A Liverpool Girl Page 6

  Saying the name ‘Jeanie’ out loud seemed strangely unfamiliar.

  ‘Best not let these bitches know about that. Sure, they’d make a right carnival out of it.’

  Babby smiled and thought how lovely it would be to have a friend. Maybe Mary would fit the bill, someone to talk to about how she was missing home, how she would never be accepted here. She had noticed that, compared to these girls, her own white blouse was grubby and frayed at the collar, even after Pauline unpicking it and turning inside out and sewing it back on, and her curly hair had already tangled and had clumps of knots on it, and there was dirt under her fingernails. She was more like Mary than the others …

  The bus reached the ornate iron gates of Saint Hilda’s convent which was a mile down the road from Pauline’s. The building, with its red brick walls, Victorian green gables, and dark windows with bars on it, made her wonder if it really was actually a prison she had been sent to. That’s what it felt like. Walking beside Mary, she followed the line of girls trudging through the nuns’ garden. She stopped for a moment in front of the statue of Our Lady. The Virgin Mary looked more sorrowful than the one at her old school. It was one of those days when the sky was shrouded in grey mist and it was chucking it down. The air was damp and a raindrop dangled from the statue’s chipped nose. If the nuns were hopeful that the girls might be inspired by the holy grotto of Our Lady of Sorrows, Babby decided this crumbling statue, stuck on a dais made of lumps of cement, wasn’t going to do the job. Glancing over her shoulder at the statue, Babby was convinced the Virgin’s disapproving eyes were following her. She moved away from the line of girls and broke into an uneasy brisk walk which took her up the school drive and through the large wooden double front doors.

  Following the others, she found herself in the cloakroom – a small bare room with a row of pegs, a bench, and under the bench, cages to put in outdoor or indoor shoes, presumably depending on which direction you were heading. She hesitated. There was a smell of damp socks, sweaty feet and shoe polish.

  ‘You new?’ asked a girl to the right of her, one of the girls that had been on the bus. Babby nodded. ‘Violet Delaney your mother? We used to live off Netherfield Road and I remember your family. You lot were the talk of our terrace.’

  The girl paused, walked away to the other side of the rack of coat pegs with her friend. The gaberdines, blazers and hats muffled their whispered conversation, but it was loud enough for Babby to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Her dad died, you know. They say her ma’s like a library book: take her out once a fortnight and then pass her around,’ continued the girl, with a snigger.

  ‘Daddy Gone Delaney,’ hissed the second.

  When they reappeared from behind the stand, Babby tried to stammer a response, but nothing seemed to come out of her mouth. A small group had gathered and there was a clattering when they took their shoes out of the cages. As they bent to untie laces of outdoor shoes and buckle up their indoor ones, they sensed that something was about to happen and took febrile, anticipatory looks at Babby.

  And maybe because of her lack of words, maybe noticing that she was providing some kind of attraction, without thinking Babby shoved the girl who was still smirking, hard in the chest. The girl fell backwards on to the bench.

  ‘What was that for?!’ yelled the girl.

  ‘You lot. Making things up. Stuff this lark,’ Babby said, seething. She hadn’t even started school and she was getting into a fight. How could they say these things about Ma?

  Her thoughts lurched back to the dreadful night her father had died. She remembered how Violet had come and found her when she was with the Kapler gang, throwing old bullets they had discovered buried in the hollas on to a huge bonfire they had made, watching them crackle and explode like firecrackers. ‘Babby!’ Violet had cried. ‘For the love of God, come away from that fire before you kill yourself. Something terrible has happened.’

  She could pinpoint the beginning of the end for the Delaney family to that moment. And then the awful realisation the following morning that they hadn’t dreamed it. Babby remembered her distraught mother coming home, slumping at the table, then leaping up and hurling her father’s knapsack across the room, flinging it so hard against the wall it fell open and the song book, penny whistle, a pair of trousers and a box of Swan Vesta matches scattered across the floor.

