‘He safe?’
Myrna nodded.
‘I’m Lucy. Welsh Lucy the girls in my building calls me, as distinct from the French girl. I come here because they told me you could help me with my work. I’m not doing it the right way.’
Welsh Lucy’s whole body was shaking. I stared at her.
‘Tell the child to stop looking at me.’
Myrna looked at Lucy and said, ‘I can tell you what to do with the men and it won’t do you any good. You’re not cut from the cloth that’s suited, Lucy. Go off somewhere.’
‘What sort are you anyway? I need to have some lessons to do what I do better. That’s all. Will you tell me what to do?’ Welsh Lucy urged. ‘Or do I have to go on myself trying?’
‘Take the child to another table, Sergio.’
Sergio moved me and Myrna spoke in a long, low voice to Welsh Lucy. They talked for a while and when Lucy left she was not shaking. But I saw the shadow with Lucy and I ran to Myrna and pointed to it.
‘You see it?’ Myrna asked. I nodded.
‘Then you have the eyes.’
Myrna drank more coffee that day than any other and spoke no more words. I played with the sugar grains, pouring them down my sleeve and piling them back into the sugar bowl. I reached for Myrna’s sleeve to do the same and she caught at me and I would have shrieked but I was silent on that day, as I was on all days.
‘You remember the eyes of Welsh Lucy, Sive. Eyes full of shadow. You remember,’ she hissed. ‘When you see eyes in your head like that then remember this: it is best to walk away from all you have known, with nothing to remain or remind. Get ready to leave, Sive, leaving is upon you.’
* * *
Two months later Welsh Lucy’s body, a knife through her young heart not yet hardened, was found in the kind of laneway that had seen it all before, opposite Sergio’s Café. The police had been crawling around all day and reporters were slipping women a few quid for stories about Welsh Lucy that may or may not have been true. When there was a murder, in those days there was a stir. The women gathered in Sergio’s and talked rapidly and smoked as much, sucking life and calm from cigarettes, and put off going to work.
‘What we have to do!’ Fanny broke her lavender sweet hard against her back teeth and pulled on the cigarette harder. ‘Take my last punter. There’s him sweating like a pig and me panting and the business finally done. When it’s over he says, “I hate people like you.” Don’t know why, but I burst into tears. The old bastard got to me!’
‘They all hate us,’ Lulu rooted in her handbag. ‘He’s only saying what they all think. They hate us because they need us. That’s why you get them to pay before – once the need is gone so is the will to pay for it. And they’re strange buggers. I’ve no respect for any man has to pay for it with me.’
‘What about your fishy fella, Lulu?’ Fanny urged as Lulu struck a match like she was striking out all the ones who’d had her and would have her again.
‘Well,’ Lulu lit her cigarette and poked it into a pearlescent holder. ‘He brings up a big salmon in an ice box and gets me to whack him with it on the arse. It’s frozen solid at the start and by the end the smell of it would put you off all fish, even caviar.’
‘I had caviar once,’ Fanny laughed. ‘Tasted like snot.’
‘What we need is for rich men with bad eyesight to love us out of all this,’ Fanny spoke as if no one was there at all. ‘We need some of Myrna’s stuff.’
‘You need to find the man first before Myrna can do anything,’ Lulu reminded. ‘Personally speaking, I wouldn’t be bothered loving a man who paid me. But I’d marry a rich one all right. Loving and marrying – two different things.’
I had seen Myrna take the hopes of more than one woman seriously and turn them into reality. I had heard a woman tell Myrna of a man who had been brought to her, a shy man, too old for his first time, but his first it was. Could Myrna read her cards and tell her if he would come back?
Myrna had taken the cards from the wooden box and unwrapped them from the piece of cloth. I watch her hands shuffle, long fine rivers of fingers flowing through the pack. No rings on them, no marks of anyone or thing but herself.
The woman picked some on Myrna’s request. Myrna spread them and read, looked up from them and smiled.
