Just Around the Corner

by Gilda O'Neill

  The tears spilled from her eyes as she whispered, ‘The other night, I dreamt me and you was dancing. We was twirling around and around. In front of everyone. And we didn’t care who’d see us.’

  He took out his handkerchief, wiped her face dry and then kissed her eyelids. He laughed mirthlessly. ‘I make you cry and, pathetic as it sounds, I can’t even dance.’ He stuck his handkerchief back in his pocket. ‘In fact, I’m totally useless to you.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Please.’

  He pulled her close to his chest again. ‘Then say you won’t leave me, Molly.’

  ‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘I won’t leave yer. I don’t reckon I’d know how to.’

  He closed his eyes and let out a loud sigh of relief. Then he held her away from him. ‘Come on. We really had better be going.’

  They walked along the icy street, clasping each other’s hand as though that was the way they always walked along together.

  ‘Least it ain’t boring,’ she said, blinking back her tears and trying to smile at him. ‘I mean, how many girls have got a secret boyfriend?’

  Simon squeezed her hand. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a nice, easy, boring boyfriend you could take home to tea and go dancing with?’

  ‘No fear,’ she sniffed. ‘I think it’s the worst thing in the world being bored. All our family’s the same. It’s our wild Irish blood, see?’ Tears were running down her cheeks again. ‘None of us ever really thinks things through. We just jump in with both feet. Trouble is, sometimes we’re in too deep before we realise it.’

  They were still holding hands as they reached the corner of Stainsby Road, where Simon was going to leave Molly. But instead of the whispered goodbyes and the promises to meet next week that she had expected, Simon grabbed her roughly by the arm, and dragged her back against the wall. ‘Look at that!’ he gasped, pointing along the street.

  Smoke was pouring out of the windows of one of the houses. People were milling around outside, shouting, panicking, giving orders and crying out. Someone had organised a chain of buckets to try to quench the flames but they seemed to be having little effect.

  A woman was pointing to the upstairs and screaming, ‘Help her, someone! Help her! She’s only a kid!’

  Simon ripped off his overcoat and hat and thrust them at Molly.

  ‘What yer doing?’

  ‘Someone’s got to climb up there, and none of those seem very keen.’

  ‘I’ll help yer.’

  ‘No, Molly. Stay here. Please, I mean it. I need to know you’re safe. I can’t be worrying about you as well.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Promise?’

  She nodded, kissed him hurriedly on the lips, then watched as he ran along the street towards a group of men who were arguing loudly about how best to reach the upstairs rooms.

  She honestly intended to wait there as he had asked, but the feeling that she shouldn’t be letting him take such a risk by himself got the better of her. She had to do something to help.

  With Simon’s coat flapping around her legs, she ran over to a huddle of women who were standing across the street, opposite the house.

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘Do?’ one of the woman snapped at her. ‘Shoot that bastard landlord, that’s what yer can do. That girl’s gas stove ain’t been working right for weeks, has it, Flo?’ she said to the woman next to her. ‘But would he do anything about it? Course not. Yet what d’yer think would’ve happened if she hadn’t paid her bloody rent, eh? I’ll tell you, he’d have been round here a bit sharpish then all right. And had her right out on her ear’ole. Now her little kiddy’s up there in all them flames.’

  ‘Look,’ shouted the woman called Flo. ‘That feller. He’s only climbing up the drainpipe. That’ll never hold his weight.’

  Molly looked on in horror as she saw Simon, his shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, inching his way up from the downstairs window ledge, the rusty-looking pipe his only support.

  He had reached a join in the pipe, just above the street door, when another man scrambled on to the window ledge behind him and started shouting.

  ‘We don’t need the likes of you helping decent people like us,’ he hollered, dragging Simon backwards by his trouser leg. ‘Now, get down, Jew boy, and clear off back where yer come from.’

  Molly could hardly believe it as the woman standing next to her joined in. ‘Yeah,’ she shouted, ‘piss off out of it, Yiddle. We don’t need the likes of you round here helping us.’

