The Four Streets (7 page)

It was too late. Within six minutes, she had haemorrhaged to death.

And at that very moment, as the last breath left her body, Bernadette heard their baby cry for the very first time… as though Nellie knew and were calling her back.

As Jerry left the hospital, the only lucid thought he had was to get to Maura’s house. When he got to the back gate, he staggered and almost fell through into the safety net of their yard. Maura ran out of the back door, wiping her hands on her apron, imploring him to tell her what was wrong as, not knowing why, she began to cry herself, fearing the very worst, which transpired to be worse than even she, in those few seconds, had imagined.

On the second day, Maura and Tommy left yet another meal on Jerry’s kitchen table. He didn’t want to go back to their house. He couldn’t face leaving his own or having to speak to anyone – he felt an inner resentment at their ability to carry on as though the most tragic, world-stopping event had not occurred. He wanted to scream and shout at them: ‘Don’t you both know she is dead? How can you both be so heartless? How can you just carry on with your lives as if nothing has happened?’

But he couldn’t shout that, because they were there, at the beginning and the end of every day, acting normally, giving him quiet and unobtrusive support as though nothing had really altered, as though life must go on just as it had before. Except he knew that could never be the case.

He fell into step behind the funeral cortège, with Nellie in his arms. ‘Here’s yer mammy,’ he whispered into the side of her face as he lifted her up onto his shoulder. With one hand on the back of her head and the other across her back, he cradled her to him. He was the only person who felt Nellie should be at the funeral. Every other woman on the four streets thought it was wrong and that a funeral was no place for a week-old baby. She shouldn’t even breathe fresh air until she was a fortnight old, or so the mantra went.

He wouldn’t give in. Nellie was Bernadette’s daughter. She had been the most important person in their lives whilst she had been growing in Bernadette’s womb. To Jerry, for Nellie not to be there was as odd as it was to the other women that she was. Nellie was going, in his arms, and that was all there was to it.

Bernadette was now only two feet away from them both. He wanted to rip open the wicker casket in which she lay and touch her. He wanted to stroke her hair, to look at her. He wanted to join her, to lie down next to her. He wanted to die and to be with her. He knew that in less than an hour she would be underground. Somewhere he and Nellie could never reach her, buried beneath the dirt, in the eternal darkness.

Tommy was at his side, and behind him four other men from the street who were acting as pall-bearers. He was about to carry his wife for the last time. The moment was coming when she wouldn’t be there any longer, when his mind would have to let go and accept there was nothing else he could do for her. He had chosen flowers for her grave, picked a dress from her wardrobe for her to be buried in, combed her hair when she lay in her casket.

Every little thing he had done since the moment she had died was for her. He had given their baby her bottle, for her. He had cleaned the house, for her. ‘She would want me to keep the place clean, Jaysus, she would go mad if I didn’t,’ he said to Kathleen who was making a good job of cleaning up whilst he insisted on feeding the baby.

He was about to take Bernadette in his arms for one last time and then she would be gone and there would be nothing left for him to do for her. He wouldn’t be carrying her as his bride, shrieking and laughing down the street. Not as the girl he sometimes playfully carried upstairs and threw on the bed with her squealing, ‘Put me down, put me down, you animal,’ as she pounded on his back, unable to squeal for long, laughing so hard she had no breath left for words. None of that would ever happen again. It was gone forever.

He also knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that distraught with grief and desperation as he was, Bernadette would never forgive him if he didn’t look after their precious daughter with every bone in his body. Bernadette would never rest if Nellie wasn’t well loved and cared for by him and him alone. His life was to be a living nightmare as there was no escape for him. He could not die. He couldn’t follow Bernadette. He could not stay with her. He had no option. Here, looking after their child, was where he had to be. There would never be a way out.

