September Starlings Read online

‘Mr McNally?’ She was in the doorway of the sitting room. I crawled along the landing, held on to the rails, held on to my breath.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘I want a word with you.’ I could picture her chins wobbling indignantly. ‘Really, I wanted a word with your wife, but she seems to be out.’

  ‘I see. What do you wish to talk about?’

  ‘My husband,’ came the swift response. ‘I’m not the first to come after your wife. Doreen Shipperbottom had a do with her last year, because that woman of yours was chasing Ernest the length and breadth of the Market Hall, pretending she was after a particular brand of Turkish delight.’ She cleared her throat in a way that thoroughly expressed her disgust. ‘The delights she was interested in had nothing to do with Turkey, Mr McNally, nothing to do with Ernest Shipperbottom’s sweet stall.’

  My father’s sigh was loud enough for me to hear quite clearly. He was a man with a problem, and the problem was not a new one. ‘Why should this concern you?’

  ‘Why?’ she screamed. ‘Why? Can’t you keep her under control? It’s like having a bitch on heat wandering the streets. I’ve heard of folk locking up their daughters, but it’s coming to a pretty pass when we have to keep our husbands on a lead. She’s not normal. She’s one of those nymphomaniacs, can’t leave the men alone for a minute.’

  He took her into the kitchen – I followed their path with my ears, then I crept like a cat down the stairs as the kitchen door clicked into its jamb. In the sitting room, I beckoned, urged her to come out of her hide. One of her knees cracked, sounded like a bullet emerging from the throat of a pistol.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Be quick, please!’

  She put a finger to her lips, stared at me with so much pleading in her eyes that I almost worried about her for a few seconds. As she pushed past me and into the hall, the kitchen door flew open. ‘I told you!’ screamed Mrs Morris. ‘I told you I could hear something.’ She flew with a speed that was commendable in a woman of her weight, grabbed Mother’s hair, swung her round and smashed her face into the wall. ‘Bitch!’ she screamed. ‘Dirty, fornicating bitch!’

  Instinctively, I beat my father to the scene of the crime, lifted my foot and kicked the wide rump. ‘Don’t you dare hit my mother. Don’t you dare touch her, you ugly, fat person.’ The tears streamed down my cheeks. My foot kept reaching its target until Dad dragged me away. ‘Go upstairs, Laura,’ he said.

  ‘No, I won’t. Mother had to hide behind a chair, so I’m going for a policeman.’

  My mother turned and looked at us, an arm coming up to protect the already injured face. I knew how she felt. I knew all about it, because I had had a bloody nose more than once. Yet I hated seeing Mother suffering as she had made me suffer. ‘Laura, go into the sitting room. We don’t need the police,’ she said.

  I bit my lip, fought to stem the weeping. ‘I’m stopping here.’

  Mrs Morris glared at me, then focused her attention on her victim. ‘And what were you doing behind a chair, Liza McNally?’

  ‘I was … playing hide-and-seek with my daughter.’ Mother never played games, unless they were adult and dangerous, but there was no point in disabusing the unwelcome visitor, so I held my tongue. ‘Laura? Weren’t we playing?’ pleaded Mother.

  ‘Yes.’ Another black blotch stuck to my soul. I almost felt it rushing into me and sinking its claws deep in my belly.

  The bloated woman screamed again, ‘You were hiding from me. You’re a liar as well as a scheming witch. Adulterous, that’s what you are.’

  Adulterous meant old, grown-up, I thought. My mother didn’t look old, certainly nothing like as old as Mrs Morris.

  ‘Have you finished?’ Dad sounded as if he were asking a diner to pass him an empty plate.

  ‘She’s been going with my husband for ages. They are at it in his office every lunchtime. I’ve three children, Mr McNally. How will they feel when they find out that their father is having an affair with the chemist’s wife? And how will you feel when I name her as co-respondent in a divorce suit?’

  ‘Calm yourself, please.’ My dad sounded tranquil, quite resigned and unruffled. He was, I decided, a dignified man. His wife ached to be dignified, missed by a mile. But he was a true gentleman. ‘It will stop, I promise you,’ he said to the fat woman. ‘There will be no further trouble.’