  As Simon dropped on to the pavement, the man who had dragged him down turned to face the others. Molly shrank back against the wall. It was Bob Jarvis.

  ‘Let’s get some decent Englishmen up here,’ ordered Bob, obviously not intending to climb the pipe himself.

  Molly turned her back on the scene and ran, head down, back to the far end of the street where she hid round the corner like a criminal, and waited as Simon made his way back to her, accompanied by a barrage of humiliating catcalls and foul language.

  Her decision had really been made this time. Molly was no longer seeing two fellers. She might have let Bob Jarvis touch her in a way that she had never let anyone else touch her ever before, and he might have been Danny’s friend, but he was no longer any friend of hers.

  She supposed she should have felt more relieved.

  10

  CHRISTMAS EVE HAD come at last; it was still perishing cold, but instead of the snow that the two youngest Mehans had longed for, the big day had brought only freezing fog, and now, at just an hour before midnight, the temperature had dropped even lower.

  In the kitchen of number twelve, totally against the usual way of things, Timmy and Michael were arguing with their mum that, at such a late hour, they really should be next door in their nanna’s, all tucked up in bed.

  Katie would hear none of it.

  ‘It’s no good you going on, Michael,’ she said, pulling on her coat over her thick woollen dress. ‘Yer gonna be in this pageant, the pair of yer, and that’s the last I’m saying on the matter. Now, come on. Have yer got yer word sheets?’

  Michael nodded defeatedly, then turned to his equally dejected-looking brother. ‘I told yer to say you had the bellyache,’ he hissed at Timmy. ‘Now all the kids are gonna see us and laugh at us.’ He shrugged into the oversized topcoat he had recently inherited from Sean. ‘And don’t come running to me when they start on yer.’

  ‘Least the narrator don’t have to wear a stupid costume,’ Timmy sniped back at him. ‘Look at me. I look like a right big girl.’

  Michael looked Timmy up and down. ‘Yeah, yer do.’

  ‘Well, I think yer look gorgeous. Don’t you, Pat?’ Nora sighed happily, admiring her grandson’s outfit that she and Katie had cobbled together from a threadbare tea towel and an old dressing gown they had borrowed off Harold from the Queen’s Arms. ‘Fancy, a grandson of mine playing Joseph in the nativity play. And on Christmas Eve, in front of everyone! I’m that chuffed I could burst, so I could.’

  ‘Yer look the proper part, son,’ said Pat stiffly, ruffling his youngest child’s hair.

  ‘Yer right, Pat, he really does,’ said Katie, flashing a sideways glance at her husband.

  Pat turned away from her and started talking to Michael.

  Katie was getting really cheesed off with his attitude. Since their row last week, instead of getting over it as he always did, Pat had been so cold with her. No matter how she tried to jolly him along, he just nodded or grunted in reply. He was talking to all the others well enough – maybe not so much to Danny – but he treated her as though she wasn’t even there half the time. Still, this feeling sorry for herself wouldn’t do, she had other things to worry about.

  Picking up her handbag from the dresser and checking she had enough change for the collection in her purse, Katie gave her family a final once-over, then said briskly: ‘You all look right smart, the lot of yer, but we’d better hurry along now or Father Hopkins’ll wonder where we’ve got to.�
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  With her best hat pinned to her mass of auburn hair, Katie held her head high, and linked her arm decisively through Pat’s. ‘Ready?’ she asked, defying him to say otherwise.

  He nodded, but his arm felt rigid to her touch.

  She would just have to make the best of it, she decided; if he wanted to play silly beggars, that was up to him.

  And so, Katie and Pat led their family in straggly procession out of the house and round the corner into Grundy Street, where they joined the stream of people making their way to the Midnight Mass being held at Saint Mary and Saint Joseph’s Catholic church.

  As they crossed over Upper North Street into Canton Street, Molly swallowed hard, her mouth dry as she recalled the scene when she had stood, just around the corner from there, watching Bob Jarvis attack Simon as he had tried to rescue the child from the burning house. Could it really have only been just a week ago?

