The Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  Nellie had no idea what Maura was really talking about. She knew Alice wasn’t her mother, because she called her Alice and everyone else had a mammy. She had never seen a photograph of her mammy, and yet she knew what she looked like, a lady with long red hair and a lovely smile. She was sure that she had seen her. She sometimes dreamt about her. She thought she had seen her sitting on her bed once, when she was half asleep, but when she sat up there was no one there.

  The excitement in the Doherty house on the day of the twins’ party was intense. All the kids helped to get the yard ready and move the furniture outside. By the time four o’clock arrived, the children began streaming in through the back gate in their Sunday best clothes, clutching either a bag of sweets or a plate of sandwiches or cakes. Everyone did their bit to contribute to the occasion.

  Soon the party was in full swing, the children playing and the adults chatting away, with Maura filling up cups of tea whilst trying to pull apart the boys, who had decided to box each other’s ears.

  Nellie had eaten enough. Maura had loaded her plate, whispering, ‘Fill yer boots, Queen,’ as she had sat her down at the table. Now that the plate was empty, and with no one to tell her to get down and play, Nellie knew she should stay put until everyone else had gone home and her da arrived.

  Nellie had spent hours yesterday at home alone with little to do and no one to talk to. Maura had been especially busy baking and getting ready for the party, and Jerry had felt too guilty to take Nellie across to Maura’s house. Alice never addressed a word to Nellie, so it was hard for her to sit quietly in a yard full of social activity. She climbed up onto one of the kitchen chairs placed around the table to see over the heads of the other children.

  All the adults were busy, chatting or attending to children. The sun was shining and the concrete yard floor had been washed clean of coal dust for the party. Nellie stood with her hands in front of her, smiling. With a full tummy and everyone around her chatting and laughing, she felt very happy and content.

  Looking up, she spotted the rope washing line running across the yard above her head, strung between the two dark-red brick walls. She could just about reach it, so she raised her hands to the rope and held on. She then lifted her feet up and swung, backwards and forwards, before putting them back down onto the chair. No one had noticed. She raised her hands and did it again, back and forth, back and forth.

  Harry spotted her and thought it looked like a fun game. He climbed up onto the table to join her. Two years older, Harry was twice the weight of Nellie. They both swung together, giggling, until the rope snapped and gave way, dumping them both in a heap on the yard floor. They shrieked and laughed so much they were almost out of control. Then, suddenly, Nellie threw up all down the front of her pink cardigan.

  As some of the mothers moved over to pick them up, the cry automatically went out: ‘Where’s her mammy?’

  There was an awkward moment, as no answer came back, then Maura rushed forward. Scooping Nellie up, she said very firmly, ‘I’m her mammy today, aren’t I, Queen?’ as she removed the jumble-sale cardigan and wiped Nellie’s face.

  Maura’s neighbour of next door but one, Deirdra, a slovenly woman from Tipperary who had only arrived on the four streets two years ago, tutted and shook her head. ‘You have enough with your own to look after, without one more to add to your troubles. Where’s that Alice woman? Is she not interested in the child?’

  Nellie heard this and a feeling of aching loneliness settled in the pit of her stomach. Maura sensed this and glared at Deirdra, hissing, ‘Hush yer mouth, why don’t ye, and look after yer own breed, before commenting on others people’s.’

  Suddenly, a lump came into Nellie’s throat. She felt acutely alone. Different from everyone else. Why did everyone regard her with such pity in their eyes? Why did the other mothers look at her and then tut and whisper to each other? Why did she have no mammy to talk to about what she had done that day? She wanted someone to say about her, ‘God, that child is driving me mad,’ but all day no one spoke about Nellie. No one told her off for being naughty, or praised her for being good. In a confined space full of mothers and children, even as young as she was, she knew she was invisible.

  With a pain in her heart and tightness in her chest, she missed the mammy whom she sometimes saw but had never known. She pressed her head tightly into Maura’s shoulder. She didn’t want Harry, who was staring at her intently, to see the tears that had suddenly sprung into her eyes and that she couldn’t stop from pouring silently down her cheeks. For the first time since the day she was born, she cried for her mammy, Bernadette.

