Kissing Alice Read online

  ‘I think everything’ll be better now,’ she said to Alice later, holding her hand.

  But Alice heard again the midnight screams her mother had made and was not at all comforted.

  When Florrie and Arthur came home after church on Sunday, Florrie’s eyes were dreamy, seeing something far away. Sitting around the kitchen table she brushed her hand against her father’s arm, and Queenie May saw her tap him lightly across the knee when he spoke, feathering her fingers like wings. Later, she announced that she wanted to be a Catholic, like her father was going to be.

  Queenie May was not surprised.

  ‘It doesn’t decide anything, for the others. They’re too young. The boys are still babies,’ was all she said, as Arthur lifted Florrie with a whoop of joy so that she banged her head on the ceiling.

  The influenza went steadily from house to house along the road. Queenie May and Arthur crept, aching, to the bed and lay together without speaking, exhausted. Their skin was cold and clammy and Arthur’s old wound throbbed. They did not want to touch each other and when Arthur moaned, soft and low, Queenie May turned aside, angry.

  Florrie could not be sure that the disease was not some kind of visitation and she worked hard to repel it. She soaked cloths to cool her parents’ faces and she toasted bread to tempt them. She got Alice ready for school and walked with her as far as the railway. She did everything she could for her brothers, holding and bathing them, kissing them over and over, singing to them, and praying, on her knees, that they would be saved.

  ‘Ma, do you think I should get them something?’ she asked, seeing how they struggled to breathe.

  But Queenie May knew there was nothing to be done. ‘Leave them be, Flor,’ she whispered.

  And the boys died without fuss, long before Arthur had resolved their religious affiliation.

  The first Sunday, when Arthur could hardly raise his head from his drenched pillow, Florrie asked Alice to go with her to the dreary chapel.

  But Alice shook her head firmly. ‘I don’t like the dockyard, Flor. Them men look at you funny,’ she pointed out, and Florrie left her sister in charge of the nursing while she hurried down through the quiet streets.

  She did not ask again. But while the sickness hung low over everything she went to mass every Sunday, and sometimes again in the week, saying out the responses as loudly as she could, with her head tipped back, as though she were calling into a storm wind. She became known. Other families beckoned to her to share their bench; the priest touched her head lightly.

  ‘Is there no one to come with you?’ they asked. It did not seem right that she should be alone, as if orphaned. And Florrie had to explain, many times, that neither her mother nor her sister believed in the same way she did; there was only her father.

  So when Arthur was well enough to go with her to church again, he found he was welcomed with unexpected affection. He was pointed out in the dark-coated mêlée gathering outside the chapel. People came to shake his hand as he knelt to pray or queued for confession; they stopped to chat with him, never mentioning Queenie May. He heard other members of the congregation whispering about him in the chrysanthemum quiet of the lady chapel. His family became, for a short while, a novelty in the neighbourhood, unconventional and conspicuous, split by their allegiance to the different faces of God.

  None of this consoled him.

  ‘I should have done it before. I should have got it done, for the boys,’ Arthur moaned.

  Queenie May opened the doors and windows wide, spreading out the bedding on the windowsills, and felt the clean air rushing through the house.

  ‘Let’s forget it, Arthur, now,’ she said. ‘You’ve got Florrie with you. Leave it now, for the rest of us. Leave it.’

  But Arthur changed his route to the dockyard so that he did not have to pass the bleak plot of land, shadow-walled and greening, where his unbaptized sons had been buried, unrecorded. And he sat clenched alongside Florrie during the majesty of the mass, screwing his nails tight into his palms, feeling it might be wrong to pray for them.

  ‘Show me your reading, then, Ally,’ Arthur said. He was sitting heavily on the bed, weary from his shift. He patted the blanket beside him in invitation, reaching for Alice with his other hand, cold from the outside air and hard from years of carrying. It surprised both of the girls.

