The Lost Souls' Reunion (7 page)

‘Why is it kids the world over hate being bathed?'

‘I don't go with that. Every one of us growing up was cleaner than this one.'

Lulu took out a compact and bothered already perfect hair rolled in a chignon. I watched her apply blood-red lipstick and smear kohl on the upper corners of her eyes. She stood up smartly and grabbed a patent leather handbag and powder-blue coat – both as new as Carmen's were worn.

‘There she goes, Lulu – as French a fuck as anyone from Leeds called Nancy.'

Lavender woman blew smoke at Lulu. Lulu was on her way out the door when she stopped and stuck her head back in again.

‘That's rich coming from a prostitute called Fanny.'

Sergio, a large man with hands that had no business cooking, put a baby's bottle of milk and an almond pastry in front of me.

‘I'd best be off too,' Fanny smiled at Carmen who did not smile, but rose herself and walked after Fanny.

‘Look, Irish, you can't just leave the child here. Sergio has a living to make too. I've got to get on. We all have our own worries.'

Carmen did not move. Fanny gave her an impatient shove towards me.

‘Go on, girl, look after your own. I have four waiting at home.'

Sergio was shaking his head and the other customers were waiting on the outcome. I was eating my pastry and drinking milk.

The door opened. In came a woman tall as life, and wearing a blue-grey dress. Her hair was silver white and her eyes a glittering black, her face unlined though there were years on her. Her step was a silent one and her presence spoke loudly. I went to her as one I had known all my life and she welcomed me with the practised kindness of one who had seen me each day. Sergio went to a table in the far corner nearest the counter and began clearing it.

‘Here, Myrna,' Fanny popped a lavender sweet in her mouth. ‘You about for a while?'

‘Yes,' she spoke in a voice that was not loud and everyone heard.

Myrna took my hand and the world was in hers. Her skin had something past warmth and beyond cold. She led me to the table Sergio had cleared and I spent all day, and many after that watching her.

That was how I came to be known to all the women of Sergio's Café. There were women who worked behind closed doors, there were street women and show women and then there was Carmen, who worked where no one worked. I went with her to the café each day and one or other of the women took care of me. Mostly Myrna.

The women of Soho, our increasingly bright Soho, no longer secretive but with its uses and skills displayed on garish signs that spoke of now and not tomorrow, all knew of Myrna.

Where Myrna came from no one knew. They once tried to deport her and could not, because she had no home place, no placeable accent, no relatives. She had shed all dutiful ties and links with the past. Her choices were always her choices and she could see no other way of living.

Some of the oldest colleagues and acquaintances of hers – women who had worked in the gentlemen's clubs of the twenties and some even before that, said she had always been there and had always been alone.

What she did to survive was what they did. She went with the men. But they got nothing of her. She went with them in such a way as would make a man continue to want her for the rest of his days. They would spend a night with her and in the morning it was as if they had never been there. It made them come again, a wanting in them.

The old women of Soho remembered Myrna young. She arrived with nothing but a grey dress and shoes that were held together with two rounds of string and a small miracle. She wore nothing but grey all her life.

By the time Constance Trapwell and Carmel Moriarty had found their way to that world, Myrna's working days were long over. But she continued to live among her own. Sergio's was where she spent her afternoons and nights. In Sergio's Café I watched her and I learned from her and I never knew all of her, even, in times to come, when she told me all she knew of herself. She could never tell me all she was. The details of her life do not explain the mystery. By her ways Myrna told me all she did not say was all she did not know.

Sergio's was where the women of Soho came to discuss the business of their days and nights and to do so without fear. Sergio was that rare thing – a silent Italian who could not cook. He made up for it with warmth, comfort and plenty of tea, coffee, sandwiches and pastries. They were my food for six years.

From Sergio I learned the value of silence. When I learned to talk I also learned to stop talking, because I heard the world better then. I did not look at people, but I watched their every move.

