Evil Relations (42 page)

Dad edges past me and unlocks the door, instantly releasing the heavy, musty smell of the building. I step in behind him, kicking away a pile of junk mail and stand in the hallway, facing a steep staircase. I know these houses so well that its layout is already familiar to me: the rooms at the back where the toilets are, the kitchen where the hot aroma of curried goat and beans might still linger, and the under-stairs door to the vast cellar. I haven’t moved an inch, but already I’m back in time, picturing Joyce with her soft eyes and honeyed voice. Then Maureen, stood on the landing against the wall, letting some man she doesn’t even know touch her everywhere . . .

‘It’s not much to look at, but we’ll sort it,’ I hear Dad say behind me. Then he opens the door to a room piled high with stinking memories of yesterday: our old belongings are there among the furniture he bought using vouchers from the Welfare Department, but everything has been in storage for months and it’s begun to rot, the damp hanging thickly in the room. Nothing is worth keeping. I feel like sinking to my knees and weeping with disappointment. One thought saves me: the boys. I need to see the boys.

Happily, I don’t have long to wait. That afternoon Dad and I pitch up on the doorstep of the Acorns and the boys rush into my arms, shouting. They’re all in fine spirits and good health, apart from Paul, who is well but very clingy and quiet, refusing to leave my side for a second. David is garrulous, wanting to know if we’ve got beds in the new house so that they can all go ‘home’. John is full of smiles. As for me, I’m over the bloody moon, knowing that we can soon be a proper family again. When I say goodbye to the boys, they seem to know this too, and our parting isn’t as difficult as I’d feared.

Back at the house, Dad and I manage to salvage one bed and a handful of covers. He sleeps on that and I settle down on the floor. But his other purchases prove worthless and, apart from the bed, the only things we keep are a table and three old chairs. The rest is taken to the dump and binned, together with his ideas, dreams and promises. I dislike the house itself; every room takes me back to somewhere I don’t want to be. Often I go down to the cellar and sit on a tea chest to be alone with my thoughts. The scuttling rats and the damp, seeping walls vanish as I lose myself in the past, where Otis sings soulfully and people dance as if it’s the last night of their lives. I look at a dark corner and picture the man who gets everybody high, the rows of drinks, and the happy-boys . . . Then the music in my head fades and the memories go with it. I climb the stairs, determined to fight the tears that threaten to fall. I’m glad to be out of prison and close to getting my children back, but in the cellar I feel so lonely I could choke on it.

We could’ve made it, girl. We could’ve crawled out of this thing together and somehow
survived . . .

Maureen. I need to find Maureen.

*

Summer 1971: I spend my days visiting the boys in the care home, carrying my guitar and a bag of peaches for them, wearing my leather jacket and feeling good as the sun blisters down on the city. Every evening I return to the house of empty dreams in Moss Side with a bag of greasy, half-cold fish and chips from the Pakistani chippy, then drink beer with Dad late into the night. I listen to his hopes for the future, while the cancer swells one side of his face. His hatred of all women comes to the fore; the roots of it lie in his youth, when someone called Rhoda hurt him badly. I don’t have the details, just a rough sketch of an episode that scarred him for life: a marriage gone awry, a child, a death and something unspoken that twisted his insides for ever. Ever since then he’s used women, and where they’re concerned Dad is not a nice person. I shut out his bitterness, glad when he’s ready for bed. I sleep next to him on the floor, wrapped in blankets and feeling like a kid again in the attic with Mum, her arms around me. I know it can never come back, that warm feeling of security, but it comforts me to remember it.

In the mornings I rise early, leaving Dad to slumber. After brewing strong black coffee, I sit in the kitchen to drink it, smoking one cigarette after another. Eventually I leave the house, stepping out onto a street that’s flooded with cool sunshine. This is my ritual, day in, day out, and I can’t let go yet because it hurts too much. I need to find her.

I want to speak to Maureen one last time. I need to be able to look into her eyes and to know what she really feels about me. I want everything and nothing: I want her to whisper softly in my ear, but I want her heart to be empty so that I can get on with my life; I want her to tell me to fuck off if that’s how it is, to hear from her lips alone that she’s met someone else and is happier with him than she was with me. Deep down inside I want to know that she is a different person now, finally alive and free of it all.

