by Marie Joseph
Maggie shook her head. No, Joe was wrong. You accepted what happened day by day because you knew, you were certain that something good was bound to happen. If not the next day then the day after. You just kept on in the meantime. You ran home at dinner-time to give your father his dinner, then you ran back, and when the hooter went at half past five, you ran home again to cook tea for a man so shelled in his own solitude that there were times she imagined he was looking at her and wondering who she could be.
And at that very moment, Joe Barton, father unknown, mostly of no fixed abode, was asking himself the very same question:
Just who the hell did he think he was? For over six months now he’d told his lies to Maggie Craig, making her believe his father was dead, letting her think he lived like she did, in a decent house in a decent street.
Foundry Street? God Almighty, compared to the two rooms he was sharing at the moment with his mother and his sister Belle, Foundry Street was bloody West End Road, up by the park where all the town’s toffs lived. It hadn’t mattered up to now because Maggie was nobbut a young lass, and their friendship had not been the kind where a young couple sat together on the sofa holding hands. What had there been apart from long conversations as they sat on the grass in the park together, a Sunday School ramble into the Ribble valley? But now Maggie was hinting that she would like to take him to her house to meet her invalid father.
‘Perhaps if you see him, Joe, you’ll understand why I can’t get out all that often.’ She’d blushed and dimpled. ‘I’m not being forward. I’m not forcing you into declaring yourself or nothing like that. You won’t have to state your intentions and swear that you can keep me in the manner to which I have become accustomed.’
‘Maggie Craig!’ Joe had pinched her cheek, laughing into her eyes. ‘How is it you can say the things other people only think and get away with it?’ They had ended up running down the long grass slope from the Conservatory in the park, with Maggie tripping over a trailing bootlace and falling, and Joe throwing himself down beside her.
‘Joe!’ she’d screamed as he tickled her. ‘If any of the Chapel folk come by and see us I’ll be condemned to hell-fire, and you with me. Stop it! Stop it, Joe!’
Working steadily when he felt the overlooker’s hard eyes on his back, Joe made up his mind. He was going to do what he should have done a long time ago. ‘Come out for a bit after tea,’ he told Maggie as they joined the stream of weavers thronging the street outside the mill after the hooter had gone. ‘I want to take you to meet my mother.’ His dark eyes were bleak. ‘I think you should meet her before I meet your father.’
‘Why? She got two heads or something?’
‘Half past six. At the top of your street, when you’ve had your tea,’ Joe said, then walked away.
Montague Court was only ten minutes’ walk away from Foundry Street, but Maggie had never been round that way before. She’d heard about it of course, and Clara had said it was what she called the red light district.
‘Red lights above the doors,’ she’d said, her left eye gliding into its corner. ‘There’s a woman lives down there what has no nose.’
Now Joe was telling her that he lived there, that when he’d said vaguely that he lived round Queen Street way, he had not been telling exactly the truth.
‘Montague Court. The bottom half of number fourteen,’ he said as they walked along the canal bank. He swaggered and whistled, telling Maggie that he was upset about something. ‘Two rooms with an outside tap and a lavvy we share with three other families. Dirty buggers too,’ he stressed.
There was a jauntiness in his step and his voice that almost broke Maggie’s heart. She knew he was poor, but then most folks seemed to be poor, and poverty was no disgrace. She knew he was doing this before she took him to her own home to give her a chance to change her mind.
In his own way he was saying: ‘See, this is how I live, Maggie Craig. Now do you still want to be my friend and introduce me to your father who was once a schoolmaster?’
He was walking so quickly that she had to do a little skip now and again to keep up with him, and though she wanted to put out a hand and touch his arm to show that she understood, and it didn’t make no difference, there was something about the expression on his face that stilled her hand. Grim was the word for it, and scared. Yes, scared to death.
‘Not far now,’ he said, and turned sharply left away from a main road so that they climbed upwards into a maze of streets with houses not much different from Maggie’s own.