  Jolting back into the present and turning on her heel, she walked straight out of the cloakroom, out into the corridor, through the doors, and down the winding drive. She tore off her hat. Respice Finem, indeed. Look to the end. What an idiotic school motto. Well, she would show them. She would look to the bloody end, all right. And with that thought in her head, she marched off in the direction of the bus stop, taking a last look over her shoulder at the school and its outhouses rearing up behind her, grim and foreboding, against a leaden, gunmetal sky.

  The wind in her face as she approached the bus stop was all enveloping. When the forty-three bus drew up, she jumped on and bought a ticket from the conductor who was whistling and walking down the aisle with his ticket machine slung low around his neck. Babby pulled the skirt of her school uniform around her thighs and readjusted the collar of her blazer to disguise the fact she was playing truant. Five stops later she hopped off and marched towards a parade of shops, dodging through straggles of shoppers spilling on to the pavements from the grocery stores, butchers and bakeries. She had been warned by Pauline that she shouldn’t go to the beach, so of course, drawn like a moth to a candle, that was where she was heading. Turning off the high street, she began walking towards the shore.

  A cloud of flies buzzed about Babby’s head and she swatted them away as, head bowed, she planned to take some comfort in the muffled quiet of the pinewoods. The route to the woods took her past the army firing range, then down towards the shore and through the orange mounds of soft granules of the nicotine dump which smelled like used cigarettes and burned her nostrils. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ she screamed, her voice disappearing on the wind, though it was loud enough to send wailing seagulls scattering and wheeling above her. All those horrible things they are saying about Mam. And I hate Pauline …

  When she reached the pinewoods, her feet trod softly upon layers and layers of fallen needles. The beach that she could see beyond reminded her of wrinkled-up washing. At least she could breathe here. The rush of wind in her face calmed her, and the spiky black bald pine trees, like giant stick insects with their brittle branches becoming arms and legs, were silhouetted against a watery sun.

  The sea was sleek and motionless. It shimmered on the horizon, reflecting a watery sun, but further inland it was sopped up by the marshes. She could see the liquid reflections of the few boats nudging up to each other, perfectly reflected back in a mirror image of themselves. The mud was thick and sludgy and water pooled in its crevices. Birds cawed and jostled and cackled above a shrimping cart and creepers, growing in long green tendrils, meandered across the silty path. Babby sat on a sawn off tree trunk.

  ‘Hell!’ she yelled, disturbing a carefully arranged flock of birds that squawked as they rose in the air. ‘Hell’s bloody teeth!’ But what was the point of shouting? No point at all. No one was listening. The words floated away on the air. Setting off once again, further up the shore in her ugly shoes, the Indoors that she shouldn’t be wearing as Outdoors, sand began making mounds and pushing up under the soles of her feet. She unbuckled the T-bar strap and slipped the shoes off, then her socks.

  Feeling the sand between her toes, she pressed on, not really having a clear idea of where to. The mast of an old shipwreck, stranded and half sunk into the sand, was silhouetted against the sky. She looked beyond that to the right of the horizon and the curve of the shoreline. Blackpool tower was a fuzzy splinter embedded in the sand. Scouring one way and then another, from the docks to the outline of the pinewoods, she trudged back to the dunes, and leaping from one to another, she felt the marram grass whipping her bare shins. From the top of the sand dunes, sh
e looked down towards the beach. A little way on and she wondered if she would reach the asylum that she remembered Violet pointing out to her once on one of the bank holiday trips to Pauline’s. She could see the gables peeking out above the tops of the sand hills. Its correct title was St Peter’s Home for the Feeble-Minded but no one called it that. The kids called it the loony bin. Violet said it was the funny farm, and that if she and Patrick kept on mithering her, she’d put them both in there one day. Babby had thought she was joking. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  A shrimping van had been left stranded on the shore. Looking back over her shoulder at it, a picture came into her head, of Johnny Gallagher and the gang, laughing and waving – they would have had some larks here. After trudging up the dune for a little while, the soft powdery sand made it tiring to walk, and her calves began to ache.