So I walk the same route every morning, Monday to Friday. These streets are as familiar to me as my own reflection; I grew up ten minutes from here. Dad told me that Maureen is working in a mail-order factory on Devonshire Street and to get there I have to walk right through my past, down Aked Street. Outside number 39, I stop for a while. Half of the street is boarded up; Asian families occupy the remainder. The entire street is awaiting demolition, part of the ongoing council scheme to rebuild the city.

But I don’t see the graffiti and the boards and the litter. I see Nellie Barnes, a plump, slow-witted woman who was always kind to us kids, even though she had the mind of a child herself, entombed in the body of an adult. I see her brother Tony, a full-blown Teddy boy, in his three-quarter-length coat, bootlace tie, New Orleans waistcoat and blue suede shoes. Tony was pure style, a photograph from a record cover. I see John McGargill, whose Mum and Dad had the first television in the street, and I remember queuing up with the other kids to be allowed 15 minutes of watching American cowboys on their white horses; afterwards we ran out pretending we were on mustangs, using two-fingered guns that never ran out of bullets and shot the whole street up. I see the rag-and-bone man handing out his treasures: balloons for the toddlers, dolly-blues for the women to do their washing, new scrubbing boards and pans, and the precious donkey stone that smartened up every window sill and front doorstep.

I see them all and more, remembering the day when the council arrived and covered our beloved cobbles with tarmac. We hated the idea, but it turned out to be brilliant for us kids: we got roller skates and went berserk, travelling at a million miles an hour, breaking our bones but laughing at the thrill of it all. And when I pass my school at the end of the street I hear an echo of past laughter, girls squealing and the chaos of playtime. Opposite is the ‘shop full of everything’, including cigarettes in packets that could be split in order to be sold to 11 year olds in the required number – singles, doubles, fives . . .

I walk this way every morning, letting the memories wash over me, but I don’t know if I’m looking for the end of the past or the beginning of the future. I need to let go, that much is certain. There’s been too much of everything and now it’s either got to stop or it’s got to start.

I’m not angry with you any more, Maureen. The pain has gone. I was ill, but now I’m better. I just need to be myself again, to remember who I am, how I was when we were kids, before Angela, before Ian and Myra. I want to see you again, to make it real. I need to let go and I think you do too, but we both need to hear the other say it to make it happen. I have to find you at the factory, to watch your lips telling me that it’s over, gone, finished, past and done with. We both need to face up to it in order to start living again, apart. If we can just talk and say what must be said . . . a final word, a hug, and a kiss, and then . . . let go.

Twice a day I stand opposite the factory, every Monday to Friday, for two weeks. In the morning I watch the workers going in, having a last natter and cigarette before starting their shifts, and in the evening I watch them leave. I study faces, hairstyles and manners of walking – anything that might lead to her – but there are only strangers. Every night I walk past my empty school, down Aked Street, where a few Asian women stand gabbling in a language I can’t understand, and when I’m past number 39 I pick up speed, heading home to Moss Side.

After a fortnight, I tell Dad his information is wrong; Maureen isn’t working there. To my surprise, he’s genuinely disappointed for me. I stop staking out the factory and instead, one hot summer’s day when I’m feeling moody and restless, decide to go back to Hattersley. I hate the idea of being there again, but I’ve got it into my head that if I can find Joyce, she might be able to tell me where Maureen is, or even Tom.

The bus journey is long and I’m impatient; even if Joyce has no news, at least I’ll know. After endless stops for passengers and at traffic lights, we finally reach the estate and turn left into Underwood Road. I glare at a street sign as we trundle by: Wardle Brook Avenue. What the fuck was I thinking, to come back here?

We pass the tall block of flats: Underwood Court. I squint up at the third-floor balcony of number 18. There are curtains at the window, flowery and cheerful, but I pity the poor bastards who occupy the place. I wonder if Mr Page, the jobsworth caretaker, is still snooping about the building, and if the graffiti can still be seen, ghostly words of hatred under a slick of council paint.

The bus stops and I get off, walking fast, excited and nervous at the same time. I check that I’m tidy: shirt in, jeans neat, collar properly turned up on my leather coat. Maybe I can persuade Joyce to come for a walk with me – that would break the ice.