True the semi-circle of flagged pavements were mostly unmopped, and the window bottoms were without a neat line of yellow stone marking out their edges, but they were not that much different.
‘Just like Foundry Street,’ she said kindly, but Joe made no sign that he had even heard.
‘Down here. And never let me catch you coming down here on your own, especially after dark. Ever! Do you hear me?’
Maggie felt a strange ripple of fear in her stomach as they turned abruptly into a narrow street, with the houses clustered so close together that it seemed as if one minute they were in the soft yellow light of an early summer evening, and the next in the murky gloom of a February winter’s night.
There were no pavements, just an extension of the cobblestones right up to the front doors. A bare-bottomed child crawled at the feet of a woman who was sitting out on her front step, suckling a baby from a breast as heavy and pendulous as a bladder of lard. Maggie averted her eyes, and lifted her skirts away from the greasy and slimy cobbles.
Number fourteen had a front door so scarred that it gave the impression of having been kicked in more than it had been opened. A strange sweet stench met them as they stepped inside, and Maggie had to fight down an urge not to cover her nose with her hand. They were in a room with very little furniture, apart from a horse-hair sofa with the stuffing hanging out, a table made from two orange boxes pushed together, and a mattress in one corner with a couple of brown blankets thrown over it.
Maggie blinked, and when her eyes became used to the darkness, she saw that a small fair-haired girl was sitting on the sofa, a girl who hung her head in shyness, then turned away.
‘Belle.’ Joe spoke quietly and urgently to his sister. ‘Where is she? Through there?’
The girl nodded.
‘With him?’
Another nod. Joe glanced at the door leading into the back room and raised his eyes ceilingwards. Then as if remembering that Maggie was there he led her forward.
‘Belle, love. This is Maggie. You remember I told you I was bringing her?’
Belle looked up and Maggie saw that the pale eyes were filling with tears which spilled over and ran slowly down her cheeks. She stared at Joe with a pleading expression as if begging to be forgiven.
‘She was ready, Joe. Honest she was. All waiting like you said. Dressed, with a frock on and everything.’ The fair head dropped again. ‘Then he came.’
‘The big one that says he’s a sailor from Liverpool?’
‘Aye, an’ he had a bottle with him, Joe, and he started laughing and he tried to make me have some.’ Belle turned her head from side to side in distaste. ‘But I wouldn’t open me mouth, then they went through there.’
Joe went to sit beside his sister and put his arms round her, pulling her to him. ‘He didn’t try to, you know . . . to touch you? Like last time?’
‘No, he didn’t. I think you frightened him with what you said you would do to him, Joe. I think he thought you meant it, Joe.’
Maggie stood a little to one side, watching, listening to Joe speak to Belle in a low resigned sort of voice.
But what Belle had just said made him shout in sudden anger. ‘I should think I bloody did mean it. If he tries to touch you again I’ll swing for him.’
Maggie glanced round her. Oh, dear God in heaven, she knew what it was to be poor. Sometimes of a Thursday there was nothing left in her purse but her key, and Clara was poor because Arnie’s wages did not amount to much. And
she could remember the poverty of the women in the farm labourers’ cottages, women who when their boots were worn out had to stay indoors until the money could be found for another pair, and them usually handed down from somebody else. But this poverty was a different kind. This place was a slum, a hovel, and now she had placed that strange sweet sickening smell.
Once as a small child, her mother had taken her into a cottage where an old woman had recently died. Hannah had gone to rescue a terrified cat, and in reply to Maggie’s outspoken query about the ‘horrible’ smell had explained:
‘That smell is bugs, love. Once they’ve got in the walls you can’t shift them without a stoving.’
And Joe lived here. He had laughed with her, and kissed her, then come back to this place. Maggie was staring at him with pity when a burst of loud laughter came from behind the closed door.
‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ Belle said again.
