The Corner House (13 page)

Big Mike Nolan swivelled slowly in his chair. ‘Shut up,’ he bellowed. He didn’t care how Joseph McManus acquired the money. As long as he got his baccy and his pint, Nolan was not interested in the finer details.

Theresa stood near the door. Her heart was jumping crazily in her chest. She could not tell Dad. There had been trouble enough over Ruth’s recent shotgun wedding. She turned away and trudged wearily up the stairs.

‘Mrs Nolan?’

She opened her eyes.

‘Nice cup of tea?’

The nurse had a pleasant, round face, dark eyes and a starched white cap. Theresa’s eyelids, still heavy with sleep, returned to the closed position.

The alley was darkening in the drizzly April dusk. She could hear them breathing, sniggering as they jumped out of a backyard. Her coat was ripped away, then her blouse, her skirt, her undergarments. When her arms were pinned down by two of them, the third tore his way into her. He was rough, but very quick.

The second attacker took longer. Beery breath filled her nostrils as the beast grunted its way towards some kind of seizure. The ogre shuddered, cried out, bit her chest. She knew him. By the time the third monster had performed his vile act, the first deemed himself fit for a repeat performance. Whatever he was doing did not work. The others mocked
him. Her eyes adjusted to the dying light and she recognized the criminals.

Carelessly, they spoke to one another, tossed names about. Theresa took those names and scorched them into the forefront of her brain. She would never forget, would never forgive. These filthy articles were privileged, supposedly educated creatures, were from the better end of town. Theresa knew their fathers, their families, their businesses. These articles had sprung from the loins of successful men.

‘What a gem,’ breathed Theresa Nolan.

‘Just a sip.’ The nurse supported her, guided the cup to her lips. ‘Who’s a gem?’ she asked.

The patient flopped back into the pillows. ‘A rough diamond,’ she mumbled. ‘Set in fools’ gold.’ In her delirium, she referred to Roy Chorlton, son of the master jeweller.

She lost count after a while. For at least half an hour, she was left on rain-slicked cobbles while they drank and smoked. Matches and lighters illuminated their faces. They were hideous. She was used and abused repeatedly until the trio lost interest. Laughing and joking, the three revellers staggered away towards their next adventure.

She sat up, leaned herself against a wall, vomited, removed an object from between her thighs. She stared through the gloom at the beer bottle. This was almost more humiliating than the actual rapes had been. Their final act had been to use her as a dustbin, a rubbish heap for their discarded debris.

‘Mrs Nolan?’

‘Where is my daughter?’

The nurse smiled reassuringly, carried on administering tea. ‘She’s tucked up in bed on the children’s ward.’

Theresa had to stay alive. There were things she had to do, people to be dealt with. Had she waited too long? she wondered. Jessica had come first. Theresa had always wanted Jess to be older before … before what? Was she going to kill those men – was that to be the plan? Was blackmail not enough? ‘What happened?’ she managed to ask the nurse. And the leaving of Jessica was going to be so difficult. ‘What happened?’ she whispered again.

‘Never mind that now. Just get some rest.’

Rest? There was none. She stood on the doorstep of her home, picked up belongings that had been tossed through an upper window. Ruth hadn’t said anything. Ruth never said much. But Big Mike Nolan had lived up to his reputation, had unleashed his famous Irish temper. ‘Get out of my house! You’re no better than any other stinking English whore!’

Theresa gathered her few possessions and moved into number 27. Mrs Eva Harris, midwife and mentor to the troubled, was the only person who knew the full story. Dad had refused to listen, would never have believed it.

Mrs Harris’s husband knew somebody who knew somebody else. The somebody else found the Emblem Street house and a job in a small newspaper shop. As the pregnancy progressed, Theresa found herself tired to the point of collapse. Eva had come to the fore yet again, had demanded money from the jeweller and his friends. Fearful for his reputation, the coward coughed up, as did his fellow business associates. And since then, Eva Harris had continued to extract money from the rapists’ families.

The blue-eyed doctor returned, listened to her heart, nodded, walked away. A woman across the room screamed for a bedpan. Theresa watched the
ward’s activities, refused soup, drifted in and out of sleep. She had not looked after herself. There was money in a tin under a bedroom floorboard, but she had never used much of it. The money was for Jessica, because Jessica was the blameless child of rape.

