Coming Home to the Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  Conor grinned at the sight of the horizon behind him. The ship was listing badly, but he had been sailing long enough to know that the skies looked good, the charts were promising and they should, on a wing and a prayer, make it to Liverpool full of a cargo the manifest said had been dumped overboard before they had reached Rotterdam.

  ‘There’s something in this for everyone,’ Conor reminded his first mate. ‘A hold full of rum, ciggies and a whole lot more which is no longer supposed to be there, it will mean a nice windfall for everyone. If any of them bellyache, send them to me. We’re lucky that the ship’s owner is insured and has taken the news in good heart. He’s booked the dry dock in Liverpool and the accommodation for the crew. I told him we were taking on water and the load was uneven because he bought too much. He thinks half of it ended up at the bottom of the ocean in order to save his ship, which matters to him more than the rum.’

  The first mate stepped out of the bridge and threw the dregs of his tea over the rails. ‘Neither the money nor the time are much use to any of us if we are dead and lying in a watery grave on the bottom of the sea, Conor.’

  Conor picked up his binoculars and looked ahead. ‘I’ll stay on the bridge until Liverpool, so stop your fretting. You’ll all be buying me drinks in the Anchor soon. That telegram from Malcolm at the Seaman’s Stop told us things are tough at home and we’ve a duty to get back and dry dock there, not in Rotterdam – and it’s carnival time soon.’ He smiled and Blinks smiled back.

  ‘You have the luck of the Irish with you, Conor, but it’s a good job it’s May and not December. I have no doubt we will reach Liverpool safe and sound. We’ll do four on and four off until we berth.’

  Conor lowered the binoculars. ‘Aye, well, I’ve cabled from Rotterdam and asked Malcolm to tell Mam I’ll be back soon and told him to give a wink to Jerry Deane.’

  Blinks asked Conor why it was he never sent the message straight to his mam. ‘Surely she would welcome a telegram from every port? My missus would never forgive me if she didn’t get the telegram.’

  Conor shook his head. He had never sent his mam a telegram in all the years he had been at sea. ‘Because it was the telegram boy who brought the news about my da, during the war. She would be a nervous wreck, just opening the door. And besides, my mam needs no excuse to be in the Anchor any more than she is. Set the course, Blinks, let’s head for home and, even with this list, keep those engines banked up and ramp up the knots.’

  ‘Aye, aye, Captain. Liverpool, here we come, even if we limp in with the Morry’s fecking arse scraping along on the bottom of the Mersey.’

  *

  By the time little Paddy reached the entry, the kids were clear of Nelson Street. He could hear them starting a game of football without him up on the wasteland and the stragglers were way too far ahead for him to catch up. His heart sank. Little Paddy was lonely and had been since the day Harry and the Doherty kids had left to live in Ireland. It didn’t seem to him as if anything was ever going to be the same again. As he watched the kids turn the corner, his steps were leaden and weighed down by his heavy heart. All of his life he had gone to the wasteland with Harry and the Doherty kids, always running and hiding from their grumpy sister, Angela.

  Kitty used to mother them all and, being a mini Maura, guided them and made sure every game was played fairly and that they all got in through the school gates on time. Even Malachi had listened to Kitty, but then one day everything had altered. The priest got murdered, Kitty went away and then she died, and not long after that the Dohertys had left and nothing had been the same since. He was very sure that all of these things were connected, but no one ever spoke of it. On a morning such as this, he would have run into the Doherty kitchen and Maura would have quizzed him.

  ‘Have you had your breakfast, Paddy?’ He would lie, to save his mother from the shame, but Maura could always tell when Paddy was lying. ‘Paddy, sit down at the table, now,’ Maura would say and moments later a bowl of pobs would be set before him, or a slice of bread, soft and warm with beef dripping.

  ‘Jeez, Harry, your mam has the sight all right!’ he would say as soon as they left the house and slammed the backyard gate behind them. ‘She could see that I was dying for the bread and dripping.’

