Soldier Girl (42 page)

‘What’s got into you, Mol?’ Cath asked on the third day as they clung on in the transport that took them to the gun site on the cliffs. It was a grey day, raining again. ‘You look really groggy. Has something happened?’

Molly felt so desperate she almost broke down in tears, but she gulped them away. ‘Oh—’ She invented something quickly, though she felt bad lying to Cath. ‘It’s my mother – she’s been taken ill. I’m a bit worried, that’s all . . .’

Cath looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t know you’d had bad news. Well, should you not be asking for leave to go and see her?’

‘Well, maybe,’ Molly said. She felt a blush rise in her cheeks.

‘After all, she is your mother. You should be by her side if she’s really sick. You never know, do you?’

This little statement, harmlessly made, felt like an accusation. Especially when Molly knew how much Cath missed her own mother. Iris was her flesh and blood – didn’t she still have a duty to her, despite everything? She must be distraught over Bert – after all, he had been her favourite, had kept her all this time, and now he was gone. What was Iris going to live on now? Had the police found out what was going on in that house? Even though the reason was not the one she had given to Cath, she started to wonder if she should go home. It was a long time since she had set foot in Birmingham. She found herself longing to see Em, to pour her heart out to someone who knew more of the truth and who understood. And she wasn’t doing any good here at the moment – in fact, she was a danger to shipping.

After the shift she went to her CO and requested compassionate leave, which she was given for an overnight stay. The next morning, she was on a train heading north.

Riding on the bus to Nechells, Molly found herself feeling both at home and like a foreigner in her own land. It was all so familiar, people’s voices, the good old Brummie accent, the smells and sounds. There were changes of course – the bomb sites, all the marks of the war, but she had seen a lot of those before. She was surprised, though, how much it already felt like somewhere in her past. She was the one who had changed the most.

She couldn’t bring herself to walk along Kenilworth Street, not yet, at least, and see the wrecked shell of the Buttons’ house again, so she went round another way, all the time aware of people staring at her ATS uniform. Then she wondered with a horrible lurch inside whether they were staring for another reason. Did they all know who she was – whose sister she was? She was very glad to reach the house, where she could take refuge inside.

Everything seemed quiet at the place in Lupin Street. The front door was open a crack, and Molly could already smell the damp, frowsy smell which her homes had always had. It made her spirits sink even further, made her feel six years old again, taking her back to poverty and cruelty and neglect. She wanted to turn and run away, never to see this place again as long as she lived.

Against her will she pushed the door open further. The stink grew stronger, laced with booze, and she was in the front room with its fancy furnishings – the Welsh dresser and dark leather chairs, the carriage clock alongside a host of other little knick-knacks. Molly looked at it all sourly. All through her childhood they had barely had two sticks of furniture to rub together, and now all this was garnered, or filched somehow, by Bert’s criminal doings. She remembered Iris sitting filling the scent bottles in her fancy frock, grotesque and ridiculous, in the murky room upstairs.

Nothing seemed to have been touched. Whatever Iris’s part in all the crooked goings-on, she seemed to have got away with it. Had the police been too interested in catching a murderer to worry about Bert’s black-market activities? Or had his associates cleared the house at a whiff of trouble? Molly was too disgusted to care. The back room still had its new things in it, but in spite of all these possessions, the place had degenerated into a grim state, as Iris’s dwellings always did. It stank of grime and booze, there were greasy plates and overturned beer bottles left on the table, and the floor round the gas stove was ringed with grease and filth. The scullery sink was choked with scum and greasy water, a pile of unwashed plates and pans was jumbled on the floor, and something once white was soaking in a pail. Molly looked round, sickened. How had she lived like this for so long? How had she stood it?

Of Iris there was no sign, but Molly decided to carry on nosing round the house. As she started up the carpeted stairs, she heard the sound of snoring. Typical! Her face creased with contempt. Four in the afternoon, and Iris was still sleeping it off.

