‘Oh no you don’t, Da, up you come right now,’ she would say and it was all he could do not to burst out laughing. She was the image of Maura.
Sometimes he fell asleep on the bed next to her as they practised their letters. One memorable night, he opened one eye and saw her serious little face right next to his as she pulled the blanket over him, clambered back into the bed and, putting her little arms around his neck, fell fast asleep.
His first-born. His princess. His favourite.
Kathleen, who had not wanted to intrude on his personal grief, began to speak, softly.
‘Tommy, we have to move her away from here. Her belly is trouble, a straight link in time to the priest. Two major events in one street would have to be connected. It is another reason for the police to visit your house. I don’t know what has brought them here today, but I have a feeling that I just have to get her away. I have already rung home. I’m taking her and Nellie to Ireland for a break while we try to figure out what to do, but I do know this, Tommy: no one around here must have even the slightest notion that the child is pregnant.’
He still couldn’t speak. His child was pregnant with the child of a man he had murdered with his own hands. How much worse could it be?
He made no attempt to halt the tears. He didn’t care that he was breaking the unspoken code that real men didn’t cry.
Jerry didn’t speak. He offered no words of comfort. To do so would be to acknowledge Tommy’s distress. Jerry had shed many tears of his own and knew that the best thing to do was to let Tommy cry them out.
It seemed only moments before Maura arrived back in the kitchen and was handing each of them a bottle of Guinness.
With a nod of appreciation to Maura for the bottle, Jerry asked Kathleen, ‘When are you leaving, Mammy?’
‘Tomorrow night, Jer. Well, at three in the morning, when it is at its darkest. We will leave the street without anyone seeing us go.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Maura almost shouted. ‘I thought we were planning for the school holidays?’
Kathleen continued, ‘Once we have left, you have to put the story about that my sister is ill. I had to rush back home and the girls came with me to help. I’ve made enough phone calls from the Anchor and given that story to Bill on the bar. I also used the phone tonight and told them we were leaving soon. I called Maeve the other day when I already knew in my mind what I was planning and she knows what’s what.
‘We have family in Ireland we can trust, Tommy, we all do. The streets here are on fire with the chinwagging and we need to be out of it. If we aren’t here, we can be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. If they see us all leaving together with bags in hand, moving off for a sudden holiday, the gossip will run riot around the four streets and might reach as far as the police station.’
They were silent with shock at what Kathleen had planned. Each raised their bottle at exactly the same moment and took a long gulp of the Guinness.
But Kathleen hadn’t finished; there was more.
‘Now, Maura, we have to put on the act of our very lives, like we have nothing to hide and the fact that we have gone away is just a coincidence. Bring all the girls in tomorrow, even Peggy. Let’s have a hair night. We need everyone to think all is fine and dandy in the Doherty house and that we haven’t a care in the world. Don’t even tell Kitty that she is being taken the following morning. The less she knows, the better.’
The following evening, after a few knocks of mops on kitchen walls, Sheila arrived in Maura’s kitchen and transformed it into a hairdressing salon. Nellie had her hair washed, with her long locks tied tightly in rags ripped from an old nappy, which the following morning would leave her a head adorned with beautiful red ringlets.
Brigid had brought with her a jam tart she had made to accompany the copious cups of tea, as well as a baby tucked inside a blanket sling tied across her chest.
In her bag she had a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a jar of Pond’s cold cream. This she had smeared thickly over everyone’s eyebrows, in preparation for her session of plucking and shaping.
Peggy had settled herself by the fire with a packet of ciggies and an ashtray.
The kitchen was a buzz of activity as Kathleen, Kitty and Brigid took it in turns to have their hair washed over the kitchen sink by Alice as Sheila set about transforming them all into visions of beauty.
Nellie and Kitty were enjoying the excitement. Hair nights in the kitchen happened about once a month, in one house or another. It was the only time Peggy ever washed her hair. Very few could afford a hairdresser and Sheila was a dab hand with a pair of scissors. The shillings she earned from her scissor skills made a difference to her life. Sheila also owned a rubber hose, which divided in the middle and connected to the kitchen taps, just as they did in the hairdresser’s. They all loved the atmosphere of the girls’ night in. For the first time in weeks, Kitty laughed at Peggy who grumbled and shuffled as usual as she came in through Maura’s back door.
