The Ballymara Road (11 page)

‘That was a lovely supper, Mrs O’Prey,’ Harriet had said. ‘I have never had cake as good as that anywhere before in my life.’

Annie O’Prey beamed from ear to ear. She liked Harriet instantly.

When Harriet smiled, Annie knew at once that the four streets were going to be lucky with her. She could feel it in her bones and see it in Harriet’s eyes.

As the new father and his sister ate upstairs, Annie cleared away the pans in the basement kitchen, while chatting to her dead friend, Molly, whose bloodstained reflection gazed back at her through the kitchen window from the deep, dark night.

‘Well, Molly, I can see as clear as the nose on your face they are just grand. The father and his sister, they is just what we need around here now. Yer man, the father, he is nothing like Father James, nicer altogether, if ye ask me, and his sister, well, she knows a good cake when she tastes it. I could always bake a better sponge than you, Molly, and that’s a fact.’ Annie turned the tap on full and filled the bowl with fresh water.

‘But, you know, there are enough families on the docks could do with a bit of her kindness, that’s for sure. I’ll just finish this pan, Molly, and I’ll make us a cuppa.’

Molly had been Annie’s closest friend in life. Annie hadn’t told anyone, but she knew that, even in death, nothing had altered.

Upstairs, Sister Evangelista spoke in hushed tones as she related the events that had rocked the congregation and the community to its core. While Annie conversed with Molly in the kitchen, in the study Sister Evangelista recounted the details of Molly’s violent death.

Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door. They heard the quiet voice of Annie O’Prey and the louder one of another woman, full of anxiety.

‘I had better see who that is, Father,’ said Sister Evangelista.

The study door burst open. Harriet was lost for words as Annie O’Prey appeared before her, in an obvious state of distress. For the second time that night, Harriet came face to face with Little Paddy, now standing at his mother’s side. Both were in tears as, for the first time in her life, Peggy struggled to speak.

Maura knew she was in hell.

Leaning against the bar of the Anchor, she held the phone out to Kathleen and watched the smile on the other woman’s face slowly fade as, on the other end of the line, Rosie told Kathleen the news.

Kitty was dead.

‘Kitty is dead, Maura. Kitty is dead.’

With no preamble, Kathleen had said it, just like that. And in just the three seconds it took her to tell Maura that her beautiful, precious and beloved daughter had gone, before Maura’s very eyes Kathleen was transformed from the upright, proud and bonny almost sixty-year-old she was to a woman who looked nearer eighty.

Maura heard the screams. She thought they came from Kathleen but then realized they were her own.

‘Carol, get out here and help me quickly,’ Bill called to his wife and, together, they put their arms round Maura and led her to a chair.

‘Sorry for your troubles. Sorry for your troubles. Sorry for your troubles,’ Carol and Bill repeated, over and over.

Kathleen pushed a glass of port into Maura’ s hand, but it was too late. Maura stumbled and as she hit the sawdust-covered floorboards she kept on going, plummeting all the way down, deep into her own living hell.

Tommy carefully guided a pallet of jute across Huskisson dock and took the ropes, whilst Jerry lit up a quick fag. The light was fading and they were minutes from the klaxon ushering them home.

‘Oi, Stanley Matthews, get yer corner quick,’ shouted Tommy to Jerry as the pallet swung round.

Jerry ducked and then, with the grace of a leopard, sprang back up to take his rope and helped to ease the pallet down. Holding his thumb up to the crane driver and moving his head from side to side, he frantically blinked away the smoke from the smouldering ciggie that dangled from his bottom lip. There was no man alive who could light up as fast as a docker.

‘What’s Bill’s lad doing, Tommy?’ asked Jerry. Throwing Tommy his tobacco tin for him to make a quick roll-up, Jerry unhooked the ropes and the pallet rested safely on the cobbles.

‘What d’you mean?’ asked Tommy. With a quizzical frown, he let the rope and hook swing back to the crane, then followed Jerry’s gaze.

They could see Billy speaking to a policeman in the hut positioned halfway down the dockers’ steps. The officer waved Billy on as he raised his helmet and rubbed his brow, scanning the dockside.

‘’Tis bad news,’ said Jerry.

