Orphan of Angel Street (7 page)

There was a pause. ‘Please ’elp me,’ Susan begged wretchedly. ‘I’ll go in the bed again else.’

Mercy climbed stiffly from the bed, teeth chattering and slid her arms under Susan’s and round her chest.

‘Skinny, aren’t you?’

‘Good job, innit?’

Though slightly smaller than her, Mercy had little difficulty in dragging Susan off the bed and positioning her on the pot.

‘Ta,’ Susan whispered, so humbly that Mercy felt ashamed of herself. She stared at Susan’s white legs. She’d never seen such scrawny, wasted limbs before.

‘So’ve you ever been able to walk then?’

‘For a bit I could – I can remember walking. I was taken sick years ago. They call it infantile paralysis. My legs ’ave got a bit better lately but they don’t think they’ll ever be any good.’

Susan looked up at her, her face ghostly in the dim light, her eyes coal-black like a snowman’s and a pudding basin of black hair.

‘You come to stop with us then?’

‘No!’ Mercy snapped, then added helplessly, ‘I dunno.’ She couldn’t even have said at that moment just how much she didn’t want to live here with Mabel and her crippled scrap of a daughter. Nothing was real. It was as if she were trapped in a dream and couldn’t wake up.

‘You don’t ’alf bang about in your sleep,’ Susan commented. After a moment she indicated that she’d finished and Mercy hoisted her back on to the bed.

‘Mom wants you to ’elp look after me like, so I’m not stuck ’ere on my own. She’s got to go and find a job or she says we can’t pay the rent or eat.’

‘Haven’t you got a dad?’ Mercy pulled the remnants of bed clothing up to cover Susan so just her head was visible.

‘’E just went. A few months back. Left us.’

She could hear the desolation in Susan’s voice, but could only say, ‘Oh,’ unable to imagine a real dad or real mom, then added, ‘Why?’

‘Dunno. ’E were a good dad really. Didn’t want us any more, I s’pose. And then we had no money so we come to live over ’ere. We ’ad a bit of a nicer ’ouse before but Mom couldn’t keep up with the rent.’

Mercy sat down on the edge of the bed, shivering.

‘D’you just lie ’ere all day then?’

‘I didn’t used to before we came ’ere. She’d get me up and that. Miss Pringle – one of our neighbours – she used to come and sit and do things with me. She were a teacher when ’er was younger. It was ’er taught me to sew and knit like. She said if I couldn’t use my legs I might as well keep my hands busy. Mom never did nothing with me. Miss Pringle said it was a shame.’

‘How old are you? Don’t you go to school?’

‘No, never. I’m thirteen.’

‘Thirteen! Blimey I reckon you’re smaller than Amy was!’

‘Who’s Amy?’

‘My best pal. They sent her away to Canada.’

‘Miss Pringle was my best pal.’ Susan sounded dismal. ‘Don’t s’pose I’ll be seeing ’er now neither.’ She swallowed hard. ‘How old’re you?’

‘Twelve – nearly.’

‘What’s it like in an orphanage then? And school?’

‘It’s awright.’ Mercy couldn’t think of anything to say. It was all she knew. What was there to say about it? ‘We had much bigger rooms,’ she brought out finally, looking round at the bleak space the bed was squeezed into.

It was growing lighter. Mercy went to the window. There was no sign of frost and the glass was running with a mixture of condensation and grime. She wiped one of the lowest panes with the back of her hand and stood wrapping her arms round herself to try to keep warm.

The lamp was still lit outside, reflecting in puddles on the uneven bricks. Mercy could just make out the long stretch of the yard, reaching along to a high building in the far corner. As she watched, a woman came out from one of the houses beside Mabel’s and walked briskly across carrying a bundle with one hand and holding her long skirt up out of the wet.

I’m not stopping here, Mercy said to herself. I’ll go back to the home and tell ’em. They can’t leave me here.

She’d never seen a more desolate place. But she thought of the journey here the day before, and knew she didn’t have the first idea where she was or how to go about getting back. She also remembered Miss O’Donnell’s warning about what would happen if she did. She swallowed hard. Oh Dorothy, she cried inside. Where are you? If you were here it’d be all right.

‘Mercy?’

She didn’t want to turn round and let Susan see the tears on her face.

‘What?’

‘Could yer empty this for me? Mom hates doing it and she’ll keep on. She weren’t so bad before but she moans all the time since we come ’ere.’

