Authors: Helen Forrester
“What you want to lock up for?” asked Agnes petulantly, as she pushed through the door the moment it was unbolted. “I’m fair clemmed.” She shook out her shawl like a flapping raven and blinked in the lamp light. Then as her eyes became accustomed to its radiance and Daisy moved to one side to let her enter, she asked, “And what’s up? Your blouse is torn and you’re all bloody.” Her protruding blue eyes popped wide, “And you’re as white as a sheet.”
“Eee, I-er-um,” faltered Daisy, making a quick grab at her torn blouse to cover herself. She
must
give some explanation.
“I was just down the yard a few minutes back,” she improvised hastily. “I caught me blouse on the latch of the privy and it tore.” She gained a little confidence, and went on, “It caught me, too — it hurt proper sharp for a moment — that’s what took me colour out. I was upstairs when you come, looking for something else to put on.”
Agnes was shivering with cold and made impolite haste towards the fire, without commiserating with her sister. Cuts and bangs were nothing — they healed or they went septic and had to be poulticed with hot water till they were clean. She seized the poker and quickly broke up the damp slack with which Daisy had banked the fire before going out. “Are you short of coal that you bank up your fire so early?”
“Not specially,” said Daisy. “I let it go out at night like always. But I went out a bit earlier to buy a Christmas present for your Marty, and I thought it could stay banked till morning.”
She sighed. What was one more lie on top of so many? “I’ve got an old blouse upstairs — I’ll just put it on. Be back in a seccie.”
Agnes rubbed her hands over the flames. “I’ll put on the kettle,” she offered hopefully.
“You do that,” agreed Daisy, and escaped upstairs. She looked again at the cut but it seemed to be drying, so she put an aged blouse on over it.
She looked anxiously at the bed, and cursed that she had not been able to burn the wallet before Agnes came. It would have to wait now until she went.
When she came downstairs again the fire was blazing cheerfully and the kettle was singing on it.
“You oughtta write to Mike and make him send you some money,” advised Agnes, as she viewed the washed-out, threadbare blouse Daisy was wearing. “He must have lots in his pocket by now.” There was a hint of jealousy in her tone — other than Freddie, who did not count, Mike was the only man in the whole family who was in work. “Your allotment is proper mean, I think.”
Daisy opened her mouth to retort that asking Mike for money was like asking one of Lewis’s for it, but she hastily swallowed this reference to a dummy in Lewis’s store window. Agnes, bless her, had confirmed her own idea of a perfect explanation for the presence of any small extras that she had bought with her ill-gotten gains. Mike had sent her some money — real generous, he was.
She beamed with the relief she felt. “I already done that. I’m hoping he’ll reply soon.”
“You don’t have to spend money on our Marty,” Agnes reproved her absently, in reference to the present Daisy said she had bought.
“Och, it’s not much,” Daisy replied, hoping that Agnes would not demand to see the present.
But Agnes’s attention had wandered, as she looked round the
room over the rim of her tea mug. “You been doing some work here?”
Daisy had indeed been doing some work. With all the time in the world and no one to gossip to unless she walked at least as far as the Ragged Bear, she had slowly been cleaning up the long neglected house. To Mrs. Donnelly’s surprise, she had purchased some Brasso.
“To clean t’ fender,” Daisy had explained sullenly.
Agnes looked down at the fender on which her feet rested, and remarked admiringly, “Whole room looks lovely.”
Daisy heaved another of her long sighs. “Aye, I’d no time with our Mam in bed.” She could not say that the saturnine watchman who had been her first customer in the house had remarked that it looked like a pig sty. They had joked about it but she had taken the remark to heart. She had no intention of bringing very many clients to the house — just a few to assuage that long, lonely hour before she went to bed — because, as she explained to Moggie, some interfering biddie will notice them if I do. She never considered that Mike might return home — that was something which might happen in the distant future — too far ahead to even be thought about.
“Are you going to Maureen Mary’s for Christmas dinner — after Mass?” asked Agnes.
“Are you kidding? Only been to her house once and that was when I heard she was expecting Bridie, and I went and told her I didn’t like her marrying a Prottie; but she should still come and see me. She never even asked me in — but I could see she had a proper nice home.”
“She got real stuck up working in Lyon’s.”
Daisy grimaced. “Well, I know where I’m not welcome.” She glowered resentfully, and then added, “They could be living with me, they could! It hurts, it really does.”
“I’m sure,” agreed Agnes. Then she giggled. “That Freddie! He makes me laugh.”
“Aye, he’s a proper panse. But he knows a lot — and he
treats me like a lady when he comes.”
Agnes forebore from reminding her sister again that he never asked her to his home, even at Christmas. She told herself she was not a troublemaker like Meg.
“Is Lizzie Ann being let out for Christmas?”
