The Four Streets (17 page)

She had known Father James all her life. He had christened her and taken her first Holy Communion, but he had never before touched her, other than to lay his hand on top of her head. She was confused and afraid. Waking up to find him standing by her bed was not a normal occurrence. She could hear music from the radio and her parents laughing downstairs. If Father James was in her bedroom, her parents must surely know. Why weren’t they in here too? Why was Father James alone? Why had he banged her on her mouth and nearly stopped her breathing? What was she supposed to say or do?

Questions chased each other and, trapped, ran wild in her head. But she didn’t speak or move. He had told her not to make a noise. Kitty did as she was told. Father James was an authority that even her parents obeyed; she wouldn’t dare make a noise.

She lay with her eyes wide open, looking at his face and wondering what on earth she should say. She had no idea how old he was. Much older, she guessed, than her parents. His hair was grey all around the sides, and she knew, from the increasingly rare occasions he took his hat off, that he was bald on top. She hated his scary hat, which made him look like the pictures she had seen in school of Guy Fawkes. She could see the dark hairs erupting out of the end of his nose and protruding in huge bushes from both of his ears as though they were trying to escape, screaming in terror, from the unnatural thoughts inside his brain. His skin was pale, with a dark shadow where he had shaved, and the wide brim of his hat meant that when his head was bent down, as it was now, his face was in total darkness. She couldn’t see anything of his expression, except the gleaming whites of his eyes.

There was silence while he stood leaning slightly over her, staring intently at the outline of her thin body under the pink cotton candlewick bedspread. She noticed that he seemed agitated, pressing his knees into the side of the mattress, pushing his weight onto the bed and grabbing hold of the headboard with one hand to steady himself. He thrust his hand through a fold in his black skirt and Kitty immediately screwed her eyes shut. This was very out of the ordinary. The black material of his skirt was brushing against her arm and she wanted to lash out and knock it away. His knees, pressing into her mattress, were less than a finger’s width from pinning down her arm. He hadn’t told her not to look, but she knew she didn’t want to see what he was doing right now.

What was wrong? Why was he here? Why had her parents sent him upstairs to her? Did they think something was wrong? What were her parents doing laughing whilst he was here scaring the life half out of her? She wanted to shout loudly, ‘Mammy, Daddy!’

She had never wanted to be close to them as much as she did right now, not even on the odd occasion when she had awoken in the night with a high temperature, shivering and shaking, feeling so ill that she couldn’t stay in her bed and needed to be with her mammy. On those nights she would wander into the kitchen half crying and flushed with sickness. Within seconds Tommy would scoop her onto his knee and hug her, making soothing sounds, whilst Maura fetched a bowl of tepid water and a flannel, and sponged down her limbs with long strokes. Both of her parents concerned, both flapping, emitting soothing noises until the temperature finally subsided. She would spend the rest of the night fitfully sleeping, watched over by one or the other, no more than a hand’s reach away. She wanted her mammy desperately now, in the same needy way, even though she wasn’t sick.

But she knew that if she woke the kids for nothing, she would probably be in trouble. She lay with her eyes squeezed tight shut as she heard his breathing become rasping and rapid.

‘Hush now, Kitty, you good child,’ he said breathlessly and gratefully.

She hadn’t spoken or made a sound, she had nothing to say. Why was he hushing her? She lay deathly still and didn’t move a muscle. She heard the muffled friction of his vestments rhythmically moving and she could feel the mattress slightly shifting under her. What in God’s name was he doing? He would wake Angela and the boys. Why was he making that noise?

She opened her eyes, to tell him in a whisper that he would disturb the others because the mattress was shaking, and to ask him to stop doing whatever it was he was doing. She was ready to call her mammy right now. In her role of junior carer of the little ones, she had the confidence to call for help. Not because she was frightened, or because she felt as though the precious space of their bedroom was invaded and no longer safe. Not because the inside of her lip was bleeding, or because she felt scared and violated, but because this was now breaking their carefully managed routine of domesticity. The little ones were her responsibility and were about to have their sleep disturbed, and that now gave her the confidence to shout for her mammy in the presence of the priest. They wouldn’t tell her off, because she was just doing her job in looking out for the others. Father James didn’t have children, he didn’t understand. Her parents would know she wasn’t being disrespectful to the priest.

