The Lost Souls' Reunion (6 page)

‘Like a fairy cot, Carmel, it will be. The child will sleep sound in it,' Eddie promised.

She did not admonish him for the time spent on it, only she wished he would look at her, as he had always looked, as if he could not get enough of her and would be happy to die trying. She was happy just to have him near when she was cold. The cold even caught her in sleep. Him being close by, though preoccupied, drove the cold away.

‘Don't worry about the cold now, Carmel. The baby is growing too fast for you to keep up with it. You sleep and let nature take away your weariness,' Eddie spoke gently but all his attention was turned on the work.

‘Sometimes, Eddie,' Carmel put her hands on his shoulders, bent over the task, ‘I wish we could live in a place always sunny.'

‘When the baby is born it will be always sunny,' Eddie promised.

And Carmel smiled at that.

*   *   *

It had been too late when Gomez realized, and it had gone badly for her when he did.

‘You make them wear a johnny,' he shouted, ‘or they don't do it.'

Carmen did not know who was with her or what they were wearing most times.

Now she was seven months pregnant and Gomez had told her she would work until the end because they would not take her now down the back lanes, as she was so far gone.

‘Some men like this. They pay more.'

Nothing had been said about what would happen after the child's birth. But it would not be Carmel's decision.

She did not know if the child was Gomez's and he would not have claimed it anyway.

Hundreds of men had put into her. One had a disease and Gomez found her a good doctor to put her right. He also found the man and put him in hospital.

‘My girls are not dirty.'

He looked after them all. They had things to wear and places to go. But no money of their own. Gomez was with them when they shopped and when they went to parties to meet new men. Gomez was always there.

She lay beside him now, listening to the night sounds of women doing their job with men on floors below her. She watched the lost sky and counted the stars that were framed by her window. Carmen was a woman who did not deserve the stars now. Eddie was a long memory away. But she went to the place where they had once been and she knew that once there had been heat in her and fire and she wished for it now, for she was frozen.

The small of her back ached from the shape of the bed and the weight of the men. She wanted to get up; she had not been up all day and all night. It was coming up to Christmas. It was busy.

She tried for sleep because Eddie always arrived with the crib soon after it. But the day's work had taken up too much of the night for that. She got up but she could not get away. Gomez's breathing was deep but if she made to leave this room he would be awake and asking her to wait for him. She never left the place alone. She never received visitors. The letters to her mother had stopped, with no one to write them.

His cigarettes and matches were beside the bed. She took them and went to light one for herself, curling up against the cold on an armchair. The bottle of spirits was almost empty. She drank what was left.

Even in sleep he did not appear vulnerable. His mouth was hard set, and his jaw clenched. What he had asked her to do that night she did in order to end things quickly.

‘This way does not harm the baby. This is my place.'

She was in pain, bleeding. The cold light of morning near. The child in her rested quietly, but even when it moved she did not feel it. By day it was the child of Gomez. There was no joy in its growth, only a reminder of another child lost.

The voices grew. Burn Carmen Moriarty. Burn the badness out. Fire to keep warm by.

She looked out at the sky and at that precise moment it opened and released a powerful shower of rain, which rattled loudly and came through the leaking places in her roof. Gomez stirred and did not wake, but fell into a heavier sleep, brought on by the drum of the night rain. The baby kicked hard and sharp against her left side. She put out her cigarette.

She took the clothes, which had been bought for her, from the wardrobe and placed them in a pile at the foot of the bed. The room was small, its function did not require much space and space was much in demand in the Soho of my mother's day. The match light was crisp and clean. She held it until it burned her fingers, could not feel anything. Another.

Then the whole box. She rested it on the clothes and knelt. The flames took hold quickly and licked through the colour and form of her soft chains.

She spread her hands and smiled at the sudden warmth. It grew now and it was as if the fire had pierced her veins and ran through them. Carmel had known it would, had known this was the way to come alive again. The voices in her formed song and chorus as the flames journeyed.

If Gomez had felt a hand on him or heard a noise he would have woken. But the flame is soft and silent and does not announce its presence. The fire crept like a great cat and pounced on prey aware of nothing until it roared victory in Gomez's ears and took what it wanted. He screamed but the rain fell louder and it could not enter the sealed window. The sky he had sealed out claimed victory.

Carmel watched the figure thrash and cry. She did not answer it but stared open mouthed as the fire claimed the small, sad space. She stood waiting for the flames to notice her, their mother, and come to her. The door burst open and hands pulled her out.

Standing on the street with the other women in their tired collection of silks, lace and nylon and simple cotton, she watched the flames shooting from the roof of the building. The men who had been with the women had disappeared in various states of undress back to their lives and their explanations.

Carmen Moriarty had a dressing gown to keep out the cold. Even that was not hers. One of the other girls had thrown it over her in the street. She had less in the world now than she had on her first day in London.

*   *   *

When the police delivered her to the former address of Constance Trapwell, an irate woman opened the door. Constance Trapwell had left a year before with a small bald man in his sixties. She had moved to the south of France with him.

They took Carmen to a cell for a night while they made enquiries.

7 ∼ The Daughter of Life

S
HE WALKED THE GROUNDS
of the home by day, and by night they learned to lock Carmel in. That did not matter – the dreams could grow in the daytime now there was no Gomez to prevent them. No men to lie with.

Only Eddie to watch. It's coming on grand, Eddie.

‘It will be ready, Carmel, or I will not be the man I think I am.'

She was in a place that was my mother's harbour, and mine for a while. She wandered the gardens barefoot and was not prevented.

‘Remember to stay close to yourself,' she whispered to me. ‘Remember what your mother forgot. When the crib is ready, we will see your father. Won't we, Eddie? You're too busy now.'

