white-bird-iolaire

two

DAY had ended in the Lane. But it was not yet night. Night didn’t come till the lamp in the causeway was lit. The hooter from the tweed mill had sounded twenty minutes ago; like the belated echo of its dying wail, the mill workers began to clatter up the Lane. This was one of the regular periods in the Lane’s existence when Poll, and Battleaxe, and even the Duchess herself, were dispossessed. They ruled their contemporaries, old and bound to the Lane like themselves; they awed the children whose youngness bound them to the precincts of the Lane; but the workers, coming through the causeway in little groups, were impervious to the Duchess’s dictates. The Lane was their bed, their supper, their tea and bread and dripping in the morning. Their lives began beyond it. In the Rialto with Pearl White on Monday nights, with the Charleston at the Lido on Tuesday nights, nearer home with a threepenny poke of chips, and It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More scratched out for nothing at Joe’s chip shop round the corner. Thursdays were zero nights in their lives. The one night that the Lane could hold them, and even then on unflattering terms: the lack of the price to get beyond it.

The Duchess and her coterie diminished on Thursday night, leaning against the causeway with silent disapproval while the Lane’s up-and-coming race held the cobbles and, even more galling, held them in an idiom alien to her Grace; flaunting overmuch of that tin jewellery from Woolworth’s, that new store, Nothing Over Sixpence, that had just opened in High Street; drunk with the novelty and prodigality of jewellery so cheap; hands on their hips; shimmying their bodies, like new-fangled whores, for the old-fangled ones like Mysie Walsh and Liza MacVean still just kicked their legs and showed their garters; and the daft tunes they shimmied in rhythm with:

They had no feeling of protocol either. Didn’t care tuppence which lavatory they used. When it had been the Duchess’s rule for years that Right Laners used the lavatory by the causeway, and Left Laners used the one up beside the ragstore. They simply used the lavatory nearest their moment of need. And the Duchess strongly suspected that, as in one other ancient time of need, they also went in two by two.

Fortunately the Duchess’s peace of mind was disturbed only on Thursdays in particular, and for this short period of time which was neither night nor day but a transition between. Up the causeway they clattered, this little group of Laners, unknown to either Poll, or Battleaxe, or the Duchess.

‘That’s wee Lil’s Betsy. She’s shot up some in this past year.’

But they didn’t know Betsy. Not now. She had outgrown them. She wasn’t old enough to be behind with her rent. She wasn’t young enough to have the School Board Man searching her out. And so she eluded them.

‘You’ve got home again, young Betsy?’

‘Aye.’

‘They’re saying you’re all being put on half-time at the mill. Is that right?’

‘You tell me!’

‘Well!’ The Duchess felt weary. ‘Did you ever hear the like of that for cheek?’

‘It’s this picture-going!’ Poll reflected. ‘It’s making them all like that. They’d bite the hand that feeds them.’

‘I’ve never put foot in a picture palace in my life,’ Battleaxe concluded. ‘And I’ve no intention of starting now.’

Hugh, the lamp-lighter, set night on its course with one flick from his long pole, and Melodeon Mike set the final seal on it, the clop of his wooden leg distorting the sound of all other passing footsteps. The women round the causeway relaxed. They had come into their own again.

‘It’s The Home Fire’s Burning and The Long Long Trail Awinding for them tonight, Cocks!’ Mike shouted his greeting, knowing that the Duchess had no objection to the rest of the world being cheated as long as she was ‘in the know’.

‘I’ll just squeeze them out of the old box, give my gammy leg a jerk behind me. And before you can spit, the coppers will be landing on my bonnet. “Poor Bugger” the folk will be thinking as they eye my leg. “Poor Sod that’s what the war did.” Not, mind you, that I ever blamed the war for the loss of my leg. I wouldn’t have the lie of it on my soul. But if I were to tell them the truth now, Poll. If I were to turn right round and say I lost my leg in a brawl at Aikey Fair. What do you think they’d say? They’d say, “Drunken Brute. Serves him right.” That’s what they’d say. Folk’s minds work queer. Dead queer. If they think I lost it in the war, they’re glad because I lost it in a good cause. Or sorry because I lost it in a bad one. All according to how they feel about war. Either way they fling the coppers. What they don’t see is that the loss of your leg is the loss of your leg. And it doesn’t matter a damn how you lose it. It’s still a loss to you.’

