Nobody Came (2 page)

W
e three boys slept in one room. Davie slept on a small put-u-up while John and I shared an old stained mattress on an ill-fitting double-bed base.

John, who was old enough to feel apprehension at both Gloria’s unpredictable behaviour and the uncle’s visits, showed little of his feelings in the daytime. However, during the night when sleep gave his fears free rein, those worries plagued him. It was then that his bladder often opened, while he tossed and turned restlessly in his sleep, and I would wake to a wet bed.

I knew he was ashamed of wetting the bed so I would try and help him hide the damp sheets from Gloria. Her method of dealing with the problem was a hard blow to the head and a torrent of abuse.

‘You dirty little bleeder,’ she screamed the first time it happened, a grimace of disgust distorting her thickly lipsticked mouth. ‘Well, you can sleep in it. I’m not wasting soap on your filth.’ And with that she stomped into the second bedroom where our baby sister, disturbed by the loud sounds of aggression, was howling.

John’s face flushed both from the pain of the blow and the look of contempt on his mother’s face, for Gloria’s approval was something he constantly sought. I had John to take care of me, Davie had both of us, but John had no one and, although I was too young then to understand this, I touched his arm in an attempt to comfort and reassure him.

Davie would do what he always did when there was shouting: bite his bottom lip, swallow back his tears, stretch out his hand and place it trustingly in mine.

When John was at school my little brother followed me around like a cute little puppy. I was the one he looked up to and I in turn looked up at John; whatever happened, he was my hero.

It was John who, last thing at night, stood guard for me at the outside privy. Gloria would just tell me to take myself down those stairs. She insisted I was old enough to go on my own and should stop making a fuss. But John would look up from whatever he was doing and give me a reassuring look.

‘Come on, Robbie,’ he would say. ‘I’ll come with you, I need to go myself.’

Without being told, John knew that I was frightened, almost in equal parts, of the dark and of Mrs Stone, the landlady. She was the owner of the three-storeyed house that was home to four families. Her flat was on the ground floor and from behind her door and the twitching net curtains of the front-room windows she monitored all the comings and goings in that house. Every time we needed access to the back-yard toilet we knew what awaited us, so we delayed as long as possible. Finally there was no alternative; we needed to ‘go’.

However hard we tried to creep silently down the uncarpeted, creaky flight of stairs, she seemed to have a sixth sense that told her small boys were approaching. She would fling open her door and give us a hard stare as she looked for some misdemeanour she could blame us for. She was a small woman with a pale face and mousy hair caught up in a tight bun, who would not have caught my attention had I seen her on the street. But when I met her in the house there was something about her ramrod-straight figure, her stern, cold look and her harsh words accompanied by a clip round the ear that made me quake with fear.

She’d often be standing on the doorstep and I had to wriggle past her body, which, small as it was, appeared large enough to fill the doorway.

‘This is a respectable place,’ was her favourite mantra, one that seemed to deny all knowledge of Gloria’s activities.

‘Wipe your feet, boys,’ she said every time, a command that was usually followed by another of her favourite chants: ‘Walk, don’t run.’

‘Hope you don’t grow up to be like your brothers,’ she would say to little Davie. Knowing his ‘still a baby’ status kept him safe, he just screwed up his eyes and ignored her.

A cuff round the head was delivered to whoever was nearest and then, with another snort of disapproval, she would stomp up the few steps leading into the dark hall and disappear behind her front door.

Her departure always left John and me grinning sheepishly at each other. ‘Silly old biddy,’ he would say bravely and I would instantly relax, giggle and nod my head in loyal agreement.

Then John would flash that special smile of his, the one that was just for me. I can see it now, sort of conspiratorial, as if to say, ‘It’s just you and me, brother, just us two against the adult world.’

Once a week, without fail, Mrs Stone climbed the stairs to our top-floor rooms to confront our mother about our bad behaviour.

‘Those hooligans of yours have …’ – and the list of complaints about our misdeeds would follow.

We had left the outside toilet dirty.

We had wasted the squares of cut-up newspaper that passed for toilet paper.

We had left the lights on.

We had made too much noise on the stairs.

We had cheeked her.

No accusation went without further comments inferring that it was all Gloria’s fault. She didn’t discipline us enough and we ran wild.

