‘Why?’ sobbed Gloria. ‘What’s the matter with you; what the hell did you think you were doing?’
‘Wrong rope,’ Mel scolded. ‘Washing line’s not up to the job, and part of it was up the side of your face, stupid. You couldn’t hang a picture on a nail, even with a spirit level.’ She was scared to death. She could not imagine life without Peter. But she wasn’t going to baby him – oh, no. The need to hug and comfort him had to be denied, since she could not allow him to continue in self-destructive mode.
Gloria, shocked and terrified, stopped weeping. ‘Mel? This is serious.’
It didn’t look serious. A very attractive boy, spread-eagled on the ground, was being drowned by two spoodles. Wagging happily, they circled him, washing his face, neck and hands, chewing on his hair and breathing heavily into his ears.
Mel folded her arms and tapped a foot. ‘You selfish, spoilt wastrel. Your mother lives in a house filled with drugs, and she might be tempted to follow you into the hereafter when you break her heart. Your sister would be bereft, while your father, a man only just out of depression, could well slip all the way back to a mental hospital.’
He started to cry.
‘Why?’ Gloria screamed again.
Seconds ticked by. ‘Will you tell her, or shall I?’ Mel demanded. ‘Because you owe her an answer.’
‘Tell me what?’ Gloria asked, her voice calmer.
Peter said nothing.
‘Right.’ Mel sat on the stump of a lightning tree that had been struck down years earlier. ‘This isn’t the first sign of your brother’s cowardice, my friend. When we had all that kerfuffle about him and me, he was trying to be my boyfriend so that no one would guess the truth. He used me as a shield. After we’d … been together, he confessed all. Your twin prefers boys, and he’s too weak to stay alive and fight for his own rights and for the rights of other people like himself. I had the feeling that he might try something dramatic.’ She recalled the occasions on which she’d watched him walk away, remembered an icy hand tracing a line down her backbone.
Gloria blinked rapidly. ‘He’s queer?’
Mel nodded. ‘He’s terrified of jail, and I understand that. We had a plan. He, I and other open-minded people were going to change the world. But soft lad here can’t cope.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going home. I’ve had enough of him.’
Gloria’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re leaving me here? With him? But what if he goes and … what am I supposed to do with him?’
‘He’s your bloody brother. Why the hell would I want to keep company with somebody who’s contemplating suicide? It’s a mortal sin, for a start.’
Gloria, knowing that Mel didn’t believe in mortal sin, realized that her best friend was using reverse psychology. It wasn’t a bad idea. It might not be a particularly good one either, but Gloria could think of nothing better. ‘Hang on while I get this rope, Mel. I’ll come with you.’ She gathered up Peter’s washing line.
‘Stop,’ Peter begged.
‘It speaks.’ Mel glared at him. ‘Well?’
‘Don’t tell them.’
Borrowing her friend’s supposed strength, Gloria approached her twin. ‘I’m not telling anybody anything. Just thank God you made such a pig’s ear of it that your neck’s not too noticeably marked.’ Still shaking, she held her ground. ‘I’m not going to break anyone’s heart for you. Do it yourself when you’re ready.’ She began to walk away, turning after a few steps. ‘It’s not your fault, by the way. You can’t help the way you’re made.’
He lay still. It’s not your fault. It’s the way you’re made. Females were always full of glib answers. While I’m all shit and self-pity. Why him, though? Why had he come out queer? Apart from the boy who painted lines for lawn tennis and rugby, Peter knew no one in this situation. His parents were normal, as was his sister, but …
In his head, Mel spoke. You’re just a different kind of normal, she had said weeks earlier. He sat up. There was a war on, and his contribution so far had been worrying about his precious reputation, his own safety, his future, his exit from a world that could not be forced to love him. It was all me, me, me.
Of course, she’d provided an answer to that, as well. We’re all selfish. It’s an age thing. We go spotty, disobedient and daft. But most of all, we go selfish. Oh, how he loved her. How could he— ‘Get on with it,’ he hissed between gritted teeth.
