Carmen Moriarty had a dressing gown to keep out the cold. Even that was not hers. One of the other girls had thrown it over her in the street. She had less in the world now than she had on her first day in London.
* * *
When the police delivered her to the former address of Constance Trapwell, an irate woman opened the door. Constance Trapwell had left a year before with a small bald man in his sixties. She had moved to the south of France with him.
They took Carmen to a cell for a night while they made enquiries.
7 ∼ The Daughter of Life
SHE WALKED THE GROUNDS of the home by day, and by night they learned to lock Carmel in. That did not matter – the dreams could grow in the daytime now there was no Gomez to prevent them. No men to lie with.
Only Eddie to watch. It’s coming on grand, Eddie.
‘It will be ready, Carmel, or I will not be the man I think I am.’
She was in a place that was my mother’s harbour, and mine for a while. She wandered the gardens barefoot and was not prevented.
‘Remember to stay close to yourself,’ she whispered to me. ‘Remember what your mother forgot. When the crib is ready, we will see your father. Won’t we, Eddie? You’re too busy now.’
The old sister in charge was kind to Carmel, in a way she was not with any of the other women. The police had made it known the kind of life she had led, the kind of place where she had almost been burned alive.
And while she gathered strength I grew inside her, but I could not be held. She let me go early and I was a small and shrivelled excuse for new life. I was afraid before I was born; it travelled from my mother’s heart into mine.
I clutched to her insides, turning this way and that. When they dragged me out with forceps they dragged most of her life with me. I was cold from the long fight out of the comforting darkness and into the harsh light.
Being born too soon I shrank from the sunlight. My mother’s womb had been a dark waiting place. I would not have formed if it had not been for the dreams that led us to the places where my mother had walked freely, away from what she had become.
She lost everything in my birth. The dreams left her blood and the harsh voices remained. The colour of my skin said Eddie would not be coming for us. I would not be laid in the crib that had been finished only the previous evening.
‘One more plane, one coat of wood oil. No varnish for the child. Let the child feel the wood proper, wood is good stuff to be felt. We know that.’ Eddie was more in a hurry now than before. His desire for neatness overtaken by the desire to be done in time.
‘Don’t worry, Eddie,’ Carmel tried to rub his shoulders but they were knotted now with intent. ‘The baby can sleep with us in the big bed for a few days.’
‘That’s no place for a baby – a big bed. The child will be lost in the bigness of it. The child needs its own place, to start off in the world knowing where and what it is.’
Carmel had watched, without words, until the pains began.
They did not expect either Carmel or me to live. But my cry grew stronger and I was calling for Carmel. My mother did not hear it. She had slid down the long passageway up which I had just travelled. How and why she came back into her body is a mystery. Perhaps the heron still held her.
When she recovered I was already two months old, had been held by her only a handful of times. The voices had returned to her and my mother fought with them this time, for the sake of the child that I was.
The voices wore habits and said, ‘Do what is best for the child.’
Carmel could write her name, but she would not sign the papers that would have given me away. When my mother had me in her arms she knew she would not let this child of dark skin and unknown parentage go.
‘This child will be a liability to your life,’ the old sister in charge said gently, ‘but a blessing to others. Leave her with us and find a life of your own.’
My mother called me Sive. It came to her from a time in Scarna when a theatre company had come to the town and brought with them a woman more fine and free than any other woman had seemed.
Sive was not the name on my certificates. The nuns who ran the home we had been placed in chose that name. They changed my name just as they changed the young woman’s name from Carmen to Carmel when she first came to them.
The certificates that made me known to the world said, Mary Moriarty. Father unknown. Mother: Carmel Moriarty. Place of Birth: St Margaret’s Home, Ealing.
She was asked to leave. The nuns bid us both farewell with a heavy heart, but their conscience intact, for they could not offer her anything while she remained a woman with a child and no wedding ring.
Where else was there for us to go?
8 ∼ Back to the Streets
BACK TO THE STREETS Carmel went, back to Carmen.
Carmen’s madness protected her. The ponces did not want the woman who it was said had started a fire in Brewer Street in which one man lost his life. They did not want a woman with a child, who walked the streets now talking to herself.
‘Will you write a letter for me?’ she would ask the world.
Only the poorest and most desperate would pay for her now and since she had no place they would have her in back alleys.
We lived in a basement room, far away from the sky, with leaking pipes and a view of feet moving in the world above, unaware that eyes watched below. There was no bathroom. There was a sink from which no water ran. There was a two ring stove with one ring working. The walls were salted with damp and Carmel would stop me from putting my tongue against them. To touch anything was to be part of rot and damp – even when you did not touch, the smell came to you until you became one with it.
I was fed when Carmen remembered. Dreams came when Carmen left me tied to the cot at night and dreams untied me. In them a long thin woman, tall as life, with grey hair and black eyes watched over me as if I was her own.
In all, I should have died, but life wanted me as it had once wanted my mother. I was kept in a room below the world for the first two years of my life, except for the times when Carmen would strap me to her and walk, sometimes for miles. We sat in Soho Square and she would watch me as I played with green blades of grass that were my fascination. We picked flowers when no one looked and brought them home to our flowerless world.