Daisy’s voice was despondent as she answered. “No. I posted a present to Jamie — don’t know whether the bastards’ll let him have it — and some scent to Lizzie Ann. I wish I could go and see them, but it’s an awful long way and it costs a lot.”
Agnes nodded her flaxen head.
“Maureen Mary’ll come on Christmas afternoon. She allus brings a present.”
“You come along and have dinner with us,” ordered Agnes. “I raised a pair of hens along with our Joe’s fighting cocks. Got some eggs out of them first and now they’re hanging in the cellar. Feathered they are and all ready to go into the oven first thing tomorrow.”
“Ta, ever so. I’ll come. You was lucky not to have them stop you having them hens — and the cocks. Mary Ellen up the road — she tried it and her neighbours complained, bloody canting Presbyterians; they said they smelled.”
Agnes laughed. “I got a couple of rabbits, too, ready for New Year’s. Joe made a hutch for them out of a butter box.”
For some weeks, Daisy had been collecting small gifts for her nephews and nieces, for her children and for dear little Bridie. They were all stacked together in a paper carrier bag in a corner of the living-room. She promised herself that, after dinner with Agnes she would walk round the various homes of the family and distribute her presents. She would even go to Meg’s house, though Meg had continued to ignore her whenever they met.
She had a rewarding Christmas Day, putting little presents into small, grubby fists. All the parents except Meg, remarked upon her generosity and expressed the hope that she had not left herself short. She was home in time for tea with Maureen Mary and Bridie, and in the late evening she finished up at George and
Nellie’s house. She presented Nellie with three boxes of the best snuff. Nellie put her arms round her friend and kissed her ecstatically. Her thin body felt hot to Daisy and her eyes glistened with fever.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Nellie half wept. “You manage your money so much better than I do.”
George gruffly thanked Daisy for the tobacco she had brought him and gratefully lit up his blackened pipe which had perforce been empty for several days while his wife scrimped to give their last surviving child, Joey, “a bit o’ Christmas”. She had knitted the skimpy lad a pullover out of old wool retrieved from a garment she had picked up for a penny in a rummage sale, and he was wearing it with great delight. He showed it off with pride to his admiring Auntie Daisy. Nellie had also made a large toffee apple for him; the remains of it were plastered like a moustache along his upper lip. His father had over the previous month carved him a wooden horse and cart from a piece of driftwood and this also had to be shown to Daisy. The fine detail of the horse showed how well George knew the animals with which he had spent his life, until the firm for which he had worked had gone bankrupt.
When Daisy presented the boy with six tin soldiers wrapped in old tissue paper his day was complete.
“Thanks, Anty Daise,” he breathed through a stuffed-up nose, and skipped off to show the present to his friends in the street. The adults sat silently listening for a minute to the clatter of his boots and his shouts to the other boys.
“I don’t know how you managed to get them,” said George with reference to the tin soldiers. He looked suspiciously at Daisy. “Our Nellie can’t even feed us properly.” He scowled at his wife.
Daisy did not want to point out that he spent too much of their Public Assistance allowance on beer and horses. It was not nice to start a fight at Christmas. Yet she saw the need to rescue Nellie from bitter recriminations breaking out the moment she
left the house, so she lied gaily to help her friend.
“Nan and me were in old Donnelly’s Christmas tontine before she died, so I had quite a bit to draw — and then I got a club cheque not long back for some bedding, and I used some of that for Christmas things.”
“Humph,” grunted George. “The tontine payments must have strapped yez?”
“Well, I written to Mike to ask for some money to help out,” replied Daisy firmly. She stuck her chin up in the air as if defying him to ask any further questions. “Mike must have lots in his pocket by now.”
George’s response was acidulous.
“Money burns holes in Mike’s pockets faster’n anybody I know.”
Daisy’s response was prompt. “Don’t you criticise Mike. I know some others what wouldn’t bear looking at.” Then she realised that this would be the beginning of a quarrel; and Nellie was already looking alarmed. “Och, you’re right,” she said placatingly. “He does spend a lot at times. But there’s no harm in asking him for some.”
George cleared his throat and spat into the fire.
She glanced at her brother, and then went on cheerfully, “He’ll send this time for sure.”
January brought another post card from Mike. It was pushed under the door by the postman, picture side up, and Daisy picked it up and looked at the highly coloured print of the port of Accra.
“He must have bought a dozen all the same,” she thought as she stuck it up on the mantelpiece, along with two other identical cards received the previous year. She did not bother to turn it over to read it. Mike never said anything, except, “Doing fine.”
She went out to collect her allotment from the shipping office.
