The Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  Alice’s behaviour had become questionable from almost the minute they had married, although even he recognized it was getting much worse. She appeared to have huge difficulty in relating to Nellie, or to anyone, for that matter, other than Jerry. She had been different when they had first met, but not so much as to raise any real concern. Now, he felt her behaviour was deteriorating by the day. Still, on balance, he reassured himself, at least she was still managing to look after Nellie when she wasn’t at Maura’s. If he wasn’t working, God knows what would happen to them.

  When he reached this point, he always comforted himself with the thought that he couldn’t have carried on the way he had been for much longer, struggling as a single father. If he had, someone would surely have reported him to the authorities.

  Sometimes he thought that if he had managed to survive on his own until now, it might have become easier. Nellie was at school during the day. Her baby days were over, it was all so much easier now. Maura could have looked after Nellie after school and at weekends; he would have willingly paid her for that, if she had let him, and he could have paid Margaret O’Flynn in number eight to do a bit of cleaning. She had offered more than once. Why hadn’t his head been clearer at the time? How had he let things get on top of him in the way they had? He had been swamped by grief. Unable to make a decision, or to think straight. What a mess.

  Anyway, here they were now, him and his girl, and weren’t they just getting on grand. He and his princess shared a lot of laughs and love, and that couldn’t be bad.

  When Jerry arrived home in the evenings, only Nellie knew that Alice was lying when she recounted Nellie’s imaginary day to Jerry. He would often listen, in an absent-minded way, as he was removing his boots or having a wash-down at the kitchen sink. Sometimes Nellie’s eyes would fill with tears and her bottom lip would tremble uncontrollably in relief at the sight of him. When that happened, Jerry would almost immediately notice. One evening, though, when he didn’t notice Nellie’s tears, he was taken by surprise.

  He thought he had felt Nellie pull at his sleeve but when he looked, she was standing on the other side of the room by the door, looking at him with eyes about to spill over. He stared at his arm questioningly. He had felt a strong, firm tug on the cuff of his jacket; not once, but twice. Firm and decisive.

  Once again, the temperature in the room had dropped. This was something that happened often, without reason. The fire could be blazing hot and yet he would feel the warmth in the room evaporate as though it were icy outdoors, even on a warm and sunny day, and then rise again just as quickly.

  Without hesitation, he walked over to Nellie and picked her up. Although she was getting bigger, he lifted her onto the draining board so that she could sit next to him and watch him, whilst he washed away the grime and dirt from a day’s dusty hard labour. He didn’t ask her why she had tears in her eyes. He didn’t dare.

  He knew someone had pulled his jacket cuff. He also knew no one else was anywhere near. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. He knew it was Bernadette. He felt she had never left the house and that she was there, watching them both.

  On a clear night, he would often leave Alice listening to the radio and step out into the yard. He would look up at the sky, pick out his star and talk to Bernadette.

  ‘Hey now, she’s OK… I’m looking after her and she’s gonna make ye really proud one day. We both miss you… loads and, God knows, I still love you, only you.’

  He managed to go on only because Bernadette could still be seen daily, twinkling in the navy sky, reflected in the street puddles and on the Mersey, flowing pink on heavy summer nights.

  Jerry sighed heavily, and went indoors to Alice.

  That night, Jerry went into Nellie’s room and sat on the edge of her bed to say goodnight. Nellie rubbed the back of her da’s hand with her finger and traced the blue veins that ran from his arm up to the base of his large stubby fingers. She pressed each thick, knobbly vein down with her finger and pushed the blood slowly out, watching it spring back and fill as she lifted her finger off. She picked up her da’s hand and pressed his palm into her face, inhaling the smell of molasses, grain and jute.

  Jerry studied her. She had no words for him, but absorbed and distracted herself with his hands. He noticed her bed was damp. He smelt something in the room he didn’t like. Was it fear?

  When he bent down to kiss her goodnight on the top of her head, she buried her face in his chest and clasped her hands tightly around his neck. She inhaled the smell of toil and labour, sweat and dust. He saw a scalp that, like his own, was red raw.

