‘That woman at the meeting,’ Gwen said as he flung his arm round her shoulders again. ‘Esther . . .’
‘Oh yes – our Esther.’ There was amusement in his voice.
‘She seems – interesting.’
‘She’s all right. Very academic. She’s from the university.’ He chuckled. ‘Quite formidable, isn’t she? The sort who won’t stop until she gets what she wants. The revolution needs people like her, full of passion.’
She wants Daniel
, Gwen thought, going cold inside. Did he know? Did he want her in return? She was horrified by her jealousy, by the sense that she wanted to know about every encounter, every word that had been spoken between them ever. She told herself not to be so ridiculous. Daniel sounded quite offhand about Esther and he’d known her for some time. If he was interested in her, surely he’d had his chance?
She said nothing more, and a moment later Daniel stopped. ‘Oh, I forgot! I’ve got something for you.’
He released her for a moment to pull a little book out of his jacket pocket.
Gwen took it, but could seen nothing in the dark street.
‘What is it?’
‘
Ten Days that Shook the World.
It’s all about Leningrad in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. The man who wrote it was there! Now – you read that and you’ll touch the heart of the revolution! I promise you will. You can keep it.’
‘Oh, thank you – I will!’ She was delighted with the book, more because he had given her a gift than because of its contents. She felt him watching her as she turned it over in her hands and she looked up at him. He held out his arms and drew her to him.
She wrapped her arms round him with a sense of relief. ‘I’ve been longing to do this all evening.’
Twenty-Six
‘Come on now – eat up, little sparrow!’
Siobhan sat beside Joey on the mattress, as he spooned sweet porridge into his mouth. He could feed himself now, but it was one of her good mornings. There were days when she wasn’t well after drinking and lay on the floor until the afternoon. Sometimes she got sick and would retch over the old tin can, then ask him to bring her water from the broken pipe in the kitchen. But at the beginning, when he was still too weak to move, she or Christie sat and fed him and every day he grew stronger.
Every day, except on Sundays, Christie was gone by the time Joey woke. He went out, and waited to be picked up at dawn to work on the building sites, coming back like a ghost, sagging with exhaustion and coated in brickdust and plaster. However early he got up, he almost always built a fire and made a pot of porridge. Siobhan told Joey that they had taught Christie regular habits when he was in the seminary in Ireland. Joey didn’t know what a seminary was, but Christie made the best porridge over that fire in the grate that Joey’d ever had.
John was out all day too, ‘bringing in the taters’ as Siobhan put it. Joey didn’t know where John went, but there never seemed to be a day when he didn’t come back without some money or food, at least, and sometimes the bottles for Siobhan that got Christie angry. Joey dreaded John bringing the bottles too because they made Siobhan bad and she cried and moaned and then often just ran off, out of the house and sometimes Christie tried to go after her. He couldn’t stop her, and he’d come back in and sit by the fire so silently, so far away he might not have been there at all. Sometimes, long after he’d settled to sleep, he heard Siobhan come stumbling back in and Christie always seemed to be awake. Joey wondered if Christie ever slept. He hated it when they were both like that and tried to shut his mind to Siobhan’s broken weeping. Worst of all, to Christie’s. He made himself think about other things. Often he thought about Miss Purdy, remembering how she had put her arms round him and how she smelled lovely, of flowers.
Micky hardly ever moved from his position in the corner.
‘He’s not a well man,’ Siobhan told him as they sat together in the dusky light of the room that morning. Things felt safe for now. Siobhan was sober, and kind. ‘He won’t be long for this world by the sound of him.’ Micky’s cough bubbled up from him and he had to fight for each wheezing breath.
Joey scraped the last bits of porridge from the old pan. The bottom of it was black and knobbly with ‘mend-its’, bits screwed in to block off holes, and they had one bent metal spoon between them.
‘There ye go.’ Siobhan took the pan from him and snuggled up closer, putting her arm round him, cradling her to him. It was comforting and warm, but the soft feel of her body filled him with dread. He wanted Siobhan in the same way he longed for his mother, and she was like Mom had been, pretty and sweet with her blue eyes and thin, pointed face and – all his instincts screamed – dangerous. With her would come something terrible. He pushed her away and scrambled to his feet.
