Fragments
by
Morgan
Gallagher
Osier
Publishing
FRAGMENTS
Morgan Gallagher
© Copyright Morgan Gallagher 2011
Published by Osier Publishing at Smashwords.
ISBN:
9781476460338
Discover other titles by Morgan Gallagher through
www.osierpublishing.co.uk
Contact Morgan Gallagher:
http://thedreyfusstrilogy.blogspot.com/
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@DreyfussTrilogy
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Book cover design by Morwenna Rakestraw.
Editing by Toni Rakestraw,
www.rakestrawbookdesign.com
The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted.
All rights reserved.
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All characters
and locations within this work are fictitious and any resemblance
to real people or places is entirely coincidental.
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This book is
dedicated to my husband, David. A wicked cool researcher, a
brilliant maker of tea, an astoundingly good giver of cuddles, and
a fantastic father. His research skills in particular, make my life
so much easier. Usually. Some days we require family therapy, to
see eye to eye on conflicting information. Therefore, in the spirit
of marriage, I wish to make one thing clear: all the good bits are
mine, and all the mistakes, his.
—Morgan
Gallagher, Scottish Borders, April 2012
Table of
Contents
Sleet Dreams
Maggie O’Hara
knew that it wasn’t hunger that made poverty so bad, it was cold.
Warm summer days and a gnawing stomach were bearable. Freezing cold
days with noodles in your stomach and no heating in your home was
hell. Rain dripping down your back and soaking into your clothes in
the frigid wind at the bus stop, was hell. Feet of ice that had
given out all heat to the snow that had soaked into the holes in
your shoes, was hell.
Hell was cold,
and that was all there was to it.
Poverty was not
being able to choose between food and heat, because there was no
way you could heat a room in the winters that slammed into the city
every year. Not on her tiny pension, no matter how much she
scrimped and saved. Heating the room was just not an option: food
could always be found. Cat food was cheap: a stove to heat it on,
much more expensive. She’d never had to resort to cat food; a
kettle of hot water on instant noodles was cheaper anyhow. As were
hot dogs, truth be told. But she knew she could go there, if she
had to. She’d never been cold and hungry and made it a life’s
ambition never to experience it.
No, the trouble
wasn’t food. The trouble was heat. Poverty was not enough heat.
Like everyone
else in her building, Maggie paid for central heat in her rent.
Like everyone else in her building, she got two hours at 6am and
three hours at 6pm. Just enough to keep you going, if you worked
day time shifts and went to bed early. Night workers, and retired
people like her, either shivered in the cold, or bought their own
electric heaters that ran off the meter in the wall, using up
electricity credit at a frightful rate. If you were, as the papers
put it, on a limited income, you couldn’t afford heat. She couldn’t
even pee in comfort: the tiled closet that held a toilet, a sink
and a shower cubicle, had no hope of staying heated from the towel
warmer, which switched on and off when everything else did,
although it was a useful airer of wet coats and clothes.
The communal
bath room she could use, if she fed the meter on the wall for
lukewarm water, was too cold to use in cold weather. By the time
the tub was filled, the water was stone cold. It was fine in the
summer and autumn, but in winter and for most of spring, no one
ever ran a bath. Strip washes at the kitchen area sink were the
best she could do once she couldn’t bear the cold in the shower.
And even that was fully clothed when the snow was on the
ground.
She couldn’t
even run the gas from the stove. When Tony, the landlord, had
inherited the run-down hovel from his grandfather, Guido, the rest
of the family had laughed. Tony had never settled into the family
businesses and never would amount to much, everyone knew. But he’d
surprised them all. He’d emptied the tenement of all the old
tenants, and the drug labs and ‘special apartments’ rented by the
hour. He’d ripped out the aged, worn and dangerous gas piping, put
in new central boilers and rewired the entire building up to
slightly above code. He’d had to go above code, as he’d stopped his
grandfather’s payments to certain city officials. He’d cut most of
the apartments in half, creating two floors of ‘studio apartments’
like hers, on the top floors. Below was two or three room
apartments, depending on how he’d carved the old floor plans up.
But whilst he pushed as many people in as he could, he’d also put
in good soundproofing and working plumbing. Every apartment got its
own pay as you go electricity meter, the front and back doors got
camera security and he banned naked bodies and flames in his
building. He was sniffy about cigarettes, and non-smokers found it
easier to get a lease and keep one. A single cigarette burn on the
fixture and fixings and you were gone. Retired people were allowed
one pet, but no one else. He re-tenanted the entire building within
two weeks of opening back up, and there was never an apartment
empty for two nights running. No-one ever got more than a month
behind on rent with a two month deposit. He was making his
investment back at a decent rate, in a decent way: no wonder the
rest of his family couldn’t stand him and were furious Guido had
left the building to him. His tenants would kill for Tony, which
went a long way to keeping everything calm. Maggie had seen mothers
burst into tears and kiss his hand on moving in day, their babies
no longer sharing their cribs with cockroaches.
Tony supplied
the tenants with three essential appliances, all electric. A shower
unit, a small instant water boiler that fed out over the
kitchenette sink and a microwave: the tenant brought in everything
else. Tony had the wiring on the appliances checked every year and
all the smoke detectors in the hallways worked. You felt safe in
Tony’s building. You could go to him personally if there was a
problem; he knew every one of his tenants by sight. He often
changed the light bulbs in the corridors himself, and many a
potential tenant had lost the chance of a lease for not realizing
the handyman showing them around was the owner.
