Run to Him (11 page)

Leaving them to have a few private minutes alone, the midwife went to fetch them both a cup of tea and some hot buttered toast. This baby had been a tricksy delivery and at one point she thought she was going to have to call for the doctor to assist. But just at the last minute, with the help of a pair of forceps, the baby shifted position and made its entrance into the world. The midwife had been touched by the obvious love and affection Nellie’s parents had for each other; knowing that the special first hour with a first-born came only once in a lifetime, she made herself scarce as quickly as she could.

Even though he had been up all night, Jerry would save the bus fare and walk back home. He could not remember ever having been as hungry as he was right now. After he had eaten breakfast he would change into his work clothes and be in time to clock on at the docks for the first shift. This was no time to miss a day’s pay.

Exhausted from her long ordeal, Bernadette lay back on the hospital pillows, feeling drowsy. She turned her head to one side and smiled at her husband, the man she loved more than life itself. Jerry had moved and was sitting on a chair next to the hospital bed, cuddling their baby, still unable to stop looking at her tiny face. Bernadette’s eyes were still full of tears as she gazed upon the manifestation of all their hopes and aspirations for the future, the baby, who was falling asleep on his chest, flooding his thoughts, absorbing every ounce of his new love and devotion. Watching them together increased her happiness, if that was at all possible.

As sleep fought to claim her, she tried to say his name and to reach out and gently stroke his hand. She looked down at her arm in confusion. Her hand was like a lead weight and, no matter how hard she tried, it wouldn’t respond. Unnoticed by Jerry, who at that very moment had eyes only for his new baby, panic slipped past him into the room and settled itself down upon Bernadette.

She tried to open her mouth, but it wouldn’t work, and despite her best efforts, her arm would not move.

Jerry’s name urgently beat against the sides of her brain but could get no further, as she managed to part her lips and move her tongue, which felt twice its normal size. But no sound escaped. A black haze had begun to blur the edges of her vision. She struggled to maintain her focus on the adoring father and their baby lying in the cradle of his arms, trapped in their bubble of wonderment. She lay, silently imploring, desperately willing Jerry to move his gaze away from their baby girl and to turn round. Her mind screamed: Look. Look. Look. At. Me. He didn’t hear it as he kissed the downy hair on his baby’s crown.

Bernadette’s head became lighter and the sounds around her more acute. She could hear people outside in the corridor, giggling and talking as though they were standing right next to her bed, laughing at her.

And then, suddenly, she sank. The screaming in her head ceased. She felt as though life itself were draining out of her very soul as a chill sped upwards from her toes and fanned across her body like an icy glaze. She could no longer move her tongue and her eyelids felt leaden; there was no energy left to fight, no will to prise them open as she wearily succumbed to the dark cloak that enveloped her which was so heavy, so oppressive, that, try as she might, she just couldn’t lift it off.

‘She hasn’t even murmured a sound yet, she just has these great big eyes lookin’ at me now, just like her mammy,’ said Jerry, as he turned himself and the baby towards Bernadette.

The last thing Bernadette saw, as her eyes slowly closed, was the smile evaporate from Jerry’s face and transform into a look of horror as he suddenly looked down at the floor and saw a steady stream of blood, dripping from the corner of the bed sheet onto the floor, as though it were running from an open tap on a slow flow, creating a puddle of blood that had reached his own boots.

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Hide Her Name

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This gripping follow on from
The Four Streets
finds the community alive with rumours and gossip after the murder which rocked it to the core.

No one knows – or is saying – who did it, least of all the police, but they are not giving up their search for the truth. Somewhere, in this tight-knit Irish Catholic community, someone must know something. Someone will surely talk one day.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Kitty Doherty, pregnant with the dead man's child, is a living danger to everyone who needs to keep the secret. Her mother, Maura and best friend Nellie's grandmother, the redoutable Kathleen, decide the girls must be spirited away quietly to Ireland to await the birth of the baby.

But it isn't easy to keep a secret that big.

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in the stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

William Butler Yeats

selected verses from

The Song of Wandering Aengus

1

‘S
TOP LYING ON
his pyjamas now, Peggy, and let yer man out to earn an honest crust!’

Paddy’s next-door neighbour, Tommy, impatiently yelled over the backyard gate as he and the Nelson Street dockers knocked on for Paddy. They stood, huddled together in an attempt to hold back the worst of the rain, as they waited for Paddy to join them.

Much to her annoyance, Peggy, Paddy’s wife, could hear their sniggering laughter.

‘Merciful God!’ she said crossly. ‘Paddy, would ye tell that horny fecker, Tommy, it’s not us at it every five minutes.’ She snatched the enamel mug of tea out of Paddy’s hand and away from his lips before he had supped his last drop. There was not a second of silence available for him in which to protest.

‘The only reason he and Maura have two sets of twins is because he’s a dirty bugger and does it twice a night. I’ll not have him shouting such filth down the entry, now tell him, will ye, Paddy?’

Peggy and Paddy had spawned enough of their own children, but Peggy had never in her life done it twice on the same night. Every woman who lived on the four streets knew: that sinful behaviour got you caught with twins.

