Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  The fuss over the rabbits made them forget everything for a few minutes, but when they went inside they found Mom at the kitchen table, hands over her face, tears running down her wrists. There was a milk bottle next to her, and a tin of jam. Polly and Bluebell, the two blue budgies, watched silently, hunched side by side in their cage.

  ‘I can’t think of anything to cook for tea,’ she sobbed. ‘I just can’t think what to do.’

  And Linda knew Mom was crying about Carol really, and all of it got up and hit her again and she felt too sick to want any tea anyway.

  Linda lay in bed. She didn’t like being alone. Normally Carol was in the other bed. Joyce slept in the little room next door. It was getting dark outside and a glow of light came from downstairs where the living-room door was open. In the end they’d had mashed potato and Bisto for tea, and a bit of bread and Stork. Joyce was the only one who seemed to be hungry anyway. It didn’t fill them up for long and Linda could feel her stomach rumbling again now.

  She wanted to think about anything but Carol lying there in the iron lung, but that was all that flooded into her mind. If she shut her eyes she could almost hear the sound of its air pumping in and out. Tears welled under her eyelids. She was so close to Carol she could feel her feelings. It had always been the same.

  How had Carol caught polio? Why her and not the others? They’d all done the same things all summer: played with the rabbits, gone to Sutton Park, gone swimming down the baths. Why Carol?

  The front door opened with a clatter. Dad. Linda tensed up straight away. At least he’d got the right house. More than once he’d been so kalied he’d gone crashing into the Kaminskis’ by mistake and frightened the life out of them. Poor things were easily frightened too.

  The door slammed shut again.

  ‘Vi?’

  ‘Ssssh,’ she heard her mother. Dad had no idea about shutting up when kids were asleep.

  ‘What’s for tea?’ He gave a long belch and Linda knew there’d be that gentle snapping sound as he pulled his braces down from his scrawny shoulders. He always did that, soon as he got home. Complained they rubbed. He had to have a cushion on the chair too. He was so thin, nothing was ever comfortable.

  ‘There’s not much – I kept it warm.’

  ‘What d’you mean, not much?’ He was almost shouting now.

  ‘Keep your voice down . . .’ It was always the same. ‘We’ve carted all the way over to the hospital – to Carol.’

  ‘Oh – yeah. The Lad.’ His tone was twisted with sarcasm. He’d got a thing about calling Carol ‘The Lad’ for the moment. ‘How is “he”, then?’

  ‘She’s bad . . .’ Linda heard her mother begin to cry. There was a rattle of plates. ‘It’s terrible – she’s in this iron lung thing. I could hardly stand to see her . . .’

  ‘Call this my bloody tea? Potato and nowt else? What d’you think I am, an effing fairy, living on air and gravy?’

  The plate hit the wall and smashed down on to the floor. ‘What does a man have to do to come home to a decent plate of food of a night?’

  ‘Earn a decent wage and not pour it down your throat, that’s what!’ Violet flared at him.

  Linda could hear the tinkle of broken crocks as she swept up.

  ‘It don’t make any difference what I give you for your tea, does it? You’re still a bloody skeleton whatever I do!’

  ‘Don’t keep on, woman! Always keeping on . . .’ There was another smashing sound and Violet’s voice rose to a scream.

  ‘Stop it! Just stop it, will you? There’ll be no bleeding plates left if you carry on. Coming in like the Lord God Almighty and carrying on – after the day I’ve had! Why can’t you just eat it and shut up, coming in that time of night with your boozing and carrying on, you selfish bastard?’

  ‘Shut up, you nagging cow!’

  Linda lay, hardly breathing. She could hear Mom was crying again.

  ‘Well, you can do without. You’ll have a roast dinner tomorrow!’

  ‘I don’t want a roast dinner . . .’ There was a crashing sound, something hitting the table. ‘Not if it means going to your sodding mother’s week in week out. Christ.’

  ‘But we always go to Mom’s. You should be grateful . . .’

  ‘Well I’m not going to “Mom’s” any more – all right? D’you think I want to sit staring at her old bloomers all afternoon? That old cow thinks she owns the whole lot of us, lock, stock and barrel!’

