Polly's Angel (7 page)

Mr Merrick gave this his consideration, which meant that he seized the end of his long, fleshy nose between finger and thumb and then rubbed them up and down for a moment, whilst pursing his lips, bringing his bushy white eyebrows together in a frown and half closing his eyes. Tad, repressing an urge to snigger, continued to look earnestly at him across the counter and was rewarded by Mr Merrick slowly nodding his balding head.

‘You could be right so, young feller-me-lad. But they'll manage, because they've sons earning good money, wouldn't you say? Brogan in the United States, Niall in Australia and young whatsisname in the merchant fleet . . .'

Tad knew that Mr Merrick was right; sons always sent money home – daughters too, if you had any. That was why most young people emigrated to America or went over the water to work; they could earn good money and send a fair amount home. But he also knew that the money would go on arriving whether the recipient lived in Dublin or England, so what difference would that make to whether the O'Bradys came home or stayed away?

‘And the t'ing is, young Tad,' Mr Merrick continued, ‘who is there in Dublin for them now? The young O'Bradys aren't here any more, they're either overseas or in Liverpool, and jobs are easier to find over the water, so they say.'

Tad could not reply ‘They've got me,' because of course he was not family, but he knew he was dear to Polly – wouldn't that count? He sighed and held out his hand for his letter.

‘Oh well, 'twas a nice t'ought, Mr Merrick,' he said, carefully folding the four pages and jamming them back into his pocket. He knew he sounded down, and tried to grin up at the older man. ‘Mebbe they'll come back for a visit, eh?'

‘Or mebbe you'll go over the water yourself one of these days,' Mr Merrick said kindly. ‘You're a likely lad, you never know when a chance might come. So don't forget, now, to be after giving me best wishes to the O'Bradys when you write.'

‘I will so,' Tad said stoutly. ‘And, Mr Merrick, if you've ever a job goin', a job a feller like meself could do, I'd be mortal grateful . . .'

‘We'll need an extra delivery boy come Christmas,' Mr Merrick said, and Tad's heart gave a joyful bound. It just went to show, one moment bad news floors you, and the next moment some amazing good news lifts you six feet above the ground. ‘If you want to pop back here in a couple o' weeks mebbe we'll manage something. Got a bicycle?'

Tad shook his head, his face falling. Some chance of him having a bicycle – he couldn't even afford a bell!

But Mr Merrick was tutting to himself and frowning. ‘No, no, of course not. 'Tis the regular boys who ride the bicycles, you'd have to manage on foot or by tram. Anyway, you call back here around the 15th. I'll not have forgotten.'

So Tad left the shop with his purchases and a light step; it looked as though things were looking up for him, even if Polly and the other O'Bradys would not be on their way home soon!

Halfway back to Gardiner's Lane, however, Tad remembered that if he was going to write to Polly he really should go round to Swift's Alley first and see what news and gossip he could pick up. On the grounds that it made his letters more interesting – and God knew, he found it hard to fill half a page, let alone four – he usually went round to Polly's old home and asked the neighbours if they had any snippets of news for the O'Bradys. Not only did it add interest to his letters, but he hoped that it would keep Swift's Alley, and Dublin, alive in Polly's mind, so that she really would come back here when she was able.

He turned his steps towards Polly's old home and very soon was climbing the first long flight of stairs. Or at least he climbed as far as the first landing, where he stopped because someone was coming down. He glanced up . . . and stayed where he was, with his mouth open and his eyes rounding.

A girl of about his own age was coming down the stairs towards him. She was wearing a blue and white checked dress, white cotton socks and light brown strap shoes, and as she got closer he saw that she had a pale oval face and a pair of very large, light blue eyes. But what really caught his attention was her hair. It was long, thick and shining, and it was the colour of – of moonlight, Tad thought reverently. It must have been recently brushed for it stood out round her head like a halo and indeed, for a moment as he looked up at her, he had a very odd sensation, because it was at this precise spot, long ago, that Polly had seen her guardian angel for the first time.

