Counting Stars Read online

“Perhaps that’s it,” she said. “Like Father O’Mahoney said this morning, this day lifts this world of pain a little closer up to Heaven.”

  We waited for our tea to cool. We sprawled on the soft turf. The trumpet quietened. The sun poured down. Margaret asked how long it was until the hospital but there were hours yet.

  She sighed.

  “She’ll be waiting,” she said. “She’ll be so lonely. Her leg’ll be so sore. Why does she have to put up with it?”

  She lay facedown, singing to herself. Mary found a stick and traced the shape of Margaret’s body onto the grass.

  “This is the boundary,” she said.

  We marked the shape with little stones. We stood back and looked at it and Margaret giggled.

  We traced each other, marked each of our shapes with stones on the grass. The shapes lay side by side between the fire and the pond.

  “There we are,” said Mary. “A map of us all.”

  We laughed and drank our tea and we heard another voice calling:

  “This is the boundary! This is the bloody boundary!”

  Two boys came toward the crest, a skinny young one and an older one. The older boy had a stick. He held the young one by the arm and pushed him forward. He kept pausing, whipping the young boy, laughing.

  “This is the boundary! This is the bloody boundary!”

  Mary jumped up and yelled.

  “Stop it! Leave him alone!”

  The boy stuck his fingers up at us, pushed the young boy forward.

  We looked at Colin.

  “Hell’s teeth,” he said.

  He and I went forward past the ponds. I lifted a stone, gripped it tight in my fist. The boy waited, grinning. He jerked the young boy’s hand up toward his shoulder blade. He stuck his fingers up again.

  “Leave him alone,” said Colin.

  “Nick off.”

  “Leave him alone, I said.”

  I held the stone high in the air.

  “What’ll you do about it?”

  “He’ll beat your brains out,” said Colin.

  “Do it!” yelped the young boy. He squealed as his arm was yanked higher. “Do it! Beat his brains out!” He howled, lost in his pain.

  The older boy relaxed his grip as we moved closer.

  “Have him,” he said. He pushed the boy, tripped him, sent him tumbling. He landed with his hands stretched out into the clay pond.

  “Look at him,” he said. “What is he, eh?”

  The young boy slithered from the pond toward us.

  “Beat his brains out,” he said. “Do it. Go on!”

  But we moved backward with him, toward the girls.

  The other sneered and walked off, lashing the bracken as he went.

  “Who are you?” asked Margaret.

  “Valentine Carr,” he whimpered, curling up on the turf beside us.

  “And who was he?”

  “Big bad blinking brother. Adrian Carr.”

  “Don’t cry now. He’s gone away.”

  “Poor Valentine,” said Margaret. She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Poor little Valentine.”

  We watched him, waited for him to settle. He wiped his face with his hands, daubed clay on his cheeks.

  “What’s he done to you?” said Catherine.

  He lifted his shirt and showed the red weals on his back.

  She listened to his heart, felt his pulse, stared into his eyes, touched his cheek. She gave him some tea and bread and butter.

  “There you are,” she said.

  He ate and drank between his sobs.

  “Don’t worry, Valentine,” she whispered. “You’ll be all right. Valentine. It’s a nice name.”

  “Was born on St. Valentine’s Day. She said everybody would love me for it. But everybody picks on me for it. What’s your names?”

  We told him. We showed him our outlines on the grass. We told him to lie down and we placed the stones around him.

  “See?” said Catherine. “There’s us and there’s Valentine beside us. See?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good boy. Sit still. Forget about it all.”

  “What time is it?” said Margaret.

  “Hours yet,” said Catherine.

  We sprawled there in the silence in the heat. In the distance, the trumpet and the bell continued. Soon Valentine was sleeping. Mary and Catherine lay dozing, too. Colin and I smoked cigarettes. Margaret pulled handfuls of clay from the edge of the pond and formed little squat figures with it. She walked them across the grass like puppets. She made wings on some of them and held them up to the sky.