He watched as little Billy clambered over a wall of stacked jute and ran up to men who were working. He was pulling on their jackets and seemed to be asking questions. He was shouting, agitated.

‘Aye, ’tis that to be sure. I’ve never seen that kid run before. I wonder what it can be,’ said Tommy thoughtfully.

He took a long drag on his ciggie and lifted his cap to wipe the sweat from his head with his sleeve and, as he did so, he noticed a gang of men point towards them both. Tommy instantly knew not only that little Billy was running towards him, but that he carried the worst news.

Tommy, overcome with a desire to turn and run himself, knew that he would never forget these last seconds as little Billy covered the ground across the dock. He sensed that nothing would ever be the same again.

‘Stop him, would ye, Jer,’ said Tommy, a note of desperation in his voice.

With a furrowed brow, Jerry turned to Tommy, but it was too late. Little Billy was within hearing distance and he was shouting as loud as he possibly could. ‘Tommy, Tommy, ye have to come to the pub, me da says to tell ye ’tis bad news. Maura needs ye, Tommy, ’tis Kitty, your Kitty, she’s dead.’

‘Tommy is on his way. Tommy is on his way. Tommy is on his way.’

Since there were no words of comfort that had any meaning or could even begin to make sense, Kathleen and Bill continued to reassure Maura with the promise of Tommy’s imminent arrival, in an attempt to penetrate her despair. As though Tommy’s presence would alter anything.

Tommy was the last person Maura wanted to see. If Maura had known that there was a choice – either your husband hangs or your daughter lives – Tommy would have hanged.

In the blackest days following the news of Kitty’s death, Maura could not look at Tommy without wishing he was dead. She hated him. He had killed the priest and, for that, they had paid the unthinkable price.

Tommy couldn’t help Maura. As far as he was concerned, the root of all the evil in their lives was Maura’s vanity and her desperation to be better than everyone else they knew.

‘Why else would she be so pally with the priest?’ he said to Kathleen as she tried to comfort him through his anger. ‘I always knew what her game was: she wanted one of our lads in the seminary, to be a priest.

‘’Twas not good enough, now, that a fucking priest was helping himself to our daughter in me own house. She wanted to send more of our kids their way. All Maura has ever prayed for was a son for a priest and a daughter for a nun.’

Kathleen made soothing noises, but even she was shaken by the rift between Tommy and Maura at a time when they needed each other the most.

Day after day the house filled with people calling to pay their respects.

Maura sat and stared.

Tommy was not allowed time off from the docks, for which Maura was glad.

Night after night, Kathleen tried to help.

‘Away to bed, Maura, ’tis late. The kids are all sleeping now, and so must ye.’

Maura did not sleep in a bed for weeks on end. She could not engage in any activity that resembled normality.

Switching off the lights and preparing for bed, slipping in between the sheets: that was normal. Normal was what other people did. People untouched by evil.

Maura spent her nights sitting in the chair next to the range, staring at the fire. In those hours when she was alone, she relived her days with Kitty. The first time she had set eyes on her first-born’s face. Kitty’s first day at school, her funny sayings, the way her hair smelt when she slipped her arms around her mother’s neck for her night-time kiss. Night after night, in the hours before dawn when sleep finally claimed her, Maura dipped in and out of Kitty’s fifteen years, comforting herself with recent memories as well as old ones, which she forced out of the darkest corner of her mind. As Maura succumbed to sleep, her last vision was that of Kitty, standing before her in front of the range where she used to dress on winter mornings: dripping wet, cold and crying for her mammy.

Exhausted, Tommy slept on top of the covers, fully clothed. Each time he closed his eyes, he prayed into the darkness, ‘Please don’t let me wake.’

He regarded his children as a curse and he hated them. They were compelling him to carry on, to provide food for the table and a roof over their heads.

They did that to him, just because they were there. It was the obligation to feed his children which drove him from his bed and down to the docks. Every morning he had to wake and know his Kitty was gone. Without Maura, who was mad somewhere within a living hell, he had to cope alone. He hated his family for forcing him to survive. He hated everyone, even the neighbours who left meals warming on the range for him, because their children were still alive.

