September Starlings (17 page)

The women giggled and shuffled off in their slippers, then the men broke ranks and wandered in various directions away from the house. Nat grabbed the stolen flowers from Ernie Grimshaw, pushed the man away, then dragged me and Confetti up the short path into his house. In the narrow hallway, we all breathed again.

‘Lass,’ he said to me after a second or two. ‘Get thissen in t’ front room and peep through t’ curtains, see ’as ’e gone, nosey owld bugger.’ As I went on my secret mission, he spoke to Sister. ‘Cum in, love. I’ll just put t’ kettle on an mek a brew.’

I found them in the kitchen, he bustling about with a tea caddy and some cups, she sitting demurely at the table. ‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry about your flowers, Mr …’

‘Evans, love. Me father were a Welsh farmer. I’m Nathaniel Jacob Evans and God alone knows what I ever did fer t’ deserve a moniker like that. Dust tha like sugar, Sister?’

‘Well, I do.’

He nodded. ‘Thought so. Are you a country girl?’

‘I am.’

He settled down across from her and began to talk to her as if she were a real person with legs, not a nun who floated about in a long black frock. ‘Dust tha like England, then?’

‘Well, I do and I don’t. Noisy, but very nice people.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Good heavens—’

His loud laughter was infectious. ‘That’s me, Sister. Good Evans.’ We all giggled at the feeble joke and Sister went bright pink. ‘I never thought,’ she gasped. ‘But we must go.’

‘’Ang on a mo.’ He beckoned me with a bony finger,
drew me towards a large box in the corner. ‘You done me a turn, lass, ’cos me flowers was rubbish – I’d never ’ave won t’ wooden spoon wi’ that load o’ weeds. So I’ll show thee this, ’cos tha’s a fine grand lass.’ He drew back an old grey blanket to reveal a squirming mass of fur. ‘Kittens,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘Their mam’s gone fer a walk. Nobbut five days old, they are.’

My heart was won in that moment. I felt as if love came to me first of all through my fingers, flooded into my whole body as I touched the tiny creatures. Some part of me wanted to cry, but it was nothing to do with sadness. There was just me and the kittens, everything else disappeared. ‘Kitty,’ I whispered to the nearest one. ‘So pretty, little kitty.’

Somebody said, ‘Poetry’ – probably Mr Evans. A hand touched my shoulder and drew me back into the other world. ‘Come, Laura.’

‘Sister …’

‘Yes.’

‘Look at these kittens, please.’

Her face went all soft as she bent over the box. ‘Laura,’ she whispered. ‘Just look at the beauty in there and you will know God. All that fur, those lovely faces. Wouldn’t it take a great architect to design such perfection?’

I knew what she meant. ‘Mr Evans?’ I pleaded. ‘Can I come again? I’ll …’ I looked round frantically for something I might do. ‘I’ll clean up, do the dusting and fetch coal.’

He placed a hand on my head, and I thought how lovely it would have been if I’d known my grandparents. There’s something wonderful about old people, as if they know all our sins and forgive us anyway. ‘Any time, luv. The owld place misses a bit o’ spit an’ polish since Elsie died. She were a good ’un, my missus, but she were fierce wi’ a duster. Would you ’appen like one o’ these ’ere cats?’

My heart did a little dance, but the music lasted just a few bars. ‘My mother doesn’t like animals.’

Sister drew me towards the door. ‘Ask her this evening, child. Every girl should have a pet, a bit of responsibility. Goodbye, Mr Evans. I shall call again with another sister. We might do some shopping for you when you’re in need? Will that be of use to you?’

He followed us to the door. ‘I’m not a Roman, luv,’ he said to Sister Maria Goretti.

She beamed at him. ‘Mr Evans, we do not confine friendship to those who practise our faith. It’s not about them and us, you know. We’re all in the one mess together, and we must take each other’s arms for guidance.’

I loved the woman from that moment. I still tortured her, still came out with remarks that stained her fair cheeks to beetroot. But there was an empathy between us. On our way back to school, she straightened my hair, redid my school tie and dug in one of her many pockets for an inch of barley sugar. ‘Don’t steal again, Laura McNally,’ she chided gently.

‘I won’t.’

We stood at the wrought iron gates and grinned at each other. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you’ll torment the life out of me all the same. Ah well, such is the will of God. If you are one of my crosses, then I shall bear you gladly.’

