The Mersey Girls (5 page)

‘The water won’t be very nice for your mam, though, after we’ve washed our hands and faces in it,’ Linnet said as Roddy began washing with a good deal of unnecessary splashing. ‘What’s she going to use it for, anyway?’

Roddy finished splashing water on his face and the front of his hair and wiped himself dry with a grimy sleeve. He shrugged. ‘Dunno, everything, I guess. She’ll boil the spuds with it, mash the tea, wash up the pots . . .’

‘But we’ve washed in it,’ Linnet protested again. She wet her hanky and wiped round her face, then washed her hands, patting herself dry on her warm little jacket. ‘You can’t drink water you’ve washed in, we’d better get her another bucketful.’

‘Don’t be daft, look at that line o’ kids,’ Roddy said with the sort of affectionate tolerance for her odd ways which Linnet was beginning to expect from him. ‘Me mam wants the bucket now, norrin a week’s time. Come on.’

He lugged the bucket to the top of the steps, waving Linnet away in a lordly fashion once again when she tried to help, hollered through the door for ‘Freddy!’ and then came down the steps towards Linnet, grinning brightly.

‘All right, are you? Off we goes, then, to your mam’s! Now what did you say your name was?’

‘Linnet Murphy,’ Linnet said patiently. ‘You should be able to remember that; I can remember you’re Roddy Sullivan!’

‘I couldn’t forget a name like Linnet, could I?’ Roddy said, chuckling. ‘It’s the Murphy bit – I gorra remember to say, “Evenin’, Mrs Murphy, ma’am, how are you today?”’ Roddy laughed at his own words and caught Linnet’s elbow as they emerged from under the arch. ‘Careful, there’s a lorra traffic at this time o’ night. We
are
late, here comes Jimmy Winkup to light the street lamps. We’d best hurry.’

‘Yes, I don’t want my mother worrying,’ Linnet said seriously. ‘I usually go straight home with my messages. Still, she’ll be so pleased I’ve brought a fr – I mean another friend home that she won’t mind me being a bit late, I daresay.’

It had been a brilliantly hot and sunny day but now the sun was sinking in the west and long shadows striped the dusty road. A small group of schoolchildren, with Lucy Murphy in their midst, were making their way home across Barry’s Bridge. They had passed the burnt-out barracks and had stopped for a moment by the big willow near the water so that the boys, Daniel, Peder and Garvan, might cut themselves willow wands, though what they wanted with them no girl, Lucy thought disdainfully, would ever understand. As they walked now, the three boys belaboured the hedges, talking in loud and boastful tones of how they would spend the coming holiday, for it was the last day of the summer term which meant – Lucy hugged herself – two whole months at home, with neither school nor teachers to bother them.

‘What’ll we do tomorrow, Caitlin?’ Lucy asked as they began to cross the river. She paused for a moment when they were a few yards out from the bank and looked down into the water; sinuous silver-bodied fish could sometimes be seen gliding in the depths and Lucy always secretly hoped that, because this was one of those strange and magical spots where the River Fertha and the sea lough joined, she might one day spy the shadowy form of a small mermaid, combing her hair with a golden comb, moving easily with the swirl and sway of the sparkling water. And anyway, she reassured herself, looking never did anyone any harm. ‘What’ll we do after we’ve done our messages, I mean?’

Caitlin Kelly was thirteen years old and lived in the cottage nearest to the Murphys’ farm. Her father worked on Murphy land and her mother gave a hand in the farmhouse, doing the washing on a Monday and what she called ‘cleaning through’ on a Wednesday, whilst on a Friday she and Maeve baked and baked until the house roared with heat and the sweet smell of cooking. Though there were large families of children on surrounding farms they were all much further off, so Lucy and Caitlin had been friends ever since Lucy was old enough to toddle and Caitlin’s attitude, at first protective since she was the elder, had subtly changed over the years until now they were simply best friends and almost always together.

Fortunately, furthermore, Maeve, who was the most important person in Lucy’s life, approved of Caitlin.

‘She’s a clever girl, that one; she’ll go far I wouldn’t wonder,’ she would say when Caitlin’s name came up. ‘She’ll do our Lucy nothing but good. Big families are all very well, but with only the one to worry over the Kellys can give her the best and make sure she minds them.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Caitlin said thoughtfully, now. ‘Well, we’ll be busy till dinner time, that’s for sure, but when I’ve done me chores an’ fettled me room I t’ought we’d go on a picnic. We could start out by two o’clock I daresay. Will your Maeve put us up a bite o’ tea?’