‘So she’s got me ’ere to be your slave, has she?’ Mercy snapped, angrily wiping her eyes on her sleeve. She pulled the rest of her clothes on quickly and went round to Susan’s side of the bed to pick up the chamber pot.

‘There’s a suff out in the yard.’

Mercy straightened up. ‘If your Mom thinks I’m staying ’ere she’s made a big mistake,’ she announced haughtily, and went to march out of the room. But she caught her foot in a trailing loop of blanket and tripped. The chamber pot leapt out of her hands and smashed with a great noise and splash. Mercy fell against the foot of the bed banging her head.

‘What the ’ell was that?’

Mabel waddled across the landing like a bloodhound, still attired in the same corset, chemise and bloomers, that Mercy had seen last night.

‘Oh yer ’aven’t gone and broken the po’?’ She stared accusingly at Mercy who was rubbing her cheek. ‘Yer clumsy little bitch. Who’s going to pay for a new one, eh? You, I suppose?’

‘No—’ Susan spoke up. ‘It weren’t ’er fault it were me. I tipped it over – knocked it with me arm. Mercy didn’t do nothing.’

Mabel stared from one to the other of them, eyes gluey with sleep, the skin under them wrinkled like rice paper. Even she could see it was pretty unlikely Susan could create a crash like that, but she wasn’t in the mood to keep on about it. She wanted her morning cuppa.

‘Pick up the bits,’ she ordered Mercy. ‘Don’t cut yourself or there’ll be that to deal with as well. Take ’em down the yard. You’ll ’ave to do your business in the bucket from now on, the pair of yer.’

She went off, heavily, down the stairs. They heard her cursing over the broken tread.

Still rubbing her sore head Mercy gaped at Susan in bewilderment. Susan’s face broke into a broad, mischievous smile.

May 1912

‘Come and see, Mom – Mr Pepper’s nearly finished it!’

Mabel Gaskin sat on a rickety chair outside number two, Nine Court, Angel Street, her face bullish with resentment. Susan’s joyous cry as she came rattling towards her along the yard only made her scowl more and pull her arms tight across her pendulous bosom.

Susan’s face was alight with hope and laughter as Mercy hurtled along with her, squeezed into the go-kart belonging to the twins, Johnny and Tom Pepper, from number one. Susan was clinging to the sides of the ancient black pram from which it was made, her wasted legs and feet flapping up and down over the end.

‘I ain’t shifting nowhere,’ Mabel snarled.

Her eyes met Mercy’s for a second over Susan’s shoulder. The girl’s hair was a tumbling skein of gold after last night’s dunking in the tin bath, and there was so much of it it almost seemed to overwhelm her delicate face. Her prettiness was marred though, by harsh mauve bruising round her left cheekbone, and the expression of loathing in her narrowed eyes directed at Mabel could have melted lead. Mabel glowered back. Every time she looked at that kid nowadays she longed to batter her. And that was often what she did.

‘’Ere—’ Alf Pepper called. He was a huge bloke, a Black Countryman with a ruddy, bashed up face from boxing and the nickname ‘Bummy’ on account of his low slung trousers. ‘I’m gunna need them wheels off o’ there in a minute.’

Eyes smouldering with triumph, Mercy struggled to turn the go-kart and, leaning all her weight on it, rattled back along the blue-brick yard to where a gaggle of the neighbours was gathered round Alf who was building Susan the first wheelchair she had ever had.

Susan turned her head for a moment, eyes pleading, but Mabel stuck her nose in the air and looked away. She wasn’t going to stay out here to be shamed any longer. She got up and carried the chair indoors in as stately a manner as possible and slammed the door.

‘Old misery,’ Elsie Pepper said, bending to pick up little Rosalie who was ‘momming’ at her skirts. She was a sturdy-looking woman, dressed in her usual attire: a long, rough skirt with a blouse tucked in. Her thick auburn hair was usually taken up under a man’s cap when she was working, which was nearly always, but she’d left it off today. ‘There’s summat wrong with ’er, that there is. That child’s right enough given a bit of kindness.’

Elsie was in her mid-forties, had given birth to nine children, eight surviving, and believed implicitly in hard work and family life. She was blessed with more energy than the average person, had a sound idea of how to feed a big family well on Bummy’s modest but regular wages as a chippy and, to make means stretch further, took in washing. She always had a house full of it.

There were several things which made Elsie’s blood boil and these were dishonesty, men with no sense of responsibility, and cruelty, especially to children.

Cruelty was what she saw in Mabel Gaskin, and Elsie had made it her business, as she did frequently for folk in need, to look out for Mercy and Susan and take them under her wing.