I wanted to tell her there and then that I loved her, but I hadn’t the words for how I felt. We walked into the classroom, endured Sister St Thomas’s gimlet stare, carried on with arithmetic in the same old way. But Confetti looked at me sometimes and smiled a secret smile. In a way, I had found my real mother.

By the time we reached the grand age of eight, Anne and I had developed sufficient independence to meet each other on the sly. I was still forbidden to go next door, and my mother continued the silent feud. But I learned how to create happy accidents, became used to Auntie Maisie’s timetable. At weekends, I would manage to be near the shops she patronized, would turn up at the butcher’s,
the grocer’s, the tripe shop. And I always got a hug and a kind word, which was a great deal more than I received at home.

Anne and I took to loitering after leaving our separate schools. We had a favourite wall, and we would sit on it for ten or fifteen minutes to discuss matters of great importance. ‘I learned a new word,’ pronounced Anne one afternoon. She whispered it in my ear, her heated breath stroking my cheek. ‘It’s very rude,’ she added as she backed away, the skin on her cheeks stained bright with excitement. ‘Of course, you won’t hear stuff like that at St Mary’s. Everybody’s too posh there to know about these interesting things.’

I shrugged, would not be outdone. ‘It’s to do with babies,’ I said confidently. ‘How they get inside their mothers. And what you said is just another word for kissing. Kissing makes babies, then the babies grow in women’s stomachs.’

She kicked her heels against the wall on which we were perched. Anne’s shoes were always badly scuffed. She was lucky, never got smacked for a torn dress, for ribbons lost on the way home. ‘How do the babies get out?’ she asked.

‘Belly button.’ I was more than confident, as the truth had been told during recreation by a girl called Rita Turner whose parents were of a medical persuasion. ‘It’s like letting the air out of a big balloon, only you get a baby instead of air. The nurse undoes the knot and a baby pops out.’

Anne thought about this for a few moments. You could always tell when Anne was thinking, because she frowned deeply and chewed her lower lip. Her mouth was often sore and chapped in winter because of all the meditation. ‘So if my dad had kissed your mother when she wanted him to kiss her, then she would have had a baby.’

‘Yes.’ This was becoming rather intricate, but I wasn’t one to let go and admit defeat, was stubborn enough to stand my ground, even when the foundation was made of
quicksand. I was the one with the superior education, so I had all the answers to life’s many questions. In a way, I was like my mother – never more ‘right’ than when I was completely wrong.

‘But, Laura – why hasn’t my mum had a lot of babies? ’Cos my dad’s always kissing her. Sometimes, she even starts the kissing, so I should have some brothers and sisters. Well, sisters.’ Anne and I disliked boys, could not entertain the concept of brothers. ‘And my dad kisses me too. Why haven’t I got a baby?’

I clicked my tongue and adopted a haughty stance. ‘For goodness sake, Anne, you’re too young. Anyway, dads don’t kiss children on the lips. It has to be on the lips and with your mouth open a bit so that the baby can crawl down into your stomach. It is very small, too small to see.’ After what I considered to be a visionary and very conclusive statement, I sat back and basked in the warmth of my own glory.

But the trouble with Anne was that she was persistent. ‘They are always kissing,’ she repeated stolidly. ‘And there’s no babies. I asked them about it and they said they weren’t going to have any more children.’

I scratched my nose – just as I always did when flummoxed. ‘Perhaps they only want you. Children are very expensive, you know.’ My mother went on constantly about how much I cost to feed and clothe. ‘So if they only want you, they don’t do the magic spell first.’

‘Eh?’ Anne, a practical soul, did not go a bundle on sorcery. ‘What spell?’ She fixed me with a hard stare, pulled at the sleeve of my hideous navy blue uniform gaberdine. ‘There’s no such thing as a spell except in stories.’

My imagination ploughed another furrow from the depths of which I would be lucky to climb. I puffed out my chest and looked at her with disdain. ‘Rita’s dad is a doctor and her mother is a midwife, so Rita knows all about the special things that happen to grown-ups.’ Thus I gave birth to another piece of McNally wisdom. It hung in
the air for a few seconds before my cousin pounced on it. ‘Sometimes, you are so daft, Laura.’ She paused for a second or two. ‘Go on, then.’ The tone was challenging. ‘Tell me.’

‘Well …’ I looked quickly over my shoulder into the garden behind us, wore the air of a secret agent in the midst of some world-altering intrigue. ‘Listen, Anne. Never turn round three times on the spot before you kiss a boy.’