The smell in the kitchen changed perceptibly as Peggy walked in. They were all well used to the distinct Peggy perfume and managed to ignore it.
‘I swear to the Holy Father I was never meant to marry that fat slob and the midwife definitely slipped someone else’s kids, which were devils themselves, into the cot, and gave the good ones I had to someone else. What have I done to deserve that lot next door, eh, Maura?’
‘We often ask the same question ourselves, Peggy,’ said Maura in a sympathetic tone with a twinkle in her eye as she winked at Kathleen. Everyone stifled their giggles.
Kitty knelt on a chair with her head over the sink, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, with Alice using the hose to rinse the shampoo out of her hair. Kitty’s shoulders shook and she felt Alice’s belly shuddering with laughter as they both leant over, trying not to be unkind and hurt Peggy’s feelings.
That happened often enough when sometimes the little ones called her Smelly Peggy out loud and she heard them.
Kitty was feeling better by the minute. The old Kitty was returning, restored by laughter.
The new Kitty was fading, suppressed by denial.
Kitty loved her hair.
Long, thick and just like her mother’s.
Brigid had plucked and shaped everyone’s eyebrows, and the kitchen had been full of screams and laughter at Kathleen’s antics under the tweezers.
Maura had sat Kitty on a chair in front of the fire and taken the curlers out. Then Sheila had backcombed the life out of her hair, piled most of it up on top of her head and swept her fringe dramatically across, almost covering one eye.
When Tommy walked into the kitchen, he pretended not to recognize her.
‘Jeez, Maura,’ Tommy shouted in mock surprise. ‘What is Marianne Faithfull doing sat in our kitchen and where the hell is our Kitty?’
‘Shut up, ye great eejit, this is our Kitty.’
‘Holy Mary, how was I to know that? We had better be careful, someone might snap her up to appear in a film or something.’
Kitty threw one of the curlers at Tommy, but she was grinning shyly from ear to ear, beside herself with pleasure.
A grand show it was as the kitchen rocked with laughter and women tripped in and out of the back door, just as they always did. Hardly a word was mentioned about the police and when it was, Maura answered with confidence, ‘Well, sure, there was no one the priest was closer to than us, now. Only natural so, that they be looking to us to help.’
Everyone nodded as kindly Brigid, who knew almost as much as the Dohertys, said, ‘Sure, isn’t that the truth.’
No one other than Nellie saw the smile slip from Kitty’s face.
It was pitch-black outside and Kitty felt as though she had been asleep for only an hour when she was woken by Maura, gently shaking her shoulders.
‘Wake up, queen,’ she whispered, ‘come downstairs.’
When Kitty staggered into the kitchen, her clothes were ready warming and Maura had poked some life into the fire. There was a candle li
t on the mantel, but Maura hadn’t switched on the lights.
As Kitty moved towards the switch, Tommy hissed, ‘No, don’t, queen, leave it.’
‘What am I getting dressed for?’ asked Kitty, dazed and only half awake, blinking at them both as she rubbed her bleary eyes.
‘You are going to Ireland now, Kitty,’ said Maura. ‘Hurry, your da is taking you down to the Pier Head to meet Kathleen in ten minutes, so you don’t have long.’
Kitty checked the clock on the mantel above the range. ‘Mammy, ’tis only half two,’ she said.
‘Yes, and that is why we have to be extra careful and quiet and leave separately, so as not to wake a living soul. It’s why we are meeting Kathleen at the Pier Head, do ye understand?’
Kitty nodded, but she didn’t understand. Thoughts of her friends and teachers were flitting through her brain. How would they know where she was, if she hadn’t had the chance to talk to them and explain what was happening?
She was too tired to talk. Maura forced her to take some tea and toast, which was the last thing she wanted, but as she drank, the excitement of the adventure began to filter through and drag her up through the folds of sleep.