  ‘Oh Da,’ Alice said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t…’

  Florrie, who was hanging up her father’s coat to dry, watched closely. Her faith was unquestioning and indefatigable. The priest smelt to her of stale sweat and wet wool, but still she let him finger her hair and bend over her in blessing. She learned the meaningless music of the Latin responses and she tried not to fidget on the hard benches. Every evening, kneeling out in the corridor, she prayed for the release of her brothers’ souls, begging God not to damn them, and when Queenie May fell pregnant again, pacing up and down during the damp nights, Florrie recited scraps of prayers to her in what she considered a reverent monotone. She refused to eat meat, if there was any, on Fridays and she went weekly to confession, scraping together a litany of sins that could be reasonably forgiven. So when Arthur began to show special interest in one of his daughters, she felt that, by rights, it should have been her.

  But it was Alice he went to.

  ‘Sit with me here, Ally, and read. Read to me.’

  Ally let him pull her on to the bed.

  ‘I can’t, Da. There’s nothing to read,’ she said, but Arthur had his hand tight on her leg now, above the knee, and she could not move away.

  Seeing her chance, Florrie took a step forward, wanting to show how much better she was than her sister at reading, so that Arthur would look at her instead, and make room for her next to him on the bed.

  ‘I’ll get the Bible, Da, shall I, for her to read? We can both read it. I can read more than her, the long names and everything.’

  ‘The other one,’ said Arthur, without looking at her. ‘From the back shelf.’

  He was clear about that. Florrie stood on the chair to fetch it down, careful not to catch the end of Arthur’s coat with her ashy feet, and she held it in both hands to pass it to him ceremonially as she had seen the altar servers do with the great missal on a Sunday. Then, not wanting to turn her back on them, but not wanting either to sit with them on the bed, she remained standing, the toes of her right foot bent double and crumpled hard into the floorboard.

  ‘Well then, go on,’ said Arthur, opening the book carefully at the first page.

  Alice tightened beside him. ‘I can’t, Da,’ she said.

  ‘I can, I’m sure. Let me, Da,’ said Florrie.

  But Arthur ignored her.

  ‘Start here, with this.’ Arthur wrapped his arm around Alice and pointed his finger beneath each of the words in turn. ‘“Piping down the valleys wild,”’ he read slowly.

  Alice began to sniff. She tried the next word, but it was ‘piping’ again, a word she had never seen written before and had no chance of recognizing. Only the p sounded.

  Then, to save herself, she said, ‘Ma lets us look at the pictures, that’s all. We don’t do the words.’

  It took a moment for Arthur to realize what had been said. ‘You read – this – with your mother?’

  ‘Not read. I said, Da. Just look.’

  Alice shuffled away from him slightly, wary of his tone. Arthur looked at Florrie now.

  ‘When is this? When do you use my book?’

  Florrie shrugged and pressed her toes harder into the floor. ‘Not often, Da. Just sometimes. For the pictures. And we used to – sometimes – show them to the boys; play with them.’

  They waited for him to say something, but he held tight on to the edges of the book and was quiet.

  ‘But I could try and read again. I could try. If you like,’ said Alice, frightened by his silence.

  He turned and looked at her, pulling her back towards him, tightening his grip this time on her leg.

  Florrie wanted to be part of it. ‘No. L
et me. Let me read, Da,’ she said.

  But it was Alice that Arthur wanted. He was short with his elder daughter. ‘You’ll just go sidling up to your mother. I’m better off with Ally.’

  Florrie backed away at this, but she continued to watch them, waiting for the moment when she could step in and read. It didn’t come. It didn’t turn out that way, neither that afternoon, nor on the afternoons that followed. Instead, Arthur made Alice read. They practised the first two lines, over and over, until they were perfect and the word piping ran off her tongue. He did not realize that she was memorizing, nor that her understanding was so distorted and her sense of the words so distant, that the piping she envisaged was thick and rusted, riveted together in long sections like the duct that wound its way around the back of the school yard. He just heard the correctness of the sounds she made. And so they moved on, learning more lines, deciphering longer and longer words, turning the pages of the book from one poem to the next, becoming slowly more assured and fluent. And when Arthur rewarded Alice for her literacy by reaching his hand clumsily under her skirt and pushing her back hard on the bed while his fingers shivered at the feel of her, Alice was too breathless to disillusion him and Florrie was speechless with envy.

