‘Me an’ Frank’d like to do our bit, Stan.’ This was from Betty and her voice was politely aggressive. ‘I’ve already iced the weddin’ cake like I’ve told Marj an’ I’ve a mind for plenty more bakin’.’
‘You don’t have to, Betty. Really.’ Marjorie Harper was a small, neatly dressed woman who always spoke in what she fondly imagined was a refined voice but in reality was merely annoyingly quiet and stilted. ‘We can lay on whatever is necessary. Pearl is our only one, after all.’
‘Mouldy bun? What’s a mouldy bun got to do with anythin’?’ Frank was somewhat deaf due to a fire-damp explosion at the pit in his youth which had taken his best friend and three brothers, and consequently found what he termed ‘that blasted woman’s whisperin” intensely aggravating. ‘We’re discussin’ a weddin’ here, aren’t we?’
Prudence closed her eyes for a moment as her face flamed with embarrassment. Her da! She wished - oh,
how
she wished - it was her leaving the menagerie in Spring Garden Lane in a few days’ time. How would she stand it after Barney was married? Still, Pearl had consoled her by telling her she’d be welcome to call at any time, and she’d do just that. Anything to escape home. And one day she would escape for good. That was what all the careful saving of the last years was looking towards.
Seven years she had been working at the laundry, ever since she’d left school, and she’d had three rises since then but she still paid Betty the same as when she’d first started. Even when her da had been laid off for eight weeks a couple of winters ago, she had offered no more and waited to see what Betty would do. But she was as soft as clarts, Betty. After her stepmother had mentioned she’d be grateful for a bit more to tide them over the bad spell, she hadn’t mentioned the matter again. And why should
she
stump up extra to feed and clothe the brats Betty turned out like clockwork?
Prudence opened her eyes, remembering how Barney had doubled his board to Betty. She’d warned her brother he was stupid and that he’d be expected to keep it up once their da was in work again, but that was Barney all over. Governed by his heart and not his head, and always a sucker for a sob story. You got nowhere in life like that.
She glanced round the expensively furnished private sitting room, frowning slightly. It might take years but one day she’d buy her very own place. You had to make things happen in this life and the end always justified the means - and there was one thing she meant to bring about in the very near future. She didn’t intend to share her room any longer with that little baggage her Aunt Vera had foisted on them.
Prudence didn’t include Gertie in the thought; the younger child’s presence had barely impinged on her consciousness, but from the second she had set eyes on Josie’s fresh glowing face, framed by its mass of wavy golden-brown hair, she’d felt immediate antipathy.
But for Vera’s interference Betty would have been looking to offer the lads’ room to a lodger once Barney was gone; that had been the original plan, Prudence told herself bitterly. The twins and Robert would have managed perfectly well on a desk-bed in the kitchen, and apart from Freda and Clara on their little pallet, she would have had the room to herself. As it was, you couldn’t move for bodies at night. It wasn’t to be borne.
Prudence moved irritably on the stiff horsehair sofa she was sharing with her brother, screwing her fleshy buttocks into the seat, and in doing so caught Pearl’s eye once more. Her friend’s pretty, slightly babyish face again signalled caution, but this time the emotion it brought forth from Prudence was one of testiness.
With her pale blue eyes and curly chestnut-brown hair, Pearl had been spoilt by her doting parents from the day she was born. What did Pearl know of being forced to share a bedroom with virtual strangers, or existing day after day in a household of morons? Prudence became aware her hands were clasped together so tightly her knuckles were shining white, and forced herself to relax her fingers one by one until they were loose in her lap. She felt she would go mad at times, stark staring mad, and since that mealy-mouthed little madam of Vera’s had arrived, the feeling had increased tenfold. Wheedling her way in with Betty, offering to do this and that, and simpering at her da until she’d got him eating out of her hand. She thought she was so clever, Josie Burns, but she’d got a shock coming.
Prudence now sat very still as she allowed herself to reflect on the journey she had taken the previous weekend, and the satisfactory outcome which had ensued. It had been sweet, very sweet to find out she had been right all along - that what she’d suspected from the first day the baggage had arrived was true.