‘Course she will.’ Lucy did a little jig, bouncing her bulging satchel up and down in the dusty road and doing it no good at all. But it’s time I had a new one, she told herself virtuously, seeing that a red arithmetic book was poking out of a hole in the corner which she did not remember seeing before.

‘You were twelve last January; it’s time you saw life,’ Caitlin was saying thoughtfully. ‘And seeing life isn’t much good unless it’s a bit frightening, wouldn’t you say?’

Lucy agreed with enthusiasm. She and Caitlin were great believers in magic as a whole and witches and the little folk in particular and Kerry was a great place to live for all those things. She said as much to Caitlin, dancing along beside her whilst the boys strolled on ahead.

‘Sure and wouldn’t we be after findin’ a mermaid, if we went right down to the shore? We could fish for tiddlers and we’d mebbe find a mermaid – just a little one, you understand – in our bucket by the end of the day. You can’t keep sea-folk,’ she added righteously, ‘Maeve says so. But we could put her back when we’d had a wish or two.’

‘Oh, you! There’s nothing frightening about mermaids,’ Caitlin said with some scorn. ‘No, I’d more witches in mind.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Lucy said rather more doubtfully. There were Irish witches, everyone knew that, and several doubtful characters lived in the area who might fit the bill. There was old Mrs O’Rourke, who lived in the tiny, teeny squeezed up house between two quite ordinary ones in the town, and there was Liam’s gran, who was over one hundred years old, bald as a coot, and managed to eat frogs, toads and raw rabbits which she caught with her hands, though they only had Liam’s word for that, of course. ‘Were you thinkin’ of Liam’s grandmother, Cait?’

But at this point the boys dropped back to walk with them, mostly in order to tease, and both girls had more sense than to continue the conversation. Instead, they kicked a stone along from one to the other so that the boys could rush at them and try to tackle it away, then they made up riddles, discussed their holiday tasks and, at the end of the deep little lane with its high banks and arching hazel trees, they told each other to enjoy their holidays and promised to meet up some time.

‘I dunno why we bother to say all that when we’ll see them in church every Sunday and at the Stations, wherever they’re held,’ Caitlin said as the boys shouted and jostled off down the road. ‘I wonder what Mammy’s got for my tea?’

‘I’m going to start my holiday task this very evening,’ Lucy said. ‘Why don’t you come round later, Cait, then we could do them together. We could work in my room – or in the hayloft, come to that. It’s nice up there, all quiet and dusty and the hay smells so sweet.’

Lucy had slept with Maeve until the previous January, when she had qualified for a room of her own because all her aunties were married now, even Nora.

‘I might come round,’ Caitlin said cautiously. ‘What’ll you do first? Your arithmetic or the English essay or the history one? I thought I’d do arithmetic, get it out of the way.’

‘I shan’t, I’ll leave my sums till last, in the hopes my brain’ll have grown bigger by the end of the holidays,’ Lucy said, earning a crow of laughter from Caitlin. ‘You may mock, girl, but I’m growing all the time, Maeve keeps grumbling about it, so surely my brain’s growing, too? Oh, I do hate sums and I do wish I was like my Auntie Nora who can do a sum without even a wrinkle coming on her forehead – and she doesn’t add on her fingers, either,’ she finished triumphantly.

‘Brains don’t grow so’s you’d notice, though,’ Caitlin pointed out as they turned into the even narrower lane which led directly into the farmyard. ‘And they’re slow doers, Lu, rare slow doers. You’ll do the sums by thinking about ’em and working them out in your head when you’re sitting quiet, not by waiting for your brain to expand.’

Lucy sighed deeply and broke into a trot; from here she could see the small kitchen window and Maeve, standing before it, cleaning something in the low stone sink. If she hurried she might persuade Maeve to hand out a bite of bread and cheese and a drink of milk before she began laying up for the family’s tea, because Lucy was starving hungry, she realised, almost dead with it.

‘All right, I’ll do a bit of each,’ she called as Caitlin continued past the end of the yard, heading for the Kelly cottage. ‘And I’ll see you later, shall I?’

‘Maybe,’ Caitlin called back. ‘Ask Maeve for some carry-out, will you?’

‘I said I would, didn’t I?’ Lucy shrieked. ‘Where are you now, Caitlin?’

‘Passing the cabbage patch,’ Caitlin yelled. ‘Where’s you, Lu?’

