The Liverpool Trilogy (101 page)

Think on? Jimmy was thinking on. He and his new wife had to live in a tiny space with Paddy and Kevin O’Neil. The design of Bootle’s prefabs meant that the bedrooms shared a wall,
and he would be inhibited. Friday, Saturday and Sunday could be all right, because on those nights Scouse Alley became Lights Irish club, nicknamed the Blarney, and Paddy would be out of the house.
But would those evenings be free, or would his mother-in-law from next door pay a visit with Seamus, her last resident child?

Paddy cleared her throat. ‘Look, I saved this for you as the best present. The O’Garas have a brand new little semidetached off Southport Road, just finished, it is. I got the rent
book for you, so you’re to have their prefab in a few days. Your furniture will be a bit of a hotch-potch, but beggars and choosers are miles apart—’ She was silenced when the two
of them grabbed and hugged her until she could scarcely breathe. ‘Let me be,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be glad to be rid of the pair of you, so.’ She glared at Jimmy.
‘Nobody wears those daft suits any more. Only the young gangs dress so stupidly, and here’s you making a show of my granddaughter.’

He smiled at her. She was all sound and echo, and there wasn’t a bad bone in her body. ‘Thanks, Gran,’ he said. ‘Your blood’s worth bottling.’

They left hand in hand to continue their marital business in Paddy’s temporarily empty house. ‘God go with you,’ the Irishwoman whispered as the couple disappeared round a
corner. They were decent kids. Daft, but decent. And the daftness would be eroded soon enough, because life would move in on them. ‘Hang on to your silliness,’ she mouthed. ‘And
hang on to each other, because this is a cold, bold world.’

She lit a second cigarette and sat on a tea chest in the shed. Well over fifty years, she’d been in Liverpool. But if she closed her eyes, she was back in Ireland in that little one up,
one down house, white with a black door, stuck in the middle of nowhere, miles of green in every direction. She saw cows and chickens, geese and pigs. It was a wondrous place, pretty, with an
orchard full of apple trees, a secret stable where lived two supposedly matchless Arab stallions, and Ganga’s rickety sheds where stills bubbled and gurgled, and roofs and walls went missing
in puffs of smoke from time to time. The isolation had been total. She just remembered when the house had been packed to the rafters with chattering people at the table, but most had disappeared
over to England by the time Paddy was taking real notice.

There’d been no school, and not a solitary book in the house. Ganga slept downstairs near the fire, while the boys had a couple of mattresses at the other end of the same room. Upstairs, a
curtain separated Muth and Da from the girl children, so no one had ever been in doubt about the creation of babies. How had they managed when the house had been fuller? Paddy had no idea. Perhaps
some had slept in barns and unexploded huts? Ah yes, that row of caravans. Many had slept in those.

Ganga had been a sore trial, mostly because he blew up sheds with monotonous frequency. His life had been devoted to the perfecting of poteen, though he’d never really achieved that. He
sold enough of it, sometimes taking off with the horse and cart for weeks at a time, only to return and cause further explosions all over the place. Paddy giggled. She remembered him with no
moustache, half a moustache, one eyebrow, smoke rising from his flat cap. It was poteen money that had got everyone out of Ireland. It was poteen that caused all the explosions, but Ganga had
blamed the spuds. Spuds, he had declared with every disaster, were not as stable as they used to be. The stud fees had been welcome, too . . . Paddy shook her head sadly, though a smile visited her
lips. She had loved him . . .

But Ganga had died there, in that little white house miles from anywhere, a jug of home-brewed cider by his chair, a ticket for Liverpool in his pocket. All his adult children and their families
were established in England, and he had intended to join them. But when Micky Malone, the nearest neighbour, travelled twenty miles to pick up Ganga’s cows and horses, he had found a corpse,
three rebuilt sheds full of alcohol, a couple of stills, and some distressed cattle. He tended the cows, led away the aged horses, buried Ganga, took the stills and all they had produced, then sent
a message with money to the oldest of the male emigrants.

Paddy drew on her Woodbine. Micky Malone had been an honest man, but when the money had been divided between all the Rileys, the sum for each of them had been paltry. When everything was sorted
out, Paddy had received a pearl rosary from her dead ganga. The pearls hadn’t been real, of course. Muth and Daddy, now deceased, had done their best, God love them. They were buried in
English soil, but in a Catholic cemetery. Paddy missed them every day of her life. Both had been immensely clever, yet neither had ever learned to read.