Our mother, who feared losing the rooms, never pointed out that three boys going up and down uncarpeted stairs were bound to make some noise. As well as the trips to the outside lavatory, we were often struggling to carry Davie’s pushchair or were weighed down by bags of shopping as we trudged up to the top floor. Of course there were times when we forgot to be quiet, normally when we were excited and racing out to play or had been given a few pennies to go and buy sweets.

Instead of defending us against the barrage of accusations, Gloria smacked John and me around the head. ‘Say you’re sorry. Do you hear me?’ she would command, in a voice that we knew was pointless to argue with.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are having a nice home like this,’ she continued, more to appease the accuser than for our benefit. Looking down at our scuffed shoes, we shuffled our feet and made our apologies to Mrs Stone, which were received with a dismissive sniff and followed with a final comment of ‘Don’t let it happen again.’ After that she left, stomping loudly down the stairs. It was hard not to get the giggles as we were convinced that she made more noise than we ever did.

No sooner did Mrs Stone’s footsteps fade than Gloria turned on us again.

‘Showing me up, that’s what you do,’ she screamed. ‘It’s you that brings that old biddy up the stairs.’ And an angry slap would follow, aimed at whoever was closest.

But on Sunday mornings Gloria was almost friendly to us. For on Sundays all the other occupants of Devonshire Place, including Mrs Stone, went to church. This meant that for a couple of hours we had the washroom to ourselves.

Before John did his chores he would fill the tin bath for Gloria using brownish hot water, which came from a rusty old boiler. With a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, a glass of gin in her hand and the latest
True
Romance
magazine under her arm, she took herself down the three flights of stairs for an hour of privacy and leisurely ablutions.

Once she returned to her bedroom she started covering her body with powder and lotions, shouting to us that it was our turn to bath. John and I quickly stripped our bed of the foul urine-smelling sheets, gathered up Davie’s too and then down we would all go. The tin bath was emptied and refilled and John, being the eldest, jumped in first then Davie and I bathed together.

After the three of us had washed and scrubbed ourselves clean it was the sheets’ turn. They were dumped in the now-scummy soapy water, rubbed and squeezed by all of us then hoisted onto the line to dry. Another set, clean but equally as grey, would then be put onto our beds.

Doing our washing on a Sunday gave the rest of the tenants and Mrs Stone another reason to complain, but on those occasions Gloria stood her ground, making us almost look like a united family unit.

‘John’s at school all week,’ was her excuse, ‘and Robbie’s too young to manage on his own. It’s their bedding, so they must clean it. Don’t want them growing up expecting women to do all the work, do you?’

And on another occasion, following the landlady’s particularly bad-tempered list of our misdeeds, her parting shot was: ‘Anyhow you keep telling me they’re dirty and smelly. Well, they’re not now.’

A few months earlier when our baby sister arrived, John and I were filled with curiosity.

Silently we crept into Gloria’s bedroom. We never thought of it as being a room that belonged to two people, for with its mess of discarded clothes, pots of cream and underwear hanging over a chair, she had marked it as her territory. There was virtually no evidence of Stanley’s presence in that room at all; just a single drawer for his underclothes and socks and a hanger, pushed to the back of the wardrobe, that held his spare pair of trousers, one jacket and a couple of shirts. In fact, except for a dish containing his shaving brush and razor, there were no personal possessions to show Stanley’s existence anywhere in the flat.

We hovered around the small chest of drawers where our sister slept on a nest of old towels in a wedged-open drawer. Gazing down at her, we felt there was something about her tiny scrunched-up face, that fuzz of dark hair, those perfect little hands and the utter helplessness of her that made us want to pick her up and hold her.

Not daring to be responsible for waking her, we contented ourselves instead with reaching out our hands to touch her. John stroked the top of her head gently and I ran my finger against the silk of her cheek. Her eyelids flickered slightly and I watched with an awaking wonder the slight rise and fall of her tiny chest and listened to her faint breath. I didn’t have the words in my head to describe how she made me feel. I was still only four and a half when she was born but I just knew I liked looking at her. And I liked the word ‘sister’.

‘Leave her alone!’ my mother shouted whenever she saw us creeping towards her room. ‘You think I want her awake? I’ve got enough to do with you lot.’ Her scarlet-tipped hand clutching its ever-present cigarette flapped in our direction as she shooed us away.

