Wild Chicory Page 5

  Maybe I should go over to the sink and clean up our lunch things, but I don’t want to make any clanky noise to interrupt whatever Grandma is thinking. She must be thinking something, staring out at the faded, smudgy sky the way she is. She’s probably thinking about him.

  I sneak over to the radiogram, at the other end of the sofa, where I’ve left my book. It’s just an old school book that I’m scribbling in the back of, to use up the pages. I’ll write a story of my own now. I’ll write one for Grandma and Granddad.

  HER ONE TRUE DARLING

  Nell Kennedy fell in love with Stevie O’Halligan in the playground at St Peter’s School sometime near the beginning of September 1913. She was seven and three-quarter years old; he was just turned ten, and he was playing donkey-league with all the other boys. It was always a rough game, where they’d organise themselves into two teams, each boy taking another onto his back and then the teams would run altogether at each other in a clash of boots and heads. Normally, Nell didn’t watch them – she saw enough of all that sort of thing in her own house, especially now her mother was always busy with the baby. But this day, her eye was caught by the snowy hair of this new boy, Stevie. He was tall and strong and he just about danced as he ran, darting through the pack of boots and heads, with fat Andy Collins on his back. Her heart was caught when this Stevie boy stopped still amid the scrum to pick up one who had fallen down and grazed his knee. The way Stevie O’Halligan placed his hand on the other boy’s shoulder to see that he was all right made Nell know that this was the boy she would marry one day. Someone brave and gentle, just like her dad.

  But within the month, both had vanished. Her dad didn’t come home one day, nor ever again. It wasn’t the done thing for a child so young as Nell to attend a burial or a funeral mass in those days, of course, so Nell couldn’t ever quite make sense of it. She didn’t quite believe her dad was gone. Run over by a cart going too fast downhill on its way to Paddy’s? Witches’ fingers of chicory root smashed all over the street? Couldn’t they find her dad under the sacks that toppled from the cart? What did the witches do with him? She dreamed it and dreamed it, but could never find him herself. Then Stevie, it soon became apparent, had gone, too. She summoned up the courage to ask the teacher, Sister Gregory, if Stevie had died as well, but the sister told her kindly: ‘No, lass, Steven has only gone back to his home. He lives in the countryside. He was only visiting for a time.’ Still, Nell looked for him in the playground every day, just as she listened for her father’s footfall to come down the hall every evening.

  Life went on: her mother chasing baby Pete around and daily mourning the loss of her garden at Ballymacyarn, for she had no garden here in Surry Hills to feed her family. For all the sunshine and for all the enormous quantities of horse manure throughout the streets, the quality of vegetables for sale in this city was a travesty – as was their extortionate price. The meat was always tough and on the turn; sausages tasted of sawdust; the tripe was leathery. But Nell never once complained; she overheard her eldest brother Danny crying alone in the lane one night when she crept out to the privy, a sound that made her promise never to complain even in her thoughts. When she was sitting out on the back step one afternoon, pushing her fist into her belly to stop it churning around nothing, to push the hunger pain from her with another, her brother Pat sat down beside her and gave her the smoke he’d just rolled: ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It helps.’

  It did in a strange way: the burning down her throat was another pain keeping the hunger at bay, while the dizzy spell it gave her made her laugh; and that made Pat laugh, too. Even Danny laughed at the sight of his tiny sister having a puff. She could also have as many cigarettes as she liked, for while her brothers had such trouble getting work that would pay the rent, they were regularly enough called upon by a fellow from Customs House to help with the unloading and concealment of contraband tobacco and opium come in on ships here and there from Manila. Nell was not aware of any of these illicit goings-on, of course, nor that this relationship between the authorities and the Kennedy boys would ultimately help them in setting up their little betting shop round the corner in Elizabeth Lane. All she knew was that, one day soon, they were moving on again.

  It was only up the hill to the top of Crown Street, and it didn’t have garden enough for anything but a handful of tomatoes and beans, but it was big and she even had her own room – sort of. It was an alcove beside her mother’s bed where a wardrobe was supposed to go, and it was diagonally opposite Pete’s cot, too, but it felt like her very own room. Her brothers had made her a special bed from an old door stacked up on bricks to fit the space, all draped with a curtain of lavender velvet Mick had got just for her – a whole bolt of the stuff, which had by some trick of fate fallen off the back of a cart.