  This morning, with his belly empty, his eyes prickled as he thought about Kitty. Her funeral had had a profound effect on him. It was the first time he had ever peeped through the upstairs window to watch one. The children on the streets were usually confined to the back bedroom when a funeral was taking place, while the adults dragged their chairs out into the street as the cortege passed by. On the day of Kitty’s funeral, the men had marched back up the dockers’ steps and the klaxon had rung out in respect. The women had thrown buckets of water at the horses’ hooves and the praying and chanting of the Hail Marys had risen up to the window where he knelt on floorboards, his face just above the sill. He was afraid, his mouth dry, and he wondered was that because he was the only person who saw what he had seen: Kitty, standing in the middle of the cobbles at the end of the street, looking down on her own funeral.

  Did she see Maura, half-falling from her chair onto the ground? Did she hear her wailing and the gasp of everyone as Tommy collapsed and Jerry and Seamus and Eugene hauled him up onto his feet? Did she see the rain that fell from the skies and blessed the mourners? And when she smiled up at him, had she really seen him too?

  He had spotted Kitty many times since, but he would never tell anyone in case they said he was mad and carted him off down to the priest, for it was well known that the priest had children taken away for being mad and they never came back. ‘Gone over the water,’ his mam had once told him when he asked about a young girl who had lived nearby. Everyone on the four streets knew she had been pregnant, but no one knew who by or what had happened to the baby.

  ‘Moral indecency, that’s what the priest at St Cuthbert’s said. He arranged it. God love her, she will never get out of that place, so she won’t,’ were the words he had heard as the women gathered in groups in the street to smoke and chatter. And then, suddenly, no one mentioned her name any more, for she had had sex. She must have, despite her protestations and it must never be spoken about, for fear it would become contagious. It seemed to little Paddy that everyone, except himself, had forgotten her. He often thought of her because she had been so pretty and so studious, in and out of the presbytery every day with her books and her Bible.

  ‘There are too many visitations of the Holy Spirit and immaculate conceptions around here for it to be true,’ he had heard one of the women say.

  ‘And to think, everyone thought she was going to take the veil,’ he had heard his mam say to his da. ‘She was never out of the priest’s study.’

  Paddy opened the green canvas army surplus bag that he had left in the outhouse and had collected on the way out of the back gate. When Max had finished his breakfast, he would transfer him into the bag whilst he kicked a ball around with the others, if Malachi would let him. It was Malachi Malone who decided whose feet could touch the ball and only the chosen few were allowed to play and the agreement was that Malachi was allowed to score the most goals of the day. Only yesterday, Malachi had become so bad-tempered with one of the boys who scored five goals in a row that Malachi picked up the ball and marched home with it under his arm, hurling abuse over his shoulder as he went. The disappointment of thirty boys on the bombed-out wasteland, especially those still waiting to play, was palpable.

  ‘Aw, come on, Malachi, be a sport! If you want to go home for your tea, leave the ball and I’ll bring it back later,’ little Paddy had called as some of the younger boys began to cry and Paddy had felt for them. ‘Come on, Malachi, don’t be giving out like that now, be a good sport and let the little fellas play.’

  But Malachi was crying hard, something boys over ten years of age on the four streets never, ever did, not in front of other boys anyway. ‘Feck off!’ he shouted over his shoulder as thirty boys watched their elevation from b
oredom march away.

  The canvas bag banged against Paddy’s thigh as he walked, the buckle pricking the skin of his hand, thrust deep into his pockets to protect Max. He could tell that Max was sleeping soundly. He would leave his new best friend in his pocket until he got near to the wasteland before he transferred him to his bag. He trudged along, wondering would Malachi be in a good mood? Would a full day of play be on the cards before Malachi took his ball home? Would Malachi try to thump him or somebody else? As he turned across the top of the entry, he saw a woman shading her eyes with her hands, peering in through the window of Maura and Tommy’s old house. Little Paddy thought for a moment and then, on a whim, he sauntered down the pavement and approached the woman.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘that’s Tommy and Maura’s house.’

  The woman turned and looked down her nose at him. ‘Was,’ she replied.

