Authors: Nadine Dorries
Nellie loved him. She loved him twice over for speaking about Bernadette as though she were still alive.
He was the funniest man she had ever met. She hadn’t seen him for two whole years but she certainly did remember him.
She loved the farm and everyone on it. She often thought about them all. What she loved most was that it was where her daddy was born, and where Nana Kathleen had also been born, and her daddy before her and his before him. Uncle Liam had built a new house on the same land as the old house, so for a long time there had always been a Deane on the farm. The new house had a fully fitted indoor bathroom. That was a novelty on the four streets in Liverpool. It was a novelty in Ballymara and in the main village, Bangornevin, too. Nellie knew there were lots of people in the village and out in the country who were envious of what a good farmer Liam was and of how well the Deane farm fared.
Nellie had also been taken aback by the suddenness of their departure. Last night she had sat on Jerry’s knee in front of the fire for a cuddle. Jerry had played with her ringlet rags and wrapped them round his fingers as they both stared into the fire.
Jerry whispered so that Alice couldn’t hear.
‘Yer mammy, Bernadette, had loved the farm so much, she used to swing on the big five-bar gate to the yard and do nothing more than gaze up the hill opposite and dream of you. Yourself, little miss, were just the twinkle in her eyes back then.’
She gave Jerry a big hug to try to make him smile. His expression was wistful and sad but she knew that wherever it was he vanished to when he mentioned her mammy, it was somewhere Nellie couldn’t reach. She could feel the ache in his heart but it was his ache and his alone, untouchable and not one she could heal.
Uncle Liam placed a kiss on her cheek and put her back down as he bent to greet Kitty. ‘And you must be Miss Kitty?’ he said grandly as he took off his cap and bowed in an exaggerated manner.
Kitty blushed a deep pink and took the hand Liam proffered.
A self-conscious Kitty had never shaken anyone’s hand before.
‘Now,’ said Nana Kathleen, ‘if ye would stop play-acting, Liam, and take these bags, I’d be very grateful.’
Kathleen playfully hit Liam across the back with her umbrella. Liam pretended it had hurt much more than it actually had and began to walk doubled over as though he were in great pain, lifting up the bags and howling with agony.
Kitty and Nellie were in fits of giggles.
‘Here, Nellie,’ shouted Liam as he threw her the keys. ‘Would ye drive? Me back is so bad now thanks to that Nana Kathleen.’
Nellie squealed loudly as she caught the keys, but she and Kitty were laughing so much they could barely protest that Nellie was too young to drive.
Liam, affecting a miraculous recovery, lifted up the tarpaulin on the back of the van and placed the bags underneath.
As Kathleen shuffled herself across the van’s bench seat to sit next to Liam, she shouted, ‘The rain is playing merry hell with my wash and set, so get in quickly, girls.’
As Liam passed the girls to reach the driver’s seat, with a wink he slipped them each a brown ten-shilling note. God, how can he afford that? thought Kitty. The reason most of the Irish were in England was to make money, but Nellie and Kitty’s first impression was that they had more money in Ireland. No one on the four streets owned a car. A ten-shilling note was a huge amount of money, enough for two days’ shopping at home.
‘Flippin’ heck, we are millionaires,’ whispered Nellie to Kitty, as they scrambled along the bench next to Nana Kathleen, to begin the long journey in the rain across Ireland to the west coast.
Kitty had never before travelled in a car, a train or a boat, and in the space of a day, she had experienced all three.
She had never visited the land of her parents’ and her ancestors’ birth, yet here she was with her feet on Irish soil and, inexplicably, it felt like her soil. The furthest distance she had ever travelled had been to St John’s market with her mam at dusk on a Christmas Eve, to buy a fresh turkey and some bacon from the meat hall at the end of the day at a knock-down price.
To date, that had been the most exciting journey Kitty had ever made. She loved the sawdust-covered, wooden floorboards and the Christmas atmosphere amongst the butchers, cheekily calling out to the women from behind their market stalls.
But that was as nothing compared to the last forty-eight hours.
Everything about this trip was a novelty, such as sloping off in the dead of night to the Pier Head to catch the ferry before the buses were even running. The sandwiches Maura had made her for the journey contained tongue. She had never before in her life had anything more exotic than jam or Shippam’s fish paste.