Ten minutes later, with the new, brown, jumble-sale holdall clutched in one hand and Kitty’s hand in his other, Tommy was tiptoeing across the cobbled entry, hugging close to the wall, slipping away into the dark night. Kitty’s secret, their secret, was at last leaving the knowing, prying eyes of those who lived on the four streets.
8
JERRY’S BROTHER, LIAM, was waiting to greet them when they arrived in Dublin.
It was a dark and wet night and the girls kept their heads bent low as they disembarked to keep the driving rain from directly hitting them in the face. They had sat at the Pier Head for most of the morning as one crossing after another had been cancelled due to the choppy Irish Sea until at last, a ferry was allowed to leave.
Now, they were officially on holiday.
Both girls were still reeling with the shock from the suddenness of their departure. It had all happened so quickly.
‘Ye’ll get used to the rain,’ shouted Kathleen who led the way as she bustled on ahead. ‘It rains so much in Mayo, Kitty, that people who stay here for too long grow a set of gills.’
‘They don’t, do they?’ Kitty said to Nellie.
Nellie laughed. ‘Not at all, it’s Nana Kathleen’s joke. She tells it all the time. I must have heard it a hundred times, but me and Da, we just laugh so she feels like she’s being funny.’
Both girls began to giggle, more from the excitement of setting foot on the soil of a foreign country than Kathleen’s jokes, which they could no longer hear above the sounds of people greeting each other and car horns beeping. Suddenly, they thought they could hear Jerry shout, ‘Mammy,’ but they both looked up and realized it was Liam, who appeared and sounded as much like Jerry as it was possible to.
‘Well, well, well, would ye look at the grown-up colleen now,’ Liam shouted as he scooped Nellie up into his arms. ‘Here, would ye let me take a look at ye. What a big miss ye are. The absolute image of yer mammy with that long red hair. I bet ye don’t remember Uncle Liam, do ye?’
Nellie didn’t know why, but she was overcome by a strange shyness. Maybe it was because Kitty was witnessing this very open display of affection. Or perhaps because he had spoken of Bernadette. She felt stupidly proud to have been compared to her own mammy, the mammy that no one in Liverpool ever spoke about. She did remember Uncle Liam. He was loud, gregarious and always playing practical jokes.
Nellie loved him. She loved him twice over for speaking about Bernadette as though she were still alive.
He was the funniest man she had ever met. She hadn’t seen him for two whole years but she certainly did remember him.
She loved the farm and everyone on it. She often thought about them all. What she loved most was that it was where her daddy was born, and where Nana Kathleen had also been born, and her daddy before her and his before him. Uncle Liam had built a new house on the same land as the old house, so for a long time there had always been a Deane on the farm. The new house had a fully fitted indoor bathroom. That was a novelty on the four streets in Liverpool. It was a novelty in Ballymara and in the main village, Bangornevin, too. Nellie knew there were lots of people in the village and out in the country who were envious of what a good farmer Liam was and of how well the Deane farm fared.
Nellie had also been taken aback by the suddenness of their departure. Last night she had sat on Jerry’s knee in front of the fire for a cuddle. Jerry had played with her ringlet rags and wrapped them round his fingers as they both stared into the fire.
Jerry whispered so that Alice couldn’t hear.
‘Yer mammy, Bernadette, had loved the farm so much, she used to swing on the big five-bar gate to the yard and do nothing more than gaze up the hill opposite and dream of you. Yourself, little miss, were just the twinkle in her eyes back then.’
She gave Jerry a big hug to try to make him smile. His expression was wistful and sad but she knew that wherever it was he vanished to when he mentioned her mammy, it was somewhere Nellie couldn’t reach. She could feel the ache in his heart but it was his ache and his alone, untouchable and not one she could heal.
Uncle Liam placed a kiss on her cheek and put her back down as he bent to greet Kitty. ‘And you must be Miss Kitty?’ he said grandly as he took off his cap and bowed in an exaggerated manner.
Kitty blushed a deep pink and took the hand Liam proffered.
A self-conscious Kitty had never shaken anyone’s hand before.