  ‘She’ll only start on somebody else’s husband. Have you any idea of the number of men in this town who have received favours from your wife?’

  He gazed at me. ‘Go away, Laura.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Laura? This is the wrong place for you. Please go upstairs.’

  I walked past them, went up six or seven steps, sat down out of sight, listened avidly.

  My father spoke first. ‘Mrs … er?’

  ‘Morris.’

  ‘Mrs Morris, my daughter is only nine years of age and she is in this house. If only for her sake, I beg you to leave. We may, if you wish, discuss this matter further on neutral ground.’

  There followed a short pause that was punctuated only by my mother’s irregular breathing. I pressed my face against the banister, prayed for the fat woman to go away and leave my father in peace.

  But she started to yell again. ‘Go anywhere near my husband again, and I’ll kill you. There’s a lot of us in Bolton wouldn’t mind turning your guts into garters, so be warned. One of these days, we’ll organize a posse and come after you. There’ll not be one single hair left on that dyed head of yours—’

  ‘My hair is not dyed.’ Even now, in the midst of chaos, Mother defended her natural beauty. ‘Which is more than can be said of yours, Florrie Morris. As for your husband – who on earth would want a man as bald as a coot and with a beer belly down to his knees? Talk sense. I’ve too much pride to be dallying with the failures of this world.’

  ‘You’ve had him, I know you have,’ snarled Mrs Morris. ‘He’s a rich man, just the sort you’re after. Well, he’ll not leave his kiddies for a trollop like you, and if you try any more of your tricks on him, I’ll separate your arms from your body.’

  She could probably do that too, I thought. She was about a foot taller than Mother, and a yard or so broader across the beam.

  ‘Can’t you be more like a man?’ screamed the distracted Mrs Morris. ‘Can’t you put your foot down, keep her in her place?’

  ‘Will you please leave my house?’ he asked.

  I crawled to the top of the stairs and lay flat on the landing. Something told me that my dad might be distraught if he discovered that I had overheard every syllable of the argument.

  The sitting room door slammed, and I gathered that Mother had escaped from her tormentor. Heavy feet plodded after my father’s tap-tapping of leather along towards the front door.

  She wanted a few final words, stopped walking when she reached the porch. ‘Mr McNally, I realize that your life must be difficult. No man likes to be married to a loose woman, but I beg you to do something about her. She’s becoming a public nuisance – everybody’s talking about her. She never left my husband alone, never gave him a minute’s peace. I got it out of him this afternoon, finally went down to the works and faced him with it. He’s terrified of divorce, but he couldn’t get rid of her. She’s had a fortune in meals and clothes, you know and—’

  ‘Please.’ His tone remained level, but I felt his grief as if it had travelled up the stairs like an invisible gas. In that moment, I knew the depths of my father’s despair. ‘Your husband’s weaknesses are no concern of mine,’ he said.

  ‘But your wife is your business, surely?’

  ‘I have no more to say to you, Mrs Morris.’

  I heard the outer door as it opened, felt a draught of quickened air.

  ‘I’m sorry for you,’ she said, and her voice was kinder, softer.

  ‘Save your pity for your children,’ he replied. ‘My own concern is for my daughter. I trust that there will be no further repercussions?’

  ‘I’ve said my piece.’<
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  She left. My dad lingered in the hallway for what seemed to be a very long time. Curious now, I climbed on to the landing railings, leaned down and looked at him. He was crying. There was no noise, but my lovely father was wiping the tears from his eyes. I swallowed my own sobs, dragged myself away, entered my bedroom.

  But in one sense, the worst was yet to come. He did not speak to my mother, did not shout at her, did not allow her the chance to explain the afternoon’s happenings. I heard him walking up the stairs, listened as he paused outside my door. When he seemed satisfied that I was unaffected by the day’s events, he went into his bedroom and closed the door quietly. He did not crash about, pound his fist, slam doors. He simply walked away from the problem.