‘And a gain too, though, Mike,’ Poll pointed out, but without rancour. ‘I bet you make more out of that gammy leg of yours and that squeeze box than Dodsie Jenner makes out of his lavender bags. And him went through the Dardanelles and all.’

‘I’ll grant you that,’ Mike agreed, the love of an argument growing big within him. ‘That’s granted. But what has Dodsie Jenner got to show for being through the Dardanelles? Damn all, Poll. If he’d lost an arm now. Or even a coupla fingers itself, his lavender bags would go like nobody’s business.’

‘But Dodsie Jenner lost his mind,’ Poll protested. ‘Or at least what mind he did have. I knew him years before the war, he never did have much in his top storey. But what he had he lost after the Dardanelles.’

‘But a mind’s a different matter altogether, Poll,’ Mike urged. ‘Nobody knows if you got much of a mind in the first place. So how to hell can they tell when you’ve lost it? Outsiders I mean. Now I know a cove. He’s brother to Bert Wylie’s wife. He went through the lot. Got half his face blown off. He sells oranges down in the Green.’

‘Oh, I know him!’ Battleaxe broke in. ‘He’s called Pippins for a by-name.’

‘The same. Pippins. That’s him. Well . . .’

‘God knows the poor soul can’t help only having half a face, but I can never bring myself to buy his oranges,’ Battleaxe went on. ‘His face puts me off. I stick to Ned Wheeler when it comes to buying an orange, and of course that’s just at the New Year.’

‘Maybe that then.’ Mike was impatient of interruptions. ‘Now, where was I? Oh aye! This cove told me himself one night in The Hole In The Wall . . .’

‘I thought Pippins was Pussyfoot,’ Poll protested. ‘He was a great one for the Salvation Army for a while.’

‘He’s not that now then,’ Mike was patient. ‘Though I did hear tell that it was the Army that helped to set him up in the Green. But when I saw him, he was in The Hole In The Wall. God, Poll, did you ever see a man with his nose shot away down a pint? You don’t want to either. But, as I was saying, he told me himself that he makes more money now than he did when he had got all his face. It’s proof folk want for their charity, Poll. Something they can see. No. I’ll say till my dying day that Dodsie Jenner would have been better off if he’d lost a hand. My luck was just in, I lost my leg in 1916. If I’d lost it in a brawl at Aikey Fair in 1902, I’d have been a dead duck. That’s what I mean by “luck”, Poll.’

Luck. It was the invincible argument. Even the Duchess was wordless against it. Mike trailed himself away from the safety and comprehension of his own kind, out into the High Street. Only the sound of his melodeon echoed back to them:

‘Where the nightingales are singing.’ Poll sang in solitary accompaniment.

‘There was a lot that didn’t come back,’ Battleaxe ventured.

‘And them that did come back, came back worse than they went off,’ the Duchess added. Even the Duchess, who knew the truth, unconsciously accepted the lie of Mike Melodeon’s wooden leg.

Up the Lane at 285 Janie, too, contemplated the results of her ‘luck’.

‘Mysie Walsh must be doing all right to give you two bob all in a once,’ her Mother said, through the hairpins in her teeth. ‘Did you see my side combs anywhere, Janie? Was Mysie Walsh getting ready to go out, did you notice?’

‘I don’t know.’ Janie was absorbed in clearing the table to find room for her book. ‘She hadn’t got her curlers in. She was just lying on top of her bed. She looked fed up. There’s a new word for meadow, Mam. A Red Indian word. Muskoday. On the muskoday. The meadow. Muskoday. Musk-o-day. It’s in this book. It sounds right fine, doesn’t it?’

‘Was that what you bought with your two bob?’ Liza sounded amused.

‘And your tobacco!’ Janie protested against this forgetfulness. ‘You are glad about the tobacco, aren’t you, Mam?’

‘Yes, of course I am. Get a lace out of one of my other shoes, Janie, this damned lace has snapped!’

‘You’d hardly any tobacco left, had you, Mam?’

