Orphan of Angel Street (8 page)

He didn’t start drinking heavily though, until later.

Susan was born in 1899, with Mabel’s dark eyes. She smiled from the first week – Mabel was certain of this even though the few people she allowed near the child said it was wind. She was placid and sweet and thrived steadily, if delicately, into a solemn-faced yet mischievous child.

Afterwards Mabel came to think of these as the last years of her marriage. Albert, his frame already shuddering under the terrible weight of responsibility – all these lives, these deaths – was kept steady by Susan. By the light in her eyes when he came into a room, the frantic, joyful kicking of her legs as he lifted her high in the air as a baby, her running to him as she grew into a five-yearold with his own loving nature. Of all his daughters she charmed him the most, softened him as Mabel no longer could, gave him hope.

When she fell ill they thought at first the fever was influenza, unseasonably in July. When the doctor pronounced it something far more serious the first image that blazed through Albert’s mind was another small white coffin.

Memories of those days, then weeks were almost impossible to recall, so strange and fragmented were they as to be discounted as a dream. Absolutely sure and certain for Mabel six months later though, was that she had a child who would never run into her father’s arms again, a drunk for a husband and that her hopes for an increase in the good things in life had been sadly misplaced.

There were another seven years of something that passed outwardly for marriage. Susan stayed small and loveable. Albert stayed drunk on and off, no longer sweet, sometimes working, sometimes not. He tried to be tender with Susan, wanted to take her out and about.

‘But she’s a cripple!’ Mabel raged. ‘Look at ’er legs. She’ll ’ave to stop at ’ome. I’ll not ’ave ’er wheeled out like a freak show.’

She took over Susan in a perverse, compulsive way. Overprotective, smothering yet ashamed, shutting Albert out. She kept even Susan’s existence as secret as possible, only letting very few people see her, like the crusading Miss Pringle with her pince-nez, her bag of coloured sewing threads and offcuts of cotton and felt.

‘She has such dextrous fingers,’ Miss Pringle said. ‘Such a pity to waste a skill like that. She could be marvellous at the piano, you know, or the violin.’

Mabel stared at her as pigs struggled to take wing around the room.

But Miss Pringle did make it possible for Mabel to live with all the contradictions of her feelings towards her remaining daughter. Susan, whom she would have been mortified to take out in the street, Susan, her companion for life who would never leave her because she couldn’t walk away and no one would marry a girl with wizened legs. Susan would always be there. Susan, in whom all her guilt, her compassion was invested. Who for so much of the time she couldn’t stand to be anywhere near, embodying as she did all the loss, all the failure of a life in which Mabel had once found hope.

Their possessions – not plentiful to begin with – Mabel was pawning piece by piece. They were already poor when Albert left. He had not been getting regular work and the jobs he did get were now unskilled and insecure. He’d had two spells in Winson Green prison for drunkenness. At home he was neither raucous nor violent. Sober, he was gentle with Susan. Drunk he was silent, lost.

And then he was gone. On a beautiful summer day when birds sang in small gardens and there was a breeze to blow the city smoke away, he left and never came back. Mabel who had believed, whatever his state, however distant they grew from one another, that he would always be there, was more shocked than she’d ever thought she could be again. She knew he wasn’t coming back – in the summer warmth he had taken his coat and hat.

Her time living as a respectable married woman was over. Now she and Susan were on their own. She was that workhouse nobody again, living in the slums where you had to burn the bugs off the ceiling with a candle before you could get to sleep, and surrounded by slummy people whom she hated almost as much as she hated herself.

‘Mom!’ Susan’s voice rang up the staircase. ‘It’s finished – come and see.’ There was a pause. ‘Please?’

‘I’ll go up,’ Mercy said, muttering ‘miserable cow’ under her breath.

Mabel’s hands gripped the cover on her bed, her teeth grating together. She heard the clatter of two pairs of boots on the stairs, an abrupt knock at the bedroom door and to her outrage Mercy and Johnny Pepper appeared.

‘Get out!’ she shrieked, sitting up in fury. ‘What the ’ell d’yer think yer playing at coming pushing your way in ’ere?’

‘Susan wants you to come,’ Mercy said in a voice of steel, standing firm in the doorway. She looked in disgust at Mabel whose appearance had deteriorated over the past months. She’d spread and sagged and her clothes were unkempt and often dirty.

