Liverpool Daisy

This is a novel, and its situations and characters are imaginary. Whatever similarity there may be of name, no reference is made or intended to any person living or dead.

The morning of the death of Daisy Gallagher’s mother, Mrs. Mary Ellen O’Brien, began like any other morning.

“And yet, you know, Mog,” Daisy once remarked to her aged tomcat, “it was the beginning — the cause — of me slide. I didn’t fall into trouble — I slid. And at times, Mog, it was pure mairder.”

Moggie stared back at her with sad, unblinking eyes, as if to indicate that, if a woman imagined that life could be anything better than pure murder, she needed her head examining.

As if to mourn the passing of Mrs. O’Brien, the clouds lay low along the Mersey; and occasionally thin rain spread up the river, like a bolt of grey georgette being hastily unrolled, a wavering wetness hardly dappling the heaving waters. Through its dimming folds, freighters and ferry boats passed liked silent spectres, their lights unearthly in the poor visibility of the morning. Through the dockside streets, men clattered in worn out boots, cloth caps set low over their eyes, stained cloth coats already wet, as they went to sign on for work which did not always materialize in those hard days of 1931.

A spatter of rain swept over Dingle Point and across the Herculaneum Dock. It pattered softly on the slate roofs of the tightly packed houses, which faced each other across each street like courting cats about to spring. The house which Daisy Gallagher and her sailor husband shared with her mother was much older than the rest and did not return the stare of another house. It faced directly towards the river, and the rain struck its window
panes squarely with a sharp pit-pat, as if it were trying to rouse the dead woman within. For a hundred years the rain and wind had been buffeting its grey stone walls and solid oak door, making the windows rattle in warning of bad weather coming up the river.

“Och, who cares about the weather,” Daisy would sometimes say to her dearest friend and sister-in-law, Nellie O’Brien; and Nellie, who looked so frail that a puff of wind would blow her away, would nod her greying head gently in agreement, knowing that nothing as minor as bad weather would upset buxom, cheerful Daisy.

Daisy would push an old stocking filled with sand across the bottom of the front door to keep the draught out, and would say, without fail, “Me grandmother was born in this house — just after me great-grandma come from Ireland in eighteen thirty-six. If she could stand it, I can.”

As yet unaware that her mother would never again complain of the draughts, Daisy looked out of the living-room window and clucked irritably to herself when she saw the overcast day. It looked as if winter was going to set in early.

She picked up a steaming mug of tea from the crowded table and tramped slowly up the worn wooden stairs to the front bedroom.

“Here’s your tea, Mam,” she announced, as she marched into the low-ceilinged, chilly room.

There was no reply. Cold, unmoving eyes returned Daisy’s glance. Mrs. O’Brien would never need tea again.

Pure terror paralyzed Daisy for a moment. Then she quavered, “Mam,” as if she hoped to waken her. “’ere, Mam.”

Fearfully, Daisy approached the bed and tentatively touched the already cold hand on the dirty blanket. “Oh, Mam!”

“Oh, Jaysus Mary!”

She felt, as she gasped out this plea for Divine help, that part of her own body had been torn from her, the pain of separation was so intense.

She stifled a desire to scream for help; it was no use screaming if there was nobody to hear. With a trembling hand she put down the mug on the mantelpiece. Then she leaned over cautiously to cover Mrs. O’Brien’s waxen face with the end of the blanket. Her lips quivered as she sought to keep herself calm.

She ran down the stairs and out of the house as if the devil was after her. The street was deserted, the pavement heavy with drops of mist. The damp pierced her tight-fitting cotton blouse; and her heavy black skirt whipped uncomfortably around her legs, as she sped round the corner and up the sloping side street to the house where Great Aunt Mary Devlin rented a room. She hammered on the door.

Great Aunt Devlin answered the knock herself, so quickly that it seemed as if she must have been waiting on the other side of the door for weeks for just such a call.

Half panting, half sobbing, Daisy announced her news.

“Me Mam! She’s gone!”

She leaned against the door jamb to steady herself, while her normally rosy face drained of colour and her eyelids drooped over her deep-set blue eyes.

“I’ll come, luv,” Mary Devlin wheezed in reply, her wizened face puckered up in sympathy. “You should have put your shawl on, luv. You’ll catch your own death.”

With fingers mis-shapen by arthritis, she lifted her own black shawl over her nearly bald head; then she stepped out and closed the door softly behind her. Great Aunt Devlin spent most of her time with the dead, and her quietness could be unnerving.