‘Go outside, will you? And take Davie with you. Bleeding brats, always under my feet. Give me some peace, why don’t you?’

Faced with one of Gloria’s unpredictable moods, when she needed no provocation to lash out with her hands and tongue, we would quickly leave the house.

John and I knew that after an hour it would be safe to return. By then she would have consoled herself with enough gin to be, if not reasonably amiable, then asleep or near enough to unconsciousness to ignore us completely.

At that age I was unaware that my mother, with the smell of gin and cigarettes on her breath and cheap perfume on her body, was different from other mothers. I didn’t know it was unusual for a woman to leave much of the homemaking and childcare to her eight-year-old son. Nor did I understand that other children had frequent baths, wore clean clothes most probably made by their mothers and ate regular home-cooked meals. In fact, I had very little idea of what a mother’s role was meant to be. It was only when we went to the beach or the park and saw mothers hug and kiss their children, holding their hands to keep them safe and drying their tears when they cried, that we got an inkling of a different sort of mothering.

‘Sissies!’ John and his mates would say to each other as they placed their hands on their hips, stuck out their elbows and swaggered past those scenes with little boys’ bravado.

But in a curious way it was Gloria’s indifference to our well-being that gave us the freedom to have that special last summer together; that summer where we played, swam in the sea and laughed with such joyous abandon, unaware that we only had a few months left before our lives changed forever. It was during those golden days that the bonds already formed between us boys grew and strengthened. And over the years when we were separated and silently called out to each other it was the power of those bonds that kept our three spirits connected and enabled us to survive.

B
efore John’s school holiday started I especially liked Saturdays. John was home all day and the nicest of the uncles, a small, nervous-looking, ginger-haired man wearing grease-stained overalls and an embarrassed smile, would arrive for his weekly visit. He owned a small garage in town, one that repaired motorcars as well as selling petrol.

John had discovered that Saturday was the day this particular uncle’s wife went shopping and met up with her friends for afternoon tea at one of St Helier’s recently opened cafés. We learnt that it was worth us delaying our departure, for this uncle handed out generous incentives to encourage us to leave and stay out of the way for some time.

‘Hello, boys,’ was his standard greeting as, with a crooked smile on his face and eyes cast down to avoid our collective stare, his hand quickly delved into his deep overall pocket and reappeared seconds later holding two shiny half crowns.

‘You don’t want to be staying indoors on a nice day like this. Here – take this money and buy yourself ice-creams.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ John and I would say in unison before turning and leaving. Barely suppressing our glee we would take Davie’s hand and pull him along as we clattered down the stairs. The lure of unlimited ice-cream or sweets was stronger than our fear of Mrs Stone. Davie was willing to walk, taking the biggest steps he could to keep pace with us bigger boys, but on those days our usual patience was stretched as we were in too much of a hurry to get to the shop nearest to the beach front. John would place him in the pram, then push it determinedly towards the shops as we planned what purchases we would make. Ice-creams, lemon sherbet, gobstoppers or the illicit chewing gum that Gloria so hated; five shillings would buy lots, John assured me confidently.

We settled on ice-cream as Davie would be able to eat this easily, although half of it always ran down his front and up his sleeve because he had still not learnt to catch the melting drips with his tongue. Once the cone was gone and the last of the sweet ice-cream had been licked off our hands, we made our way to either the park or the beach.

Most Saturdays we met up with John’s gang of friends. They were boys whose parents never seemed to notice if they were home or not; boys who played marbles intent on winning, took over the swings, bounced energetically up and down on the seesaw, had scabbed knees, grimy fingernails and wore torn jumpers; boys whose childhood had disappeared long before the onset of puberty, boys who were miniature men, boys from the same type of families as us.

‘Playing nanny, John?’ the group called mockingly when they saw all three of us approaching.

‘Shut your mouths!’ was his response, but his wide grin showed there was no ill feeling. And they in turn laughed, a friendly chuckling laughter that showed they were really only joking.

There was something about my elder brother even then – a confidence in his stance, an impression of not caring what other people thought – that made the boys understand that beneath that good humour was a temper. It was a temper that might be slow to rise but one they would be safer not waking, so the teasing always dried up almost before it began.

Packets of cigarettes and boxes of matches would appear. Cupping their hands to protect the flame from the wind, the boys formed a circle – one from which I was excluded.