When the door was banged back almost to the plaster, the man framed in the opening was the biggest man Maggie ever remembered seeing. Heavy-jowled and unshaven, he was buckling a wide leather belt round the top of his trousers and laughing with his head thrown back, showing brown uneven teeth. Behind him was a young-old woman, so like Joe in the set of her features and the way her dark hair sprang back from her forehead that Maggie blinked.
For a moment, as Joe stood up from the sofa and faced her, Annie Barton knew a moment of sheer panic. Her glance went to the girl standing there beside her son, a fresh-faced bonny girl with country pink cheeks, wearing a clean print dress.
That was the way she used to look. That was the way Belle should look now, not shriven up like an old woman before her fourteenth birthday. Anger suddenly took the place of fear.
‘Wait for me outside, Ned,’ she told the big man. ‘I’ll not be long.’
‘You heard what she said.’ Joe’s voice was low but firm.
Maggie held her breath as the big man’s darting glance went from Joe to his mother then back again. Then she let it out in a sigh of relief as with a shrug of massive shoulders the man went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.
‘Now!’ Annie Barton said before Joe could speak. ‘Let’s get it over with, our Joe.’ She jerked her head in Maggie’s direction. ‘All right, so I shouldn’t have gone in there when I knew she was coming, should I? But Ned came unexpected like, and afore you jump on your soap box, just you go through there and see what he’s brought this time. Enough food to last us a month.’
‘I provide for that.’ Joe’s hand shot out as he gripped his mother’s wrist. ‘We could manage if you’d try.’
With a twist of her thin body she broke loose from his grasp, rushed over to the cluttered mantelpiece and snatched a piece of paper, thrusting it in front of Maggie’s horrified face.
‘See, lass! See here what he makes me do! Every mouldy penny he expects me to write down afore he’ll hand over another. See! Have a sken at that. Rent half a crown. Gas fivepence. Two candles a halfpenny. Soap a penny and a tin of milk twopence. Go on, tek it, and see for thyself what a skinflint tha’s courting!’
The sound that came from Belle frightened Maggie more than the loud shouting of the dishevelled woman. It was the cry of a small, wounded animal, ashamed to the point of collapse.
‘Oh, Mam, stop it,’ she moaned softly. ‘You know if it wasn’t for our Joe there’d be days when we didn’t eat at all. Stop showing him up, our mam. Just go!’
Then as the front door slammed behind her mother, Belle lifted her head and smiled a tremulous smile at her brother.
‘Soon I’ll be living in at me new job, then you can stop fretting about me, our Joe.’ She turned to Maggie. ‘He has to try to make her write it down or else she spends every penny on drink.’ The watery smile widened. ‘And if you hadn’t been here he’d have clouted her one. He’s not always as quiet as this. If you hadn’t been here I don’t know what would have happened.’
‘I do. I’d have thrown that big lout outside for a start off,’ Joe muttered.
‘You and who else?’
And incredibly they were laughing, the pair of them, pulling Maggie down to sit beside them on the moulting sofa, the three of them shaking with a laughter bordering on hysteria.
‘And I’d got the best tea-set out,’ Joe grinned, pointing to four saucerless cups set out on the rickety makeshift table.
‘And Mam was going to crook her little finger when she drank, like this.’
Joe’s eyes met Maggie’s with an expression that cut straight through to her heart.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘It doesn’t matter, truly.’
‘Wait till you meet my father,’ she kept saying in the weeks that followed when Joe refused to even consider a return visit. ‘He won’t shout at me, I admit, but he’ll probably close his eyes and carry on rocking himself in his chair when I take you in.’ She touched Joe’s arm. ‘Neither of us come from what anyone could call a stable background, Joe. My father won’t make any friends, and your mother makes too many, that’s all.’
She clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘But it’s true,’ Joe told her, his young face dark and anguished. ‘My mother’s a whore, a drunken whore. If just one of Mam’s men even tries to touch Belle, I’ll kill him. Stone dead.’
Maggie nipped his wrist as they walked along, so that he had to turn and look at her.