  They heard the noise first: a wailing on the wind that began to filter through and fragment their conversations. It was an audible static that hurt their ears and sent the dogs yelping down the street. And then, rapidly, the wailing became a sudden fierce gale, rising from the surface of the Mersey and taking the water upwards with it, blasting in across the docks and up the steps. On its way it shifted cranes, rocked ships and knocked over piles of stacked-up timber. It scooped up the dust from the bombed-out wasteland that surrounded the four streets and, like a plague of small flies, the dust swarmed ferociously into the centre of the street.

  It wrapped itself around the children playing in the yard, blowing into their ears and up their noses and sending them running to bury their heads in their mothers’ aprons. It hit the eyes of the women and filled their mouths with dust, making them choke and splutter, and covered their bodies like a brown shroud. Dragging their children along with them, they abandoned the party and idle gossip to run inside and wash the dust out of their mouths and off their skin.

  The storm carried on its crest a dead mother’s heartache and whilst Maura rubbed Nellie’s back and whispered gently into her hair, ‘There, there, now,’ it found its way between them both and mingled its tears with Nellie’s own.

  Chapter Nine

  The morning after the party, Nellie woke and sat bolt upright in bed, worried, bleary-eyed, rigid. She did the same thing every morning. Her attention focused on the noises coming from the kitchen. She listened hard for the sound of ashes being riddled, or a shovel of coal being thrown into the range. If she awoke to silence, she would put her ear flat to the cold wall at the side of her bed, concentrating hard, in order to hear better. Once she heard the falling clatter of coal upon brick which let her know Jerry was downstairs, she threw herself back on the pillow and, with her arms straight by her sides, closed her eyes and breathed a loud sigh of deep relief.

  ‘Thank you, Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ she whispered, and crossed herself. Maura said she should do this, every morning, and Nellie had, as always, taken her words to heart.

  After her morning prayer, she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, then, with dramatic urgency, she cast aside the blankets, threw herself out of bed and pattered across the cold red linoleum of her bedroom floor. The lino was patterned with large bunches of white, pink and yellow roses, tied together with a green bow, which Nellie used to hop across like islands in a red sea.

  When she was a baby, toddling across the lino one morning to Jerry, he had said, ‘Quickly now, before Jack Frost gets ye.’ Startled, she looked behind her to see what he meant. There was nothing and no one there. Nellie assumed Jack Frost must live under her bed, as she could see nowhere else for him to be.

  She had never forgotten those words and since that day, every morning as her feet first touched the floor, she was done for. Now that she knew where he lived, there was no escaping him. Jack Frost would reach out from under the bed where he hid all night and seize her little feet, freezing her to the spot. He would wrap himself around her calves, making Nellie gasp as, just for a second, not satisfied with just her small limbs, he took her breath away too.

  Grabbing her breath back, with a squeal that she tried hard to suppress, she flew lightfooted towards the bedroom door, scared to creak a floorboard or bang a door, thereby waking Alice. The thought of Alice spread icy tendrils up from her calves
into the pit of her stomach. She mustn’t wake Alice.

  It was very important for Nellie to catch Jerry in the mornings. If Alice chose to stay in bed, she would forget about Nellie, who would then have to stay in her room, without food and with a rumbling, empty belly, until Alice fetched her, which sometimes could be very late in the day. This distressed Nellie as she needed the outhouse and often had to sneak out in fear of being heard or caught by Alice. Home was a menacing place when Jerry wasn’t there.

  From the first day Alice had moved in, almost every minute that Jerry was out of the house was a minute Nellie spent in her room, alone. In the early months, she would be left in her bed all day. Alice would leave her with bread and a drink to feed herself with, and walk out. Sometimes Nellie would cry for hours, until her tears became a whimper. After a while, she learnt that crying was pointless. Crying achieved nothing. It made no difference whatsoever, other than to make her sick, and so she stopped and became quiet. At the end of each day, Alice would bring her down an hour before Jerry arrived home. She would change the soaked nappy and put her straight back into her nightdress, before bringing her downstairs, plonking her onto a kitchen chair with a crust of bread in her hand, just in time for her da to walk in through the door.

