The Four Streets Saga

by Nadine Dorries

  As Sean walked home, it occurred to him that there were many things in his life he wasn’t happy with, other than having to work every moment God sent.

  One of them was Brigid’s constant reluctance to talk about the day he was saving for, when they could pack up and leave for America, and join his family in Chicago. He wanted to work hard for himself and his family. To be in charge of his own destiny.

  In America, he knew his efforts would be rewarded with a better life for them all.

  In England, he struggled to save. Each week he made the dock company wealthier and had his head punched in every Friday night. Life had to be better than that.

  His sister’s letters were full of the most innocent yet enticing details.

  His mother could not stop talking about the opportunities for those prepared to take a risk and put in the graft.

  Already his sister and her husband were earning a small fortune, enough to buy their own home and pay for his mother to sail to America twice a year. This summer they had been to Florida for a holiday and had sent him a postcard. It made his stomach crunch to think how much easier and more prosperous life was for them.

  Sean decided that he would talk to Brigid again when he got into bed. He would wake her up if he had to. Brigid had to stop this ridiculous, small-minded clinging onto what she knew and realize that emigrating to America was for the good of the family.

  ‘Jeez, what is up with the woman?’ he said out loud as he shook his head.

  He loved home as much as the next Irishman, but even in Galway there was nothing for Sean other than poverty and then more poverty for his kids too. He punched the entry wall with his fist as he turned the top corner and, for the first time that night, his knuckles bled. Lucky that he had another week for the skin to heal over.

  As Sean looked up he was shocked to see Alice standing by her back gate. He had enjoyed talking to her at the Irish centre. She had none of Brigid’s reserve. They had spoken most of the night about America. Alice had told him she had kept all the brochures she had found that had been left by guests staying at the Grand before taking their passage across the Atlantic, and that sometimes she still read through them.

  God, Jerry doesn’t know how lucky he is, thought Sean. I wish I was married to someone who had a spirit like Alice.

  ‘Everything all right, Alice?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Yes, everything is fine, Sean. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I want to know so much about how to get to America, and to try to persuade Jerry that it would be such a good idea. I wondered if we could talk again some time?’

  Alice felt a thrill that came only when she was in her own secret world. Talking out her fantasies with Sean, without Jerry or anyone else being aware, was exciting. She wanted to know Sean better.

  ‘Would you mind not telling Jerry or Brigid that I asked, though?’

  ‘Aye, of course, and don’t worry, I won’t mention anything. If Jerry is as stubborn as Brigid, I know exactly what ye mean.’

  Alice glanced up at the bedroom window, where Jerry had been sleeping for the last hour. As she looked back at Sean, her eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Sean noticed there was something different, unusual about her. Was she wearing lipstick? Unlike the other women, Alice never ever wore a hairnet and she had styled her hair in the fashion of the girls who worked in the offices in town.

  Her deep fringe swept almost over her eyes, with the rest of her hair hanging loose on her shoulders.

  Alice had experimented with changes every day for weeks. Sean had noted that she was always a little smarter than the other women on the four streets, in a very English kind of way. No one had seen much of her for years and yet suddenly it was as if she was everywhere.

  This was the third time he had seen Alice in as many days.

  Alice noticed the blood running down Sean’s fingers. She reached out and took his hand in hers, examining it and dabbing his knuckles with her apron, making him flinch.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, is that from your fight?’ She looked up at him, holding both of his huge hands in hers, her eyes wide, and turned over the damaged hand to search for further signs of injury.

  Alice now took her handkerchief out of her pocket and, wetting it with her saliva, began dabbing away at the open graze.

  ‘No, Alice,’ Sean laughed. He had knocked three men out cold tonight without a scratch. How could he tell her it was from punching the entry wall? ‘I skimmed my hand on the wall as I walked past,’ he said, pulling away.

  The sensation of another woman holding his hands made him uncomfortable. Not because it was unpleasant, in fact it was just the opposite. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced for a long time.