‘You’re a peculiar child if you’ll not have a cuddle!’ Siobhan leaned over on her elbow and held out her other arm to him, looking up through her long black hair. He could tell he had roused some emotion in her, something which crouched curled up inside. ‘Ah, come on – come and be with your Auntie Shiv!’ Her voice was wheedling now, and Joey felt panic rise inside him.
‘No!’ He felt his face harden into a scowl.
‘Sure, you’re the hard man, aren’t ye?’ she said, and her voice had a savage edge to it. ‘Well, please yourself, though you’d think you’d have some gratitude, you little slum rat. Christie and me – we’re from a good family, I’ll have you know. You needn’t go thinking you’re anything so special, you little bastard!’ She shouted as he let himself into the hall.
Over those days of recovery he came to discover more about the house. The four of them inhabited the front room, which was boarded up except for the loose plank Christie slid back and forth at the side so they could see better. There was barely any light in the hall and all the floor tiles were loose and clinked underfoot. Joey was still learning to find his way round, avoiding the holes where the tiles had come away altogether. The back room was full of rubble where the floor above had collapsed, and if you stepped just inside there was a place where you could look up through the jagged wreckage and see the sky. Beyond was a dark kitchen and scullery from which came the sound of running water. The tap had been wrenched off the water pipe, leaving a trickle of water running constantly into the stone sink. Something scuttled away into the darkness as he approached. The door to the front room had to be kept shut always – it was Christie’s strict rule.
‘There’s two or three things you’ve got to remember if you’re staying here with us,’ Christie had told him once he was well enough to listen. They were squatting by the grate and Joey stared intently into Christie’s gaunt face. He had immediate respect for Christie and felt safe with him.
‘We don’t want anyone knowing we’re here, right? So you never,
ever
go out the front. There’s a way out the back, I’ll show you. We never keep the fire going when it’s light outside – even in the cold. We don’t want anyone seeing the smoke and getting suspicious. So no building up the fire when I’m gone out. Whatever we earn we share – that’s another rule. Micky can’t work but that doesn’t mean we leave him to starve. And –’ he pointed emphatically – ‘you keep that door shut at all times. Got that, little fella? This place is like a barnyard there’s that many rats. You’ll hear them running under the boards. But this room’s the one place in not bad repair. I’ve blocked off a couple of holes in the floor and we’re sound enough. We don’t want to be inviting them in to share our dinner, now, all right?’
Joey nodded solemnly, and Christie’s usually woebegone expression lit with a rare grin.
‘C’mere.’ He held out a thin arm. Once again Joey was struck by how hard and sore his hands looked. Christie put an arm loosely round him and looked into his face. In a whisper, he said, ‘And the other thing is . . . Siobhan, my sister . . .’ Joey saw a look of pain cross Christie’s face. ‘She’s not always very well. You’ve seen she’s not always herself. That’s all. That’s why we’re in England, see. We came to . . . help her.’
Christie’s face looked very sad as he spoke. Joey nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say, but deep in himself he knew things about the kind of not very well that affected women like Siobhan, like his mom.
He pushed open the back door, screwing up his eyes in the bright morning. A bird was singing close by. He pushed his hair back. It was longer than he’d ever known it before, hanging over his eyes. He stepped out onto the narrow area behind the house, which was paved with broken blue bricks. The rest of the garden was a chaos of brambles. Using the three fruit trees in the garden as a scaffold, the brambles had grown, spread, interwoven to a height about the same as Joey’s so that the whole garden was taken over by them. Except in one part.
‘This is how you get out.’ Christie had taken him outside to show him. ‘I cut a way through – with John, and Micky when he wasn’t so bad. Through here, look!’
The men had cut a tunnel through the bramble forest. Christie bent right over to lead him through. Joey only had to bend his knees a bit to follow Christie’s dark back between the green walls of hacked brambles, treading down some scrawny nettles trying to grow in the gloom. Christie stopped and cut back more bramble suckers which were trying to advance again.
‘They’re determined fellows these,’ Joey heard him say. ‘Come on, watch yourself now – we’re nearly there.’
They followed the path down the length of the garden.
‘Now – this is our gate,’ Christie said, squatting down by the hedge. He was talking in a low voice. ‘We’ve not had any problem. The road out there’s quite quiet, but you have to look carefully before you step out. You don’t want to run into the Guard.’
