by V E Rooney
Up until now, very little was known about Reynolds’ family. Neighbours and friends I spoke to refused to disclose anything they knew about them, some declining to speak out of loyalty to Reynolds, and some who would only give the scantest of details. Here she describes her family in her own words.
***
I guess you could say I’m Irish, although that wasn’t unusual round where I grew up. Most people at home have got a bit of Paddy in them, haven’t they? My Dad? Declan Mulvaney, who came from Tralee in County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland. He came to Liverpool in the late 1960s, with the intention of heading to London to look for work in construction. That’s what a lot of Irish did, to earn some money so they could buy some land at home. But like so many migrants before him, he ended up staying at the first port he disembarked at.
My memories of him fade the older I get. His face becomes blanker, the sound of his voice goes quieter and our interactions have blurred to the degree that it’s hard to know whether they were real or fantasised, like an imagined ghost fading from memory.
What I do remember is a tall, sandy-haired man with permanent stubble on the verge of becoming a beard. A chipped front tooth and a gruff laugh that sounded like a bear being tickled. Thick, muscled arms speckled with paint, cement and brick dust and wide shoulders honed by years of lifting bags of sand and pushing tar. My earliest memory of him, when I was about three and a bit years old, is of a snow-covered hill, which was probably at the park down the bottom of our road. We were sat on a wooden bread crate doubling as a makeshift sled, and he was cradling me from behind as we hurtled down the hill to the snowy drift at the bottom. I remember the chilly wind rippling my face and my squeals of delight that lasted all the way down until we both tipped over into the snow, wheezing with laughter.
My mum was Clare Reynolds. Mum was born in Liverpool, the third child and the only daughter of Irish migrants from Portlaoise, County Laois, who had settled in Liverpool in the 1940s. She left home at fifteen and had intermittent contact with them until they both died, ravaged by alcoholism until their respective livers turned to mush within six years of each other. She didn’t talk much about her family or what caused her antagonism towards them. My two uncles never visited us, a fact which I subconsciously interpreted as something which was not to be spoken about.
Mum was tall and slender with a mop of unruly dark hair that seemed to be permanently fixed into a ponytail. She looked like a scruffier version of Kate Bush. She had me when she was seventeen, more out of expectation and boredom than actually wanting to have a baby, I suppose. That’s what girls on the estate did – squeeze out a sprog as soon as you are legal and get a flat or house off the social. I’m an only child, by the way.
My parents named me Alison. According to Mum, my name was the subject of much argument between them – my surname, that is. Although unmarried, Dad took it for granted that I would be given his surname, which Mum took umbrage at. “If you can’t be arsed marrying me, then MY daughter gets MY name.”
Other abiding memories? Countless dusks turning into nights and a recurring anxiety, a sense of impending doom that returned again and again as darkness slowly crept into my room. The turn of Dad’s key in the front door. Me in my little room, in darkness, huddling under my quilt with my hands over my ears, or holding Snowy close to me, trying to block out the sound of all the shouting and screaming and hitting and things getting smashed. Dad disappearing without a word for days or weeks and then reappearing like he’d always been there, like a trick of the light.
One time, when I was about four years old, I was sat on Mum’s lap. I was looking at her face and laughing because, overnight, she had magically transformed into a clown. I brought my small chubby fingers up to touch the vivid red and purple colours around her eyes.
“Don’t touch that, love,” she said in a weary whisper as she pulled her head away from my hand.
“Why?”
“Because it’s sore.”
“But it’s pretty.”
She put me down onto the floor and told me to play with one of my dolls as she closed the living room door behind her, leaving me alone.
Dad left not long after that, after another big fight with Mum. Well, when you kick your kid’s dog to death, what do you expect?
***
Reynolds describes this event so dispassionately and calmly to me that I am taken aback.
“Your dad kicked your dog to death?”
“Yep,” she says quietly as her gaze drops to the floor again.
“Sorry…do you mind describing for me what happened?” I ask. “If it’s too upsetting then…” Without hesitation, Reynolds leans forward and starts talking in an animated fashion.
“So it’s dead late and I’m in bed in my little room and Snowy is curled up beside me, he loved snuggling up next to me. I hear Dad trying to get his keys in the front door, but he’s so pissed he keeps dropping them and I can hear him effing and blinding. So eventually, he manages to get his keys in the door. He comes in and he’s staggering around, bumping into the walls. So then my Mum comes down the hallway to see what all the racket is about and she is fucking fuming at him. She’s shouting at him, ‘where the fuck have you been,’ and so it kicks off. He starts shouting back at her, telling her to fuck off and leave him alone, calling her all the cunts under the sun and what have you. By this time, Snowy is growling and barking a little bit.