‘Halfway across the haggard,’ Lucy bellowed. This was a nightly ritual which drove the other members of both families mad, but she and Caitlin loved it. ‘I’ve got me foot on the back doorstep now – where’s you?’

‘Ducking under the lintel . . .’

The slam of the Kellys’ door told the rest of the story. Lucy threw open her own back door and hurled her satchel across the kitchen, watching it collide with the sturdy legs of the big kitchen table with a certain satisfaction. ‘No more school for two months!’ she shouted.

Maeve, scrubbing a sinkful of potatoes which she would bake presently in the ashes, said automatically, ‘Shut the door, don’t slam it, and pick up that satchel for goodness sake, we aren’t made o’ money, Lucy Murphy. What do you think your grandad would say if he saw you wearing out your good bag on the old earth floor? He’d want to know why in the name of God you have to hurl your books about, that’s what, and by the same token I’d like to know why you have to tell the whole of Kerry your whereabouts each afternoon?’

‘Shan’t have to for another eight weeks,’ Lucy said, begging the question since Maeve knew the answer as well as she herself did. ‘As for me satchel, it’s full of holiday tasks and they ought to be slung in the river, not just across the floor. It isn’t fair is it, Maeve, to give you a holiday with one hand and take it back with the other? That’s what holiday tasks are, they’re trying to make you be at school even when you aren’t.’

‘They’re to make sure you use your brain during the summer and don’t just leave it lie and rust,’ Maeve said. She put the last potato on the draining board and turned away from the sink, beginning to dry her hands on a scrap of blue and white striped towelling. ‘Well? How did today go, and aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’

Lucy struggled out of her school jacket, not without difficulty for it was shrunk from many washes, and slung it across the kitchen table, then hurled herself at Maeve and gave her a squeeze, burrowing her face into Maeve’s flowered wrap-around pinny as she did so.

‘Today went great . . . oh, I do love you, Maeve! Do you know you smell of new-baked bread? I love that smell – is there a wee bit to spare? I’m so hungry me belly’s flapping against me backbone, I could murder a slice of bread and some cheese so I could!’

‘You’ve a clever nose on you to smell fresh bread when the larder door’s shut and the loaves came out of the bake-oven first thing this morning, I’ll say that for you,’ Maeve said with a chuckle. She dropped a kiss on the top of Lucy’s head and gave her a hug. ‘But since you’re starving to death there’s a loaf cooling on the marble slab in the larder and some cheese in the meat safe. Can you help yourself while I get these potatoes on to cook?’

‘Helping meself is what I’m best at,’ Lucy said eagerly. ‘Shall I cut you a slice an’ all, alanna? Can I have some milk, too?’

‘It’s a surprise to me you can still do up your school jacket,’ Maeve said. ‘Go on, then, there’s a jug of milk in the safe, you won’t want to go trudging over to the dairy when you’re worn out from hollerin’ at young Caitlin and sweating over your school books. And close the safe door properly,’ she added as Lucy danced across to the larder, emerging presently with a large hunk of bread and cheese and a mug of creamy milk.

Maeve was kneeling in front of the oven, pushing her clean potatoes down its hot black throat. ‘And now, young woman, where’s your report?’

The air immediately became electric. Lucy had no idea what Miss Carruthers had said about her this year, but it was bound to be something horrible, or at least critical. Miss Carruthers had sharp eyes, a sharp voice and an extremely sharp tongue – her pen would no doubt resemble the rest of her. But it would not do to say so; Lucy affected extreme nonchalance.

‘Oh, that. It’s in the bottom of me satchel, under the red arithmetic book. And I haven’t opened the envelope, either. Want it now?’

‘Yes, I think so. Get it out of the way before Grandad comes in, shall we? He’ll remember it later and probably read it, but we don’t want to spoil his tea!’

Maeve was smiling as she spoke and Lucy stooped and picked up her satchel, rummaged her way through the books and produced the long white envelope. If Miss Carruthers has given me a hard time I’ll put a live mouse in her desk and a dead one in her outdoor shoes next year, Lucy vowed grimly. Or she can have the plague of frogs next spring; take your choice, Miss C.

Maeve slit the envelope open and pulled out the report form. She sat in a chair and began to read, one finger following the line across. ‘Hmm . . . hmm . . . hmm . . .’ She looked up at Lucy, anxiously hovering, still trying to pretend indifference but not making such a good job of it now the moment had come. ‘Well, she’s given you top marks for English, both language and literature, anyway. Which isn’t surprising, considering you came top of the class in the English exam.’