  Paddy furrowed his brow. ‘No, it’s definitely theirs,’ he replied and, without thinking, put his thumb in his mouth. Along with wetting the bed, it was the thing he was desperately trying to stop himself from doing. He had promised Maura he would before she left. It had been the last conversation she had with him.

  ‘I won’t be here, Paddy, to help your mam get the sheets dry. You know, she sometimes needs a bit of help, don’t you? You promise me you will try, there’s a good lad. Make sure you go every night, before you get into your bed, and keep the old brown ale pot next to you, in case you wake in the night.’

  ‘I will, Auntie Maura, I promise,’ he had said and he had managed to do just as she had asked. He never wanted to let her down especially after she said, ‘You’re such a good and special lad, little Paddy. The best in the four streets – along with our Harry, of course – you could be brothers, you two.’ And he had felt so filled with pride to think Maura would rank him alongside his best friend and personal hero, Harry, that he hadn’t wet the bed once since.

  ‘Are you wanting Auntie Maura?’ Paddy asked the woman now, feeling as though he was shrinking in size, caught as he was in the spotlight of the woman’s unfriendly gaze. She peered down at him as though he was something that had crawled out of a half-eaten apple.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

  Paddy grinned, this was a question he could answer easily. ‘I’m little Paddy, I am. I live there.’ He nodded towards the grimy front window of his house which hadn’t seen a wash leather since the Dohertys had left and the front step was unscrubbed, didn’t smell of Lysol and bleach like all the others. Paddy could see Mrs Trott on her hands and knees with a bucket scrubbing her step and willed her to look up and help him finish something he truly wished he had not begun.

  The woman wrinkled her nose and, following his gaze, looked past Mrs Trott, down the street towards the docks. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘we are going to be neighbours. My husband and I are to live here, so your mother had better get her house in order before we arrive, I can tell you. Those nets are filthy and I’m not living next door to that.’ She sniffed with distaste as she bent to look back into the window of Maura and Tommy’s old house.

  ‘What? How can you be doing that?’ Little Paddy was about to say that his mother’s nets weren’t filthy, but he knew better than to start an argument he couldn’t win. He looked down the road and saw Annie O’Prey, her gleaming white nets twitching at him from the side of the window. He felt in need of protection and for once was reassured to be under the gaze of the four streets’ nosiest neighbour. The woman peered down at little Paddy again, her face a picture of distaste.

  ‘I think the women of these streets need to know that Margaret Wright is moving in.’ Paddy sucked harder on his thumb. The woman had decided he would be as good a way as any at getting the message across, but his silence made her wonder. She felt a need to fill the silence his lack of response had created. ‘My husband is the new police sergeant, been promoted he has. He’s going to be in charge of what goes on at the docks and I can assure you, bringing order around here will be his first challenge, especially with the O’Prey boys living here. We will be your next-door neighbours, young man, and I’ll tell you this for nothing: my husband is a man who enforces law and order and we aren’t stupid. Nothing anyone says or does gets past my Frank. Do you understand that?’

  She bent down until her face was on a level with his own. Her red lipstick had bled into the cracks in her skin that ran away from her top lip and Paddy was transfixed by the faint orange line on her neck where her foundation ended and the white skin on her neck began, for it resembled a noose. She was also now obviously struggling to maintain her composure.

  ‘What is up with you, boy?’

  Paddy swallowed hard, now beyond speech. She turned her head towards Annie O’Prey, still peering around the nets in her window, and refocused her gaze. One of Annie’s boys, Jimmy, was due out of Walton Jail any day now and Paddy guessed she might know that because she smiled a cold and meaningful smile in Annie’s direction. The net curtain fell abruptly and Margaret Wright turned back to little Paddy, who was deeply regretting his decision to talk to her.

  For a brief moment, Paddy lost his focus and suddenly he could see Kitty; she was standing at the end of the street, watching him. He froze and stared until his eyes stung and blurred and then, despite not wanting to, he blinked and she was gone.

  ‘Have you got my meaning, boy?’

  Seeing Kitty’s ghost was far preferable to this encounter any day. His instinct was to run, but his feet felt as heavy as lead and refused to move.

