By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ was some hot water in the kettle sitting on the greasy little gas stove, so I poured it into the washing-up bowl and commenced to wash Edward. I could hear Father’s choked voice. He said furiously, ‘It is not funny. It is horrible. At the least, it shows a total disrespect for the dead – at the worst, it is perversion. They ought to be put out of business.’

      Mother was laboriously cutting her nails with our single pair of blunt scissors, letting the ends drop into the hearth, and she murmured, ‘It makes me shudder.’

      I paused in my preparations to wash Edward’s dirty knees, and left him sitting on the kitchen table drying his face, while I went to the intervening door and asked, ‘What’s happened, Daddy?’

      ‘Pack of sickening necrophiles!’ Father exploded again, turning to me.

      Brian and Tony were sitting at the table, elbows on open exercise books. I saw Tony’s eyes light up. A beautiful new word to be learned, to be used incessantly for at least a week, while he turned it over in his mind and tried it in every possible way.

      Mother greeted me with a worried, ‘Hello, Helen. We’ll explain it later. Put Avril and Edward to bed – it’s getting late.’ She turned to the students at the table who were obviously most intrigued by the conversation. ‘Hurry up, you two. Put your books away.’

      ‘It’s something about looking at dead people, Helen,’ Edward whispered to me, as I returned to him, and rolled down his knee-high socks. His knees were very dirty and I scrubbed them with a piece of cotton cloth. There was no soap.

      Avril had followed me out, and stood waiting for her turn to be washed. She said nothing, but her plain, round face beneath the straggling blonde hair was white, and I wondered if she were ill.

      Edward struggled out of his woollen jersey and proffered a far-from-white neck to be washed. ‘It’s nasty,’ he muttered.

      Both children looked so bewildered and scared that I answered them with forced cheerfulness. ‘It doesn’t sound very respectful, I know. But I’m sure there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dead people are just people who have shed an overcoat which has worn out. And the real people – their souls – have gone to Heaven. They are happy. It is only the people who get left behind who are unhappy – it’s natural – they don’t like being left.’

      I tried to be soothing and matter-of-fact, while Avril perfunctorily washed her hands and face in the same pint of water.

      Protesting crossly, Brian and Tony put their books together and heaved themselves between furniture and family towards the staircase and bed. Tony asked sulkily, ‘How do you spell necrophile?’ and was told angrily by Father not to be impudent.

      I took the candle from the kitchen and eased Avril and Edward along after the boys. Mother looked overwhelmed with fatigue, but she was not too tired to fire at Fiona, as I passed her, ‘For goodness’ sake, be quiet, girl.’ Fiona sank down on an upturned paint can, which we used as a chair, and continued to whimper miserably.

      Upstairs, I heard Avril and Edward say the small prayer which our nanny had taught me long ago, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild...’ Then I tucked Avril into the bed she shared with Fiona and me, and put Edward into the one he shared with Brian and Tony, and left them, shivering under the thin blankets, to their individual nightmares.

      Brian and Tony stumped grumpily round the room, pulling off their outer clothes and tossing them on to the bed rail. I put the candle down on an orange-box, which had been made into a dressing table by draping an old curtain over it, and told Brian to blow it out before he got into bed. ‘Quietly, boys,’ I pleaded. ‘Let Edward go to sleep.’ Then I ran downstairs again to the living room.

      Alan had picked up a book and was flicking through it. Father and Mother were staring into the fire, Father rubbing his chin with quick, impatient motions. Fiona sat, her back against the wall, still crying. I was dreadfully hungry and quite apprehensive about what might have happened, but I went first to her and put my arm round her shoulders. She laid her head against my threadbare skirt. We never talked together – we had little in common except our sisterhood; yet we were often a comfort to each other.

      ‘Daddy, what has happened?’

      ‘She has to leave her job,’ said Father, beating an impatient tattoo with his fingers on the arm of his chair. Mother nodded agreement. Alan put down his book and watched the scene with a look of morbid fascination, glancing expectantly from one to the other of us.

      ‘Why?’ I inquired, puzzled.

      ‘She must,’ Mother agreed, and then added crossly. ‘It is not fit for a young girl – it is not fit for anyone to be there.’

      Alan interjected with an unexpected chuckle, ‘You could put it down to professional interest – after all, it’s all meat.’

      Mother was shocked. ‘Alan! How could you say such a revolting thing?’

      Alan grinned wickedly and folded his arms, as if enjoying the family’s evident distress.

      Father groped for words and finally said carefully, ‘The butcher’s shop in which Fiona is working is opposite an undertaker’s. Sometimes the undertakers invite the butchers over to look at the corpses. I cannot believe that it is the undertaker himself who does this – I think it is some of his employees.’

      Fiona lifted her face. ‘It is, Daddy. They do it when he is out – and the butchers always wait until our boss has gone to market.’

      ‘How awful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Imagine being stared at in your coffin by a pack of strangers. How morbid!’ I looked down at Fiona’s tousled head, and said to her, ‘Perhaps you should look for another job.’

      Fiona turned her face up towards me. She was so white that I thought she might faint. She said, ‘They had a young girl there this morning – and she wasn’t in her coffin – or even wrapped up. She was naked – and they were whispering and laughing afterwards about how they played with her. It sounded awful. So I was sick suddenly over the cash desk – and they laughed. After I had cleared up the mess, they sent me home early.’

      Nausea began to overwhelm me. Vague tales I had heard, whispered amongst the beshawled women beside whom I had sat on front steps or in the park while watching the children play, began to surface in my mind and come together. I had always discounted their mutterings as rubbish. Now I realised that it was not rubbish. They had been disapproving about something which had really happened. I took big breaths to control my surging stomach. How could men be so vile?

      ‘Heavens, I’m glad you told Daddy,’ I muttered.

      ‘I had to,’ responded Fiona flatly. ‘I was thinking about it again just before you came in – and I was sick over the floor.’

      ‘Humph,’ Mother almost grunted, ‘I thought it was something else, but I was wrong, thank goodness.’

      For a moment, I looked at her blankly and then remembered her bouts of morning sickness before every birth, and I said indignantly, ‘Fi would never get herself into trouble. She’s not that kind.’ But a sudden, different fear for Fiona had been planted in my mind. Did she know anything about sex? I was still vague myself about the precise details of this mystery, but since I never expected to have a boyfriend it did not matter in my case. It did matter for Fiona. I knew that she was already meeting a local youth secretly and going to the cinema with him.

      Father СКАЧАТЬ