‘You’ll have him. When he comes back to you it will be for you. Give him some of this,’ she reached into her bag and pulled out a small bag of powder, ‘in a glass of whatever he is drinking.’
The woman thanked her all the way out and was not seen again on the streets.
Carmen came to the café door and called for me. I went out the door, pushing past Lulu who patted me on the head and tried to plant a kiss on it, but I shrugged it away.
‘She’s getting stranger,’ Lulu said, miffed at being snubbed in front of everyone.
‘She doesn’t look eight, with those big green eyes looking back at you.’
Myrna said, ‘Not much longer for her now.’
10 ∼ All Small beside Him
THE CAFÉ HAD the quiet of Welsh Lucy’s death about it when the man who had to stoop to come through its front door entered. Sergio was small beside him, all were small beside him.
The man put hands on Sergio’s counter.
Words were spoken. Sergio looked at him a long while and finally pointed to one of the stools and poured him a coffee. The women sniggered at him sitting on the stool – an ostrich on a canary perch – then again at his wincing on the roughness of the coffee.
Black, he took it, no sugar. After one mouthful he spooned a heap in and stirred. He continued to murmur to Sergio – long, slow and deep – like thunder in the far off distance.
I watched the man, as near to a mountain as I had seen. His hair was brown with strands of silver grey and his long neck ran out of it and down into shoulder blades that stood sharp against the cream shirt he wore.
He turned away from Sergio only once, to glance at the surroundings in a way that left the women out of them. I needed only one moment to catch the eyes – their blue not like anything I have seen before or since. Almost black this blue was, the colour of dark sapphires.
‘Photographs,’ he said the word to Sergio.
Sergio shook his head. The place had been full of photographers since the death of Lucy. But this man was different; otherwise Sergio would have shown him out the way he had shown all others.
The women sniffed money and asked for it.
The giant said no. He did not pay. He was here for a story on Welsh Lucy and the women she worked with. Myrna came in and Sergio beckoned to her. I went up to the giant man behind her.
‘Perhaps,’ she was saying, ‘you could tell us your name?’
‘Thomas Cave.’
‘The women work, Thomas. It would be good to give them something in return.’
Thomas Cave shook his head.
‘If I pay then you do what I want, rather than what you want yourselves.’
He pushed away the coffee cup, emptied at great pains to himself and thought, slowly, as if the world would end in moving quickly. His skin was a light tan. He would be fair on most days of the year away from sun.
‘I could,’ he offered, ‘buy you all lunch.’
The sunlight came at the same moment and fell on the giant who had come to make my world so small. His voice was calm in his dealings, but I watched the backs of his hands placed on the counter, the skin raised on them, light fighting through the white hairs, standing on end. If he had lifted those hands they would have been shaking. He did not lift them.
‘Lunch,’ Myrna said, ‘would be delightful.’
The women she turned to did not reply. Sergio’s lunches were not famous for being eaten. More women left than stayed and the giant seemed content with that. He had once had chestnut-brown hair and it had lightened to grey. I wanted to touch it to know what made the rivers of colour run their way.
The giant Thomas Cave was not for touching or talking. He ate with us at Myrna’
s table, before photographs. I watched him and he asked, ‘Who is the child?’
‘She is Sive.’
He did not do the small talk adults insist on using with children.
‘Where did you get your green eyes?’
I looked away from him.
‘From the same place as her mother. The same place you come from,’ Myrna spoke.
Thomas Cave’s turn to look away. He did not discuss himself. Where, he asked, after a while, did Myrna come from?
‘Here,’ she said as if there were nowhere else.
The giant Thomas Cave held his knife and fork awkwardly; they were too small instruments for such hands. After lunch he got his camera and behind it he was a different man. The giant’s awkward presence smoothed into invisibility. The women forgot he was there; he was patient in letting them forget him. They talked among themselves, did their coming and their going.
