‘I sometimes wish we had gone on to America, Maura. We both should have done what my brothers did. Maybe this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened in America.’
Maura listened to him, all the while keeping her own thoughts close. How glad she was that she had indulged and spoilt Kitty over the last few days.
‘Come to bed, Tommy,’ she whispered.
Maura was exhausted from having to wake at two o’clock to spirit Kitty away into the night and coping with the demands of her children. Malachi and Declan ran Maura ragged on the best of days and today was no different. Maura was already missing Kitty in so many ways.
‘She is with Kathleen and Nellie, and no doubt having great craic while we are here worrying ourselves stupid. Come to bed,’ she said softly.
Tommy pulled the window down and the curtains across before he slipped into the comforting arms of the woman who loved him as no other ever would.
Who was not from Cork.
Kathleen and Liam chatted away as they drove across Dublin, with Nellie throwing in the odd comment or question. Kitty could barely understand what they were talking about. She knew none of the names or the places they were discussing. Liam had a list of deliveries to collect, which would make the journey longer.
Kitty stared out at the wide river and the tenement buildings. Had it been only three days since she had found out what was wrong? Now she knew why her period hadn’t arrived. She had started only a year ago and had not thought anything of having missed. She’d had no idea what this meant until Maura had explained it to her last night in furtive whispers, as she sat her in yet another scalding-hot bath before Sheila and the other neighbours called round.
On three occasions over the last three days, Maura had almost boiled her alive in a bath while making her swallow a weird-tasting drink. Her nausea had been replaced by the most awful diarrhoea.
‘You need to be purged, Kitty,’ Maura had whispered. ‘Your guts making all that movement in the outhouse will bring your monthly on, so it will. And you have to drink the Epsoms whilst you are sat in the hot bath, it doesn’t work else.’
Kitty had been well and truly purged and, heavens, had a cleaner child ever visited Eire? Her monthly had remained stubborn, clinging to the lining of her womb for dear life.
Kitty pressed her face against the window and looked out into the Dublin night at the women gathered on the tenement building steps under an overhead canopy, smoking pipes and wearing headscarves, with black knitted shawls draped around their shoulders. In long black skirts, they sat with their knees wide apart. By the light of the glass-domed street lamps, she saw children walking in the pouring rain, wearing barely any clothes. They couldn’t have been more than two years of age. It was late and yet the streets were incredibly noisy. Through open doors she glimpsed long counters of polished dark wood in bars heaving with customers, drinking the black-velvet Guinness.
They drove past a group of men fighting in the street.
‘Dublin is the capital of sin now, Mammy,’ Liam said to Kathleen. ‘No one comes here unless they have to. It is a bad state of affairs all right.’
‘Sure, it always was, Liam, nothing has altered there. Dublin has always been a bad place, which is why I never allowed any of you to come here when ye were growing up.’
The capital of sin? Kitty and Nellie looked at each other and then outside with renewed interest.
Kitty had never even been into Liverpool at night and now, here she was, in the heart of Dublin, driving through the capital of sin.
It felt as though each minute there was a new sensation or experience. Kitty felt time shifting. Her foundation of stability, all she knew and understood, was slipping away from under her. This journey, with every mile they drove, drew a line under her life as the old Kitty. She tried not to think about what was happening but she realized that, from this night on, nothing would ever be the same again.
Already homesick, Kitty wanted to return to Liverpool to her mammy. To sit with Maura and Tommy, just the three of them together, as they sometimes did at night when the younger children were asleep.
Tommy would tell jokes about what the men had done and said on the docks and they would usually laugh about one of the twins’ antics. They would worry out loud about Harry’s asthma, and all three would have a drink and a bite together before Kitty went upstairs to bed.
Before she did, she would kiss and hug both her parents goodnight. Kitty would walk over to her da and bend to kiss him on the cheek. He would pretend to be reading his paper and then, at the last second, as she bent her head, he would turn quickly and steal a peck on the lips. He did it every night, but the three of them always laughed as though he had never done it before.
