The Four Streets (11 page)

After about a year, he began to invite Alice to go with him to the Irish centre on a Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoons she would occasionally meet up with him, as he pushed Nellie around in her pram for a change of scenery. Jerry would do anything to keep moving and to blot Bernadette out of his mind. Thinking about her wasn’t the source of comfort he once thought it would be; it was torturous and painful.

As Alice became a regular feature at the house, Maura grew spitting mad. If she could have poisoned Alice and got away with it, she would have. One day, when Jerry wasn’t around, Maura decided to meet Alice on her own terms. When she saw Alice enter Jerry’s house via the entry, she followed her into the house and pretended to be shocked when she found Alice in the kitchen. Alice was so much at home that there wasn’t much acting involved in Maura’s being stunned.

‘Can I help ye?’ she said. ‘Are ye here for anything special? Only Jerry didn’t mention youse was comin’.’

Alice knew she would have to deal with this one carefully. Maura might be bog Irish, but she could tell she was sharp.

‘He doesn’t know,’ she responded, without a hint of friendliness in her voice. ‘I finished early at the hotel and thought I would pop down to help him out.’

‘Did you now,’ said Maura, instantly affronted and her temper rising. ‘Well, let me tell ye, miss, there are plenty of us here on this street to help out. Jerry doesn’t need a stranger to do it for him.’

‘Oh, I’m no stranger, Maura,’ said Alice tartly. ‘In fact, Jerry is taking me to the Irish centre on Saturday night. So I am sure we can chat there, but for now, if you don’t mind, I have a meal to make.’

Maura stared with envy at the meat Alice had unpacked from her basket. A dark piece of brisket sat on the table covered in a dark-veined, deep-yellow fat. Maura could never afford meat like that in her house. The two women looked each other in the eye. Maura had met her match. As she retreated from the kitchen, Maura spotted the statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece, facing the wall, as if in disgust. She immediately thought Alice had done it.

In an act of defiance and with a determination somehow to leave her mark on the kitchen before she exited, Maura stormed over to the range and reached up to the mantelpiece.

‘The Virgin Mother doesn’t put her back on us,’ said Maura, as she turned the statue round. ‘She keeps an eye on what we’re up to.’ Then she flounced out of the kitchen.

Confused, Alice looked up at the statue and at the door Maura had just slammed behind her. It is true, she thought somewhat ironically, the Irish are mad.

It was after a particularly bad second winter alone, with Nellie now toddling around the house, that Jerry asked Alice to marry him. He hadn’t planned to and for days afterwards he regretted what he had done, but there was no way out of it. He had committed a mortal sin. He had made his bed and now he had to lie in it.

Two weeks earlier, measles had swept the streets and Nellie had been ill for the entire time. Jerry had barely coped. Maura was at her wits’ end, with her own seven children all down with the same illness, including Kitty, who was usually like a second mother and a second pair of hands for Maura.

It was the first time Nellie had been ill and despite Maura’s protestations that she could handle one more sick child, Jerry wanted his Nellie to have all of his attention. He took the whole week off work and didn’t go down to the docks once. It was Tommy who kept both houses fed that week.

Jerry hadn’t seen much of Alice while Nellie was ill, although it was the one time he could really have done with her help. He wondered where she was and why she hadn’t called in, but he was too busy nursing Nellie to think too much about anything, other than keeping her temperature and her food down.

It had never once occurred to him to ask Alice to marry him. He didn’t think about it even for a second, not even when he hit his lowest point, boiling Nellie’s vomit-soaked sheets in the copper boiler in the yard, with the cold rain pouring down the back of his neck and the steam from the boiler scalding his face. Not even when he cried again and his tears ran into the trickles of steam on his cheeks.

Definitely not then, because that was when he thought he heard Bernadette say his name. As he looked up, he saw her through the steam at the kitchen window, like he used to. She was standing at the sink, smiling out at him. Definitely not then, because that was one of the few moments he felt Bernadette was somewhere near, when he needed her, when he knew he wasn’t alone. One of the very few moments he allowed himself to think about who and what he had lost and lived without, when he let her memory roam free. And he was filled with shame at how angry those moments made him feel, the fury rising like acid in his throat.