Meanwhile, as Liam drove slowly away from the port towards the streets of Dublin, back at number nineteen Tommy and Maura were clearing up the kitchen following supper.
Angela had been in a foul mood, a seamless continuation from her bad temper at breakfast, when she had discovered that Kitty was taking a holiday to Ireland.
‘I cannot believe this,’ she had screamed. ‘Why her and not me? It’s desperate, Mammy, that I am being left behind, it is, desperate,’ she sobbed.
Angela wailed and cried at the unjustness of it all, adding to the load of Maura’s day.
‘Every cloud has a silver lining, Angela,’ Maura replied. ‘Ye become the eldest child whilst Kitty is having her holiday.’
Maura had no idea that that was exactly what Angela was dreading.
‘Thank God Kitty’s gone,’ said Tommy wearily when he and Maura were preparing for bed. ‘She needs this holiday. The air on the farm will put the colour back in her cheeks. They say a change is as good as a rest, don’t they?’
With a sigh, he pulled up the sash window. The night sounds of the tugs on the river filled the room. Putting his head outside to blow away his cigarette smoke, with a heavy heart he whispered, more to the moon and the stars than to Maura, ‘I only wish I was going with her.’
Hardly a day passed without Tommy thinking of Cork and the village where he had been born and raised. He thought now of his own family – his mammy, daddy and those of his siblings – who had travelled on to America rather than stay in Liverpool. Whenever someone mentioned Cork within earshot of Tommy, he always repeated the same comment: ‘Aye, God’s own county, and there is no finer a place on this earth, so there isn’t. No better people, no finer horses, nor more beautiful women.’
Tommy spent some of his day, every day, dreaming of Cork.
‘I sometimes wish we had gone on to America, Maura. We both should have done what my brothers did. Maybe this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened in America.’
Maura listened to him, all the while keeping her own thoughts close. How glad she was that she had indulged and spoilt Kitty over the last few days.
‘Come to bed, Tommy,’ she whispered.
Maura was exhausted from having to wake at two o’clock to spirit Kitty away into the night and coping with the demands of her children. Malachi and Declan ran Maura ragged on the best of days and today was no different. Maura was already missing Kitty in so many ways.
‘She is with Kathleen and Nellie, and no doubt having great craic while we are here worrying ourselves stupid. Come to bed,’ she said softly.
Tommy pulled the window down and the curtains across before he slipped into the comforting arms of the woman who loved him as no other ever would.
Who was not from Cork.
Kathleen and Liam chatted away as they drove across Dublin, with Nellie throwing in the odd comment or question. Kitty could barely understand what they were talking about. She knew none of the names or the places they were discussing. Liam had a list of deliveries to collect, which would make the journey longer.
Kitty stared out at the wide river and the tenement buildings. Had it been only three days since she had found out what was wrong? Now she knew why her period hadn’t arrived. She had started only a year ago and had not thought anything of having missed. She’d had no idea what this meant until Maura had explained it to her last night in furtive whispers, as she sat her in yet another scalding-hot bath before Sheila and the other neighbours called round.
On three occasions over the last three days, Maura had almost boiled her alive in a bath while making her swallow a weird-tasting drink. Her nausea had been replaced by the most awful diarrhoea.
‘You need to be purged, Kitty,’ Maura had whispered. ‘Your guts making all that movement in the outhouse will bring your monthly on, so it will. And you have to drink the Epsoms whilst you are sat in the hot bath, it doesn’t work else.’
Kitty had been well and truly purged and, heavens, had a cleaner child ever visited Eire? Her monthly had remained stubborn, clinging to the lining of her womb for dear life.
Kitty pressed her face against the window and looked out into the Dublin night at the women gathered on the tenement building steps under an overhead canopy, smoking pipes and wearing headscarves, with black knitted shawls draped around their shoulders. In long black skirts, they sat with their knees wide apart. By the light of the glass-domed street lamps, she saw children walking in the pouring rain, wearing barely any clothes. They couldn’t have been more than two years of age. It was late and yet the streets were incredibly noisy. Through open doors she glimpsed long counters of polished dark wood in bars heaving with customers, drinking the black-velvet Guinness.