After viewing the body with experienced, rheumy eyes, Great Aunt Devlin drew fourpence from her apron pocket and pressed it into Daisy’s shaking hand.

“Ask t’ chemist, if he’s open, if you can use t’ telephone. You got to tell the club man and ask him to bring the burial money. Then phone Doctor Macpherson to coom and certify her.”

Obedient and still tearless, though inwardly shattered, Daisy
delivered these two messages as fast as her fat legs and empty stomach would permit her.

On her way home, she knocked at the door of the house of her sister, Meg Fogarty. The house was one of a row of dilapidated brick houses opening directly on to the pavement. The door had long since lost its handles, but it did not yield when Daisy tried to push it open.

She heard the bolt squeak as Meg Fogarty wriggled it out of its socket.

“’allo, what you doin’ here so early?” Meg inquired, her black-rimmed eyes staring apprehensively out of a gaunt, tired face, as she wiped her hands on a grey apron. “What’s to do?” Her children crowded behind her, eager to greet their dear Anty Daise.

Meg drew in a quick breath, and her round, grey eyes with their black circles seemed suddenly much rounder. Her hand went to her mouth in a gesture of shock.

“God have mercy on us! Is it Mam?”

“Yes. I been for the doctor just now. Great Aunt Devlin’s with her.” Daisy lifted a corner of her apron and agitatedly mopped the sweat from her smooth, broad forehead.

Meg’s toothless mouth quivered. “She’s gone, is it?”

Daisy nodded, and the children gaped at her with open-mouthed, jam-smeared faces.

Meg’s whole body sagged and she clutched her eldest daughter’s shoulder to support herself.

“Now, Meg,” said Daisy sharply. “Don’t take on. Pull yourself together. I need help. Get your little Mary to go and tell Agnes and George and Maureen Mary — and Father Patrick — and all the others.”

Little Mary on whom Meg was leaning ran the comb she was holding quickly through her lanky, shoulder-length hair. She said eagerly, “I’d love to go, Anty.”

Her mother was dabbing her eyes with the back of her hand. Now she sniffed, and ordered, “Not now, you don’t. You can go
after school.” She said firmly to Daisy, “I’m in a pile of trouble for keeping her home to help me last week.” She shut her eyes tightly, and added passionately, “Poor Mam!”

Daisy sighed. “Well, send her after school, then.”

The whole mystery and the fearsome finality of death struck her forcibly as she shivered on Meg’s doorstep. She wanted to scream out loud, “Holy Angels at the Throne of God, it was unfair to take her from me. Mike’s been at sea for eighteen months now, and there was only her and me in the house. You know me daughter, Maureen Mary, and her husband is too stuck up to live with me — and the rest of me children is lost to me. Dear Holy Angels, it’s unfair, it is! It’s unfair! I’ll be alone, I will!”

But Meg’s children were there, so she must be silent; and Meg was saying that she would have gone herself to announce the sad news to the rest of the family, but she dare not leave her invalid father-in-law, old Fogarty, for fear he fell out of his chair or suffered some other catastrophe.

“I’ll come over tonight, I will,” she promised.” As soon as our John gets home.”

Daisy clasped her hands over her aching, empty stomach, to comfort herself, and sniffed. Surely mothers came before fathers-in-law, she thought angrily. Meg could have asked her sister-in-law, Emily, to watch old Fogarty. But she did not feel strong enough to fight Meg this morning — and Emily was a fool of the first water, she had to admit that.

She sighed, and turned away without another word, and walked hastily homeward. From time to time, she would clap her hand over her mouth, as if to keep inside her the scream she longed to give vent to.

After her unusually subdued children had gone to school, Meg sat down suddenly on a kitchen chair and allowed the tears she had withheld while the children were present to burst out of her. She swayed her skinny body back and forth and beat her breast, as she wailed aloud, “Me poor Mam! Poor Mam!”

“What you making such a racket for? What’s to do?”
shouted Mr. Fogarty, her irascible, crippled father-in-law. “Shut up that row and bring the pot. I want to pee.”

Meg ceased her sobbing. For a moment she sat quite still as anger overwhelmed her grief. “Why couldn’t it have been you, you old bugger?” she muttered furiously, as she seized a jam jar from under the kitchen sink and scurried to him.