‘Stop talking like that, Joe Barton. You’re not going to kill anybody, and one of these days you’re going to come to tea, and Belle too. See?’
‘You’re the boss,’ Joe said, but he was smiling again, and that was enough for Maggie.
‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,’ she sang at the top of her voice on the afternoon of the following Sunday. The sun was still shining, and she had managed to push Thomas out through the front door, making him promise to walk to the top of Foundry Street and back.
She was happy, because unless things were terrible, she felt she owed it to herself to be happy.
She knew, of course, that Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, and that if she disobeyed the rules of her Chapel she might end up in hell-fire, but surely, she argued, cleaning the little house and stopping in with her father, her earthly father, was doing more good than going with Clara to Chapel in the morning and the evening? Surely her heavenly Father would understand?
And Joe was coming to tea soon. He’d promised.
Sometimes, on the very rare occasions when Thomas was out of the house, she had this overwhelming urge to shout and sing, to climb on the table set squarely in the middle of the room and dance on it.
‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and a flippin’ fine sunbeam I’d be,’ she sang, standing on tiptoe and staring at herself in the large mahogany-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. She stuck out her tongue, and all at once she was little Maggie Craig, six years old, pulling faces in class and goading Miss Hepinstall to fury. Once, too impatient to reach for her cane, the teacher had grabbed Maggie’s slate from her hands and clouted her over the head with it.
She wasn’t fed up, not really. It was just that her father was always there, following her around the house, lurking behind her like a doleful shadow, a shadow with more substance than himself. He was so negative. Maggie was sure that the messages Doctor Bates had said could not reach his brain would be all the wrong ones even if they got there.
‘Go and have your rest, Father,’ she would say.
‘The only rest I want is my eternal one,’ he would answer back.
If it wasn’t for all the larking about that went on at the mill, and Joe’s return to good humour, she bet her face would have forgotten how to smile. She stretched her mouth into a wide grin, then still watching herself, she said:
‘You are not a very nice person, Maggie Craig. Carrying on like a mad woman just because your father’s gone out of the house for a bit. He’s ill and he can’t help being as miserable as sin, and one day you’l
l be old and I bet you’ll be a miserable old faggot.’
She sucked in her lips as if over toothless gums, chewing wildly on nothing, then burst out laughing, feeling the laugh catch in her throat as the front door opened with such force that it banged right back to the plaster wall.
Clara’s voice rang out like a clarion call.
‘It’s all right, love. Don’t worry now. We’re fetching your dad back. He fell off the kerb and couldn’t get up, that’s all.’
Carried into the house between two men – Arnie and Mr Isherwood, a blacksmith-striker from number fifteen, Thomas lolled like a filleted corpse, his eyes closed, and his face the colour of putty.
‘Put him on the sofa,’ Clara ordered, her eye swivelling into the corner. ‘You’d best run for the doctor, Arnie.’
‘Or the undertaker,’ she amended, not quite underneath her breath.
Maggie stared at her father’s closed face, too shocked to move or speak. She had pushed him out into the street, and if he was dead it was all her fault.
Arnie stood, poised for flight, small and insignificant, neat head on one side, whilst Mr Isherwood, his part in the drama played out, moved towards the door.
‘If there’s owt . . . ?’ he said vaguely.
‘Thank you,’ Maggie said, going down on her knees by the sofa, and Mr Isherwood went back to his own house to tell his wife that in his opinion Mr Craig was already knocking on the pearly gates.
Clara thought so too, and decided that she would make the funeral spread for Maggie. Ham and tongue, with a batch of her scones to follow. She felt heart sorry for Mr Craig, of course she did, but he was a miserable old fella, older at fifty than her grandpa had been at eighty-two. She jumped at the sound of Maggie’s voice.
‘I’m going to make a pot of tea. Would you like a cup?’
Her voice as she got to her feet was bright and cheerful. Clara stared at her as if she had not heard aright. Then she saw the way her eyes twinkled as she exchanged a glance with Arnie, and her bewilderment increased.
