The Four Streets (10 page)

She had seen it happen to the previous housekeeper, Miss Griffiths, who had been forced out by rheumatoid arthritis at the age of forty-two. Not long after Miss Griffiths left and Alice was promoted to take her place, the hotel manager asked Alice to take a letter and some personal belongings around to Miss Griffiths’ forwarding address. What she found there shocked Alice into a fear that was never to leave her. This fear had occupied her thoughts after she turned off her light at night, keeping her awake into the small hours, and was now propelling her into action.

According to the address on the envelope given to her by the hotel manager, Miss Griffiths lived in a large terraced house on Upper Parliament Street, in the not-so-salubrious part of Liverpool. When Alice knocked at the door, she could smell the stench wafting from within.

A young woman, no more than eighteen years old and only half dressed, had answered after the fourth knock.

‘What d’ya fuckin’ want at this time?’ she screeched as she yanked open the door. It was two in the afternoon. She had the grace to say, ‘Oh sorry, luv, thought it was one of me customers who couldn’t fuckin’ wait.’

‘I am looking for Miss Griffiths. I believe she lives in flat number two,’ said Alice once she had got over her shock.

‘The spinster? Is that her name? Yer, luv, she’s down the ’all. Close the door after youse, will yer, it’s fuckin’ freezing,’ said the girl, leaving Alice standing on the doorstep. She almost fell back up the stairs, where Alice could hear a baby screaming its lungs out.

Alice stepped inside, reluctant to close the door, as there was no window. A dark brown wire hung from the ceiling but with no bulb attached. The floorboards were bare and filthier than any Alice had ever seen in her life. Rubbish was piled up against the wall in an open wooden box that obviously contained the remains of stale food, even though there was a metal bin outside. The smell of rotting food competed for dominance with that of cat pee, which was definitely winning. Next to the box was the shabbiest pram, with barely any rubber on the wheels, and two skinny, flea-bitten cats asleep inside. She could hear the noise of a man and a woman arguing, and the baby’s crying hadn’t stopped. It was relentless.

As Alice tentatively clicked the door shut behind her, she was suddenly plunged into darkness and stood still for a few moments to let her eyes adjust. Within seconds, she heard the sound of rustling coming from the box on the floor and realized she was probably sharing her air with rats or goodness knows what other vermin or wildlife.

‘Don’t panic, just breathe,’ she told herself, as she placed her scarf over her mouth to reduce the stench of cat pee and whatever else was making her gag. She heard muffled music coming from down the hall and then saw a faint light struggle to penetrate the darkness from under a door. Alice gingerly made her way towards the thin strip of light, step by step, one hand holding her scarf against her mouth and the other flat on the wall to feel her way along the hall corridor. Suddenly she stood on something that moved so swiftly from under her feet, it made her lose her balance. She put both her hands out to save herself, but to no avail, ending up face down in a new musky smell she recognized. Shaken and shocked, she picked herself up as the door tentatively opened and, to Alice’s huge relief, flooded the narrow hallway with light.

‘Hello, Alice,’ said Miss Griffiths, ‘My poor girl, I am so sorry, are you all right? Can I help you up? How lovely to see you, please come in.’

Alice looked down at herself. She was covered in black dust, having fallen over a pile of coal outside the door. She took a handkerchief out of her handbag and began to furiously brush herself down.

‘It is my fault,’ she said, seeing how much worse the rheumatics had made Miss Griffiths and how gnarled her hands were. ‘I will just put this back.’ She bent down and retrieved the coal scattered around the hallway.

‘I am relieved to see it’s you,’ said Miss Griffiths. ‘Some of my coal is stolen every day and I don’t ever get to the door in time to see who it is.’

Alice wanted to ask why it was kept on the floor outside the door but the answer awaited her as she stepped inside.

