Stay Dead

by Jessie Keane

  Then little Sandy, the weakest and youngest of the kids, fell victim, then Dick and Nigel, and finally Sarah, who’d been helping Dolly care for the whole damned lot of them. Inevitably, Dolly herself got up one morning and fell back on to the bed, too hot and dizzy to stand. For two weeks it was Dad who had to do the honours, stopping off work to heat up soup to feed them all and carrying buckets and bowls to and fro to all their sickbeds. Dolly was viciously glad to see him having to empty the shit and vomit in the khazi out in the back yard.

  Served him right.

  And there was a bonus to being ill; Dad didn’t come near. Didn’t want to catch a dose of the dreaded lurgy like she and the others had.

  The Devil looks after his own, thought Dolly as she watched her father faffing around the house, moaning like a drain about having to fetch and carry for them all. He didn’t get ill, the bastard.

  But soon the family recovered. Sarah started making cups of tea and helping again, Edie crawled from her bed to the rocking chair and then downstairs to the kitchen to flop into her usual seat there. The boys went back to school and Dad to work. But Dolly remained unwell; the flu didn’t seem to want to loosen its grip on her, and she was usually the strongest, the fittest of the whole family.

  Eventually, Edie stirred herself enough to call the doctor out again. Dolly hated the doctor with his pompous air, she hated seeing the disgust on his face when he came into the house, into the bedroom she shared with Sarah. He prodded her with a stone-cold stethoscope, had her sit up, pressed the cold horrible thing to her chest and back, told her to breathe out, breathe in. Then he palpated her abdomen, looked at her face. He drew back, repacking his stethoscope in the Gladstone bag.

  ‘Do you have a due date?’ he asked.

  Dolly stared at him blankly. What the hell was he talking about?

  ‘How old are you, girl?’ He sounded exasperated.

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Dolly. She felt like she was about to be sick again. Every morning, she was sick as a dog, it was wearing her out.

  ‘You know who the father is?’ Now he looked truly disgusted, like she’d crawled out from under a stone.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ She had no idea what he meant. The father? What father?

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ said the doctor, and Dolly’s whole young world imploded.

  21

  She should have been able to turn to her mother at a time like this, but she couldn’t. Edie scarcely talked or moved or took any interest in anything these days. Talking to her was like talking to a wall. You got just as much sense out of either one.

  To Dolly’s utter shame and humiliation, it was Dad the doctor talked to after his visit to her sickbed. She watched the two men conversing out on the landing, glancing back in at her, and she saw the exact moment when Dad got the news; she saw all the colour leave his face in an instant, and despite her own shock and devastation she felt a stab of evil gladness. It shocked him, did it, what he’d done to her? Well, good.

  After the doctor left, Dad came back upstairs. All the kids were out at school. Edie was off having her brains adjusted, there was only the two of them in the silent messy house, this awful place that had become Dolly’s own private corner of hell over the last few years.

  He came and stood at the end of the bed and he looked awkward, his eyes shifting around the room, as if trying to avoid fixing on Dolly, lying there in the bed. Maybe he was disgusted too, like the doctor.

  But he did this to me, she thought.

  Sam’s lip was curled like there was a bad smell under his nose. She’d let him down, she could see that, and somewhere inside her that hurt; he was her dad, and she loved him. But she hated him too, and now the hatred was growing stronger, like this thing he’d planted inside her.

  ‘The doctor said . . .’ she started, and she had to stop, she didn’t know how to go on with it. Embarrassment flooded her cheeks with red and she faltered to a halt.

  ‘I know.’ His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. It was almost comical, only it wasn’t very bloody funny at all, really, was it? Not when you got right down to the facts of the matter.

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ he said, and without another word he turned and left the room.

  One week later, Dolly was still in bed, feeling fragile. Timid little Sarah came in with soup and tea and chatter, as she did every day, doing her best to keep Dolly’s spirits up.

  ‘This flu’s a bugger, but you’ll be better soon, don’t worry,’ she said.

  Then Dad came in from work that evening and said: ‘It’s all fixed up, we’ll go tomorrow.’

