Annie recognised a younger Dot, and Uncle Bert before he'd grown his moustache, that she realised it was her parents' wedding.

She showed the photograph to Marie, who looked at it for a long time before her face crumpled up, as if she