She made a loud vomiting sound. ‘I don’t kiss boys. They smell of dirt and Derbac soap and you never know whether they’ve got a spider or a worm in their lunchbox. There’s always worms at our school and frogs and beetles and caterpillars.’

I liked the sound of her school. All we got in our St Mary’s dining-room was an overcooked dinner with watery vegetables and grace before meals, grace after meals, lectures all through meals. We couldn’t even talk at the table, let alone compare our back-to-front ladybirds. During lunch, we were supposed to be ‘ladies’ while the Mother of the convent read out stories about Jesus and Noah and some poor fellow whose head finished up on a plate. John the Baptist put most of us off our treacle sponge, while Jonah’s brief residence in the belly of a whale was hardly designed to improve the appetite.

The nuns were always harping on about gratitude. We were to be grateful for our school, for our parents, for the smelly cabbage on our plates. We were to be grateful for our teachers, for the weather, for the fact that we weren’t starving like some black babies in Africa. We all adopted one of these babies for five shillings and were allowed to choose a name. My baby was called Maureen and she sat next to my beaker all through lunch. We had to look at our babies and pray for them and hope that they all had a nice plateful of smelly cabbage and tough meat.

Each girl had what the sisters called a serviette, and though this item was provided to protect clothing, any spot of gravy or sago pudding had to be washed out
immediately by the offending pupil. Before the meal, our hands were examined. Alter the meal, both sides of our serviettes were scrutinized. ‘I wish I could come to your school,’ I groaned.

She laughed. ‘Your mother would go mad if she knew we were meeting on the way home.’

She would have gone madder still had she discovered that I owned one of Mr Evans’s cats, a little grey one called Solomon, and that Solomon was in residence with Anne and Uncle Freddie and Auntie Maisie. Anne was very fair about my cat. She never called him hers, tried not to get close to him. Anne was and is the most equitable person I have ever known. I attempted a careless shrug. ‘Bugger her. She’s never in when I get home. I have to get the key from the shed and let myself in.’

Anne stopped laughing. ‘She’ll be out with one of her boyfriends,’ she whispered. ‘I heard my mam saying something about it. She said Liza’s never happy unless someone’s crawling all over her and calling her beautiful.’

I stared blankly across the road. My dad was terribly busy, had sunk every halfpenny of profit from the shop into his new venture. Mother was buying lots of dresses and costumes, had three pairs of high-heeled shoes. And she no longer worked, so she was spending Dad’s money instead of her own. We couldn’t afford any of it. ‘She’s always dressed up,’ I grumbled. ‘And I’m learning to cook things because she can’t.’

Anne placed a companionable hand on my chilled fingers. With all the wisdom of the mature eight-year-old, she comforted me by saying, ‘The boyfriends will be paying for the new clothes, not your dad.’

‘Oh.’ What else could I have said?

‘With any luck,’ confided Anne. ‘She’ll take a fancy to one of them and buggar off to the other side of town. My dad says you and Uncle John would be better off without her, ’cos she’s a disgrace.’

It isn’t easy knowing that your mother is a disgrace. It
was becoming obvious that Liza McNally had moved on after her years of wartime patriotism, had lost that bevy of admiring sycophants who haunted our house once a fortnight during the conflict. She was out for some fun and she would bring trouble on my father’s head, I felt that in my bones. For my own part, I was not concerned about Mother’s behaviour. It suited me to have peace after school sometimes, while I actually enjoyed the culinary efforts I made for myself and for my father.

Anne leapt down from the wall. ‘You go first. She might be in today, and we’d best not be seen together in case she’s in a mood.’

I ran the rest of the distance home, sped past the house as usual, made for the shed where the spare key was kept. I unlocked the door, replaced the key under its plantpot in the shed, walked into the kitchen. ‘No!’ The scream pierced its way past the slightly open door to the dining-room.

‘It is my business.’ This was my father speaking. ‘And I shall employ whomever I choose.’

It was a large kitchen, because Mother had hired a builder to extend it into the rear garden. The dining-room was also spacious, but I felt as if I were standing right next to my mother, since her voice was shrill with anger. ‘The Co-op has no further use for him. They’ve able-bodied men now with strong legs and a bit of brainpower. He was bound to get the sack sooner or later. So you are taking pity on him, is that it? How will you cope with a cripple managing your stupid factory?’