As she opened her eyes and turned her head to shout for her mammy and daddy, his ejaculation left him, like an opaque milky fountain, and hit her full in the face.

And then again. And again. Again.

He was still holding onto the headboard as he slumped forward and let out a low groan. She gasped in horror. The bitter smell of his close proximity robbed her of her ability to inhale. He was leaning so far over the bed that he was less than six inches away from her face. She stared in transfixed terror, her mind screaming a rejection of what she was seeing, as the final flow of his exudate slowly oozed out onto the end of his langer and formed into a threatening drop. Her fingers clenched the bedsheets tightly. She was too terrified to raise her hand to her face.

He gave a last irregular gasp and spat out the word, ‘Feck,’ as, spent, he leant more heavily on his knees into the mattress. Less than an inch from her face, the last milky drop dribbled slowly and clumsily, still attached by a thread of slime, onto her chin and slithered down onto her neck. She screwed her eyes tightly shut and swallowed her breath in gulps, as she fought off the instinct to scream repeatedly and loudly, and to prevent the contents of her stomach from discharging themselves onto the bed.

She couldn’t scream. She had to protect the others from the badness in the room. They were safe whilst they were asleep.

She could feel his sperm, now cold, slowly crawling down her nose and cheek. She felt her fringe, wet and sticky, clinging to her forehead. Her stomach leapt in revulsion as a puddle halted its downward journey and settled in the dipped valley of her cushioned, clenched lips. She could faintly taste salt, seeping through her teeth and onto her tongue.

Helpless, trapped, terrified, she felt as though she was about to choke. She could not breathe and although she would rather die than open her lips, a low cry, beyond her control, escaped her. Shocked, at first she wondered whether the sound had come from him, then recognized it was coming from somewhere within herself. She fought to stop, but was driven by fear. Surely she was ensnared in a nightmare; this couldn’t be happening. She was terrified he would now ask her a question and she would have to open her mouth to speak. All she could think, as she cried, was, Oh God, please let this end and take him away.

She longed for Angela to let out one of the noisy, tortured cries she sometimes did in the night, as though she had been poked unexpectedly with a sharp stick. This quite often brought her mammy running up the stairs to check she was all right. The boys were so used to Angela’s noises that they slept through, but Angela always woke Kitty or her mother, and either one or the other went to her side, checking her to make sure she hadn’t woken herself. Please scream now, Angela, Kitty silently begged.

She kept her eyes firmly shut and played dead. Every muscle in her body was rigid and tightly sprung, ready to do battle if he touched her again. He didn’t say a word. She almost lashed out in terror at the pressure of his leg and let her breath out suddenly with shock as his hand came down to wipe her face and rub and rub at her skin, with what she assumed was his skirt, or maybe a handkerchief he kept somewhere in there, just for this occasion. She was pathetically grateful to him. Removing the slime was a huge relief.

‘Stay quiet now, Kitty, there’s a good girl,’ he whispered in a thick voice, as his breathing returned to normal. ‘Mammy and Daddy will be very angry with ye if ye say anything about this to anyone, even to them. They don’t want to hear a word of this, do ye understand what I’m sayin’, child?’

He knew she was a child.

‘God will be very angry, and throw you into the fire and flames of hell and eternal damnation if ye so much as let the words pass ye lips and upset ye mammy and daddy. Do ye understand, Kitty?’

She nodded. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

‘What ye have just done, Kitty, was very bad, a bad sin, ye have been a very bad girl.’

She thought she had always been good. She strove to be a good girl. Why had she been bad? What had she done wrong?

He had stopped talking. He was quiet, but he was still there, and although she could now hardly hear his breathing, she could sense him. She still didn’t open her eyes. And then she heard him whisper, asking God to forgive her for her sins and save her from the fire, and then, with a flourish of his vestments, he was gone.

