No Small Shame Read online

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Da made a playful swipe at her. ‘I’ve a meeting with the immigration agent in Motherwell and to pick up the last of me wages. Do you want to eat tomorrow and for the rest of the month?’

  ‘You need to be well, Da, or they won’t let you on the ship. You need someone along to take care of you. I could make sure you eat right and keep your clothes clean, empty the privy pot even.’ She added the last, trying to keep the begging note out of her voice.

  ‘Hah! Now I know you’re pulling a man’s leg.’ Da’s eyes twinkled under the lamplight. He sculled half his tea and handed her the dregs.

  Her hands welcomed the comforting warmth while a teensy hope rose in her breast as another of last night’s arguments jumped back into her head. ‘If you let me go ahead with you, Da, I could start working. Help you save the pounds to get a house set up for the others. No-one will want me for any job worthwhile if all I’m good for is scrubbing the burn off pots and going for messages.’

  ‘You’ll be out to work soon enough. Maw can teach you plenty at home.’

  Mary only just bit back the retort that Maw thought scrubbing and emptying shite about the sum of women’s work, before another plea she’d long been thinking shot out of her mouth instead.

  ‘Kate could stay home with Maw. Kate hates school. I’m useless at home. Ain’t Maw always saying it?’

  Da glanced across the dimness at her mother and, for a moment, Mary grew hopeful, even knowing her sister too young. Her that desperate.

  ‘Maw needs you here; the wean due any day.’

  ‘But Da, I’ve been stuck home a whole year with Maw.’ Even as Mary said it, guilt scalded her insides knowing that Maw had nearly died of the bleeding after the last babe born sleeping. Of course, her own misery was nothing in comparison and she’d not do anything to risk Maw or the new babe coming safe into the world. She just didn’t want to be the one home alone with Maw when it did.

  Da hugged her to him then in a rare show, but one of savage desperation. The rough serge of his jacket soaking up the tears on her cheeks. ‘I know it’s been hard on you giving up that scholarship, lass, but I couldn’t get on the damn boat without knowing you here.’

  All the air puffed out of her then. How could she argue when going to Australia had been the only O’Donnell talk of months? The babe on the way unexpected, yes, but being a lass she’d never have been allowed go ahead anyway. It didn’t stop her from wanting it. Or wishing …

  ‘Mind you’re up in time to cook the porridge. Let Maw sleep. The woman tossed like the damn devil chasing her most of the night. This wean must be another boy for sure.’

  Da stared down at Mary seriously then, tugging up her chin so as she’d meet his eyes. ‘I know Maw barks harsh, but she loves all you girls. Having another wean so soon is taking all her energy. She’ll need you to do the heavy work and watch after your sisters.’

  Mary wanted to pull away then, her last chance to change Da’s mind drowning under the weight of his trust and the vision of five more months stuck home, Da and Liam gone, all her friends out to work already, except those taking scholarships, some not rightfully theirs. She only hoped Maw knew things were going to be different in Australia.

  Still Da kept hold of her chin. ‘I’m depending on you to bring Maw and your sisters, and this new wean, safe to Australia on the ship. Do I have your word now?’

  ‘No, Da. Please don’t ask that of me.’ A shake started up in her knees even knowing that this time Maw was gonna lie-in, before a desperate prayer found her lips. Please, Lord, can’t you make this wean come a tad early? Just a wincy bit before Da leaves? A couple of weeks won’t hurt the babe at all. But then Maw would be well again and the wean safe here. Da could go easier.

  She didn’t add and herself along with him in case the Lord God Almighty thought she was trying to bargain with him. And everyone knew the Almighty did not make deals, else wouldn’t she be going with Da already?

  Unable to resist the pleading in her father’s eyes, she nodded, but every bone in her body blanched in protest. ‘But Da, what if … ?’

  ‘Hush and back to bed now.’ Da’s tone rang final. He reached for his boots and stamped his feet into the beaten leather with a wry smile. ‘Damn boots shrunk again. Still wet they are too!’ His sigh the giveaway he was glad to be going somewhere in the world where the sun shone warm, no mind to the burden he’d weighted on her – his eyes too full of blue skies and seasides.

