Coming Home to the Four Streets Read online

  Her expression altered in a heartbeat, her eyes alight. Her firstborn, her Jimmy, her favourite had been mentioned. ‘Oh, everyone will be up for a party that night!’ Annie clasped her hands together and almost danced across the parlour.

  Callum sighed inwardly. She had chosen to believe Jimmy’s version of events, deliberately chose to ignore the pain of the poor man he had tied up, bruised and shaken, with a lump the size of an egg on the side of his head. He hadn’t worked since and in a hard-working community, Jimmy’s actions were a breach of common decency. Rob from the rich but do no harm to the poor was a well-established principle. The fact that Jimmy had crossed the line from scally to baddun was not a thought that had entered Annie’s brain.

  Callum shook his head; there would be no partying when Jimmy came home. Jimmy had broken the code of honour and for that the community would cast him out.

  ‘Why can’t I go with you to meet him when he comes out? Why won’t you let me? Can’t you get Jerry to take Jimmy on too?’

  Since his own stint in prison, Callum, a good-looking boy, had managed to keep himself out of trouble and had been taken under the wing of their neighbour, Jerry Deane. Jerry had persuaded the gaffer down on the dock to take Callum on so long as Jerry guaranteed his good behaviour. Callum had sworn, to himself, Jerry and the priest, that he would work every day to repay this generosity and there was nothing and no one on this earth who could persuade him to do anything that would let Jerry down.

  The O’Prey twins had earned a dockside-renowned reputation of stealing to order as soon as they realised they could run faster than anyone else, but in the past it had always been for a good cause – the back of a bread van emptied out so that a child on the four streets could have a birthday party; a delivery to the off-licence on the Dock Road, intercepted in time for Christmas. Their mother Annie, widowed young, had never been able to handle her boisterous twins and had long ago given up.

  ‘You are going to meet Jimmy at the prison gates, aren’t you? He can’t walk out of that godforsaken place and travel all the way home, alone. It’s three buses.’ Annie’s voice had taken on a note of pleading.

  Callum thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘Mam, if I don’t meet him, he could be back inside before he got home! Of course I am. That’s why I’m going to get as many hours in as I can between now and then – and that’s the last day I’m giving to Jimmy.’

  Annie frowned and pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Well, it’s not his fault, is it?’ she said. ‘Ever since the priest was murdered, the police have not been away from these streets. They’ve put that horror of a bobby, Frank the Skank, on the docks since the sergeant married Miss Devlin and he’s always walking up and down past our window.’

  ‘Mam, if Jimmy stays clean he’s nothing to fear from Frank the Skank. Jimmy was caught breaking into a betting shop in the Dingle. And don’t forget poor Mary – he broke that girl’s heart. Will he be doing the right thing there?’

  Annie pushed Callum to one side as she walked past him into the kitchen. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it. He was far too good for the likes of that girl. Our Jimmy deserves better than that.’

  Now it was Callum’s turn to feel angry. He carried a torch for Mary himself, but knowing she had fallen for his brother meant he couldn’t do anything about it. To him, Mary was perfect. Annie could see she had upset her son, and whilst Jimmy was her favourite, Callum was the dependable son she needed to help pay the rent and the bills.

  ‘Come on now, Callum, don’t be like that. I’ll fry a few rashers before you go, put something in your stomach; you can’t do a day’s work on an empty belly. You still have time to eat and be at the front of the pen.’

  Callum followed his mammy into the kitchen. He had vowed that he would never again see the inside of a cell and resented having to take the day off work and three buses to meet Jimmy. His almost-impossible goal on the day he collected Jimmy would be to persuade his brother to become a reformed character and that a life of crime really didn’t pay as well as the docks.

  *

  Eric walked to the cart and lifted Mrs Trott’s milk from the crate. He noticed the net curtain across the road, which had been in place when he arrived, was now balanced on the top of an ornament. He placed his empty cup into one of Maggie’s outstretched hands and the bottle of milk in the other.

  ‘Seems as though someone was having a good look,’ he said, flicking his head backwards.