*   *   *

When I close my eyes now I can see the café. I smell the cheap scent and cigarettes of the working women. I see them check themselves in the mirror over the counter as they leave and come in, a mirror that had lost its silvering over the years as the women lost their brightness, rubbed out by hard-edged lives. I hear the high chatter and low confidences. I see the dark-wood tables scraped with names and longing and the chairs with tatty cushions in bright brocade curtain material, sewn by Sergio's long-gone wife. She had been the one to cook and make the place into a proper restaurant. He had been lost when she had left.

Sergio threw out what threatened, but he would never throw out anything his wife had made in case she came back through the door, which tinkled as it opened and shut.

I see Sergio, always with a cloth in his hand, cleaning in the way that men do – without seeing the dirt. He cleaned slowly and with thought in his eyes. He would wipe away the condensation from the half-curtained window on cold days when the women's breath had filled the room with welcome warmth and clouded the view.

I see his balding head and large belly under a grey-white apron and the heavy arms folded when the window is wiped clear and his eyes on the street outside.

Myrna would come and stand beside him and whisper, ‘Make some more coffee.'

The café held the combined sadness of the women who worked and the man who served them. But it held their laughter and hopes too, their speculations on silver linings and sunshine around corners that, for most, never came. The women and Sergio were the first evidence I had that lost souls make good together with what they have.

When you have nothing you always have conversation. Women with little to lose, sharing what was left.

It was a kind of home.

*   *   *

Carmen became afraid to stay in any one place. We moved around the narrow streets, leaving no marks behind for her sake. I was eight when I put out Carmen's first fire. She had torn the pages from a phone book.

‘The way home is here, Sive, but I can't find it because I haven't the right eyes.'

She put a match to her efforts. I quenched the flames quickly enough with a pan of water. It had begun.

I found food for us, washed us and dressed us from the cast-offs the other women gave me. Once more Carmen was in things not her own. I took her by the hand to the kind doctor with the soft voice and thick glasses who came once a month to clean the women up as best he could. My mother was beyond cleaning.

Fanny and Lulu prided themselves on not having need of that kind of doctor. Fanny because she only took ‘respectables', Lulu because she only did kinky.

‘There's no use having money for trimmings and no teeth, now, Lulu,' Fanny warned. ‘You're best with those who want little of it.'

‘Why is it you never mention the word sex?' Lulu barked. ‘You've been working as long as I've known you and you never mention sex.'

‘Well, it's not as if I enjoy it. You ever tried to feed four and clothe four kids on coupons? Well that's how I got started. What's your excuse?'

‘I'm just a tart,' Lulu said in a hard way that hid the softness of her story.

‘Well, there's no one to dispute that. When I got going I had a bed settee and five of us to sleep in it. I had two pairs of shoes for four pairs of feet and me own. Now I got a nice flat and keep it nice. I got lino, curtains, dressing table…'

‘You got clap, too.'

‘I never. All mine wear French letters or they don't get near me.'

I watched them all from Myrna's table. Myrna was given respect because she did not ask for it. The women all knew her to be one of their own and yet apart from them. In a place where many shared their stories Myrna did not share hers. But she told many of theirs. Myrna read cards and told fortunes by palms. The women would ask for this and more often than not Myrna would say no. Why not? the women would ask. It's worth a few bob to you.

‘I tell the truth, you don't want to hear the truth.'

Myrna would say nothing more, but look at Sergio. He would put a hand on the woman's shoulder.

Myrna drank coffee black as her eyes. I tasted it once and found it bitter.

‘You are too young for such sourness,' Myrna smiled a rare smile.

*   *   *

I did not have proper schooling, but one or two of the women would give me lessons. At eight I wrote and read but not well. I wrote letters for my mother, to a place she knew from memory. I wrote as much as I could of what she asked me to say to Noreen. I wrote my name, over and over, while she told me to write all I could not. When I had done writing, my mother would come close to sleep and give into it, peaceful only in those times. I would take the words and paper and hide them where she could not find them. I put my head on her lap and went to my dreams of places other than Soho. No one begins like my mother, I learned in those dreams. All are innocent.

