Читать книгу By the Waters of Liverpool - Helen Forrester - Страница 8

To get a little time alone with Father would, I knew, be difficult. A big family in a tiny house has almost no privacy.

I pulled the string hanging inside the flapless letter box, in order to let myself in. I had worked late and then gone straight to evening school and had not eaten since morning, but I paused for a moment in the doorway to watch some men playing ollies in the gutter. The little white balls skittered over the rough roadway, almost invisible in the light of the street lamps. These men used to say disparagingly about our family that we talked ‘with ollies in t’ mouth’. Refined Oxford accents were extremely rare in slums.

The smell of the house hit me as I went into the little hall, a smell of warm, damp, much-used air, with strong overtones of the odour of vomit.

All the family was crowded into the small, back living room. Old-fashioned wooden shutters had been closed across the curtainless windows and secured by an iron bar. A small fire blazed bravely in the big, iron kitchen range, and by it Father was seated bolt upright in the solitary easy chair.

His usual yellowy complexion was flushed red, and he was pounding his delicate, almost feminine fist on the arm of the chair, as if to emphasise forcibly something he had already said.

As I paused by the door, he almost shouted, ‘I will not tolerate such an abomination. It is disgusting beyond words. She must leave at once.’

He was answered by an unintelligible babble from the family.

I thought for an anxious second that he was talking about me. I lived in constant, gnawing fear that my parents would withdraw me from my job and make me stay at home again to keep house; they were quite capable of taking such a decision without any prior discussion with me and of handing in my resignation directly to my employer. I was still under twenty-one.

With some trepidation I eased my way through the half-open door and into the room itself. The children’s upturned faces looked sickly in the light of the single, unshaded electric bulb, and Edward turned his heart-shaped face, pinched with fatigue, towards me. He said simply, ‘Bed.’

Though he was nearly seven, he was no great weight and I picked him up, and said, ‘Yes, love.’ He and Brian were the only children I ever knew who asked to go to bed. It was as if their strength ran out suddenly. I smiled at him, and added, ‘I’ll put the kettle on to heat and help you wash your knees and neck as soon as it is hot.’ I looked cautiously round him at the family.

The centre of attention was Fiona. She was standing in the middle of the group, facing Father, and her wide eyes with their enormous fringe of long lashes showed signs of tears. She was almost cringing, her toes turned slightly inward, her arms across her breast as if to protect herself.

She said in a watery voice, ‘It’s not that bad, Daddy. I didn’t go. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

Nobody took any notice of me, except Alan, who grinned at me as I stumbled over his feet, on my way to the kitchen with Edward. ‘I think it’s funny,’ he said to Father.

There was some hot water in the kettle sitting on the greasy little gas stove, so I poured it into the washing-up bowl and commenced to wash Edward. I could hear Father’s choked voice. He said furiously, ‘It is not funny. It is horrible. At the least, it shows a total disrespect for the dead – at the worst, it is perversion. They ought to be put out of business.’

Mother was laboriously cutting her nails with our single pair of blunt scissors, letting the ends drop into the hearth, and she murmured, ‘It makes me shudder.’

I paused in my preparations to wash Edward’s dirty knees, and left him sitting on the kitchen table drying his face, while I went to the intervening door and asked, ‘What’s happened, Daddy?’

‘Pack of sickening necrophiles!’ Father exploded again, turning to me.

Brian and Tony were sitting at the table, elbows on open exercise books. I saw Tony’s eyes light up. A beautiful new word to be learned, to be used incessantly for at least a week, while he turned it over in his mind and tried it in every possible way.

Mother greeted me with a worried, ‘Hello, Helen. We’ll explain it later. Put Avril and Edward to bed – it’s getting late.’ She turned to the students at the table who were obviously most intrigued by the conversation. ‘Hurry up, you two. Put your books away.’

‘It’s something about looking at dead people, Helen,’ Edward whispered to me, as I returned to him, and rolled down his knee-high socks. His knees were very dirty and I scrubbed them with a piece of cotton cloth. There was no soap.

Avril had followed me out, and stood waiting for her turn to be washed. She said nothing, but her plain, round face beneath the straggling blonde hair was white, and I wondered if she were ill.

Edward struggled out of his woollen jersey and proffered a far-from-white neck to be washed. ‘It’s nasty,’ he muttered.

Both children looked so bewildered and scared that I answered them with forced cheerfulness. ‘It doesn’t sound very respectful, I know. But I’m sure there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dead people are just people who have shed an overcoat which has worn out. And the real people – their souls – have gone to Heaven. They are happy. It is only the people who get left behind who are unhappy – it’s natural – they don’t like being left.’

I tried to be soothing and matter-of-fact, while Avril perfunctorily washed her hands and face in the same pint of water.