I did not forget – I watched all he was as he worked. And Myrna watched me. The hands that held knife and fork so clumsily were deft with this black box, small as a toy in his hands, but part of them.
He passed it to me once, when he felt my eyes on him.
‘Look.’
I saw all I needed to know about my world. Carmen came and he put her beside me and we shared our green eyes with him, we were the only two he asked to look directly at the camera. Myrna turned black eyes on him, but not on his lens, and said it was the first time she had allowed her image to be taken away from her. He said that he was privileged. The reluctant subjects eased into the work he did with them. Sergio put his arms on the counter and leaned into a smile.
Thomas Cave took all we offered. Then he was gone. With his camera he could make an almost unseen exit so unlike his cumbersome entrance. Only Myrna and myself watched his departure and took his thanks. Myrna put her hands on my shoulders, said, ‘Watch, Sive, for when he comes through your door again.’
* * *
Six weeks later photographs arrived of all of us, bar Myrna. A note from Thomas Cave said her image could not be taken from her as it had refused to develop. The days came and went the same way, Welsh Lucy and Thomas Cave forgotten but for the photographs pinned to the mirror behind Sergio’s counter.
11 ∼ Noreen, by Way of Dreams
A WOMAN I did not know came to us by way of dreams. Before they and she came to me, Fanny Martin and I were sitting in Sergio’s Café. The rain coming down too hard for the punters to be about, Fanny’s talk was as full, as the rain. I pointed to the place where Myrna always sat and Fanny said, ‘Well, we all want to know more about her. What I learned about Myrna from her own mouth I could write on a postcard. But I know her. There’s two kinds of women, Sive, women that do this work out of need, that’s me and most of the girls in here. Then there’s the women who do it out of choice. Myrna belongs with them. She’s no tart, but she’s too fond of freedom for the times she was born in.
‘She couldn’t settle and in our days, not yours, women who didn’t settle had no life. She could have married any man she pleased and it didn’t please her. I know she was born with nothing, because she’s left with it now. I know she lived with gypsies for a time because of her potion-making. I know she learned that from them, because one called to Sergio’s once, begging, and Myrna spoke to her in the gypsy tongue. Mind you, she speaks more than gypsy, she speaks—’ Fanny broke off, suddenly unwilling to continue before adding, ‘There are girls round here who turned into old ladies and into gravestones and Myrna’s still alive. There are some who think, and I’m one of them, that Myrna’s lived forever.’
The door tinkled and Fanny sensed it was Myrna, even though her back was to it.
‘Well,’ Fanny said. ‘Wet enough for you?’
‘Have you been boring the child?’ Myrna asked Fanny.
‘No, Sive likes to hear the old stories.’
‘Do you think, Sive,’ Myrna asked quietly, ‘that you would like to come for a walk with me?’
I took Myrna’s hand and we walked out into waiting Soho.
‘I take this walk most days before I come to the café. It’s a walk you will like, Sive, a walk into the past. All places are somewhere different before they become what they are. They move on to become somewhere different. Just like people, Sive. Like you and I. You and I will be very different in the years to come,’ she said, as we walked down Berwick Street. The doorways to Soho were doorways to worlds of many choices and the same end.
‘What happens here,’ Myrna said as we walked along, ‘is the same as happens anywhere else. All you have to do is look to see the same stories told time after time. Mine is just the same as yours, Sive. It’s started somewhere else and has ended up here. This place has more than its fair share of past.’
She stopped at a fruit stall and picked two bright red apples, bloody with ripeness. She bit firmly into hers.
‘Soho has sold everything from the apple to Eve herself. Life is for sale here, Sive, and death in some places. This is life, Sive, this is how you must learn to treat it. Be fierce with it and it will not beat you, be tender with it and it will not harm you. At each moment you will be told what is the right way to take hold of life. Listen well and do only what your heart tells you. Do only as you please. There is no other way of living unless you prefer death as life.’
She put her hands on my shoulders.