Her Aunt Vera was a fool, they all were - even Barney because he wouldn’t hear a word against Josie - but she had seen straight through the little strumpet. All that talk about her da and Gertie, what did Josie take them for? Well, the others might not have the sense they were born with, but she was on to Josie’s little game. The chit had got tired of looking after her mam and running the household in Sunderland. She’d decided to get away and, knowing Vera had a sister in Newcastle, had told a pack of lies and duped them all. All except herself, Prudence Robson. Her lips formed in a mirthless smile. Young Josie was going to find out very soon that Prudence Robson wasn’t as daft as she looked . . .
At first Josie thought it was the dream she had been having which had woken her. It wasn’t the first time she had had it; it had been the same for years now. Sometimes whole months would go by and she would think it had finally gone, and then night after night, sometimes for a week at a time, she’d awake hot and desperate and gasping for air.
It had begun not long after she had met Vera, and the night after her mam had been ill all the previous day. Her mam had been crying and moaning on and off with the belly-ache for hours, and Maud from upstairs had been sitting with her for a long time before she’d shooed them all into the kitchen. Hubert had only been a little baby then; she remembered that because he’d only just learned to sit up and he’d been screaming all day, even when she’d tried to feed him his pap bottle.
After a while her mam had stopped making a noise and then Maud had come out with the chamber pot which she’d been going to take out into the backyard. Then Gertie had fallen over and cracked her head on the fender and Maud had put the pot down quickly just outside the kitchen in the hall, by the back door. Gertie had been bleeding everywhere, and Jimmy had been bawling and Hubert had made himself sick and then filled his napkin, and in the ensuing pandemonium Maud had forgotten about the chamber pot. And then she, Josie, had been going out into the yard to swill Hubert’s bit of rag through, and she had seen -
she had seen what was in it
. It had been tiny, the babby, so tiny, but with little arms and legs, and she had wanted to reach down and lift it out of the chamber pot which her da used most nights when he’d been drinking. She hadn’t wanted it to be in there.
And then in the midst of it all her da had come home. There was a gap in her memory here because the next thing she could recollect was her and her da in the yard, and she’d been hanging on his arm because she knew what he was going to do. But she hadn’t been able to stop him and he had leathered her after with his belt; she still had the scars from his buckle on her back. But she hadn’t cared about that, not even when the blood had caused all her clothes to stick to her for days afterwards and her skin had felt as though it was on fire. All she’d been able to think about was the minute baby lying amongst all the filth and excrement in the privy and being scraped out by the scavengers’ long shovels and tossed in their stinking cart.
It was from that day she had really hated her father and that night that the nightmare had come. It was always the same. It would be all right at first. All of them, her mam and her three sisters and Jimmy and Hubert would be sitting in a boat on the sea, but a funny sea - black and dark. And then the dreadful fear would fill her and a sense of horror that was paralysing. The sea would begin to lap over the side of the boat but it was thick, like mud, and her da was suddenly there, shouting they were all too heavy. One by one he would push the others out, and she could see their desperate eyes and hear their screams but she was unable to move, held down by some invisible force. And the black sea would suck them under but slowly, horribly slowly, and then she would know it was her turn . . . But she always woke up in the moment that her father’s hands reached out for her.
Why had she dreamed the dream now? It hadn’t come once since she had been in Newcastle and - foolishly perhaps, she acknowledged as she rubbed her damp palms on her skirt - she had told herself the break from Sunderland had set her free from it.
And then the knock came at the door again, and she realised someone was outside. Whether it was the inexplicable feeling of dread the dream always left in its wake, or a primeval sixth sense, or just the fact that Josie suddenly became very aware she was all alone in the house apart from the baby, and Gertie and the children upstairs, she didn’t know, but the hairs on the back of her neck were pricking. In the warmth emanating from the range she shivered.
‘Don’t be so daft.’ She spoke out loud as she rose from the settle, dropping the shirt on to the dingy cushions and reaching for the oil lamp in the middle of the kitchen table. Someone was outside, a friend of Betty and Frank’s maybe, or perhaps one of Frank’s pit cronies. It wouldn’t be any of Frank’s married children or their wives, they would have come straight in without due ceremony.