Which one was the father? Was it the jeweller, the tanner or the furniture dealer? Which one of those heroes had planted Jess inside Theresa’s body? Strange how those men of substance feared a woman as tiny as Eva Harris. They paid up each time, quickly and almost noiselessly. Why?

Her eyes fixed themselves on a grimy window pane. There had been a fourth man. He had crossed the bottom of the alley – she remembered seeing him outlined against the sky. For a few seconds, he had seemed riveted to the spot. Yes, there had been a witness, a good man who had arrived far too late to intervene. Bernard Walsh had smelled of fish. He had offered comfort, had wept silently into Theresa’s hair. Later, the same man had ridden shotgun on Eva’s ‘blackmail’ visits.

Oh, Jessica. Time was running out for Theresa Nolan. Rheumatic fever had left her weak and available to any passing germ. Diminished even further by a harrowing pregnancy and a difficult birthing, she was exhausted. She must use what was left of her life to bring to justice those so-called men who had used her so carelessly. The legal system had nothing to offer, not after this length of time; Theresa must mete out the punishments herself. To do that, Theresa must leave behind the light of her life, her one and only love, her little Jessica.

The child needed to be kept safe, must be protected while Theresa went about her business. But
who would minister to a fatherless waif? Who could be trusted to take care of that precious child? Eva. There was no-one but Eva, yet Eva was a busy woman with a job to do and a husband to care for. And nothing could be arranged properly until the end of the war, because all the attackers were abroad fighting for King and country. Perhaps the German army would do the job for her.

Theresa drifted off to sleep and the intensity of the dreams diminished. She returned to the time when Bernard Walsh had talked softly about being a witness should she choose to bring in the law, to the evening when he had held her sobbing against his hard shoulder. That was no coward; Bernard had been a man in shock, a good person who had not believed the horror before his eyes. The Walshes were lovely, kind people. How many times had Bernard said, ‘I felt riveted to the spot’? How many times had Theresa been the comforter? ‘You arrived when it was all over.’

The patient dozed, her expression more peaceful, the sobs less frequent. They had given her some sweet-tasting medicine in a little cup, something to trim the edges off painful memories. Nevertheless, while Theresa floated on the soft wings of sedation, three faces passed in turn before her mind’s eye, and the memory of wet cobbles forced hard against vulnerable flesh caused a sharp intake of breath from time to time.

‘She’s settling,’ the nurse advised the doctor. All the same, whenever she passed Theresa Nolan’s bed, the same nurse wiped tears from the face of her charge.

While her mother clung uncertainly to the rim of life, Jessica found herself surrounded by a set of people whose components might have been fascinating had the circumstances been different. Doctors poked and prodded at her chest and back, pushed thermometers in her mouth, stared down her throat while making clicking noises with their tongues. One had bad breath; another, a bald man with sad eyes, was quite the nicest of them all. The bald one had told Jessica that her mother, though poorly, would survive.

Nurses fluttered about in white aprons that crackled with starch; then, when a visiting chest specialist took too close an interest, Jessica was wheeled into a little room for photographs to be taken. These were not ordinary likenesses; the pictures taken in the infirmary were all bones and shadows. Jessica was a skeleton. Underneath layers of dermis and flesh, she was a thing encountered only on ghost trains at fairs. She was more frightening than any imagined devil in a coal hole. She was a living monster wearing a borrowed garment of skin. And everyone else was the same, because a man in a white coat had told her so.

After X-rays had been assessed, the little girl was moved from the medical ward and placed in total isolation. Attendants came in with masks on their faces and food on trays. Books were made available, but they smelled funny and were placed inside a bag marked TB before being taken from the room. It was all so boring. Jessica did not feel particularly ill. Hospital food was all right, but the bed was hard and she wanted to play outside in the snow. ‘I want my mam,’ she advised a masked invader.

‘She’s still asleep,’ came Staff Nurse Joan Bowker’s muffled reply. ‘She needs rest, love.’

‘And I want to play out. Mr Moss says children should play out like pigeons do. He says children need fresh air and—’

‘You’ll be getting plenty of that at the sanatorium,’ replied the overworked angel of mercy.

‘What’s a san … it … that word you just said?’

‘It’s a place for TB.’

‘What’s TB?’

‘A germ that makes you cough.’

The child sighed heavily. ‘I haven’t got a cough.’

‘You will have if you don’t shape. Stop in bed and keep warm.’

