Authors: Nadine Dorries
Before Tommy or Jerry could react she added, ‘Before either of you think of gobbing off with an opinion, hear what Kathleen has to say, because she has more sense than all of us put together, so she does.’
Tommy couldn’t have given an opinion. He was in shock. His bottom jaw had dropped and there it remained, gawping. Jerry rubbed his hands through his hair and was the first to speak.
‘The fecking bastard. He’s still here tormenting us. The fecking bastard.’
Maura didn’t know where she found her strength. It came from nowhere and surged up in her. As she began to speak, she hardly recognized her own voice.
‘Before either of you say another thing, I have children upstairs, and the baby is asleep and I will not let her be woken. They are not going to hear either of you raise your voices and they are not going to know what is going on, just because neither of you two can control yourselves. Do you both understand?’
For a split second, Tommy wasn’t quite sure what had shocked him most. The news that Kitty was carrying the dead priest’s child, or the fact that Maura was laying down the law when, as Kitty’s father, he was more than entitled to kick off. He instantly understood why Maura had asked Jerry to come over.
‘Whilst Kathleen explains, I will take some money from the bread bin and buy four bottles of Guinness from the Anchor. Not a word until I get back. I want no argument over this, it is too important.’
Neither man spoke. Jerry watched Maura as she put on her coat and fastened her headscarf over her curlers. The back-door latch clicked shut and Jerry listened to her feet tip-tapping over the yard.
Not for the first time, he admired her. She would fight for her family and here she was, laying the law down in her own kitchen to calm the two men she was closest to.
Tommy tipped his head backwards, stared at the ceiling and let out a large sigh.
His eyes focused on a stain that spread outwards from the light bulb in the centre. Within a dark-brown outline, shaped like a perfect cloud on a summer’s day. The type you see drawn in the children’s books from which Kitty had taught Tommy to read.
He remembered the first book they had read together.
Janet and John
. When he had told his five-year-old princess that he had never really attended school and had spent all of his childhood with his father, helping him with the horses, she had set her goal: to teach Tommy everything the sisters had taught her at school.
‘Come on, Da, up,’ she used to say to him when it was time for her to go to bed.
They had decided that it would be their secret. Sometimes, if he was tired after a hard day, he would make an excuse but she would stand there, one hand on her little hip and the other pointing up the stairs, her face set into what Tommy called her school-marm expression.
‘Oh no you don’t, Da, up you come right now,’ she would say and it was all he could do not to burst out laughing. She was the image of Maura.
Sometimes he fell asleep on the bed next to her as they practised their letters. One memorable night, he opened one eye and saw her serious little face right next to his as she pulled the blanket over him, clambered back into the bed and, putting her little arms around his neck, fell fast asleep.
His first-born. His princess. His favourite.
Kathleen, who had not wanted to intrude on his personal grief, began to speak, softly.
‘Tommy, we have to move her away from here. Her belly is trouble, a straight link in time to the priest. Two major events in one street would have to be connected. It is another reason for the police to visit your house. I don’t know what has brought them here today, but I have a feeling that I just have to get her away. I have already rung home. I’m taking her and Nellie to Ireland for a break while we try to figure out what to do, but I do know this, Tommy: no one around here must have even the slightest notion that the child is pregnant.’
He still couldn’t speak. His child was pregnant with the child of a man he had murdered with his own hands. How much worse could it be?
He made no attempt to halt the tears. He didn’t care that he was breaking the unspoken code that real men didn’t cry.
Jerry didn’t speak. He offered no words of comfort. To do so would be to acknowledge Tommy’s distress. Jerry had shed many tears of his own and knew that the best thing to do was to let Tommy cry them out.
It seemed only moments before Maura arrived back in the kitchen and was handing each of them a bottle of Guinness.
With a nod of appreciation to Maura for the bottle, Jerry asked Kathleen, ‘When are you leaving, Mammy?’
‘Tomorrow night, Jer. Well, at three in the morning, when it is at its darkest. We will leave the street without anyone seeing us go.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Maura almost shouted. ‘I thought we were planning for the school holidays?’
Kathleen continued, ‘Once we have left, you have to put the story about that my sister is ill. I had to rush back home and the girls came with me to help. I’ve made enough phone calls from the Anchor and given that story to Bill on the bar. I also used the phone tonight and told them we were leaving soon. I called Maeve the other day when I already knew in my mind what I was planning and she knows what’s what.
