The Liverpool Trilogy (139 page)

‘No, just the pudding trolley, thanks.’ Then she kissed him very fiercely.

‘See?’ he said when he managed to escape. ‘I knew you were hungry.’

Tess Compton sat in front of her dressing-table mirror. ‘I’ve got lines,’ she complained. ‘I’m getting old. Crows’ feet? I look as if
I’ve been attacked by a full-grown eagle.’

Don managed to contain a bubble of laughter. With hands clasped behind his head, he sat propped up by pillows while watching his almost brand new beloved as she patted cream into the offending
areas. ‘I hope you’re not going all greasy during the day as well. When I grabbed you last night, you nearly shot out of my arms all the way up to the ceiling.’

She turned. ‘Don’t exaggerate. Anyway, this is day cream. It’s very thin, and it gets completely absorbed.’

He was completely absorbed. He felt he might be quite happy to watch her for the rest of the day. ‘There’s an oil slick on your pillow case,’ he stated boldly. His mind
wandered into the past, where he could never have made fun of her, where she had been a sour, bitter, old-before-her-time woman, an automaton. Underneath all those confused hormones, Tess had been
there all along. ‘You’re lovely,’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t swap you for a quarter of Horniman’s. Maybe I might for half a pound of my favourite tea,
but—’

‘Oh, shut up. I’ve got lines.’

‘
You’ve
got lines? You should try living with you. My lines have got lines. I’m like a map of the London underground railway. If you want the Bakerloo line, it runs all
the way up to my hair.’ In ham actor fashion, he exhaled sadly. ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ God, she was beautiful. ‘You’re getting ready for Mark,’
he pretended to accuse her. ‘Flaunting yourself in front of your only daughter’s only boyfriend. It’s the same every Saturday.’

‘And you’re off to see Injun Joe, so don’t forget your headdress and peace pipe.’

He smiled to himself as she got dressed. Until relatively recently, he’d never seen her unclothed or even in underwear. There was something undeniably moving about watching an attractive
woman while she donned clothing. It was a form of ritual, filled with little moves and habits she had probably developed since she was a teenager.

During the early years of wedlock, she’d been shy about her body; then the dreaded hormone imbalance had kicked in, and they had both begun to exist in nightmares. ‘Tess?’

‘What now?’

He allowed a few beats of time to pass. ‘Did you marry me for my dad’s bit of money?’

She grinned. ‘It was taken into consideration, and you know why.’

‘Oh, yes. I do now.’

‘But, in so far as I was capable of loving at that time, I loved and valued you, Don. Whatever was wrong inside me must have started to affect me when Anne-Marie was a little girl. I was
never the cold, calculating bitch I seemed to be. Sometimes, I heard myself and was shocked. Then, that day in the launderette, the first panic attack. Fortunately, I had only two that floored me
completely.’

‘After which, we got the literally bloody day.’

She pulled on a stocking and rolled it up a shapely leg. ‘The day that saved us. I thank God for fibroids, cysts and all the other alien growths I carried for years. I thank Him often for
giving me back to me, because those invaders owned Tess Compton for a very long time.’

Don chuckled. ‘Now I own you.’

‘In your dreams, lad. This is 1960. In case you haven’t noticed, women took over in 1939 and got a bit feisty. We’ve been in charge ever since, but we allow men to believe they
still have power. Just watch this space, Tarzan. Twenty years from now, we Janes will be running the country from the front instead of leading from behind.’

‘Oo-er. I’m terrified.’

‘So you should be. Because when a woman tells you to jump, there’ll be hurdles of varying heights. I’ll fetch you a cup of tea before Mark gets here.’ She blew him a kiss
before leaving the room.

He shook his head and wriggled down under the covers. His Tess was strong now, as was the other one. The other one, in her single room at the top end of Tess’s ward, was also strong. Her
ordeal had hit headlines both local and national but, according to the press, she’d gone on to open a shop and a café up in Waterloo. And there were more of them – Tess was well
aware of that. A long-dead Irishman had saved to send them to England, and they had come across the Irish Sea a few at a time. Don’s wife, filled to the brim with terrible memories, had
walked away from her siblings as soon as possible. For that, she should not be blamed.