  My father didn’t care one jot about his wife’s behaviour. I suppose I had already known that my parents’ marriage was not a good one. I had seen Auntie Maisie and Uncle Freddie together, had witnessed the language of love in its spoken form and in gestures, touches, glances. But now, I suddenly knew that my dad was going through hell for me, for his beloved little girl. For my sake, he continued to live with Mother. It was my fault, all of it.

  Chapter Six

  The conversion of Liza McNally took place just a few weeks after the famous altercation with Mrs Florence Morris and all her chins. It was very dramatic, very sudden, and it gave Mother the opportunity to put to use the saintlike expression that had been practised in mirrors all over the house since the dawn of time.

  She began to attend the Methodist chapel every Sunday, sometimes twice, and she took to wearing what she called ‘quiet’ clothes, navy suits, dark coats, white blouses with high necks and prim collars, usually with a discreet little cameo brooch perched neatly at the throat. Her walk became sedate, decorous and slow, but this new demeanour was probably another pantomime for the neighbours’ benefit. It was the same whenever we got any new furniture. She had to be out in the avenue directing the delivery men, making sure that everyone knew how well she was doing. John Willie’s men were well used to my mother, always wore caps pulled down to conceal knowing grins when they came to our house.

  Many years later, I came to realize what a good hatchet job Mrs-Morris-of-the-chins had achieved, even though her effectiveness dwindled with the passage of time. But when the chapel saga began, no-one had visited us for some time, while few spoke to my mother when we went shopping. Inside shops, conversations would stop abruptly as soon as we entered, and discomfort crackled in the atmosphere while we made our purchases.

  Mother did not choose to remain permanently in the persona non grata slot, so she launched herself upon religion in a very big way, a way that was meant to show her fellows the enormity of their mistakes, the error of their collective judgement. In the beginning, before the next lot of trouble arrived, she was doing a form of penance, I suppose, wearing her weeds like sackcloth and ashes, presenting the aura of a wronged woman who has seen the blue-white flame of eternal joy, the orange embers of infinite damnation.

  I suffered, of course, was dragged along in weathers fair and foul, my reluctant patent-leather-clad feet dragging in the wake of Mother’s urgent need to be seen doing the right things. The whole caboodle got me down, wore me out with its monotony. I was forced to wear a silly, babyish, royal blue coat with a gored skirt, velvet collar and velvet strips above the pockets. ‘It’s a princess line,’ Mother announced when she witnessed my dismay. ‘It will be all the rage in a year or two.’

  I scowled. ‘Let the princesses wear it in a year or two, then.’ I could not imagine Princess Margaret putting up with this sort of garb. ‘I hate it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll wear it. You’ll wear it and be glad that you have a coat. There are many children who would be delighted to have a coat that cost three pounds.’

  The coat was bad enough, but the matching hat was almost too awful to mention, though I learned to laugh in later years about my mortal agony. A nine-year-old girl does not enjoy wearing a poke bonnet of dimensions so enormous that it might have served as blinkers for a brewery shire. ‘I am not wearing that. I could get killed wearing it. You couldn’t see a tram coming or a car or anything.’

  ‘It is very fashionable and it hides your sulky face.’

  ‘Anybody would sulk in these clothes. Can I send them to Africa for my black baby?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the mission in town, or the Salvation Army?’

  ‘Laura, do be quiet. You look very nice.’

  I went as far as stamping a foot, but this won me nothing more than a hefty slap across the head. My ears rang with the pain while she repeated from behind gritted teeth, ‘You look very classy, so stop the nonsense.’

  I looked stupid and felt stupid. The one benefit of the terrible hat lay in the fact that when sitting, standing or kneeling in a pew, I could not always see my mother praying earnestly by my side. Mother’s idea of earnestness was ludicrous. She screwed up her face and moved her lips, so I was minimally glad for the narrowing of peripheral vision while we were at service.

  It was a solid, well-built chapel with good windows and polished pews. We lived in one of the ‘better’ areas that clung by the skin of its teeth to the rim of affluence. Had we been truly rich at that time, we would have entered the hallowed acres of Heaton, would have settled ourselves further along Chorley New Road. But we were still up-and-coming, would arrive elsewhere in a year or so.