  “Put them in the fire,” said Colin. “They’ll harden and you’ll be able to take them home.”

  We knelt around the fire, gently laying the figures on the embers. I put more hawthorn there and the flames began to crackle and flare around them. We put up our hands, protecting our faces.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “They won’t burn.”

  “I’ll take one for Mam,” said Margaret. “That one there, look.”

  She stared into the flames.

  “How long will they take?”

  “Long as you can leave them,” said Colin. “Till they’re hot right through and they’re baked like bread and they’re hard as stone.”

  “She’ll put it on the bedside table. Every time she looks at it she’ll think of us.”

  Valentine woke up and came to us.

  “Can you take me home now?” he said.

  We looked at each other.

  “But what time is it?” said Margaret.

  “Where do you live?” said Colin.

  “I don’t know,” said Valentine.

  “Hell’s teeth, Valentine!”

  We took him back to where we could look down over Felling. We pointed out the streets radiating out from Felling Square, the parks, the new flats, the old neighborhoods.

  “Somewhere down there?” we said.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  Catherine came and named places he might live, the landmarks he might live beside. She stroked his shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” he whimpered. “I don’t know how to get home again.”

  She shook her head and sighed.

  “I dreamed about the Ascension,” she said. “Jesus came out from St. Patrick’s. He was lifted slowly up into the sky. I kept pointing to him but nobody noticed a thing. He got smaller and smaller and smaller and then he was gone. The sky was very blue and very empty, just like today.”

  Valentine leaned on her.

  “Take me home, Catherine.”

  She clicked her tongue and shook her head at him.

  “Hell’s teeth, Valentine. Somebody must have told you where you live. Is it big or small? Is it a flat or a house?”

  He stared down at the grass.

  “Think about it! Think!”

  He thought and cried.

  “I think I remember,” he said at last. “I think it starts with The.”

  “Hell’s teeth,” said Colin. “The bloody what?”

  “The Hayning?” said Catherine. “The Crescent? The Green? The Drive?”

  His eyes brightened.

  “The Drive? Yes? The Drive?”

  “I think so. I don’t know.”

  We looked at each other. We looked over the playing fields and rooftops to the distant curved roadway named The Drive.

  “But what time is it?” said Margaret.

  Colin looked at his watch: just time enough, if we hurried and Valentine was right.

  We gathered our things together. We lifted Margaret’s hot figures from the dying embers and laid them in the tin where the eggs and bread had been. She carried the angel that wouldn’t fit, rolling it from hand to hand because of its heat. We hurried out of the Heather Hills and away from the hospital. We kept urging Valentine to move, to hurry, we were doing this for his sake and he should at least try to keep up. He kept stopping, saying he was tired, he was too hot, he wanted to go home, we were being h
orrible to him. His face was wet and wild and red with weeping. I lost patience with him and half dragged him across the playing fields.

  “Is it near here?” said Catherine as we entered Chilside Road and headed down toward The Drive.

  “He doesn’t blinking know,” said Mary.

  “I think so,” said Valentine. He said yes as we entered The Drive. He wiped his eyes with his fists.

  “Yes,” he said. “That one there.”

  We hesitated as he began to lead us toward it.

  “Don’t leave me yet,” he said, starting to cry again.

  We went to the gate. The garden inside was worn smooth as stone. Someone had been digging a deep hole. A sheet of corrugated steel was thrown across it with Danger Keep Out painted in red. At the side of the house a sleeping mongrel was chained to a clothes post and a fire was smoldering. A man stared from the window, disappeared, appeared at the door. He wore a maroon dressing gown, black boots.

  “Who’s this?” he said.

  “They brung me home,” said Valentine. “My friends.”

  “His brother just left him,” said Mary. She pulled up Valentine’s shirt. “And look what he did to him.”

  “Get in here,” said the man.