He rolled to the other side of the bed and breathed her in. To his knowledge, she had made no attempt to reconnect with her family. They’d be different now, older, separated from each
other by marriage and workplaces. The bigger, healthier ones who had deprived a small thin child of food, who had beaten her and screamed at her, no longer existed. That animal-like behaviour would
have ceased by now, surely? Their life had been so wild that the survival of the fittest had been unwritten and unspoken law.

Anyway, he must shift himself. Injun Joe had become fed up with a series of temporary assistants, and today he would probably offer Don the job of office manager, which was just a posh term for
someone who answered phones and lined up appointments. Joe was a great local character, a man who wanted all European invaders removed from America, because it belonged to the natives. After the
clearance, buffalo would be reintroduced, and the indigenous population could go back to the way they used to be, tribe fighting tribe, hunting parties arguing about which was whose buffalo, and a
jolly time could be had by all who managed to hang on to their scalps.

‘Daft,’ Don said as he dressed. ‘Still, it takes all sorts, I suppose.’

A cup of tea, followed by his wife, entered the room. ‘Make sure you eat before going to see soft lad. If you ask me, Joe’s as mad as a flea in a tin.’

‘Well, he’s good at his job.’

‘Job? Taking photos of cheating husbands?’

‘And wives,’ he reminded her. ‘Takes two to join a St Bernard’s waltz and change partners after a certain number of steps.’

Tess blushed. ‘I wouldn’t swap you.’

‘Not for a ton of Horniman’s?’

She hesitated. ‘Make it Typhoo, and you’re on.’

And she was gone. Since losing some of her innards, she had moved on from a moderate, ladylike pace to greased lightning. Grease. Night cream, day cream, all-over-after-a-bath cream, foot cream
to ward off the horrors of hard skin, eye cream, hand cream – everything but ice cream.

Oh well. Time to get down Smithdown Road to Joe’s place. Because Joe was about to become master
and
servant all in the one body. Joe Dodds, Injun Joe, the man of many disguises, was
going to round up the Riley clan and drive them out of hiding. With a whip, if necessary. It was time.

Seamus had heard the term ‘in two minds’, but he was in several. He adored Gran. She was his hero for most of the time, but she was naughty. He couldn’t tell
her not to go to London, because she was his senior, and anyway, he’d be forced to admit to mooching and going in drawers upstairs in her house while he was supposed to be ill. He might have
to confess his sins to somebody, but it wouldn’t be Gran.

Mam would erupt if he talked to her. World War Two and the Blitzkrieg in Bootle might pale into insignificance compared to the wrath of Mrs Maureen Walsh. She had been known to start,
choreograph and play an active part in battles on the green in the centre of Stanley Square where they had lived in their prefab, so Mam had to be left out of all calculations.

Reen, his sister, was simply daft. All she went on about these days was wanting a baby and dining-room furniture, not necessarily in that order. She’d be no good with babies, because she
kept losing things, putting them down somewhere or other, then running round her house shouting, ‘Where did I leave the whatever?’ The whatever varied in size from a key to a basket
filled with washing, so Seamus didn’t fancy a baby’s chances unless it cried all the time. Which it would. Anybody with Reen for a mother would cry all the time.

This left Seamus’s grandfather, a grand chap who was slowing down noticeably these days. He wasn’t ill; he was just hesitant. And he was worried about Gran, because his noisy,
beloved wife had a terrible cough that was proving difficult to shift.

Oh, bugger. Seamus wasn’t supposed to even think that word, but this was a terrible situation, and a boy lost control when life tied itself in knots with very little warning. But the
conclusion had to be reached even if he walked towards it with leaden legs. It had to be Dad. Something had happened to Dad a couple of years back, and Dad had suffered from nerves; would that
happen again? Oh, this was too much responsibility for Seamus. He wasn’t even a grown-up. He couldn’t carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Could an adult bear the load?

There were priests, of course, but they knew nothing about complications. They could reel off the rules, but hadn’t the ability to understand that sometimes those commandments and laws had
to be bent a bit. It was a lack of creativity again. Most of the adults Seamus knew didn’t own the sense required to work out difficult answers to complicated questions, so how was a mere
child expected to manage? Teachers were the worst; unless it was long division, gifts of the Holy Ghost, or the Battle of Hastings, their knowledge wouldn’t fill the back of a stamp.