The snoring grew louder, and reaching the top of the stairs, Molly realized that it was the sound of not one, but two people. The deep hoggish noise she had heard had been joined by something almost as loud but lighter in tone. She tiptoed to Iris’s room and peered round the door.

Under a counterpane hectic with sickly pink flowers lay Iris and a stocky man with a moustache. The room smelt headily of spirits and both of them were so soundly asleep that Molly could have danced a jig in clogs and they wouldn’t have noticed.

She moved closer and stood looking down at her mother, squeezed into the three-quarter-sized bed with this strapping bloke in his vest with his chest hair fuzzing out round the neck and armholes. His chin was dark with stubble and his open mouth showed a furred-up tongue. Iris’s face was pink and slack, her red nose clashing with the coppery dye in her hair, which was tousled into a mess, almost half an inch of grey showing at the roots. The covers were pulled high over her belly and chest but her shoulders were bare and white as pork fat. One arm lay outside the covers and Molly saw rings on her fingers set with big colourful stones. The hairs on her forearm and a large mole at the top of her left shoulder stood out darkly against her white skin. Anger and revulsion swelled in Molly until she was ready to explode.

‘You
stupid
, disgusting old cow,’ she hissed. ‘You never change do yer? Never do anything – nothing good in yer whole life. You don’t care about anyone or anything except pouring booze down yer neck!’ She was shaking with anger. What the hell had she bothered coming all the way back here for? Some romantic idea of ‘mother’ that she had conjured up when she was far away? Of what a mother should be? When had Iris ever shown a single sign that she was a real mother?

As she stared down at this woman, her closest blood relative, with her head so close to this strange man, both of them drunk, both oblivious to anything, for a moment she imagined plunging a knife into her mother’s bloated body. Her arm twitched, lips curling at her thoughts.
God, I’ll end up in the nick with Bert if I go on like this!

But by Christ, you’ve asked for it enough times
, she thought.
You wicked, cruel, drunken old whore
. The last shreds of her connection to her family died inside her. After all, what was family? What had she had in the way of relatives who mattered to her? The old man, her foul grandfather, who had sired her, and her broken stand-in father, Joe Fox. Iris had never shown an ounce of maternal feeling. Molly’s elder brother Tom had been a pasty, sullen character who had vanished years ago, as soon as he could get out. And there was Bert – rotting in the Green now. The girls with her in the ATS felt more like her family. Standing looking down with loathing at the mother who had brought her into the world, she knew the only thing she could do was to go away and stay away. That was how she would survive. Turn her back on all of it and slam the door.

On a gust of Iris’s snores she turned away without a breath of a goodbye and left the house. Her step felt lighter and lighter the further she moved away.

She went to find Em at Mr Perry’s shop.

‘Someone to see yer!’ he called through to the back.

Em came in clutching an armful of cauliflowers. ‘Molly!’ she almost dropped them in astonishment. ‘For heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell us you were coming?’

‘Sorry,’ Molly said. ‘Only it was last minute. I daint know either. I got them to give me leave.’

‘Very nice uniform,’ Mr Perry said admiringly. ‘Very nice, I must say. Suits you, wench.’

Em grinned. ‘She looks lovely, doesn’t she?’

‘Ta,’ Molly said, blushing with pleasure. She had already pushed Lupin Street far away in her mind.

‘You knock off early, Em,’ Mr Perry said. ‘It’s only a quarter of an hour to go.’

Em protested but he insisted, and soon the two of them were walking back to Kenilworth Street together, just as they used to walk to school when they were kids.

‘He’s ever so kind to me, he is,’ Em said. ‘You’d never find a better employer.’

‘Why’s his tongue that funny colour?’ Molly asked.

‘Oh – it’s the pencil he uses for the ration books,’ Em laughed. ‘The kids get an orange on the ration, and the little monkeys were coming it with him – rubbing out where he’d marked it in their ration books and coming back for another share. So he’s had to get an indelible pencil – he licks the end every time to make it work!’

Once again Molly was brought up against the complications of civilian life. For her, food was just laid on and that was that – and at least now she didn’t have to cook it herself!

‘You’ve come because of Bert?’ Em asked, looking round at her.

