September Starlings Read online

  The cats found homes, settled and thrived. Henry was spoiled rotten by the sisters, sat in French classes, English lessons, was never impressed by any of our syllabus. Solomon assumed a new importance, because he was a living piece of Mr Evans’s legacy. In my garden, I played with him, fussed over him, bought fish with my spending money. And Mother continued to fret because next door’s feline was on her property. So my love for her, if there ever was a seed of affection, did not grow. Like Mr Evans’s last dahlias, it failed to flourish. But my guilt thrived in all weathers, because disliking my mother was a grievous sin.

  I didn’t do it. To my dying day, I would carry the scar in my heart, because I was innocent. The worst thing was that they sent for my father. They seemed to know things about my mother, seemed to understand that she should not be summoned. So they phoned Dad at the shop and he came to school, looked smaller there than he did at home, a bit lost in Sister Agatha’s office.

  Sister Agatha was the headmistress. Her heart was full of love, but she never let her face know about it. Sometimes, her face was like an empty house, no movement, no expression, just blank and absent. Perhaps she was praying or meditating when she looked distant, or perhaps she had learned how to appear noncommittal and unprejudiced. ‘Mr McNally,’ she said gravely. ‘We found these in your daughter’s desk.’

  ‘These’ were a pearl rosary and a white missal with the price tags still attached. My father picked them up, weighed them in his hands, returned them to the desk. ‘My daughter is not a thief,’ he said.

  Sister Agatha leaned back in her chair, swept her eyes over me, then over my poor father. ‘Every other girl in the class has her own rosary and missal. Laura is fascinated by the faith, so she must have taken these from the repository.’

  ‘I’ve never been near the repository,’ I said, my temper beginning to simmer. ‘And if I did go, I’d pay for what I wanted. And,’ I mumbled heatedly, ‘Norma Wallace hasn’t got these things either, because she’s not a Catholic.’

  Sister Agatha rattled her beads, then clicked her tongue. ‘Norma Wallace would not steal things and put them in your desk, Laura.’

  I was getting really worked up by this time. ‘Neither would I, Sister. If I was going to steal something, I’d make sure I hid it well away from my desk.’

  ‘Ah.’ The cold grey eyes flickered momentarily. ‘So you’ve it all worked out, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  Dad stepped nearer to the desk. ‘Sister, I would bet my life that Laura didn’t do it. If she’d done it, she’d say so. She has a rosary at home – mine. There’s a missal too, in Latin and in English.’

  She put her head on one side. ‘So you are Catholic and your daughter isn’t?’ She made this sound like a charge being read out in a court of law.

  He straightened his shoulders in preparation for an argument. ‘My parents were Catholic, but my wife isn’t.’

  ‘You married out?’

  He nodded, seemed cowed.

  ‘She hates Catholics,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not my dad’s fault. Mother says that Catholics are only any good when it comes to educating people.’

  Sister Agatha ignored me. ‘Mr McNally, you must excuse my digression, as we are not gathered here to discuss your faith or your lack of it. Laura has taken these things from the repository during recess. We keep our stock on display so that the children may choose freely when they want a holy picture or a missal. Laura took the items without attempting to pay for them.’

  ‘I did not! Why won’t you listen to me? Why do you keep talking about me as if I’m not here? I did not take the bloody stupid things!’

  Dad’s complexion paled when the swear word fell so easily from my lips.

  ‘She’s a handful, Mr McNally. A very strong-willed girl with a good brain that she fails to use much of the time. Laura has shouted before, has been disobedient, but we never bothered you till now. Stealing is not a thing I can deal with in isolation. If we have a thief in our school, then you have the same thief in your house.’

  He stepped closer to the desk, and I noticed that a muscle in his cheek was twitching, as if the anger in his mouth wanted to jump out and spit itself all over Sister Agatha’s office. ‘I shall tell you just one more time that my daughter has not stolen, that she would not, under any circumstances, steal from you or from anyone else. Her language may have been a little … adventurous just now, but Laura did not take these.’ He picked up the missal and slapped it on the blotter. ‘I suggest you look elsewhere for your criminal.’