  But Da’s ‘No,’ meant no, any day of the week, including one that was going to change everything for all of them.

  Mary watched him go out the door and tread down the steps. A bright glimmer flared below where Joe Merrilees puffed on his pipe at the bottom of the stoop.

  Da put his head down and shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Morning, Joe.’ Without turning around, he called back up the stairs, ‘Get in and shut the door, girl. Have you no brains under that hair at all?’

  No, thought Mary. No brains. Just dreams. And wishes. And no way of making any of them come true. Not for five long months.

  Before she could close out the chill dawn breeze, Da began to hawk up the spit. The echo keeping on with him all along the rows of tenements.

  ONE PLUS ONE …

  AUGUST 1913

  Smoke was rising off the bing near the pithead when Mary reached the Bothwellhaugh Through Road. The grey of the colliery and the tenement rows on one side and the green of the farms and fields leading down to the River Clyde on the other. She gazed beyond the rooftops of the houses to where the Hamilton Palace Colliery loomed over the entire village. The twin wheels of the winding gear on the tower began to turn, either taking men down or bringing them up from the pit, and she bit her lip at the thought of the day beginning like any other in most houses.

  Smoke drifting on the wind. Any other day Maw would be ranting along with the rest of the wives, the soot certain to be all through the wash hanging on the drying greens. Any other day in the Pailis. Except this one … Her poor wee brother so ill and not yet two weeks old. Oh, God! Please, please watch over Thady.

  Worrying didn’t help the guilt, gnawing the skin off her thumb, waiting on Mr Garvey, the postman, instead of where she should be, at home, helping Maw tend the sick babe. ‘Come on, Mr Garvey, hurry up, won’t you?’

  Maw’d skelp her when she found her not back. But, living with the motherless McGarritys now and with the babe so ill, was it her fault she’d to take her sisters and them all to the McGarrity aunt in Bothwell for minding? Hadn’t she run them the whole two miles there and all the way back?

  Mary jumped at a sudden squeal from between the rows and a wee girl raced around the corner of Raith Place chased by the two youngest Watson brats shaking a frog in her face. ‘Kiss him, Tim. Kiss him, Tim. Turn him into a prince.’ The wee girl ran off screaming for her maw, while the brats fell about laughing.

  In a village overwhelmingly Orange, what could any of them expect? And it went both ways.

  Look at what had happened with Lily.

  It had been fine and good for the two wee friends to run on the green or skip rope in the square but the day she’d tried to bring Lily into the house, Maw’d blocked the door.

  ‘Off you go, both you and your mate. Outside if you want to run with a Prod.’

  Lily had fled down the steps crying and wouldn’t even look at or speak to Mary again. No matter how many ‘sorries’ or Mary pleading.

  Mary shook away the prickling memory and searched the road for the postman for the umpteenth time. When it stood empty of all but a huddle of housewives getting their news along with their bread from the baker’s cart – she could wait no longer.

  She hurried past Brandon Place and along past the Co-operative store, dodging puddles in the unmetalled road. It were a shame James McGarrity didn’t live in one of those better houses with their four rooms and indoor bath instead of in Clyde Place.

  Crowded into the McGarrity’s made their old single room in Store Place seem roo
my as a queen’s castle, but then they’d had no choice. They all knew the rules – no mine worker, no house. The day Da left, another family had waited at the bottom of the steps.

  ‘Think yourselves lucky James McGarrity in need of a maid and minder for his children. And that his house has two rooms and a scullery,’ Maw chastised when Kate complained those McGarritys had nits.

  It could be worse, Mary consoled herself. Liam’s maw, Julia Merrilees, along with her twins, Jane and Samuel, and new wean coming, had been forced to leave the village altogether and stay in Glasgow with her maw and da.

  A hoot from the shunting yard in the colliery jumped her out of her musing and she breathed the sulphury air blown across from the engine waiting to take the night-shift coal north to Glasgow. The pit whistle, and the timing of the trains, regulated all their days in the Pailis, better than any timepiece.

  Ah, but it were a palace in name only. The residents might’ve nicknamed the village of Bothwellhaugh the Pailis after the Duke of Hamilton’s fine house, but it were more a joke on all that their houses were not. The Duke the only one living in any palace.