‘I saw it in the paper, just by chance,’ Molly said. There was a pause as they walked on, before she said, ‘I don’t feel as if he’s my brother.’

Em seemed suddenly agitated. ‘Thing is, Molly – I feel bad about it. I saw them, him and that Agnes – Aggie he called her – a few weeks back. It was New Year. I was with Violet and Robbie, going home, and he was with her. Vi and me, we heard them – they were in an entry – off Rupert Street I think. We just heard these funny noises, and then they came out, right near us, and went off down the road. It was dark but I knew it was him. The thing was, it sounded . . . Well, he was being horrible to her, hurting her somehow I think . . . I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it – maybe I should’ve done summat then . . .’

Molly thought again of the cold barrel of the gun against her neck. She was the one who should have done something.

‘You couldn’t have done anything,’ she told Em. ‘Bert’s a bad ’un through and through. Summat would’ve happened sooner or later.’

When they opened the Browns’ front door, Molly found herself smiling at the sight that met them. Sid was in the front room playing with Robbie, swinging him up in the air, and Robbie’s happy giggles spilled out to the street.

‘Go on – up yer go. Yer gunna stand on the roof!’ Sid was teasing. ‘Shall I throw yer up through the window?’

From the back room came the sound of the wireless, and voices. There was washing everywhere, the air a mixture of steam, soap and cooking.

‘ ’Ello – who’s this!’ Sid suddenly noticed them. ‘Oh-oh – it’s yer mom, Robbie. Now there’ll be trouble!’

Robbie was far too caught up in the game even to notice Em. ‘’Gain! Do it ’gain!’ he shouted, pummelling Sid’s chest.

‘Oh – ’ello Molly!’ Sid said in surprise. ‘Almost daint recognize yer there!’

‘Hello, son!’ Em said to Robbie. ‘I’ve got a little treat for you – you can have the bit of cake they gave me to make up the weight!’ But Robbie ignored her and begged Sid again to carry on with the game. ‘Well – his uncle’s more interesting than my makeweight cake,’ Em joked, trying to pretend she didn’t mind. ‘Come on through, Molly.’

‘That you, Em?’ The wireless was clicked off in the back room.

‘Yeah – I’ve brought a visitor.’ They went through to the back, where Cynthia was at the table, cutting up potatoes.

‘Who is it? Oh – hello, Molly love! Back again then?’ Cynthia gave a warm smile. She seemed well, Molly thought, and it suited her. Bob was at the table with a paper and Violet was doing sums there too. They looked up and smiled.

‘All right, are yer?’ Bob said.

‘Hello, Mrs Brown, Mr Brown. I’ve just come home for a couple of days’ leave because – well, you know . . . Bert, and everything.’

Cynthia’s face fell. ‘Oh love – of course. I almost forgot – how could I? What a terrible thing. We couldn’t get over it when we heard. I mean, d’you think it might be a mistake, like – that they’ve got the wrong person?’

Molly shook her head, ‘No. I doubt it. He’s a nasty piece of work and always has been.’

‘Oh,’ Cynthia said, looking taken aback at Molly’s bald judgement of her brother. ‘I see.’

Violet was watching, listening intently, and Molly realized she was thinking of the night she and Em had seen Bert with Agnes. Violet was quite a quiet sort, but she took things in deeply. Molly wondered what the girl thought about it all.

‘Here, Em – get yer pal a cuppa tea. You stopping with us tonight?’ Cynthia said.

‘Well – I don’t know . . . Can I?’

‘You’re all right, love – course you can. We’ll squeeze you in. Sid can sleep down here.’

‘Oh no!’ Sid came in from the front. ‘Why’s it always me?’

‘Oh stop complaining,’ his mother said, unsympathetically.

‘You’d complain an’ all, if you had to sleep on that cowing couch!’

‘I’ll sleep down ’ere,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘No!’ Cynth protested. ‘Let this gentleman here give up his bed!’

‘No really – I don’t mind,’ Molly said. ‘I can sleep anywhere.’