‘Oh you always know what Susan wants nowadays, don’t you? Well, you can tell ’er from me she’s gunna ’ave a long wait, ’cos I ain’t coming just to see where Mr God-Almighty Pepper’s nailed a couple of wheels on to some planks.’

She lay down on the bed again feeling Mercy’s piercing look of loathing through her back. Mercy and Johnny went back down again.

Susan was sitting enthroned in her ingenious, very straight-backed chair at the threshold of the house. Her face fell as Mercy reappeared.

‘Never mind—’ Johnny set out to cheer her up. ‘Come on – ’ave a ride!’

He took hold of the metal bar at the back of the chair and careered along the yard so fast that the neighbours had to scatter. Mercy’s eyes followed them. It had worked! She laughed with delight. Now she and Susan would be able to get out!

‘Johnny!’ Elsie bawled at him. ‘Go easy!’

‘She won’t come,’ Susan said as they skidded to a halt. ‘She ain’t feeling too well.’

Everyone saw this for the thin excuse it was.

‘Never mind,’ Elsie said. ‘She’ll come round to the idea.’

‘Go on then,’ said Bummy. ‘Take it off up there again – I want to see ’ow well it’s going.’

Susan managed to turn the wheels a little on her own, but being unused to any form of exertion was soon exhausted. Mercy completed this next lap of honour for her as everyone clapped, down towards the entry then back up to the factory wall, past the soot-dusted cabbages in the little garden at the front of the two cottages.

‘She’s evil, that Mabel Gaskin,’ Mary Jones spat out in Susan’s absence.

‘Nah.’ Her husband Stan, a taut, stocky bloke with black hair and a thin moustache was smoking, leaning against the brewhouse wall. ‘She’s all right really, she is.’

‘And what would you know?’ Mary turned on him. ‘You wanna keep yer eyes to yourself, you do.’

‘Eh, you two,’ Bummy said, then called to Susan. ‘D’yer like it then?’

The expression on her face was enough of a reply.

Mabel’s fury had been building up all that Sunday, and by the evening she was an unexploded bomb.

Mercy knew she was only biding her time, waiting for an excuse. She knew the signs: the silence, Mabel’s clenching of her jaw, the way she averted her eyes from both of them.

Susan was at the table (the wheelchair was to be stowed in the brewhouse at night – Mabel said she wouldn’t have it in the house). Mercy was moving round her laying the tin plates and the few eating implements they had, and Mabel was at the range with her back to them, stirring a pot. The room was lit only by the last of the summer evening light.

‘What’s to eat then?’ Susan asked cautiously.

‘Wait and see,’ Mabel snapped. She looked a dreadful mess from lying round on her bed half the afternoon, hair tumbling everywhere, and she knew it.

Mercy stepped round her, eyes downcast, went to put a fork on the table and dropped it with a tinny clatter on the bricks.

Mabel jumped and struck out savagely with her spare arm, knocking Mercy across the room so she crashed into the wall.

‘Yer clumsy little bitch!’ Mabel roared. ‘You’re useless, that’s what you are. Dropping things all the time and breaking them!’ It was true. Mercy lived in such a state of nerves around Mabel that it made her clumsy and there were frequent breakages. ‘What do we want forks for any’ow, when we’re ’aving broth? No bloody brains in yer ’ead, that’s your trouble!’

Mercy slid down the wall, curling into a ball, head and arms pulled in tight to her knees to protect herself, a position she’d had to take up so many times in her life, it came now by instinct.

Mabel thought she would burst from rage. She grabbed one of Mercy’s arms and dragged her with no difficulty to her feet, fingers pressing viciously into her flesh.

‘Look at me!’

The child raised her eyes, those glittering grey eyes, which even in her fear were stony with disgust at the woman in front of her and Mabel almost flinched. She squeezed her fingers as tight as claws into the tops of Mercy’s arms.

‘Mom, don’t, please . . .’ Susan begged.

‘You’re nothing,’ Mabel went on. ‘Filth from the gutter, that’s what you are. That’s what your own mother thought of you, you know that, don’t yer? She didn’t want you so she just threw you away. Dumped you on the steps of Hanley’s. That’s ’ow much she thought of yer.’

Mercy stared at her, stunned. She’d never, never heard this before. As far as she’d understood she’d been spawned in some mysterious way by the Birmingham streets and taken in. In a high voice she said, ‘But I never ’ad a mother. I was an orphan.’