Peter Bingley got on with it. He mounted his bike and rode the seven miles. The sky was dark with smoke. People ran when they could, walked round rubble when they had to, dug with shovels and with bare hands, every one of them searching for life below the piles, shouting, shining torches into blackness and debris.
In the heart of Liverpool, Peter dug with the best of them, lifting out injured and dead, young and old, male and female, dogs, cats and a little trembling rabbit. On the end of a rope ten times stronger than the one he had used this morning, he was lowered into a cellar where he found an intact and silent little girl. When they pulled him and the child out, tears streamed and made a clean path down his filthy cheeks. A warden led him away to a shed and forced him to sit and drink sweet tea. ‘Yer all right, lad. You done well. That kiddy was shocked into silence. She could have starved down there. She’s the only one left, because her mam and her brothers were killed, and her dad’s out there somewhere on a ship.’
‘What a bloody mess this is,’ Peter managed.
‘You talk nice, son.’
‘Posh school. Crosby. Merchants.’
‘Well, bloody good luck to you, that’s what I say. What you going to be, like?’
‘A lawyer.’
‘Good. You can start by suing the Dock Board for us. We want the death penalty.’
‘Fine.’ He left the hut and worked for another four hours. As he rode home, his legs could scarcely turn the pedals. Yet he felt … good. Because on that third day in May, Peter Bingley grew up. Oh, and he acquired a baby rabbit.
Wabbit was just about old enough for solid food, though he chose to try suckling. Pandora, who took a fancy to the black and white intruder, accepted the circumstance without too much fuss. ‘They match,’ Tom said sleepily. ‘Same colours. And she may produce milk – stranger things have happened.’
Today’s human hero, cleaner after a bath, slept soundly in a rocking chair.
‘I’m proud of Peter,’ Marie said. ‘Somebody took a photograph of him. He could be in the paper. That reminds me, Tom. Did you post the last lot to Phil Watson?’
‘I did.’
Marie continued to smile benignly on her sleeping son. He had saved a little girl and a sweet rabbit. ‘God bless him,’ she sighed.
Gloria simply sat and held her twin brother’s hand. They had been born together, raised together, and as a pair they would face the war, his secret problem, and whatever else lay on the stony road ahead. ‘That sweet rabbit is eating its way through Dad’s shoelace,’ she said.
But Dad, too, was asleep.
‘I’ll try to make him stay at home tonight. He’s so tired.’ Marie moved the shoes. Tom did too much. He could not or would not unload his mental burdens when he got home, refusing point-blank to discuss the war work he was not supposed to do, since he had been instructed to stay at home for his patients’ sake. In his head, he carried the weight of some terrible scenes. Time after time, he left a locum on call so that he could do battle for the city of Liverpool. She had two heroes now, husband and son.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Gloria?’
‘The Pendleburys kept rabbits. They may have a hutch.’
Marie beamed. ‘Telephone them, dear.’
‘No line, Mum. They’ve fixed most of Liverpool Road, so Dad’s locum has a phone at the practice, but we’re still out of order.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot. Would you go along and ask about a hutch?’
Gloria walked along silent roads. It was as if this cusp that divided Crosby from Blundellsands held its breath, no sound, no movement, no life. They were waiting t
o be bombed. She thought about the truly threatened a few miles down the road. Saturdays were almost as holy as Sundays in Liverpool. Me mam and me dad came, as did our Auntie Flo with her new feller from the gasworks, Uncle Fred with our Steve, our ’arry and our Edna, what was just out of jail for shoplifting what she never done, and it never rained but it poured, eh?
Floors of landing houses were scrubbed early on Saturday mornings. Even in wet weather, landing house kids were thrown out while the job was done. They could be picked out at a glance, shivering in shop doorways, walking to the swimming baths with rolled-up towels whose original colours were long forgotten, or kicking a ball, or fighting in a tangle of limbs.
That was their culture, the rhythm they had invented, their own music, their own passion. Mel had often been heard to mutter, ‘It’ll be the poor who suffer most. They’re the ones I’ll be batting for; not as a lawyer, but as a politician.’ Mel was right. They were sure as hell suffering now. Extended families were forced to separate, because houses were gone, and people were becoming careful and wary. Saturday family gatherings were few and far between. A whole way of life had been stolen.