‘I will be away now,’ shouted Father James, as he strode through the kitchen purposefully, on his way to the back door, his black cape billowing out behind him.

‘Ah, thank ye, Father, for blessing the kids,’ said Maura. ‘It is so kind of ye. I know they don’t always go to mass, but they are all good kids.’

‘Aye, they are that,’ he replied. ‘Don’t fret, Maura; if they miss a week I will always pop in. It’s no trouble, but they must make confession and communion now.’

‘Yes, Father, they will that,’ promised Maura to his departing back, as the door closed. She turned to Tommy. ‘Sure he was in a hurry tonight.’

Tommy wasn’t listening, he was somewhere else. He put his hand out to Maura to hold hers and pulled her down onto his knee.

‘Ye know, Maura, as you and the Father were talking tonight, I was sat here, counting me blessings and thinking how lucky we are, ye know. Maybe seeing Jerry’s fall in fortune has made me think, but there was once a time, I am ashamed to say it, when I envied him, as he always had much more than we did. We are always struggling, but look at us now, eh? We are warm, I’ve good work, the kids are fed and all safe and asleep in their beds, and they’ve even been blessed tonight. Life can’t get much better than that, now, can it?’

Maura cupped her man’s face and they kissed tenderly. They were united in their love for each other and for their children, whom they adored and who were their pride and joy. They had little else, but it was enough.

The room smelt funny. Kitty thought to herself that this wasn’t the first time the room had smelt like this. She had woken up on a number of occasions, feeling something sticky and itchy on her skin and smelling this smell. She had thought it was snot. She remembered waking with the itchiness and wiping it away with the back of her hand and the corner of the pillowcase.

Kitty began to cry, quietly. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what had happened. She just knew it was something bad. With brothers to look after, she knew exactly what a langer looked like, but she had never seen a grown man’s before. Tommy was very careful to maintain dignity within the family and none of his children had ever seen him undressed. Something she had never before seen or encountered had been violently thrust upon her and rent her childhood apart.

Father James, God’s voice on earth, had told her she would be thrown into the eternal flames if she told anyone what had just happened, but she wanted her mammy so badly. She could hear her parents laughing downstairs, all the familiar sounds of family. Security and safety in love. She wanted to run down the few stairs that separated them, the few yards of distance between her bed and the kitchen table. To be in the same warm, brightly lit, protected space they were. She wanted to wash the lingering smell from her cheek at the kitchen sink with the distinctive clean and antiseptic smell of the Wright’s Coal Tar soap, which lived in a broken grey saucer on the windowsill. She sobbed quietly until, once again, exhaustion claimed her.

She didn’t open her eyes again until the next morning, when an unexplained feeling of badness and shame was quickly drowned by the calls of siblings asking for her help. She could tell no one. No one knew about the evil that had crept uninvited into her room. When she washed at the sink, she plunged her face into the bowl of water with a force that made Maura shout out at her for splashing the floor. Finally, Kitty got to hug her mother. She flung her arms round her waist and buried her head in her chest. Maura kissed the top of her head and rubbed her shoulders, too busy with the morning routines and the chores of daily existence for procrastination.

What Kitty had suffered that night was the by-product of being poor. It wasn’t the outward signs of poverty or the lack of shoes and clothes that defined a poorer child and brought the deepest lasting misery. It wasn’t even the hidden hunger pains, pale skin and pinched cheeks, an unheated house or broken furniture. It wasn’t having to share a bed with springs protruding from a stained mattress or having to walk on cold, bare, splintered floorboards. What often defined a poor child was shame. Shame not just from being without, but from having encountered something dark that roamed the streets and homes of the vulnerable. An evil that did a greater damage and left a deeper mark than an empty belly. Hunger could be fed, a numbed body could be clothed, but a damaged soul could not be seen or healed. Poverty, gratitude, a sense of inferiority and insecurity made children prey to the things that were invisible and were never spoken of.

Time rolled by and life on the four streets altered very little. People still existed rather than lived, and Alice, wallowing in the residual memory of a dream, withdrew into her familiar pattern of isolation.