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

a good-looking couple’ and she knew it. A vainer woman than Maggie Trott would have relished such a compliment.

‘You know what? You are a big softie, Eric,’ she said, smiling up at him. ‘Mind you, I’m not much better. Sometimes I think I only bake cakes every other day to make sure I can give some to little Paddy to hand them out to the kids. He loves my shortbreads, and God love him, they are so easy to make. No idea why his mother can’t do it.

‘I know Kathleen and Alice fed all the kids this Sunday; Kathleen said she had made too much and Alice had peeled too many spuds but they never did; they just knew those kids were on jam and bread all day because big Paddy, the lazy sod, barely worked last week.’ She glanced up the road. ‘Oh dear, Peggy will fall right out of that bedroom window if she leans any further forward to catch your eye, Eric! What are you going to do?’

Eric shook his head. If there was one thing he hated more in his life than anything else, it was having to say no to a woman asking him for milk he knew she couldn’t pay for. ‘What can I do? Our Gladys wants to get out on the round on Friday nights and do the collecting with me. She counts every pint out and every penny in since Peggy didn’t pay up last time.’

Maggie pulled hard on her ciggie and then glanced up the road. ‘If you do give her some, put it on my bill this week. It’s her lazy git of a husband that’s at fault, not her. If that man can get out of work, he will. Kathleen said yesterday, when she read my tea leaves, that Jerry was going to step in or those kids will be living on jam buttys forever more. Kathleen told me that one morning their Jerry and Tommy stormed up the stairs, dragged Paddy from his steaming pit and marched him down the steps. Now Jerry is going to try and do it on his own, before those kids get rickets – though God love them, the youngest looks like he has it already. Give her four steri, Eric, and I’ll pay it; that way, your Gladys will never know.’

He fought the urge to reach out and fold her into his arms. Maggie Trott, kind, dependable, lonely. A bit like himself, even though he had Gladys at home. Maggie flicked her ash onto the pavement and under her breath whispered to Eric, ‘Don’t look now, we really are being watched and it’s not just Peggy Nolan…’

*

Annie O’Prey never lifted the front room nets until Maggie Trott took out her cigarette lighter. That way, she and Eric never saw her as she watched their every exchange across the cobbled road. ‘One day, his Gladys will catch him at that,’ she said to her son, Callum, who had walked into the room behind her.

‘I’m leaving for work now, Mam.’

She spun around to face him. ‘What, now? The klaxon hasn’t gone yet.’ Her voice was laced with a hint of irritation at being caught spying on her neighbour but Callum couldn’t have been less interested in what was happening across the road.

‘I’m knocking on for Jerry,’ he said. ‘There’s a full load of lumber in today and I want to make sure I’m taken on because I’m going to have to miss a day when Jimmy gets out.’

Her expression altered in a heartbeat, her eyes alight. Her firstborn, her Jimmy, her favourite had been mentioned. ‘Oh, everyone will be up for a party that night!’ Annie clasped her hands together and almost danced across the parlour.

Callum sighed inwardly. She had chosen to believe Jimmy’s version of events, deliberately chose to ignore the pain of the poor man he had tied up, bruised and shaken, with a lump the size of an egg on the side of his head. He hadn’t worked since and in a hard-working community, Jimmy’s actions were a breach of common decency. Rob from the rich but do no harm to the poor was a well-established principle. The fact that Jimmy had crossed the line from scally to baddun was not a thought that had entered Annie’s brain.

Callum shook his head; there would be no partying when Jimmy came home. Jimmy had broken the code of honour and for that the community would cast him out.

‘Why can’t I go with you to meet him when he comes out? Why won’t you let me? Can’t you get Jerry to take Jimmy on too?’

Since his own stint in prison, Callum, a good-looking boy, had managed to keep himself out of trouble and had been taken under the wing of their neighbour, Jerry Deane. Jerry had persuaded the gaffer down on the dock to take Callum on so long as Jerry guaranteed his good behaviour. Callum had sworn, to himself, Jerry and the priest, that he would work every day to repay this generosity and there was nothing and no one on this earth who could persuade him to do anything that would let Jerry down.

The O’Prey twins had earned a dockside-renowned reputation of stealing to order as soon as they realised they could run faster than anyone else, but in the past it had always been for a good cause – the back of a bread van emptied out so that a child on the four streets could have a birthday party; a delivery to the off-licence on the Dock Road, intercepted in time for Christmas. Their mother Annie, widowed young, had never been able to handle her boisterous twins and had long ago given up.

‘You are going to meet Jimmy at the prison gates, aren’t you? He can’t walk out of that godforsaken place and travel all the way home, alone. It’s three buses.’ Annie’s voice had taken on a note of pleading.

Callum thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘Mam,