The Four Streets (16 page)

She looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantel-shelf above the fire, which, now that she was in her da’s arms, was directly at her eye level. Nellie had often stared at the statue. When she was laid in her crib in the kitchen as a baby. As a toddler sitting in her wooden playpen, and often when she was in her da’s arms, as he sang her to sleep. Now Nellie stared intently at the statue and was rewarded as, through the tears swimming in her eyes, it smiled. Nellie grinned back and hugged her da tighter. It had happened so many times before.

That night, Jerry and Alice lay next to each other in a hostile silence. Alice lay, waiting to be assaulted, but hoping the row had been enough to deter Jerry from lovemaking. They hadn’t had sex since the night she had lost her virginity and although doing the deed had got her here, where she wanted to be, it was not something she relished doing again.

Jerry, lying on his back looking at the ceiling, decided that they couldn’t go on like this. He had to do something. It was time to perform his wedding-night duty and get it over with. They had to put behind them an awful day. This time he kissed Alice. He had kissed her a number of times since the night they had crossed the line and it had never been unpleasant. Kissing Alice didn’t stir him in the way kissing Bernadette had, but, as the sailors said, any port in a storm. Maybe having regular sex would make him feel happier in himself.

This time he tried to be as gentle as he had once been rough, he really tried. He tried to make it responsive and special. Alice didn’t. It was over in five minutes. When he said goodnight, Alice didn’t respond. She hadn’t made a sound or moved a muscle from beginning to end. Five minutes later, as he began to drift into sleep, he heard the latch of the bedroom door lift as Alice left the room.

Jerry lifted himself up onto one elbow and lit a cigarette. He looked out through the bedroom window at the stars illuminating the inky-black sky. There was a full moon and he could hear a tug out on the river and a tomcat fighting in the street, screeching like a baby. As he blew out smoke, he lay back on his pillow and felt lonelier than he had ever done in his life. His eyes filled with tears brought on by the familiar pain of loss, enhanced tonight by guilt and shame, as he gazed up at the sky and whispered, ‘I’m sorry, angel, I’m so sorry.’

Maura knew it would be just a matter of time before Father James called round to the house to ascertain for himself the details of the wedding. He wouldn’t want to hear it in bite-sized chunks, from women who he knew were exaggerating their own sense of importance in the situation and embellishing their second-hand knowledge. At the six o’clock mass, some of the women had tried to engage him in gossip and ask him what he thought.

‘I have no opinion now,’ he replied sternly, brusquely dismissing the invitation to gossip, ‘until I hear it from the horse’s mouth meself.’

‘Well, they are legally married in the law, so they are, Father, and that’s a fact,’ said Peggy indignantly, affronted at being put down so abruptly in front of the other women. Peggy was never quite as deferential to the priests as the other inhabitants on the streets.

Father James shook his head in disbelief and boomed, ‘The only marriage that matters, Peggy, is a marriage made before the eyes of God.’

He was as keen as the women to know what had happened. He also knew the best place to find out was to get himself to number nineteen as quickly as possible and inveigle Maura into giving him the unfiltered version.

Maura had missed the six o’clock mass and was in the process of wiping the dust from her windowsills for the second time that day. Cleanliness was next to godliness. She felt guilty at having attended a Protestant wedding and missing mass. She knew that Father James wouldn’t be able to keep away and that she would see him walking through her back door at any minute, now that evening prayers were over.

The Father often liked to visit Maura’s house, which annoyed Tommy.

‘Jaysus, Maura, we get more visits from the Father than the whorehouse gets from a sailor,’ he liked to complain. ‘Everyone will be thinking we are the biggest sinners in Liverpool.’

‘Go wash yer mouth, ye heathen, ye,’ she would shout, as she flicked him with a rolled-up tea towel.

Tommy had learnt from bitter experience not to say a word against Father James. The tea towel hurt. As he walked out of the house, sulking, he shouted over his shoulder, ‘I’m away to the outhouse for a shite. Maybe ye can leave me be in peace in there, eh?’

Tommy didn’t get it. He didn’t understand the prestige or the feeling of self-worth and status that being popular with the priest gave Maura. She liked the fact that the others saw him tripping in and out of her back door; it made them jealous, so she thought. Maura wouldn’t have a word said against Father James. It was her dream that one day Harry would become a priest or Kitty enter the convent.

Father James was a disciplinarian who brooked no dissent from his flock. Jerry’s marriage in a register office to a Protestant had been undertaken in defiance of the Church and God. The Father had a sinner in the midst of his flock and he wasn’t happy. It was the first step on a road that could lead a community into ruin and it had to be stopped in its tracks.

Sure enough, an hour later, as Maura was washing the dishes, after what felt like the feeding of the five thousand in her kitchen, she heard the click of the gate latch and through the window saw Father James’s hat, darker than the night sky, loom towards her up the back path.

‘Come along in, Father,’ said Maura, ‘and have some tea. Tommy,’ she shouted upstairs, ‘Father James is here.’

As he took off his cape and placed it over the back of the kitchen chair, Maura noted that, yet again, the Father’s cassock was dirty with what looked like soup stains down his front and he never looked as though he had managed to shave as well as he should have, with clumps of whiskers around his mouth clinging onto the remnants of food he had eaten that day. He always left on his ostentatious hat. Father James thought it gave him an air of authority, especially with the children.

Tommy was tucking in Harry, who hadn’t been sleeping so well. His asthma had been worse than usual that evening, as it always was when there was an unloading of stone on the Herculaneum dock.

‘Night, night, little fella,’ said Tommy, as Harry finally closed his eyes and Tommy could creep down the stairs.

‘Jaysus, Maura, it took me half an hour to get him off, what are ye doing shouting like the foghorn up the stairs?’ said Tommy, as he entered the kitchen, closing the door behind him. Maura gave him a look that told Tommy to shut up quickly, just as he saw Father James out of the corner of his eye, standing by the back door.

‘Oh hello, Father, how are ye, ’tis a pleasure as always, are ye staying for a cuppa tea?’ Despite the resentment Tommy felt at once again finding the priest in his kitchen, no one observing would have guessed that Father James wasn’t Tommy’s favourite person.

Everyone had to be courteous and grateful to the Fathers. They were the community pillars of truth, morality and discipline. When times were desperate, they provided food from the sisters, or sometimes clothes from a big house in town. Almost every family in the street had, at one time or another, found itself knocking on the Priory door on a dark and cold winter’s night, looking for help in the form of food or coal. The Fathers and their housekeeper were the last port in a sea of poverty. Their authority came from God, not the City Corporation offices or the government. They were the mortal representatives of God’s voice on earth and no other office could match that.

‘I am indeed, Tommy; I have come by, though, to hear about how the sinful service that calls itself a wedding went today and which you yourself and Maura took part in.’

Maura wasn’t expecting that and looked quite crestfallen.

Tommy left Maura and Father James to it as they took a tray of tea and fruit loaf into the front room. He made his excuses and sat at the kitchen table to do his pools and read the
Liverpool Echo
. He lit his Capstan Full Strength ciggie, put on the radio, stoked the fire and poured his own tea. He grinned as he cut himself a slice of fruit loaf; Maura had made it that morning by soaking overnight in cold sweet tea a large pocketful of sultanas that had been Tommy’s share from a chest that had split the day before. Tommy often joked that he could fit a small baby into one of his jacket pockets, but promised he never would.

Just the one tall lamp, with a large red lampshade, was lit in the corner by the table. It had seen better days but despite its shabbiness, along with the glow from the fire, it bathed the kitchen in a warm light. Tommy inhaled deeply on his cigarette. Everything was all right in his world. Wasn’t this just the best bit of the day? His family were well and asleep on full bellies, a blessing in itself and not something that could be said for every child on the four streets. Each one tucked up in their beds, dreaming their own dreams. He looked down at his paper and heard the murmur of Maura’s and the priest’s voices.

Father James was the only person who was ever taken into the front room. In Maura’s eyes, the kitchen wasn’t good enough for someone of Father James’s standing and importance. Father James was the ‘other man’ in Maura’s life, the only person towards whom Tommy felt any resentment. It was a sin he couldn’t take to confession and so it festered and rotted in his gut.

He knew that the Father and Maura talked about the oldest twins becoming altar boys and entering the priesthood, and that they did it behind his back. As God was Tommy’s judge, that would never happen. Maura would witness the wrong side of Tommy’s temper if she ever tried to overstep her matriarchal mark to pull that one off. Being the mother of a priest brought with it a sense of pride and an elevated standing in the community. Tommy knew this was something Maura craved and would seek through the advancement of at least one of their sons to the priesthood.

‘Even a worm can turn,’ whispered Tommy to himself. He had rehearsed the words in his head ready for the argument that would come one day soon. He knew everyone thought he was a pushover but he also knew the boundaries he would allow himself to be pushed to. Even a worm can turn.

He sighed and leant back in the kitchen chair as Maura walked into the kitchen. Tommy looked up with an element of surprise and, thinking he might have left via the front door, asked, ‘Has the Father gone?’

‘Not yet,’ said Maura. ‘He’s gone up the stairs to bless the kids whilst they are sleeping. He’s a bit mad that none of them were at mass this weekend. I asked you not to stop them going, Tommy,’ she half hissed.

‘Aye, well, did ye tell him that football’s a religion too, so it is?’ said Tommy, through his chuckles. He had beaten the priest. One up to Tommy.

‘Hush yer mouth,’ she hissed. ‘He may hear ye.’

Tommy leant over and turned up the volume on the radio and, as he did so, winked at Maura and they both giggled. She moved over to the sink where the bowl of cold greasy water awaited her with a knitted dishcloth floating on the top. It would have never entered Tommy’s mind to wash the dishes. That was women’s work and the dividing line was strong and well understood. Maura plunged her red, weather-chapped hands into the bowl and carried on where she had left off with the dishes. Whilst she waited for Father James to come back down the stairs and into the kitchen, she and Tommy chatted in the same relaxed way about the travails of their family life, as they had every night since the day they had married.

Kitty was exhausted and had fallen asleep as soon as her head had hit the pillow. She shared a large bed with her sister, Angela. The boys were behind the curtain and also shared a bed. She had heard her da comforting Harry and sitting with him, having put a towel over Harry’s head and made him breathe over a bowl of steaming, medicinal-smelling water, and then that was it; she went out like a light. She sometimes thought that being the eldest, and a girl, was a curse. She had spent the day looking after her four younger brothers and her younger sister, and she had looked after Nellie too. But she hadn’t minded looking after Nellie.

‘Sure, Mammy, Nellie was a dream altogether,’ she had told Maura when her parents returned from their exciting excursion into town.

Nellie was a good kid who did everything she was asked as soon as Kitty asked it. She never cried or whined, unlike Kitty’s younger sister. Kitty would rather have a dozen Nellies than one crying, whinging Angela, any day. Since she had been able, Kitty had helped her mother with childcare as soon as she was big enough to carry a child on her own small hip. She accepted that she was the working, practical appendage to her mother’s ever-productive womb and that was her lot in life. At such a young age, she not only knew what her future would hold, she was already an expert at it.

When she looked back, she couldn’t remember how it had begun. She didn’t know what had woken her. Was it a noise or simply a sense that there was an alien presence in the room? She turned over onto her side to make herself more comfortable and to move their Angela’s feet out of her back. Even when she was asleep, Angela could be difficult. Kitty had to put Angela next to the wall to sleep. She cried if she was on the outside because she was scared, and would lie next to Kitty and spend her nights kicking, or crying out and waking up the others.

Kitty opened her eyes slowly, taking in the familiar shadows in the room but aware something wasn’t quite right. She froze as she saw black skirts swish across in front of her face and then let out a startled gasp. He very swiftly clamped his hand firmly over her mouth.

‘Hush now, Kitty, ’tis only I. Don’t make a noise and wake the others.’

As he moved his hand away from her mouth, Kitty realized she couldn’t make a sound. She had been about to say sorry after she had gasped, but there was something unnatural about how hard his hand had pressed on her mouth. She could smell the stale tobacco on his stained fingers and an acrid aroma of unwashedness that had rubbed off his hand onto the skin under her nose. She could taste blood on her inner lip where his hand had so suddenly slammed on her mouth. Her heart was banging against her chest wall so loud she could hear it. Could Angela hear it?