  Life went on: a war began in Europe, lighting up war with the Uptons and the Boyles down the road, her three eldest brothers then disappeared in uniform, and Pete nearly burned down the house. Pete – that Lucky little Pete – was so annoying, he could get away with murder. Somewhere in her heart, she knew that her mother clung to that last little boy for all that she’d lost when her husband died, and all the fearfulness she felt for her boys gone abroad, but Nell harboured a little streak of hatred for him nevertheless. Pete had almost incinerated her lavender curtain, but there were a thousand more reasons to hate him than that: the way their mother would always give him the biggest share of apple peelings, or the bone of her chop to suck, or the last stick of rhubarb sprinkled with sugar – it all drove Nell quietly insane. No wonder Pete couldn’t talk properly, she’d grumble to herself – their mother was always shoving food in his mouth, or pinching his fat little cheeks. Nell couldn’t get five minutes of her mother’s attention even if Johnny Upton tried to kill her in the street.

  Nell took every opportunity to keep out of the house, whenever her mother didn’t need her. She’d roam all the way along Cleveland Street and across to Centennial Park, sometimes with her brothers Tommy or Jack, and once or twice with Eileen Tighe, her friend from school who lived halfway there on South Dowling Street, but mostly she’d go alone, just because she liked to be alone, walking, walking, going to the park. She loved those long hours of freedom on a Saturday afternoon or long summer evening and, once inside the park, she’d take off her shoes to feel the cool of the clover beneath her bare feet; she’d close her eyes and pretend she was back in Ballymacyarn. Her memories of her home in Ireland were already fading into dreams, but she’d find her longing and her fill of love in the tiny flowers she’d spy on her walks, and it was always worth being bawled out by her mother for being late in just to see them. Tiny lilac stars of onion weed, drifts of even tinier white daisies she’d never know the name of, and graceful little sky-coloured bells that everyone called blueberries, that weren’t berries at all but small lilies that grew somehow miraculously out of half-dead seeming clumps of grass. These last were the colour of forget-me-nots; they were the colour of her father’s eyes. They weren’t neat spots of sky like her Irish forget-me-nots, though; these were raggedy and drooping splotches of blue, but they were her forget-me-nots – here, in this city. She dreamed they were raggedy and drooping from the fairies wearing them out at their midsummer balls. They were very sad and very beautiful all at the same time.

  But, oddly enough, her favourite new flower was the strangest, one that was like none from her old home: it was the golden wattle. On the first day of spring each year, now that she was in primary school, her whole class would go out into the countryside to pick great armfuls of these cheerful, bobbling blooms to decorate the church and the schoolrooms for Wattle Day. The so-called countryside wasn’t very far out of the city – it was only a patch of scrub a few miles away at Kingsford, just off the tram line, but every time they went there, she’d look out again for Stevie O’Halligan, wondering where in the country he was. Until she started sneezing. With her arms full of wattle, she would sneeze – and sneeze, and sneeze a thousand times – so the whole class would
be tumbling around laughing, even the Sisters. That was always the best part of the day. That such laughter could burst from so little; that this bush that had only a week or so ago been so dull and grey was now so suddenly shouting with happy colour.

  School was Nell’s most happy place, though. There was always so much to do and think and dream, that whatever else might have been going on went well by the wayside while she was there. Her teacher was Sister Mary-Bernadette, and Nell was one of her favourites – she was always being picked to read out for the class, or to sing, as Sister Mary-Bernadette said Nell had the music of the south-west in her voice – the south-west of Ireland, that is. The school even had a little library of its own, and Nell could borrow books and take them home, books of bible stories, fables and fairytales – and even an illustrated book of carpentry that Nell was quite taken with for a while.