  His eyes were doing that slip-sliding thing again, going around the room, not looking at his daughter, and he was sweating. Fix what? wondered Dolly. As soon as he’d gone, her hands wandered to her stomach, feeling the slight alien curve of it. She’d seen pregnant women; she’d be like the side of a house soon, and there would be things to buy, nursery stuff, she supposed. That must be what Dad was talking about. And at least this thing inside her meant that he wouldn’t touch her any more; there was that to be thankful for.

  The next day Dad stayed off work. Dolly got up, ate breakfast, spewed it back up, then cleaned herself and they caught the bus over to Aldgate. Maybe there was a shop there with kids’ stuff, she didn’t know and she didn’t ask. Dad didn’t talk to her on the journey and Dolly was glad of that. She felt both queasy and numb, all at the same time. The numbness, the distance from the real world, had started the first time he’d played the man-and-woman game with her, and it had stayed.

  When they got off the bus, they walked a couple of streets along lines of identical Victorian semis. Dad opened the gate of one called ‘Swanlea’ and Dolly trailed after him up the little chequer-tiled path, feeling almost faint. Dad knocked on the door and in a minute or so it was opened by a middle-aged woman so heavily made up it looked like she was wearing a clown’s mask. Her eyes were huge and fringed with blackened lashes. Her darkly tinted red hair, all the life coloured out of it so that it had the texture of a Brillo pad, stood out around her face like a frazzled scarlet halo.

  ‘Mrs Averly?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Yeah. Mr Farrell, is it?’ she said, fag in hand. She squinted first at him and then at Dolly. ‘Come in then.’

  They moved into a grubby hallway that stank of cabbage and cat piss, and the woman shut the door behind them.

  ‘First things first,’ she said, and held out her hand.

  Dad rummaged in his billfold and pulled out a fiver. He placed it in her hand, and she nodded with satisfaction and quickly tucked it into her bra.

  ‘That’s fine. You can wait down here.’ She turned to Dolly. ‘Come on then, girl, up the stairs.’

  This wasn’t a shop with baby clothes. Bewildered, Dolly followed the woman up. They went into a tiny box room; inside there was a fold-up bed stashed against the wall, hectic violet wallpaper with sprigs of heather rampaging all over it. In the centre of the room, on the scuffed and worn purple carpet, was a yellow washing-up bowl steaming with warm water and frothy with soap suds. Beside it was what Dolly recognized as an enema, and an open packet of Omo.

  ‘We’ll soon have you straight again,’ said the woman, crossing to the fold-up bed and stubbing her cigarette out on an overflowing ashtray perched there. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  Dolly had no idea what she meant, but she was a kid and this ugly gorgon of a woman was an adult; it wasn’t her place to question.

  Then the woman turned back to her with a thin smile. ‘Right then, lovey. Slip your knickers off and stand over the bowl.’

  22

  Dolly didn’t know how she got back down those bloody stairs and out of that place in Aldgate. She was in agony. From the moment the woman had started pumping that Omo mixture into her, she’d been doubled up with pain.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, you’ll come away, that’s what matters,’ said the woman in an irritated tone of voice because Dolly had the gall to complain and start to cry.

  Dolly
didn’t even know what that meant. Come away? Come away with what?

  ‘All right then, Doll?’ asked Dad when she came back downstairs, and he looked sheepish when he saw how white she was, her face twisted up with pain, before his gaze skipped away from her again.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said to the woman, and they left.

  Dolly, standing at the bus stop and trying not to pass out, couldn’t believe it. Her dad had taken her to that horrible ugly frightening cow and let her do that dreadful thing to her. As they waited and the rain drizzled down, a young mother with a child in a pushchair stood nearby and the child howled its head off.

  Shut up, you little shit, thought Dolly, looking daggers at the tiny thing, feeling she could hardly bear to have that near her, not when she’d had all this done to her.

  ‘Dad . . .’ she moaned, clutching at her stomach.

  ‘Bus’ll be here in a mo,’ he said brightly, smiling at the young woman with the kid, everything normal here, nothing to see.