  ‘Don’t talk about my mother like that. You’ll soon come when you want summat to eat. Everything just so long as it suits you, isn’t it? Harry Martin – the one person on this earth who matters. You don’t give a monkey’s if your daughter’s in hospital in an iron lung . . .’

  ‘My daughter . . . ?’ He was snarling now. Linda turned on her side under the cover, forcing her fingers into her ears. Saturday nights . . .

  It hadn’t always been like this. So far as Linda was concerned she’d only had a dad for four years. Before, when the war was on, Saturdays nights had been her and Mom and Joyce and Auntie Muriel when she was living with them, and it had been safe, and fun and cosy. And then the new babby came. Mom was happy then.

  ‘I know you don’t remember your dad . . .’ That day the telegram had come, she’d been six years old. Carol was crawling around by then, head a mass of blonde curls, too young to understand anything. Her mother’s face had been ghostly white.

  ‘Your dad’s been a brave soldier, but it says here . . . . . .’ She choked on the shock of it, couldn’t say it for a bit. ‘He won’t be coming home.’ Killed in action . . . Harry Ernest Martin. She didn’t take in that they’d got his middle name wrong, that her Harry was Harry Arthur Martin. She didn’t think it was important at the time.

  Mom was upset, of course, but Linda had heard her say some funny things to Muriel. ‘The terrible thing is, I feel grateful, almost . . . He’ll never need to see her . . .’

  And life had gone on without him.

  Then, in 1946, while they were still living in Aston, this spectre appeared at their door. A knock one evening, her mother’s scream of shock.

  The man on the doorstep was horrifying to see, sinister, like a puppet. He was emaciated, his head too big for his body, thin grey hair, sunken eyes, stooped over. Mom’s hands went to her face and she backed away, moaning.

  ‘Vi?’

  His voice was high and reedy.

  ‘No! No . . .!’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘It’s me, Vi, for God’s sake. It’s Harry.’

  Someone else had got killed, not him. Harry Arthur Martin had been a POW of the Japanese. Even now he didn’t weigh much more than when he came home, and food often didn’t agree with him. They said he’d been so malnourished that his body had lost the knack of absorbing it. His head had lost the knack of fending off memories and dreams, and if Mom and Dad had ever loved each other they seemed to have lost the knack of that too. Drink was his anaesthetic and on Saturday nights he took as much of it as he could manage.

  Linda screwed her eyes tightly shut as the voices raged on downstairs. She thought about the gates of the grammar school, seeing them open in front of her in her mind like the gates of heaven, safe and tidy and full of promise.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ‘Mom – Linda’s in the lav again. Tell her to get out!’

  Linda scowled, perched on the toilet seat with her copy of Great Expectations.

  ‘Lin, hurry up – I need to go!’

  ‘Linda!’ she heard Mom’s voice. ‘Out – now!’

  It had always been the same, as soon as she could read. Going to Nana’s meant perching in the outside lav with her books, the one place you could get a bit of peace.

  Since Nana moved, after the war, to a two-up two-down in Spring Street, they had an outside toilet not shared with anyone. It felt like her place, with the cobwebs and slug trails and the nail with squares of newspaper hanging, or sometimes bits of coloured tissue from round the oranges and app
les begged off the greengrocer. And best of all, the rusty bolt she could pull across and shut everyone else out – especially Joyce. From there she’d travelled to other worlds in her head with comics and some of the books Johnny Vetch lent her. Most of Johnny’s books were about rocks and fossils and birds, but he did once hand her a dog-eared copy of Treasure Island. She was completely taken up in it, scared to go to bed every night for ages after, thinking she was going to hear Blind Pew’s stick tapping along Spring Street, coming to get her.

  They’d left Spring Street for the estate soon after, and now they had a bathroom inside. It was warmer, in the winter anyhow, but it just wasn’t the same. She still slipped out to the outside lav in Aston when she had the chance. In any case, it got her away from Nana and the others. Of course Nana didn’t like Johnny Vetch. She said he was queer in the head. And she had no time for books because she couldn’t read herself. She kept that quiet out of shame. Even Mom said she’d gone all her childhood without realizing Bessie couldn’t read.