  Her mother wasn’t always as enthusiastic about her daughter’s schooling, however. Brigid Kennedy was suspicious of anything that went beyond the three r’s – especially for a girl. A girl shouldn’t be too well educated – only enough to read for her husband as required, but never enough to embarrass him. And when she learned that the Lasallian Brothers at the boys’ Superior school wanted to bring classes for Gaeilge into not only that establishment, but for the little ones still with the Sisters of Mercy at Saint Peter’s, she was moved to make a protest at the parents’ meeting. The language of Ireland might have been romantic for some whose families had left generations ago, but it was a stigma still fresh and sharp for many newer arrivals: it was the language of illiteracy, poverty and prejudice, and Brigid Kennedy would not have her children speaking a word of it. She was straight-backed and adamant with terror at what the failed Easter Rising in Dublin just past would bring them now, too: the Irish rebels had been rounded up and murdered by the British lords, as you would expect – but would that mean bullets rather than bricks through windows in the streets of Surry Hills now? It didn’t, but neither did the push for Irish patriotism in the schools go ahead. Still, having picked up tantalising pieces of the argument herself, every day at school little Nell Kennedy waited to hear the music of her Irish language, but she never did again.

  Instead, she received a special letter from her brother Pat, from the trenches in France, reminding her to work hard at her lessons, because he was putting money aside to see to it that she would go on to high school at St Anne’s. She slept with that letter under her pillow to see to it that all wars would end, and that he would come home, bringing Danny and Mick with him.

  A most extraordinary thing occurred before the war did end, though: Stevie O’Halligan reappeared, in the March of 1918. Nell was walking out of the schoolyard, taking the long way round via Marlborough Street past the boys’ school, to avoid run-ins with the nasty Prots across the blocks along Crown, when she saw him. She knew him by his snowy hair and the smooth but strapping way he walked. She had to stop herself from calling out, even though she’d never once spoken to him before. She was twelve years old; he was almost fifteen.

  Something made him turn around and the sun came out as it had never done. He said, as smooth and strapping as his walk: ‘I know you, don’t I? Miss Kennedy, isn’t it?’

  Up until this day, no-one had ever called her ‘Miss’. She didn’t know which knee to hide behind the other, or how she’d work the look of stupidity off her face now that it was there.

  Inside she whirled madder than her mad red hair, she curled and unfurled all at the same time. But, Nell being Nell, all Stevie O’Halligan saw was a girl standing there with her hand on her hip, telling him with some impatience: ‘I’m not sure that I can say I know you.’

  But she did, oh she did. They already knew each other very well, for Stevie, so smooth and so strapping on the outside, was a storm of nerves on the inside. He couldn’t believe he’d just spoken to Nell Kennedy at all. He’d been watching her walk past the gates of his school every afternoon now for almost a month, since his return to Sydney from the farm at Guyong. He’d asked one of his classmates who she was – as he really, truly thought he knew her. Even if he didn’t, she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

  He said to her: ‘I know you.’

  And then he dared to walk her home – bold as that! In broad daylight. As they walked, he did the talking: he told her he was back in Sydney staying with his Aunt Hannah over in Cooper Street, because the Brothers wanted him for a rugby team.

  Rugby? She didn’t much care why he was here now. She wanted to ask him why he’d come for that tiny speck of time five years ago, though; she wanted to see if the hand of God was at work between them. She wanted to ask Stevie O’Halligan if he and his aunt would like to go on a picnic in Centennial Park but, although it was entirely inappropriate that she should make any such suggestion, she couldn’t open her mouth to say anything all.

  When he left her to continue on his way home, she didn’t hear his cheerio. She couldn’t hear anything above the chorus of angels that had just gone off in her head – she couldn’t feel the front step under her feet for the wings that carried her.

  ‘What’s got into you, girl?’ her mother asked her as they sat across the kitchen table from each other, peeling potatoes, having noticed that Nell had left great chunks of skin all over her lot.

  ‘Nothing,’ Nell told her mother, but Brigid knew. She saw the little smirk on her daughter’s face, the little blush on her cheeks – she knew – and from then on, Nell was not allowed to go traipsing round the neighbourhood without one of her brothers or a girlfriend for company.

  ‘But, Mum – why?’ Nell protested a few days later, when she wanted to wander to the park – secretly, via Cooper Street.