  By the end of the year, Alice and Arthur had read the whole of the book together. Alice’s reading was much improved. She had a sturdy confidence in her ability to decipher new words, however peculiar. Hurrying home from school ahead of Florrie, taking the hill too fast, ignoring the squeal of her breath, she would feel the pound of her heartbeat as she climbed the stairs, seeing her father sprawled on the bed, waiting, his eyes widening at the sight of her. It seemed to her, always, a time of sunlight, of moving shadows quick across the sky, of summer air. It never surprised her that Florrie always threw open the tattered windows as soon as she came home.

  ‘You should tell Ma,’ said Florrie on one of these afternoons, leaning out to catch sight of the sea as she let in the breeze.

  Alice was sitting on the edge of the bed, quiet. ‘Tell her what, Flor?’

  There was a pause. Florrie looked at her sister.

  ‘That you got moved up again, in class,’ she said at last, flatly.

  Alice was now by far the best reader in her school. She read everything she was given with certainty, and with a voice fluid with poetry, so that even the most ordinary things came out sounding special. She was quite a marvel, leapfrogging up the benches towards the front of the classroom, leaving Florrie languishing behind. Queenie May could not have guessed this.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Alice, relieved, lying back on the counterpane as a gust reached her from the open window. It blew the ends of her hair across her face.

  ‘She’d like it though, Ally. You could read to her even; show her.’

  ‘I don’t want to read to her,’ said Alice.

  Later that evening Florrie found a folded newspaper on the stone windowsill of a house in the next street. It was slightly damp. She took it home, flapping it hard in the air to dry it.

  ‘I’ll read to you, Ma,’ she offered. ‘To take your mind off the baby. To find out about things.’

  But Queenie May was weary and fell asleep before Florrie had finished the first page, the words coming slow and stilted. Florrie went back outside, and the newspaper was used a few days later to clean the windows. On Sunday she tried again, saying out the prayers loudly next to Arthur in church, so that he would notice how well she sounded the words, and praise her. But he never did. And before long she became accustomed to the idea that she did not share Alice’s precocious talent for words. She spent the smooth-tide summer evenings playing mechanical games of hopscotch and she grew suddenly tall and spindly, which she took as further proof that she was somehow foolish and badly developed. She ceased to believe in the efficacy of prayer.

  Queenie May did everything she could to stop the next baby, and her daughters helped her.

  ‘We can’t manage it, with another one,’ she explained to them. ‘Not now.’

  So Florrie and Alice took turns to stand on their mother’s stomach as she lay on the floor, stamping as hard as they dared, until they made her cry and they couldn’t go on. They went instead then, together, to the chemist, investing in a large number of pills. They waited with Queenie May, encouraging her as she retched so that she would not vomit up the expensive medicine, and they discussed between themselves on the way home from school the reasons why nothing had happened. They boiled up soap and quinine over the stove and gave it to their mother to drink, to poison the baby, but Queenie May could not keep this mixture down, no matter how hard she tried. So that evening they made up the mixture again and with a stiff nozzle of newspaper Queenie May poured it inside herself.

  Queenie May emptied the funnel of poison three times a day, for as long as she could bear, but still nothing happened. They expected some kind of sign when the baby died and were puzzled. They could not be sure that they had successfully killed it. If it would not come out, there was no way of knowing.

  ‘It might be tiny. No bigger than a bean,’ said Florrie hopefully. ‘Perhaps you didn’t notice, Ma.’

  But Queenie May was certain. ‘There’s been nothing,’ she said. Her head was thick, stuffed with wet feathers. Her thoughts could not get through. So she did not know what to do next, and it was Alice who went back to the chemist for sticks of slippery elm bark that Queenie May could thrust inside herself, deep. But the sticks did not work either.