A microwave was
fine for her sort of income, but it didn’t heat much otherwise.
Most of the other tenants had also bought plug-in electric grills,
as well as stand alone electric heaters. She couldn’t afford
either; to buy or to run. The meter that doled out electricity took
enough cash off her as it was. Middle of the nights were worse, the
cold would disturb her sleep, pinging out through her aching
joints, her hot water bottles having lost all their heat. She’d
twist, and turn, and try layers in this direction, layers in that;
there just wasn’t enough of her to keep the bed snug and warm all
through the night. She often dreamed she still had Bertie, her old
dog. Now Bertie had been great at snuggling up and keeping her
warm, much better than either of her husbands. But Bertie was long
gone, in the cold, cold ground. So was husband number one,
actually, but she didn’t mourn him. She still carried the scar he’d
given her when she’d miscarried their first, and only, child. She’d
been standing at the kitchen table, scrubbing carrots in a bowl of
warm water; even then she’d hated cold hands. He’d been sitting at
the table, telling her flat out that the baby had died because she
was a bad mother and not to think he’d spawn any more with her, if
she was gonna push them out early and dead, in his bed. He wasn’t
that kind of fool, not when it was obvious she must have been
whoring somewhere and another man’s prick had killed his son.
She’d picked
the bowl up and hurled it at his head. It had hit square on and
split in half, leaving a gash on him; the muddy water erupting like
his rage. She remembered slipping on the water as she danced around
the kitchen trying to escape him and the paring knife she’d thrown
at him. A slash to her inner arm, the tip of the blade taking the
long way down as she twisted past it, had been deep enough to scar
and to flood out enough blood to stop him in his tracks. She often
thought, as she looked at the thin line of white, that it had saved
her life that day; that slash that never made it deep enough to
bleed her out. She should have left him then, but he’d been so
contrite... Maggie shoved it away.
No, like
Bertie, Fred was long gone cold dead. She’d stuck it out to the
end, which hadn’t been long as cancer had taken him. Left her with
the scar, some aches in her heart about how you fall in love with a
stranger, and a debt that would have crippled Jesus. Cancer
treatment had turned out to be more than the insurance, wasn’t that
a pip?
The phrase
bounced around her head. That had been Charlie’s best saying, a
cheeky chappy smile, and his English accent, to charm the socks,
and panties, off anyone. Oh she’d fallen for Charlie, fallen hard.
And he’d been good to her. He’d helped pay off the debts in return
for his green card, had rented them a neat little house in the
suburbs, and tried to put life in her belly. But all the rubbing up
heat he did with all the other pretty ladies robbed him of that
vital spark, that’s what she reckoned. Can’t stoke the fire at
home, if you are layin’ kindling all around town.
They broke up
well enough. She just couldn’t take an empty bed
and
an
empty cradle. He’d gone off to Southern California, where he’d
settled down to a life of widows and gratified smiles. Divorce
papers had followed through a year or two later. They exchanged a
card every year until they each moved one time too many.
He’d gone where
the ladies were and she’d gone where the work was. Before she’d
known it she’d drifted steadily north, into the cold zone. At first
she was glad, as summers were so much cooler and so much more
bearable but she’d had younger bones and a good strong back to earn
money with in any way she could. Waitressing; maid; check out. Did
one summer as a short order cook, but didn’t like the heat, now
wasn’t
that
a pip? What she’d give now to be hot and sweaty
all day long with as many greasy burgers as she could eat.
But age had
slowly wound down her life, and her job opportunities. Minimum wage
was for the young and strong, and she’d never settled on anything
she could call ‘skilled’ labor, nothing that made still employing
her worth anyone’s while: too many younger bones and strong backs
to choose from. So she slowly dropped down the scale... or up,
rather, as each apartment got smaller and higher up. Until here she
was, on the fifth floor in a one room hideaway and a closet for a
toilet. Which would have been fine if she’d still been in the
south: she didn’t need much. Sure, the building was old but Tony
had every corridor and stairwell checked weekly. Tenants were sober
and respectable and there were no vermin, either in the walls or
the other rooms around her. The basement boilers were lined with
rat traps. The corridors were filled with workers moving up and
down all day, from one shift to the other. The thick gates and bars
kept out all but the most determined thief and nothing was ever
allowed to molder. No, she could be in a lot worse places, even if
you did have to push past the drug dealers and the prostitute women
and boys, in order to get up the steps. She’d waited damn near two
years to get in, grateful the pay as you go meters meant she didn’t
have to find a huge utility deposit with the two month’s rent up
front: she’d just scraped in.
She wasn’t so
much proud of her little place, as settled in it. Her treasures
were safe here. Her grandmother’s quilt: her mother’s porcelain
figurines. Her collection of commemorative plates of dog breeds:
they hung safely on the walls, smiling down on her. She was as
reasonably sure as anyone could be that they’d still be there when
she came back every time she nodded goodbye to them as she went
out. It was just the cold, the winter. Winter and being poor were
not good bedfellows.