He knew this because he had dreamt it, as though Bernadette had lain next to him and whispered it with imperative urgency into his ear when he slept last night. The dream was so real, it had given him some comfort. It hadn’t taken away the pain, but he felt as though she were, somehow, somewhere near. When he woke, he thought he could smell her. The room felt as though she had just walked out and was standing at the top of the stairs. He was sure that if he shouted her name, she would shout back, ‘Yes, I’m here, Jer,’ with her tinkling laugh.

Only in the dream, she hadn’t been laughing. She had been urgent, imploring, instructing him to take care of Nellie. He had felt her fingers intertwining with the hair on his chest. He had felt her leg cross over his as she kissed his ear and her free hand stroked his hair, just as she always had. She was loving him in his sleep and giving him a list of instructions. These instructions were about Nellie and, when he woke, he could remember every single one.

The dream had given him purpose. He had been starving with grief and, in his sleep, Bernadette had fed him. That was his job now, to look after Nellie in the way Bernadette would have wanted. She was their legacy. This was his purpose. When he felt sorry for himself and trapped in a living nightmare, he would remember that dream.

Nellie began to whimper against his chest.

‘It’s yer beautiful mammy, don’t cry,’ he croaked. His throat had closed; it was on fire, thick with distress. He could say no more. His legs felt like jelly and his arms began to shake. ‘Oh God, make me strong, let me cope,’ he quietly prayed. He looked up and could just make out all the familiar faces around him, down the street, at the top of the steps and on the green. Neighbours who had spent hours talking to Bernadette. She had been in every house and had dispensed her own kind words to almost everyone in front of him.

For every woman who had cried tears of exhaustion, Bernadette had lent a hand.

She had hugged away the fears of some of the wives and laughed with the men as easily as he did.

His own eyes swam with tears to see so many people lining the street to say goodbye. As he looked towards the steps he saw the men from the dockyard lining the top together and, on the edge of the green, the shopkeepers and the ladies from Sunday school where Bernadette had helped with the classes. They all swam before him, blurred.

He felt Kathleen’s hand in the small of his back, pressing gently as she stood behind him.

‘C’mon, lad,’ she whispered, ‘one foot in front of the other, steady now, you have the babe.’

And as she nodded to Mr Clegg, the funeral director, who signalled to the horsemen, the wooden carriage wheels slowly inched forward, lurching to the left slightly, lifting from a groove in the cobbles and settling into the next, then lifting again, until the horses increased their speed to allow the wheels to glide over the top.

As they moved down the street, the sobbing of the women could be heard, following them in waves, the slow repetitive peal of the death bells ushering them along.

Jerry had used the money saved for their future to buy his love a wicker casket and to use Clegg’s best horses and carriage.

Bernadette had exchanged her silver heels for silver wheels.

As the procession slowly moved towards the end of the street, those who were attending the requiem mass got up from the chairs and fell into a regimental order behind Jerry and his family. The sound of their footsteps took on the rhythm of an army of mourning soldiers, as they marched in time, as methodically as the horses’ funeral walk.

Those still in their headscarves and nightdresses, battling to keep out the cold with their overcoats, watched as the last black mantilla turned the corner. And then silently, they watched some more, before, with heavy hearts, they took the chairs back inside.

Jerry handed Nellie to Kathleen as he and Tommy moved towards the carriage. And now their friends would support him. The men he lived alongside and worked with every day of his life were about to help him to carry Bernadette in love and duty, and he needed them, as the tears poured down his face so hard he could barely see where he was going.

‘Hold up, mate,’ said Tommy, as he steered Jerry to the foot of the hearse. ‘We need to unload her.’

Tommy used the language of the docks, as though the hearse were a ship. He was worried about Jerry’s ability to walk straight, having never seen a man cry like this before. None of them had. Jerry seemed to have lost all composure.

‘Me and Jerry will lift from the front, Seamus and Tommy Mac, get the end, Paddy and Kevin, move into the middle and bear the weight even. Now, steady, after three.’ Tommy was taking charge, his way of coping.

Jerry began to shake. At first it was just his hands but as soon as he had handed Nellie over to his mother the shaking seized his whole body. When the men slipped the coffin along the waxed wooden runners, the shaking became violent, as he and Tommy lifted Bernadette up onto their shoulders, in unison and with the same control that they lifted heavy weights every day of their lives.