They drove past a group of men fighting in the street.
‘Dublin is the capital of sin now, Mammy,’ Liam said to Kathleen. ‘No one comes here unless they have to. It is a bad state of affairs all right.’
‘Sure, it always was, Liam, nothing has altered there. Dublin has always been a bad place, which is why I never allowed any of you to come here when ye were growing up.’
The capital of sin? Kitty and Nellie looked at each other and then outside with renewed interest.
Kitty had never even been into Liverpool at night and now, here she was, in the heart of Dublin, driving through the capital of sin.
It felt as though each minute there was a new sensation or experience. Kitty felt time shifting. Her foundation of stability, all she knew and understood, was slipping away from under her. This journey, with every mile they drove, drew a line under her life as the old Kitty. She tried not to think about what was happening but she realized that, from this night on, nothing would ever be the same again.
Already homesick, Kitty wanted to return to Liverpool to her mammy. To sit with Maura and Tommy, just the three of them together, as they sometimes did at night when the younger children were asleep.
Tommy would tell jokes about what the men had done and said on the docks and they would usually laugh about one of the twins’ antics. They would worry out loud about Harry’s asthma, and all three would have a drink and a bite together before Kitty went upstairs to bed.
Before she did, she would kiss and hug both her parents goodnight. Kitty would walk over to her da and bend to kiss him on the cheek. He would pretend to be reading his paper and then, at the last second, as she bent her head, he would turn quickly and steal a peck on the lips. He did it every night, but the three of them always laughed as though he had never done it before.
Kitty wanted to be there right now, in the warmth of her kitchen with the people who loved her best of all.
She was a young girl, pregnant, in a strange country with people who, kind as they might be, weren’t her own.
Exhausted, she leant her head against Nellie’s shoulder and slept.
A
LICE AND
B
RIGID
had become good friends.
They shared a secret. They had both become bound by events which took place following the murder.
Brigid had helped in her own way to throw the police off the scent away from number nineteen following the murder. Her and Sean had provided Tommy with an alibi. They were parents of daughters and although they didn’t fully know all the details neither did Alice, not completely. The only people who really knew what took place in the graveyard that night, were Tommy and Jerry. Or so they thought. On the night of the murder, they had all raised their whiskey glasses and made a vow. Not one word was to be spoken about that night, to anyone, not even to each other, ever again.
No one other than Tommy knew of the torment that now woke him in the middle of the night and left him staring out of the window, wondering how in God’s name he had gone from a peace-loving family man to a murderer in one fateful hour.
Tommy would rewind the evening over and over in his mind, as though on a loop. Images of the hangman’s gallows haunted him as he tried and failed to somehow make sense of the extraordinary events that had taken over his very ordinary life.
It was no surprise, really, that the first real friend Alice had ever made, other than her mother-in-law Kathleen, had been Brigid. They had plenty in common, besides the secret. Brigid had daughters around the same age as Joseph.
There wasn’t anything Brigid didn’t know about child rearing. There was nothing Alice did know.
They both had the best-looking husbands on the four streets, if not in all of Liverpool.
Sean, like Jerry, was able to make even the elderly ladies on Nelson Street giggle in a flirtatious way and both men hammed it up outrageously.
‘Evening, Mrs O’Prey,’ Jerry would shout if he saw Annie on her step on his way home. ‘God, ye look gorgeous today, so ye do. Lock the door tonight or I’ll be desperate to get across into your bed if my Alice turns me away and says no.’
Mrs O’Prey would flash her gums at Jerry and disintegrate into a fit of giggles.
‘Oh, away with ye, Jerry Deane, ye bad lad, wait until I tell ye mammy.’
Jerry knew there was very little in Mrs O’Prey’s life to make her smile.
If Tommy was with him he would shake his head.
‘Nothing wrong in making them laugh, Tommy,’ Jerry would say.
‘Aye, you just made her day all right, Jerry, you did.’
‘What about ye, Tommy, will ye be comin’ over after he’s finished?’ Annie O’Prey shouted cheekily across.