- TOO YOUNG TO SMOKE
When we lived in the Bullring we had balconies in the air. They were our playgrounds, me and Jimmy and John, and all our mates like Kitty next door and Eddie downstairs. The Bullring wasn’t a ring really, it was a long curve of tenements made out of brick and concrete, with a wide balcony that ran past the front doors on all four floors. We weren’t allowed to play on the bombsites left over from the War, but we played hopscotch and skipping and catch up there, and when the ball went over the balcony we’d fight over who’d go down to fetch it back, they had to be fast or the big kids downstairs would rob it.
Our dad sang You are my sunshine, he’d lift me by the arms and swing me round, my little golden sun he called me, our mam said Stop that, Alf, you’ll have her thinking she’s the centre of the world, our dad said She is, and spun me dizzy so I laughed and cried. And when I was little and fell asleep on the couch at bedtime, he’d wrap me up in a blanket and carry me to bed, all warm in his arms.
Once our Jimmy pinched me – he was younger than me, only nine years old but big, with long skinny arms and dirty knees all scabs – and our dad hit him in the face. Jimmy’s lip bled but he didn’t cry. Our mam cried a lot after she and our dad’d been fighting, her tears dripped in the sink and she tried to smooth down her hair with soapy hands but it was too wispy and nearly all grey, you couldn’t even see it’d been fair once.
Our dad worked down the docks. He didn’t get pissed every payday like Kitty’s dad and he never hit our mam even when he came home late and they’d fight about ration books or the lecky bill, and one night he said to me, Your ma’s a saint, girl, don’t you ever forget that.
I went to school for a bit, I didn’t like having to sit still and say Yes Sister, no Sister and getting rulered on the hand if I answered back, and the nuns telling me the Devil was on my shoulder watching everything I did, but I liked it when Sister Clement told us about the stars, and pinned up a big coloured picture of the solar system with the sun all fiery in the middle and all the little planets dancing round it.
After our dad hurt his back and they gave him an office job he hated, he didn’t sing the sunshine song any more, mam got thinner and shoutier, and when I was twelve she said I couldn’t go to school any more because I had to help with my little brothers. I’d walk them to school and make them their dinners, and every Friday I helped mam put dirty clothes and bedsheets in our John’s old pram, we’d bump it down the tenny stairs and over the road to the washhouse, we’d stuff everything in the tubs, then the big spinning drums, then hang it all on drying rails in the hot-air tunnels. All the mothers and aunties and grannies were there drinking cups of tea, I was the only kid most times because the others went to school. I’d bum ciggies off mam’s mates when she wasn’t looking, they said I was too young to smoke but they gave me the ciggies anyway, I’d light up in the stairwell and take a big drag to watch the tip turn gold.
Our Jimmy and our John bunked off school to play footbal and race go-karts them and their mates made, our mam just said Boys will be boys and gave me another pan of spuds to peel.
When I was seventeen the lads all started taking notice, but the only one I wanted was Eddie, he’d got tall and had the biggest smile, he said I was his whole world, we’d no money but my dad gave me away, too proud to lean on his stick, and both our lads were born before me and Eddie were twenty.
The tennies got pulled down to make way for the new cathedral, The Wigwam they called it, all metal and glass with tall windows up to the sky. Eddie didn’t like going there because it reminded him of the nuns and priests that used to hit him at school, but I took our lads in when they were little, I said Me and your nan and grandad lived right here. Our Tony looked all round and said Where, mam? Where’s nana and grandad? It was sunny that day and when you stood in the middle and looked up at the stained glass it was like being in water with rainbows swirling round you, all the colours were lovely but south was best, that’s where the reds and oranges were, and no saints or crosses. Our Brian said It looks hot as hell up there, and I smacked him one on the ear, because you’ve got to show respect haven’t you?
One night after Eddie died of cancer, when our Brian was nineteen and tall like his dad, I told him about my dad carrying me to bed in a blanket, cuddled in his arms. Brian didn’t say a word, he just got a blanket and lifted me off the sofa and carried me upstairs, with me laughing and crying a little bit too.
- QUEEN OF THE STREET
We lift our heads whenever Maureen’s hyena laugh echo-bounces up and down the street, from pavement to bricks to slates to tarmac.