He felt Tommy’s arm slap across his back, grab him firmly and rest on his shoulder, hugging him as close as possible. The men were carrying Jerry, a human wreck, as much as they were Bernadette. Their footsteps shuffled, haltingly at first, and then fell into time as they slowly marched up the path and in through the church doors.

At the moment the large wooden doors of St Mary’s church closed, the bell above the door of the bakery tinkled as Mr Shaw returned from the green and let in a customer who had stood outside, patiently waiting. Life on the streets had already begun to move on.

The men who were returning to their work on the dockyard slowly replaced their caps and turned to walk back down towards the river in groups of two and three. Within minutes they began to discuss the Everton away match on Saturday.

The children began to filter into the entry one at a time. Everyone began helping the older residents to put away their chairs before they made haste to check the babies and little ones they had been allocated for the morning so that the younger neighbours closest to Bernadette could attend the mass together.

They had all been too solemn, preoccupied and tearful to notice the thin young woman who had arrived at the top of the street and now stood at a distance.

She hugged the wall of the corner house, more to remain discreet than to shelter from the wind. She was dressed in a sage-green coat, fastened with a belt, and a matching green Napoleon hat with the front flap held up by three fashionable brass buttons.

She had a thin face, pale and pinched except for her nose, which appeared unusually large for her narrow face. Wisps of shoulder-length fine dark hair escaped from her hat to blow around her face.

Unemotionally, with small, dry, hazel eyes, she observed every second of the scene before her. She scanned the houses, all with curtains drawn both upstairs and down, and noticed, as the carriage had arrived in the street, a flurry of small faces dip under the upstairs curtains as, in one house after another, little noses pressed against the glass to view the horses.

She gave an involuntary shudder. She had the same distaste for children as she did for vermin.

She observed, with interest, that one of the women mourners appeared to be more distraught than the others. As she raised her hand, kept warm in her brown leather gloves, to tuck back an errant wisp of hair, she made a mental note of which house the woman had come out of.

As the mourners dispersed and went about their business, she moved away to catch the bus back into town. She was the only person that day who entered the four streets and smiled.

Most of the inhabitants, especially Jerry, felt as though they would never smile again.

When the last of the mourners had left the house, Jerry’s daddy, Joe, managed to get the best part of a bottle of whiskey into Jerry with the sole intention of knocking him out. It worked.

Once Kathleen and Joe had him undressed and tucked safely into his bed, they tiptoed down the stairs and closed the door at the bottom behind them, just as they had done when he was a young and vulnerable boy. They looked at each other and breathed a sigh of deep relief.

‘We haven’t put him to bed in years,’ said Kathleen, tears quietly trickling down her cheeks for the very first time.

Joe put his arm round her shoulder for comfort, struggling to contain his own worry and grief. The way Jerry had cried over the last week had torn at his father’s heart.

‘He’s hardly put the baby down and he’s going mad with no sleep,’ she said, as she pulled her hankie out of her apron pocket to wipe her eyes. Kathleen was a strong woman and unused to crying.

Joe had known the whiskey would push Jerry off the cliff. He knew how strong his son was, but he also knew no man could last a week with hardly any sleep.

‘A night’s sleep and all will be different in the morning, you wait and see. He will be stronger and we can all move on a bit,’ he said reassuringly.

They had to return to the farm and their younger boys soon. Kathleen hoped Joe was right.

At five-thirty the following morning, Kathleen placed Nellie in the pram Bernadette had chosen, covered the hood with netting, to keep out the flies, and placed her in the backyard to sleep after her morning feed. It was the only day she had been able to get her hands on the baby for more than a couple of minutes, since she had carried her out of the hospital, five days ago.

Kathleen looked through the kitchen window, at the pram stood against the brick wall in the grey morning light, and whispered to no one other than herself, ‘Thank God for Maura.’