The old sister in charge was kind to Carmel, in a way she was not with any of the other women. The police had made it known the kind of life she had led, the kind of place where she had almost been burned alive.

And while she gathered strength I grew inside her, but I could not be held. She let me go early and I was a small and shrivelled excuse for new life. I was afraid before I was born; it travelled from my mother's heart into mine.

I clutched to her insides, turning this way and that. When they dragged me out with forceps they dragged most of her life with me. I was cold from the long fight out of the comforting darkness and into the harsh light.

Being born too soon I shrank from the sunlight. My mother's womb had been a dark waiting place. I would not have formed if it had not been for the dreams that led us to the places where my mother had walked freely, away from what she had become.

She lost everything in my birth. The dreams left her blood and the harsh voices remained. The colour of my skin said Eddie would not be coming for us. I would not be laid in the crib that had been finished only the previous evening.

‘One more plane, one coat of wood oil. No varnish for the child. Let the child feel the wood proper, wood is good stuff to be felt. We know that.' Eddie was more in a hurry now than before. His desire for neatness overtaken by the desire to be done in time.

‘Don't worry, Eddie,' Carmel tried to rub his shoulders but they were knotted now with intent. ‘The baby can sleep with us in the big bed for a few days.'

‘That's no place for a baby – a big bed. The child will be lost in the bigness of it. The child needs its own place, to start off in the world knowing where and what it is.'

Carmel had watched, without words, until the pains began.

They did not expect either Carmel or me to live. But my cry grew stronger and I was calling for Carmel. My mother did not hear it. She had slid down the long passageway up which I had just travelled. How and why she came back into her body is a mystery. Perhaps the heron still held her.

When she recovered I was already two months old, had been held by her only a handful of times. The voices had returned to her and my mother fought with them this time, for the sake of the child that I was.

The voices wore habits and said, ‘Do what is best for the child.'

Carmel could write her name, but she would not sign the papers that would have given me away. When my mother had me in her arms she knew she would not let this child of dark skin and unknown parentage go.

‘This child will be a liability to your life,' the old sister in charge said gently, ‘but a blessing to others. Leave her with us and find a life of your own.'

My mother called me Sive. It came to her from a time in Scarna when a theatre company had come to the town and brought with them a woman more fine and free than any other woman had seemed.

Sive was not the name on my certificates. The nuns who ran the home we had been placed in chose that name. They changed my name just as they changed the young woman's name from Carmen to Carmel when she first came to them.

The certificates that made me known to the world said, Mary Moriarty. Father unknown. Mother: Carmel Moriarty. Place of Birth: St Margaret's Home, Ealing.

She was asked to leave. The nuns bid us both farewell with a heavy heart, but their conscience intact, for they could not offer her anything while she remained a woman with a child and no wedding ring.

Where else was there for us to go?

8 ∼ Back to the Streets

B
ACK TO THE STREETS
Carmel went, back to Carmen.

Carmen's madness protected her. The ponces did not want the woman who it was said had started a fire in Brewer Street in which one man lost his life. They did not want a woman with a child, who walked the streets now talking to herself.

‘Will you write a letter for me?' she would ask the world.

Only the poorest and most desperate would pay for her now and since she had no place they would have her in back alleys.

We lived in a basement room, far away from the sky, with leaking pipes and a view of feet moving in the world above, unaware that eyes watched below. There was no bathroom. There was a sink from which no water ran. There was a two ring stove with one ring working. The walls were salted with damp and Carmel would stop me from putting my tongue against them. To touch anything was to be part of rot and damp – even when you did not touch, the smell came to you until you became one with it.

I was fed when Carmen remembered. Dreams came when Carmen left me tied to the cot at night and dreams untied me. In them a long thin woman, tall as life, with grey hair and black eyes watched over me as if I was her own.

In all, I should have died, but life wanted me as it had once wanted my mother. I was kept in a room below the world for the first two years of my life, except for the times when Carmen would strap me to her and walk, sometimes for miles. We sat in Soho Square and she would watch me as I played with green blades of grass that were my fascination. We picked flowers when no one looked and brought them home to our flowerless world.

As I grew, the dream lost its hold and the woman with it and I stepped into my mother's place one day on sturdy legs that took me out of the door and up the stone steps worn down by feet before ours, into Soho. I followed my mother's wasted legs in torn tights and shining red shoes that disappeared into the grey-black of the thickening crowd.

I cried and wandered until my cry was heard and a woman picked me up in her arms. She carried me into the café close by where her friends sat. Carmen also sat, alone.

Carmen looked up from her copper-stewed tea and took me.

‘She's a grubby one, could do with a wash, and what is she doing on the streets?'

The woman who had carried me put spit on her thumb and leaned down to wipe my mouth.

‘I didn't even know you had a baby, Irish.' She smelled of the lavender sweets she sucked perpetually.

‘How would you?' another said. ‘We don't even know Irish's name.'

‘You'll have to take her home.'

Carmen shook her head and whispered, ‘Work.'

Carmen put a sugar into her cup and did not stir it. She held the cup to my lips.

‘Don't!' the woman who had carried me screeched. ‘It's too hot! Sergio, get the little girl some milk, there's a good lad. I'll go and get a towel and wipe some of the muck off the mite's face. Keep a child clean they'll grow clean – no one ever tell you that, Irish?'

‘'Course not,' another new face said. ‘Them Irish is savages – they have about ten kids apiece.'

‘That's rich coming from you, Lulu, your mother had twelve.'

Lavender woman came back from the bathroom with a steaming towel. She scrubbed hard. The wail I sent up shook my own bones and lavender woman's dusted cleavage was suddenly a prison as she pushed my face into it to get at the back of my neck with a practised hand.