  ‘They didn’t make my Frank a sergeant for nothing, you know. You had better let your mam know that.’ She leant in closer towards him, narrowing her eyes, and he felt a strong desire to clutch hold of his langer before he wet himself. He had been doing so well, but this woman, she had the power to undo all Maura’s good work. He could see the curls of dark hair escaping from under the rim of her bottle-green felt hat. The women on the four streets didn’t wear hats, they wore wire curlers held in place all day long with a headscarf and they only ever came out for the bingo, mass, or a bit of a do down at the Anchor or, in his mam’s case, on rent day. His eyes narrowed back at her – it was the best he could do.

  ‘You tell your mam that we are moving in next door in the next few days if Mr Heartfelt gets his act together. We are just waiting for the rent book to be handed over.’ She pulled herself upright. ‘Do you know why they are still paying the rent? It’s very odd. I know they had a windfall, but if they aren’t coming back, why would they be doing that? Is there someone else living in there who shouldn’t be?’

  Paddy blinked. He was truly confused and had no idea what the woman was talking about.

  ‘Lost your tongue, have you? Well, here’s something else to pass onto your mam: if there’s anything knock-off arriving in this house on a regular basis, it had better stop right now. Do you understand? Makes sense to me that an empty house must be getting used for something, so fencing, I reckon. That’s why the nets are still up. Well, you make sure your mam knows I’m onto them. The robbing can stop, because Frank Wright is moving in, those nets can be washed, that step scrubbed and the playing on the bomb site, that can stop too. Have you got that? Make sure your mam knows that we will be in before the carnival. I think we can improve the standards around here no end and it will make it a better community for all to live in.’

  Paddy nodded, his thumb was now thrust so deep in his mouth it protruded out of the side of his cheek. There was nothing knock-off in their house – no one trusted his mam and da to keep anything safe – but Tommy and Maura’s wash house and scullery had indeed been the trading post if there had been a haul and he knew the woman was bang on. The house was empty now, but as soon as the Morry came into dock, that would change. He knew that there were empty wooden tea chests, still in Maura and Tommy’s outhouse. Not a scrap of tea in them, though, or his mother would surely have had it.

  He had slipped in himself once and tried to scrape some out for her, when he had found her sitting at the
kitchen table, crying. He had tipped up a case and, pulling away the thin paper lining of the chest, to his joy extracted enough to make his mam a pot of weak tea every day for a week. She had been so grateful she even stopped crying and hugged him. That had been the week after Maura had left.

  The woman folded her arms, peered down at him and sniffed. It had occurred to her that either little Paddy wasn’t about to cough up, or he was so stupid he was of no use to her. She had no ill feeling towards the boy, but Margaret was disappointed that the best the dock board could do for her Frank, following his promotion, was a house on Nelson Street. Margaret hated rats and therefore hadn’t wanted to live so close to the river.

  ‘I can tell you,’ she said, ‘if housing wasn’t still so short, we wouldn’t be moving here, but needs must.’ She wasn’t really talking to him as she looked up and down the street. ‘They will be building the new houses soon and then we’ll be off. All this lot, they will be razed to the ground and the rats along with them.’

  Paddy instinctively clasped his hand over his pocket – and felt a shock run though him. Max was gone! The woman took one long look at little Paddy, who wasn’t quite sure if, by rats, she had meant the large river rats that ran along the bins and the top of the yard walls, where he had found Max, or the residents of the four streets. He stood frozen to the spot. Max, where are you? he thought, as he crossed his legs.

  The woman sighed. ‘These streets have a dreadful reputation.’ She slipped her handbag into the crook of her arm and clasped her leather-clad hands together. ‘Goodbye, young man,’ she said. ‘Remember what I said and make sure your mother knows. My husband won’t be tolerating litter like that in the gutters, either.’

  Paddy took a deep breath as Kitty appeared from nowhere, behind the woman’s back. He thought Kitty had come to save him and Max, but it was too late, he could tell where Max was by the warmth on his shoulder and by the look on the woman’s face that she had seen him.