‘We have family in Ireland we can trust, Tommy, we all do. The streets here are on fire with the chinwagging and we need to be out of it. If we aren’t here, we can be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. If they see us all leaving together with bags in hand, moving off for a sudden holiday, the gossip will run riot around the four streets and might reach as far as the police station.’
They were silent with shock at what Kathleen had planned. Each raised their bottle at exactly the same moment and took a long gulp of the Guinness.
But Kathleen hadn’t finished; there was more.
‘Now, Maura, we have to put on the act of our very lives, like we have nothing to hide and the fact that we have gone away is just a coincidence. Bring all the girls in tomorrow, even Peggy. Let’s have a hair night. We need everyone to think all is fine and dandy in the Doherty house and that we haven’t a care in the world. Don’t even tell Kitty that she is being taken the following morning. The less she knows, the better.’
The following evening, after a few knocks of mops on kitchen walls, Sheila arrived in Maura’s kitchen and transformed it into a hairdressing salon. Nellie had her hair washed, with her long locks tied tightly in rags ripped from an old nappy, which the following morning would leave her a head adorned with beautiful red ringlets.
Brigid had brought with her a jam tart she had made to accompany the copious cups of tea, as well as a baby tucked inside a blanket sling tied across her chest.
In her bag she had a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a jar of Pond’s cold cream. This she had smeared thickly over everyone’s eyebrows, in preparation for her session of plucking and shaping.
Peggy had settled herself by the fire with a packet of ciggies and an ashtray.
The kitchen was a buzz of activity as Kathleen, Kitty and Brigid took it in turns to have their hair washed over the kitchen sink by Alice as Sheila set about transforming them all into visions of beauty.
Nellie and Kitty were enjoying the excitement. Hair nights in the kitchen happened about once a month, in one house or another. It was the only time Peggy ever washed her hair. Very few could afford a hairdresser and Sheila was a dab hand with a pair of scissors. The shillings she earned from her scissor skills made a difference to her life. Sheila also owned a rubber hose, which divided in the middle and connected to the kitchen taps, just as they did in the hairdresser’s. They all loved the atmosphere of the girls’ night in. For the first time in weeks, Kitty laughed at Peggy who grumbled and shuffled as usual as she came in through Maura’s back door.
The smell in the kitchen changed perceptibly as Peggy walked in. They were all well used to the distinct Peggy perfume and managed to ignore it.
‘I swear to the Holy Father I was never meant to marry that fat slob and the midwife definitely slipped someone else’s kids, which were devils themselves, into the cot, and gave the good ones I had to someone else. What have I done to deserve that lot next door, eh, Maura?’
‘We often ask the same question ourselves, Peggy,’ said Maura in a sympathetic tone with a twinkle in her eye as she winked at Kathleen. Everyone stifled their giggles.
Kitty knelt on a chair with her head over the sink, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, with Alice using the hose to rinse the shampoo out of her hair. Kitty’s shoulders shook and she felt Alice’s belly shuddering with laughter as they both leant over, trying not to be unkind and hurt Peggy’s feelings.
That happened often enough when sometimes the little ones called her Smelly Peggy out loud and she heard them.
Kitty was feeling better by the minute. The old Kitty was returning, restored by laughter.
The new Kitty was fading, suppressed by denial.
Kitty loved her hair.
Long, thick and just like her mother’s.
Brigid had plucked and shaped everyone’s eyebrows, and the kitchen had been full of screams and laughter at Kathleen’s antics under the tweezers.
Maura had sat Kitty on a chair in front of the fire and taken the curlers out. Then Sheila had backcombed the life out of her hair, piled most of it up on top of her head and swept her fringe dramatically across, almost covering one eye.
When Tommy walked into the kitchen, he pretended not to recognize her.
‘Jeez, Maura,’ Tommy shouted in mock surprise. ‘What is Marianne Faithfull doing sat in our kitchen and where the hell is our Kitty?’
‘Shut up, ye great eejit, this is our Kitty.’
‘Holy Mary, how was I to know that? We had better be careful, someone might snap her up to appear in a film or something.’