  Valentine walked to the door and the man pulled him over the threshold. The door slammed. We heard the yelling from inside.

  “Adrian! Get in here! Many times have I told you not to leave him? Many times have I told you not to hit the little sod?”

  Then there was Adrian’s voice, yelling in pain and cursing, too, and Valentine looking out at us through his tears.

  “Poor little Valentine,” we murmured as he was dragged from our sight.

  “We’ll see him again,” said Catherine.

  “We’ll take him to see Mam,” said Mary.

  “Yes. Someday. Poor little soul.”

  We turned away and Margaret sighed: she was so tired and hot, the way back was so steep. Mam would be so worried if we weren’t there on time.

  The distant rooftops and chimneys of the hospital shimmered in the heat.

  We heard a voice:

  “Here they are! Oh, here they are!”

  It was Mrs. Minto in her garden. She knelt at the border of her lawn with a trowel in her hand. She still had her battered hat on and when she rose and came to the fence we saw the little squares of carpet tied around her knees with string.

  “Fancy that!” she called. “How lovely! How nice to see you all!”

  She stood there beaming, with dirt on her face and a ladybird crawling over the front of her green blouse.

  “Don’t move, now!”

  She trotted off to her open back door and came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla in her hand. She passed it across the fence and we drank and handed it on to each other.

  “Fancy you lot coming past my fence on such a lovely day. Suppose you’re off to see your mam. Give her my love. Make sure, now.”

  She took a packet of biscuits from her pocket and passed them over, too.

  “Go on,” she said. “You need the nourishment. Get them down.”

  Colin looked at his watch and said it was all right. We’d be there on time. So we stood there and munched and drank and started to smile.

  “So lovely,” said Mrs. Minto. “So warm and bright. Jesus safe in Heaven. Mam tucked up in hospital, and here’s us all together on God’s good Earth.”

  Margaret inspected the angel in her hand. The surface was crumbly and one of the wings had snapped.

  “Don’t worry,” whispered Catherine. “She’ll love it just the same.”

  I lifted the lid of the tin and showed the others resting safe in there.

  The trumpet and bell sounded from a distant boundary.

  Mrs. Minto tilted her head.

  “Can you hear that?” she said. “It’s gone round and round in my head all day long.”

  The Baby

  THERE WAS A SEAMSTRESS, Miss Golightly, who lived in Kitchener Street behind Felling Square. We bought our gloves and balaclavas from her. She lengthened our hems and altered our hand-me-downs. She was no taller than I, she smelt of mints and liniment and cologne. She had a thin mustache and her earlobes were stretched by the silver earrings she wore. On cold days a tatty fur stole with animals’ heads hung over her cardigan and stared at you with stupid glassy eyes.

  There were kids who said she was a witch and who wouldn’t pass her door at night. They talked about spells and spirits. They said she’d stolen children and sold them to the devil. Her great-nephew, Kev, a red-haired boy of my own age, said the stories were true. He hated her. He said his family knew she’d done terrible things. She’d been a whore in her youth and after that nobody’d touch her with a barge pole and that was why she was alone.

  “Watch yourself,” he used to say. “She’s a filthy cow. She’ll start touching you up. Just you wait and see.”

  When I repeated some of this at home, Mam said there wasn’t a harmful bone in the woman’s body. She wanted no more than to have children to make and mend for, and she loved us all. This seemed true to me. I liked to be with her in her little front room, to stand on a chair before her while she held her pins between her teeth and tugged at hems and seams. She touched me so gently as she smoothed the clothes to fit the body. She stroked my hair and said how quickly I grew. Afterward there were jars of wrapped sweets on her sideboard, dozens of books on her shelves, framed faded photographs on her walls.