  The door burst open and Confetti fell in, her cheeks red and the veil a little off-centre. ‘Sister?’

  ‘Yes?’ Agatha shook her head slightly at the sight of her dishevelled colleague.

  ‘May I speak with you in private?’

  In response to Sister Agatha’s nod, Dad and I stepped into the corridor. He stared at a red light that flickered at the feet of a Sacred Heart statue. ‘You mustn’t swear,’ he said softly. ‘But I know that I don’t need to lecture you about stealing. A soul as generous as yours would not choose to offend itself by such lowly behaviour.’

  Well, my father believed in me, or so it seemed.

  The office was growing noisy. ‘I tell you here and now that the child did not do it!’

  ‘Goretti, are you questioning my wisdom?’

  ‘In this case, yes. Yes, I am.’

  A chair scraped along the floor, then a drawer seemed to slam shut. ‘I am your superior in this matter, in all matters connected with your work here. Did you not learn humility on your way to the altar, Goretti Hourigan? Are you still running with the wind like you did when I tried to teach you some sense back at home?’

  ‘You are no longer my teacher. I am not a barefoot seven-year-old now, Sister Agatha. I’m a teacher, and I work closely with that child out there. There’s trouble in that house, trouble you’ve talked about to me. Even if she had taken those trinkets, then who would blame her when her mother—’

  ‘Whisht.’ That was a noise the Irish nuns often made when they were impatient and wanted quiet. ‘Leave the girl’s mother out of it and don’t be calling a missal and a rosary trinkets.’

  There was a short pause. ‘They’re trinkets till they’re blessed.’

  Confetti’s remark did not go down well. Agatha was probably mad because the girl she had taught in Ireland was bright and clever, was determined to have the last word too. ‘Then we shall let the matter lie. As you say, your contact with Laura McNally is a daily occurrence. Perhaps I have been hasty. But what am I supposed to think when the goods are found in her desk?’

  ‘That there is jealousy.’

  ‘Oh. And why?’

  ‘Because I … I try to take an interest in the child.’

  My father pulled me away from the door. ‘Best not listen to any more of it, Laurie. The young one’s on your side, so you’ll be all right.’

  I stamped a foot. ‘I want to leave. I want to go to a proper school with real teachers in real clothes instead of blackout curtains. I’m fed up with everything, specially the dinners and being called a thief.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Life’s unfair. Growing up is just learning to accept the unfairness.’

  I turned on him, my frustration making me unreasonable. ‘You’re never there. I’m stuck in that house on my own or with her when she comes back from wherever she goes. And you don’t talk to me as much as you did and I can’t go next door and … and everything is horrible.’ I breathed rapidly, puffed myself up for the big drama. ‘I wish I was dead.’

  A hand touched my shoulder. ‘You’re a bit young for those words, Laura.’ It was Confetti. ‘Usually a girl is twelve or thirteen when her parents hear that sort of noise. And then it’s all “I should never have been born” and “It’s your fault that I’m here.” But then, you are advanced in some ways, Laura McNally.’

  ‘I’m not a thief.’

  ‘And you’re no mathematician either, so don’t brag about the good points.’ She looked k
indly at my dad. ‘You shouldn’t have been dragged all the way up here, Mr McNally.’

  He pulled at his collar, appeared to be embarrassed by the whole episode, as if he were unused to witnessing real emotion. ‘Send for me, Sister. If you’ve any problems at all, don’t tell my er … don’t hesitate to call on me.’

  Ignored for the moment, I searched for my place at centre-stage. ‘I still wish I was dead. And if I can’t be dead, I want to be at Anne’s school.’

  ‘Shut up, Laurie.’ He did not raise his voice. ‘There’s trouble enough in the world without you turning all contrary.’ He shook Sister Maria Goretti’s hand. ‘Thank you. She’s a good girl, you know. Spirited, but good.’

  ‘I know.’

