They all joined in. You had to know it off by heart. And once you’d done confession then you could make your First Holy Communion. Nina had her dress already. There were tiny pearl buttons and lace round the sleeves. The lace was dead itchy. She wasn’t allowed to try it on any more in case it got dirty. She had white gloves too and a headband, a tiara like something a Princess would wear but no diamonds, just white. And white shoes and socks.
Father Leary was nice. He smiled a lot. Not like Daddy, who only smiled at Stephen and mainly had a shut look on his face like you couldn’t come in. When he got cross his mouth made a mean line. But he didn’t smack her. Mummy did the smacking. She usually smacked her legs.
Father Leary had a nice laugh too. It made you want to laugh.
It was hard to be good all the time. The priest said the confession was to say you’re sorry to God and that you had to try hard to be good after your confession. Yesterday she’d ambushed Stephen. She’d got the metal colander for her head and the sink plunger for her death ray and she’d waited behind the door on the landing and when she heard him coming upstairs she jumped out. ‘Exterminate! Exterminate! I am a Dalek, I will exterminate you!’ He’d jumped and screamed and she had laughed so much it hurt. He was bigger than her after all. He scowled at her and went off and she thought he might tell tales but Mummy didn’t come. It couldn’t be a sin that, being a Dalek, but maybe it was a bit mean. And teasing him about his books. He was always reading. Not fun stuff, like she got Bunty and there was good stories and pictures and always a free gift, like last week there was a hair slide on the front and it came through the door with the paper and it was great. But Stephen picked Look and Learn, which was more like school-y. And he read books without pictures in. She hated that sort. The pictures were always the best bit. But even when Nina was nice to Stephen and did kind things she would still think bad thoughts, they came into her head without her wanting them to, sneaked in so quick she didn’t see how you could stop them.
She knew she would have to go to confession a lot. If she died in-between she’d be sent to purgatory and be tortured until they decided she could go to heaven. She didn’t know what they used to torture you but it hurt a lot. In Hell they had fire but maybe purgatory was different – bamboo shoots under your nails or that one where they put a rat on your tummy and then a cage over it and when the rat got hungry it ate a tunnel through you to escape.
‘Nina.’
Startled, she looked up.
‘Make your act of contrition.’
‘Yes, Father. Oh, my God, because thou art so good…’
Megan
‘All right, Megan?’ Joe was on earlies, one in three weeks. She knew them all now, the regular drivers, but Joe was the most talkative.
‘So-so,’ she replied and put her fare on the metal dish. He rang her off a ticket and shoved the bus back into gear.
He waited till she was sat on the first seat before moving off.
‘They’ve forecast snow,’ he called over his shoulder. The bus was practically empty, sometimes she wondered if they ran it just for her. Now and then you’d get a student with a hulking great backpack off to India or Amsterdam on the Magic Bus from town but no one in their right mind would be on a bus at five in the morning if they could be tucked up warm in bed. Megan had no choice.
‘My mammy’d say it was too cold to snow,’ Megan called back. She lit up. They were bringing in rules about smoking, you had to go upstairs, but Joe didn’t mind and there was no one else to bother. He’d a fag in his mouth like a permanent fixture, even got a little yellow-brown stain there above his lip.
‘Never quite got it myself,’ she continued. ‘I mean, it snows at the North Pole, doesn’t it, and up Everest an’ all? Can’t get much colder than that.’
‘It’s not the same in town, is it, the snow? All mucky by the end of the day.’
‘That salt they chuck everywhere, the gritters and that, you should see what that does to the carpets. Burns ’em. It’s corrosive, that’s what it is. Ruins ’em if you let it build up.’
Joe swung the bus on to Rochdale Road leading down into town. ‘Your Brendan had any luck?’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Anything that comes up there’s half of Harpurhey after it. And they take the youngsters. Pay ’em less.’
‘Bloody crime,’ Joe put in. ‘When I started out you could always find something.’
‘Like the buses?’
He laughed. ‘Aye. Well they had conductors too in them days. Or the railways, markets, factories. Everywhere’s hit now. Rolls Royce gone bust, did you see that? Dockers and engineers on strike, even the post office.’
She knew only too well. After she’d been off having Chris they’d cut back at her old place. When she went to see about going back to work they couldn’t give her anything. Not even part-time. Orders were down and overheads were up. People blamed cheap imports and they were tightening their belts.
‘Something might turn up,’ he said. ‘You live in hope.’
‘Aye, you live in hope and you die in despair.’
‘Keep doing the pools, lass.’
She watched the streets rattle past. Houses in darkness, streetlights still casting everything in an orange wash. It was perishing. They hadn’t had the heating on all winter. Just using the gas fire in the lounge. They were living on beans and toast. She still tried to keep the kids looking nice but it was hard. Aidan only had to look at a pair of shoes and they started dropping to bits and Francine growing so fast they couldn’t keep up. She’d even got them some stuff from the Oxfam shop in town. That was a real no-no. You were meant to give your kids the best, only the best, all new. Never cast-offs or if you absolutely had to then only in the family. She pretended they’d come from Woollies, they all had ladybird labels in and you couldn’t tell they’d been worn.
Brendan had taken her to task for it, thinking she’d been spending what they hadn’t got, so she’d had to tell him the whole lot had only cost a couple of bob. She’d seen the fleeting look of shame cross his features and fought against the same feelings in herself.
‘It doesn’t matter, Brendan,’ she said gently, ‘it’s just another way of keeping our heads above water.’
With no joy at the factory she now had four cleaning jobs and still they were spending more than they brought home. If she earned any more they’d dock his social. Two of the jobs were cash-in-hand as it was. Some fool somewhere had decided how much a family of five needed to live on. They must have forgotten to add a nought on the end because the amount barely fed them never mind all the rest – cleaning stuff, soap, plasters, tampons, school things, repairs, birthday cards.
Brendan had helped out on the Driscoll’s stall for a couple of months but they all knew it didn’t add up. People were holding on to their money and takings were rock bottom. Now and again he’d get a day or two labouring, on the motorway. Digging and lifting. He’d come back shattered, the sun or the wind peeled his nose and his shoulders and he’d have cuts on his hands and arms and sometimes was half-deaf from the drills but he’d have a note or two in his pocket. Enough for a bit of shopping or towards the gas or the electric. It didn't happen often. Too many after the same chance and besides it was wise not to push it, too many snoopers eager to catch them out and stop all their benefits.
Her stop next. She finished her cigarette and trod on the tab. Her day stretched ahead like an endurance test. Two and a half hours at the office block in town; five floors they covered, just the three of them. And that included everything from emptying paper bins and hoovering to cleaning toilets and polishing the big entrance hall with the industrial machines.
Then on to the nightclub, where it was clearing up tab ends and broken glass, wiping last night’s beer from the bar and often as not someone's vomit from the floor. The carpet was past saving. Years of spills creating the dark, tacky residue that made your soles stick as you walked on it. Made her skin crawl, that carpet. Third job was a private house in Prestwich where she did a different floor each weekday and always the kitchen and bathroom. A consultant lived there, working at the hospital. She’d never met him, only his wife, who acted like minor royalty. She was often out, going off to coffee mornings and exhibitions and trips to Stratford or up to London, which was where they were from originally. How could you go up to London, Megan thought? The place was 300 miles south. It wasn’t so much a direction thing, she’d said to Brendan, she reckoned it was more like a snob thing: London was better than everywhere else so London was up and everywhere else was down.