  As Jerry left her room, he knew it was time to act. He was out of his depth. He had noticed her flinch as he tucked the blanket in around the top of her arms. She was too thin. As he held her, he could feel her ribs digging into him. Her eyes looked haunted and had great black shadows underneath them.

  Something was seriously wrong.

  It was time to put his pride on the back burner.

  Later that night, when Alice had gone to bed, he sat down at the kitchen table with a paper and a pen and wrote to the only woman he knew who could help.

  Chapter Ten

  A week later, while she was playing out on the green with Harry after school, Nellie stopped in her tracks. A lady walking down the street seemed to be looking over towards them. She looked familiar, but Nellie didn’t know why. She was stout and well fed, which made her stand out; most of the women on the four streets were thin. Everyone Nellie knew in her life was right here, within fifty yards. The lady was wearing a black hat, with grey curls poking out, and a long black coat, with three buttons at the top and a velvet collar, that went almost all the way down to the floor and she carried a large bag. Nellie saw her stop and talk to Peggy and Sheila, who were chatting on the front step, then Peggy pointed straight at Nellie.

  As the lady turned round, Nellie immediately knew she was kind; she could tell by her round rosy cheeks and the fact that she hadn’t stopped smiling since Nellie and Harry had spotted her.

  ‘Why is Auntie Peggy pointing at me, Harry?’ said Nellie. Every parent on the street was known as auntie or uncle to all the children.

  ‘I dunno, Nellie,’ said Harry, who automatically walked over and took Nellie’s hand. That was Harry’s job in life, to protect Nellie. ‘That’s a big bag, maybe she has some sweets in it,’ he said, his voice high with expectation. They both stared as the lady came straight over to the two of them. Harry squeezed Nellie’s hand tightly.

  ‘Hello, Nellie,’ said the lady. ‘I’m your Nana Kathleen and I’ve come over from Ireland to stay and help you and your daddy.’

  Nellie grinned. In her little mind, this meant Alice would be going and she was very excited. Nellie didn’t remember Kathleen from when she was a baby, but when they were having their breakfast Jerry always read out the blue airmail letters that arrived every couple of weeks. It was like having a new chapter of a book read, each time one arrived. Nellie dreamt of visiting Ireland. Of riding her daddy’s donkey, Jacko, and of meeting her uncles and seeing the river her daddy and her Grandad Joe had poached the salmon from. She could see it all in her mind’s eye and she knew she was in love with Ireland, before she had ever even been.

  Sometimes, when he’d finished reading out the letter, her da would tell her about her grandad and her nana, and the people who lived on the farms and ran the pub and the shops. Some of the stories made her laugh so much that she made him tell them to her over and over again. She loved to hear how the priest had drunk so much Guinness in the village pub one Saturday night that the following Sunday morning he was found, fast asleep, propped up against a headstone in the graveyard. He was still so drunk, he couldn’t take the mass. Cuddled up next to him was Mulligan’s pig, which had also been lost and had stuck close to the priest for warmth.

  ‘I’m not sure who smelt the worst,’ said her da, ‘the priest, from the Guinness, or the pig!’

  The story never failed to make Nellie squeal wit
h laughter. Even though she had never been to Bangornevin or Ballymara, she imagined the scene, just as it had happened.

  Nellie threw her arms around Kathleen’s legs and cried. Nana Kathleen had come. This was the happiest day of her little life.

  Nellie hadn’t managed to hide her bruises from Jerry. He had seen the fingerprint marks on the top of her arms and noticed that the skin on her bright-red scalp was now the same colour as her hair. It was not an unusual occurrence on the four streets for kids to be given a good hiding for misbehaving, and as a child Jerry had received many a whacking himself from his own da. But with a girl it was different, and Jerry knew Nellie hadn’t a bad or naughty bone in her body. Whatever Alice had hit her for, it wouldn’t have been deserved. He also shared Maura’s concerns at how skinny she was.

  ‘Jaysus, Jerry, I’ve seen more meat on Murphy’s pencil!’ she frequently said to him, and she was right. Jerry couldn’t understand it, as he had always believed that Alice fed her well.

