Winter on the Mersey(82)
This had been going on for weeks. Alfie had been too ill to be bored to begin with, but now he was slowly growing tired of being stuck in this one room, the bedroom he’d had since he was a boy. He’d never been much of a reader, and his eyes hurt too much to squint at the newspaper. He couldn’t stand all the radio programmes his mother loved so much – he could hear ITMA – It’s That Man Again – floating up the stairs, and sometimes she would laugh out loud and join in with one of the catchphrases. He swore he would scream if she ever said ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ one more time, except he didn’t have the energy.
He had to admit she had looked after him, bringing him hot soup when he was cold, and chilled lemonade when he was burning up. All the same, he resented her for it, having to rely on her so much, as if he was nothing but a little boy again. He’d always taken blatant advantage of the way she spoilt him, taking it for granted that she’d be happy to wait on him hand and foot, and he hadn’t particularly noticed how she did it. Now every tiny detail jarred. The way she’d be so deliberately cheerful in the morning, pulling up the hated blind. The little song she’d hum as she brought him up his meals. The snippets of gossip she’d bring back, in which he had not the slightest bit of interest.
Even though his body was worn out, his mind was beginning to churn, rehashing old resentments and frustrations. He didn’t in the least care about being off work. He would rather his fellow dockers didn’t think badly of him for taking the time off, but he didn’t miss the physical work itself – he was happy to leave them to get on with it. He missed the company, though, and the opportunities it brought him for little deals on the side, always with an eye out for a profit. That was what made life worth living – getting one over on somebody, winning a game the other person hadn’t even realised they’d been playing.
The fact that he hadn’t managed to get Danny to do what he wanted still plagued him. Danny had somehow won without even seeming to try. He was safe as houses, doing his soft desk job, not getting his hands dirty. Alfie had begun to imagine how he’d teach the man a lesson if he ever got him alone, where he couldn’t cry out for help. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. His feverish days and nights put strange images of vengeance into his mind. Before his illness, Alfie had done a deal with one of Clender’s men and got himself a crate of whisky off the back of a lorry. He’d hidden it in his wardrobe so his mother wouldn’t find it, and had been helping himself when his thirst got really bad. It was now nearly all gone, but it had further fuelled his hatred of Danny, and his obsession with the Callaghans.
Then there was Kitty. Even before the illness hit him, he’d decided to lie low. He could have sworn that with an extra few minutes he would have worked out a way of getting into her house that night, but that bloody interfering Pop Feeny had come along to spoil his fun. The real problem was, Pop might have recognised him. Alfie had scarpered as fast as he was able, but he knew Pop was no fool. He didn’t know if the self-righteous old ARP warden would have said anything to Kitty. He knew they were close, that Pop was almost like a second father to her, so on the one hand he might have felt obliged to warn her, but on the other he might not have wanted to frighten her.
He was fairly sure Pop hadn’t reported him to his boss down at the docks, or to the police. Alfie had prepared his excuse: that he had just been dropping round to see Tommy and check if the new bike he’d got through Frank was all right, or if the lad wanted Alfie to go ahead and get him a better one. He figured this would be plausible – Tommy could back him up that he’d made the offer in the first place. He hadn’t needed to use it, though. This was the one advantage of being laid up for so long. The odds were that by the time he eventually made it back into the outside world, everyone would have forgotten the incident.
He hadn’t though. He craved news of Kitty, but no matter how much salacious gossip his mother repeated when she got home from shopping, she never mentioned her. He was all too familiar with the progress of the Feeny twins, whose unexpected arrival was the talk of the neighbourhood, and the never-ending sorrow of old Mrs Kerrigan, missing her POW son Sid and now mourning Eddy Feeny too, despite her never having had a good word for him as far as anyone could remember while he was alive. There was the report that Mr and Mrs Mawdsley had had a goose for Christmas dinner and invited lots of their neighbours to share it. Alfie had not appreciated that titbit – it had been stuck-up Mr Mawdsley who’d led the complaints about the poisoned meat that had got him banned from the Sailor’s Rest and forced to go up to Clydebank.
Every now and again he would feign interest in his mother’s gossip and drop in Kitty’s name just in case it jogged her memory. It hadn’t done any good. As far as he could tell, Kitty was still working at that combined forces place in the city centre along with her brother. Yet again, he resented that Danny Callaghan, who he knew for a fact was no better than he was when it came to sticking to the right side of the law, was now some highfalutin boffin, safe and warm at his desk, while he, Alfie Delaney, worked all hours God sent labouring away and breaking his back. There was no justice in the world and his mind churned with hatred.
Alfie cursed to himself as he heard the door go downstairs and his mother cackling away to the ITMA theme. He took a small swig of whisky. When he was up and about again, he’d find a way of getting through to Kitty. She was going to be his and his alone. He knew that deep down it was what she wanted; she just hadn’t realised it yet. It was up to him to show her what she was missing.