Mr Pendlebury promised to bring a hutch later on. ‘Go home, Gloria. The Bosch are getting confident, and I shouldn’t put it past them to arrive in daylight. They’ve been doing that for months down south.’
She walked home. Soon, all windows would be blacked out, all doors closed. This wasn’t living; it was an existence, no more. Many children had never seen a banana, an orange, a pineapple. Food was so scarce that hunger was a constant companion. Hemlines had ascended to knee level in a bid to save cloth. The cotton mills were concentrating on calico for shrouds, a thought that made Gloria shiver.
She wasn’t to know yet that this was the day on which all levels of the Divine Comedy would be visible. The descending circles of Dante’s Inferno would be displayed, all the way from its seething rim down into the deepest realms of torment. But Wabbit would have a hutch, a surrogate mother, some greens, and a carrot. For now, that was Gloria’s sole concern.
For the people of Liverpool, Lewis’s department store was sacrosanct.
Blackler’s was high on the list, too, so the loss by fire of these two large emporia would be bemoaned for some considerable time to come. All seven storeys of Lewis’s were destroyed, while Blackler’s, already seriously lacking in windows, was also burned to death. Among the shop’s contents, ten thousand pounds’ worth of fully fashioned silk stockings had recently been delivered, and they melted alongside everything else in the building. This crime alone would be judged massive in the opinion of the city’s already angry women.
Tom heard about these events, but he was on the dock road with several people who had been seriously hurt in a collision involving four vehicles. In truth, no one needed telling about the fires; even from the edge of the city, the devastation was visible. More news arrived. The William Brown Library had been eradicated along with the music section, and every book had been consumed by flames.
Tom placed two dead children on the pavement. They could wait there until an ambulance came. Minutes earlier, they had probably been sleeping in the car, but they would never wake again. His stomach rumbled angrily, though he could not have eaten to save his life. Dead children had always been the worst part of his job. He patched up a couple of adults, stepped back when ambulances arrived. At least three more were dead, but he could now leave them in safe, respectful hands. Because something was developing in the area of Huskisson Dock Two, and as he ran along the road his eyes remained riveted to the sight.
At about a quarter past eleven, a burning barrage balloon had freed itself from its moorings and floated gracefully past Tom, the ambulances, the suffering and the dead. It landed, after a few pirouettes, on the deck of SS Malakand and became entangled with the rigging.
‘Oh, bugger,’ said a nearby dock worker. ‘That ship’s packed with explosives.’ After a further fifteen minutes the fire had been extinguished by the crew, but here came the Germans. They dropped firebombs and high explosives onto dock buildings, and burning debris fell on the steamer, igniting it from stem to stern. The order to abandon ship could be heard above anti-aircraft fire and falling bombs.
There was nothing Tom could do but wait while the crew obeyed the captain’s orders. Many stayed on the quayside and fought to scuttle their ship, but she refused go down. He was probably wasting his time, so he backtracked into the city. The wind was up, the water mains had been blasted out of existence, and fire-fighters stood with dry hoses, many of the men in tears. Tom touched the arm of the nearest. ‘Can I do anything?’
The man allowed a hysterical laugh to leave his dry throat. ‘No. They’ve even burned Sammie, and all the fish boiled to death.’
‘The museum?’ Tom enquired.
‘What sodding museum? We haven’t got no museum no more. Even Sammie, poor little Sammie. All the kids loved him.’
Tom blinked. Sammie the seal had been everyone’s favourite. ‘I want to hit somebody,’ he whispered.
The fireman pointed to a colleague. ‘Hit him,’ he suggested. ‘He’s an Everton supporter.’
Fire raged and closed in on the city centre from all sides. And still a few loiterers circled, great iron birds spewing bombs, hatred and flame on a dry, windswept city. Over six hundred incidents had been counted by the time SS Malakand blew in the early hours. She scattered herself just about everywhere within miles of her mooring, yet only four people died, two of them a civilian couple on their way home via the dock road.