Kitty wanted to be there right now, in the warmth of her kitchen with the people who loved her best of all.
She was a young girl, pregnant, in a strange country with people who, kind as they might be, weren’t her own.
Exhausted, she leant her head against Nellie’s shoulder and slept.
9
ALICE AND BRIGID had become good friends.
They shared a secret. They had both become bound by events which took place following the murder.
Brigid had helped in her own way to throw the police off the scent away from number nineteen following the murder. Her and Sean had provided Tommy with an alibi. They were parents of daughters and although they didn’t fully know all the details neither did Alice, not completely. The only people who really knew what took place in the graveyard that night, were Tommy and Jerry. Or so they thought. On the night of the murder, they had all raised their whiskey glasses and made a vow. Not one word was to be spoken about that night, to anyone, not even to each other, ever again.
No one other than Tommy knew of the torment that now woke him in the middle of the night and left him staring out of the window, wondering how in God’s name he had gone from a peace-loving family man to a murderer in one fateful hour.
Tommy would rewind the evening over and over in his mind, as though on a loop. Images of the hangman’s gallows haunted him as he tried and failed to somehow make sense of the extraordinary events that had taken over his very ordinary life.
It was no surprise, really, that the first real friend Alice had ever made, other than her mother-in-law Kathleen, had been Brigid. They had plenty in common, besides the secret. Brigid had daughters around the same age as Joseph.
There wasn’t anything Brigid didn’t know about child rearing. There was nothing Alice did know.
They both had the best-looking husbands on the four streets, if not in all of Liverpool.
Sean, like Jerry, was able to make even the elderly ladies on Nelson Street giggle in a flirtatious way and both men hammed it up outrageously.
‘Evening, Mrs O’Prey,’ Jerry would shout if he saw Annie on her step on his way home. ‘God, ye look gorgeous today, so ye do. Lock the door tonight or I’ll be desperate to get across into your bed if my Alice turns me away and says no.’
Mrs O’Prey would flash her gums at Jerry and disintegrate into a fit of giggles.
‘Oh, away with ye, Jerry Deane, ye bad lad, wait until I tell ye mammy.’
Jerry knew there was very little in Mrs O’Prey’s life to make her smile.
If Tommy was with him he would shake his head.
‘Nothing wrong in making them laugh, Tommy,’ Jerry would say.
‘Aye, you just made her day all right, Jerry, you did.’
‘What about ye, Tommy, will ye be comin’ over after he’s finished?’ Annie O’Prey shouted cheekily across.
‘Oh no, not me, Annie, my Maura never says no,’ Tommy shouted back.
Sean on the other side of the road would join in the banter. ‘Oi, keep yer hands off my woman, Deane, or yer a dead man. She’s mine and if ye want her, see me in the ring on Friday night.’
The street was filled with laughter as Jerry whispered to Tommy, ‘If Maura ever hears you telling Annie O’Prey that she never says no,
you’re the one whose feckin’ dead.’
Blowing Mrs O’Prey an exaggerated kiss, the three men separated and walked on to their own back doors.
Sean and Brigid weren’t as badly off as other families in Nelson Street.
Sean won money at the boxing ring each Friday night, which he put into the bread bin.
Some of it went to buy the meat and eggs Sean needed in order to remain fighting fit.
Some went towards the housekeeping and to feed his many daughters. And the remainder was for the day when they had enough saved to emigrate to America.
Sean had plans and dreams.
He and Brigid received a letter every fortnight from his sister, Mary, in Chicago.
Mary and her husband, along with Sean’s brother, Eddie, had established a small building company and, by all accounts, were doing well. In every letter they pleaded for Sean and the family to travel and join them, to work with them because the business was growing so fast. They could barely manage and were having to employ large teams of Irish builders from home. It galled Mary and Eddie that their very own brother worked as he did on the Liverpool docks, when a life of prosperity and opportunity was waiting for him and his, right there in Chicago.