  Maggie sighed. ‘Jimmy gets out of jail any day now. She won’t get the chance to change his sheets before he’s back in again.’

  ‘Is that so? Can you get the news on those, then,’ he asked, nodding and grinning at her wire curlers. ‘Or, do they tingle if it’s going to rain?’

  Maggie grinned. ‘Oh stop, will you! I’ll be seeing you tomorrow then?’ She always did, but she had to know.

  He was reluctant to leave, to surrender to the remainder of the day. ‘You will, as always. What would my morning be without you?’ Two heartbeats skipped, the air held still, the seagulls silenced… Then, ‘I’d be gasping for a cuppa,’ and life returned to normal. He tore himself away and with his own heart heavy, walked briskly towards number 42.

  *

  Maggie watched him go. She patted the headscarf that was supposed to conceal her wire curlers. Maybe I should start taking my curlers out and putting on a bit of lippy in the mornings, she thought. She could count on one hand the times she had applied lipstick during the last two decades. Well, it was time for a perm so she would call in to Cindy the hairdresser on the parade and ask her for a lesson in the modern way of wearing make-up. It was all blue eyelids, sweeping eyeliner and shimmering pink lips these days and she had no idea where to start, but she could try. Unbidden, she imagined Eric in her bed – and the vision was so vivid, that, as she closed her eyes, she heard the mattress creak. Felt his hands, on which her eyes had lingered only seconds before, roaming along the length of her thighs, his lips, pressing down on hers, his breathing, deep and urgent, the smell of him, sweet and cold, the weight of his body, moving closer… His fingertips parted her willing knees – and just as that delicious thought grew in her mind, Sister Evangelista marched across the bottom of Nelson Street with Deirdre Malone following in her wake.

  ‘Will I see you at mass, Mrs Trott?’ Sister Evangelista called as she raised her hand. Maggie gave a guilty start and called back, ‘You will indeed, Sister! I’ll be on my way in just a minute.’ She stepped back indoors and slammed the door, redemption from her wicked thoughts just around the corner, which meant that she was entirely free to indulge herself on another day soon.

  Chapter Two

  The west coast of Ireland

  Maura deftly flicked her apron to the side as she moved swiftly between the bar and the Guinness barrel in order to retrieve a pewter mug, suspended from the wooden beam above her head. It belonged to her first customer of the afternoon, one of a small number of fishermen who frequented the inn on a daily basis and who always arrived with great ceremony. She was ready for him. He ignored the doormat she religiously beat each morning and stomped across the dark wooden floorboards she had polished on her hands and knees just an hour before, leaving puddles of muddy water behind him. He shuffled off his dripping oilskin and flung it onto the settle by the fire, never breaking his stride until he reached the bar.

  Maura raised her eyes to the low ceiling, stained brown from peat smoke and clay pipes and bit her tongue. She had found the transition from docker’s wife and queen of the four streets in Liverpool, to that of the landlady at the Talk of the Town Inn on the windy west coast of Ireland, a difficult one.

  ‘Why would anyone call it the Talk of the Town?’ she had demanded of her husband, on the wet, cold, windswept day they had arrived. She could barely hear his reply as the ocean roared behind them, only a moment’s walk from where they stood. Their children, bedraggled, too miserable even to complain, huddled into their sides. ‘There’s almost nothing and no one here and we haven�
�t passed a shop in miles. In the name of God, what flamin’ town is it supposed to be the talk of? Where is the town, Tommy?’

  She had stood with her hands on her hips and taken in the sparsity of stone cottages with weak spirals of grey smoke struggling to rise in the rain and blending without trace into the equally grey sky. The church, with its teetering gravestones facing the ocean, sloped down towards them and, huddling against the crumbling perimeter wall for protection, stood a sad and sorry-looking donkey that struggled to raise his head, or show any interest whatsoever in their arrival. Maura’s dark eyes, offended by the sight of the dilapidated inn, locked onto Tommy’s face and she realised, with a sickening dip of her heart, that her husband had been entirely duped.

  ‘Tommy, speak to me, are we in the wrong place? Tell me we are, please,’ she begged.