  And her mother said: ‘Do as you are told.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do as you’re told or get to the Devil.’ She said it twice – once in Irish, under her breath.

  There was no arguing with Brigid Kennedy after that, and so Stevie O’Halligan walked Nell Kennedy home most afternoons in the company of Eddie or Tom or Jack, or all three, and often Sean and Martin as well, providing a humiliating chorus of ‘Hell’s Nells has got a sweetheart, hell’s bells and ain’t he too smart.’ So smart, Stevie was, he never responded with anything but a good-natured smile no matter how much he wanted to smash their heads together.

  It was a situation that did not alter when the news finally arrived that the war had ended – Frankie and Chris had raced home from the post office with the news so that their mother could get it first. Brigid Kennedy’s humour did not improve where the O’Halligan boy was concerned even after she received the news that all three of her own elder boys were safe in London, awaiting a ship home. Brigid would not even meet with Steven’s Aunt Hannah to make her acquaintance. Her daughter was not thirteen yet. She was far too young. She didn’t want her daughter married at sixteen as she had been, much as she had cherished every moment of her own marriage. Whoever the lad would be for her Nell, he’d have some education past merit certificate – a trade perhaps, or a clerkship – and a good job already under his belt, he’d have money put away for his future family before he’d even thought to take a wife. He would not be a pimply-faced, football-playing bumpkin from the bush. She’d heard, privy to privy, his father was a pig farmer. She thought she might as well send her daughter back to Ballymacyarn when she’d heard that. When she’d heard he was a pig farmer from County Armagh, that settled it – her daughter would not be going with some dark-tempered ruffian from the north.

  She wouldn’t change her mind, even when Dan and Mick and Pat came home in the winter of 1919, all of them needing a long spell in the fattening paddock of their mother’s kitchen, all of them needing the beauty of their little sister and safety of their small world of home to keep the sadness from their eyes for all they’d seen of pointless violence and tragedy in the world abroad. Pat, in particular, was haunted, not only by the ghosts of the battlefield but by ghosts put in his lungs from mustard gas – he would never be quite well
again. Not that this marred any Kennedy rejoicing. They ate more and laughed harder against any pain, they tossed Lucky Pete higher, though he now weighed a small ton, and when the news came through that Pat, who had risen to the rank of lieutenant in the army, was now accepted into the University of Sydney to study to be a lawyer, his mother fainted. She’d been standing by the stove making a custard and collapsed to the floor in her wonder and awe. A Kennedy? Going to university? She would never quite believe that had occurred.

  But the boys had brought home with them the tail of something wicked: although none of them were sick with it themselves, their ship had brought a deadly load of Spanish flu from Arabia. It ripped and slashed its way through the neighbourhood and killed ten children in one night.

  And one of those children was little Lucky Pete. He’d had a sniffle and a sneeze on a Friday afternoon, and he was dead in a boiling fever by the Sunday morning. He was not quite seven.

  The bells of Saint Peter’s tolled black over Surry Hills.

  The shock of it stunned the streets to silence. Even cartwheels seemed to whisper; horses’ shoes trod soft. The Uptons and the Boyles brought gifts of food and flowers to Brigid Kennedy’s door, in permanent truce. In peace, and love.

  Nell’s mind was blank to it all, at first. From the moment she heard her mother scream from Pete’s bedside, Nell could not form a thought. She made cups of tea for her mother, cups of tea for the priest; she kept her brothers’ bellies filled even as she couldn’t think to eat herself.

  She went to the funeral mass for her little brother – she was old enough for that these days – but she wasn’t allowed to go to the burial. It wouldn’t do anyone any good for her to see her mother throw herself to the ground as it received her little son.

  All the while, though Nell could barely see him, Stevie O’Halligan was there. He held her hand all the way home that day as any other, and at her gate this day, as she felt his hand in hers, Nell began to cry. It would be the very last time she ever really cried, like this, so openly, for shame and grief, for dismay and guilt, holding her pebble to her heart for Pete, for her mother and for herself, and she cried as if she knew this would be the very last time.