‘No, hardly any. Not out of that shoe, Janie! Use your eyes, that’s a brown one.’

‘Your black shoe must be under the bed then. If you’d had one wish, it would have been for tobacco, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes, Janie.’ Liza’s voice came slow and quiet and clear. ‘I’m glad you bought tobacco. I had hardly any left. And if I’d had one wish, it would have been for tobacco. Now. Have you found my shoe?’

The surprise of Mysie Walsh’s two bob was over. Dimly Janie realised that her Mother’s gladness at getting, just didn’t equal her own gladness in giving.

‘Is this the right shoe, Mam?’

‘That’s it. That’s the one.’ Liza sat absorbed unlacing it. Janie, watching her down-bent head, thought, It’s strange, I can hug Mysie Walsh. And smell her hair and I can’t do that to my own Mam. Though she’s much bonnier than Mysie Walsh. If Janie had been suddenly stricken with blindness she would have had a perpetual picture of her Mother in her memory. Not a photograph. Her Mother had so many faces. But a hundred little images. Each of which was some part of her Mother. And her Mother some part of each. The way her red hair glistened and crept up into little curls when it rained. Her long legs sprawled across the fender. Her tall, swift stride. And her eyes that looked as if they were smiling when the rest of her face was in a rage.

‘I’ll maybe get diphtheria like Gertie did,’ Janie thought, watching her, ‘and have to go away in the ambulance. Maybe my Mam will hug me like Mysie Walsh does, then.’

‘The Salacs are here, Janie,’ Gertie shouted from the lobby below. ‘There’s going to be testimony and saving. Hurry up, or you’ll miss it all.’

‘Well.’ Liza’s eyes were smiling. ‘That’s something, Janie. Aren’t you going?’

‘I was going.’ Janie was undecided. ‘But there’s a penny for the gas now. And I’ve got my book. The only thing is the Salacs only come on Saturdays. If I don’t go tonight, I’ll miss it all for a week.’

‘And you want both things at once, Janie?’ Liza was quizzical. ‘Well. Nothing like it if you can get it. I’m away now. If you’re in your bed before I get back, see and leave the sneck off the door.’ Liza, remembering something, popped her head round the door again: ‘Take my tip, Janie. If you go to the Salacs tonight, you’ll still have your book left for tomorrow. That way of it, you’ll get both things. But not at once, that’s what makes it tough. Don’t forget. Leave the sneck off the door for me.’

Five minutes later Janie and Gertie were pushing their way through the crowd gathered round the street lamp.

‘You’ve made us late,’ Gertie grumbled. ‘And you’ve got an awful smell.’

‘I know.’ Janie was unoffended. ‘It’s cats. I’d to crawl under our bed. And Mysie Walsh’s cat always comes in and does it under our bed. O look, Gertie, Annie Frigg’s got a good shot in. I bet you anything she’ll cry tonight, and give testimony, and kiss the Salacs. I love it when she does that. She’s so funny.’

The crowd gathered round the Salvation Army was unchanging. The old Laners, who preferred the light of the lamp and the company to the darkness and loneliness of their rooms. The deformed Laners. White, fanatical, and selfish, not only laying claim to the best position round the lamp, but forcing a prior claim on God Himself, whining their Halleluiahs right up to the top of the lamp, where they thought the Mercy Seat must lie. And of course always the children of the Lane who loved a noise anyhow. Later the drunks, reluctant to go home, would join the group. And if testimony wasn’t over by the time they arrived, their testimony would be the most fervent of the lot. Beyond the group, leaning against the causeway, were the objective spectators, the Duchess, Poll, and Battleaxe. Without need of salvation in their own opinions, they nevertheless enjoyed the antics of their neighbours who were so very obviously in need of it.

Despite themselves, the objective spectators hummed the chorus. It was familiar. Like saying God bless you. Or God curse you. Something you had always said.

But Janie knew that she would always remember the sudden green and silver image the words had brought to the Lane at dusk. Gertie, unmoved by words and images, was becoming irritable.

‘I thought they were going to be saving us tonight. It’s a damned shame if they don’t. So it is.’

‘Wheesht,’ admonished Chae Tastard, normally one of the best cursers in the Lane, but momentarily under the spell of the Salvationists. ‘It’s terrible the language that’s on you two bairns. And the napkins hardly off your arses yet.’

And even more terrible the crowd’s sudden and complete desertion of the Salvationists. It was Betsy’s young Alan, who started the whisper:

‘Mysie Walsh’s done herself in. Hanged herself. The Bobbies are up at 284 now.’

‘Making a right barney about her being cut down before they got the chance to do it themselves,’ Betsy added to the information.

‘Who cut her down, Son?’ Battleaxe demanded like a furious general who had been overlooked, but still had a right to know. ‘Who was it that cut her down?’

‘Chae did. Chae Tastard, with his sharp cobbler’s knife.’

‘Liars!’ Janie screamed in a small panic. ‘She isn’t dead. I took cheese to her.’

‘Yeah?’ Betsy’s young Alan shot his tongue out at Janie and passed on, anxious to spread all the news to the more important grown-ups. ‘And do you know what? A bit of cheese was stuck in her mouth when they took the rope off.’

Ted Howe, only drunkenly comprehending the news, forced his way through the crowd. ‘Take my boots off when I die. When I die.’ And beneath the lamp the Salvationists sang for their own edification:

For the crowd had deserted them and were following Ted towards the door of Mysie Walsh who was.

‘Them,’ Poll was saying, watching the police-guarded door morosely. ‘Them that takes their own lives, don’t get to rest in consecrated ground. It’s yon bit of common ground behind the gaswork for them.’

‘I saw this coming,’ Battleaxe added, with the pride of a prophet whose vision has come true. ‘ “Mark my words,” I said to my man just the night before last, “Mysie Walsh will come to a bad end. She’ll never die in her bed.” ’

‘Not with the life she led,’ the Duchess agreed. ‘Running around with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Enough to drive you mad, through time. And that time she was in hospital with the poomonia. I know what she had. And it wasn’t poomonia either. I cut my wisdom teeth too early to be mistaken.’

The next of kin pushed her way through the crowd. Battleaxe, furious at her prerogative in getting past the Bobby unchallenged, spat out her commentary:

‘See her? No show without Punch. Last time she saw Mysie Walsh she was pulling the hair out of her. Said she wouldn’t spit in Mysie Walsh’s direction because she owed her ten bob.’

A sense of fear took hold of Chae Tastard’s small wife. Fear of what lay beyond the police-guarded door, fear of Battleaxe’s anger, fear of everything. ‘Death pays all debts,’ she said in a quiet and already defeated attempt to escape.

The Duchess began to laugh harshly. ‘That way of it, Lil, the sooner we’re all in our wee, black boxes the better.’

The next of kin was coming out. ‘Is she dead?’ shouted Battleaxe, waving aside personal differences out of a zeal for truth.

‘Stone dead.’ The next of kin was glad of a truce which lent her an attentive ear. ‘As dead as a door nail. You wouldn’t know her. You wouldn’t know a bit of her. Her face black. Her tongue swollen twice the size of your fist. And a lump of cheese fit to choke her on its own stuck in her gullet.’

‘I took the cheese to her,’ Janie shouted from amongst the women’s shawls. ‘But I didn’t know. Honest to God I didn’t.’

The shawls wheeled round in attack.

‘You shouldn’t know either,’ Battleaxe shouted, jealously eyeing the small girl who had last seen the corpse alive. ‘You’re too young to give evidence, anyhow.’

‘You should have been in your bed long ago,’ the Duchess added. ‘If you were mine! But, thank God you’re no’ mine. Standing there all eyes and ears. Beat it now. Before I take the lights from you!’

The policeman saved Janie from sudden extinction. ‘The show’s over for tonight,’ he said, with just the amount of humour needed for the crowd’s mood. ‘You lot got no homes to go to?’

‘Only just,’ cried Battleaxe, speaking for them all. ‘The rent’s behind.’

The crowd had gone, taking with them the cover which they had flung over the tenement. Mysie Walsh’s window, covered with a blanket, lay exposed to Janie and Gertie. Gertie who lived two doors away flaunted her own safety: ‘I’d just hate to be you, Janie, having to pass Mysie Walsh’s door tonight. Maybe she’ll jump out on you.’