On her return, she dropped off the tram outside the soot-blackened row house where Nellie and George rented the back room and a scullery. The front door led into a room occupied by a large family, so Daisy went down the back entry and came in through the tiny, walled back yard. She slammed the wooden door behind her and marched past a dustbin, out of which a cat scrambled hastily, and past the privy which was doorless and stank.
A dog within the house barked a warning.
She opened the door to the tiled scullery. It was empty except for an old terrier gnawing at a bone. He knew her and his tail flapped lazily in welcome, though he did not get up.
A dirty saucepan and the remains of a loaf of bread lay on a wooden table. Otherwise the room was as bleak as her own back kitchen.
“Hey, Nellie!” she shouted.
“I’m in here. Come in,” responded a muffled voice from the other room.
Daisy opened the inner door into what had once been the kitchen of the house. Now it was home to Nellie.
The afternoon light filtered through a torn lace curtain which masked a tall, narrow window where cardboard inadequately covered a broken windowpane. In the large, iron fireplace a few cinders gleamed. On the far side another door led to the front part of the house. Daisy knew that the door was locked and that the key had been thrown away, to discourage a procession of people going through from the rest of the house to use the privy in the back yard; the tenants fumed and complained and walked down the street and up the alley to get to the lavatory. The atmosphere of the room was foetid despite the draught from the broken window. A double bed reached from the wall to the fireplace, and in the middle of the bed Daisy could see the small curled up figure of Nellie.
In the poor light Nellie seemed no bigger than a ten-year-old girl, and her black shawl covered her completely.
“That you, Daise?” she whispered, without bothering to lift her head.
Daisy laughed. “No, it’s me ghost,” she replied cheerily. She crossed to the bed and looked down at the tiny form on it. The laughter went out of her voice and she asked apprehensively, “What’s up? You ill?”
Nellie slowly turned her head and opened her eyes. She made an effort to smile.
“’Allo, la. Sit down.” A hand that was practically all bone patted the bed beside her.
Daisy sat down, and the sudden advent of her weight caused the bed to bounce. Nellie started to cough, and Daisy viewed her with alarm as the spasm continued.
“I got to spit,” Nellie announced suddenly between spasms. Daisy got up hastily and assisted her friend off the bed. She spat into the fire but partially missed and, even in the poor light, a
long streak of blood was clearly visible across the hearth. The spittle on Nellie’s chin was also streaked.
“Mother of God!” Daisy exclaimed in horror.
Very gently she helped the suffering woman on to the bed, the coughing having eased for a moment. With tender hands she wrapped the shawl again round Nellie.
“Nellie, you’re proper sick. You got to see a doctor. I got some money from Mike and I can pay.” This latter remark was literally true since she had Mike’s allotment in her pocket.
She leaned over Nellie and gently patted her shoulder. “But never you fret. I’m going to ask t’ quack to come to you.”
Nellie gasped for breath and made weak negative gestures with her hands. “No — oh, no, Daise! He’ll put me into the infirmary and I’ll die. And what would happen to iddy Joey — and our George.” She clutched at her friend’s arm as if to save herself from falling into a crevasse. “I couldn’t bear it, Daise, I couldn’t!”
Daisy’s face was white, the mottles from fire burns on her cheeks standing out like a design for lace. “Aye, Nellie, luv, we got to do something. You can’t go on like this.” She knelt down by the bed and put her arm comfortingly over Nellie’s shoulders. “You’re spitting blood and you can’t go on doing that.”
Nellie took a labouring breath. “Been spitting for ages.”
“Jaysus! Look, I’m going to get t’ doctor. Lots of people with T.B. don’t go into hospital. I know our Tommy did for a while — but I had him home most of the time.”
A slow tear fell from Nellie’s tightly clenched eyes on to the coverless pillow, which had several ominous dark stains on it. “Yes, he died at home.”
The words were like an arrow shot into Daisy. The pain of the inference was so terrible she did not know how to bear it. She gasped for breath, while she tried to gather up her courage. Then she said, “Come on, now, Nell. You’re not going to die — not if we get a doctor quick.”
Nellie smiled but it was not a cheerful smile, rather it conveyed that she knew secrets hidden from Daisy, far away, unearthly secrets.
Daisy felt as cornered as she had done when she was threatened with a knife in the narrow alleyway she now knew so well. “Aye, Nell, come on,” she rallied the other woman. “I’ll get that doctor from Park Road to come down — he’s proper nice, real kind, He’ll know what to do.”
“No, Daise!” The sick woman forced herself to raise herself on her elbow.
“Now, look here, Nell.” Daisy’s expression was grim. “I promise I won’t let him put you in the infirmary or anywhere else, unless you change your mind. Hear me? We’ll manage somehow. If you stay in bed you’ll get better. Our Meg and our Agnes and me — we’ll help you.” She grasped her friend’s hand. “You got to get better!” she cried in anguish.