  ‘No wonder she wouldn’t read my school reports,’ she said.

  Sundays meant dinner at Nana’s house in Aston the way morning meant the sun coming up. She was famous for it in the street, the way she always had the family there every week.

  ‘Going to Bessie’s, are yer?’

  ‘Awright Violet – off to your mom’s?’

  It was always the same, voices greeting them as they walked from the bus stop. Bessie hadn’t moved far, and everyone knew her.

  The smell of dinners wafted out to them and they could hear the wirelesses playing through open windows where curtains wafted in the breeze. The old man was standing on the corner with string tied round his jacket, Mr Baffin was tinkering with his bike a few doors along from Nana’s and kids were playing out with soapbox carts and marbles.

  But today there was something else.

  ‘Where’s the little ’un? Where’s your Carol?’

  And Linda heard her mother keep explaining with tears in her eyes about the polio and how Carol was over at the isolation hospital and everyone saying ahh and oh, bab, what a shame and how sorry they were, so it took quite a time to get along the road. It made Linda feel all upset again too, so she held on tight to her book and tried to block out the voices which reminded her. It seemed terrible to forget about Carol, but if she didn’t her tears would come. What was happening to Carol was like an ache, always there.

  It was always the same, Sundays. Same smells of cooking and Uncle Clarence with his pot of ale resting on the arm of the chair, Auntie Marigold in her baggy old frocks following orders in the kitchen, cutting up cabbage and carrots. And Uncle Charlie and Gladys came with the cousins – Norman didn’t always come now he was almost sixteen, but Colin came. And once it was all cooked, Nana always commanded one of the girls to knock for old Mrs Magee who lived across the street to eat dinner with them. She’d long been a widow and Nana said no one should have to cook for one on a Sunday, it wasn’t worth the gas.

  The kitchen was Nana’s kingdom, ruled with a rod of iron. Uncle Clarence stayed in the front doing nothing much as usual and moaning about it.

  ‘The country’s going to the dogs,’ was one of his favourite moans. He didn’t work any more, now the war was over.

  ‘ ’Allo wench!’ he said lugubriously as Linda ran in ahead of Joyce. ‘How’s the world treating you?’

  Uncle Clarence always said that as well. In fact Uncle Clarence mostly said the same sorts of things over and over again, like ‘Bottoms up!’ when he drank his ale, and, with a jerk of his balding head, ‘You’d best ask the kitchen,’ which meant Nana was in charge and what was the use of him saying anything?

  ‘Come ’ere and give us a kiss!’ Linda kissed his stubbly cheek and he rumpled her hair, but then, his eyes mournful as a hound’s, he said, ‘Did you get up the hospital to see her?’

  Linda nodded. ‘She’s in an iron lung thing. They say they don’t know how long she’ll be there.’

  She saw something in Uncle Clarence’s eyes, as if he was flinching inside and he shook his head and looked away and picked up his ale. Everyone loved Carol, even Uncle Clarence, who mainly loved his allotment. ‘Poor little bugger.’

  Gladys and Charlie were listening, and even Colin, who was thirteen, didn’t look quite so much like a spotty sack of potatoes as usual.

  ‘Is that them here?’ Nana’s voice boomed through from the kitchen.

  ‘Our Linda’s here,’ Uncle Clarence called.

  ‘What about Joyce?’ Linda made a face. Joyce was always the favourite.

  ‘She was always like that with us,’ Violet told Linda once. ‘Only ever had eyes for Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Linda said, shrugging. Nana was even worse now, after the grammar school.

  ‘She’ll ’ave to do then. Get in ’ere, Linda – I can’t leave this pudding. Marigold – pass us that cloth!’

  The kitchen was full of steam. Bessie was in the process of dropping a pudding basin, tied firmly at the top, into a pan of boiling water. It would steam away for two or three hours, to be eaten draped in custard as the dinner ran on into cups of tea and Nana’s games: canasta and cribbage and ludo for the kids, and the week’s sweet rations from the grown-ups, all pooled together. Nana always ate as if it was the last day there’d ever be food.