  He had enjoyed talking to Alice on Saturday night. He had noticed that she had become prettier as the months went by. Since Kathleen had moved into the four streets, Alice had filled out and was no longer the skinny wretch she had once been.

  There was an air of aloofness, of reserve about her that Sean quite liked. She wasn’t like the Irish girls at home who were apt to be overly friendly in their search for a husband. Alice had a detachment, which he now realized was quite exciting.

  ‘It will be fine. I will run it under the tap when I get in.’

  Sean gazed down. He could smell the warmth of her hair and was overcome by a sudden compulsion to bend down and kiss her.

  The entry was asleep. Dark and deeply quiet.

  ‘Sure, Alice, I am fine,’ he said. ‘It is no problem, really.’

  Alice, resigned, pushed the handkerchief up her sleeve again and, drawing her cardigan across to keep out the night air, lifted her face to Sean.

  ‘Sean, I think I said too much in front of your mother when I visited this morning and I really hope I haven’t caused a problem. It’s just that nothing pleases me more than talking about the prospect of living in America and Jerry won’t even hear about it. I feel very lonely sometimes and would love to talk to someone who feels just as I do.’

  Sean looked down at Alice’s hand, which she had placed on his arm whilst she leant forward and whispered to him. She had made the same gesture when he had seen her outside of the shop. It was friendly and intimate. The sensation burnt through his coat sleeve. A warm hint of perfume wafted upwards and distracted him. He realized that never, in all the time he and Brigid had been together, had he smelt the feminine scent of perfume.

  Alice was no longer the plain Protestant English girl. She was now almost pretty and, to Sean, in the midst of an assault on his senses, she was certainly very sexy.

  Not because of what she wore, or how she looked, although that did play a part. But because of what she said.

  She was talking his language and it was playing with his mind.

  ‘I am working the graveyard shift tomorrow. Why don’t you come down to the café on the Dock Road and we could have a chat, before I walk home?’ Sean suggested.

  ‘Great, that’s fantastic, I would love to. I will see you there ten minutes after the klaxon then.’

  Alice put her hand on the back gate and lifted the latch.

  He smiled. She smiled. They lingered.

  The moon glinted from the wet cobbled pavement whilst millions of stars shone and bore witness to the silent messages that flew from one pair of eyes to the other.

  Nothing either of them could now do would erase those first few moments.

  It had begun.

  Sean had already had sex once that day.

  Brigid was so scared of becoming pregnant yet again that she often slipped into the bedroom when Sean was washing after work and went down on her knees to satisfy her husband, in order to avoid full sex later.

  She regarded it more as a daily task to be completed, rather than an expression of love or intimacy.

  An act of efficiency. Two jobs in the time of one. Sean sorted. All finished and done in ten minutes.

  The women talked openly and graphically about sex. Their jokes were as ribald as the men’s. Each knew exactly who had sex an
d when. Every woman in the four streets often knew when another was pregnant, even before her own husband did.

  Sex provided a reason to complain. An excuse to be ill.

  The detail of conversations was always explicit and uninhibited.

  Brigid was the only woman on the four streets who undertook this ungodly act and she was frequently besieged with questions from the others, appalled by what she did. Following the third child, they would never willingly volunteer to have sex of any description and went to imaginative lengths to avoid it, all except Maura.

  Enthralled, they pressed Brigid for details each time they met in Maura’s kitchen for a cuppa and a gossip.

  ‘What does it taste like?’ asked Maura, more curious than disgusted.

  ‘It surely has to be a sin, Brigid. Do ye pray for forgiveness?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Sure, I do. I never miss six o’clock mass, Sheila. I’m only a sinner for a few minutes. The father is fabulous and kind, so he is. He asks me for all the little details and I mean every one, to guarantee I am fully absolved, because, sure, we both know I will do it again,’ said Brigid. ‘He always asks me do I enjoy meself and I always answer, not at all, so that makes it all right, I reckon.