  ‘I don’t think so, queen,’ he replied, his voice hesitant, a letter that they both knew he couldn’t fully read, gripped in his hands. He was inches shorter than his wife and twice as wide and she fought the conflicting desires to knock his cap off his head, or comfort him.

  Angela, their eldest since Kitty’s death, sensing danger, inserted herself between them and slipped her hand into Tommy’s. There were certain responsibilities Angela had assumed from Kitty, and one of those was to look out for Tommy, who could be far too trusting for his own good. A quiet man of simple needs, loving his family, football and friends, Tommy had bumbled through life until he had, late one evening, without any warning whatsoever, found himself standing at the doors of hell and nothing had been quite the same since.

  ‘Da, where are we going now?’ she’d asked, hoping the answer was not into the low, stone-built, partly-thatched building before them.

  ‘I’m not sure, queen,’ Tommy replied, his heart beating so fast it made him dizzy. Maura had ripped the letter from his fingers and scanned it with her flashing eyes.

  ‘Oh, for the love of God, Tommy, tell me, is this it? Did you did ask the man how many people actually lived in this place before you signed the contract and handed over the money?’ Her dark hair, free from the curlers she wore for most of the day in Liverpool, was pinned to the nape of her neck in a tight bun, her headscarf, tied into a knot under her chin, making her look much older than her forty years. ‘Oh Tommy, by all the saints in heaven, what have you done now?’

  For a brief moment, Maura thought she saw tears well in her husband’s eyes, but with a blink, they were gone. Angela looked up into her da’s face; she had seen the tears too and threw her mother a threatening glance. She squeezed Tommy’s hand tighter, willing him to look down at her and say the only thing she wanted to hear, ‘We’ve come to the wrong place, queen.’

  Niamh slipped her thumb into her mouth and her free hand into her mother’s, her eyes wide, while Harry rocked from side to side with the baby on his hip and the younger boys, tired from their long journey, flopped onto the suitcases that Tommy – carrying one under each arm and one in each hand – had dropped on the ground into puddles which splashed the shoes Maura had polished, ready to make a good impression on arrival at their new home. Each one of them was staring at Tommy, the man of the family who everyone looked up to. Tommy, who dragged men out of the Anchor and back into their own kitchens, tipping their money into the bread bin of a grateful wife and mother. Tommy, the man who organised the hauls from the tramp ship, got them up the dockers’ steps and into his wash house, then distributed around the four streets before it was time to light the copper for the next week’s washday.

  Tommy was the close friend of Captain Conor who sailed the tramp ship Morry to the four corners of the world, and if it hadn’t been for his meeting Maura on the day he arrived in Liverpool, Tommy might have been a merchant sailor himself. It was Tommy who studied the form of the horses and had the best tips in Liverpool, making him the man amongst men. Tommy, who lived with the darkest secret, shared with his best friend Jerry Deane. And if the residents of the four streets had an inkling what it was that Tommy had done, they would have chased him all the way to the gates of hell.

  But Tommy was no longer in the four streets, this was a new world. He was out of his depth, in total despair and confusion, as he turned to face his family and replied, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, Maura; all I know is, if we don’t make a go of this, we’ve lost the bleeding lot.’

  Maura remained as appalled today as she had been on that fateful morning and nothing and no one had managed to convince her that there were any more benefits for her children to living in a public house which faced out across the Atlantic, than there were perched in an equally damp two-up, two-down facing down across the Mersey in Liverpool.

  ‘How are ye, Maura?’ called the man who had soaked her floors, banging both of his palms flat on the bar. Maura’s eyes fixed on the water that ran from the oilskin coat onto her tapestry cushion. If one of the twins had done that, she would have flicked them around the back of the legs with the tea towel that hung from her waistband. She glared at her customer but he was impervious. His face broke into a grin and he removed his cap and shook it, sending water flying across the polished countertop and flopped it back on his head. Ignoring her lack of greeting, he continued unperturbed.