  Mary glanced back along the houses lining the Through Road. ‘C’mon, Mr Garvey.’ If it were anyone’s fault she were late, it were Liam’s. If the postman didn’t pull a letter from his satchel today, they’d have weeks to wait until the ship reached port and Liam could even post a letter home. Liam wouldn’t dare to make her wait that long, not when he and Joe had promised Maw news of them, Da unable to read or write, not even to sign his own name.

  News of Da might cheer her mother some at least.

  That’s if Maw were up again. She’d left them both asleep. As well as Maw could sleep with one ear on the newborn’s cough and him so fretful, but finally given in to exhaustion.

  Giving up on Mr Garvey, Mary turned off the Through Road and ran along Store Place in a tizzy, stopping only at the bottom of the steps of number ten and seeing a stranger’s shape cross the window of their old room. The same one room where she’d seen her sisters arrive and two of her brothers depart, but could not call theirs anymore.

  ‘Hah!’

  The postman’s arthritic gait came into view at the far end of the row.

  Mary picked up her skirts and ran all the way back along to meet him. He nodded as she neared and tugged an envelope from his bag.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Garvey. Thank you kindly,’ she added, grinning like a mad thing on seeing Liam’s familiar hand, totally ignoring that the letter was addressed to Maw too.

  She hurried across to the Clyde Place row opposite and, with one quick glance along the stoops, bare of any sign of her mother, ducked into the shadows below, tearing at the envelope.

  She scanned the writing, drinking in news of the men’s long train ride to London and steamships coming and going on the Tilbury Dock, including the Makarini, the ship the agent had booked them to board on the sixth. Her stomach pitched ill spying the ink blotted date on the top corner, the three of them six days at sea by now.

  She read on of emigrants in the hostel near the docks boasting of wages to be had in Australia. Filling Liam’s head with big ideas, she feared, as if jobs could be found at every door, like lumps of gold on the street.

  I might even get a job in an office. Da’ll come round when he sees the wages. Nothing’s going to change my mind; I’m not going back underground. When I get out to Australia I can go anywhere and do anything I want.

  Mary doubted Liam had told his da his plans. Joe Merrilees suffered no fools or foolish ideas. He’d expect Liam down the pit alongside him, no mistake about it. A nervy knot clumped in her belly thinking of her own high hopes and dreams. Until now she’d had no real expectation Maw would give her blessing to any such consideration as teacher training or nursing, but her heart jolted at the miracle of five full weeks aboard the ship to convince her.

  Mary read the rest of the letter, frowning that Liam was so agitated with his grand plans he didn’t even ask after her at all. Still, she could imagine a gold watch appearing in his pocket, him trading his old bunnet for a bowler.

  Stop it. She should be indoors, not letting her imagination roil. Her throat tightened. Maw was beside herself with fears over the new wean and rightly so with diphtheria and the pneumonia rife across Bothwellhaugh and the nearby villages. The Lanarkshire churches busier with funerals than the Mass.

  She clutched the letter to her breast and offered up a quick prayer that Liam would find his good job and her brother be well again soon. The squeak of the door opening at the top of the stairs broke her thoughts and she pounded up the steps in time to meet Maw on the landing.

  Her mother pulled her inside, closing the door on the draughts. ‘Where on God’s good earth have you been, girl, when your poor, wee brother’s dying?’

  The sight of Maw wild-eyed, wisps of hair straggling out her bun, scared Mary silly. Worse, the wet, sucking cough coming from a set of drawers beside the range across the room. Thady’s crackling bark stopped midway in his chest and rattled. A râle they’d heard before, when Seamus, the first brother, left for heaven.

  Mary hurried to fetch up the poor wee thing, but Maw pushed a florin into her hand.

  ‘Run like your skirt’s on fire. Fetch the priest and try for the doctor. See if he’ll come while I fix a poultice.’

  Mary’s chest prickled at the word, her mind casting back four years to when Seamus’s cough barked much like her own at the time. She could remember little before or after their shared illness, both with their temperatures raging and her sisters ill too – only not so desperate.