The room was hardly big enough for one person and Alice noticed that it was not as clean as Mrs Griffiths had kept her room at the hotel. Her housekeeper’s eye took in the dirt on the floor around her fireplace and the smoky grime on the mirror hung on the wall. Alice wondered how Miss Griffiths managed to cope as she noticed her hands were so bad that her fingers appeared to have closed over on themselves. A badly made bed occupied one corner; at its foot was a table with a pot, bowl and a matching jug. Another small table stood against a wall with wooden chairs on either side, the seat pads covered in green leather. On this table stood a radio playing classical music, a bowl of sugar, a brown teapot, a milk jug and a cup and saucer. Two red velvet armchairs flanked the small range in which a pathetic fire with the remains from a handful of coal smouldered. Against the opposite wall was a cupboard that obviously contained food. A chest of drawers stood to the side of the door and above it hung a picture that Alice thought she had once seen in one of the hotel bedrooms before it had been redecorated. The cold from outside had seeped into the room and the dwindling fire had allowed the damp to take hold. On a diminutive rug in front of the fire slept a ginger tomcat with a battle-chewed and bloody ear.

Alice didn’t like being here. Miss Griffiths had been her superior. Never a personal word had passed between them. Their past conversations had been about bathrooms, sheets and chambermaids. Alice knew nothing about Miss Griffiths but, over a short period of time, she had watched the older woman’s hands turn out sideways to resemble a pair of fans and her back hunched, until she was so debilitated that she could no longer work.

‘Would you like a cup of tea for your trouble?’ asked Miss Griffiths, as she struggled to take the envelope and the bag from Alice.

If Alice felt awkward, Miss Griffiths felt diminished and embarrassed by Alice seeing her in this condition. Her job had been her world and she had been very professional, running a tight ship and managing the chambermaids as though she were a strict hospital matron. If only she had known, she was friendliness itself compared with Alice.

‘Er, no, thank you,’ said Alice. ‘I had better be getting the bus back now. We have a new girl arriving off the boat from the bogs this afternoon and, as you know, I need to be there to sort her out.’

She had no idea what to say and took her leave within minutes, not noticing the look of acute disappointment in Miss Griffiths’ eyes. It would never have occurred to Alice that she was the only visitor Miss Griffiths had received in many months. It never crossed her mind to offer to carry in some coal, or ask if there was anything she could help with. It was now almost impossible for Miss Griffiths to pick up a cup and saucer, but she would never let anyone know that.

Those thoughts still didn’t cross Alice’s mind when she heard three months later that Miss Griffiths had been found dead in her armchair, having died of dehydration and hypothermia. It was the constant wailing of the cat and the lack of coal to steal that had attracted the neighbour’s attention.

Alice knew that if she didn’t act quickly, this could be her fate. She would become the next Miss Griffiths. She was prepared to do whatever it took to make sure that never happened to her. Come hell or high water, her future would be secure.

Later that afternoon, at the end of their shift, the crew from the bus enjoyed their mug of tea in the Crosville hut down at the Pier Head. The conductor filled in his accident book and noted what had happened for his supervisor.

‘She was a fucking loony,’ said the conductor to the driver. ‘Posh gloves, but away with the fucking fairies, if you ask me, talking to herself out of the window. Not even so much as a flinch when the ticket machine caught her in the face.’

‘You’re the nutter,’ said the driver, ‘pulling the bleeding cord and then saying you didn’t.’

They finished their break in an acrimonious silence, the conductor not wanting to mention the woman with long red hair that he thought he had seen jump onto the bus just before the bell rang, but was nowhere to be found afterwards.

Over the next year and a half, Alice put her plan into action with great skill and single-minded determination. She was living a lie but she was excited and fired up by the fact that it was no effort whatsoever, and she could very easily see the results of her scheming slowly and steadily becoming her reward.

She had hoped that the baby would travel back to Ireland with her grandparents or maybe even be popped into a convent. To her huge disappointment, she discovered on one of her first visits that the baby was going nowhere. It was a blow, but Alice even had a plan as to how to cope with Nellie. Week by week, she eased herself a little more into Jerry’s life and each week made it a little harder for him to manage without her help. Without his even realizing it, Jerry was slowly becoming dependent upon Alice.

Alice was as cunning as she was cold. She paid her second visit almost a month after the first and then the next three weeks later. Each time she came with something delicious to leave behind and, by the third visit, she had begun to help with little things, like the ironing, or making a pie, with food she had taken from the hotel kitchen. This food was divided out amongst staff who worked at the hotel. For the lower grades, it was the leftovers from the table service; but for the more senior staff, it was a cut from the butcher’s and a share from the fresh fruit and veg delivery.