  Finally, Florrie said it would have to be something sharper.

  ‘A needle, Ma; a knitting needle,’ she said, having asked around. ‘If you do it carefully, you’ll be all right. It’ll just be the baby that gets it.’

  Queenie May had never gone so far before. The thought of it made her flinch.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’ve tried enough. I’ll think about it.’

  But she couldn’t think about it; her thoughts were rattling around too loosely.

  ‘Don’t tell your father,’ was all she said, in the end, before she lay back on the bed with a folded towel beneath her to catch the blood. But she did not have the courage to take the knitting needle herself and poke around. She did not want to feel the dense softness of her baby at the end of it, impaled. So it was Florrie who did it, while Queenie May stared hard at the damp rings on the ceiling.

  Florrie herself was surprised at the feel of it, and at how deep the needle would go. She was cautious. She had heard about what could happen. She had heard of a woman whose insides had been pulled out to hang loose between her legs, almost to the floor, dragging low like sodden stockings. She did not want that. So although she made a show of things, she could not in the end stab as hard as perhaps she should. And so both Queenie May and her child came out of it unscathed.

  After that they gave up, and nothing was ever said about not wanting the baby.

  When Arthur’s third daughter was born, two weeks overdue and squawking, Queenie May finally saw that there was nothing to be done. The things she had always believed would happen to her, had somehow happened elsewhere, to other women. What she was left with was repetition, and a sense that her life was being lived by someone else, somewhere out of sight. She sat wrapped around in Arthur’s coat, despite the damp heat of late summer, with the baby across her lap, her hair untied and lank, wetting the cushion slightly each time she coughed. She stopped worrying about the rent, the cost of shoes, and the tightness of Alice’s breathing. She refused to name the baby.

  ‘Then I’ll do it,’ said Arthur, bending over the basin to wash his face. It was another morning when he did not have to go to work. ‘We’ll call her Mary.’

  Queenie May looked down at the baby sleeping on her knees, pink with the heat around her ears and forehead. She did not want to argue, so she nodded. And Arthur offered a silent prayer of thanks, that at last he would be getting his own way with things, and one of his daughters would be blessed with a sanctified name.

  ‘Will Mary come to
church with me and Da, or not?’ asked Florrie a few days later when she and Queenie May were alone together and the baby was sleeping.

  Queenie May was idly tying threads into the back of a patch of darning. ‘When she’s older, she might, sometimes,’ she said, breaking a thread with her teeth.

  ‘I think she should, Ma,’ said Florrie firmly.

  ‘I s’pose your father will decide.’

  Queenie May heard the torpor in her voice as though from afar.

  ‘But she should come, from the start, Ma, really,’ kept on Florrie. ‘I’ve seen babies at church before, little babbies still in arms.’

  Queenie May was surprised. ‘I thought you were fed up of it, going on a Sunday now. All that fuss you make about having your hair neat, my girl, and getting your clothes brushed. You’re going on eleven now, Florrie – I thought you were growing out of it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not that, is it,’ said Florrie, not making sense. ‘And I like the walk.’

  Queenie May had caught a glimpse of her daughter, close to Arthur in the smoke-thick streets, talking, their heads down, hurrying to the church. She could see why Florrie would not want to give this up.

  ‘You wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘if you had to take Mary along too?’

  Florrie couldn’t look at her mother, but she said it nonetheless. ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

  Queenie May shrugged. She fingered the threads distractedly, glancing occasionally at Mary, out of habit, but not seeing her. And it took such a long time for Florrie to say something more, that it might have been a different conversation.

  ‘And if she comes to church with us, and Da gets her baptized, and the priest holds her head over the water and splashes it on her, and we all have candles, then she’ll be a child of God, won’t she, Ma?’

  ‘She will. I suppose.’

  ‘Good,’ said Florrie.

  Mary stirred slightly, gurgling, and Queenie May got up with a sigh and went over to her baby but did not pick her up. She looked at Florrie, noticing she had grown out of her skirt again.