I pass Slater Way and the last home I shared with Maureen, screwed up and in free-fall. Head down, I walk faster until I’m standing opposite Joyce’s house. I stare at the door and the windows, puzzled. It’s all wrong: the door is shut as it never was when Joyce was there, and the house is silent, no kids running wild in and out, or Miss Jamaica singing to herself as she hangs out the washing. But I can’t tear myself away because I’m so sure Joyce will appear at the kitchen window, shocked to see me, then breaking into a smile before coming up the path with her arms open.

It doesn’t happen. The house is as still as a leaf, and Joyce and her kids have vanished into the past like so much else, leaving me in a no-man’s-land of confusion and unhappiness.

I walk away.

It will be 30 years before I visit Hattersley again.

A few days later I go with Dad to visit his friend Big Martin in Hyde. This is where Dad stayed while I was in prison, after his explosive row with Maureen. He’s told me about his weeks in Hyde, how good Martin was to him and how he spent hours on end talking to Martin’s teenage daughter, Mary. He
hasn’t
told me that he would collect the boys from the Acorns and bring them here so that he and Martin could spend hours at the pub while Mary – whom I haven’t met – entertained the boys and took care of them.

It will be a while before I discover the firm bond that was formed between Big Martin’s daughter and my sons. For now, I sit awkwardly in the house in Hyde, hunched up in my leather jacket and clutching my guitar. My future and salvation is mere minutes away, but I don’t know that either, and sink further down into the settee, bored and wishing I was somewhere else. Hyde is the place that Ian and Myra put on the map in the very worst of ways; I know every inch of the small police station and I know, too, that its people don’t like me. But Big Martin, a great handsome lump of an Irishman at 20 stone or more, never listens to gossip and makes up his own mind about things. He’s a trusting, straightforward man. Like all Irish people, he’s keen that we eat while we’re under his roof and disappears into the kitchen to organise a few sandwiches and a pot of tea. His son, Little Martin, a plump boy of 11, wanders in and out, peering curiously at me, and my guitar.

I fidget on the settee, as Big Martin returns to his chair next to the open fire, talking to Dad. For a split-second, on the other side of the kitchen door, I’m aware of movement – a shape – and then it’s gone. I’m alert now, trying to listen: two voices giggle and mumble, plates clatter on worktops, cupboards open and shut. Then, quite clearly, I hear a girl hiss, ‘I don’t care who he is, he’s a greaser, get him out!’

I sit upright, straining to hear what else is being said. Suddenly Little Martin appears at the kitchen door, staring at me and rooted to the spot. Then he returns to the kitchen and the muffled voices begin again. I feel self-conscious, thinking:
greaser? What the hell happened to Jimmy Dean and white T-shirts, faded jeans and a steel comb in your back pocket? I’m not a bloody greaser. Who does that girl think she is?

I get my answer immediately. She comes out of the kitchen, carrying a roasted pork sandwich and a huge mug of tea. She places both on the coffee table and when I thank her she looks directly at me, replying with a smile, ‘Hello, I’m Mary.’ Then she’s gone, leaving me without a trace of a grin on my face and a pork sandwich for my trouble and charm. A bloody greaser!

* * *

Mary Flaherty was the eldest of two children born illegitimately to Martin Flaherty and Hazel Symcock. There was a 25-year age gap between the couple; Hazel was 26 and Martin 51. His birth name was Faherty, but he modified it to the more easily pronounceable Flaherty when he left Ireland during the Troubles of the 1920s. Coming from a small village in the west of Ireland, Martin departed for what were diplomatically termed ‘political reasons’ and would often refer to his friends there as the ‘old boys’ with a gentle, mischievous smile. After his relationship with Hazel broke down, Mary and her younger brother Martin divided their days between both parents, living with their mother during the week and their father at the weekends. Mary looked forward most to her time with her father and enjoyed looking after him.

‘Mary ran Big Martin’s household,’ David recalls. ‘That might seem unusual for a girl so young – though I didn’t realise just how young she was at the time – but it was a situation that everyone felt comfortable with, so why not? Then Dad moved in for a while, and he would literally sit up all night, chatting to Mary about everything in his head. When he brought the boys over, she looked after them while he and Big Martin went out for a few pints. Paul, David and John adored her and being with Mary undoubtedly helped them during their months in the care home.’