Day after day could pass without either Maura or Tommy speaking a single word, either to each other or barely to anyone else. Once Kathleen had been able to persuade Maura to sleep in her own bed, for weeks Maura was hardly able to get up again or put her feet on the floor to face the day. Many mornings, she didn’t even try.

She lay in her bed, facing the wall, untouched and unaffected by the needs of her family. She was deaf to the cries of her baby, impervious to the sound of Tommy’s voice, oblivious to her own basic need for food or drink.

Those were the days when neighbours let themselves into the house, unasked or uninvited, and did whatever had to be done. They had their own code. If Peggy didn’t hear the familiar early-morning noises coming from Maura’s kitchen, she knocked on the walls with the mop handle, the jungle drums of the four streets, to inform the others that, today, they were needed. That today was not good. And, without fuss or drama, the women of the four streets took over the running of Maura’s house.

They did her washing, mopped her floor and left stews on the range. They baked her bread and cleaned her windows, letting her know they were there. Life still went on and, if she wanted, she could absent herself from it for a while but they would not allow her to leave altogether. She had children to care for. She could heal, in her own time, but she would not be permitted to wither.

With the support of old friends such as Kathleen and Jerry, and new friends like Harriet and Father Anthony, Maura and Tommy slowly surfaced from the deepest well of their own black thoughts. Their daily existence now became one of oppressive, scarcely bearable greyness. And still they did not speak.

It was Harry who eventually broke the spell of their despair.

‘Mam, Mammy, Da.’

In the small hours, Angela had turned on the landing light and stood framed in the doorway of Maura and Tommy’s bedroom.

Maura didn’t reply.

‘Mammy, ’tis Harry. His asthma has been really bad since yesterday and now he can’t breathe.’

Maura sat bolt upright in bed and strained her ears. She could hear the familiar whistle coming from the boys’ room, Harry’s distinctive and unique breathing: short in, long out. But it was too short in and too long out.

Maura had been so wrapped up in her own misery that she had been oblivious to the fact that Harry was ill.

She shook Tommy awake and, for the first time in six weeks, they spoke as though there had never been a period of silence between them.

‘Tommy, ’tis Harry, quick. It’s his asthma, something is wrong.’

The thaw came as they sat outside the children’s ward at Alder Hey Hospital, just as the first dawn light was breaking.

Tommy realized his anger had dissipated, to be replaced by concern for Harry. As he carried the two cups of tea the nurse had brought him, his love for his wife flooded back at the sight of her perched on the edge of the wooden bench, looking frail and exhausted, a shadow of the strong woman she had once been.

Maura placed the cup and saucer on the bench next to her. Tommy slipped his arm round her shoulder and pulled her into him. She cried and, for the first time in his adult life, Tommy cried too.

‘God, I’ve missed you,’ he whispered into her hair.

‘I’ve missed you too,’ she whispered back. ‘Please God, let Harry be all right. Tommy, I could not imagine…’

Her voice trailed off as a doctor came out through the swing doors from the wards and made his way towards them. They could tell, just by looking at him, that he was Irish. It wasn’t just his red hair, it was his facial features too. He appeared familiar. At his approach Tommy squinted, trying to place him.

The doctor was smiling.

‘Harry is going to be fine, so he is,’ he said.

Maura’s hand flew to her mouth as she let out a sob stemmed in relief.

‘We have been using a new trial drug, Salbutamol. I wish we’d had it all the years your little lad has been poorly.

‘A year ago, things could have been very different indeed, given the state of his asthma when he was admitted. He has responded better than we could have hoped for. What’s more, you can use it at home. It will make a huge difference to how we manage his asthma in the future. Harry is one of the lucky ones. This drug isn’t available everywhere yet.

‘I would just say, though, Mr and Mrs Doherty, it isn’t good to leave him so long when he has breathing difficulties. It makes life very problematic for us when we can’t find a vein that we can insert a needle into, to treat him with the drugs we now have that we know will work. When asthma is as bad as Harry’s was, the peripheral veins shut down and, even with the best drugs in the world, if we can’t get the drugs into him, treatment becomes impossible.’

The doctor placed his hand over Maura’s and gave it a squeeze.

‘I know you have had a lot on yer plate, but this little lad needs his mammy and daddy to look out for him. In the meantime, we are going to keep him here for a few days to make sure he is absolutely right before he returns home.’