This was Saturday. The Co-op shut at half past twelve, but Dad often stayed behind to fill in order sheets and clear his desk of paperwork. Yes, this was Saturday and, on Thursday, Gran would be
on the midnight coach to London. The Krays were gangsters. Seamus had found that out by asking at the local branch library. And this knowledge had pushed the lad right to the edge. He had to talk
to someone, and the someone needed to be Dad.

Mam and Gran were out preparing Lights for a coming-of-age party. They had to transform Scouse Alley into a nightclub with a licence for drink, so at least they were out of the way. It was noon.
Time to start walking towards the Co-op. Oh, God. Could he? Should he? Of course he should. If Gran ended up dead, killed by gangsters, it would be his fault for saying nothing. He was going to get
into trouble whatever happened or didn’t happen, so he might as well be in trouble with a live gran rather than a dead one.

In spite of dawdling, Seamus reached the Co-op before the last customers had completed their shopping. He sat on the wall and waited until his dad appeared at the door and ushered out the
stragglers. ‘Dad?’

‘Hello, son. Here.’ Tom threw half a crown which Seamus caught deftly. He needed no instructions. He was to go to the Fat Ladies’ Chippy and buy fish, chips and peas, which he
and his dad would share. The favourite times in his life thus far had been Dad days. He loved going out with Granddad, loved all his family, but sharing a meal with Dad was Seamus’s idea of
bliss. Well, it would be bliss if he didn’t have to spoil it all with . . . By the time he got back, Dad’s staff had all gone home, so there were just the two of them.

They sat at Tom’s desk in the office and ate from the paper with their fingers.

‘What’s the matter?’ Tom asked.

Seamus shrugged. He didn’t know where to start.

‘I can tell there’s something bothering you. I’ve eaten more than my fair share of these chips already.’

Seamus opened his mouth. ‘It’s a funny name for a chip shop. They’re fat, and they don’t care, do they?’

‘It’s called marketing, Seamus. They turn a negative into a positive and sell more chips.’

‘Right.’

Tom studied his son. The lad couldn’t sit still at the best of times, but he was a bag of nerves today. ‘I haven’t much to do here this afternoon, so I’m ready when you
are.’ He paused, waited for a reply, got none. ‘You’d best get on with it, because your mam and your gran are going to need help down yonder.’

Seamus swallowed audibly. ‘It’s bad. If I tell you, there’ll be trouble. And if I don’t tell you . . . well . . . I have to tell you.’ He took a deep breath.
‘Thursday midnight, Gran’s getting on a coach in town and travelling to London. She’s got a ticket hidden with pictures of our Michael and our Finbar in that big chest of drawers
in her bedroom. If you tell Mam, there’ll be murder. They’ll be like two cats in a dustbin.’ His shoulders dropped slightly as the tension left his body. Dad was in charge
now.

Tom stopped eating. ‘How the blood and sand did you find out?’

‘Mooching and rooting when I was off school. I didn’t know what to do or who to tell. Gran – well – she’d hit the roof. Mam would start on Gran, then they’d
both hit the roof. Granddad’s a bit old, Reen’s daft—’

‘So that leaves me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hell’s bells.’

‘I know,’ Seamus said. ‘But with me having an imagination, I’ve got an idea. Will you listen to it, Dad?’

‘Course I will. All contributions received with gratitude, son.’

So the plan poured from Seamus’s troubled mind and into a room in which the aroma of cured bacon flitches mingled with the heavenly scent of ground coffee.

Silence ruled for several seconds. ‘You’re quite a clever boy, aren’t you?’ Tom asked.

Seamus nodded. ‘See, if you tell Mam before Thursday, you’ll be stymied. She’ll go for Gran’s throat, and that’ll mean war. So you have to get Friday and Saturday
off work, and pack some of Mam’s stuff and yours without her noticing. That won’t be easy. I’ll help if I can.’

Tom’s fingers drummed on the desk behind which he sat. ‘So, suitcase in the boot, take your mam out to the pictures, then for a meal—’

‘Yes, and make sure it’s gone eleven before you leave the restaurant.’

‘Which gives me just about an hour to tell your mother and calm her down. Then we follow the coach.’

‘Yes. Because if you bought tickets and rode on the same bus, there’d be murder on a moving vehicle.’

Tom blew out his cheeks and exhaled. ‘Like the Orient Express. Then we get to Victoria Coach Station and wait for a man to pick her up. And we follow him—’

‘To the Kray house, yes.’