  The fire and the successful if dramatic rescue of the little girl had been practically all that anyone had been talking about during the last few days. All sorts of stories and speculations about what had happened had been passed around – most of them by Phoebe Tucker – that Molly knew to be exaggerated or plain lies, but she had said nothing. She wasn’t even supposed to have been out of her room last Sunday afternoon, let alone out in the street watching a Jewish boy her mum knew nothing about trying to climb up a drainpipe.

  But, for the moment at least, Simon wasn’t on the top of Molly’s list of worries; like her mother, she had more pressing concerns, although Molly’s were rather more troubling than whether the boys would remember their positions in the play. Molly was fretting about Bob Jarvis.

  It had been easy enough getting Danny to give him a message explaining that she couldn’t see him this week, what with all the things her mum needed help with, it being Christmas and everything, but she wasn’t looking forward to telling him that she had no intention of seeing him ever again. She felt stupid now, ashamed even, that it had taken so long for her to admit to herself that Bob Jarvis wasn’t a bloke to be messed around with. In fact, if she was totally honest, she reckoned Bob Jarvis was a bloke to be scared of.

  By the time they reached the church, Molly’s nerves were so on edge that she almost leapt in the air when she felt someone slip their arm around her waist.

  ‘Look at these lot, will yer?’ the person breathed angrily.

  With a gulp of relief, Molly recognised her nanna’s soft Irish brogue.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nora went on, ‘heathens most of them. I mean, when did you last see her at Mass?’ Nora pointed at a flushed-looking woman who was propped unsteadily against the church wall. ‘Not once in a blue moon, that’s when. And from the state of her, I can guess where she’s been all night before she got round to dragging her fat carcass over here.’ Nora turned to her daughter and jerked her head towards the church doors. ‘Come on, Katie, let’s get inside, love, before this lot nabs all the best seats.’

  Nora, her elbows stuck out like the spikes on Boadicea’s chariot, pushed her way through the crowd, making a path so that her daughter’s family could follow her with a bit of dignity.

  As usual, Midnight Mass was packed; there were those who, like Liz Watts’s family, attended church regularly, only missing Mass under extreme circumstances. Then there were Nora’s heathens, the complete non-believers, straight from the surrounding pubs who thought attending Midnight Mass and watching the local kids perform their nativity play was as traditional a part of Christmas as hanging up the stockings and getting in the crates of light ale for a knees-up with the neighbours. And then there were the occasional churchgoers who, according to Nora, were the worst of all. At least the heathens weren’t hypocrites, they were just there out of some sentimental notion of what Christmas was all about, but the occasionals, the ones who only turned up for festivals and holy days of obligation – Nora, if she had her way, would have banned every one of them from the church, and consigned them all to an eternity of the tortures of purgatory.

  But once inside, safely settled in what she considered her rightful place in the front pew, Nora forgot all about her inconsistent neighbours as the atmosphere of the church took effect on her. The sight of the children, looking deceptively angelic in the soft, transfiguring shimmer of candlelight, as they took their places around the little wooden crib, built especially for the occasion by Bill Watts, would have brought a lump to the throat of even the most hardened of sceptics, but for Nora, having her grandchildren taking leading roles in the pageant, was as close to heaven on earth as she could imagine.

  The magic worked on Molly too; all visions of Bob Jarvis melted as Michael began retelling, in a high, quavering voice, the age-old story of the holy birth. And when Timmy, playing the part of Joseph, led his tiny Virgin Mary from inn to inn, only to be turned away, Molly had tears running down her cheeks.

  Katie had determined to keep her chin in the air and her eyes dry, until the service was over at least, but when the little ones began to sing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, she practically snatched Pat’s big white handkerchief from him, pretending she needed to blow her nose.

  Even Danny and Sean couldn’t conceal their pride when, with hardly a stumble, Michael finished reading the final words off his card. Sean really felt like clapping but knew his mum wouldn’t approve in church, so when his two little brothers paraded back to join their family for the final part of the service, he treated them both to a rough punch in the shoulder by way of congratulations instead, and shoved up to let them sit between him and Molly.