  ‘Confessing to the father takes almost as long as keeping Sean happy. I spend longer on me knees praying for forgiveness and saying Hail Marys than I do with Sean’s langer in me mouth. But I’d rather that than have another baby in me belly just now.’

  All the women laughed at this, some with genuine mirth, others in utter amazement at Brigid’s audacity.

  ‘Ye can still get pregnant doing that disgusting thing, so ye can,’ said Peggy when they had all calmed down. ‘Ye might think ye is being clever, but ye will still end up with another babby. Do what I do. Just tell Sean to feck off and stop bothering ye.’

  ‘Oh my God, has Sean tried it on with you too, Peggy? That’s disgustin’, the man is a fiend,’ squealed Deirdre from Tipperary, who always got the wrong end of the stick.

  ‘Jesus, no,’ screamed Peggy. ‘Sean may be the big man around here, but he’d know what a fist was, to be sure, if he tried anything on with meself.’

  Brigid often wondered if she would ever one day tell them how she had discovered the way to keep Sean happy and to stop herself from becoming pregnant more often than she already was. Brigid knew she never could. It would be a betrayal and, besides, it was a sinful thing to do to speak in such a way of the dead. Bernadette and Brigid had shared many secrets and her special way to keep Sean happy had been one. Let the leaves of the sprawling oak tree, each one as big as a lady’s hand, fan the summer breeze across her grave. Let her be in peace, with the daffodils, tulips and wild primroses in the spring. Red roses and lilac in the summer. Burnt-orange chrysanthemums in the autumn. All provided by the old woman, selling her flowers for sixpence a bunch, from a metal pail at the cemetery gate which Brigid placed in the old, discoloured jam jar at the foot of her headstone.

  Often, when running back from six o’clock mass, Brigid would notice that the old flower woman had left for the day.

  Having taken the remaining flowers from her pail and shaken the slimy water and strings of bright green moss free from the naked stalks, she would lay the tired blooms with drooping, sleepy heads against the gate railings, for the gravediggers to collect and lay on some lonely and forgotten grave.

  Brigid would pick up a few of the blooms (she never took them all) and then, running up the path, she would take the flowers to the friend she had not forgotten, Bernadette.

  Brigid never confessed to the other women that, when they were all gathered in Maura’s kitchen together, Bernadette was sitting at the table with them, too. She was sure of it.

  Laughing and smiling with them.

  When they banged their mops on the walls to summon each other to a powwow, they were also waking one of the dead.

  They would think she was mad.

  Maybe she was mad. Maybe it was her mind playing tricks. Over the last week Brigid had felt strongly as though Bernadette was trying to send her a message. It made Brigid uneasy, in a way she could not put into words, nor did she want to.

  Maybe she hadn’t seen her, but she was sure she had.

  At first, Sean had enjoyed Brigid’s routine.

  An act, provided by his loving wife, thought to be in the domain of prostitutes alone, had been exciting. It had thrilled him. He knew he was lucky and that there were many men on the four streets who would die happy if their wives would do the same just once in their lifetime.

  But now it had become robotic. He had his allotted few minutes, amongst her tightly choreographed domestic tasks, and it was the same every single day. His needs were just another item on her domestic checklist, slotted somewhere between dishes, mopping the floor and mass. He resented it.

  But not tonight. Alice had stirred him.

  Tonight he wanted full and proper sex. The kind that was normal between a man and wife. He would whisper to Brigid that he would jump off at Edge Hill and that she wouldn’t become pregnant. He needed her closeness. To feel her in intimacy and warmth, like it used to be. He was desperate for reassurance that they were a team.

  Like Jerry, Brigid had been asleep for over an hour when Sean slipped into bed, began kissing her neck and slowly lifting up her nightdress.

  She was exhausted. Between teething toddlers and nursing babies, she had achieved only three hours’ sleep the previous night.

