Prized Possessions (4 page)

As soon as she'd parted with the fiver he would smile and when he stood close to her, pint glass in hand, she would feel quite safe and protected.

Alex O'Hara was much older than she was, of course. Ten years at least. That didn't matter. In fact it was better. She'd seen what happened to girls who wedded young chaps. Two or three years, two or three bairns into the marriage and you would be struggling to make do on dole money and your figure would be gone for good. And hubby would be down the pub every night, scrounging drink while you were stuck in Lavender Court or Keane Street trying to stop the rot. Rosie knew that Babs had nothing but scorn for girls who jumped into marriage. Babs was for ever shouting that she wasn't going to get caught in that trap, not her, would never go out with boys who didn't have money to spend or let any boys she did go out with have more than a ‘nibble', whatever that meant.

Because Rosie was still attending the Institute and wore its uniform she had never had a boyfriend. You didn't meet proper boyfriends in the Institute. You met boyfriends at the corner up by Gorbals Cross where she was forbidden to loiter or in the Black Cat Café late at night or, best of all, up town at the roller-skating rink. You could meet them too at Socialist Sunday School dances or on Jewish pipe band picnics but Mammy would have had a fit if any of her girls, any of her prized possessions, had suggested consorting with Jews or Communists, though as far as Rosie could make out Jews and Communists were among the nicest people you could meet.

Alex O'Hara, then, was her very first boyfriend.

He met her by arrangement every fourth of fifth Saturday down in Molliston Street, in the deserted cul-de-sac away from the Ibrox football crowd and the bedlam of the Paisley Road. He never suggested making a date with her. Rosie reckoned he was just shy or, more likely, that he'd encountered Mammy and was as wary of crossing her mother as most other chaps seemed to be, even if Alex was a bigwig and had a bad reputation.

Anyway it was simpler to
pretend
that he was her boyfriend.

It made the walk from Gorbals Cross seem purposeful and exciting. She even kidded herself that Alex wouldn't mind if she turned up without the fiver some Saturday, that perhaps then he would draw her gently into the doorway or walk hand in hand with her down towards the river and there on the ash pad – where horses had been kept to pull the ferry in the olden days – there he would kiss her. She speculated on what his pinched, rather frozen mouth would feel like, if it would be as cold as it looked or if the touch of her lips would instantly ignite the flames of passion.

Now and then, not often, she saw Alex in the Gorbals or Laurieston.

Unplanned and unexpected, the encounters gave her a start and reminded her that Alex didn't spend his entire life waiting for her on the pavement outside the Ferryhead Rowing Club. When they met by chance Alex would pretend not to notice her or, if she waved, would lower his head and nod reluctantly. Only once had he spoken. ‘What're you doin' at Gorbals Cross?' he'd said. ‘Is it not past your bedtime, a wee girl like you?' She hadn't made him out clearly, though, and had given him a big beaming smile in lieu of an answer. And he had shrugged and gone strolling on about his business.

It was easy to foster the illusion that Alex O'Hara, the Collector, was her boyfriend, to convince herself that when she knew him better she would be able to wheedle out of him what she wanted: not cigarettes, not bars of Five Boys chocolate, not even stolen kisses by the riverside but the sort of information that Polly and Babs refused to share with her.

So she came striding briskly down Paisley Road in the witching hour between twilight and full dark, extra careful of tramcars laden with football supporters and buses that swept too close to the pavements.

She dodged nimbly among the shoppers until the two big arc-lamps that lit up the front of Gerber's clothing factory came in sight. Then she switched her concentration up to full blast and sped across the thoroughfare, holding her hat with one hand and cupping the other round her left ear to separate the clash and clatter of trams from the dangerous hiss of motorcars and buses.

She darted into Congleton Street, turned into the top of Molliston Street and saw Alex in the distance, waiting for her, same as he always was – only different. It wasn't a subtle difference. Oh, no. A blind man could have spotted it. Rosie let out a throaty little squeal of delight.

She came up to him and looked him up and down.

‘Are you going to a wedding then?' she asked, as distinctly as possible.

