September Starlings (55 page)

It was going to be a struggle. I had to pick up my boys, gather our belongings, go forward into a city I hardly knew, make a life for us and for a person who was not yet born. But I couldn’t stay, didn’t want to put my children through any pain. ‘His dad’s your dad’s brother and you’ve both got the same mother’, ‘Your dad’s in prison’, ‘Your dad got life for killing your brother’s dad’, and so on. They deserved better than that.

‘You’ll make it,’ he said softly.

‘I must. There’s no real choice, is there?’

I walked out of that home, stood at the gate until Anne came, listened to the world and knew how noisy it was, how peaceful life had been until this morning. Giving up could be easy, I thought. How simple life might have been had I stayed in the care of others. Meals prepared, dishes washed, clothes laid out each morning. For many weeks, I had made no decisions, taken no responsibility for my own existence.

Anne pulled up. ‘Climb in, you look lost.’ She bore his mark on her forehead, a thin line that was turning to silver.

I climbed in. ‘I am lost. And I’ll definitely be lost in Liverpool. They talk funny, you know. If I ask for directions, I’ll not understand the lingo. And my kids will grow up to be Scousers.’

She drove off, left tyre marks in her wake. ‘There’s nowt wrong wi’ Liverpool folk,’ she said mockingly. ‘It’s still a Lanky town, not foreign soil.’

‘They’ll call me a Woollyback,’ I said.

‘Sod them.’

‘They’re very quick-witted,’ I moaned.

‘Then give as good as you get, and give it before you get it.’

‘Eh?’

She turned slightly, allowing me another glimpse of the silver scar on her forehead. ‘You’re thick, Laura. You deserve to be called a Woollyback.’

I had thought that places such as this had been eradicated before the 1960s, yet I stood in a filthy room with boarded windows and ancient oilcloth sticking up in patches all over a stone floor. There was a living room and a kitchen at ground level and, so far, I hadn’t dared to look at the kitchen. I was trapped in a time warp, had somehow got stuck in the fourth dimension with gas mantles and a pulley line above a black iron range.

The kitchen – not much more than a scullery, really – was no better. A meatsafe hung open, its meshed door crippled due to a missing hinge. The unmistakeable perfume of boiled cabbage hung in the summer air, mingled listlessly with dust motes in shafts of light. Lead piping emerged from the outer wall, leaked where it joined a brass tap. Cold water only, it seemed. Beneath the tap sat a slopstone, just a shallow brown trough held up by two walls of pitted brick, no plug to the sink, no frills here. Oh heck. Was this to be the start of my new life, then?

Anne came in, muttered something about car springs and cobbles, froze like a statue when she saw the house. ‘Bloody hell’, she finally managed. ‘Well, you were only a stride from the pavement in Maybank Street, but at least there was electricity. What the hell do we do?’

I rolled up my sleeves, picked up mop and bucket. ‘Go and buy white paint and a small bag of coal. I’ll fill this copper and get moving. Have you any change for the meter?’

‘You’ll get moving?’ Her eyes were round as she stared at the ancient copper that perched to one side of the fireplace. ‘You’re not moving in here, Laura. Who the hell do they think we are?’ She marched into the kitchen, trotted back straight away, an expression of anger distorting her features. ‘Get back in the car. Do you realize that the only source of water is in that so-called kitchen? To make a bath, you’ll be carrying buckets through here, traipsing back and forth like a chain gang with only one member. You are not staying in a house without proper plumbing. Come on.’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll go on my own.’

‘Where?’

She dragged a hand through her hair, dislodged most of the chic French plait. ‘To the housing, of course. They can’t put you here, not in a place like this. You’ve two children and another on the way. This is no place for a young family.’

I sat on an old orange box, folded my hands around my knees. ‘I never expected the Savoy, Anne. We’re here under sufferance, you know. Do you think that some displaced Liverpool family will be given a brand new council house in Breightmet, three bedrooms, bathroom, south-facing rear garden? Will they hell as like! Bolton Council has a list as long as the Nile, so whichever poor woman has gone to my town will be no better off than I am. We’re as good as homeless, Anne. I’m a misfit, a woman without a man, without a fixed abode and I’m a mother whose children have no father. This is the best I’ll get to begin with. After a while, I can start crying, plead overcrowding and move on.’