  Maw had boiled a bread poultice and laid it over her chest before tending to the younger ones. She could still feel the beginning of the burn and remember her screams start. Maw shushing her, ‘Don’t be such a sooking baby. It ain’t that hot.’ She’d tried to tear off the muslin flannel but screamed all the louder when it stuck to her skin. Only then had Maw recognised she was not just blubbing, but by the time her mother came away from dosing the younger ones, Mary’s skin burned red with the overheated poultice.

  Some nights, when she undressed, she’d catch Maw’s eyes wash with pain and turn away from the puckered, ugly skin. Mary was not proud, but it were a small satisfaction to know that Maw still suffered too. Her scars were at last beginning to fade and really she should be grateful she was still here. Unlike her poor wee brother.

  Oh, God, would Maw blame her now if the same thing happened to Thady? Please, Lord, don’t take Thady. All we need is one wee boy to bring back Maw’s smile. Please!

  Thady’s cough spluttered into choking gasps while Maw grabbed the wean out of the drawer and banged him harder on the back than she ever slapped any tough old piece of pie dough.

  A sob caught in Mary’s throat, unsure if she was more scared of the poor babe coughing his life away or his mother’s efforts to save him.

  ‘Oh, God, Maw, what can we do?’

  ‘Go. Fetch the priest. Hurry, girl.’

  Despite the urgency in Maw’s words, the terror in her eyes had calmed to acceptance. It could mean only one thing.

  Mary gave the crucifix hanging over Maw’s bed a ferocious look. Why did God want this wee fellow to be in such a rush to join him? In the rows, heaven had plenty of weans suckling from their mothers to choose from and all kinds of people knocking on his door every day of the week. Thady had no need to hurry into heaven, like as not he’d get there anyways.

  The babe’s eyes flickered open and Mary crossed herself, wrenching on the door handle. As if the poor wee soul could help getting the pneumonia. Please God, let me get the priest for the rites in time. Please, please, God, Thady can’t die. I promised Da.

  She skidded back down the stairway and across the unmetalled road beyond. Indecision tattooed as needles through her brain. Go for the doctor? No … fetch the priest? Da said … Jesus, what to do? She’d promised Da, but Maw …

  How could Maw suffer saying goodbye to another mite? Not a third time.

 
She couldn’t bring further grief to her mother by denying the babe the rites. At least if the priest came in time Maw might see the wean go a little easier. But Da would have her fetch the doctor for sure, over any priest.

  I have to, Da. If you were here … could hear the poor mite’s râle. I’m sorry. I wish you never asked me. I don’t know what to do.

  If anything happened to Thady, it would be all her fault. For taking too long waiting on a letter and wasting time on daydreams she’d no business putting ahead of her brother.

  Four days ago, she’d patted his wee back and sung him a lullaby, running her fingers through his downy hair, burnished red much like her own and Maw’s. Her hands had come away damp with his perspiration and she’d laid him forward in her arms, horror prickling her stomach at the crimson stains burned into his cheeks. Guiltily, she’d put him to bed before Maw caught her spoiling him and rocking him to sleep.

  A sob broke her lips, muted under the clangs of a locomotive shunting empty coal wagons back up the line towards the pits. How could life go right on when death was on its way? If only she could wish herself back to the eve of Da’s leaving, then she could take back her promise.

  THE SUM OF LIFE

  GLASGOW – LONDON TRAIN, JANUARY 1914

  In just forty-one days they’d arrive in Australia, but already Scotland was gone to them. Nearly halfway to London, there was no going back. Not that Mary wanted to; it was more about who she was leaving behind.

  From the instant the wheels of the London train began to cross the twenty-four arches of the Ribblehead viaduct, it seemed as if everything she’d ever known fell behind. As if each span were crumbling and blocking her way back. All the days of her life up to now just a memory. All trace of her past life gone. Her brothers gone.

  It made her wish she could still be a child, like Kate and Hannah sitting alongside her in the carriage, scoffing bread and jam, without a seeming care in the world. She could only shake her head when Kate offered her a crust held out in a grubby paw. The pitiful wails of the newborn in the arms of the jolly-faced woman opposite enough to steal all her excitement and appetite, along with the sight of only four of their own where there should be five. They’d nothing to show of the brother who should be in Maw’s arms. Not even a photograph.