Maureen knows everyone, and everyone knows Maureen. She’s been here since she was a new bride, lost her husband young, brought up two sons that married and moved away.
Now, nearly everyone’s moved away. Some people sold their homes as soon as the regeneration came in, some signed up for part-exchange on the new houses that’ll go up when ours have gone. New for old, the developers call it, like they think we’ll be glad to exchange our high Victorian terraced houses for boxy new ones with a little square of garden. Keeping the community together, they say, but it doesn’t feel like together with so many of us gone, like Janet, and Janet’s old mum, and Betty and Arthur who’d lived in the street forever.
Only Maureen and a few of us old ones stay on, though the Council’s threatening them with compulsory purchase. Ursula says she’s too old to move, ‘I was born in this house, and I’ll die here’. Jack was a union organiser back in the day and says he won’t line the pockets of any fuckin’ billionaire developer, he swears he’ll lie down in front of the bulldozers first. Maureen says his head’s up his arse. She and Jack have history, they had a thing together in the Seventies after Maureen’s husband left her the first time, now they bitch like an old married couple. She calls him dirty old man because his second wife was younger. He calls her Queen of the Street.
Maureen says she stays on because she likes it here. But being honest, there’s not much to like any more. People used to move in next door to their mums and dads, big families, long waiting lists for houses. We remember the music from open windows, door-brass polished every week, people calling hello. Doing the Conga up the street on New Year’s Eve, with Maureen leading. It’s all empties now, windows with metal shutters on. Some houses weren’t secured quick enough, the windowglass got smashed by gangs of kids. Jack says ‘It looks like fuckin’ Beirut, them kids are a disgrace’. Maureen says, ‘You knobhead, what else have they got to do? Where’s the youth clubs them regeneration bastards said we were getting?’ Maureen’s all for the kids, she always was, even when the rest of us were screaming at them and calling 999.
Maureen does what she’s always done, while the street empties out around us. She waits tables at a Greek restaurant in town, helps with her grandkids in St Helens on weekends. Sits out on the sidewalk in the sun with a can of ale in one hand, a ciggy in the other, chatting to neighbours. Not so many of us, now.
Ursula falls and breaks her hip. When they tell her she can’t go home, she sinks fast. Maureen’s down the hospital every day, more than Ursula’s own family. The last thing Ursula whispers is, ‘Sorry I’m a nuisance’. Maureen climbs on the hospital bed and holds her, kisses her sunk cheek as the warmth leaves it.
Maureen changes her mind about selling up, and we all follow her, though Jack mutters, ‘Fuckin’ capitalist bastards’ as he signs the paperwork. Maureen’s moving to St Helens where her family lives. She says she’ll come and visit us in our part-owned boxes.
The wrecking ball and bulldozers start down the far end, even before everyone’s moved out. Janet’s house has its front taken off like a dolls’ house, we can see the wallpaper and the ghost squares where pictures used to hang, like on the bombsites after the War. Maureen likes walking the half-flattened streets after the crews go home, never mind the barriers and no-entry signs. Saying, ‘I helped Vi put up that wallpaper in seventy-two’, and ‘Fuckin’ell, is that our Eileen’s green toilet up there?’ She calls it her Magical Memories Tour.
Jack goes with her one evening. The stars aren’t out yet, but Maureen says you can see them better now the houses are coming down. They look up at a mountain of bricks where Betty’s house used to be, a digger standing silent with bent elbow, the scoop resting on rubble like the knuckles of a gorilla. Some kids are scrambling over the mound, Maureen shouts, ‘Get down lads, you’ll break your fuckin’ necks!’ The kids swoop away laughing.
Maureen rests her head on Jack’s shoulder. Jack leans in and says, ‘What about it, girl? You and me knobbin’ it, for old time’s sake?’
Maureen jabs him in the beer-belly, her hyena cackle flies up as high as the last slate roofs.
Patience Mackarness (she/her) lives and writes in rural Brittany. ‘Urban stargazing’, like a number of her stories, was inspired by sixteen years spent in the very different surroundings of inner-city Liverpool. Her work has appeared in Free Flash Fiction, Mslexia, Flash Fiction Magazine, Citron Review, and elsewhere. Links to her published work can be found at https://patiencemackarness.wordpress.com.