  When Nellie started talking, Alice laid down the boundaries of behaviour she expected from her stepdaughter. One morning Alice squatted down on the kitchen floor, her face level with Nellie’s, and said, ‘I just want you to know, little madam, that when your father is out, you don’t speak until you are spoken to. Don’t ever speak to me first, unless I ask you to. Do you get that?’

  Alice spat the words out with such venom that Nellie was speechless. The fire in the range was burning high behind Alice’s back, the flames licking and dancing, an orange and yellow burst of light in the otherwise gloomy room. Nellie’s imagination ran away with her. She knew she was in danger. The thought went through her mind that if she said the wrong thing Alice might throw her in the fire. She thought she would be all burnt up, like the potato peelings, and her da wouldn’t know where she was or be able to find her.

  Alice terrified her. She did exactly as she was told and spoke only when her da was in the room, but each and every time she did, she cast a sideways glance at Alice, just to make sure it was OK, and Alice was always, without fail, staring at Nellie with a blank face. Only her eyes carried any expression and they were saying a great deal to Nellie.

  Sometimes, Jerry would leave for the docks and work through for a straight twenty-four hours. This was hard for Nellie, although it did mean that even though he was in bed, recovering the following day, her da was at home. His being in the house made an enormous difference, for Nellie lived two lives. The one her da and Auntie Maura knew about, and the one she had to keep secret.

  Nellie never really surprised Jerry when she opened the kitchen door in the mornings. He always expected her, although he never woke her, preferring to wait until the fire was lit and the kitchen had warmed. For more months of the year than not, Jerry could see his own breath indoors. It appeared to him as though Nellie had some form of sixth sense, because every morning, just as the fire was lit and the crystallized icy flakes slowly began to melt away from the inside of the window-pane, Nellie would walk in through the door, eyes still full of night-time dreams, clutching her old teddy. Jerry had no idea what a punctual alarm clock his morning routine was. It made all the comforting morning sounds Nellie loved to hear. It never altered and provided her with a familiar morning song to wake up to.

  One morning she had come down and he wasn’t there, despite the fact that she had heard all the usual wake-up sounds. She hadn’t known what to do. Disappointment washed over her, as tears began to flow and she began to sob. A morning without breakfast and a cuddle from her da was indeed miserable, as she might not eat again until the evening. Suddenly, the back door flew open and her da came in with the coal scuttle in his hand. As soon as he saw her, he placed it on the floor and ran over to her, lifting her up into his arms and hugging her.

  ‘Shush now, princess, what is up with ye?’ he soothed. She never replied and he never knew, but now, in the mornings if he went outside for coal, no matter how cold it was, he left the back door open so that she would know where he had gone.

  This morning, as Nellie tiptoed down the landing, Jerry opened the first tap for running water, and she heard the cistern clank and the lead pipes play a tune that was more suited to a game of musical railway sidings than a domestic water supply. She stopped dead in her tracks, terrified that the sound would wake Alice and that she would be trapped outside her door. With a sharp inward gasp, she swiftly covered her mouth with her hand so that Alice couldn’t hear her breathe. If Alice did wake, she mustn’t know Nellie was there. She willed herself to be invisible as well as silent, believing this could be achieved by squeezing her eyes tight shut.

  Once the water began to flow and the clanks subsided, Nellie opened her eyes and breathed again. She tiptoed stealthily down the wooden stairs, skipping the next to last one at the bottom, which always yelled out in protest as soon as it was stepped on.

  As soon as she opened the kitchen door, her eyes alighted upon Jerry and she took her thumb out of her mouth, smiled her beaming smile and ran across the cold stone floor to hug him.

  ‘Good morning, my beautiful colleen,’ he said, swinging her up in his arms and lifting her above his head. ‘One, two, three,’ he shouted, and then threw her six inches into the air. ‘By Jaysus,’ he puffed, ‘I won’t be doing that for much longer, I’ll be hitting the roof, so I will, and sending the tiles flying into Harrington Road, yer getting such a big girl.’