Tom, exhausted by lack of sleep and food, decided to call it a night. The all-clear had sounded, the city was a blazing wreck, and he had worked non-stop for five hours. The damage was unbelievable, yet it was only too real. A total lack of water due to bombed mains, coupled with a skittish wind, had taken away the core of Liverpool. But not its heart, never its heart. The pulse was in the people, in their intelligence, their humour – Hit him, he’s an Everton supporter. Even while they wept, even when their clothes were almost on fire, that cheeky, confident banter floated to the surface. ‘God help them all,’ he muttered as he stepped into his car.
Forced to follow a tortuous route in near-darkness, he could only hope that the moon would continue to offer some glimmer of light. Roads that led directly to Crosby were not easily reachable; every few minutes, Tom had to negotiate a way past rubble, craters, abandoned vehicles. Mel’s voice, mingled with Gloria’s laughter, echoed in the sad, dulled chambers of his mind. I miss Wagner, she had said. But it seems unpatriotic to listen to music favoured by a psychopath. I shan’t give up Beethoven, though, not even for England. And Pandora’s eating one of your mother’s best shoes … Mel summed up what he meant, what he felt about the people of this city. She was strong, passionate, smart and down to earth. As was her mother.
He stopped the car and closed his eyes. This going home business was too complicated for an exhausted man. While he nodded, the moon played hide-and-seek behind cloud or smoke, and as he neared sleep Tom didn’t hear the ominous rumble, didn’t see the nearby wall of a house peel away from its foundations. He and his car were buried; and the moon came out to play once more.
SUNDAY
Eileen, who resembled a question mark when standing, was now allowed to walk a few paces. According to Sister Mary Dominic, this would keep her blood on the move. ‘We don’t want to be having an embolism now, do we?’
‘You can please yourself,’ was Eileen’s reply. ‘I am not having one; a bag of chips with plenty of vinegar will do me, ta.’
‘And you’d be straighter if you let us put the twins on the bottle. You’ve stitches, there could be adhesions—’
‘Give over,’ Keith advised. ‘She does what she does, and nothing shifts her.’
‘I’m learning that. She’s a madam, a bold girl.’
Eileen stood still. ‘Shut up, both of you. Wasn’t there enough noise in the night? You’ve half a ship planted in your rockery for a start. I’m telling you
now, we’re going home. I mean, look at us, six o’clock in the blinking morning, three hours’ sleep. Sister, go away. I’ve had enough. And no, I haven’t said me morning prayers.’ Eileen’s mood was real; she wasn’t acting up on this occasion. Liverpool was gone. With a sky as red as last night’s, the whole of the centre must have been destroyed.
The nun left the room, and Keith followed with towel, toothbrush and shaving equipment. The wing was full of women, of course, so his shower had to happen at the crack of dawn. But in the corridor, Mary Dominic stopped him. ‘We’ve a … what you might call a situation, son. Away to the office. No one can hear us down there. You’ll be all right for one day without the ablutions.’
A bemused Keith followed his new friend into the den of Mother Superior; Mother Superior, a fierce lady who always avoided him as if he were a pile of dog muck, was out, and Keith breathed a sigh of relief.
His little pal almost disappeared from view when she sat in Mother’s chair. She moved a few things on the desk before speaking. ‘Keith, you know how we closed down public rooms here and upstairs as our bit of war work?’
He nodded.
‘Well, we used just upstairs at first. We tried not to affect maternity, but upstairs got busy, so we had to bite the bullet and use every room we had. You see, those who come here are in need of a priest or a vicar – we don’t mind which. Very few walk out. This must not be told to any of the new mothers.’
‘So they’re dying?’
She sighed. ‘We sometimes manage the odd miracle, because surgeons do their best in the theatres above. But, for the most part, our patients leave by a back door in a hearse and in the night. That’s just to spare our mothers and babies. With this little lot down here at the start of their lives, it seems wrong to have the dead in the same building, but we have a Christian duty. Now, pin back your ears, this isn’t going to be easy …’
Bad news travels fast, and truth hurts.
The Liverpool Trilogy Page 77