Tad had been with her though he had not seen the angel, had not believed Polly at first. But Mrs O'Brady had accepted without the flicker of an eyelid that Polly's guardian angel was a fact, and despite loudly pooh-poohing the whole idea of an angel who had nothing better to do than keep an eye on young Polly, Tad had, insensibly, begun to believe that the angel was there all right. He couldn't see it – only Polly said it was a girl, not an it – because chisellers didn't go in much for seeing angels, but Polly was the most honest person he knew, and she saw her angel all the time, so the angel had to exist.

And standing there, pressed back against the chipped and dirty tenement wall, looking up at the vision which seemed almost to float down the stairs, Tad really thought, just for a second, that this was Polly's angel, letting him see her at last so that he wouldn't tease Polly about it any more. Only then the girl caught sight of him and grinned, showing a chipped tooth, and then she swung the basket she was carrying and it caught in the banisters and she said a word – but quietly – which Tad knew full well that no angel would ever allow to pass its lips, and he grinned back, greatly relieved. He didn't mind Polly seeing angels if she was set on it, but he didn't want any truck with the supernatural himself, be it angelic or devilish. Life was quite tough enough without adding ghoulies and ghosties to the mixture.

But the girl, coming level with him, had stopped. ‘Sure an' you don't live around here, or I'd know it,' she stated. ‘I've been livin' here ten whole days and I know everyone in the block by sight, just about. What are you doin' here, then? Me family's on the next floor up an' you aren't after seein' me brother Mick, 'cos I know all his pals, so I do. And you're too young to be visitin' the poor girls on the top floor.'

‘I was goin' up to see Felicity,' Tad said with dignity. He was not quite sure why she thought him too young to visit the poor girls, since he and Felicity were great pals, so they were, and often had great crack together. Indeed, Felicity was his main source of tenement gossip, for she had lived in this particular block for five years now and knew everyone and was, furthermore, well-liked. Tad knew, vaguely, that the poor girls were thought to be no better than they should be, but he was not at all sure just what this entailed. He only knew that Felicity was sweet and generous, that she sometimes gave him tuppence to run her messages and take her baby boy out for a couple of hours, and that Mrs O'Brady, Polly's mammy, had said that the girls were good girls, or if they weren't good girls then it was not their fault but the fault of their one-time rich employers. So now Tad stuck to his guns, even though the girl grinned more broadly than ever. ‘She's a friend of mine, so she is,' Tad said reprovingly. ‘And she knows all what's goin' on around here, you bet your life she does! So when I write a letter to me pal Polly, who used to live in the rooms you live in now, I come round here first to find out if there's any news the poor girls t'ink would interest the O'Bradys.'

‘I've heard about Polly,' the pale-haired girl said. ‘She sounds a great gun, so she does. I wish she was still here. There's no one my age livin' in this block. What's your name, eh?'

‘I'm Tad Donoghue,' Tad said readily. ‘I'm fourteen, I've left school. Who's you?'

‘Angela Machin. Wish I were fourteen, but I shall be, come next summer,' the blonde girl said. ‘Where d'you live?'

‘Gardiner's Lane,' Tad said. ‘I've got a tree growin' out of me bedroom chimney, so I have, an' – an' a huge brown an' yellow fungus on the wall above me bed. It smells somethin' tarble at this time o' year,' he added with pride.

‘Truly? Cut your t'roat an' hope to die?' Angela asked. ‘Can I come an' see it for meself?'

‘'Course, when I've been up an' talked to Felicity,' Tad said. ‘Do you only have the one brother? No sisters?'

‘That's right,' Angela said. ‘I'll come up wit' you; I like the poor girls.'

She fell into step beside him and the two of them climbed the stairs together, passed the door behind which the O'Bradys had once lived, and up the next flight to the attic rooms rented by the poor girls. Tad kept giving quick little sideways looks at his companion. What a pretty creature she was! He just hoped that some of the fellers who'd been to school with him would see him with this girl, who was more like a film star than anyone else he had ever met. He decided, as they climbed the stairs side by side, that he would take her home and show her the tree growing in the crooked little fireplace in his bedroom, and the huge, evil-smelling fungus, and that he would tell her all about his daddy's defection and his mammy's hard work and his large family of younger brothers and sisters. If, after that, she decided that she no longer wanted to be pals, that was that. But if she decided he was worthy of being a friend . . . Tad decided that when he next had some money he would take Angela Machin to the flicks, or to some other place of entertainment. She would be his as Polly had once been his – but was, he supposed sadly, his no longer. She was too far away, she would never come back to Dublin . . . And what was more, a description of Angela could easily fill up half a page of anyone's letter.