“Dad starts shouting in the hallway, telling the dog to shut the fuck up and all that. So then Mum and Dad are in the kitchen properly having it out with each other. Mum’s shouting at him, going, ‘I’m sick of you, treating this place like a hotel, you’re a bastard,’ and he’s going, ‘I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt,’ and I can hear them pushing and shoving each other. Before I could stop him, Snowy jumps off my bed and runs into the kitchen, barking his little head off. Then I hear my Dad going, ‘fuck off, you little…’”
Reynolds pauses at this point but looks composed. “And then I hear him kicking Snowy. I’ll never forget the sound,” she says, shaking her head. “So straight away I jump out of bed and run down the hall, I can hear my Mum screaming at Dad to stop, and then I see them in the kitchen grappling with each other. I saw Snowy lying on the kitchen floor. And I screamed.”
Reynolds looks down at the floor at this point, as if the image is replaying in her mind. “So then my Mum scoops me up in her arms and she’s running down the hallway, out of the flat and downstairs to the neighbour’s flat below. I can hear my Dad going, ‘I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry,’ but he’s so pissed he can barely get the words out. Of course, the neighbours have heard the racket so as soon as my Mum starts hammering on their door, they open it straight away and let us in. Then the busies turned up. So we’re in the neighbour’s flat, sat on the couch. My Mum’s hugging me, going, ‘don’t worry, babe, I’ll get you another dog,’ and I say, ‘I don’t want another dog.’ Then the busies dragged my Dad off and away. A day later, the busies bring him back to the flat so he can pick his stuff up. The last time I saw him was when he was just about to leave. Mum and me were stood in the lounge watching him go down the hallway. I was sort of hiding behind Mum’s legs. As he went out the front door, he looked at me. But then Mum shut the lounge door. And that was that. That was the last time I saw him.”
Reynolds looks at me to signal the end of the anecdote. She remains calm, matter-of-fact and composed.
“How did your dad’s departure affect you?”
“Oh, I was fucking made up,” she says in an upbeat manner. “When he left, the shouting and screaming stopped so I was happy and Mum seemed a lot happier too. The last I heard of him, from one of his old workmates, was that he had gone off to London looking for work and that’s the last anyone saw of him. I never did get another dog, or any kind of pet for that matter. It would’ve been too painful a reminder, know what I mean?”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
I am scribbling away in my notebook, trying to take in everythin
g that Reynolds has just told me. I cannot determine whether her detached demeanour is a kind of defence mechanism to enable her to recall these memories, or whether it is an immutable part of her nature and personality. It could be that this detachment is something that enabled her to carve out such an exclusive niche in the drugs trade, although I am guessing she would dispute that.
I ask her about life on the estate, to describe her childhood.
“Well, see, a lot of families got moved into the estate at the same time so there were loads of kids all around the same age. And you know what it was like in those days. Mums would kick their kids out of the house and tell them to go and play until it got dark, get them out from under their feet, you know? So us kids, we were just like packs of wild dogs, running around all over the place without a care in the world. Not like today, with kids getting mollycoddled all the time, not even allowed to go down the street by themselves. Can’t even wipe their own arses without their parents watching.
“Kids were always knocking on each other’s doors, asking other kids to come out to play. One time, my mates came knocking for me, wanting me to go play footie with them. So we’re all rushing outside and then my Mum appears in the window of the lounge, she leans out and shouts down to me in the street, ‘make sure you’re back by dark, otherwise the Yorkshire Ripper will get you.’ You know, because he was still on the loose at that time. But me being a smart arse, I shout back, ‘no he won’t, because he lives in Yorkshire, and we don’t live in Yorkshire.’ So she goes, ‘he might fancy a day trip. You never know,’ and shuts the window.”
Given that that the Yorkshire Ripper was not apprehended until 1981, that would put Reynolds at about seven or eight years old at this point. Perhaps prompted by my shocked expression, Reynolds elaborates.
“I was too young to understand exactly what he’d done – all I knew was that he was going round doing bad stuff. And it was on the news all the time. Sometimes I would hear Mum and her mates sat in the living room, or stood on the street corner, or in the shop, talking in hushed tones about his latest atrocity.”
Reynolds then repeats in mimicked voices the snatches of conversation she heard.
Oooh, he’s got another one…
That poor girl, did you hear what the sick bastard did to her?
Them dozy Police cunts in Yorkshire are too busy trying to find their own dicks under their beer bellies to find him…
“I know this sounds fucked up, right, but the Yorkshire Ripper was like the bogeyman for us. All the mums used to use him to get us to behave.”
***
3. POLLINATION
The other memories I have of my childhood? Well, they were pretty carefree under the circumstances, and by carefree I mean at least I wasn’t some orphan in Africa walking twenty miles a day for fresh water and married off to the 80-year-old village chief before I’d had the chance to develop breasts and a functioning uterus. Mum and I had a roof over our heads, I had clothes to wear and food to eat.
I went to school. Well, I know it’s mandatory but I went voluntarily, unlike a lot of the kids I grew up with. Maths and history were my favourite subjects, and I did well in them. Enough to get called a girly swot, believe it or not. I had friends on the estate, girls and boys. We would congregate in the square that stood beneath the maisonettes. I think it was originally designed as some sort of courtyard. It was a patch of grass criss-crossed by two diagonally opposed paved pathways and bordered by small brick walls on all four sides.
