Daughter of Mine

‘Then they’ll be right, but they won’t know it all and maybe they’ll not need to.’ Rodney glanced across at Flo and said, ‘You go along to the police station tomorrow and see what’s what. Just so we know where we stand an’ all.’

Flo nodded. She knew she’d have to. There was no one else and she knew she could expect little help from Neil.

But Flo didn’t follow her husband to bed after Mike had left. Thoughts of her boy in a prison cell would keep sleep at bay and she knew who was to blame. The same girl that had caused a row each time she was here. And now for that piece to throw her son over! She had no desire to lose Steve to any woman, but for one to indicate he wasn’t good enough! That wasn’t to be borne at all.

What else did Lizzie want in a man? Flo thought. True, he had a temper at times and a liking for the beer, but in that he was like a great many other men; and as for the women…Well, he was a normal man, after all, and the women usually chased him. You couldn’t blame a man for taking what was on offer.

Everything that had happened to her son that night was down to Lizzie Clooney, and Flo knew she’d never forgive her for as long as she lived.

Steve felt panicky when he came to the next morning and realised where he was. He couldn’t bear being cooped up and he had the desire to hammer on the door, but when he tried to stand, nausea caused him to vomit into the bucket by his bed.

The breakfast they brought him he couldn’t face, but he was grateful for the cup of tea. By lunchtime he’d not been sick for some time, but the headache continued to bother him and he was in no mood for the grinning face that appeared at the hatch.

‘Ready?’ the policeman asked, unlocking the door.

‘Ready? For what?’ So far no one had told him anything.

‘You’re before the magistrate, mate, so on your feet.’

Steve got to his feet gingerly. His head felt as if it were on fire and his red-rimmed eyes burned. The young policeman laughed. ‘You look a pretty sight, I don’t think.’

Steve shut his eyes for a moment against the pain. God, how he wanted to send the young copper’s teeth down his throat, but now he was sober he knew better and he was in no fit state anyway. But what was he talking about, before the magistrate? Just for getting drunk? He thought they’d tell him off and let him go. ‘What have I got to go before the magistrate for?’

‘Ooh, now let’s see. Little string of offences we have. Drunk and disorderly, causing an affray, assaulting a police officer.’

‘Assaulting a police officer?’ Steve said incredulously.

‘No recollection of it, mate?’ the policeman said with a grin. ‘Well, that won’t save you. Come on, let’s get going.’

Flo could have wept when she saw her son. His face was grey and his eyes were bloodshot and had black pouches beneath them. His hair stood on end and his Sunday suit was crumpled and stained.

Steve was fastidious about his appearance. His suits were regularly cleaned and returned to the wardrobe under a plastic cover and he was fussy about his shirts, which had to be pristine white and ironed just so, and on Sundays his tie always matched the handkerchief poking from his pocket.

But in the dock, Steve had no tie and no sign of the handkerchief either. He looked a beaten, crestfallen man and it tore at Flo’s heart.

When the police officer read out the charges against him, Flo saw him shake his head from side to side, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, and she knew he could remember little or nothing of what had happened. That didn’t seem to matter and the magistrate tore into him. ‘Assaulting a police officer is a serious offence and one that can carry a custodial sentence,’ he told Steve. ‘But as you’ve told the court you’re in steady employment we don’t think it would be in the country’s best interests to lock you up.’

Steve let his breath out in a sigh of relief. He’d never even thought of a jail sentence.

‘But, we don’t want to be considered as treating this as a trivial matter,’ the man went on. ‘No indeed, and if you come before me again there will be no doubt about the custodial sentence. This time, however, you are fined seventy-five pounds.’

Seventy-five pounds! The sum reverberated in Steve’s head. How in God’s name was he going to find that sort of money? Christ! The image of Lizzie staring out at him from the window of the hotel suddenly floated before him, and he knew just who was to blame for the state he was in. He’d never forget it for as long as he lived.