Protesting crossly, Brian and Tony put their books together and heaved themselves between furniture and family towards the staircase and bed. Tony asked sulkily, ‘How do you spell necrophile?’ and was told angrily by Father not to be impudent.

I took the candle from the kitchen and eased Avril and Edward along after the boys. Mother looked overwhelmed with fatigue, but she was not too tired to fire at Fiona, as I passed her, ‘For goodness’ sake, be quiet, girl.’ Fiona sank down on an upturned paint can, which we used as a chair, and continued to whimper miserably.

Upstairs, I heard Avril and Edward say the small prayer which our nanny had taught me long ago, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild...’ Then I tucked Avril into the bed she shared with Fiona and me, and put Edward into the one he shared with Brian and Tony, and left them, shivering under the thin blankets, to their individual nightmares.

Brian and Tony stumped grumpily round the room, pulling off their outer clothes and tossing them on to the bed rail. I put the candle down on an orange-box, which had been made into a dressing table by draping an old curtain over it, and told Brian to blow it out before he got into bed. ‘Quietly, boys,’ I pleaded. ‘Let Edward go to sleep.’ Then I ran downstairs again to the living room.

Alan had picked up a book and was flicking through it. Father and Mother were staring into the fire, Father rubbing his chin with quick, impatient motions. Fiona sat, her back against the wall, still crying. I was dreadfully hungry and quite apprehensive about what might have happened, but I went first to her and put my arm round her shoulders. She laid her head against my threadbare skirt. We never talked together – we had little in common except our sisterhood; yet we were often a comfort to each other.

‘Daddy, what has happened?’

‘She has to leave her job,’ said Father, beating an impatient tattoo with his fingers on the arm of his chair. Mother nodded agreement. Alan put down his book and watched the scene with a look of morbid fascination, glancing expectantly from one to the other of us.

‘Why?’ I inquired, puzzled.

‘She must,’ Mother agreed, and then added crossly. ‘It is not fit for a young girl – it is not fit for anyone to be there.’

Alan interjected with an unexpected chuckle, ‘You could put it down to professional interest – after all, it’s all meat.’

Mother was shocked. ‘Alan! How could you say such a revolting thing?’

Alan grinned wickedly and folded his arms, as if enjoying the family’s evident distress.

Father groped for words and finally said carefully, ‘The butcher’s shop in which Fiona is working is opposite an undertaker’s. Sometimes the undertakers invite the butchers over to look at the corpses. I cannot believe that it is the undertaker himself who does this – I think it is some of his employees.’

Fiona lifted her face. ‘It is, Daddy. They do it when he is out – and the butchers always wait until our boss has gone to market.’

‘How awful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Imagine being stared at in your coffin by a pack of strangers. How morbid!’ I looked down at Fiona’s tousled head, and said to her, ‘Perhaps you should look for another job.’

Fiona turned her face up towards me. She was so white that I thought she might faint. She said, ‘They had a young girl there this morning – and she wasn’t in her coffin – or even wrapped up. She was naked – and they were whispering and laughing afterwards about how they played with her. It sounded awful. So I was sick suddenly over the cash desk – and they laughed. After I had cleared up the mess, they sent me home early.’

Nausea began to overwhelm me. Vague tales I had heard, whispered amongst the beshawled women beside whom I had sat on front steps or in the park while watching the children play, began to surface in my mind and come together. I had always discounted their mutterings as rubbish. Now I realised that it was not rubbish. They had been disapproving about something which had really happened. I took big breaths to control my surging stomach. How could men be so vile?

‘Heavens, I’m glad you told Daddy,’ I muttered.

‘I had to,’ responded Fiona flatly. ‘I was thinking about it again just before you came in – and I was sick over the floor.’

‘Humph,’ Mother almost grunted, ‘I thought it was something else, but I was wrong, thank goodness.’

For a moment, I looked at her blankly and then remembered her bouts of morning sickness before every birth, and I said indignantly, ‘Fi would never get herself into trouble. She’s not that kind.’ But a sudden, different fear for Fiona had been planted in my mind. Did she know anything about sex? I was still vague myself about the precise details of this mystery, but since I never expected to have a boyfriend it did not matter in my case. It did matter for Fiona. I knew that she was already meeting a local youth secretly and going to the cinema with him.

Father had been brooding during this exchange. Now he fumed, ‘They should be reported.’

‘Who to?’ asked Mother.

‘The police, of course.’

‘Could the police do anything?’

‘Oh, yes. It is a serious matter.’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ wailed Fiona, ‘if you do tell the police there’ll be such a rumpus in the shop. The men will say I’m a lying troublemaker, and the boss won’t want to give me a reference.’ She rubbed her wet eyes with the backs of her hands. ‘The story will go all round the local shops, and then what will I do? With no reference, I won’t stand a chance.’

She clung to me and I suddenly leaned limply against her. I was beginning to feel faint with hunger.