The Street and other stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

older than me. She was working in the mill and we met through the camogie. I was still at school but we both got a wee job, so we did, working together at nights for a couple of hours in Mr Keenan’s sweetie shop.”
    “Poor old Mr Keenan, now he was a proper gentleman. I remember…”
    “Lily always got the boys. I recall one time saying to my mammy about, you know, Lily always getting the boys, and my mammy said to me not to worry, she wouldn’t have her sorrows to seek. Anyway, not long after that Lily got pregnant. She never told any of us, none of her friends or family. I didn’t know until she was about six months, and by then some of the women in the mill had advised her how to get rid of it. That’s what the story was anyway. I couldn’t tell you if it was true or not, Lily never talked about it. Anyway, she’s supposed to have taken things to make the baby come away. If she did it never worked. The baby was born: it was a wee girl—deformed so it was; it lived for about a month. Poor Lily never saw it.”
    “Ach, I never knew that, Maisie.”
    “I know, Aggie. You were away at the time. Do you remember?You went off to Cushendall with our Aunt Sadie for the summer. You were too young anyway. Remember, there’s ten years between us. That mightn’t be much at our age now, but it’s a lot when you’re younger, so it is.”
    “What age were you then?”
    “I was about fifteen and Lily would have been about nineteen or twenty-odd. Everybody was talking about her at the time. All the boys at the corner arguing and saying it wasn’t theirs. That really annoyed me. Poor Lily. And all the fellas she was so crazy about: all they could think about was themselves.”
    “Typical bloody men. They’re all the bloody same.”
    “I still knocked round with Lily. Remember oul’ Missus Reid? She came around one day and told me mammy that she shouldn’t let me go around with Lily ’cos Lily had such a bad name. She was shown the door—nicely, of course. Me ma said that I was her rearing, not meaning any harm on Lily’s mammy, of course, and I could keep my own company. Like, me ma wouldn’t let you say a word about Lily. Lily was more often in our house than she was in her own.”
    “Is it true that her mother used to follow her about the place?”
    “Aye, but only because she was worrying for her. Me mammy says Lily had a wee want in her, a wee weakness, and her mother knew this. I think it got worse after she lost the child. I remember hearing her mammy and ours talking one day and her mammy was saying that when you lose a child like that you have a wee craving inside you for another one. When I asked me ma about it afterwards, she told me I’d understand when I got older.”
    “Who was the father?”
    “Nobody knows. Except Lily, of course. I heard years later it was a married man from Leeson Street. Lily’s mother always blamed poor Sean Dunne from one of the Rock streets. Sean was as innocent as a baby himself, but Lily’s mother gave him dog’s abuse. She never gave him the light of day, shouting at him in the street and this, that and the other thing.”
    “I never heard of him.”
    “Ach, you’d know his sister, Gonne. She married into the Quinns from Hawthorn Street.”
    “Ah yes, I know who you mean. Gonne and me were in the same class together. She never mentioned a brother, Sean. There was Brendan and Hugh and…”
    “Sean ended up going off to sea, so he did. He’s dead now, God rest him. He died in Norway or one of them places. Anyway, a year or so later Lily was pregnant again. Only this time she told everybody and her family and all of us helped her, so we did. The only thing was the fella she said was the one that done it: he said it wasn’t him.”
    “Typical! Was he married too?”
    “No, not at that time. I might as well tell you his name. It was big Sammy Mallon.”
    “Big Sammy? Nora McCluskey’s man? Him?”
    “Aye, he was a fly man in them days. All the girls were