  ‘God in heaven, it’s mighty fierce out there,’ he said as a chill damp breeze whistled through the bar when the door he had failed to close properly behind him blew open and banged against the wall. Maura flicked the brass tap on the barrel of Guinness and the black velvet liquid began to flow into his favourite pot. ‘Where would Tommy be?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be giving me half measures there now, will ye?’

  Maura felt a familiar irritation wash over her. Tommy was over at the Deanes’ farm, helping with the milking, and she had never given anyone half measures since the day they had taken over the inn. ‘He’s away milking,’ she replied as she wiped the foam spilling down over the lip of the pot with the corner of her apron and laid it on the towelling bar mat. She had made a point of overfilling the pot, in order to avoid further criticism but he uttered not a word of thanks, just raised the pot to his lips and slurped away the foam, then took out his pipe and lit it.

  Maura picked up the mop that stood permanently in the bucket in the passage behind the bar and wheeled it towards the wet puddles, pointedly slamming the door shut that he had left open. Flames from the peat fire in the huge open grate leapt up the chimney and then settled back down as the door closed.

  ‘Born in a barn were you?’ she hissed.

  ‘Aye,’ he replied between puffs on his pipe, ‘as it happens, I was.’

  Maura felt no inclination to laugh at his attempt at humour and besides, he was likely speaking the truth. Their only neighbours lived in a long stone barn, with a cow and a pen of pigs at one end, the family at the other.

  ‘It’s 1966,’ Maura said to Tommy, after the first time they had been invited in, ‘and it’s the same as when we were kids, nothing has changed.’

  Tommy had to agree with her. ‘Aye, it’s still a long way from Galway out here on the coast. Every one of their boys gone to America, too. Still, they have the money arriving every week, they aren’t poor.’

  Maura was not impressed. ‘I’d rather have my kids by my side than the money,’ she had answered, ‘and you should know better, after losing our Kitty.’

  She looked out now through the window next to the door, down over the road and towards the ocean. Raindrops the size of fat pebbles hurled against the thick, opaque glass, worn white with ingrained sea salt that had proved almost impossible to remove. She could count on one hand the number of days she had seen the sun shine since they had arrived and her heart felt so heavy it rooted her to the spot. This was it, the reality. The future she and Tommy had dreamt of and planned for. They had willingly returned from Liverpool to Ireland, heading in the opposite direction to almost everyone else, to run their own business.

  The tourists were supposed to be beating a path to their door and although the occasional American, in search of his or her
heritage, had found their way here, they hadn’t stopped for long, but returned to seek the hot fresh coffee, afternoon fancies and indoor lavatories in the Hardiman Hotel in Galway. Having sailed first class from America, the search for their heritage took ten minutes to complete. A visit to the church to light a penny candle, a blessing on a grave and a snap with a Canon camera to prove ‘we were here’, sufficed.

  Maura very quickly discovered that they were wholly dependent on the small fishing community to keep things turning over. But as much as she hated it, they had no option but to go along with it. Tommy was running from his demons and she would run along with him, at her husband’s side.

  ‘We’ll make it the best place for miles, Maura, you watch,’ he had said as they opened the front door for the first time. ‘They will be landing at Shannon and telling the taxi drivers to bring them straight to our door.’

  But the bedrooms they had lovingly decorated and furnished stood empty and their dreams had turned to dust as their bank balance depleted, so Tommy had no choice but to help out on Liam Deane’s farm to bring in some money. Liam was Jerry’s brother and Kathleen’s son, as good as their own family, and it was in the river that ran through their land where their beloved Kitty had drowned. They were bound together by an invisible bond and a knowledge of deeds that would never be spoken of but would hold fast for a lifetime. Liam and Maeve Deane were their only true friends in Ireland – all of Maura’s own family were long since in America and lost to her and Tommy, an only child, had seen the passing of his parents. They had returned to the country of their childhoods to discover that, without those they had loved around them, it was a hard and miserable place.

  The bar began to fill with the smell of pipe smoke, which suppressed that of stale ale and the smell from the jacks at the back of the inn – which Maura discovered was used by every inhabitant of the village as a sluice to empty their toilet buckets when the wind was too high to walk down to the shore. Nose held, she cleaned it daily with Dettol and a mop.