But Paddy had mastered the art. In her late teens, Paddy – known then as Patricia – had been handed over to Liverpool nuns. Unable to read or write, she had been placed with
five-year-olds and, because of her skill with arithmetic, was nominated as a junior teacher in that area; in return, she was taught to read within months, and was then moved out into society to
keep company with her peers. ‘I shone,’ she whispered now. ‘But to what end?’ There had been no chance of further education. The Cross and Passionist sisters had taken her,
a young adult, out of the goodness of their hearts, but Paddy had wanted to be a qualified teacher.

‘No chance,’ she mumbled. ‘But you won’t moan, Paddy O’Neil. You’ve a good man, a precious daughter and lovely grandchildren.’ Even while alone, she
made no mention of her sons. She didn’t want to think about them. They had followed her brothers into the gaping maw of England’s capital of culture, government and crime. More
recently, Maureen’s lads had made the same journey. Six of them gone, two from each generation. Were they all in gangs? No, she wasn’t thinking of them, refused to. Invitations to the
wedding had been ignored, and— ‘Stop it,’ she snapped aloud. Not thinking about them did as much damage as thinking about them.

The lovely grandchild returned covered in even more food and without the dreaded hat. He was worried. She could tell he was worried, because he was shifting his weight from foot to foot.
‘Gran?’

‘Would you ever consider the possibility of standing on both feet? You’ll have me dizzy.’

‘I counted, but I think she’s gone and hid some near the wall.’ The child bit his lip and stilled his lower limbs. He meandered on, throwing into the arena knickers, hat and
his cheating mother. There were only seven bottles on the table, but there might be six or more hidden and she’d started singing. ‘I was busy with knickers, so I couldn’t watch
her, could I?’

‘God,’ Paddy breathed. Maureen was a lovely girl, but she had a singing voice that might have persuaded the
Titanic
to accept its fate. ‘What’s she murdering this
time?’

‘Cockles and mussels alive, alive oh.’

‘Bugger.’

‘That’s what Granda said.’

‘And she’s up?’

Seamus nodded. ‘She’s up.’

‘On the table?’

‘On a chair.’

Paddy delivered a sigh of relief. A chair was easy to deal with.

‘The chair’s on the table, and Mam’s on the chair, Gran.’

She gasped, as if retrieving that mistaken sigh. ‘Jaysus, she’ll be the death of me, Seamus. Your mother’s a lovely woman, but . . .’

There was a rule connected to Maureen, daughter of Paddy, mother to Seamus, to the bride and to a pair of sons who had moved south. She would go weeks and months without drinking, then an
occasion would occur, and she needed a counter. Once appointed, the counter was in charge of keeping an eye on the intake. Twelve small bottles of Guinness constituted the limit. Once the twelfth
empty hit the table, Maureen was handed over by the counter to Gran, who took her home.

‘Could be more than thirteen, Gran.’

She bridled. ‘Oh yes? And what’s your eejit grandfather doing?’

Seamus swallowed audibly. ‘First aid, I think.’

‘Holy Mother. So it’s kicked off?’

The child nodded.

It was chaos. Or, as Paddy described it, Bedlam with custard. Chairs had taken to the air, curses flew, while small heaps of people on the floor tried to beat the living daylights out of each
other. Maureen, apparently oblivious to the situation she had caused, was balanced precariously on a chair, and the chair was far from steady on its table. The ceilidh band had escaped with its
drums, Irish pipes and fiddles, while a clutch of emerald-clad young female dancers huddled in the kitchen doorway. The room, long and narrow when disguised as Scouse Alley, had partitions peeled
back to make an L shape, and only the kitchen was separate and behind real walls.

Paddy risked her unstable daughter’s safety, blew her whistle, and the scene became still life. Maureen, trying hard to balance, stopped inflicting grievous bodily harm on Molly Malone.
‘Thomas Walsh?’ Paddy yelled. ‘Get your stupid wife – my stupid daughter – down from the perch. Any higher and she’ll be having a word with St Peter.’ She
waited until Maureen was back on terra firma. ‘Take her home, Tom.’

‘But you’re the only one she’ll—’

‘Away with your burden. Time you learned to control the mother of your children. Knock her out if you have to, as we ran out of chloroform.’