Great Aunt Devlin laid out her niece and sat for two nights in the cold bedroom with the corpse. Two shawls were draped around her shoulders, and in one apron pocket she carried a bottle of gin; in the other one lay her rosary which she told from time to time. It was she who was paid first for her services from the money promptly brought by the agent of the insurance company.

It seemed to Daisy that in death her mother was more important and received more respect that she had ever enjoyed in life.

Father Patrick came to see Daisy and offer consolation. And the undertaker arrived on the dog-fouled doorstep before either Daisy or Meg had communicated with him.

“As if he could smell a passing on the wind,” snorted Daisy.

The tiny house seemed to be full of clumsy, gossipy relations, who thankfully left all the arrangements for the funeral to Daisy, since she was now the eldest woman in the family; in this matter of hierarchy Aunt Devlin did not count because she was a spinster.

Daisy’s lifelong friend and sister-in-law, Nellie O’Brien, though obviously tired and ill, sat for hours on one of the kitchen chairs and listened kindly to Daisy’s impatient fulminations about the laziness of the rest of the family. She had brought her only son, iddy Joey, to say good-bye to his Nan, lying cold and white beside Great Aunt Devlin, who, he was certain, was a witch. And, of course, there were neighbours who loved to come to inspect a corpse.

“I been fair run off me feet,” Daisy complained to Mrs. Hanlon of the Ragged Bear, when she went to buy two bottles of rum and four of cheap port wine for the wake.

Mrs. Hanlon commiserated and tendered her condolences, as she thrust the bottles through the narrow hatch of the Off-Licence Department.

Mrs. Donnelly, the grocer, whose heart it was affirmed locally was solid flint regarding extensions of credit, also politely tendered her sympathy while she weighed and wrapped up three pounds of her cheapest currant cake.

“That’ll be a shilling,” she announced, putting one hand firmly over the parcel until the coin should be produced.

“You’ll have to put it on me bill,” Daisy replied, folding her great arms over her bosom. “I haven’t got the insurance yet,” she lied. Mrs. Donnelly and she had been crossing swords for nearly forty years and she saw no reason to part with good money for Mrs. Donnelly’s benefit. Let the old devil wait.

Mrs. Donnelly’s eyes narrowed till they looked like a bunch of wrinkles with only a pinpoint of light gleaming from them. “You owe me four and tenpence already. Seeing as I cut the cake I’ll keep it for you till later on. The agent should come soon.”

Thwarted, Daisy drew in a huge breath, savouring for a moment the familiar odours of rancid bacon, ageing cheese and carbolic soap. She blew out her cheeks till she looked as if she might burst. She was not going to walk all the way down the hill to her home and back up again later in the day; yet she did not know how to retreat from the stance she had taken.

Slowly she exhaled, making a most satisfying rude noise. Mrs. Donnelly clamped her thin lips together and busied herself by putting some bacon into the slicer, having first removed the parcel of cake from Daisy’s reach.

Muttering sourly to herself, Daisy reached into her skirt pocket. “I got some of Meg’s money. I’ll pay for it from that.”

Mrs. Donnelly thrust out a hand deeply lined with blacking from the daily polishing of her fireplace. Daisy banged two sixpences into it so hard that Mrs. Donnelly’s knuckles nearly hit the counter. Mrs. Donnelly silently put the money into her
wooden till. Then she put the cake on the counter within reach of Daisy.

Daisy snatched it up, tucked it under her black shawl and stalked out.

Daisy’s eldest daughter, Maureen Mary, a faded blonde, arrived in the late afternoon of the day of her grandmother’s death, from her home in Princes Park. Carrying her three-year old daughter, Bridie, she had set out immediately upon receiving word from Meg’s little Mary. Knowing the sad state of her mother’s home, she brought with her a pair of sheets on which to lay the body, and two candlesticks with long new candles to light the death chamber until the funeral.

She agreed with Daisy that dear Nan looked really beautiful after the ministrations of Great Aunt Mary Devlin.

“She must have looked like that when she was young,” Maureen Mary remarked as she dried her eyes with a flowered pocket handkerchief. “I mean, before she had eleven children — and lost six of them.”

“Yes,” agreed Daisy with a sigh. “We was all young once.”

She went on to tell Maureen Mary how she vaguely remembered being taken to say farewell to her own tiny, Irish Nan in the same upstairs bedroom. Nan had been still alive and had blessed her. Three days later she had been carried out of the house in a big box by four of her grandsons, Daisy’s cousins.