Joey frowned.
‘Your police fellows. Sure, you’re a solemn little man!’ Christie tweaked Joey’s ear playfully. He leaned forwards, parting a place in the hedge and looked cautiously about. He stepped outside and Joey joined him. Christie was still looking warily up and down the street. There were houses further along, but down this end they faced the back ends of gardens and a warehouse and it was quiet. Joey found that he felt tired and shaky, just after walking that short distance. Looking up at Christie, he thought he looked smaller out here, and defenceless.
‘When you’re coming back, the place to go in is just after that drain.’ He pointed. ‘You’ll soon find it – can’t go wrong. But you don’t need to be going out and about yet, do you now? Unless you’ve somewhere to go back to. Have you, Joey? Is there someone waiting for you at home?’
The question made Joey’s chest ache. He shook his head fiercely.
Christie reached out and ruffled his hair. ‘You can go with John, in a day or two, if you’ve nowhere else to go. He can always use a bit of help.’
Standing alone in the garden now, Joey looked at the green tunnel through the brambles. He’d been restless since he felt better, and fed up with staying inside. He thought of just going. He could do what he liked, after all! But he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find his way back yet if he left. He sat down, cross-legged and poked at the bricks idly with a dry twig. He didn’t want to go back inside. He didn’t want evening to come either.
At night they sat round the fire. It was John who brought in the food. Christie seemed to trust him with the money he earned. John knew the place well, all the ins and outs. They cooked up stews in the one pan – always potatoes, boiled in the skins, and anything else John could get, flavoured with Bovril. Sometimes meat, and bread to mop it all up. Christie was so famished sometimes he could barely wait till it was cooked. They took turns with the spoon, out of the pan.
No one talked much. They were all too tired. Joey learned odd scraps about the adults around him as they talked to one another. He didn’t understand much of it. He picked up that Christie had been in training to be a priest in Ireland. That he’d run away because of Siobhan. Something bad had happened. Joey didn’t know what. He could feel Christie’s intense protectiveness towards his sister, though. Once or twice he wondered what had happened to Lena. Did they take her away to the home? And Kenny and Polly? But he pushed those thoughts away.
Micky didn’t talk now. Christie tried to feed him but he coughed and spat it out. Joey had been afraid of Micky, with his big, whiskery face. He wasn’t like a real person to Joey at first, lying there, the coughing, the stink of him, which hit you every time you stepped in the room, but more like some kind of animal, or monster. But once or twice Micky had sat up in the evening and Joey saw he was a real man, heavy and weary and very sick. Once or twice Micky’s bloodshot gaze had swivelled towards him and in his thick, rasping voice, said, ‘Who’s this little fella then?’
The next time, Micky glowered at him and roared, ‘Get out o’ here you little bastard!’ Another evening, while still lying down, he said in a bewildered tone, ‘So, you’re all grown up then are ye now, Seamus?’
‘He doesn’t know you,’ Siobhan whispered to him. ‘He’s muddled in his head. Don’t go taking any notice. And our John – he’s simple in the head too, but he’ll do ye no harm.’
From things John said, Joey knew he had grown up somewhere across town. John had an odd, wooden-sounding voice, so different from the fluid rise and fall Joey heard in Christie’s and Siobhan’s voices. He seemed to speak all on one note and to keep on talking whether or not his mouth was crammed full of potato. He kept complaining about ‘the camp’.
‘Don’t let them ever put you in one of them camps,’ he warned Christie, as he did most evenings.
‘I won’t, John,’ Christie said, rubbing his face wearily. ‘I’ve heard you.’ Sometimes Christie’s mood seemed very low.
‘Whatever they say, you’re better off on the dole . . . Take you off to the depths of fucking Wales . . . Sorry for my language . . .’ He nodded round at them. ‘Sorry, Siobhan – didn’t mean it.’ He was devoted to Siobhan. Often he sat just staring at her while she slept.
‘Ah, you’re all right there, John.’ She took her turn spooning food out of the pan. Her hair fell forward either side of her face and she shook her head to get it out of the way. Joey thought it was strange the way John was always saying sorry to Siobhan when her language was even worse than his.