  ‘What are ye doing that for? Stop it now,’ she whispered, as she clambered up through the layers of sleep and looked at him with bleary eyes. She knocked his hand away. ‘You’ve already been sorted today and ye will wake yer mammy, sleeping downstairs below us.’

  Brigid rolled over and turned her back to him, pulling her nightdress in tightly behind her knees.

  Sean was disappointed but, realizing there was no point in persisting, rolled onto his back and let his thoughts dwell on Alice.

  The little Alice whose eyes lit up when she spoke about America.

  He tried to sleep, constantly shifting his body weight on the mattress, searching for a limb on which to lay his weight on that wasn’t bruised or tender.

  His physical discomfort lessened as his thoughts wandered to the prospect of meeting Alice tomorrow. A woman who could talk about things other than babies and housework. A woman who was interesting. A woman who wanted more.

  When sleep finally took Sean, he was already lost in the arms of Alice. And in a similar bed in an identical house further down the entry, Alice was lost in his.

  13

  KITTY AND NELLIE woke to Kathleen gently shaking them.

  ‘Wake up, ye sleeping beauties,’ she laughed. ‘We have arrived.’

  The first thing Kitty noticed was the smell. Without thinking, she put her hand over her mouth and nose and retched.

  ‘Don’t worry, Kitty love,’ said Kathleen, ‘ye will be used to it soon enough.’

  ‘Aye, that’s the smell of the proper earth, Kitty, so it is, and I’m glad to see, miss, that you have now become accustomed to it,’ said Liam, gently poking Nellie in the ribs.

  Even though Nellie was half asleep, she grinned.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Kitty. ‘I don’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘Not at all, child,’ laughed Liam. ‘If ye want rude, Miss Nellie can teach ye a thing or two. The first time I got her out of the van, on her first visit, she was as green as the turf, weren’t you now, Nellie?’

  Nellie looked sheepish. ‘’Tis true,’ she replied, as from the tail of her eye she watched Liam imitating her throwing up and laughing to himself, making Nellie grin, reluctantly.

  ‘Will ye pack it in, Liam,’ said Kathleen. ‘I am parched and want to move these girls inside to see Maeve and have a cuppa tea.’

  Kitty was now standing outside the van, observing her new surroundings, as Liam lifted the bags out from under the tarpaulin. The deep-blue sky was broken by a full moon, illuminating the Ballymara road, a silver ribbon, all th
e way back to Bangornevin. Light also poured out from the open doorway of the farmhouse while the lamps in the windows beamed a warm orange glow.

  Her surroundings could not have been less like the four streets.

  To her right, she could make out the dark and forbidding hill that ran steeply up from the roadside and she could smell the tall rhododendron bushes which bordered the edge of the Ballymara road in a deep crimson fringe.

  She could hear a gentle trickle of water and noticed an old stone sink standing in the middle of a stream at the bottom of the hill, directly opposite the pathway to the house.

  To her left and out of sight, down past the farmhouse, she could hear the faster-running peaty-brown water of the Moorhaun river.

  ‘That’s what Nana Kathleen used for water when she was a little girl,’ said Liam, nodding towards the stone sink. ‘Ask her to tell ye the stories. Our own ancestors carved that and put it in place to collect and store the water from the stream. Come away in now and eat, plenty of time for exploring tomorrow.’

  Kitty could smell so many things.

  Water and peat. Crops and cattle. Iron and earth.

  The smell was so rich, so natural, it stung the inside of her nostrils and caught the back of her throat, but she instinctively knew it was good air. Free from the smog, coal and stone dust that daily blew upwards from the docks and hovered over the four streets in a threatening cloud, coating the houses and windows with a thin layer of dust and grime.

  The air here was free from the toxic yellow smoke spewed out by the chimneys of the houses that edged the Mersey and of the foundries set back from the Dock Road. Free from the fumes and chemicals churned out by the processing plants, which Maura was convinced were responsible for making Harry ill.

  Kitty breathed in deeply and slowly. She had quickly acclimatized to the stinging purity and freshness of the air. Her lungs took their fill.