‘You’re too young,’ said John sternly to me when I tried putting my hand out for a puff of the shared cigarette. I would watch the smoke rising up, see the cigarette being passed around the circle of conspirators until there was nothing left and wonder silently when I would be old enough to join their group.

As we headed for the play area we would see neatly dressed children being pushed on the swings by their mothers. The colourful ribbons in the girls’ plaited hair streamed out behind them and the little boys’ ties flew over their shoulders. As our group approached, the mothers would stop the swings, order the children off and, with a glare of disapproval in our direction, would take their children’s hands and move off to the slide or the roundabouts.

All the swings were then commandeered by us boys. Davie would be begging to join us but John always took him a few feet away to the baby section where there were small boxy swings with a metal safety bar in front. Checking that he was firmly seated and secure, John would give him a few firm pushes to get him started before running over to join his mates. Last year I too had been placed on the baby swings, but that summer John allowed me to swing on the same ones as him and his friends, not only sitting on the wooden seat but standing on it just like them. ‘Hold fast now, Robbie,’ he would remind me.

I swung so high I thought I would go over the bar. I clutched the metal chains so tightly that the knuckles on both hands were white. I pushed my body backwards and forwards and pumped my legs as hard as I could. In and out they went, higher and higher I flew, until the chains buckled, stopping me from going right over the metal bar. I bent my body as far back as possible until my feet and head were almost in a straight line, looked at the blue sky, felt the wind rush by me and laughed out loud at the sheer exhilarating freedom of it. And those bigger boys laughed, first at my determined efforts at keeping up with them and then with me as they felt the same thrill that I did.

‘Tell whose brother he is,’ they said, patting me on the back, and I, feeling their approval, glowed with pride.

Go-carts appeared in the park, made out of orange boxes and the bases of old prams that had been found discarded on rubbish dumps. Rope was tied to them and Davie and I were placed inside. John and his friends ran round and round the park pulling those carts while Davie and I screamed out our enjoyment. The park-keeper tried to chase us away but we always found another area out of his sight.

‘Hey, Robbie! Do you fancy an apple?’ John asked me on one of those days.

A picture of a juicy red apple floated in front of my eyes and I nodded my head with enthusiasm.

‘We got enough money left?’ I asked. I was still too young to work out what change we should have.

John gave a little laugh. ‘Don’t cost. You’ll see. Just take Davie’s pram and watch. Give us a few minutes then follow. Got it?’

I put my hands over the pram’s handle and watched John running up the road, his arms swinging and his head down. He slowed to a brisk trot in front of the greengrocers, shot his hand out, and an apple disappeared into his pocket.

I felt my eyes grow big just seeing him do that. I waited as he had told me then followed him slowly.

He had only had time to steal one apple so we all had to share it.

It tasted very good.

On another occasion he told me he had to stop to get something from one of the local shops. A tin of corned beef for our tea, he told me.

The shopkeeper viewed our trio with something I recognised as suspicion until John took one of our half crowns out of his pocket and placed it on the counter. He gave his order and then, looking up at the top shelf, he pretended to see something else he wanted. It didn’t matter what it was because he had no intention of buying it.

‘I’ll have that as well,’ he would tell the shopkeeper. ‘My Ma said for me to buy it.’ The shopkeeper had to stand on a set of steps to reach it and, once his back was turned, quick as a flash John’s hands reached out to pick up several bars of chocolate. He gave me a wink as he hastily slid them into his pocket.

When the shopkeeper put the object on the counter he would just say he had made a mistake and paid for the tin of corned beef or whatever it was that Gloria had asked him to bring home with us. I felt a surge of pride at my older brother’s antics.

Once out of the shopkeeper’s view he broke up one of the bars into equal amounts for him and me and a smaller piece for Davie. They tasted even better than the apple. Before we reached Devonshire Place we stopped to spit on a ragged handkerchief so that we could wipe our faces. We didn’t want telltale rings of chocolate around our mouths giving us away to Mrs Stone or Gloria.

‘Now keep your mouths shut when we get in,’ John instructed Davie and me.

I nodded my head vehemently in agreement even though we both knew that the chances were that Gloria would be in a gin-induced stupor when we returned. And even on the rare occasions when she had run out of alcohol, she showed little interest in where we had been. So long as we weren’t under her feet, she didn’t give a damn.