It happened on a Saturday night. Jerry had invited Alice to the Irish centre, something he now did on a regular basis as a way of saying thank you. He didn’t really know what else to do. Even though he’d worked out she didn’t have much of a social life, he told himself that she appeared to enjoy herself and the odd glass of Guinness, so it usually turned out well enough.

The dockers worked hard, their wives struggled to manage every day, but it was all made bearable by the fun they had down the club on a Saturday night. They spent the first half of their week talking about the previous Saturday and the second looking forward to the next. So special were Saturday nights that it was the only night of the week the headscarves came off, the curlers came out and the Coty cherry-red lipstick was taken off the top of the mantelpiece, where it stood all week like an ornament, and was applied carefully in front of the mirror that hung above. Lipstick cost money. Nothing that cost money was hidden away. A lipstick was a possession to be admired and it remained on parade, ready to hand, to apply at a moment’s notice. Maura dusted her lipstick, along with the pot dogs. The family lived hard during the week but there was no better fun to be had than in the Irish centre, or in the Grafton rooms on a Saturday night.

There was a comedian over from Dublin that night to do a turn and a band from Sligo playing afterwards, which everyone on the docks had been talking about for weeks. Jerry knew the craic would be good and he would be able to have a few drinks himself and relax, not something he did often. It didn’t really worry him that Alice was intense and slow to laugh, that she never spoke to Nellie, that she avoided any intimate contact with him and was the coldest fish he had ever met. He didn’t care. He just liked to have the company. Another human being to relate to. Someone to keep him talking about little things and stop him thinking and remembering.

The women in the street reminded him every day. They knocked on his window as they walked past and shouted to him, ‘On me way to mass, Jerry, and I’ll light a candle for the angel Bernadette when I’m there, so I will.’

He would stand and look through the nets as the women’s shadows passed by, and feel nothing. He hadn’t been to mass since the day of the funeral. He never opened the door to the priest and he hadn’t prayed a word since the day Bernadette died.

The women on the street mentioned Bernadette every single time they saw him. They spoke to him with manufactured expressions of acute pain etched on their faces.

‘Oh God, ye look like a man broken with tears,’ said Molly Barrett, as he bumped into her in the entry. He had no words to reply with, as she dragged on her ciggie and went on her way. He knew she meant well.

Mrs McGinty would touch his forearm and look at the floor as though suffering an attack of acute colic before squeezing out a tear and saying, ‘God, I imagine the pain, Jerry, is more than ye can bear, Jer, ye must weep ye’self to sleep every night, ye poor, poor man, and how is the poor wee motherless babby?’

The past two weeks had been tough. He was haunted by the fact that people kept telling him he couldn’t manage, that he needed help, that he shouldn’t have to cope. He knew people frowned at the thought of him bringing up Nellie on his own. As he walked out of a shop one day with Nellie in his arms, struggling to carry his bag, he heard the greengrocer whisper to the next customer, who nodded in agreement, ‘It’s unnatural, so it is, he won’t keep that up for long.’

He realized he needed Alice’s help. Alice never mentioned his pain. She never spoke of Bernadette, ever. He had heard her mention Bernadette’s name only on her first visit. With Alice, he hid. She was a life after death.

He drank too much that night. Alice didn’t like to socialize and, although she hadn’t ever said so to him, she made it known. It wasn’t that she was rude to people, she was just quiet. She never asked a question and never fully answered one, either. And she was asked a lot of questions. No one on the four streets knew where Alice had sprung from. Some of the women, especially Maura, knew what her game was, but there was nothing they could do. Alice gave them no ammunition to use against her. She didn’t engage or converse. She knew their game, too.

Jerry had to sit on a table for two with Alice, not on a big circular table for twenty as he had with his Bernadette. The nights at the Irish centre with Bernadette had been some of the best in his life, full of dancing and laughter. Bernadette would often run down to the centre first when he was getting changed after work, or watching the footie, and he often tried to stop her.

‘Jerry,’ she would protest, ‘we have no babbies, we aren’t as busy as the others. I like to keep a seat for everyone at the big table.’ And that is what she did and everyone knew she would.