‘Now,’ said Nana Kathleen, ‘if ye would stop play-acting, Liam, and take these bags, I’d be very grateful.’
Kathleen playfully hit Liam across the back with her umbrella. Liam pretended it had hurt much more than it actually had and began to walk doubled over as though he were in great pain, lifting up the bags and howling with agony.
Kitty and Nellie were in fits of giggles.
‘Here, Nellie,’ shouted Liam as he threw her the keys. ‘Would ye drive? Me back is so bad now thanks to that Nana Kathleen.’
Nellie squealed loudly as she caught the keys, but she and Kitty were laughing so much they could barely protest that Nellie was too young to drive.
Liam, affecting a miraculous recovery, lifted up the tarpaulin on the back of the van and placed the bags underneath.
As Kathleen shuffled herself across the van’s bench seat to sit next to Liam, she shouted, ‘The rain is playing merry hell with my wash and set, so get in quickly, girls.’
As Liam passed the girls to reach the driver’s seat, with a wink he slipped them each a brown ten-shilling note. God, how can he afford that? thought Kitty. The reason most of the Irish were in England was to make money, but Nellie and Kitty’s first impression was that they had more money in Ireland. No one on the four streets owned a car. A ten-shilling note was a huge amount of money, enough for two days’ shopping at home.
‘Flippin’ heck, we are millionaires,’ whispered Nellie to Kitty, as they scrambled along the bench next to Nana Kathleen, to begin the long journey in the rain across Ireland to the west coast.
Kitty had never before travelled in a car, a train or a boat, and in the space of a day, she had experienced all three.
She had never visited the land of her parents’ and her ancestors’ birth, yet here she was with her feet on Irish soil and, inexplicably, it felt like her soil. The furthest distance she had ever travelled had been to St John’s market with her mam at dusk on a Christmas Eve, to buy a fresh turkey and some bacon from the meat hall at the end of the day at a knock-down price.
To date, that had been the most exciting journey Kitty had ever made. She loved the sawdust-covered, wooden floorboards and the Christmas atmosphere amongst the butchers, cheekily calling out to the women from behind their market stalls.
But that was as nothing compared to the last forty-eight hours.
Everything about this trip
was a novelty, such as sloping off in the dead of night to the Pier Head to catch the ferry before the buses were even running. The sandwiches Maura had made her for the journey contained tongue. She had never before in her life had anything more exotic than jam or Shippam’s fish paste.
Meanwhile, as Liam drove slowly away from the port towards the streets of Dublin, back at number nineteen Tommy and Maura were clearing up the kitchen following supper.
Angela had been in a foul mood, a seamless continuation from her bad temper at breakfast, when she had discovered that Kitty was taking a holiday to Ireland.
‘I cannot believe this,’ she had screamed. ‘Why her and not me? It’s desperate, Mammy, that I am being left behind, it is, desperate,’ she sobbed.
Angela wailed and cried at the unjustness of it all, adding to the load of Maura’s day.
‘Every cloud has a silver lining, Angela,’ Maura replied. ‘Ye become the eldest child whilst Kitty is having her holiday.’
Maura had no idea that that was exactly what Angela was dreading.
‘Thank God Kitty’s gone,’ said Tommy wearily when he and Maura were preparing for bed. ‘She needs this holiday. The air on the farm will put the colour back in her cheeks. They say a change is as good as a rest, don’t they?’
With a sigh, he pulled up the sash window. The night sounds of the tugs on the river filled the room. Putting his head outside to blow away his cigarette smoke, with a heavy heart he whispered, more to the moon and the stars than to Maura, ‘I only wish I was going with her.’
Hardly a day passed without Tommy thinking of Cork and the village where he had been born and raised. He thought now of his own family – his mammy, daddy and those of his siblings – who had travelled on to America rather than stay in Liverpool. Whenever someone mentioned Cork within earshot of Tommy, he always repeated the same comment: ‘Aye, God’s own county, and there is no finer a place on this earth, so there isn’t. No better people, no finer horses, nor more beautiful women.’
Tommy spent some of his day, every day, dreaming of Cork.
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