In the afternoon, after school had let out, stretching into evening and nighttime, this patch of land served as our make-do football pitch. It was perfect. Because of the amount of time we spent on there, the grass was flattened and worn away in some places, and the walls served as makeshift goal posts and barriers which would deflect the ball back at us, saving us the effort of walking an extra few metres to get to the road to retrieve it.
It’s funny when I think back to that time. It was definitely the women of the estate who were the characters. In warm weather, the women – the mums, the grans, the aunts, the mates - would congregate outside each other’s front doors, leaning up against the door posts or sitting down in some plastic garden chairs facing the courtyard, hanging out the windows, like some informal underclass Women’s Institute. Fags in hand, cans of lager and cider at their feet, voices clattering with each other, a burst of raucous laughter now and then. An open window would reveal a snatch of commentary from the footie on the telly, and either the euphoric or despairing roar from the men inside.
There was an unwritten law that adults ventured across the courtyard to the bus stop on the other side at their own peril if the kids were playing footie on it. Occasionally some brave soul would take the chance, knowing that their odds of catching the bus were considerably greater if they went across rather than circling round the outside. Invariably, they would either disrupt the game or get smacked in the head by a ball and threaten the kids, screaming blue murder, and something about sending us to borstal. “Fuck off, you old cunt” was our usual retort - and if the hapless invader hoped to find allies in the women sitting outside the maisonettes to remonstrate with these foul-mouthed children, the women’s retorts would be like:
Well, what the fuck were you doing there anyway, you stupid cow?
Oi! That’s our kids’ footie pitch!
Fuck off, you old cunt!
I was very good at football, particularly as a defender. Sometimes the teams would be all boys, sometimes it would be all girls, (until the lads spotted us and begged to be allowed to join in), and sometimes it would be mixed teams. It was an egalitarian estate in that regard. Every afternoon after school, there was a race among the kids to see who would get to the pitch first and lay claim to the first match, with the losers forced to wait their turn. I wasn’t particularly skilful, but I had a quick turn of heel and I could head the ball just as well as any boy, so I was considered a valuable player. On a few occasions, I was subject to a transfer bidding war by rival teams. I would get picked by one team, only for the other team to try and tempt me over to theirs with the offer of a bar of chocolate. Then the other team would counter with offers of a ride on someone’s Chopper bike.
The one and only time that I can remember the courtyard/makeshift pitch being unavailable to us was Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981, when it became the venue for our street party.
The neighbour in the downstairs flat on the ground floor had this massive colour telly that she’d hired from Rumbelows, so loads of women from the maisonettes – me and Mum, the other mums, some grans and some kids – we were all jammed in her front room watching the wedding on the telly.
Ooh, doesn’t she look beautiful, Jean?
Oh my God, she looks just like a princess.
She IS a princess, you dozy cow.
How much was that dress? 30 grand? I could do a better job with a roll of silk from Paddy’s market for £50.
I’m telling you, she’s in for a treat tonight. You know what they say about men with big noses. They don’t need to come up for air so often.
As if that gormless twat knows his way round a woman. I bet you he cries when he comes.
A couple of women were outside the maisonette, watching through the open windows. Meanwhile, some of the fellas were outside, already getting pissed and bellowing that fucking Joe Dolce song in a sing-along, you know that really annoying piece of shit? One of the women watching through the window had a right gob on.
Will you lot shut the fuck up? I’m trying to watch this!
AAAAH, SHADDAPAYAFACE!
Union Jack bunting was put up from lamppost to lamppost, and the pitch was covered in four long rows of trestle tables, which were soon overflowing with sandwiches, cocktail sausages, cake, and every kind of alcohol you could imagine. Lager, bitter, cider, whiskey, vodka, rum, gin, Martini…someone had even stretched to a bottle of Aspi Spumanti and some Babychams.
Everyone’s maisonette windows were opened so that various hi-fi
systems could belt out their own favoured style of music throughout the day, each layer of sound converging to form a jarring Satanic-sounding cacophony. From the maisonettes facing opposite, Duran Duran, Gary Numan, Michael Jackson and Dire Straits. And that fucking Joe Dolce with his Shaddapayaface pile of wank. Above that maisonette, someone was giving their frigging Status Quo albums an airing. I’ll say one thing for Mum, she knew her music. She loved Motown, soul and funk, so from our maisonette came the likes of Tina Turner, Earth Wind & Fire, the Gap Band, the Delfonics, Rick James, a bit of Aretha and a dash of Teddy Prendergast.
That day, the summer haze lasted well into the evening and the musical soundtrack was punctuated by drinking, hoots of laughter, singing, dirty jokes and a few football chants, occasionally halted by one of the grown-ups getting up to vomit in the street gutter, having a bit of a breather, and then rejoining their table to resume drinking. It was probably the only time everyone who lived on the estate got together. I think that was probably one of the last times I felt like a proper kid - happy, full of energy, with a future that was limitless and endless. I didn’t think Mum and I were any worse off or any better off than anyone else on the estate, or on any other estate. Like I said, a happy, carefree childhood, doing all the things that kids are supposed to do. But that didn’t last long. I grew up pretty fast.