‘Keep me seat on Sat’dy night, our Bernadette,’ neighbours would shout to her, during the week. ‘We’ll be counting on ye, Bernadette, me corns won’t take the pressure stood.’

It was just one of the little things she used to do that made her, a new wife, one of the community, from the day she arrived on the four streets.

Alice had no intention of saving seats for anyone. God, how she hated the Irish centre and everyone in it. She hid it well, but not enough to join in.

‘Are ye not good enough to sit with us then, ye two?’ the odd person would say, as they passed by their table.

People were trying to be welcoming and willing to have Alice on their table for Jerry’s sake. Jerry hadn’t told them that Alice was a Proddie, but they had all guessed. Everyone had wondered whether she was part of an Orange Lodge and would be out on the march in July. But, as it was, they saw her going into Jerry’s house just as the big march was taking two hours to pass through the city and so they knew Jerry was safe on that score. It was the nineteen-fifties, but in Liverpool it was as if the battle of the Boyne was only last week.

Some of Jerry’s friends would be more insistent, trying to get them to bring their drinks over and join them on their table. Jerry wanted nothing more. But always, the answer was no. Alice would shake her head, look down into her Guinness, smile sweetly and appear shy.

She wanted to reply, ‘No, you aren’t good enough to sit with us, never mind us with you.’

God, how she hated Guinness too. Alice looked around the club on this particular Saturday and tried to hide her discomfort at the cigarette smoke stinging her eyes. When would he realize he needed her? When could she stop pretending to like this foul drink?

Alice had reached a wall. She had no experience of romance and no idea of what to do to take her plan to another level. For the first time since she had left home, she was lost for ideas.

Alice was the only person in the club who didn’t laugh at the comedian. The only woman not to dance to the band. Jerry, a fun-lover, who had spent most of his life laughing, recognized that he wasn’t enjoying himself. In fact, he didn’t even feel comfortable. He and Alice had run out of things to say half an hour ago. He had managed through the measles without help and, sure, hadn’t he come out of the other side all right? The house might be a mess today, but Nellie was better and had wanted for nothing. Measles killed toddlers, but not his Nellie. He had passed the biggest test of a single father, one many women struggled with.

Time to stop this, he thought to himself. I will not ask Alice to come any more and in future will come here on my own and sit with the others.

Jerry was feeling stronger. It was almost two years since Bernadette had died. He could do this alone now. He took a deep sigh. He had just taken the first decision of his own in two years and he felt good. Empowered. He was going to get a grip, take control of his own life and look forwards for him and Nellie. It was time to make a visit home and take Nellie to see her family and the farm he grew up on. His mammy had written to say Joe had been ill, and Jerry was keen to visit him. He would arrange that tomorrow.

He looked at Alice, knowing she was about to become a thing of the past, and he felt lighter at that thought. No sense of loss, just relief.

A minute later, Alice took a very huge risk and slipped her hand on top of Jerry’s while he sat and laughed at the comedian. As she lifted her own to put it on top of his, it shook. Her mouth was dry, and she was breathless. This was the most daring thing she had ever done in her life. The comedian sounded louder than he actually was and as she looked around, no one was looking at them. Everyone was laughing loudly and hysterically. It was a good moment.

She had no idea what he would do in response. She was terrified, but knew that, as he had already drunk a fair quantity of Guinness, now was as good a time as any. She had seen the look on his face, the expression in his eye when he had looked at her a moment ago. It was as though he had stepped back. She saw in his eyes the slight flicker of a decision and his body language spoke volumes, as he leant back in his chair and sighed. For the first time, she felt as though she was losing control. She had slipped backwards in the flash of a second and she knew that she had nothing to offer that couldn’t easily be supplied by any other woman. A woman he could easily pay a few bob a week to and who would look after Nellie in her own home. Her capital was shrinking. His gratitude diminishing. She had to think fast.

She didn’t look at him, as she felt the dark hair on the back of his hand bristle against her palm. Her heart was beating too fast; she couldn’t catch her breath and she didn’t dare look up.