by Annie Murray
Over those days of recovery he came to discover more about the house. The four of them inhabited the front room, which was boarded up except for the loose plank Christie slid back and forth at the side so they could see better. There was barely any light in the hall and all the floor tiles were loose and clinked underfoot. Joey was still learning to find his way round, avoiding the holes where the tiles had come away altogether. The back room was full of rubble where the floor above had collapsed, and if you stepped just inside there was a place where you could look up through the jagged wreckage and see the sky. Beyond was a dark kitchen and scullery from which came the sound of running water. The tap had been wrenched off the water pipe, leaving a trickle of water running constantly into the stone sink. Something scuttled away into the darkness as he approached. The door to the front room had to be kept shut always – it was Christie’s strict rule.
‘There’s two or three things you’ve got to remember if you’re staying here with us,’ Christie had told him once he was well enough to listen. They were squatting by the grate and Joey stared intently into Christie’s gaunt face. He had immediate respect for Christie and felt safe with him.
‘We don’t want anyone knowing we’re here, right? So you never, ever go out the front. There’s a way out the back, I’ll show you. We never keep the fire going when it’s light outside – even in the cold. We don’t want anyone seeing the smoke and getting suspicious. So no building up the fire when I’m gone out. Whatever we earn we share – that’s another rule. Micky can’t work but that doesn’t mean we leave him to starve. And –’ he pointed emphatically – ‘you keep that door shut at all times. Got that, little fella? This place is like a barnyard there’s that many rats. You’ll hear them running under the boards. But this room’s the one place in not bad repair. I’ve blocked off a couple of holes in the floor and we’re sound enough. We don’t want to be inviting them in to share our dinner, now, all right?’
Joey nodded solemnly, and Christie’s usually woebegone expression lit with a rare grin.
‘C’mere.’ He held out a thin arm. Once again Joey was struck by how hard and sore his hands looked. Christie put an arm loosely round him and looked into his face. In a whisper, he said, ‘And the other thing is . . . Siobhan, my sister . . .’ Joey saw a look of pain cross Christie’s face. ‘She’s not always very well. You’ve seen she’s not always herself. That’s all. That’s why we’re in England, see. We came to . . . help her.’
Christie’s face looked very sad as he spoke. Joey nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say, but deep in himself he knew things about the kind of not very well that affected women like Siobhan, like his mom.
He pushed open the back door, screwing up his eyes in the bright morning. A bird was singing close by. He pushed his hair back. It was longer than he’d ever known it before, hanging over his eyes. He stepped out onto the narrow area behind the house, which was paved with broken blue bricks. The rest of the garden was a chaos of brambles. Using the three fruit trees in the garden as a scaffold, the brambles had grown, spread, interwoven to a height about the same as Joey’s so that the whole garden was taken over by them. Except in one part.
‘This is how you get out.’ Christie had taken him outside to show him. ‘I cut a way through – with John, and Micky when he wasn’t so bad. Through here, look!’
The men had cut a tunnel through the bramble forest. Christie bent right over to lead him through. Joey only had to bend his knees a bit to follow Christie’s dark back between the green walls of hacked brambles, treading down some scrawny nettles trying to grow in the gloom. Christie stopped and cut back more bramble suckers which were trying to advance again.
‘They’re determined fellows these,’ Joey heard him say. ‘Come on, watch yourself now – we’re nearly there.’
They followed the path down the length of the garden.
‘Now – this is our gate,’ Christie said, squatting down by the hedge. He was talking in a low voice. ‘We’ve not had any problem. The road out there’s quite quiet, but you have to look carefully before you step out. You don’t want to run into the Guard.’
Joey frowned.
‘Your police fellows. Sure, you’re a solemn little man!’ Christie tweaked Joey’s ear playfully. He leaned forwards, parting a place in the hedge and looked cautiously about. He stepped outside and Joey joined him. Christie was still looking warily up and down the street. There were houses further along, but down this end they faced the back ends of gardens and a warehouse and it was quiet. Joey found that he felt tired and shaky, just after walking that short distance. Looking up at Christie, he thought he looked smaller out here, and defenceless.