She stamped a foot, looked petulant and childish. ‘I wish you’d try, Laura. I wish you’d stir yourself and stand up for your rights, because—’

‘I’ve no rights, not in Liverpool.’

‘You’ve human rights, woman! You’ve a duty to those boys as well, a duty to find them some decent accommodation.’

‘Safety will do,’ I mumbled. ‘Safety is a luxury.’

She turned on her heel and stamped up the stairs. After she had made her noisy inspection of the first floor, she yelled down the stairway, ‘There’s not even a gas jet up here, no lighting at all.’

‘That’s why I need white paint,’ I shouted. ‘So that I can read down here under one of the mantles. I’ll get an oil lantern for upstairs.’ My words bounced off the walls, came back to me with their syllables hollowed out and lengthened. It was a hole, but I didn’t care. We could live here, the boys and I, could make our own amusements and mistakes.

Her face was covered in smudges when she reappeared. ‘Cobwebs everywhere. This house hasn’t been occupied for ages – the cabbage smell must come from next door. That’s another thing. What sort of neighbours are you going to have?’

I shrugged in a manner that was probably over-careless.
‘The same sort I’d have in a Bolton slum.’

But she would not be placated. ‘No self-respecting woman could live in such a dump. How can you think of setting up here? And why don’t you get that bloody mother of yours to part with the price of a little semi?’

‘Stop it, Anne. You know I won’t let her win. She owned me once, but never again.’

She came and stood next to me, one hand resting on my hair as she tried to persuade me. ‘There has to be an alternative. I can’t bear this, Laura.’ I heard what she said, remembered that she had uttered the same words when Solomon died. She couldn’t bear me to lose a pet I’d never really owned, couldn’t cope with the idea of me suffering.

‘Well, I can bear it, just as I bore it when Mr Evans’s Solomon died. I’m stronger than you think and I’m staying here. No-one will find me in Liverpool.’

The hand on my head stilled itself. ‘He’s in prison. Why the hell are you afraid of a man behind bars?’

‘He’ll get out. There’s nothing will hold a will as strong as his, nothing man-made, anyway.’

She walked to the grimy window where one small pane had managed to survive despite footballs and stones. ‘It’s a hell-hole,’ she insisted. ‘And look,’ she waved a hand towards the street. ‘Just yards away, new houses, flats, playgrounds. Yet they put you here.’

I didn’t mind. We could be safe in this place, secure, fresh and new. All I needed was white paint. ‘Go and buy gallons of white paint,’ I insisted. ‘Then, when my house is sold, we can get the electricity board in.’

She frowned, chewed her lip. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t improve the place – they’ll put your rent up. And how do you know whether there’s a main in the street? Don’t you need a big underground wire for electricity?’

I forced a grin. ‘Twenty-seven and six is what they want and twenty-seven and six is what they’ll get. And of course there’s a main – how do you think they managed to build flats in 1966 without mains electricity? I’ll just get myself tagged on at the end of their cable.’ I rummaged in my
purse for coins, fed the meter, tested the nearest gas-jet. It spat, coughed, exploded, then sent a blue-centred flame towards the ceiling. ‘There,’ I said placidly. ‘All mod cons.’

‘You need a mantle,’ she grumbled.

‘I’ll get some.’

‘Where?’

‘At the mantle shop.’ I would never make her understand, not in a month of Easter Sundays. ‘Anne, get gone for the bloody paint. At this rate, we’ll be here till midnight. And I want to move the boys here next week, get them settled.’

She slammed out of the house, revved the engine to bursting point, shot off in a blaze of temper and oil fumes. Anne was a go-getter, a woman of great ambition, a woman of substance. She didn’t understand my attitude, could not make herself realize that my life’s ambition was simple. All I needed was to be away from two people, and one of those was my mother. There were worries in my head, of course, concerns about money, about keeping three children on an income that was non-existent. But I hadn’t shared my brainwave with Anne, hadn’t told her about the recipe.