She made her way slowly along the hall, but when she reached the front door and the knock came again, she found herself sliding the bolt instead of opening it, much to her surprise. She frowned, holding her free hand to her heart as it thudded into her throat. What was the matter with her? She was going doolally. Nevertheless, and in spite of now feeling slightly ridiculous, she called, ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’
There was silence for some ten seconds, and then the knock came a third time. She stared at the battered front door and then stooped down, placing the oil lamp on the floor before opening the door into Frank and Betty’s front room. Before the arrival of Frank’s second family this room had been used rarely; it had held a green plush suite and a highly polished oval table and six upholstered chairs. The suite remained, but now a double brass bed stood in the alcove which had housed the table and chairs, with a space at the side of it where the crib - containing the youngest Robson - stood at night. Along with this was a huge wooden airer constantly filled with damp and drying clothes and a rickety wardrobe, which meant careful negotiation when edging to the bed. But it was to the window that Josie made her way, carefully folding the moth-eaten velvet curtains back a fraction as she peered out into the dark street.
But she hadn’t been careful enough. As the big broad man outside turned and stared straight at her, Josie felt a scream which was never voiced spiral in her head, and then she heard the front door being rattled as her father realised he had been tumbled. She let the curtain fall back into place and now she stood in the darkness, no semblance of colour left in her face and her hands gripping the bodice of her dress as her eyes stared wildly about her.
He was here. Her da had found them.
But how? How had he found out where they were living? She stumbled back into the hall, entangling herself in the airer on the way and causing it to fall backwards into the wardrobe. If it had fallen the other way the clothes would have landed on top of the glowing fire in the grate, kept burning day and night courtesy of the free coal the miners received, but such was Josie’s state of mind she wouldn’t have known.
‘Josie? It’s me. Da.’ His voice now came clearly. ‘Open the door, lass.’
He was speaking in the wheedling tone he had used once before outside Central Station, as though he was a normal father dealing with a recalcitrant child who needed careful handling. And she answered him as she had then, her voice flat and controlled. ‘Leave us alone,’ she said.
‘Come on, lass, open the door. I only want to talk to you an’ see how things are. Your mam’s bin half mad with worry.’
That was a lie if ever she heard one because Vera had told her that Shirley was pleased they were out of harm’s way. And when had her da ever bothered about how her mam was feeling anyway? He must think she was daft to swallow that one. Josie took a long shuddering pull of air and said once more, ‘Leave us alone. We’re not coming back.’ She was leaning against the cold wall for support but then, as the door was rattled violently on its hinges again, she sprang forwards and banged on it herself, hissing, ‘You leave us be or else I’ll call Barney and Mr Robson. They know all about you.’
‘Oh aye? An’ they’re sittin’ by the fireside, are they? Best place, lass, on a night like this. Well, you call ’em an’ we’ll all have a crack together, eh? Mind, I might be inclined to say what I think about folk who take a pair of bit bairns away from their rightful mam an’ da.’
She stared at the door, biting the end of her thumb. And then his voice came again saying, ‘Well? I’m waitin’, lass. Or could it be they’re oilin’ their wigs some place? A little bird told me there’s the comin’ nuptials to get sorted.’
He had known. He had known all along that the house was empty except for her and the bairns. As the thought hit home she knew in the same instant her father had been keeping her talking deliberately, but then a hard hand was slid across her mouth as she was grabbed from behind and held close to a body which she recognised from its smell. ‘Now you just keep nice an’ quiet like a good little lassie an’ no one’ll get hurt.’ Patrick Duffy was holding her fast despite her struggling, and Josie would never have believed his strength if she hadn’t felt it. ‘Y’know, you’ve put me to a fair bit of trouble, me darlin’, an’ I’m not too happy about that.’
His hand was so tight across her nose and mouth that Josie couldn’t breathe, but still she continued to struggle and kick as Patrick forced her towards the front door. She could hear him cursing, and in the moment he removed his hand from her mouth she sucked in a pull of air intending to scream, only to receive a blow across the side of her face that made her neck crack as her head bounced on her shoulders.