‘I wonder sometimes how Maura holds her head up without the shame, so I do. Once caught doing it twice, ye would know what the feck had happened and not do it again. He must be mighty powerful with his persuasion, that Tommy. Answer me, Paddy, tell him, will ye?’

‘Aye, I will that, Peggy,’ said Paddy as he picked up his army-issue canvas bag containing his dinner: a bottle of cold tea and Shipman’s beef paste sandwiches. Rushing to the door, he placed a kiss on Peggy’s cheek, his shouted goodbye cut midway as the back gate snapped closed behind him.

Each man who lived on the four streets worked on the docks. Their day began as it ended, together.

It took exactly four minutes from the last backyard on Nelson Street, down the dock steps, to the perimeter gate. The same amount of time it took to smoke the second roll-up as ribald jokes and football banter rose high on the air. When the sun shone, their spirits lifted and they would often sing whilst walking.

The same melancholy songs heard in the Grafton rooms or the Irish centre on a Saturday night sunk into a pint of Guinness. Melodies of a love they left behind. Of green fields the colour of emeralds, or a raven-haired girl, with eyes that shone like diamonds.

The Nelson Street gang was often delayed by Paddy at number seventeen and would pause at his back gate and stand a while.

Each morning, wearing a string vest that carried the menu of every meal eaten at home that week, Paddy sat up in bed, picked up his cigarettes and matches that lay next to an ever-overflowing ashtray on the bedside table, and lit up his first ciggie of the day.

Paddy smoked a great deal in bed.

He would often wake Peggy in the middle of the night with the sound of his match striking through the dark, providing a split second of bright illumination.

‘Give us a puff,’ Peggy would croak, without any need of the teeth soaking in a glass on the table next to her. Not waiting for nor expecting a reply, she would warily uncoil her arm from under the old grey army blanket and, cheating the cold air of any opportunity to penetrate the dark, smelly warmth beneath, grasp the wet-ended cigarette between her finger and thumb, put it to her lips and draw deeply.

‘Ah, that’s better,’ she would say. ‘Me nerves are shot, Paddy,’ and within seconds she would drift back to sleep.

This morning, the squall blew across the Mersey and up the four streets, soaking the men waiting for Paddy. They stood huddled against the entry wall, trying in vain to protect their ciggies from the downpour.

Paddy appeared through the gate, Peggy’s words at his back pushing him out onto the cobbles.

‘Yer fecking bastards, ye’ll get me hung one day, so yer will,’ said Paddy only half seriously to Tommy and the rest of the gang.

‘I was only joking, Paddy, I’ve seen a better face on a clock than on yer missus,’ said Tommy. ‘I knew ye was just stuffing yer gob with another slice of toast.’

‘Leave Peggy alone or I’ll set her on yer,’ joked Paddy. ‘She was kept in a cage till she was five. Ye’ll be sorry if I do.’

They all laughed, even Paddy.

Tall Sean, a docker by day and a boxer by night, joined in as he struggled to light up.

‘Never fear, Paddy,’ he laughed. ‘Yer a lucky man with your Peggy, her titties are so feckin’ big, ye could hang me wet donkey jacket off them with a bottle of Guinness in each pocket and it still wouldn’t fall off.’

They roared with laughter and with lots of matey reassuring pats on the back for Paddy, they continued on their way down the steps to face another day of hard graft on the river’s edge.

Boots on cobbles. Minds on the match.

From an upstairs window in the Priory, Daisy Quinn, Father James’s housekeeper, studied the dockers marching down the steps towards the gate, just as she had done every single morning since she herself had arrived from Dublin during the war.

In an hour, once she had cleared away the breakfast things, she would take her damp duster and move to another room, across the landing and look down on the mothers and children from Nelson Street as they walked in the opposite direction to that of the dockers, towards the school gates.

The Victorian Priory, large, square and detached, stood next to the graveyard and from each of the upstairs windows Daisy could alter her view: of the docks, the graveyard, the school and the convent, or the four streets. Daisy had her own panoramic view of life as it happened. There wasn’t very much about anyone or anything Daisy didn’t know. They all turned up on the Priory steps at some time, for one reason or another.

‘Daisy, have ye any coal to spare? We have none and the babby is freezing.’

‘Do ye have any potatoes or bread? A coat for the child to go to school?’

They were always wanting something and, sure enough, Father James could often solve the problem. They had cupboards in the Priory stuffed full of the clothes people donated for him to hand out to the poor.

But the father never gave. Mothers had to ask.

‘I am here to do God’s work, not the corporation’s,’ he would often boom in a bad-tempered way when Daisy asked should he take a coat or a pair of shoes to a family, after she had noticed the welfare officer knocking on their door.

But pride never stood in the way of a mother needing to warm a child, so beg they often did.

Occasionally people came for happy reasons – to ask for the father to perform a christening or a wedding – and when that happened, the father would take them into his study and Daisy would carry in a tray of tea and a plate of her home-made biscuits, just as Mrs Malone had taught her.