  She turned, her fleshy face puce and running with moisture. She was enormously stout now, just past her sixty-fourth birthday, but very strong-looking, hair in plaits coiled round her head. Her hair was white but it always had a yellow tinge because she smoked one cigarette end on from the last, sucking the life out of each one. She always wore big frocks in dark material, blue or black, and tight black shoes, her feet appearing small because the flesh of her ankles bulged out over them. Her voice could fill a parade ground and when she laughed it shook her whole body up to her chins. Linda had heard Dad say Nana was ‘like an effing battleship and someone ought to torpedo her’.

  ‘Don’t be so rude about my mother,’ Violet would shout sometimes when the beer was in and they were at it again, bicker, bicker. ‘She’s done a lot for us, she has – more than yours ever flaming well did. You should show some gratitude.’

  ‘Gratitude? She’s worse than bloody Hitler ever was!’

  ‘There – ’ Bessie settled the basin triumphantly. ‘I’ve got a nice treacle suet in today. Linda – get over here!’ She mopped her face with the corner of her huge white apron, stained all down the front with beef juices. ‘Give your auntie Marigold a hand or ’er’ll never get done today, this rate. ’Ow’s Carol? Poor little beggar.’

  Without waiting for an answer, Bessie waddled into the front room.

  ‘Violet? How’s our Carol? What’ve they done with her?’

  ‘D’you want some help, Auntie?’

  Linda sat across the kitchen table from Marigold, who was working on a pile of carrots. She smiled at Linda in her rather vacant way.

  ‘You can do some of these.’ Very deliberately she wiped the blade of her knife on the floral breast of her apron and passed it to Linda. ‘You be careful now.’

  Marigold’s hair, once liquorice black, was already fading to grey and hung limply round her collar, held back with two kirby-grips, and her fringe dipped into her eyes. Mom had told her that when Marigold and Charlie were born, Marigold came second and they hadn’t got her out quick enough so her brain had been starved. Linda never really understood for years how you could starve a brain. But now Carol was having to be kept in the machine so she wasn’t starved as well. Whatever exactly had happened to Marigold, she could talk to you all right and do a lot of things, but she wasn’t quite like anyone else.

  ‘Our Marigold’s not the marrying sort,’ Bessie had decreed for years, and no one questioned it.

  Then there was Auntie Rosina, whom no one ever talked about much except to say she’d ‘gone to London’ before the war. If anyone even mentioned her, Nana looked fit to blow up. Auntie Rosina had wanted to go on the stage and ran off w
ith an actor. There was that one picture she had sent, of herself all dressed up, and it stayed behind a jug on the mantelshelf. In the picture she looked very pretty and had dark eyes and hair. Gone to the bad, no doubt, Nana said.

  It sometimes seemed to Linda that her mom and Charlie, despite being married and having homes of their own, were like Marigold and had never left either. They danced to Nana’s tune like puppets. It was only Rosina who had ever really left.

  Linda cut the end off a carrot and began to scrape off the dirt, dipping it in a bowl of water. Marigold was shelling peas, with her funny, secret smile on her face. Violet could hear the voices from the other room, Mom describing going all the way to that hospital, two bus rides away.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to go carting over there all the time,’ she was saying.

  After a moment Linda saw that Marigold had stopped doing the peas and was reaching furtively into her cleavage. With a swift movement she pulled out a little bottle full of clear liquid, took a quick swig which she swallowed with relish, then replaced the bottle with a wink at Linda.

  ‘Don’t tell on me, will you?’

  ‘No,’ Linda said, looking away, at the steam curling from the cooker over to the sink, in front of the window. There was a packet of Bird’s custard on the draining board. Nana must smell the drink on Marigold’s breath, but it seemed to please Marigold to think she had secrets.

  ‘Where’s little Carol?’ Marigold said, as if she couldn’t hear anything that was going on in the next room. When Linda explained, Marigold looked at her and said, ‘Oh. Shame,’ but without emotion.

  They put the carrots on to boil and Nana came back in then, grunting as she hoisted the beef out of the oven with the potatoes sizzling round it and basted them.

  ‘Vi, Gladys – set the table!’ she bellowed. ‘You go and get Mrs Magee,’ she ordered Linda. ‘You needn’t think you’re going to get out of doing anything.’