  Eventually the damned bus came, and they all piled on. Dolly didn’t know how she made it the whole length of the journey without shrieking out loud. Finally they were home, and Dad helped her up the stairs to bed and then left her there, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Dolly’s not well, but she’ll soon feel better,’ she heard him saying to Sarah out on the landing. ‘Don’t go in, Sar, she’s having a kip.

  Dolly writhed on the bed in fearful agony all the rest of that day and all night. She couldn’t sleep through the pain, it was awful. When morning came and it got light she tried to get up, to get dressed. She could hear the others, her brothers and her sister, getting up, going downstairs to the kitchen, but she could hardly move, the pain was too great.

  Somehow she got herself up on to the edge of the bed and hauled herself to her feet. It was then that she felt wetness and saw her nightie was soaked with blood. Another hot bolting spasm of agony shot through her and as she tried to stand up she felt something warm drop down between her legs.

  Gasping, crying, she got the pot out from under the bed and crouched over it, and then it happened: the baby came away and fell straight into the pot with a sticky, stomach-churning slurp. Staring at it, Dolly nearly screamed but she didn’t, she couldn’t rouse the rest of the household, what would they think?

  She’d been quite far along. In her innocence, she hadn’t known what the fuck was happening, but she could see it was a girl, fully formed and hanging by the cord, still joined to her. Horror gripped her then. It was a girl, a real child, and they’d sluiced it out of her like it was nothing.

  ‘Oh Jesus, oh angels,’ said Dolly, crying, desperate. She looked at the poor little kid’s face and nearly fell to the floor in shock. She’d committed a mortal sin, this was a human being and she’d killed it.

  Another cramp sent the afterbirth sploshing down on to the floor. Dolly let out a scream then, she couldn’t stop herself.

  Presently, as she stood there staring down at the abomination in the pot, there was a tap at the door. She cringed with panic. ‘Who is it?’ she shouted.

  ‘It’s me, it’s Sar. You all right, Doll?’ came her sister’s voice.

  Christ, she couldn’t let poor little Sarah see this!

  ‘Fetch Dad will you, Sar?’ she called, and stepped away from the pot, wetness trailing down her legs and making her shiver with revulsion. She toed the pot under the bed and got back between the sheets, feeling blood sticking to her, messing up the bed. It was a horrible thing she’d done and she was shivering now, bleeding, feeling sick at what had just happened.

  Dad was up within a couple of minutes, and came in the room, closing the door behind him. He stood there, and said: ‘Has it come away then, Doll?’

  Dolly couldn’t bear to look at him. She nodded, swiped at her tears.

  ‘Under the bed,’ she said, and Dad moved forward, delicately stepping around the afterbirth, and pulled out the pot. Dolly heard him draw in a sharp breath.

  ‘Doll?’ he said.

  Dolly turned her head and stared at her father. His grizzled face looked sweat-sheened and white; he looked like he was about to puke his guts up and Dolly knew why: he’d seen what she had seen – that the tiny dead girl had his face – the same chin, the same nose, everything.

  ‘You all right then, girl?’ he asked, and his voice shook.

  Something hardened in Dolly then. She stopped crying, and nodded. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘But the sheets are dirty and so’s my nightie, I’ll need clean.’

  He was nodding too. With a shudder his eyes went back to the tiny dead thing in the pot. ‘I’ll see you all right,’ he said.

  Before he’d taken her to that ugly cow in Aldgate, Dolly would have believed that.

  Now, she didn’t.

  23

  London, June 1994

  ‘Fuck, it’s you,’ said the man.

  Annie turned. It was the day after she’d got to Ellie’s. She’d overslept so she had a quick bath, dressed, skipped breakfast, said hello to Chris, Ellie’s husband, who was sitting at the kitchen table and who grunted a reply. She braced herself and took a cab over to the Palermo Lounge to see what was happening there.

  Answer? Not much. The big double red doors were closed, the neon sign was switched off, there were police tapes strung up and a beat copper was standing there, staring impassively into the middle distance. And now this other man had arrived, one she recognized. He was about six-three, with straight dark hair and dark hard eyes that endlessly scanned everything around him. He was formally dressed in a black suit, white shirt and tie. His downturned solemn trap of a mouth didn’t lift in a smile.