As I grew, the dream lost its hold and the woman with it and I stepped into my mother’s place one day on sturdy legs that took me out of the door and up the stone steps worn down by feet before ours, into Soho. I followed my mother’s wasted legs in torn tights and shining red shoes that disappeared into the grey-black of the thickening crowd.
I cried and wandered until my cry was heard and a woman picked me up in her arms. She carried me into the café close by where her friends sat. Carmen also sat, alone.
Carmen looked up from her copper-stewed tea and took me.
‘She’s a grubby one, could do with a wash, and what is she doing on the streets?’
The woman who had carried me put spit on her thumb and leaned down to wipe my mouth.
‘I didn’t even know you had a baby, Irish.’ She smelled of the lavender sweets she sucked perpetually.
‘How would you?’ another said. ‘We don’t even know Irish’s name.’
‘You’ll have to take her home.’
Carmen shook her head and whispered, ‘Work.’
Carmen put a sugar into her cup and did not stir it. She held the cup to my lips.
‘Don’t!’ the woman who had carried me screeched. ‘It’s too hot! Sergio, get the little girl some milk, there’s a good lad. I’ll go and get a towel and wipe some of the muck off the mite’s face. Keep a child clean they’ll grow clean – no one ever tell you that, Irish?’
‘’Course not,’ another new face said. ‘Them Irish is savages – they have about ten kids apiece.’
‘That’s rich coming from you, Lulu, your mother had twelve.’
Lavender woman came back from the bathroom with a steamin
g towel. She scrubbed hard. The wail I sent up shook my own bones and lavender woman’s dusted cleavage was suddenly a prison as she pushed my face into it to get at the back of my neck with a practised hand.
‘Why is it kids the world over hate being bathed?’
‘I don’t go with that. Every one of us growing up was cleaner than this one.’
Lulu took out a compact and bothered already perfect hair rolled in a chignon. I watched her apply blood-red lipstick and smear kohl on the upper corners of her eyes. She stood up smartly and grabbed a patent leather handbag and powder-blue coat – both as new as Carmen’s were worn.
‘There she goes, Lulu – as French a fuck as anyone from Leeds called Nancy.’
Lavender woman blew smoke at Lulu. Lulu was on her way out the door when she stopped and stuck her head back in again.
‘That’s rich coming from a prostitute called Fanny.’
Sergio, a large man with hands that had no business cooking, put a baby’s bottle of milk and an almond pastry in front of me.
‘I’d best be off too,’ Fanny smiled at Carmen who did not smile, but rose herself and walked after Fanny.
‘Look, Irish, you can’t just leave the child here. Sergio has a living to make too. I’ve got to get on. We all have our own worries.’
Carmen did not move. Fanny gave her an impatient shove towards me.
‘Go on, girl, look after your own. I have four waiting at home.’
Sergio was shaking his head and the other customers were waiting on the outcome. I was eating my pastry and drinking milk.
The door opened. In came a woman tall as life, and wearing a blue-grey dress. Her hair was silver white and her eyes a glittering black, her face unlined though there were years on her. Her step was a silent one and her presence spoke loudly. I went to her as one I had known all my life and she welcomed me with the practised kindness of one who had seen me each day. Sergio went to a table in the far corner nearest the counter and began clearing it.
‘Here, Myrna,’ Fanny popped a lavender sweet in her mouth. ‘You about for a while?’
‘Yes,’ she spoke in a voice that was not loud and everyone heard.
Myrna took my hand and the world was in hers. Her skin had something past warmth and beyond cold. She led me to the table Sergio had cleared and I spent all day, and many after that watching her.
That was how I came to be known to all the women of Sergio’s Café. There were women who worked behind closed doors, there were street women and show women and then there was Carmen, who worked where no one worked. I went with her to the café each day and one or other of the women took care of me. Mostly Myrna.
The women of Soho, our increasingly bright Soho, no longer secretive but with its uses and skills displayed on garish signs that spoke of now and not tomorrow, all knew of Myrna.
Where Myrna came from no one knew. They once tried to deport her and could not, because she had no home place, no placeable accent, no relatives. She had shed all dutiful ties and links with the past. Her choices were always her choices and she could see no other way of living.
Some of the oldest colleagues and acquaintances of hers – women who had worked in the gentlemen’s clubs of the twenties and some even before that, said she had always been there and had always been alone.
What she did to survive was what they did. She went with the men. But they got nothing of her. She went with them in such a way as would make a man continue to want her for the rest of his days. They would spend a night with her and in the morning it was as if they had never been there. It made them come again, a wanting in them.
The old women of Soho remembered Myrna young. She arrived with nothing but a grey dress and shoes that were held together with two rounds of string and a small miracle. She wore nothing but grey all her life.
By the time Constance Trapwell and Carmel Moriarty had found their way to that world, Myrna’s working days were long over. But she continued to live among her own. Sergio’s was where she spent her afternoons and nights. In Sergio’s Café I watched her and I learned from her and I never knew all of her, even, in times to come, when she told me all she knew of herself. She could never tell me all she was. The details of her life do not explain the mystery. By her ways Myrna told me all she did not say was all she did not know.