Sean was desperate to set sail and join them. His work in Liverpool was only ever meant to be temporary and a means of saving for the passage to America.
Mary and Eddie, who were both older than Sean, had travelled on ahead of him to Liverpool, worked for three years and went without, so determined were they to save every penny they earned.
Eddie had taken two jobs: for six days a week, Sunday excepted, he worked as a brickie on the new housing estates on the outskirts of Liverpool, and for four nights as a barman.
Mary had trained as a nurse and lived in the nurses’ home, eating on the wards and barely spending a penny of her salary. Within two weeks of qualifying, she and Eddie realized they had enough saved and had boldly booked their passage across the Atlantic.
Their single-minded determination had paid off well.
Sean would have left the day after every letter arrived from America, but for two problems.
The first was that Brigid would have none of it.
‘England is far enough away from Ireland and from my family and your mammy too,’ she said reproachfully, every time he brought the subject up. ‘Now that Mary and Eddie have selfishly gone to America, who will be here for your mammy, should she be sick? Ye know the rules, Sean. The nearest does the looking after and that’s me and you.’
The second was that, even if Sean could talk Brigid round, he didn’t yet have enough fare money for all of them. He was too proud to ask his sister for help.
Mary’s last letter had included a black-and-white photograph of their house in Chicago and a picture of Mary and her husband in front of their fireplace.
Sean had placed the picture on the press. He picked it up and looked at it at least once a day.
It wasn’t Mary he looked at, nor her husband, despite their clean, wholesome well-fed expressions and fine clothes.
‘It was the size of the marble mantelpiece with the gilt-framed mirror above it and the solid brass fender round the fire. Alongside, a small polished wooden table held an oversized lamp with a fringed lampshade. On the mantel stood an ornament of a sailing ship and a shire horse, with photographs in silver frames.
He studied them all. Such fine things.
Sean would not even have been able to afford the large brass coal bucket at the opposite end of the fender, never mind the house.
‘They have everything, sure, there’s no denying that, all right,’ he said to Brigid.
“I desperately want us to be with them. I know we made the wrong decision to stay in Liverpool. I cannot see a way forward out of the four streets for us all and quick enough too.”
Brigid never replied or returned his enthusiasm.
‘Sure, she never stops giving out about America and how great it is, does she?’ Sean said when he finished reading the latest letter.
‘She makes me laugh, so she does,’ replied Brigid. ‘She always signs off, “From the land of the free”. Sure, we are free too. Does she think we are all prisoners in England?’
‘We are, aren’t we, though, Brigid?’ said Sean. ‘I can’t earn any more money than I do. They seem to be free to do whatever they want to over there. If you want to set up a business, you can. If you want to buy your own house, you can get money to do it. America is growing and bursting with opportunities that we just don’t have here. No one cares where you came from or what class you are. There is no class in America, don’t ye understand? Everyone is the same. If ye can work ye can win.
‘We aren’t even the same when we go to the grocer’s. All the shite gets loaded into our baskets. Ye heard what the grocer told Paddy in the pub when he was pissed. The best potatoes go to the English, the second-best to the pigs and the rest to the Irish.’
Sean walked over to Brigid and put his arms round her.
‘I just don’t want our kids to live our life and repeat our hardships every day. We have to keep saving, Brigid, and I have to keep fighting to bring the extra money in.’
He pulled away and looked down at her, seeking reassurance.
Brigid broke free of his arms and refused to meet his eyes. She could be bolder when he wasn’t touching her.
‘I want to be wherever you are and if you think America is better for our kids, when we have the money for the fare, we will talk about it then, but I’m not making any promises, Sean.’
She was holding him off, playing for time. She turned back to the kitchen sink.
Sean put his arms round his wife’s waist and hugged her.