  ‘Oh! DCI Hunter,’ she said vaguely, and went back to staring at the front of the building.

  He stood there with her, silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘I thought you might show up. A bit of a shock, yes? You knew her well.’

  ‘I’ve known her for years,’ said Annie, and she had, since way back in Limehouse when Auntie Celia had held sway over the best whorehouse in the district and Dolly had been the brassiest of the brasses who worked there. Dolly had come a long, long way since then. They all had. And to see it end like this was damned near unbearable.

  ‘And how is Mr Carter?’ asked DCI Hunter.

  Annie’s face was set as she turned her head and started at him. Years, the Bill had been trying to pin stuff on Max. But he was always too sharp for them. Too sharp for her, too. She wondered what he was up to right now, and again her mind filled with images of tangled limbs, hot and heavy sex, some anonymous younger woman greedily, eagerly, taking her place. Quickly, she dragged her mind away from that. There was nothing she could do about it.

  There’s nothing you can do about this, either, said a voice in her head.

  But she couldn’t, wouldn’t ever, believe that. She’d come back to find out what had happened here. And she meant to do that.

  ‘You got any leads on this?’ she asked him.

  He gave a tight little smile. ‘None that I am inclined to share with you.’

  Annie shrugged. She’d find out anyway. From way back, before the Carter gang became almost legit, running not only the three London clubs but also a lucrative security firm whose territory encompassed a hefty chunk of central London and deep into Essex, they’d had tame coppers tucked away in the Met, people who were on their payroll and kept them up to speed with whatever was going down.

  ‘She was shot, I was told,’ said Annie.

  ‘If you know anything else about this, you should tell me,’ he replied, neither confirming nor denying it.

  ‘How the hell would I know anything? I’ve been abroad.’

  ‘Disgruntled customer? Lover?’

  ‘Dolly didn’t have lovers.’

  ‘She was never married?’

  Annie pursed her lips. She felt she was giving away more than she wanted to, but perhaps he could help. Perhaps he could even nail the lowlife who’d done this. ‘Dolly didn’t care for men much,’ she said.<
br />
  ‘Women then?’

  ‘Dolly? Nah. Dolly was no lezzie. Dolly was . . .’

  Had been . . .

  Self-sufficient best summed it up, Annie supposed. Some people might say she had a cold core, but that wasn’t the case. Once you were in with Dolly, you were in for life and she’d do anything for you. But . . . no lovers, male or female. She liked cats, Annie knew that. But not kids. She could vividly remember one of the girls’ sisters bringing in a tiny baby to the Limehouse knocking shop, and all the girls cooing over the infant – but not Dolly. Never Dolly. She didn’t want to hold the child and she seemed uninterested in it. If anything, she seemed relieved when the girl left and took the kid with her.

  ‘Friends?’ asked Hunter.

  ‘She had friends all right. Close friends. Ellie at the Shalimar. And me.’

  ‘Relatives?’

  Annie squinted at him through the rain. It was coming down harder, sticking her hair to her head. Jesus, she hated the rain. All at once she had an urge to run back to the airport and get on a plane, escape to her carefree sunlit life, to Max.

  ‘How should I know?’ she asked. She didn’t know a damned thing about Dolly pre-Celia, and that had been the sixties. Dolly had never spoken about brothers or sisters, or her mother and father.

  ‘What, you’ve known this woman for a long time, been friends with her—’

  ‘Best friends.’

  ‘And you don’t know whether she has any relatives? Don’t that strike you as strange?’

  Annie took a moment, considering this. ‘Sometimes you know when a person don’t want to talk about something. They don’t have to tell you, you just know. Dolly didn’t want to discuss her past. And I never dug around in it because I got the message loud and clear, OK?’

  ‘Would Ellie at the Shalimar know more?’ he asked.

  ‘She might . . .’

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  ‘. . . but I doubt it.’

  Hunter was silent, staring up at the Palermo Lounge’s façade. They were both getting soaked to the skin. Then he stirred and let out a sigh. ‘I’m going inside,’ he said, and moved off toward the PC standing at the door.