9 ∼ Welsh Lucy's Request

I
WAS SITTING
with Myrna when the young girl with the white face came in and walked straight up to Myrna.

‘Are you the one reads fortunes?'

Myrna looked at her a moment and said yes for the first time in many days. She spoke nothing for a while. The girl looked ready to run out the door, there were sweat pearls on her forehead – she rubbed her hands together, palms flat and kept looking at Sergio.

‘He safe?'

Myrna nodded.

‘I'm Lucy. Welsh Lucy the girls in my building calls me, as distinct from the French girl. I come here because they told me you could help me with my work. I'm not doing it the right way.'

Welsh Lucy's whole body was shaking. I stared at her.

‘Tell the child to stop looking at me.'

Myrna looked at Lucy and said, ‘I can tell you what to do with the men and it won't do you any good. You're not cut from the cloth that's suited, Lucy. Go off somewhere.'

‘What sort are you anyway? I need to have some lessons to do what I do better. That's all. Will you tell me what to do?' Welsh Lucy urged. ‘Or do I have to go on myself trying?'

‘Take the child to another table, Sergio.'

Sergio moved me and Myrna spoke in a long, low voice to Welsh Lucy. They talked for a while and when Lucy left she was not shaking. But I saw the shadow with Lucy and I ran to Myrna and pointed to it.

‘You see it?' Myrna asked. I nodded.

‘Then you have the eyes.'

Myrna drank more coffee that day than any other and spoke no more words. I played with the sugar grains, pouring them down my sleeve and piling them back into the sugar bowl. I reached for Myrna's sleeve to do the same and she caught at me and I would have shrieked but I was silent on that day, as I was on all days.

‘You remember the eyes of Welsh Lucy, Sive. Eyes full of shadow. You remember,' she hissed. ‘When you see eyes in
your
head like that then remember this: it is best to walk away from all you have known, with nothing to remain or remind. Get ready to leave, Sive, leaving is upon you.'

*   *   *

Two months later Welsh Lucy's body, a knife through her young heart not yet hardened, was found in the kind of laneway that had seen it all before, opposite Sergio's Café. The police had been crawling around all day and reporters were slipping women a few quid for stories about Welsh Lucy that may or may not have been true. When there was a murder, in those days there was a stir. The women gathered in Sergio's and talked rapidly and smoked as much, sucking life and calm from cigarettes, and put off going to work.

‘What we have to do!' Fanny broke her lavender sweet hard against her back teeth and pulled on the cigarette harder. ‘Take my last punter. There's him sweating like a pig and me panting and the business finally done. When it's over he says, “I hate people like you.” Don't know why, but I burst into tears. The old bastard got to me!'

‘They all hate us,' Lulu rooted in her handbag. ‘He's only saying what they all think. They hate us because they need us. That's why you get them to pay before – once the need is gone so is the will to pay for it. And they're strange buggers. I've no respect for any man has to pay for it with me.'

‘What about your fishy fella, Lulu?' Fanny urged as Lulu struck a match like she was striking out all the ones who'd had her and would have her again.

‘Well,' Lulu lit her cigarette and poked it into a pearlescent holder. ‘He brings up a big salmon in an ice box and gets me to whack him with it on the arse. It's frozen solid at the start and by the end the smell of it would put you off all fish, even caviar.'

‘I had caviar once,' Fanny laughed. ‘Tasted like snot.'

‘What we need is for rich men with bad eyesight to love us out of all this,' Fanny spoke as if no one was there at all. ‘We need some of Myrna's stuff.'

‘You need to find the man first before Myrna can do anything,' Lulu reminded. ‘Personally speaking, I wouldn't be bothered loving a man who paid me. But I'd marry a rich one all right. Loving and marrying – two different things.'

I had seen Myrna take the hopes of more than one woman seriously and turn them into reality. I had heard a woman tell Myrna of a man who had been brought to her, a shy man, too old for his first time, but his first it was. Could Myrna read her cards and tell her if he would come back?