  Once down the other side of the dune, squinting against the particles of sand that blew into her eyes when she was on the flat beach, she set off to the water’s edge. Negotiating tangled fishing nets, old milk crates and a tyre, she then walked out further, and the sand became smoother. Tapping at a jellyfish with a stick, she made it wobble to see if it was alive. Standing bent in half, with the palms of her hands pressed to her knees, she searched out tiny scallop-shaped shells from the sand and put them in her pocket. Finding an old wellington boot, she picked it up and slung it towards the sea. And then she stopped. Watching the waves foaming and tumbling and gushing on, as they had done for uncountable centuries, it all felt hopeless.

  This was useless, she decided. Pinpricks of sweat formed on her brow. She was vaguely aware of lights in the distance, perhaps the oil rigs or the gasworks. She screwed her gaze out to the Irish Sea where it joined the mouth of the River Mersey. She could see the lilac smudge of the Welsh hills beyond and, around the bend in the river, she could just make out the ships’ containers and the cranes at Liverpool docks sharpening into focus. In the sunshine, a seagull skimmed across the surface of the gently breaking waves. Then a whole flock appeared, swooping and jostling over her head. A ship, the Isle of Man ferry, perhaps, sounded its belching foghorn as it slipped around the headland. The birds were in for rich pickings.

  She felt the ripples of the sand under her feet, and then it softened to mud so that her toes sunk in. Paddling into the sea, she shivered with the shock of the cold water. After a minute or so she began to get used to it and she picked up her skirts and waded further, until the water was up to her knees. She paused, thrust the hair out of her eyes and looked to the horizon and the large expanse of sky. She sighed, felt herself twisting into air. She lifted her face, felt the spray wet her cheeks. With the sea swirling about her, and her feet sinking deeper into the sand, her head dizzy, she felt as though she belonged to some other world. There was the sound of the wind wheezing through the pines and sea birds screeching.

  Running her tongue over her dry lips, she shivered. A tense pain gathered in a ball in her stomach.

  But when she turned around to go back to the shore, she gasped. She could see nothing but the sea, spilling out like a lake. Her pupils dilated with fear. How long had she been standing here? She remembered her father saying, after one the dockers fell overboard from a ship into the Mersey, that when someone drowns it feels like everything stops in the world and all the grief goes into the depths. She shuddered, trying to put the thought out of her head, and squashing down the overwhelming sickening feeling that was coming over her in waves, realising that there was a very real danger of her getting into trouble in the deepening channels if she didn’t move now and she tucked her skirts into her knickers and buttoned up her cardigan.

  Then a thought occurred to her. Was this actually the answer? To wade out into the sea, and be done with it? To give in to the murky waters? That would show everyone – they would be sorry if she were to drown. Perhaps it would solve everything if she were to put an end to it all.

  She hesitated, let the thought take shape in her head – and took some morbid satisfaction as she imagined Violet weeping inconsolably at her funeral.

  ‘Stuff that for a game of bloody soldiers,’ she shouted into the wind.

  Of course, she wasn’t going to do something as stupid as that. She was a fighter; always had been, always would be.

  But she was done with this ‘we know what’s best for you’ malarkey.

  She would continue to go to school, say nothing, eat Pauline’s dreadful meals, drink the undoubtedly sour school milk. She would be like an actor, going through her moves. And then, when the time was right, she was going home.

  The nickname Daddy Gone Delaney was beginning to stick. The lessons in spelling, First Aid, mental arithmetic, and Latin, were bad enough, but were made even worse with the seating arrangements that put the brightest girls at the front and, inevitably, left Babby stuck at the back, understanding nothing, unable to read the blackboard, and thus ridiculed for being stupid. She dreaded the Angelus that interrupted classes every day at noon – Sister Bernardette leading the prayer in her office, her disembodied voice floating through an intercom. When a bewildered Babby resorted to mumbling gobbledegook, the whole class snickered.

  ‘Delaney! Are you with us?’

  Babby jerked up her head. ‘Yes, sister?’

  ‘Then you’ll answer the question.’

  ‘Sorry, Sister Ignatius. The question?’

  There was the sound of sniggering. Some girls giggled into the crook of their arms. Others made a show of lifting the lid of their desk, sneered and exchanged disdainful glances behind it.

