*
It was almost ten when Tommy riddled down the upstairs fire. ‘’Tis a small mercy, but one I’m grateful for that the boats are out in the morning,’ said Maura.
The villagers lived by the tide and the light. As soon as it was fully dark, they made their way home, ready for an early catch on the boats or to lay the lobster pots, but it was not always so. If the fiddler or the storyteller called into the village, the wives and the children came too and not one of them left; at times it felt to Maura as though they had been taken over by squatters. The villagers drank until they could stand no more and slept where they fell, the wives and children too, with no catch the following day. Maura had resorted to dousing them with cold water, courtesy of her mop and bucket, to encourage them to move and her insistence that they left the inn and returned to their own homes had won her no friends amongst the locals, who knew no end to time, no urgency of need. Life was sun up, sun down, pots and boats out, pots and boats back in. Always, just enough to last until the next day. Life happened at a pace so slow Maura could barely comprehend how it was they existed at all.
As Tommy went to fetch peat sods to fill up the bucket, Maura washed up their cups in the small rear kitchen. She felt a sadness wash over her as she looked at her reflection in the mirror hanging next to the sink. She was ageing, she thought. Her face looked even thinner than usual. The sound of the wind and rain was so loud she almost couldn’t hear the radio. She half smiled as she remembered how often the women on the four streets complained about the wind that blew up from the Mersey.
Tommy came and slipped his arms around her waist. ‘Got you,’ he whispered into her ear. She hugged her husband and for a long, still moment they breathed as one.
‘I was just thinking to myself, how the women back at home—’
‘Here is home,’ Tommy corrected her.
‘No, I mean back on the four streets.’ She eased herself out of his embrace. ‘They should try a day living in a house facing the Atlantic. To think how much we moaned about the river Mersey. You can hardly hear yourself think in here for the noise. Do you think the ocean has ever got as far as the front door?’
Tommy wasn’t listening; his hands slipped down her back and cupped her buttocks as he began to kiss her neck.
‘Tommy, stop, would you?’ she protested as she pushed his hands away. On any other night she would have giggled and a play fight, which only ever ended in the bedroom, would have ensued. ‘Tommy, we have to think. What are we to do about Harry and that brute, Cleary? Could you imagine him coming home with his hands bleeding like that if we were still living in the four streets? Sister Evangelista would never harm a hair on a child’s head, even if Miss Devlin had sent him to her office.’
Harry had been so stoical when Tommy had returned home and applied the iodine to the bleeding, raw cuts on his hands. She’d had to fight back her own tears as well as wipe away Harry’s. Her brave little soldier had turned a ghastly shade of white and she’d felt his legs buckle beneath him. Tommy had grabbed him and held him fast to his own chest. Maura saw the anger in his eyes as their son tried his best not to cry out again. Now Tommy released his hold and took his wife’s hands.
‘Maura, I got worse when I was a kid. The Brothers are brutal, all right, but they make a firm fist of turning us into good earners.’
Maura knew exactly what her husband was doing and it was no use. He had done it every day since they had moved to the west coast. ‘Save your breath, Tommy. You try to put a gloss on everything that happens here but you aren’t going to make me feel any better. You can’t put a shine on a turd and that man belongs in a midden. This is serious – and anyway, they teach you nothing. You can’t flamin’ read; if you could, we wouldn’t be here. All you know, our Kitty taught you. Are you really such an arse feck?’
Tommy had the good grace to look embarrassed, if a little crestfallen, and Maura instantly felt guilty.
‘Jesus, why did God make men such eejits?’ she asked. ‘They turn out good workers, I’ll give you that, but Tommy, our kids spend more time in school on their catechisms and writing in the Gaelic than they do on their tables. This school is in the last century. I know for a fact it’s not as backwards as this in Galway or Dublin. But here we are in the forgotten land, stuck behind the mountains where no bugger comes because the roads are too bad.’
Tommy bent to switch off the standard lamp by the plug. ‘Aye, well, there’s more to school than maths and reading and the Brothers, they run schools all over Ireland. They know what they are doing.’
‘Tommy, are you mad? What more is there?’
Tommy sighed and gave in. He had been filled with his own rage when he had first seen Harry’s hands and was consumed by an urge to put his coat back on and march down to the schoolhouse to give Mr Cleary a piece of his mind. But breathing deeply, he’d waited for the red mist to pass. The last time someone harmed one of his children, a murder had been committed… What was more, Tommy knew, as did Maura, it would only make things worse. ‘Cleary
