Story 7 of 8 Clyde Street 1890
Thomas gently caressed the swelling mound of Mary’s belly. He was going to be a father again. He felt the heat of Mary Ellen’s small body tucked into the curve of his back. “Sleep side you, Daddy,” she demanded every night clamouring over her mother to get to him from her makeshift bed on the floor of the single end one room tenement they lived in. “The face of an angel and the temper of our Cassie,” Mary scolded. It was from her teeth out. She loved their wee daughter with an intensity that worried him sometimes.
Outside the November wind howled around the three storey red brick building. It’ll be blustery up on the scaffolding of the old church beside the Clyde, the day, he thought. He had Mary to thank for being in steady employment as a mason’s labourer. If he’d listen to the big gaffer he’d met on the boat he’d have missed the opportunity for a real job.
Gently he smoothed Mary’s long hair from her shoulders and kissed her neck. She turned to him in her sleep. He felt the softness of her breasts and the smoothness of her skin despite the hard life she was living. As he lay there he went back in his mind to their wedding day three years before and the night that followed.
Telling Mary now that they were married she had to come back to live with him in Bell’s house had come as a shock to her. Confused, she insisted she was going home to Argery “A woman must leave her mother and father and cleave to her husband,” Father Hughes asserted, before going on about the intimacy of married love that made both him and Mary cringe with embarrassment.
In the end she had paid heed to Willie Crossen. “Wait here,” he’d said. Clicking his tongue at the horse he had taken Cassie home and hurried back for them.
After the wedding breakfast of boiled chicken and eggs Bell cooked, he’d went back to his work. In the evening Barney Mc Ginley, the fiddle player came. And Ned O Crory, who had a secret still on Croghan Hill, brought them a wedding present of a crockery jug full to the brim with poteen. The strong whiskey and the rhythm of the fiddler’s foot tapping out a tune on the earthen floor lulled Thomas to sleep. When he woke the fire in the hearth was dead and dawn was creeping over the fields. He had slept in a drunken stuper and missed his wedding night.
Thomas cringed remembering how impervious to Mary’s feelings he had been then.
Mary Catherine’s birth had changed his ways. And with Mary expectin’ again he’d work all the hours God sent to make her dream of getting a two- roomed place with its own toilet come true.
Pulling on his work clothes and carrying his well-worn work boots he tiptoed on stockinged feet so as not to wake them and made for the door that led to the shared landing.
“Thomas,” Mary’s voice whispered. “What are you doing up? It’s still dark.”
“A wee extra job before I start on the site. It’ll be a few pounds for that cot you want for the new wean.”
Mary pulled back the bedclothes. “Come back to bed. It’ll not be born for another five months. It can sleep in the drawer for a while the same as Mary Ellen did.”
“See you the night; don’t forget Cattie and Jimmy are comin’ over,” he whispered slipping out the door.
Mary lay listening to the sound of Glasgow waking up. She thought to when she’d come off the boat and saw it for the first time; the streets thronged with more people than she’d ever seen at Strabane’s Fair Day; all living and trading in dirty narrow streets thick with yelling barrow sellers and the nauseating smell coming off the Glasgow Docks.
If she’d had a home to go to she’d have go on the first boat back to Derry but the message Willie Crossen gave her from her mother was clear. The door would be barred against her. She had been standing tears tripping her, clutching her Granda’s bag of money when Thomas, the anger dead in him, found her.
“It’ll be alright,” he’d said when she sobbed out the message Willie had given her. “In a few years we’ll go back and build a house beside the Cloughfin Rock where you first kissed me,” he teased. “C’mon, help me with the trunk .We.re stayin’ with my uncle Jimmy Freel in the Gorbals.”
That night Jimmy and his wife gave them their bed in the recess off the kitchen. A curtain hid them from the bedroom off the kitchen where Jimmy and Cattie lay down in the only other bed they had with their four bairns.
The next night they gave them the bairns bed, pushed the kitchen table and chairs back against the sink and gas cooker and made shake down beds for the four youngsters.
Lying in the gloom of the breaking dawn Mary recollected the relief that washed over her when Jimmy said he had heard of a place in Clyde Street for renting. “It’ll take a back-hander to get the name on the rent book changed. You’ll have to say you’re relatives from Ireland.”
Thomas had sunk into a chair like a deflated balloon. “A back hander? We don’t have any money. We only have the clothes we stand here in and a trunk full of pots and pans for cooking.”
Mary opened her mouth to say she had money her Granda gave her. Then remembering she still hadn’t told Thomas she clammed up. In the month they had lived with the Freels she’d noticed Jimmy handed his unopened pay packet to Cattie. The barely got by. They’d wonder why if she and Thomas had money why hadn’t they told them. Thomas paid his uncle a bit of rent which he used for this smokes and the pub. She couldn’t say it right out. She’d have to tell Thomas first.
“Do you think he’d give it to us without the back-hander,” Thomas asked.
“Don’t think so.”
“I have money.” The words flew from Mary as if of their own accord. Thomas startled and Cattie stopped getting the bairns ready for bed.
“Granda James gave it to me.”She could a vein twitching in Thomas’s jaw. Without looking at her he pulled on his coat. “Will he be in the pub?”
“Aye, he will but…”Jimmy glanced at Cattie. Reaching above the cooker she took down the spare shilling for the meter and gave it to him.
“You have that money ready when I get back with the man,” Thomas shot at Mary as he slammed the door after him.
Mary didn’t think she was going to like what she’d find inside the dilapidated old tenement building on Clyde Street. Their new home, a single-end was three storeys up. Thomas, silent and stiff backed left her to find her own way up the dimly lit stairs.
“No 58, “he said stopping at a door.
Mary couldn’t hide her shock when she saw it. It was a kitchen with a curtained off bed similar to Jimmy and Cattie’s. But unlike the exterior of the red stoned building it was as neat and clean as a new pin.
. Ignoring Thomas’s stiff body she flung her arms around him.
“We have to share the bathroom on the landing,” Thomas asked yielding a little.
“It’s … Just the place for a baby,”
Thomas stood stock still. “You’re expectin’,” he said incredulously. “When did that happen?”
Mary laughed. “I’d say it happened the night you said sorry for getting drunk on poteen and leaving me to sleep in a strange bed in the loft of a strange house on my wedding night.”
Mary Catherine moved beside her in the bed. Mary put a protective arm around her. She didn’t need a cot. She liked having her in the bed. She had never slept alone in her whole life; except that first night under the thatched roof in Bell’s house. Every sound seemed amplified. She’d heard the settle bed creak as Bell lay down to sleep and the drunken snores of Thomas. And the soft cluck of the hens in the pen in the corner of the kitchen.
For the first part of the night she had cried copiously stuffing her nightdress into her mouth to keep her mother-in-law from hearing her. Then she got angry at Thomas and then her father who had died and left her to the wickedness of her mother and Cassie. Sometime near the morning she lay trying out her new married name in whispers: Mrs Mary Cannon: Mary Cannon, Mary Cannon….Until the name became a sing song in her head and she fell asleep.
“Mrs Cannon, Mary, will ye come away. The polis are at yer door,” the old woman who shared the landing with her gabbled pulling Mary away from the clotheslines behind the tenements.
Mary hitched Mary Catherine up on her hip and climbed the stairs. By the time she reached her own landing she was out of breath.
Her feet faltered as she drew near her own door and saw not only the police but the priest from St Patricks, their parish standing there. Her immediate thought was that her Granda James had died.
“Is it my Grandfather…?”
“We should go inside,” the young police constable said gently.
“There’s been an accident…at work,” the priest said…
Gemma Hill 2020 ©
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