Thoroughly pleased with himself, Tad reached the attic landing, beat a tattoo on the door with one fist, and flung it open. Felicity was stirring something in a big black cauldron over a rather small and smoky fire.

‘Hello, Tad,' Felicity said, looking round. Her smile included Angela. ‘So you've met up wit' our Angel, have you? Isn't she a picture, then?'

Tad wanted to make some manly, disclaiming remark, but his traitorous mouth had its own ideas. ‘Aye, she's as pretty as Polly,' he said rather thickly. ‘Prettier.'

To the old Tad, this would have been almost blasphemy since he had made no secret of the fact that he thought Polly the prettiest girl in the whole of Dublin, if not the world, but Felicity just raised an eyebrow and then turned back to her pot-stirring. ‘She's pretty in a different way, so she is,' she corrected in her calm, country voice. ‘If you go to the crock on the sideboard, young feller, you'll find some oatcakes. Help yourselves. Now, Tad,' she went on as the two children settled themselves on the wooden table, swinging their legs and munching oatcakes, ‘what can I do for you?'

By the time Tad and Angela parted company, Tad knew as much about Angela as she did about him, which was a good deal. Her elder brother, Mick, was a young man of twenty and worked in a shoe shop. He was courting, Angie said – she told Tad to call her Angie since everyone else did – and very much disliked being parted from his young lady, who was still in Limerick, but who intended to come to Dublin just as soon as she could. The Machins had come over from Limerick because Mr Machin had been offered the job of head sales assistant in the men's department of Switzers on Grafton Street. Mick, who had been working as a clerk in a solicitor's office, had been glad to leave and take his chance of a job in the capital city, for the wages in Limerick had been poor and the hours long, and sure enough he had been taken on by the shoe shop within a couple of days of arriving here. Mrs Machin, it seemed, was a dab hand with her needle and at home in Limerick had worked as a dressmaker, but her sight was failing, so they had seized the chance of a better paid job in order that they could manage on one less salary.

‘I was a lovely surprise to me mammy an' daddy so I was,' Angela told him complacently as they sauntered towards Gardiner's Lane. ‘Mammy had given up all hopes of another baby before I was born, so I were a lovely surprise and now they've got me, they want to see I'm brought up right. Which is why they're sendin' me to the convent school, though I dare say there's a lot of t'ings they'd rather do wit' the fee money.'

‘I went to the national school; you don't have to pay there,' Tad said. ‘Now me brothers go there. Ain't all schools the same, then?'

But he knew they weren't, not really. Polly had gone to private school, though she had grumbled about her eckers and the nuns just as much as Tad's sisters, who went to the free school, had done. But Angela was shrugging.

‘I don't think it matters. I'm not clever, like some, but I keep me end up. I get good enough marks. And Mammy and Daddy think I'll get a good job when I leave, because I've been to private school.'

Tad nodded gloomily. He remembered Polly saying something of the sort now that he thought back. ‘Where's your school, then, Angie? Miles away?'

‘Well, I usually take a tram,' Angela said vaguely. ‘I suppose I could walk, but it 'ud take me a while. I'm glad you came callin', Tad. I don't know hardly anyone in Dublin yet . . . now I know you!'

‘That's the idea. We'll be pals, shall we?' Tad asked eagerly. ‘There's all sorts to do in Dublin when there's two of you. Does your mammy give you money for the tuppenny rush at the cinema? I go to the Tiv, on Francis Street; I do love Sat'day flickers.'

‘I do too,' Angela said. ‘Me mammy used to give me a Peggy's leg or an ounce of rainbow caramels of a Sat'day, so's I don't fade away before me dinner, and I used to see the show and then go round to me cousin Kitty's, an' play Piggy Bed or Shop or skippin' until it were time for tea. But here . . . well, I don't know folk yet.'