  The preacher was a noisy zealot with a handsome face, a dowdy wife and a terrible fixation about hell and all its horrors. His three children sat in a front seat with their mother, whose nondescript looks they had inherited. They never flinched when their dad roared, never showed the slightest response to his ravings. I wondered occasionally how they reacted at home when he asked for the salt to be passed along the table. Did he yell, promise everlasting banishment to those who did not hand the condiments to God’s messenger? In actuality, he advertised Satan far more vigorously than he commended God, and this implied that several among his congregation must have known little about the alternative to Hades.

  Each Sunday, my mother would emerge from the chapel with a smile of such beatitude that the minister could not fail to notice how powerful his sermonizing had become. This meant that Mother and I received a lot of attention, and I was embarrassed as much by my mother’s sighs and flutterings as I was by the dreadful hat. He shook hands with everyone, made the odd comment to some people, peered down his long nose at others. Mother’s glowing face always made him stammer. When we came out through the door, I bowed my head and listened to the stammering. Then Mother would show me up, go on at length about how soul-cleansing he was, how gifted in the art of translating the will of God so that it might be understood by lesser beings. I kept my head so low that all I could see was the pavement and my shoes. If the ground had opened up, I would have jumped gladly into the hereafter in spite of the heat, the horns and the cloven hooves.

  I got fed up with it. Getting fed up with chapel, saying that I was sick to death with it, was the first sign of my next attempt at rebellion. I had taken Mother to task before, but previous problems paled into insignificance in the face of the ranting pastor and when compared to that hat and coat. This time, I was determined to get my own way, was not prepared to negotiate a treaty, had no intention of giving one inch of ground to anyone. Even Mother. If she wanted to kill me, then she could just get it over and done with. I would leave a note for Dad, would let him know that I must not be buried in my ‘Sunday best’.

  At first, in spite of firm resolve and several hours of rehearsal, I took the coward’s way out, a headache, stomach pain, an ankle twisted on uneven paving along Chorley Old Road. But I ran out of lies, ran out of my father’s remedies for illnesses and injuries that I’d made up in the first place. After depleting my store of excuses and imagination, after emptying my father’s store of medicaments, I simply said no.

  Mother was never a woman to take no for an answer. It was as if the word ‘no’ should not exist
in my vocabulary. ‘You will do as you are told this instant, Laura McNally. Put on that lovely coat immediately. It cost three pounds, and I am not leaving it to hang with the mothballs.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Oh yes, you are.’

  If she was dug in, then I was even further entrenched, sinking lower by the minute into the sea of mud that was my own determination. ‘I’m not wearing that stupid coat again as long as I live. And I’m not wearing that stupid hat, either.’

  We were in the dining-room ‘enjoying’ our Sunday breakfast. My father, vague as usual until my voice was raised, put down his newspaper and stared mildly at his belligerent daughter. ‘What is the matter, Laurie-child?’

  ‘Laura,’ snapped my mother. ‘She’s a big girl, and it’s time you dropped that baby name, John.’

  He ignored her. ‘Laurie?’

  I was suddenly inspired. ‘Well, he frightens me. That Mr Openshaw has a terrible loud voice and he screams all the time and goes on about the day of judgement and burning in the flames of hell.’ I glanced at my mother as she pushed the orange end of a Craven A into her mouth. ‘Drinking is a sin and so is smoking. Mother will go to hell because of smoking and you will go too Dad, because you have a glass of whisky at night. It’s best not to be a Methodist if you drink and smoke.’ The ensuing pregnant pause aborted itself as Mother coughed against the day’s first dose of nicotine. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘it’s all a terrible waste of time when I could be getting on with homework and things.’

  He folded the paper and placed it next to his napkin on the table. Dad and I didn’t approve of napkins, so we avoided using them whenever possible. I followed suit with my own napkin, crushed it into a ball and set it in the centre of my plate where the egg had congealed. Mother’s fried eggs were always burnt or still clear and runny where they should have been white. This had been one of her runnier days.

  Dad cleared his throat. ‘You should try to go for your mother’s sake, dear. There’s no need to take the man too seriously. Close your ears when he shouts about hell.’