Alice had never previously taken any, but now she pulled rank. She brought fresh beef and chicken to Jerry’s house and, having taken lessons from the hotel chef, could cook a decent stew. The chef made her the odd pie with buttery hand-rolled puff pastry and steaming gravy, which, delivered in a wicker basket wrapped up in a tea towel, lasted Jerry a few days. In return, Alice supplied the kitchen staff with bedding, blankets and pillows. The hotel trade was doing well in Liverpool and everyone had their cut.

After the first six months, Jerry would arrive home some nights to find Alice in the kitchen cooking a meal. She always left straight away, insisting she didn’t want to encroach upon his time. This made him feel bad and he implored her to stay and eat with him. He had never invited her to the house, but she quickly worked out that the back door was never locked and took the daring step one day to let herself in.

For Jerry, the pleasure of coming home to a clean house, with the range lit and a meal cooked, quickly surpassed his shock at finding a near stranger in his kitchen.

One day, when Jerry and Tommy were sitting on the dock wall having a ciggie break after unloading a hull, they began to talk about Alice.

‘She is a strange thing, this Alice,’ Jerry said to Tommy. ‘She seems to like helping out and I can’t work out what she wants in return because she won’t let me pay her nowt.’

Eejit, thought Tommy, but kept his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t going to start a row with his best mate. He also wasn’t going to repeat to Maura what Jerry had just said, because she would kick off. Instead, Tommy made a few enquiries of his own.

‘Was she a friend of Bernadette, then?’ he asked, as subtly as a brick. ‘It’s just that I was wondering, like, why I never saw her before Bernadette passed away and, the thing is, I don’t remember her from the wedding, either.’

‘She was nursing her sick aunt in Macclesfield,’ said Jerry, who had already asked this question of Alice during one of their first meetings. He had tried to place her in his mind and tried to remember meeting her. He couldn’t. It was a mystery. He knew the name, he had heard Bernadette mention an Alice, but in what context he had no recollection. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it and, anyway, she was obviously just kind and trying to help.

‘I do feel a bit uncomfortable, so I do, just sometimes,’ said Jerry. ‘I mean, what would Bernadette say? But, Tommy, I swear to God, it’s nothing like that, I never so much as touched her or had a thought like that cross me mind. Anyway, as soon as I gets in, she leaves.’

‘Aye,’ said Tommy, nodding. Maura had mentioned that. ‘You know what I think, Jerry? I think she’s broody and it’s all about the babby. She has none of her own and I reckon she’s hanging around ’cause she has a nature for Nellie. Not having had a baby of their own by the time they are twenty-one does strange things to a woman’s brain, so it does, and the more time goes on the worse it gets. I don’t know how Bernadette stayed so normal, I don’t. Best thing to do is bang ’em up as much as ye can and as soon as possible and then ye can’t go wrong. It’s natural.’

Having both spoken enough for working men, they sat on the wall in silence, looking down at their boots while they finished their ciggies. Jerry was lost in thought as to how things would have been different if he had led his life according to Tommy’s simple rules.

One day, Jerry invited Alice to stop, spend the evening and eat with him and Nellie. He felt bad that she had arrived with a meal and wouldn’t take a penny off him.

His mornings were always rushed. On his way to work he took Nellie down to Maura’s, with a basket full of nappies, and collected her on his way home. He often left the kitchen in a mess and felt horribly guilty at how much this nice, kind woman, who wouldn’t stay longer than five minutes once he and Nellie got in, did to help them. He felt he should do something in return. Initially, she refused every single time but then slowly she began to accept the occasional invitation, always manufacturing reasons as to why she couldn’t accept most times he asked.

Over time, although he had never so much as touched her, Jerry realized that Alice was becoming a fixture in his life and that others would regard her as more than a friend. Alice was odd, he recognized that.

Maura remembered the stories Bernadette had told her about Alice. Maura hated Alice, which made things difficult. Every time Jerry dropped Nellie off at Maura’s, he was assailed by a storm of questions. He assumed that Alice didn’t relate very well to Nellie because she didn’t want to step on Maura’s toes. Even he was aware that when Maura came into his house and Alice was there, the hostility between them froze the air within seconds. However, he knew that when Alice wasn’t around, life was just that bit harder.