He shook his head. Her appraisal disconcerted him. He was, Rosie thought, very easily disconcerted.

She said, ‘You look real nice. I have never seen a man in a monkey suit before, not outside a tailor's window.'

‘Got the money?'

‘Yes,' she said.

She took the banknote from her pocket and held it up. It was folded into the shape of a taper, longer than it was broad. He suited the suit, and the suit suited him. She would have told him that too if she could have got her tongue around the words without fumbling.

Mischievously, she waved the banknote before him.

He snatched at it with his left hand. He wore a wristlet watch on an expanding band. Cuff-links. He had shaved very cleanly and the dark shadow of stubble was all beneath the skin. His jet black hair was slicked back and his features seemed less prominent, less rapacious. He appeared comfortable in the formal outfit, as if he had been born into silver-spoon society and had somehow become misplaced.

In fact, he looked almost harmless.

She wafted the note about.

He was not a large man and looked as if he should be nippy on his feet but he flapped ineffectually, his reactions slower than she would have anticipated. Momentarily intoxicated by her superiority, she giggled. Then he snatched at her, not the note. He grabbed her arms first then her forearm and hip, fingers digging into her thigh through her school skirt.

‘I was only teasing,' Rosie got out, the words clumsy with dismay.

‘Don't,' he said. ‘Don't come it wi' me, not where money's concerned.'

He plucked the banknote from her fingers, released her and stepped back.

She could still feel his fingers squeezing her hip. She wriggled, straightened her knickers, adjusted her skirt.

She didn't know whether to be indignant or tearful. It hadn't occurred to her to treat him roughly as she'd treated Gordon Porlock, and it dawned on her at that moment that she really knew nothing about men after all.

She said, ‘I am sorry.'

He eyed her, head back.

The fiver had already vanished into one of his pockets and a small, hesitant smile seemed to be hovering on the corner of his lips.

She felt hot all over.

‘Is it a wedding you're dressed up for?' she said, at length.

‘Nah.' He seemed not just reluctant but almost incapable of answering an innocent question. He glanced over his shoulder at the doors of the Rowing Club – propped wide open tonight – then forced himself to admit, ‘Dinner, a testimonial dinner. Know what that means, kid?'

Inside the club she could make out other men in monkey suits, black and bulky against the whisky-coloured light that filtered from the bar. It looked secretive beyond the lobby but solemn too.

‘Is it a testimonial for somebody important?'

He shook his head. ‘You shouldn't ask so many questions, Rosie.'

It was the first time that he had used her name. It seemed more intimate and romantic than any of the standard terms of endearment that tabbed the end of his conversations, the ‘dears' and ‘darlings' that were so devoid of sentiment that they sounded like insults. Now he had called her by her name and had recognised her right to an identity. She felt the heat go out of her and, pleased and flattered, gave him a cheesy smile.

He shook his head again, took her arm and led her two or three steps away from the doorway. He glanced bleakly up the street and then, squinting a little, down the long empty stretch that ended at the river.

On the far bank the lights of Anderston and the Finnieston docks glimmered in the dank haze and Rosie watched a little tug or puffer carve across the plane of the Clyde, silent as a phantom.

‘Mr O'Hara?'

‘What? What now, Rosie, for Christ's sake?'

‘Did you know my daddy?'

*   *   *

Whatever might be said against Lizzie Conway nobody could ever accuse her of laziness. She'd always been a demon for hard work. Her detractors might argue that she'd never held on to a job for long and that her progress in the labour market had been erratic at best.

They might have said that if she'd been less voluble in sticking up for her rights she might have made something of herself. What that ‘something' might be was left unspecified, for somehow familiar comforting homilies didn't apply to a woman like Lizzie Conway who had clambered out of poverty with three young children and an insupportable burden of debt hanging round her neck.

If it hadn't been for the children and the fact that she needed a permanent address from which to apply – unsuccessfully – for a war widow's pension, she would simply have vanished into the blue. That, at least, was the fairytale Lizzie had put about, the lie that her ailing mother and spinster sister had been persuaded to swallow.