Inside the house Mabel climbed the rotting stairs shaking with rage and humiliation. Going to the girls’ room she stood back from the window, peering out at the far end of the yard which was buttressed by the high wall of the wire factory.

They were all out there, laughing and carrying on, all against her as usual. Most of all she loathed the Pepper family with all their kids and their self-righteous ways. Elsie, who everyone seemed to regard as the yard’s gaffer, handing out her opinions left, right and centre. ’Course, she’d got Mercy well under her thumb. And all her flaming kids. No one should have that many kids. There were the twins who Mercy adored, and more infuriating still, the Pepper family were so taken with her. And now thanks to that scheming, interfering Mercy, Susan was going to have a wheelchair and she’d be out, for everyone to see her as the cripple she was.

‘She’s mine!’ Mabel’s voice came out in a harsh, irrational outburst. ‘My baby. I won’t let you take her away. She’s mine, mine, mine.’

Unable to stand watching any more of this merriment outside she went to her own room. She loathed Mercy for her energy and guile, for her devotion to Susan and for being more than she herself would ever be. Yet now she couldn’t do without her. She wanted the very best money could buy for Susan, but she barely had any money and couldn’t bear anyone else to be the one to help her. She was above all these slummy people yet had to live among them.

She fell on the bed in a turmoil of self-hatred provoked by the crowd out there all bunched against her, Susan’s glowing hope, the wheelchair – yet another of the things she’d failed to provide. Failed. That’s what she was, in every way, and Susan, her one scrap of hope, the one who would always have to stay with her and depend on her, was pulling away now as well.

Mabel Smith was born in 1873 in the workhouse at Winson Green. Her mother, already in poor health, died of TB two years later never having left the workhouse, and Mabel and two older siblings, a boy and a girl, were orphaned. She never knew who her father had been.

At fourteen Mabel was put into service as a kitchen maid to a family in Handsworth. Over the next couple of years her thickset features, which had given her a skulking, toadlike appearance as a child, spread and thinned to an earthy sort of glamour with those gappy teeth, the hooded eyes and long black hair. Her body was generously curved and stayed lithe through housework.

Albert Gaskin – then seventeen, whirling along the streets on a baker’s delivery cycle – started shilly-shallying at this particular door in Broughton Road, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mabel’s broad hips and supple waist bending over a bucket, the breasts full of promise, strong arms wringing a cloth, sleeves rolled, muscles moving under the skin.

Mabel, whose head had been rammed full of the notion that as a workhouse orphan she’d never be of anything more than heavy domestic use to anyone, suddenly found a more generous slice of hope than she’d been expecting.

Albert, thin, gangly, with high cheekbones, shorn brown hair and a jauntily-angled cap, pursued her with cheerfulness, persistence and a seething eroticism that quite took her by surprise. The sounds of desire he let out even at their first kiss were something she’d never forget.

When eventually Albert said, ‘Will yer marry me, Mabel, my true love?’ she had long ago made up her mind.

Things started well. Albert moved into factory work and Mabel carried on in service as a ‘daily’. They rented a couple of rooms. After all the anticipation the wedding night in 1893 was a sad disappointment (Albert had had several too many pints of Butler’s Ale). But things improved on that front and others. Mabel fell pregnant. She bloomed. She had a home, or half a one, a sweet-natured husband in work and she was to be a mother. Workhouse-born she may have been, but look what she was making of herself now!

The baby, a girl who they named Victoria, was born dead. Albert stayed off work for a week and promptly got the sack. After, he came home with two finches in a cage who chirruped mournfully and pecked their ash-coloured breasts until Mabel screamed for him to take them away again.

By the time a second baby was on the way, Albert had long found another job, and the sad darkness haunting the rooms near the canal thinned and blazed into hope again. Dulcie was born on All Hallows Eve, a plump, fair baby. Albert wept again, this time for joy.

At three months Dulcie contracted whooping cough. Mabel rushed for a doctor, uncaring of the expense and cursing the mother with a whooping child she’d spoken to when crumbling crusts for the ducks over in Handsworth Park. In five days she was dead.

Mabel fell into mourning and depression. They didn’t see Albert’s scattered family, and with none of her own to mourn with her she took it all on herself. Somewhere in her nature was a dulled, lugubrious space reserved for grief and disaster, perhaps cultured in the workhouse. But this was not the case with Albert. He was sunshine and tears all at the surface, his personality as slim as cardboard, enough to accommodate only the thinnest of shadows.