  The photographs seemed alien and ancient at first, but she guided me to see that the unknown existed within the familiar: that carnival with its brass band and tents and roundabouts took place on the fields at Felling Shore; those horses with the great leather halters around their necks drank from a trough at the center of Felling Square; that steep row of shops with the aproned proprietors outside was Felling High Street. Everywhere, there were glimpses of the world in which I’d grown: the broad river, the curve of the Heather Hills, St. Patrick’s steeple, the unmistakable gradients and intersections of our streets, the shapes of buildings beneath reconstructed facades, the names of public houses and businesses rewritten but unchanged. I sought familiarity in the people, too, looking for my ancestry in the faces of those who had held still while the film was exposed, and trying to decipher the shapes of those who had moved and left only translucent impressions like ghosts.

  As I leaned close, I kept whispering, “Yes. I see.” And she smiled and nodded and squeezed my arm in congratulation.

  There were many pictures of nurses. They posed in formation in hospital grounds, they were busy in field hospitals preparing for the first war. They cared for the casualties: young men on benches or slumped in wheelchairs, with their bandages, their stump limbs, their brave smiling, their deadened eyes. Once she brought a parcel from another room: her old uniform, folded and pressed, wrapped in tissue and brown paper; the dark blue skirts and the brilliant white pinafore, the cross on the bib darkened to the color of blood. She held it before her body and posed for me. She directed me to the photographs. “Where am I?” she asked, and time after time I scanned the faces until I learned to see her quick and true: the little bright and beaming one, who still survived in the gentle seamstress at my side.

  It was inevitable that as I grew older her seams should begin to pucker and twist. We noticed it first when she was making me trousers from a length of blackout cloth we’d found in the back of a drawer. She was distracted that day, she found it difficult to focus on her task.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Ten,” I answered.

  She counted on her fingers, whispered numbers, decades.

  “Ten?”

  “Yes. Ten.”

  “Ten.”

  She meditated, or dreamt, with her needle poised in midair. It was November, near to Remembrance Day. I remember the red poppies we were wearing at our breasts. Frost was resting in the joints of the cobbles outside. A family hurried by, parents and small children in a close group with their breath
in clouds around them. When she came out of it and stitched again, her fingers slipped and she drew a little bulb of blood from my leg.

  “Poor soul,” she whispered as she dabbed my skin with cotton wool. “Such tender things.”

  She stitched again, half dreaming.

  “How old are you?” she asked. “How old?”

  Afterward we stood before the photographs again.

  “There you are,” I told her.

  “And here’s this one,” she said.

  Beneath her finger was a grinning black-haired soldier, helmet in his hand, thick uniform buttoned to his throat. He stood by a front door like hers, which opened directly to the pavement. Even in this darkened print you saw how the sun had beaten down that day, glared upon the brick walls and the threshold, how the soldier narrowed his dark eyes against the relentless light and grinned and grinned.

  “See?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She turned me to another photograph, a crowd of soldiers in loose formation on a railway platform on a duller day.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  I played the game, scanned the faces.

  “That one.”

  “No. This one,” she said. “This bonny one.”

  We went to other photographs.

  “Where is he?”

  “This one.”

  “No, this one. See?”

  “I see.”

  She cupped my chin in her palm. She pressed my cheek with the tips of her cold fingers, pressed harder upon my cheekbone, traced the delicate curve of my temple.

  “Silly bonny boy,” she said. “And where is he now?”

  She dreamt again, then left me and went to somewhere else in the house and came back with another photograph. It was the head of the soldier, in shirt and tie, relaxed, hardly faded at all, smiling through the even light at us. The name of a Felling photographer was embossed in the corner of the print.

  “Here he is,” she said.

  She touched the flesh of my cheek again.

  She wrapped up the trousers in brown paper.

  “I told him, you know. Don’t go. Nurses know the body’s such a soft and fragile thing.”

  At home, Mam fingered the crooked stitching at my waist. She tugged the material and tried to make it fall evenly to my ankles. She knelt at my side with scissors and needle and thread, opened the stitches, tried to close them again more evenly. She sighed and shook her head and said they’d just have to do, I could use them for playing in.