  He walked away and left me standing in a dark corridor with the Sacred Heart and a nun who loved me. I knew that she loved me when she said, ‘Come along of me, Miss Imp. There’ll be no dying done, for the planet needs folk like you to keep the rest of us on our toes. It’s me you’ll be the death of, so get back and do some work. And stop copying your English homework out of other books.’

  This was going too far! I heaved up my spine until I achieved a height well in excess of my usual standing. ‘I don’t copy,’ I snapped. ‘That’s another lie about me.’

  She chortled quietly, adjusted her veil and stuck a black-headed pin into the front. ‘Just testing, Laura McNally. It’ll be English for you at the university, then.’

  ‘But you said I copied.’

  Her face positively beamed. ‘Well, it worked, didn’t it? Now you have to stay alive to prove me wrong. One day, we’ll see your name in print. And comb your hair, you look like an angry hedgehog.’

  This was one of my more daring moments. ‘And you look like a big penguin, Sister Maria Goretti.’

  She giggled like a five-year-old. ‘You still call me Confetti, don’t you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And your other good friend is old Tommy-gun.’

  ‘I didn’t invent that name. She already had it when I came, so don’t blame me.’ We wandered down the corridor. ‘Sister?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you never want a little girl of your own?’

  She thought for a moment or two. ‘Oh yes. And I wanted a pony of my own, long hair, a big house, a handsome husband. Oh and I wanted to be a film star.’

  We both stood still and stared at one another. I asked her, ‘Do you have to find the most important thing and give up all the others? Is that what grown-ups do? Like you being a nun and looking after us – is that more important than all the other things you wanted?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know. See, we had on our farm horses for field work and horses for breeding. The breeding stock were good Irish Arabs for the racing. The same thing happens with people, it’s how we’re built. It sort of comes to you when you get to a certain age. And you realize that you’re just a work horse, not a brood mare. Whatever, horses for courses.’

  ‘What will I be?’

  She steered me towards the classroom. ‘A terrible torment. But not a thief, Laura McNally. You are never a thief.’

  Chapter Five

  We never discovered who put the beads and the missal in my desk, but then we didn’t hire Mother as a detective. She found out everything, always. She found out about me and Anne meeting after school. One predictable thing was that my mother would always catch you unawares, would discover where you had been, even what you were thinking. Sometimes, she would scour me with her eyes, and I would glance quickly over my shoulder, as if I expected to see a hole burnt into the wall behind my head.

  Every time I have looked back on my childhood, I have seen the same thing. Mother and me standing near some furniture, always with at least one piece between us. It might have been a table, a chair, a piano, but it was always there. She never touched me except in anger. For most of us, infancy is something we seem to view through the wrong end of a telescope, little pictures that are slightly distorted, misty round the frames. And I have always had the one endless scene, small, tinged with sepia, but a definite portrait inside my head. It is as if most of my formative years were spent in this single circumstance.

  Brown is the chief colour of my early life, because the furniture was usually brown, while most walls in our house were of a dull beige or mushroom. Mother strayed only once from her ‘tasteful’ theme, allowed a decorator to paint my room yellow. For three days, she fretted and fumed about the gaudiness, then she hauled the workman back and reduced my happy room to a miserable fawn. Miserable fawn was ‘tasteful’.

  In my dreams, which have often been in colour, a red light has usually surrounded my mother. Red is the colour of anger, of lipstick, of nail varnish, so I suppose that my young brown days were edged with scarlet. Mother towered over me, is the one big thing I remember. Memories of her are not all reduced by the passage of time. Even now, her essence hovers over me, makes my spirit shrink and cower. When I was a child, she plainly needed me to look up to her both physically and mentally. Respect was what she craved and never got. Because my mother is and was a bad angel.

  ‘You’ve been meeting Anne on your way home from school. You were seen more than once, by a friend of mine, and you were sitting side by side on a garden wall in Chorley New Road.’

  I made no reply. Replies, in my mother’s massive tome of domestic etiquette, were cheeky unless she had actually solicited an answer. ‘What were you doing sitting on a garden wall like a common person for all the world to see?’