  The two little ones sat there as good as gold, right up until the final blessing, then they were up on their feet and ready to flee. Not only were they keen to get home – it was as good as Christmas itself once Mass was over – but they wanted to escape having to run the gauntlet of jeers of the kids who had not been in the play. It took all of Molly’s strength to stop them sprinting off down the aisle.

  ‘Now we’re for it,’ Michael hissed at his little brother. ‘I told yer to run when we had the chance.’

  But instead of the expected telling off, Katie smiled benignly at them. ‘Why don’t all you kids get off home?’ she suggested. ‘Me and yer nanna . . .’ She flicked her eyes sideways at Pat and saw he was smiling too. ‘. . . and yer dad won’t be long, we’ll just have a word with Father Hopkins.’

  The little ones didn’t need telling twice; they clambered over Molly’s lap into the aisle and were off like a pair of escaped convicts, closely followed by Sean and Danny.

  Katie held out her arm to her mum. ‘Coming?’

  Nora shook her head, and grinned shrewdly at her daughter. ‘No. You go with your husband and say your good nights to Father Hopkins. I’ll be out to join yers in a minute. I just want a few quiet moments.’

  Molly stood up to let her parents pass, then went to join them in the aisle, but Nora pulled her back down into the pew. ‘No, you wait here with me, love.’

  ‘All right, Nanna,’ Molly said, settling back, not really understanding what was going on.

  Katie looked up at Pat; he was smiling down at her, a genuine, warm smile, not the sort of expression you flashed out of habit or good manners. Happier than she had been for a week, Katie took her husband’s arm and let him lead her outside to where the priest would be holding court.

  Molly sat by her nanna’s side and waited. When the church was empty and the sounds from outside were muffled by the heavy oak door, Nora lowered herself on to her knees and nodded for Molly to do the same.

  ‘All I ask,’ Nora whispered under her breath, her eyes fixed on the stained-glass window above the altar as it glowed in the flickering candlelight, ‘is for my family to be as happy as they are tonight. That their differences stay settled, and their love for one another never leaves their hearts.’

  Satisfied that she had only asked for what was fair, and that there had been no selfishness in her request, Nora pulled herself to her feet. ‘Come along then,’ she said to Molly, ushe
ring her into the aisle where Nora joined her. They both crossed themselves and then began to walk out of the church.

  Just as they reached the door, Nora stopped, turned round, bobbed down, crossed herself again and mumbled quietly to herself, ‘And God bless and protect my Stephen, wherever he might be.’

  Then she straightened up, took a deep breath and steered Molly out of the door into the freezing night air. She stood on the step looking round to see who was still in the churchyard; Katie and Pat had already gone.

  ‘Right, my love,’ she said, buttoning her coat up to her chin. ‘This is as good a time as any. I want to talk to you about these young fellers of yours.’

  Molly hesitated for a moment, then said quietly, ‘There’s only one now, Nanna.’

  ‘So, yer’ve picked at last. Good. Good.’

  Molly shrugged shyly. ‘Yeah, I suppose I have.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s about time yer let yer old nanna have a look at him. If you’ve found happiness you make sure you grab it by the tail, girl.’

  ‘Do you believe that, Nanna? No matter what?’

  ‘I do.’ She held out her arm to Molly. ‘Come on, you can tell me all about him on the way home.’

  Molly didn’t move from the steps. ‘Nanna,’ she said. ‘I’d love yer to meet him. But . . .’

  ‘Sure, he’s not got two heads, has he?’

  Molly said nothing.

  ‘He’s not married?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So what’s so wrong with him that yer keep him hidden away from us all? Or is it that yer ashamed of us, maybe?’

  ‘Nanna, you know I’d never be ashamed of me own family.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Nanna.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Simon’s Jewish.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Is that all yer gonna say?’ Molly could have cut her tongue out; why had she told her? Her nanna always had that effect on her; because of the way she carried on, with all her joking and fooling about, she made Molly forget that her grandmother was one of the grown-ups – one of the ones with the power to spoil things for her.