‘When you’re coming back, the place to go in is just after that drain.’ He pointed. ‘You’ll soon find it – can’t go wrong. But you don’t need to be going out and about yet, do you now? Unless you’ve somewhere to go back to. Have you, Joey? Is there someone waiting for you at home?’
The question made Joey’s chest ache. He shook his head fiercely.
Christie reached out and ruffled his hair. ‘You can go with John, in a day or two, if you’ve nowhere else to go. He can always use a bit of help.’
Standing alone in the garden now, Joey looked at the green tunnel through the brambles. He’d been restless since he felt better, and fed up with staying inside. He thought of just going. He could do what he liked, after all! But he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find his way back yet if he left. He sat down, cross-legged and poked at the bricks idly with a dry twig. He didn’t want to go back inside. He didn’t want evening to come either.
At night they sat round the fire. It was John who brought in the food. Christie seemed to trust him with the money he earned. John knew the place well, all the ins and outs. They cooked up stews in the one pan – always potatoes, boiled in the skins, and anything else John could get, flavoured with Bovril. Sometimes meat, and bread to mop it all up. Christie was so famished sometimes he could barely wait till it was cooked. They took turns with the spoon, out of the pan.
No one talked much. They were all too tired. Joey learned odd scraps about the adults around him as they talked to one another. He didn’t understand much of it. He picked up that Christie had been in training to be a priest in Ireland. That he’d run away because of Siobhan. Something bad had happened. Joey didn’t know what. He could feel Christie’s intense protectiveness towards his sister, though. Once or twice he wondered what had happened to Lena. Did they take her away to the home? And Kenny and Polly? But he pushed those thoughts away.
Micky didn’t talk now. Christie tried to feed him but he coughed and spat it out. Joey had been afraid of Micky, with his big, whiskery face. He wasn’t like a real person to Joey at first, lying there, the coughing, the stink of him, which hit you every time you stepped in the room, but more like some kind of animal, or monster. But once or twice Micky had sat up in the evening and Joey saw he was a real man, heavy and weary and very sick. Once or twice Micky’s bloodshot gaze had swivelled towards him and in his thick, rasping voice, said, ‘Who’s this little fella then?’
The next time, Micky glowered at him and roared, ‘Get out o’ here you little bastard!’ Another evening, while still lying down, he said in a bewildered tone, ‘So, you’re all grown up then are ye now, Seamus?’
‘He doesn’t know you,’ Siobhan whispered to him. ‘He’s muddled in his head. Don’t go taking any notice. And our John – he’s simple in the head too, but he’ll do ye no harm.’
From things John said, Joey knew he had grown up somewhere across town. John had an odd, wooden-sounding voice, so different from the fluid rise and fall Joey heard in Christie’s and Siobhan’s voices. He seemed to speak all on one note and to keep on talking whether or not his mouth was crammed full of potato. He kept complaining about ‘the camp’.
‘Don’t let them ever put you in one of them camps,’ he warned Christie, as he did most evenings.
‘I won’t, John,’ Christie sa
id, rubbing his face wearily. ‘I’ve heard you.’ Sometimes Christie’s mood seemed very low.
‘Whatever they say, you’re better off on the dole . . . Take you off to the depths of fucking Wales . . . Sorry for my language . . .’ He nodded round at them. ‘Sorry, Siobhan – didn’t mean it.’ He was devoted to Siobhan. Often he sat just staring at her while she slept.
‘Ah, you’re all right there, John.’ She took her turn spooning food out of the pan. Her hair fell forward either side of her face and she shook her head to get it out of the way. Joey thought it was strange the way John was always saying sorry to Siobhan when her language was even worse than his.
‘Wales. Brechfa . . .’ John spat the word out with loathing. ‘Christ, what a hellhole. Nothing there – not even a fucking pub for miles. Slavery, that’s what it is. Dawn till dusk they had us slaving with a pick and fucking shovel. And for what? I’ll have ’em for it one day – you’ll see. Last time I take anything off of anyone. I’m never going back down that Labour Exchange. I’m my own man from now on – no dole, no fucking nothing off of none of ’em . . .’