A few people giggled, and Paddy’s right foot began a solo tap dance. ‘Do you know what this place is?’ she screamed. She delivered the answer to her own question in a lowered
tone, because it fell into total silence. ‘Yes, we have a licence for weekends, but our first duty is to the dockers. This is a teetotal establishment to which anyone of any creed or colour
may come for his lunch instead of going to the pub. Right?’

The congregation murmured.

‘So now, fewer dockers meet their maker or a surgeon in the afternoons. That is our primary function, to keep safe and sober our men. Tomorrow, after Mass, the committee gets its hands
dirty and Scouse Alley clean.’ Very slowly, she scanned the room with narrowed eyes. ‘Do you know what Orange Lodgers say about an Irish Catholic wedding? Oh, yes. They call it a fight
with chairs, a blessing and rosary beads. I want this place spotless by noon tomorrow.’

She stood her ground while family and guests began their attempt to clear the mess. Most of them were drunk enough to need a map to find their own feet, but she let them struggle on for a while.
Even the priest was crawling round in trifle, bits of sausage roll and lumps of wedding cake. He was an old soak anyway, and Paddy was glad to see that he’d finally found his true level in
life.

With arms folded, Paddy maintained her stance. She knew how they talked about her, what they said when she got ‘uppity’. Liver Bird Number Three was one of her titles. Some reckoned
she was the one that had taken flight, that she had come down to earth to watch over lesser beings and keep them on their toes. Others had her down as Irish mafia, as an avenging angel from the
dark side, as a big-mouthed biddy from Mayo. Till they needed something, that was. Oh, everything changed when they ran out of money, because Paddy O’Neil was no shark, and she treated people
well when it came to finance.

When her gaze lit on her husband, she allowed herself a tight smile. He was one of her better decisions. From a family of fifteen children whose mother had died after delivering one final baby,
he had made sure that his wife had not been weighed down by a rugby team. All their married life, he had kept a calendar, and Paddy had given birth only three times. Kev was a good man, the
best.

Her eyes slid sideways to today’s best man, another Teddy-boy idiot in electric socks, crêpe-soled shoes, and trousers that looked as if they’d been painted on. He was spark
out on the lino, his carefully cultivated quiff sweeping the floor in its now collapsed state. The world had gone mad.

Girls were as bad, if not worse. Those who couldn’t afford stiff, multi-layered net underskirts made their own waist-slips from cheap material with wire threaded through the hem.
Occasionally such behaviour led to disaster, because a girl would sit on the wire, and the front of her hoop would shoot upwards to reveal stockings, suspenders and knickers. Boys celebrated such
catastrophes, but many a girl stayed indoors for weeks after so humiliating an occurrence. Yes, they were all stark raving bonkers, and parents were mystified.

Maureen was being dragged out by her husband. Her parting shot was aimed at ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, but she missed by a mile, as usual. Tomorrow, she would be sober; tomorrow,
she would make no attempt to sing. The impulse to murder music arrived only with the thirteenth Guinness.

But tonight, Maureen had taken only six drinks, because tonight she needed to be sober. Remembering how to act drunk had been difficult. It was as if the booze altered every atom of her body and
mind; she changed into a different person. ‘Let me go,’ she advised her supportive husband. ‘I touched hardly a drop. Michael and Finbar are back.’

Tom Walsh ground to a halt. ‘You what?’

‘I’m sober.’

‘And I’m the pope. What about Michael and Finbar? Why didn’t they come to the wedding? Their sister’s got married just today—’

‘They couldn’t,’ she snapped. ‘God knows who’s on their tails.’

Tom swallowed hard and processed his thoughts. ‘You let the wedding go ahead when you knew it could have been any or all of us? Who is it this time? The bloody Krays, the Bow Boys, the
Spitalfields so-called sodding Soldiers?’ Furious now, he grabbed his wife’s shoulders and shook her. ‘Is it the Greeks?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whimpered.

‘But you do know all them London bastards go for family. We could have been blown up. You took our lives into your hands—’ His jaw dropped as she took something from her
handbag. ‘Who the buggering bollocks gave you that? Is it loaded?’

‘Course it is. What use would it be without bullets? Fin gave it me. They’re hiding with Ernie Avago. Well, they’re in his mam’s bedroom, God rest her soul.’ She
returned the gun to its resting place.