  ‘Name me one of the Romans’ greatest achievements?’ asked the nun.

  There was a pause, interspersed by muffled giggles escaping from the mouths of a few girls sitting in the back.

  The nun began performing a mesmerising feat of threading a piece of chalk through her bony fingers. ‘The Romans’ greatest achievements? I’m waiting?’ she said, in studied casualness.

  ‘Learning to speak Latin?’ replied Babby.

  The piece of chalk dropped from the nun’s hands. There was more sniggering and a couple of explosive snorts of laughter. Babby stared ahead, unflinching.

  ‘Such a div, Delaney,’ said the girl sitting next to her, in a low voice.

  But Babby didn’t care. Because the next day she was going home.

  The following morning, a miserable day like every other miserable day, she left the house at seven, stuffed her velveteen hat and tie in a convenient privet bush, and waited for the bus to Liverpool. When it arrived, she took her place on the top deck and thrust her hands deep in the pockets of the shapeless gabardine coat which Violet had bought from the thrift shop. There were holes in one pocket and the hem was coming undone. It had passed muster in the dimly lit shop and Violet had been seduced by its cheapness, but it didn’t fit, it was old-fashioned – and it was hard to imagine a person on earth who would have chosen it if they had bought it new. Babby felt conspicuous wearing it and hoped it wouldn’t give her away.

  She arrived at Skelhorne Street bus station in Liverpool. Outside Lime Street station the Hackney carriages were lined up like a row of black beetles. She made her way to the Pier Head where she planned to get the overhead railway back to Joseph Street. The luminous estuary light welcomed her home and she felt a surge of happiness to be back in the city. A child wearing a cowboy hat was executing slow, lazy circles as he danced along the waterfront, waving his arms, and Babby returned his beaming smile, shot back at him when he pointed an imaginary pistol at her and shouted, ‘Pow, pow.’ The Mersey glittered and dazzled in the sun and the Liver birds, with their outstretched wings, looked down at the scene played out below. Pulling the sleeve of her shirt over the heel of her hand and wiping it across the top of the rail, Babby examined the filthy black mark it made. Some things would never change. And the grime of the city felt comforting to her. But when she arrived at Joseph Street the door was firmly locked with a note from Violet saying that there was no one in, could the coalmen leave the bag of coal in
the coal-hole and she would be back at six.

  Chapter Nine

  At the Boot Inn, Gladys Worrall sat nursing a drink at the bar. She had her usual bottle of Mackeson’s milk stout and was chasing a pickled egg around a plate with a spoon. The outlandish pink feather boa coiled around her neck seemed incongruous alongside the spit and sawdust. And there was certainly nothing snug about this place. It was draughty, with dim lighting, hard, split plastic seats, and sticky floors and surfaces where dust had congealed. Gladys Worrall’s grand idea to bring a touch of glamour to the dock road hadn’t worked out quite as she had hoped. She had changed the name to the Tivoli, after the cinema, hoping it would attract a better class of customers. Yet disappointingly for Gladys, the locals still called it the Boot Inn and chose Burton Ales over Cinzano. And despite an unfortunate incident in the past, they still preferred a good brawl to ballroom dancing. They said that the Tivvy would always be a place where they played tick with hatchets and the fleas wore clogs – and with the sailors and dockers still choosing it over the other pubs in the dock road for old time’s sake, one thing you could guarantee was a night out to remember.

  Elsie joined her at the bar. Both women were laughing together, roaring throaty, dirty laughs. Gladys blotted her crudely painted lips, leaving an impression of them on a handkerchief. ‘Get me a glass of Harvey’s Bristol cream, Elsie.’ She was slightly squiffy, trying to sound her aitches, as if she was the queen. Her Knotty Ash vowels sounded mangled and difficult to place.

  At first, they didn’t see Babby making her way into the bar, with her head held high, thrusting her chin out. But they noticed her when the pub went quiet, a blanket of hush descending and eyes turning in her direction. Gladys stared at Babby, not knowing what to say.