After a certain point every evening, Christie would say, ‘Joey – get to sleep now.’
And as if Christie was his father, Joey, usually tired by then, would settle on the floor and close his eyes while the adult voices murmured on around him and their shadows moved on the walls.
One night Joey woke to the sound of the front door shuddering open and low voices. There was only the barest glow from the fire and he could hear Micky’s laboured breathing across the room. Joey lay with his heart pounding. No one came in through the front! They had no way of locking the door but it was so swollen and stiff that it was hard to get open in any case. Whoever had come in was now struggling to shut it again. He heard a bang, followed by a giggle, and whispering outside the door. The tiles in the hall clattered and he heard, ‘Ssssh, you’re enough to wake the dead so ye are!’ in a fierce whisper.
Joey sat up. Inside him a struggle was going on. He should just lie down. He didn’t want to know who it was or what was going on. He knew already though, really, that it was Siobhan. She’d been on the booze earlier, had been carrying on, loudly and nastily and Christie had begged her not to leave the house. ‘Don’t do it!’ he’d pleaded, trying to restrain her. ‘Oh God, Siobhan, don’t do this to yourself!’ Joey knew all right. Like going home. Like Mom. Yet he was drawn up and out of bed and couldn’t stop himself, as if he was being pulled by a magnet like the one Miss Purdy showed them at school. He thought no one else was awake.
Barefoot, he felt his way across the room and took the door handle in both hands, hearing the rusty rasp of the catch turning. The door squeaked open. He heard someone stir behind him.
‘Siobhan?’ Christie’s voice was thick with sleep. ‘Is that you?’
Without answering, Joey slipped out, closing the door out of habit. It shut with a loud click.
The floor was rough and cold against his feet. He felt his way along the knobbly wallpaper in the hall. Already he could hear sounds he recognized. They drew him, numbed, chill inside, along the hall. He clenched his jaws tightly together in the darkness, barely even feeling the sharp edge of a tile cutting into his foot. They couldn’t hear him coming over their own noise. Joey stood at the door of the scullery, forcing himself to listen to the woman’s mewling sounds, the man’s grunting.
A light appeared behind him. There was a rattle of the tiles. Joey stood holding tightly to the doorframe, aware that someone was beside him, and then the candlelight fell on the pair coupling up against the sink, Siobhan’s legs spread each side of the man, her head back against the wall, long hair hanging.
Joey didn’t notice Christie moving. He seemed to be upon them in an instant, without a word, banging the candle on the shelf next to the sink, locking his arm round the man’s neck and yanking him off. Joey caught a glimpse of a bullish, drunken face.
‘What the fuck . . .?’ Three slurred words before Christie punched him with all his force in the face.
‘You filthy bastard!’ Christie hurled a blow into the great belly. ‘You stinking scum – get your hands off my sister!’ He delivered another body blow, then another to the head until the man sank with a groan onto his back, flies gaping.
Dazed, Siobhan lowered herself off the edge of the sink.
‘Christie . . . oh, for the love of God, what’ve you done?’ She was wailing, swaying. Joey could see she was very drunk, her eyelids drooping, voice thick and slurred. ‘Why d’you have to come interfering? Why can’t you just leave me be?’ She sagged to the floor, sobbing. ‘He was giving me a baby. They killed my baby, my little baby . . .’ She folded her arms tight to her and rocked back and forth, weeping in agony. ‘Oh God, Christie, why did I let them do it? His little soul’s hovering round me, in torment . . . I’m a murderer . . . and I can never make him rest . . . I want his soul to be at rest . . . I want to die, Christie . . . just let me die . . .’
Christie sank to his knees, gathering her into his arms. ‘Oh God, Shiv . . . Oh Lord Christ, don’t do this . . .’