Warm? The infirmary had three temperatures – hot, boiling and fit to roast the dinner. ‘But I’m already warm. When am I going to the sanity place?’

The mask changed shape as the nurse allowed herself a smile. It was a damned shame, a little lass like this having TB and a mother in and out of coma. Places at children’s sanatoriums in East Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire were as rare as pigs in flight, so Jessica would be kept with Theresa. ‘You’re both going soon. You and your mother. It’s nice up at
Williamson’s San. You get really good food, no rationing there. And there’s all trees and flowers.’ Like her daughter, Theresa Nolan had tuberculosis, though the child’s problem was comparatively mild. Both Nolans would be transferred within days to a place where TB was the norm, where everyone fought daily battles with the same bloodthirsty disease, where new antibiotics were being tested on those human volunteers for whom penicillin was not always the answer.

‘No rationing?’ The child’s eyes were widened by this news. Jessica had never known a world without points and coupons. ‘Will I have a lot of meat and stuff?’

‘Oh, yes. The patients who are getting better plant vegetables. The sanatorium’s even got its own bakery and milking herd. Jelly every Sunday, ice cream with it. I’ve some friends who work there. They get well fed, too.’ Joan Bowker’s friends were nourished against the possibility of miliary tuberculosis, the type that spread via veins and arteries throughout the whole body. Bribed during wartime by the certainty of good food, nurses braved lethal bacteria, ignored the future and lived comfortably, dangerously, in the present.

Jessica hugged the nightdress round her knees and rocked herself against stony pillows. ‘I thought my mam was dead,’ she said. ‘She went all cold and quiet.’

‘Your mam hasn’t been looking after herself.’ Theresa Nolan weighed about six stones. A slight woman, she was meant to be a lightweight, but there was a difference between slimness and emaciation. ‘She got much too cold.’

Jessica nodded pensively. ‘Like the mice, with a
sad smile. I told Lucy about it when she came back, and she thought Mam was dead, too.’

‘Lucy?’

It was the child’s turn to smile. ‘I think Lucy is really a smaller me. When I was little, I saw myself in the mirror and I called the other girl Lucy. I know she’s only pretend, but … talking out loud to her makes me feel better.’ Jessica sensed the heat in her cheeks. ‘Am I daft?’ She hadn’t told many people about Lucy.

‘No.’ As Joan Bowker closed the door in her wake, she felt a lump in her throat. Poor Jessica Nolan was lonely, while her mother was an outcast because she had given birth out of wedlock. Theresa Nolan had kept her child. She hadn’t gone to a so-called midwife for help in getting rid of it, hadn’t strangled the baby with its cord in order to claim a stillbirth and a fresh start in another town. As far as Nurse Bowker was concerned, Theresa deserved praise, not condemnation.

The nurse left the ward, removed from her person an all-over muslin wrap and placed it in the contamination bin. Soft paper slippers found the same destination before Joan Bowker went forth to tend patients on women’s medical. Theresa Nolan, too, had been removed from the ward. Like her daughter, Theresa was in a small room of her own, was lying on sheets and under-blankets that would be fumigated before resurfacing for use. Soon, both Nolans would be due for transfer to Williamson’s Sanatorium up on the moors. Ready or not, Theresa would have to be moved.

‘Can I have a bedpan?’

Joan Bowker moved towards the sluice, grim determination quickening her stride. She loved nursing,
had always wanted to care for the sick. But if any daft swine were to write an opera about a hospital, ‘Can I Have a Bedpan’ would form the chorus for women’s medical. Men were easier. They felt so apologetic and stupid about being ill that they often struggled to straighten their beds even on their dying day. She rattled through the steam-sterilizer and came up with what she needed. It wasn’t fair. Rheumatic fever, damaged heart, childbirth, malnourishment and TB. The odds were not exactly stacked in Theresa Nolan’s favour. And somebody was still screaming for a bedpan.

Danny Walsh surveyed the shop’s two-day-old replacement window. It might last five minutes if his luck held. Children had no respect for property these days – and was it any wonder? Dads at war, mams stuck in factories, grandparents expected to mind youngsters during school holidays. The war was winding down a bit – fewer raids, even in the south of the country, fewer sirens screeching at night – but the kiddies had seen too many newsreels, too many smashed houses. A broken window was nothing compared to London, Liverpool, Coventry.