  I tried to think about this one before answering, but I failed to come up with something inventive or self-protective. Even as I opened my mouth to speak, I had no real concept of what I might say. So I slipped into automatic, just allowed my tongue to do the work. ‘I was sitting on a wall, I suppose.’ Well done, Laura, I said to my inner self. That will get you a big gold star.

  Her cheeks went pink and she reached across to the mantelpiece for her Craven A. ‘That is worse than dumb insolence, Laura McNally. A gifted girl? Who does that Maria Goretti think she’s fooling when she writes your school report? What are they teaching you at the convent? Do you have lessons in how to make your mother ill?’

  ‘No.’

  She slapped her hand down on the chair back. ‘I know that you were sitting on a wall. I do not need a picture, thank you. I have just said that you were sitting on a wall. What I require to know is why you were doing it against my express wishes.’

  ‘I was tired, I think.’ An express was a train, so I wondered vaguely whether my mother’s express wishes moved as fast as the 9.15 from Manchester. Or Blackpool. No, it would definitely not be Blackpool, as Blackpool was for common people with yellow bedrooms and poor taste. I shifted about, wondered where I’d ever got the courage to argue with her a few months earlier. I’d told her that she was bad, and that hadn’t done any good. And I was still frightened of her …

  ‘What is the matter with you, girl? Look at yourself, just look.’

  In the absence of a mirror at the correct height, I could not obey this new command, not without turning myself inside out.

  ‘You are no daughter of mine. I always imagined that I would have a pretty girl child, but you look like a tramp, all rumpled and dirty. What are you thinking of?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I tightened my lips to stop my loud thoughts escaping into the room, because Liza McNally was capable of reading a person’s innermost imaginings.

  She took a chestful of smoke, blew it out in a long blue stream that caressed my face with its filth. ‘Dumb insolence again,’ she announced. ‘I should have thought that the nuns would not allow this type of behaviour.’ She flicked non-existent ash in the direction of a crystal ashtray. Even the air I breathed was an unpleasant shade of nicotine in those days.

  My mother was really peculiar. If you talked back, it was cheek, if you stood still and listened, it was this dumb insolence thing. The hardest part was trying to work out which was worse; it was impossible to fathom what to do. ‘If I d
on’t talk to Anne when she talks to me, then I’ll be rude. Sister Maria Goretti says that we shouldn’t be rude.’

  She took a step closer to me, and I wondered whether this was the right time for me to stoop and cover my head with my hands. I really hated that. Cowering and protecting the skull from a larger person is so dehumanizing and humiliating. ‘Don’t quote that dried-up nun at me, miss. When you leave that school at four o’clock, you obey my rules. The Turnbull family is just trouble. I don’t want you growing up wild like Anne – she gets far too much of her own way. As for Maisie and Freddie – they are no better than they ought to be. I have asked you to stay away from them, and I expect obedience, not criticism.’

  The seeds were planted, had been sown when I was very young, but I was too inexperienced to verbalize, even inwardly, the contempt I felt for this thin, selfish, chain-smoking woman. ‘I like Auntie Maisie and Uncle Freddie.’ The words were out before I could check them for flaws.

  She nodded, but her mouth was thin with displeasure. ‘You are too young to differentiate between people, so you must simply accept what I say. In time, you will discriminate for yourself, you will realize that the family next door is not up to the mark.’ She was a talking dictionary once she got heated, or even warmish. ‘They are not our sort.’

  Anne was my sort, would remain my sort throughout life. I stood and waited for the tirade to continue. Mother might follow up with a lecture on gratitude, a homily on good behaviour, a speech about her own martyrdom. Or perhaps I would get a mixture, a few bits from each well-worn monologue. Whatever, the delivery would take time, but at least she didn’t seem to be lashing out with fists and nails on this occasion.

  ‘No-one knows how I suffer.’ She looked at herself in the mirror over the fireplace. She had opted for martyrdom, then, was practising a pose that might gain her a halo in the fullness of time. And she could be hung in the corridor at St Mary’s with a lunch menu to her left, a timetable to her right. And Joan of Arc staring across from the opposite wall. I swallowed the wry laughter. No way would my mother merit sainthood.