‘You are a great find, Sive. Don’t be afraid of ghosts, they only appear to the living they find worthwhile. The ghosts will come to you, Sive, because your eyes invite them. One day, when I am long gone, you will remember that.’
Myrna and I walked on. I was given in those hours and that talk a sense of all that could be done with a future. I wanted to rise up and out.
Myrna saw the stir in me and she smiled at it. We walked back to the familiar café.
‘You can walk between two worlds, Sive, but you’re best off picking one. If ever you need me I’ll come to you in dreams,’ were Myrna’s last words to me before we went through Sergio’s door.
* * *
My first memory of my grandmother Noreen was that she filled the room early one morning in a big green hat with a yellow band. She came by way of dreams – with hope of mending what had been long broken.
* * *
Carmen and I had found our way from the room under the earth to a room near the sky. But it was my sky now. I sat at the open window and stared at it and was a part of it. My mother Carmen did not look at it.
The woman who lived in the flat below had been growing a sunflower in a window box. I had watched it reaching up for our window and each day I strained to touch it, but the wind snapped its life in two before that.
‘Did you take the sunflower?’ I thought, when I opened the door to Noreen.
‘I am glad you like my hat.’ Noreen said, in answer to my stare. ‘Can I come in?’
I let her enter the room, not like me, who ran from strangers in the same way my mother went towards them.
Carmen had not been home that night. Noreen sat in my watchful silence.
‘Where is she then?’ she asked.
She did not expect an answer. She looked down at her feet, which were swollen in the new shoes. Her ankles had no shape, they were straight lines pinched into the cutting edges of leather. She was a big woman again, but she perched on our chair as if she was small.
‘Are you hungry, child?’ she asked after a long while. ‘I know I am.’
The key finally turned in the door. Carmen did not recognize Noreen under her hat.
‘Mammy,’ she said, after long minutes at the door with the cold wind of the day travelling up the stairs behind her. Noreen removed her sunflower hat to reveal a sweat-drenched scalp covered with hair that had grown grey and thinned and in places come away altogether. It was the only part of her that had given way to Joseph Moriarty and lost.
‘Mammy,’ Carmen cried softly.
‘Carmel.’
Noreen watched her and said the name and did not draw close. She knew L
ondon had been no kinder to her than the homeplace had been. ‘I would have written to say I was coming, but you didn’t give me an address.’ Noreen began the talk with the distance between them.
‘How did you find us?’
‘An old woman in a café told me the place. I would have cooked a breakfast for the child, but she wasn’t keen. The child needs a wash, as do you.’
‘How did you find us, Mammy?’
‘By asking. I found the letters last month, one of them was Hammersmith and the other few were postmarked Shepherd Market. I went to Shepherd Market and found out what they do there. Then I was told to come here. I asked until I was told.’ Noreen spoke with a softness that did not hide the shake in her voice. ‘The child won’t tell me her name.’
Noreen almost could not face what she had come to face. That is why she had bought the summer hat. Even though it was autumn it was brightness she needed.
‘That’s Sive – go for bread, Sive,’ Carmen told me.
I did not want to leave. I hovered by the door while Carmen fished about in her purse. A crumple of well-worn notes, each with their separate story, fell to the floor. Noreen put her head in her hands.
‘Sive, take the pound note and count the change like I told you. Go to the Italian baker. You can’t trust the Italians, Mammy; they’d rob the eyes out of your head. You can’t trust anyone round here.’
Carmen’s voice and her eyes were moving rapidly around the room, her breath was short. I went to her side.
‘Go on, love!’
My spindly limbs were pushed out the door. But I waited in the hall for a while. I heard the big woman’s voice.
‘She’s very small for eleven.’
‘She’s eight. The other baby’s gone.’
‘Gone where? You said in the letter “gone”, too. Gone where?’
‘Dead.’
Noreen sighed.
‘I didn’t get the letters until last month. Your father had hidden them. She’s not going to burn in the sun like her mother, is she?’
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 6