No one had wanted to believe that indomitable, bull-in-a-china-shop Lizzie would be stupid enough to stay on in the Gorbals simply to await the return of a husband who, if he wasn't actually rotting in a field in Flanders, certainly didn't intend to hot-foot it back to Glasgow.

The debt with which Frank had saddled her had committed her to sixty hours a week grafting at a machine in Gerber's factory or cleaning for the Corporation Tramways Department, among other employments. Hard work had turned out to be the stuff of life for Lizzie, though. Hopelessness, exhaustion and despair were held at bay not just by strength of will but by devotion to her daughters and a steely determination to see them, and everyone else for whom she felt responsible, fare better than she had done.

For four years now she'd been employed by the Public Health Department and worked ten-hour days in the laundry of the Sanitary Wash-house at Balmain Park where bedding and body clothing from the victims of infectious diseases were labelled, disinfected, washed, dried and returned, irrespective of whether the poor patient died or recovered.

Sometimes Lizzie plied the rakes in the disinfecting tanks. Sometimes she took her turn rinsing frail items at stone wash-tubs. But usually she was put to labelling in the room next door to the main hall where the noise of the dash wheels and the incessant clack of the carpet-beating machine were so wearing that she would come home half deaf and would have to use Rosie's special syringe to ease the ringing in her ears.

None the less, Lizzie was proud to be part of a procedure that had all but rid the city of typhus and cholera and that had diphtheria, phthisis and scarlet fever well on the run; proud of the fact that all the goods and chattels hauled in for cleansing in the morning were always returned before midnight. Property, after all, was property.

The Public Health authorities weren't thieves; which was more than could be said for Frank Conway, her dear departed husband, who had been a thief born and bred and who, if he hadn't vanished in the smoke of battle somewhere north of Baupaume, would probably have wound up floating face down in the Clyde or, if luck had been on his side, serving a twenty-year stretch in Barlinnie.

She still thought of Frank from time to time.

Memories of good times as well as bad would steal upon her as she settled her head on the pillow or, more often, cat-napped in the chair by the fire.

She imagined that she could hear his voice, the persuasive, arrogant murmur that had made every daft dream he chose to peddle seem practical.

She recalled how he'd looked the first time she'd clapped eyes on him, just before he went to work for the Eye-tie. All glammed up in a trilby, hand-sewn boots and an embroidered waistcoat. Black curls bobbing. More Italian in appearance than any of old Carlo Manone's mob, though Frank was the errant son of a dirt farmer from Armagh, and as Irish as the pigs of Docherty.

She had loved him and hated him in equal measure. Though he had never raised his hand to her in the six years they were married he'd been callous in other ways. The hand-sewn boots and embroidered waistcoat had been no more real and lasting than his declarations of undying passion; mere trophies of a successful housebreaking, pawned before the marriage was three weeks old.

Even although Frank was a staunch Protestant, worry about his unsuitability had done for Lizzie's father, so her mother claimed. The truth was that Charlie McKerlie had chalked up more hours in Brady's public house than any man in the barony and had died right there at the bar, a pickled egg in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other.

Naturally it had been left to Frank to scrape up the money to bury the old bugger, with black horses, black plumes, and a cortège half a mile long with free booze at the end of it. Lizzie's mother had declared herself too ill to face the rigours of a funeral service but had recovered sufficiently to be carried downstairs and placed in the open carriage that Frank had hired from Carlo Manone and had ridden in style to the wake in the Orange Halls, acknowledging condolences with a wave of her gloved hand.

On that Saturday evening, however, Lizzie wasn't thinking of Frank Conway, or of times past.

She sprawled in the battered armchair by the fire, head on a cushion, garters unloosened and legs stuck out, not quite asleep and not quite awake, mulling over the pilgrimage that she must make to Dominic Manone's house, and the manoeuvres that would follow; not a plan yet, nothing so ordered as a plan, but the nucleus of one, the first foetal stirrings of a plan to shake the dust of the Gorbals from her feet once and for all.