He beat the shite out of three men every Friday night in order to earn the money they needed to save. Brigid would never know how that felt. She would never understand that, knowing she was with him, supporting him and sharing his dreams, would make getting into the ring easier to bear.
With Brigid beside him, he could dive over the ropes and see nothing ahead but their future.
Punches easier to take. Bruises quicker to heal.
Brigid continued washing the dirty dishes.
‘I do think about it sometimes, ye know,’ she said, with a lift in her voice. ‘When Kathleen read me tea leaves on Friday, she said we would be visiting foreign shores before long.’
Sean didn’t believe in prophecies found in the tea leaves, but Kathleen’s endorsement made him feel surprisingly good.
‘It won’t be long now before we have enough money for the fare. Two more steady years on this lucky winning streak and we can be off, all of us.’ His voice was loaded with a false brightness, but dropped as he added, ‘Providing we don’t have any more babies.’
Brigid didn’t reply. She had no desire to move further away from home. She was happy enough, but Sean was always restless, wanting more and better, and looking to see how green was another man’s grass. Sometimes it wore her out.
Nothing wore Sean out.
Winning in the boxing ring was a foregone conclusion for him, driven by his personal goal. Every waking hour that he wasn’t working on the docks, he was training in the ring. There was no doubt in his mind that he would have the money within two years.
They were fine the way they were, mused Brigid. She comforted herself with the idea that he would soon grow tired of wanting to leave. Sean was someone in the community. He enjoyed his reputation as a big and powerful man. When he walked down the street, the kids shouted out to him, ‘Hey, big man Sean, will ye show us how to throw a punch?’
They would run along beside him, begging and chanting. Often he would stop and spend time on the green, showing them how to jib. He truly was the big man and, when he realized that, pride alone would be enough to make him stay.
Better to be a big fish in Liverpool and not a little fish across the other side of a very big pond.
The adults on the four streets were in awe of Sean’s size and strength. Even Ka
thleen, who had wondered at the arrogance and the cheek of Father James, who had often tripped in and out of Brigid’s house. Kathleen liked to imagine what Sean would have done to the priest if he had caught him up to anything.
If neighbours on Nelson Street ever thought one of their own had murdered Father James, they would naturally have assumed it was the big and muscular Sean, not the short and kindly Tommy.
Little did they know.
It took rage to kill a man, not strength.
The night before Kathleen left for Ireland, she had popped down to see Brigid, to tell her they were having a hairdo night at Maura’s.
‘I haven’t time to beat around the bush, Brigid,’ said Kathleen, breathlessly, almost as soon as she walked in through Brigid’s back door.
As Kathleen looked around the kitchen, she was overcome with admiration. A wooden box sat on the floor to the side of the fire, padded with hand-crocheted blankets, and inside, top to tail, slept two babies. In the pram just inside the back door slept two more. The kitchen was spotlessly clean.
‘Brigid, I am here to ask ye a favour,’ said Kathleen, ‘and I didn’t want to do it tonight in front of the others, especially nosy Peggy.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, sit down,’ Brigid said, concerned. Kathleen was bright red and panting. Brigid had always thought Kathleen did too much and should be taking things a bit easier.
‘Brigid, I need ye to help me, but I also need you to keep it quiet, between the two of us. I am away to Ireland with Nellie and Kitty. Would ye please keep an eye on Alice and the baby whilst Jerry is at work and I am away? But please, Brigid, please, could it be our secret?’
Brigid pressed a cup of tea into Kathleen’s hand and sat down next to her.
‘I would be happy to, but Alice seems a different woman altogether these days. Sure, I know it was necessary, but remember, after the murder, she came into my kitchen, all by herself.’
‘Aye, I know,’ said Kathleen, ‘and that is grand and a great improvement, so it is, but it would just make me feel better if I knew ye was keeping an eye out. Things aren’t quite right, Brigid. I wouldn’t worry if I was here, but I have to travel back home for a little while and I would feel much happier if ye was keeping watch for me.’
Hide Her Name Page 9