Kitty threw one of the curlers at Tommy, but she was grinning shyly from ear to ear, beside herself with pleasure.
A grand show it was as the kitchen rocked with laughter and women tripped in and out of the back door, just as they always did. Hardly a word was mentioned about the police and when it was, Maura answered with confidence, ‘Well, sure, there was no one the priest was closer to than us, now. Only natural so, that they be looking to us to help.’
Everyone nodded as kindly Brigid, who knew almost as much as the Dohertys, said, ‘Sure, isn’t that the truth.’
No one other than Nellie saw the smile slip from Kitty’s face.
It was pitch-black outside and Kitty felt as though she had been asleep for only an hour when she was woken by Maura, gently shaking her shoulders.
‘Wake up, queen,’ she whispered, ‘come downstairs.’
When Kitty staggered into the kitchen, her clothes were ready warming and Maura had poked some life into the fire. There was a candle lit on the mantel, but Maura hadn’t switched on the lights.
As Kitty moved towards the switch, Tommy hissed, ‘No, don’t, queen, leave it.’
‘What am I getting dressed for?’ asked Kitty, dazed and only half awake, blinking at them both as she rubbed her bleary eyes.
‘You are going to Ireland now, Kitty,’ said Maura. ‘Hurry, your da is taking you down to the Pier Head to meet Kathleen in ten minutes, so you don’t have long.’
Kitty checked the clock on the mantel above the range. ‘Mammy, ’tis only half two,’ she said.
‘Yes, and that is why we have to be extra careful and quiet and leave separately, so as not to wake a living soul. It’s why we are meeting Kathleen at the Pier Head, do ye understand?’
Kitty nodded, but she didn’t understand. Thoughts of her friends and teachers were flitting through her brain. How would they know where she was, if she hadn’t had the chance to talk to them and explain what was happening?
She was too tired to talk. Maura forced her to take some tea and toast, which was the last thing she wanted, but as she drank, the excitement of the adventure began to filter through and drag her up through the folds of sleep.
Ten minutes later, with the new, brown, jumble-sale holdall clutched in one hand and Kitty’s hand in his other, Tommy was tiptoeing across the cobbled entry, hugging close to the wall, slipping away into the dark night. Kitty’s secret, their secret, was at last leaving the knowing, prying eyes of those who lived on the four streets.
J
ERRY
’
S BROTHER,
L
IAM
, was waiting to greet them when they arrived in Dublin.
It was a dark and wet night and the girls kept their heads bent low as they disembarked to keep the driving rain from directly hitting them in the face. They had sat at the Pier Head for most of the morning as one crossing after another had been cancelled due to the choppy Irish Sea until at last, a ferry was allowed to leave.
Now, they were officially on holiday.
Both girls were still reeling with the shock from the suddenness of their departure. It had all happened so quickly.
‘Ye’ll get used to the rain,’ shouted Kathleen who led the way as she bustled on ahead. ‘It rains so much in Mayo, Kitty, that people who stay here for too long grow a set of gills.’
‘They don’t, do they?’ Kitty said to Nellie.
Nellie laughed. ‘Not at all, it’s Nana Kathleen’s joke. She tells it all the time. I must have heard it a hundred times, but me and Da, we just laugh so she feels like she’s being funny.’
Both girls began to giggle, more from the excitement of setting foot on the soil of a foreign country than Kathleen’s jokes, which they could no longer hear above the sounds of people greeting each other and car horns beeping. Suddenly, they thought they could hear Jerry shout, ‘Mammy,’ but they both looked up and realized it was Liam, who appeared and sounded as much like Jerry as it was possible to.
‘Well, well, well, would ye look at the grown-up colleen now,’ Liam shouted as he scooped Nellie up into his arms. ‘Here, would ye let me take a look at ye. What a big miss ye are. The absolute image of yer mammy with that long red hair. I bet ye don’t remember Uncle Liam, do ye?’
Nellie didn’t know why, but she was overcome by a strange shyness. Maybe it was because Kitty was witnessing this very open display of affection. Or perhaps because he had spoken of Bernadette. She felt stupidly proud to have been compared to her own mammy, the mammy that no one in Liverpool ever spoke about. She did remember Uncle Liam. He was loud, gregarious and always playing practical jokes.