Stay Dead - [5]

Edie did have a boy next time – two years after Dolly arrived – and Sam got royally pissed down the Dog and Duck celebrating with his mates and then reeled home and clouted Edie when she commented on the state of him.

It was a lesson learned – after that, Edie didn’t say a word when he got drunk, which he often did after a hard day on the railways. He’d started in the signal box after the war, but it was all hours and he didn’t like being cooped up in there, pulling levers and listening for the many different-sounding bells. It was all too complicated. So he applied for another job and went out on to the tracks as a wheeltapper. He liked that, all his mates were around him and they toasted him, slapped him on the back, said what a great feller he was.

Sam thought he was a very great feller indeed. After the boy was born – Nigel, they named him – Sam lost no time in climbing on board Edie and impregnating her a third time. A girl this time, Sarah, and then he got to work on Edie again and – at last! – another boy to be proud of, little Dick. After that, Sam put his own little dick to good use, and then along came Sandy, who was a boy but a bit sickly, prone to the sniffles.

‘She shouldn’t have many more,’ said the midwife, who’d attended all five of Edie’s births and could see that it was dragging the poor cow down. Not only having the kids, but on a railwayman’s wage it was a fight to keep them all clothed and fed. Edie was struggling, anyone could see that. If they wanted to. Which Sam didn’t.

Sam wanted a big Catholic family, seven minimum.

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ he told the midwife.

Who’d asked for her opinion anyway? He was keeping the kids fed, just about, although of course he had to have his fags and beer first. After all, he was the breadwinner, wasn’t he? There had to be something in it for him.

After Edie’s fifth pregnancy there was a stillbirth, then a miscarriage, then another stillbirth. Tired, depressed, Edie finally said to her husband, enough. He would have to use something if he wanted to go on enjoying marital relations. That earned her another clout around the ear. He was from a good Catholic family, Sam told her in a rage; what she was talking about, wasn’t that a sin?

‘I can’t go on with it, Sam,’ said Edie in tears. ‘It ain’t fair.’

‘It’s God’s will,’ said Sam, and that was an end to it. He was doing well on the railways, he was responsible for a small gang of men on the tracks now, his pay was better than before. There was no reason he shouldn’t enjoy his own wife and have the big Catholic family he wanted. No reason at all.

‘I’m so tired,’ whinged Edie.

He was sick of the sound of her voice, always whining on about what a hard life she had. He supported her, didn’t he? Treated her all right. Wasn’t that enough?

Nothing would deter Sam from making her perform her wifely duties. Back from the pub, he would fall into bed and right away he’d be on her. Sometimes she protested, and then it turned into straightforward rape, but if ever Sam felt a twinge of conscience over that he salved it quickly – because he knew that a man could never rape his wife, he had legal rights over her. Conjugal rights, wasn’t that a fact?

There came another miscarriage.

Another stillbirth.

Edie seemed to shrink into herself, become like a shadow. She lost weight and her face was pale with misery; she was no longer the pretty, engaging and hopeful girl he’d married, and Sam felt cheated.

‘I don’t know what the fuck you want from me,’ he raged at her. ‘You’ve got a bloody good earner looking after you, you’ve even got help around the house now Dolly’s getting older. What the hell do you want?’

Edie never answered that question openly, but in her head she did: she wanted him to leave her alone. She wanted him to go out one day and never come home. That was what she wanted, and if she said as much he would kill her stone dead. So she didn’t; couldn’t. Worn out by the misery of endless pregnancies and bloody miscarriages and devastating stillbirths, she stepped back from the world. And in her heart she grew to hate him, her Sam, once her best love, her only love. All that had turned to dust.

5

Limehouse, 1955-57

When she was ten, Dolly Farrell considered running away from home. She was at primary school with her friends, and she liked primary school and never missed a day because it was much nicer than home. The school was a small Catholic-funded centre of education, and it looked like a church; in fact it had been built in the same year as the Victorian church just up the road, beside the recreation ground with its huge, terrifying slide for the kids to play on.

For Dolly, primary school was an escape. It felt safe and there were big brightly coloured posters up all around the room she sat in every day, saying A is for Apple (a big rosy-red apple to illustrate) and all the way through the alphabet to Z is for Zebra (a striped horse on this one). Even the teachers she hated weren’t too horrible. Mrs Lockhart took the kids for maths and clonked you on the head if she felt your work wasn’t up to scratch. Mr Vancy, who taught English, lobbed a rock-hard oblong blackboard duster at you if you chatted at the back of the class during lessons; and Dolly, who didn’t much care for education, was always chatting at the back of the class with her mates Vera and Lucy.