Sergio’s was where the women of Soho came to discuss the business of their days and nights and to do so without fear. Sergio was that rare thing – a silent Italian who could not cook. He made up for it with warmth, comfort and plenty of tea, coffee, sandwiches and pastries. They were my food for six years.
From Sergio I learned the value of silence. When I learned to talk I also learned to stop talking, because I heard the world better then. I did not look at people, but I watched their every move.
* * *
When I close my eyes now I can see the café. I smell the cheap scent and cigarettes of the working women. I see them check themselves in the mirror over the counter as they leave and come in, a mirror that had lost its silvering over the years as the women lost their brightness, rubbed out by hard-edged lives. I hear the high chatter and low confidences. I see the dark-wood tables scraped with names and longing and the chairs with tatty cushions in bright brocade curtain material, sewn by Sergio’s long-gone wife. She had been the one to cook and make the place into a proper restaurant. He had been lost when she had left.
Sergio threw out what threatened, but he would never throw out anything his wife had made in case she came back through the door, which tinkled as it opened and shut.
I see Sergio, always with a cloth in his hand, cleaning in the way that men do – without seeing the dirt. He cleaned slowly and with thought in his eyes. He would wipe away the condensation from the half-curtained window on cold days when the women’s breath had filled the room with welcome warmth and clouded the view.
I see his balding head and large belly under a grey-white apron and the heavy arms folded when the window is wiped clear and his eyes on the street outside.
Myrna would come and stand beside him and whisper, ‘Make some more coffee.’
The café held the combined sadness of the women who worked and the man who served them. But it held their laughter and hopes too, their speculations on silver linings and sunshine around corners that, for most, never came. The women and Sergio were the first evidence I had that lost souls make good together with what they have.
When you have nothing you always have conversation. Women with little to lose, sharing what was left.
It was a kind of home.
* * *
Carmen became afraid to stay in any one place. We moved around the narrow streets, leaving no marks behind for her sake. I was eight when I put out Carmen’s first fire. She had torn the pages from a phone book.
‘The way home is here, Sive, but I can’t find it because I haven’t the right eyes.’
She put a match to her efforts. I quenched the flames quickly enough with a pan of water. It had begun.
I found food for us, washed us and dressed us from the cast-offs the other women gave me. Once more Carmen was in things not her own. I took her by the hand to the kind doctor with the soft voice and thick glasses who came once a month to clean the women up as best he could. My mother was beyond cleaning.
Fanny and Lulu prided themselves on not having need of that kind of doctor. Fanny because she only took ‘respectables’, Lulu because she only did kinky.
‘There’s no use having money for trimmings and no teeth, now, Lulu,’ Fanny warned. ‘You’re best with those who want little of it.’
‘Why is it you never mention the word sex?’ Lulu barked. ‘You’ve been working as long as I’ve known you and you never mention sex.’
‘Well, it’s not as if I enjoy it. You ever tried to feed four and clothe four kids on coupons? Well that’s how I got started. What’s your excuse?’
‘I’m just a tart,’ Lulu said in a hard way that hid the softness of her story.
&nbs
p; ‘Well, there’s no one to dispute that. When I got going I had a bed settee and five of us to sleep in it. I had two pairs of shoes for four pairs of feet and me own. Now I got a nice flat and keep it nice. I got lino, curtains, dressing table…’
‘You got clap, too.’
‘I never. All mine wear French letters or they don’t get near me.’
I watched them all from Myrna’s table. Myrna was given respect because she did not ask for it. The women all knew her to be one of their own and yet apart from them. In a place where many shared their stories Myrna did not share hers. But she told many of theirs. Myrna read cards and told fortunes by palms. The women would ask for this and more often than not Myrna would say no. Why not? the women would ask. It’s worth a few bob to you.
‘I tell the truth, you don’t want to hear the truth.’
Myrna would say nothing more, but look at Sergio. He would put a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
Myrna drank coffee black as her eyes. I tasted it once and found it bitter.
‘You are too young for such sourness,’ Myrna smiled a rare smile.
* * *
I did not have proper schooling, but one or two of the women would give me lessons. At eight I wrote and read but not well. I wrote letters for my mother, to a place she knew from memory. I wrote as much as I could of what she asked me to say to Noreen. I wrote my name, over and over, while she told me to write all I could not. When I had done writing, my mother would come close to sleep and give into it, peaceful only in those times. I would take the words and paper and hide them where she could not find them. I put my head on her lap and went to my dreams of places other than Soho. No one begins like my mother, I learned in those dreams. All are innocent.
9 ∼ Welsh Lucy’s Request
I WAS SITTING with Myrna when the young girl with the white face came in and walked straight up to Myrna.
‘Are you the one reads fortunes?’
Myrna looked at her a moment and said yes for the first time in many days. She spoke nothing for a while. The girl looked ready to run out the door, there were sweat pearls on her forehead – she rubbed her hands together, palms flat and kept looking at Sergio.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 5