I stood in the scullery, left the bucket to fill beneath a tap that seemed to have three speeds – drip, trickle and flood. I opted for trickle, then took the envelope from my pocket. They thanked me for my interest, advised me to read at least thirty True Heart romances. The ingredients were listed below this advice. I was to take two beautiful people, mix them with love and misunderstanding, lace the cocktail with some competition – an anti-hero, perhaps, then deliver both parties to the altar at the end of some 80,000 words. Well, I would have a go. Story-telling had been my forte and I would revive that small slumbering talent, try to make it pay. I lit a cigarette, despising the habit I had picked up while recuperating. It was the last in the packet, would be the last in my mouth. If I smoked, the new baby would be stunted and my boys might
become bronchitic. Liza smoked and I thought I knew why. Nicotine alerts the brain, stops the boredom.

After tipping the water into the fireside copper, I started a fire by breaking up the orange box and using it for kindling. How many pages for 80,000 words, I wondered. And I’d need a typewriter, was glad I’d learned to type at McNally’s. A pawnshop might have a portable, then there’d be carbon paper, reams of foolscap or A4, a steady table and … no. I would think about all that some other time. Anne would be back in a minute, then we could carry that small bag of coal from boot to house. ‘No graphic sex, no swear words or blasphemy, no reference to politics or to religion. Our readers expect a well-told story with a happy ending.’ Well, OK. I must plumb the very depths of my soul, find a bit of romance somewhere. My heart lurched as I thought of Frank, who had been my one romantic interlude. For him, for his son and his nephew, I would become a writer. ‘I can do it, Frank,’ I whispered into the dusty air.

I walked to the back door, peered outside, saw the lavatory shed at the bottom of the yard. No, I wouldn’t look in there, not today. I could not take on an army of germs while planning to become a True Hearts writer. A few crumbs of slack coal were scattered about with some sticks of chopped-up furniture, so I scooped up my find on a handleless shovel, dumped the lot on the ailing fire. Anne was right, this was back-breaking labour, especially for one who expected another sort of labour in a few months.

Anne’s cheeks glowed with some emotion or other when she stepped into the front room. ‘Two quid a tin.’ She dumped the paint next to the gas meter. ‘I’ve seen this for one pound fifteen shillings at home. And they talk another language altogether, it’s like double flaming Dutch.’

‘They’re Scousers, a very clever and amusing breed.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure they’re very funny once you get through the language barrier. I’d have done better in downtown Calcutta.’ She inhaled a few times, cursed the
smell of filth, brought in the coal. ‘Actually, they were quite helpful. They said something about Liverpool Council planning to pull these houses down in a few years. But for now, they’re being let to down-and-outs.’

I decided to take no notice, got busy with tepid water and cloths. She opened the stairway door, sat for a while at the bottom of the flight, then picked up a sponge and started at the other side of the room. Inevitably, our paths crossed under the window. ‘You’re a damned fool,’ she said.

I giggled, pushed the hair from my eyes. ‘I know, but I’m lovable with it.’

The Hourigan Farm,

Near Celbridge,

County Kildare,

Eire.

May 12th 1966

Dear Laura,

I don’t know where you are, so I’m sending this via Anne. I am so sorry for what happened, I should never have left you. It even got into the papers over here, which is why I understand your need for a new start. I have spoken to Anne on the telephone, but she will not give out your address, even to me, without your permission. I agree with her wholeheartedly in this matter, though I am hoping that you will begin writing to me very soon. Please try to keep the hatred for Tommo out of your heart. Apart from it being a sin, it’s also very exhausting and time-wasting.

Have you room for me wherever you are? Just keep the bed aired, because I’ll be a while. My father has taken to drink since my mother took to her bed. He is all the while over to an inn on the Dublin Road and different fellows bring him home every few days. If I’m not careful, the dowry will be used up before I get back to England, as the farm has gone down with neglect. It is a terrible shame for my
father, who is a good man, because he scarcely took a drop till Mammy was ill. He cannot bear the thought of life without her, so he is burying himself in whiskey, poor soul.

Eugene has four children now and he doesn’t enjoy being a daddy. I think he wishes he had stuck to his cassock, because a priest’s life would have been easier. They quarrel a lot, all of them, so it’s very noisy when they visit.

Mammy is really ill this time, though the famous cough medicine does take the edge off her pain. There is no hope for her, but she is happy to leave this life, since all her children have been such a bitter disappointment. I’ve five brothers, none of them priests, then my two sisters are married and living in Birmingham. I am the worst of the failures, as I took the veil then ripped it off. She accuses me with her eyes, but voices few opinions these days. Like I said to you all those years ago, life is not about pleasing parents, so I do not feel too guilty.