  Jerry had taken Nellie to Maura’s every day since the night she had silently traced the veins on the back of his hand and he had seen her angry red scalp as he bent to kiss the top of her head. He hadn’t said anything to Nellie, but she didn’t complain about being taken. In fact, when he told her at breakfast, she began to cry, but she was laughing at the same time. This disturbed him. Clearly, Nellie didn’t want to be in the house alone with Alice. When she arrived home from school, she went back to Maura’s with Kitty and he called to collect her.

  Jerry had acknowledged that he was sinking.

  ‘I’m just a simple man and I’m struggling here,’ he had confided to Maura and Tommy in the past. But now, he had taken action and, when Jerry told Maura what he had done, she also laughed and cried together with relief.

  Once Maura knew that Jerry had written to send for Kathleen, she waited ’til Jerry and Tommy had gone to work and the kids were packed off to school, then out came the mops banging like jungle drums on the kitchen walls up and down the street. The women ran like mice up the entry, carrying children in their arms, curlers bobbing under scarves, some in slippers and not yet even dressed, with ciggies thrust into coat or apron pockets, to gather in Maura’s kitchen and hear the news and each drink a bucket of tea.

  Once Kathleen appeared on the scene, Nellie quickly realized that Alice wasn’t going anywhere, after all, but things in the house altered dramatically. Alice accepted Kathleen’s arrival meekly, and soon became almost subservient to her. Kathleen had a way with her. It was of no consequence to Kathleen that Alice was a Protestant, or that she had been married in a register office.

  ‘What’s done can’t be undone, Maura,’ she said, when Maura brought it up. ‘I want to make progress, not dwell on the past.’

  She quickly realized that there was something disturbingly wrong with Alice’s basic character.

  ‘God knows how he never saw it,’ Kathleen wrote to her son back in Ireland, ‘he must have been blinded with the grief.’

  Kathleen was up for the battle. She had solved bigger problems than this.

  One of the first things she did was to march Alice straight to Dr Brendan O’Cole. Surely there must be something he could do? Alice spent a while in with the doctor, who came out to chat to Kathleen afterwards. His own mammy and Kathleen had attended the same convent school back home.

  ‘It’s a personality problem, Kathleen, there’s little medicine can do for that. But she’s also suffering from anxiety, so I’m putting her on Valium, ten milligrams four times a day. You should see a great change altogether, but don’t expect miracles. She wasn’t brought up running free on the peat bogs, like we were. She had problems.’

  ‘I thought as much, Doctor,’ said Kathleen. She had actually changed Brendan’s nappy when he was a baby, but felt it right and proper to award him the respect due to his position.

  ‘Ye will cope, Kathleen, as my mammy would too. Ye will make a great difference to little Nellie’s life by being here, I’m sure,’ said Brendan, who felt about six years old when he was talking to Kathleen.

  ‘Aye, I hope so. I’ve never been so wanted in all me life before, which leads me to believe something must have been very wrong.’

  Alice left the doctor’s surgery with a prescription for medication that meant she now spent much of the day staring peacefully into the fire, rather than standing at the bedroom window, glaring at the street. Every now and then, she even smiled.

  Kathleen was relieved to have been sent for. What Jerry didn’t know was that Maura had written to Kathleen often and pleaded with her to come back and visit, but Kathleen had always said no. Any request for help had to come from Jerry himself. He had to want Kathleen to be there.

  On her first visit, she stayed for six weeks. Then she went home for three and came back again for another six. Jerry’s daddy, Joe, had passed away a year since. Kathleen’s sons had almost all married, and they and their wives managed the farm and the house while she was away.

  Kathleen established a routine in the house, which even Alice managed to adapt to. Having Kathleen around taught Alice how a real mother behaved. It was the first time in Alice’s life she had known normality. She still had no love for Nellie, which was obvious to Kathleen, but Kathleen also knew that Jerry had made his choice and it was now Kathleen’s job to pick up the pieces. Alice was his wife, in God’s eyes or not.