‘She can’t. She’s dead.’ Janie used reason to fight fancy, but didn’t succeed. ‘Come on up with me, Gertie. Just till my Mam comes home.’

‘I can’t, I’ve got to go home or else I’ll get a belting. But she can’t touch you, Janie,’ and as if regretting her reassurances, Gertie shouted over her shoulder as she disappeared: ‘I wouldn’t be you for anything. Janie. She might just jump out on you.’

All black and her tongue purple, Janie thought, as the wooden stairs creaked beneath her feet. Ready to jump out on me when I reach second landing. For death, and this was Janie’s first, near experience of it, could suddenly translate the loved and the living into the ghostly and the frightening. The scream poised itself in Janie’s throat, ready for its flight through the tenement, the moment Mysie Walsh jumped out of death, through the door. And not really ready when the moment came. Only the figure who leapt from beside her door, heard the cry that was a substitute for the scream.

‘Shut your mouth, you little bastard. Do you want the whole house woken up?’

The dead don’t speak so. The livingness of the words calmed Janie into surveying the speaker. It was a man. Her Mother suddenly appeared from behind him, annoyance in her voice. ‘Leave the bairn alone.’

‘Yours?’ the man asked.

‘Aye. My first mistake. And my last one.’

The man jingled coppers in his pocket. ‘Like to go and get yourself some chips, hen?’

‘I can’t. Chip shop’s shut,’ Janie said, contemplating him gratefully, since, whoever he was, he just wasn’t Mysie Walsh back from the dead.

‘Find out the time for us, then.’

‘It’s gone eleven. Gertie and me heard the clock not long since.’

‘Scram then.’ The man was growing angry. ‘Make yourself scarce for God’s sake.’

‘She’s my bairn,’ Liza said resentfully, coming towards Janie. ‘Look, luv, run into Mysie Walsh’s for some coppers for the gas. Here’s sixpence. Move over, you. Till the bairn gets past.’

‘I can’t,’ Janie stood impassively. ‘Mysie Walsh’s dead.’

‘Don’t be daft. Don’t act it,’ Liza said harshly in the darkness. ‘I spoke to Mysie Walsh when I went out.’

‘She’s dead since.’ Janie stood small and impregnable in the safety of truth. ‘She hanged herself. The Bobbies were here and all. Chae Tastard cut her down with his big knife.’

Liza stared at Mysie Walsh’s door, and backed away from it, no longer aware of the man: ‘Come on, Janie. It’s high time you and me were in our bed. Mind your feet on the first step. It won’t be there much longer.’

‘What about me?’ The man’s voice came plaintively behind them.

‘You can keep,’ Liza called down, as if she had forgotten him.

‘What about my dough? I paid you, didn’t I?’

‘And I should have got you between the eyes with your lousy dough.’ There was anger in Liza’s voice. But Janie sensed that this anger wasn’t directed at her. It was as if herself and her Mother were in league, against the man. ‘Mind your feet now, bairn,’ her Mother said. Warmly, intimately. The two of them taking care of each other on the stairs.

‘You damned two-timer. You prick-tormentor.’ The man’s voice came furiously from below. ‘I paid you, didn’t I?’

‘And here’s your money.’ The sudden clatter of coppers in the darkness, the anger in Liza’s voice, frightened the man. He mumbled himself down, and out of hearing.

‘You stay here, Mam,’ Janie cried, when he had gone. ‘Just wait for me here, and I’ll look for the money you threw. It’s on the landing somewhere.’

Liza waited without protest. Throwing the money had been a sincere gesture, but a reckless one. ‘There was two bob. A two-bob bit, and sixpence of coppers,’ she shouted to Janie. ‘Can you see, or will I light the lobby gas?’

‘I’ve found the two-bob bit,’ Janie answered. ‘Maybe the pennies have rolled under Mysie Walsh’s door!’

But Mysie Walsh was dead. At the other side of the door. Her face all black and her tongue all purple. Janie had forgotten. Now she remembered, and ran upstairs without the pennies, to where her Mother waited.