Mabel laughed nastily. ‘’Ark at ’er! “I was an orphan!” Didn’t they tell you nothing in that place? We all ’ave a mother, deary – ain’t no way of getting into the world without one. But some babbies is wanted and some ain’t and you was one of the ones that ain’t. Least I never gave none of mine away like your mom did.’

Seeing the genuine shock in Mercy’s eyes she loosed her arm and began slapping her face until she’d made her cry.

‘Don’t, Mom!’ Susan was sobbing. ‘Stop it, you’re hurting ’er!’

Mabel pushed Mercy away in disgust. ‘Get out of ’ere. Yer can go up to bed without no tea. I’ve had enough of yer for one day.’

Later Mabel carried Susan upstairs and plonked her on the bed saying, ‘If you need any ’elp you can ask ’er Majesty there.’

Mercy lay with her eyes closed, hugging her badly bruised arms tight to herself. When Mabel had gone she felt Susan’s hand tapping her shoulder.

‘Brought you this – look.’

From out of her clothes she drew a chunk of bread and held it in front of Mercy’s face. ‘Don’t you want it?’

There was a pause, then Mercy shook her head.

‘I wish I could stop her treating you so bad.’ Susan leant over her, talking close to her ear.

Mercy shrugged as if to say, who cares?

‘Mercy go on, turn over.’

Reluctantly, obviously in pain, Mercy turned on her back. Susan saw that in one hand, close up to her face, she was holding the little handkerchief with her name embroidered on it. Her eyes though, were dry.

‘What she said about your mom . . . You never knew?’

Mercy shook her head again. Her face showed her pain as she spoke. ‘No one ever said. They never told us much about where we’d come from. They never said I’d had a mom. I always sort of thought that if I’d had one she must be dead, and that’s why I was there . . .’

Susan stroked her hair, unable to think what else to do. Mercy caught hold of her hand and gripped it hard. She couldn’t explain how Mabel’s cruel revelation had made her feel. Shocked, rejected, lost. Her mother wasn’t dead, she’d abandoned her, thrown her away! She felt filthy and crumpled like rubbish on the street.

After a long silence Susan said, ‘ I know ’ow I felt when my dad went.’ There was more silence, then she said, ‘You won’t go away too, will yer?’

Mercy looked up at her. Susan’s dark head had a halo of light round it from the candle behind her. She had quickly come to feel even more tenderness and devotion for Susan.

than she had for Amy. Even though the younger of the two, Mercy was the protector, the fighter.

‘No – ’course I won’t.’ She squeezed Susan’s hand. ‘Where’ve I got to run away to?’

For months Mercy had stayed home with Susan and acted as Mabel’s unpaid skivvy. She soon became a familiar figure in the Highgate yard, in her old dress from the home, a piece of sacking round the waistband, labouring back and forth from the tap with buckets of water, kneeling scrubbing the step, her bright hair tied back with a red rag, smudges on her face.

She’d started out determined to make Mabel’s house somewhere more fit to live.

‘I mean the home wasn’t pretty or anything, but at least it was clean. We don’t have to have it looking as bad as this.’

‘I s’pose not,’ Susan said doubtfully.

It was a woefully thankless task. She swept and scrubbed, washed down the windows and rubbed them with newspaper. Some of the window frames were so rotten they had to be stuffed with old rags. She brushed down the walls which sent showers of dusty, yellowed distemper on top of her and Elsie showed her how to stove the house with a sulphur candle to keep the bugs at bay. But however hard she worked she couldn’t disguise the fact that they were living in a cluster of jerry-built, mouldering slums and that theirs was one of the worst of the bunch. The paint just flaked more and more, the floor was in a terrible state, and the effluents from the factories coated the windows and step as soon as she’d finished washing them.

They were living in such poverty that they never seemed to have the simplest things they needed, like scissors to cut their nails or a comb that wasn’t broken – let alone any new clothes.

But she did like the freedom from Miss Rowney’s regime, being able to come and go as she needed, when Mabel wasn’t around. And there was Susan.

‘You don’t ’ave to sit there doing nothing,’ she said to her, the very first day, when she’d struggled to help her downstairs, step by step, the two of them sitting squeezed in side by side.

‘What can I do?’ Susan said, legs dangling from the chair, not even touching the floor. Mercy was hot from her exertions, but Susan was still huddled up, cold.

Mercy caught hold of the chair and inched it over to the black iron range, glad to see it was much smaller than the one in the home. She handed Susan an old rag, and the small amount of polish Mabel had left.