Coming Home to the Four Streets by Nadine Dorries (books that read to you .txt) 📗

They turned, startled to see their son, little Paddy, in the doorway, his dog Scamp by his side, ears and tail down. There was no smile to match little Paddy’s words, just a worried, furrowed brow. This morning the raised voices made his heart race with anxiety and his bladder weak. Before, whenever she heard raised voices, Auntie Maura would be straight in through the back door and either usher little Paddy and the others into her kitchen, or reprimand Peggy and Paddy until they stopped shouting; little Paddy no longer felt safe, now Maura wasn’t there.

Peggy fixed a smile on her face. ‘We’ve milk,’ she said. ‘Eric has left four steri on the step and isn’t that just great? You fetch it in quick and I’ll make everyone pobs, eh, how does that sound? We’ve got bread left over from yesterday to make it with, and a little bit of sugar.’

Little Paddy felt relief wash over him. He would do anything for his mother, but he hated it when she asked him to go out and steal milk from Malcolm at the Seaman’s Stop on the Dock Road, while he still had his curtains closed. He felt physically sick lifting the gold top from the crate and would run as fast as his legs would carry him back to the house, with the milk precariously swinging in his hands.

‘Go on, off with you,’ she would say when she woke him early, extracting him from the tangled limbs of the brothers he shared his bed with. ‘The greedy git gets eight pints and he only has six rooms, so he can’t be using all of them. Hang around on the corner and when you see Eric cross over to the pub, you slip out, take one and leg it.’

On those days, little Paddy called into the chapel at the convent on his way into Sister Theresa’s class. He felt weighed down with the guilt and compelled to confess. He liked Mr Coffey, and the lady who was sometimes there, his friend, Biddy. Once he’d carried her bag from the bus to the Seaman’s Stop and ever since then she would give him a barley twist, whenever she saw him. He really liked Biddy and it near killed him to steal the milk, in case she found out it was him. His mother, he knew, acted from a desire to feed them all, but he wondered, so many times, how it was his mother and big Paddy were so different from just about every other family on the streets whose kids managed to eat a breakfast every morning.

But now little Paddy finally grinned, for this was a good morning. Eric had delivered, little Paddy was spared and there would be breakfast before school.

‘Go on, get your clothes on or some other little bugger will be stealing the milk from our step – it’s like the wild west out there.’ And Peggy roared with laughter as little Paddy went back into the second bedroom to retrieve the trousers Maura Doherty had bought him before she had left for Ireland. He folded them every night carefully and hung them over the brass bedstead. Maura had bought them two sizes too big and, initially, he’d had to thread string through the waistband because even the belt she bought with them was too big.

‘Don’t you be worrying, little Paddy,’ Maura had said. ‘They will fit you a dream by next year. Just don’t go getting holes in the knees because I won’t be here to sew them. Your mother’s not the best with the needle. If you’re desperate, take them to Maisie Tanner’s and say Maura said you were to go there, do you hear me?’

Little Paddy had nodded, his eyes wide. Maura had left him with so many instructions he was afraid that he was going to forget something. On the day he stood in Maura’s kitchen, as she pinned up the hem of the trousers so that he would get more wear out of them, Tommy had sat in armchair by the fire, reading the Echo.

‘Peggy will pawn those before the boat docks in Dublin,’ Tommy said.

‘Shush, you!’ Maura had hissed at him. ‘There, Tommy, doesn’t he look just grand? Paddy, you’ll have all the girls in the school after you, so you will.’

Little Paddy had blushed at the mere thought, but it didn’t matter, nothing in the world could diminish the pride he felt at owning a pair of trousers with no holes and which had been bought from new, along with the shoes Maura had also bought for him.

Tommy had put the paper on his lap. ‘You look proper grown-up, Paddy,’ he had said. ‘Best not to play footie in them, though, they won’t last five minutes if you do.’

‘I won’t, never, I promise, Tommy,’ he said and Maura had felt her heart swell for the little boy she had delivered herself in the front bedroom next door.

But it wasn’t just little Paddy – she had bought clothes for the entire Nolan family.

‘What’s the use of us having money if we can’t rig everyone out?’ she had protested when Peggy made a half-hearted objection. As it happened, Tommy had been only half right. Peggy had indeed pawned the shoes and clothes Maura had bought for Peggy, but she hadn’t touched anything of the children’s, and when big Paddy suggested it, she had felt her blood boil.

‘I’ll pawn the blankets on the bed, the statue of the Holy Mother, even my mother’s clock! I’d pawn you, you useless lump of shite, before I take the shoes off their feet. It’s a shame I couldn’t bear, Paddy, and I warn you: if I have to pawn the kids’ shoes, don’t you even bother coming back home.’

Now, before he put on his clothes, little Paddy flung himself flat on the bedroom floor, shimmied on his belly under the bed and opened the lid of the cardboard box he kept hidden there. Two small