  Nellie was in heaven. Kathleen brought everything into the home a mother should and, as time passed, Nellie loved the way that all the women now popped into their house for a chat and to have a fuss with Nana Kathleen. It was as if she was everyone’s mammy. Alice never made a word of complaint; she knew she couldn’t.

  Maura never dreamt it would be possible for things to alter as much as they had. For the first time, Jerry’s back door began to open and people walked in. Nellie noticed the women never spoke much to Alice. It was now definitely Nana Kathleen’s house. The cuckoo in the nest had been put firmly in her place. But it really didn’t matter; on forty milligrams of Valium a day, Alice couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Writing to me mammy was the best thing I have ever done in me life,’ Jerry said to Tommy, one day soon after Kathleen’s arrival. ‘Even Nellie is putting on the weight now. We all are.’

  ‘What could I say to him?’ said Tommy to Maura, when he got home that night. ‘I wanted to say, aye, well, what’s the use of Alice, why didn’t you just send for Kathleen in the first place?’

  ‘Because he’s a man and he’s proud,’ said Maura, ‘and, like with all men, pride comes before a fall.’

  Kathleen’s price for staying was for Jerry to trip down to the off-licence every Friday and Saturday night and bring her back two bottles of Guinness. She would put the poker into the fire and, when it was red hot, plunge it into the Guinness.

  ‘That’s me iron, Queen,’ she would say to Nellie, who watched this ritual with fascination.

  On Fridays, Kathleen went down to the bingo with all the other women and even took Alice with her once or twice. Kathleen was teaching Alice to knit; although she wouldn’t touch baby clothes, she had been knitting Jerry a scarf for weeks.

  Life settled down into a steady pace. The kitchen was like an advice surgery every morning and Nellie loved listening to the problems that everyone brought to Nana Kathleen.

  One morning young Sheila came in, crying, with her newborn baby. She had four now and looked exhausted.

  ‘Kathleen,’ she cried, ‘this babby hasn’t slept a minute since it was born, what am I to do, I’m near at me wits’ end.’

  It took Kathleen mere seconds to diagnose the problem. ‘A baby with cold feet never sleeps,’ she said. ‘Get some socks and some booties on its feet. Here, give him to me.’

  Kathleen sat in front of the range with the baby on her lap and his bare feet facing the fire. She rubbed and warmed his feet between her hands and, slowly, the baby calmed. Within ten minutes, he was sleeping soundly. Nellie sat and grinned, feeling very important in having such a
nice and clever nana.

  Her life had been totally transformed. She now loved going to school and when she arrived home she ran in and out of the house with the other kids to play, rather than go straight to her room as Alice had made her. Her Nana Kathleen would be waiting for her with a mug of tea and a rock cake she had baked that afternoon, and often she and Harry would sit and eat it together before they ran outside. It was almost as though Alice didn’t exist.

  It transpired over the weeks that Kathleen was the only woman on the street who didn’t have the time of day for Father James.

  ‘He gives me the creeps, that man. Mind, I’ll hold me tongue and say that to no one but you, Jerry, but he makes the hair on the back of me neck stand up when I see him walking up the street in his big fancy hat.’

  Father James sensed Kathleen’s reserve and kept his distance. He knew he had met his match. There was no charming Kathleen or pulling the wool over her eyes. She was polite enough at mass, but he knew not to chance a social visit.

  Kathleen tried out her reservations on Maura one morning, when they saw Father James leaving Brigie’s house down the road. Brigie had been blessed with eight daughters and not a single son.

  ‘That man should be spending more time in his own church and less in other people’s houses, if you ask me,’ Kathleen said. ‘Back home, the priest calls only for a birth, or the last rites. No other good reason for him to be dropping by all the time.’

  Maura looked shocked. ‘Kathleen,’ she said in a pained voice, ‘we are lucky to have the Father and grateful to him for sticking with us. He’s so well thought of now, he could be in a cathedral, and Rome was wanting him to go to New York, but no, he stayed with us and we won’t hear a bad word against him.’

  Kathleen knew better than to argue, with no more than her suspicions to go on. Kathleen just knew. In her older years, she had learnt to size people up pretty quickly and Father James wasn’t coming out well.