Steve and Flo weren’t the only ones blaming Lizzie, for she already did an adequate job of this herself. She thought she’d never get over the sight of Steve hauled into the van, handcuffs holding his hands behind his back, especially as she still thought it was her fault, at least in part. She certainly didn’t want to come across him, not for a while anyway, so when Tressa met Mike in her free periods, Lizzie would sit in her room and hem the sheets and blankets she had picked up cheap in the Bull Ring.

‘Come out with us,’ Pat urged. ‘We go to the flicks, or dancing at Tony’s Ballroom up the West End.’

But Lizzie would shake her head, thinking that at the moment it was best to lie low. Tressa worried about her, and in the end Mike reluctantly agreed she could come out with them a time or two, but she wouldn’t do that either. ‘She’s frightened of bumping into Steve,’ Tressa said, ‘and making things worse for him.’

Nothing could make things worse, Mike thought, for Lizzie’s decision had upset the man totally. He was paralytic each night, not tipsy or merry but fallingdown drunk, and before he got to that state he’d tell any who would listen about Lizzie and how much he had loved her and how he wished he could make her see that. He was hurting, and Mike was well aware of that, but he told Steve he had to keep well away from Lizzie. Steve knew that already and he drank himself into oblivion because that was the only way he could cope with it.

Then, he’d started becoming friendly with a man called Stuart Fellows, who lived at the bottom end of Bell Barn Road. They’d all been to St Catherine’s together, but as Stuart was considered a troublemaker, Mike and Steve had kept well away from him. But now, with Mike meeting Tressa as many nights as he could, they’d sort of been thrown together, and Mike could hardly blame Steve for that.

Stuart was only too willing to go after the women with Steve, despite having a steady girlfriend of his own. ‘Don’t it bother you?’ Mike asked him when the three of them were together one day. ‘What if your girlfriend finds out?’

‘She won’t,’ Stuart said confidently. ‘Anyroad, if she does, so what? It ain’t hurting her, it’s helping.’

‘How d’you work that out?’

‘Look, she don’t want to go all the way, frightened of finding herself pregnant; and she’s right to worry because I think her old man would kill the pair of us. This way I don’t have to push her.’

‘Tressa wouldn’t see it that way,’ Mike said, shaking his head.

‘You sleep with Tressa,’ Steve pointed out.

‘Well, we’re engaged.’

‘I ain’t going down that route, mate,’ Stuart replied quickly. ‘Have fun while you’re young, that’s me. But I don’t think it would stop me if I was engaged, or even married.’

‘Talk sense, man.’

‘Look,’ Stuart explained, ‘you can’t do nothing to stop having kids, can you, cos the Pope says so. Well, I wouldn’t want a houseful of kids and a wife like an old hag. Some of these women having a baby every year and living hand to mouth would take it as a bonus to have their old man dip his wick elsewhere once in a while, I’ll tell you.’

Steve thought about that. Next door to them lived Bob and Chrissie Roberts. They’d been married thirteen years and Chrissie was pregnant with her tenth child. All the children were pitifully thin, dressed in rags and usually barefoot, and Steve had heard them crying with hunger and cold.

And countless times he’d heard Chrissie pleading with Bob to leave her alone and the resultant slaps and thumps and punches, followed by her muffled moans and the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of their bedhead against the wall, and later in the quiet of the night he’d often hear Chrissie sobbing.

The young, once beautiful girl was gone for good. Her golden locks were dark, lank and greasy and her skin had lost its earlier bloom and was heavily lined and sallow and thin. Added to that, her body was shapeless and she’d lost a lot of teeth. And the woman was too poor and wretched to take joy in anything. Would you want that for any woman you married? No, by God you wouldn’t.

So, when Stuart said, ‘Seems to me the church has you by the balls every which way, and I’ll go on the way I’ve always done, wife or no wife, and no bloody church will tell me different,’ Steve could see the reasoning behind it.

‘Well, I have no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing,’ Steve said. ‘And I’m not doing without female company a minute longer. Are you coming along with us, Mike, or are you not?’

Mike shook his head, and the other men laughed. ‘Suit yourself,’ Steve said, and with a wave they were gone.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_d23f834c-8383-5327-a28a-a344b945c97c)

‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.

Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.

He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’

Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’

Bugger! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.

‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’