  She hugged his neck, and he breathed in the scent of her hair, just the same as her mother’s. He savoured the moment, as he closed his eyes, rocking her slowly from side to side, hugging her tight. Nellie closed her eyes too. They both remained quiet, locked in their special moment until they felt her join them, as she nearly always did. They both felt the intensity of the love that flowed and wrapped itself around them, holding them tightly together and lasting for just a minute. Then it was gone as quickly as it came. But it never failed them; it was always there.

  After crashing the range doors once he had put his rashers of Irish bacon and sliced tatties in the oven, Jerry started dancing around the kitchen with Nellie, as he did almost every morning, holding one of her hands out to the side as if they were waltzing. Some mornings Nellie left after him for school, but her weekends were just like the early years with Alice had been, lonely.

  Jerry sang at the top of his voice, accompanying Cliff Richard on the red and grey Roberts radio, as he swirled her around the kitchen, and she began to giggle. He never seemed to be in the slightest bit scared about waking Alice.

  When they finished dancing, he filled a bowl with milk and water, dropped four or five cobs of bread into it with a sprinkling of sugar and popped it into the range oven with his rashers. If Nellie didn’t have her breakfast and milk with her da in the morning, she might go all day without food, but she would never tell him that, because Alice had told her not to. She might also have a bit of bacon and tatties, if she hurried and finished her bowl first. She made sure she hurried.

  Jerry took his breakfast and Nellie’s ‘pobs’ from the range and placed them on the dark wooden table. Jerry had loved the yellow table he and Bernadette had saved for and bought together. Now, he and Nellie sat on Alice’s very cumbersome oak chairs with dark brown leather seat pads. Jerry and Nellie called them chairs; Alice called them ladder-backs.

  At least the bright yellow table had gone to Maura and Tommy, who had been delighted beyond words. They had too many children ever to be able to afford anything new in the way of furniture. Everything they owned was falling to bits. Maura had cried the day he and Tommy carried the table into their kitchen along with the four modern chairs, with spindle chrome legs and plastic seats and backs, covered in the same pattern as the Formica table. It was bright yellow with a design that looked
as if someone had scattered a box of grey matches over the top. Maura wrote to her relatives in Mayo and told them it was time they came for a visit. She wanted them to report back to her relatives and friends in the village how prosperous Maura and Tommy were in England and how good the wages must be, if they could afford a Formica table.

  Once Jerry and Nellie sat down to their breakfast together, the chatter began. Nellie’s chatter, that is. Jerry could never get a word in edgeways. She talked and rambled non-stop. Sometimes she almost made him late, a disaster for a docker. Work was on a first come, first served basis and it was getting harder to be taken on each day.

  This morning, the tide was out and Jerry had an extra half-hour. It was Sunday and there was no school for Nellie. From the upstairs window he could see out across the river. He knew, from having popped into the dock office the day before, which boats were expected in and he could see the tugs and pilots weren’t moving out yet.

  ‘Let’s play a game, shall we,’ he said to Nellie. He didn’t often get time to romp about with her. There was no Alice up and making demands on his attention, so why not? Nellie was squealing and jumping up and down on the spot.

  Eager to make her happy, Jerry remembered a game Nellie had played at Maura’s at the weekend and said, ‘I have an idea. Why don’t we make a den?’

  Nellie could not believe her ears and was beside herself with excitement. Jerry took her into the living room and they pulled out the dark oak sideboard, which was normally flush with the wall, and put it across the corner of the room. Jerry lifted her over the top, so she was in the triangle-shaped space, and then pulled the sideboard away and squeezed in himself.

  The sideboard was another of Alice’s possessions. Again, it was too large for the room but it was her pride and joy and she polished it every day.

  Nellie and her da played in the den, pretending that they were in a cave and that out in the living room were lots of wild animals they had to hide from. They both had to go into the kitchen to fetch essential supplies for the den, dodging the imaginary wild animals.