Siobhan was crying, but it was the sound of Christie’s distraught sobs that drove Joey back, away from them. He flung himself out through the back door, slamming it with every ounce of strength he had in him. The sharp stones on the path bit into his feet as he stormed along, and he didn’t care, welcomed the feeling, the hurt. He wanted to do it to himself, for it to hurt more and more. Stamping his feet down, yelping, his body started jerking and he couldn’t work out for a moment what was happening to him as his sobs began to release themselves. He limped out through the gate into the street, barely able to see because of the darkness and his tears. He stumbled along the middle of the road with no thought to where he was going or where he would end up. The very air he breathed hurt him. He was lost in it, blind to anything round him.
He didn’t know how long the voice had been calling to him. Only when it came close and he heard running feet, did it penetrate through to him.
‘Joey, Joey – where’re you off to?’
And he was lifted up into Christie’s strong arms and held close and tight.
‘There now, little fellow . . . It’s all right now.’ Christie’s hand stroked his thin back, cradling, soothing him. Joey let out a wail from the depths of himself and for the first time in the years he could remember he cried in someone’s arms until he could cry no more.
Twenty-Seven
‘Comrades, we know Mosley’s thugs are attacking Jews in the East End – attacking innocent working men like ourselves!’
Daniel stood on the platform at the front of the dingy hall, his sleeves rolled up. Behind him was a huge red banner with a black hammer and sickle blazing in the middle.
‘We’ve seen the fascists holding their rallies – even lording it in the Albert Hall! We’ve seen Oswald Mosley in our own city, in the Bull Ring, spreading his poison to infect the minds of those who know no better . . . But we’ve also seen our people silence their foul fascist rhetoric in Tonypandy last week. What was Mosley’s slogan? “Blackshirt Policy Alone Can Save the Coalfields”? And what did our members do? Drowned them out by singing the “Red Flag”, that’s what!’
There was a brief outbreak of clapping and cheering. As Daniel spoke, he paced back and forth, emphasizing phrases with a clenched fist. His speech was reaching its climax.
‘The fascists are capitalists to the core. If anyone knows that, it is the people of my home, the miners of the South Wales valleys! I’ve seen it, brothers, and I’ve seen the way we fight it, by the protest of working men. By our dignity and our passion in the struggle!’
Gwen looked round at the people close to her. They were all listening intently. A young man sat along the row from her, his eyes fixed on Daniel, bright with passion.
‘Capitalist oppression and despair is bleeding its way across Europe and it is we – us! – you and me, brothers, whose glorious duty it is to stem the tide of this oppression. We’ve fought ag
ainst it – we all know that. We’ve broken up their meetings and rallies. We’ve stopped them using our halls and meeting places.’
Daniel leaned towards the audience and wagged his finger. ‘Oh yes – make no mistake. The capitalists, the police and the fascists are all hand in glove in the valleys, while they destroy our unions and throw anyone who gainsays them in jail to rot! They victimize our workers and slash our wages to starvation levels. But we shall not be beaten! We shall fight it! We shall come together in unity in the struggle. And together, through the strength and solidarity of our party, we’ll see a new dawn for our people. We shall bring about the revolution!’
Daniel finished with one hand clenched high in the air. The room erupted into clapping and cheering and most of the audience got to their feet. Daniel stood, looking solemn, dignified, nodding in acknowledgement.
Gwen jumped up as well, full of pride. And soon this meeting would be over and she could be alone with him and in his arms! Looking across the hall, she caught sight of Esther Lane standing at the end of the front row and this dented her happiness. Esther was wearing an extraordinary green dress and leading the ovation to Daniel, clapping her hands high in the air. Gwen had noticed that, over the past weeks while she had been going to meetings with Daniel, Esther was almost always there, no matter in what part of the city the meeting was held. Every time she saw Esther she felt a pang of panic, of jealousy. It was so clear that Esther was infatuated with Daniel, and she was such a handsome, stormy-looking woman, strong and passionate like him, and so committed to the party. How could he not be interested in Esther? Daniel always denied it, though, and spoke of Esther with a kind of amused detachment.
‘Esther’s all right. She’s a good party worker – one of the best.’ He didn’t seem to think of her in any other terms, but Gwen was never comfortable when Esther was around. All she knew was that she wanted to learn to share Daniel’s passion, that same commitment to the party. Nothing else now seemed to matter except this life – and Daniel.
