Free My Notorious Life by Kate Manning Page B

child in front of a piano the size of a knacker’s wagon. She sat like an angel in a red dress, plinking the keys. Her miniature patent leather boots did not reach the floor but dangled kicking time to the music. The sound jangled out faint through the panes, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was the tune. I stared, craving the black and white keys of the instrument, the red dress, the tune plinking away like a taste in my mouth.
    —Move along there, miss, said a gentleman. —Move along.
    —Move along yourself, you big ox, I said, but he had a walking stick tipped with silver raised in my direction, so I scrambled away, my head furious with plans. One day I’d have such pianos and goblets, draperies and gewgaws and gated walkways with wrought iron curlicues. For now I turned into an alley and spied a row of ash barrels set out for collection. I dug through their contents no better than a dog. There was coffee grounds and eggshell and rags greasy with stove blacking. There was the bones of a roast chicken, plus the feet, all of which I wrapped in a bit of paper for soup. Then toward the bottom was treasure: whole slices of a roast joint congealed in gravy, four or six potatoes half ate in their skins, the scrapings of plates frozen in a mash of cake and sauce, cold peas and cream. A wasted miracle from the table of some ponce. I wrapped the haul in my apron, and carried it home triumphant, launching up the stairs two at a time.
    When Mam seen my findings, she set about with great excitement, slicing cabbage. She was not bad with a knife even with the one arm, and together we simmered Washington Square Hoity Toity Stew, the discarded meat stretched with cabbage and one onion cooked in a sauce of ale. The smell of it tortured us as we awaited Michael Duffy, who soon came through the door from a day hauling plaster. He grabbed my mother around her thick waist and danced her about singing Whiskey in the Jar till she shrieked and laughed and swatted at him, and I saw how he nuzzled her neck and she ducked away from him, blushing and fussing with her hair.
    —You’re a fine one-armed woman Mary Duffy, he said to her.
    —Go on Michael, she said, her eyes bright in the firelight.
    They sent me to my bed to dream of grand pianos and red shoes and someplace where my sister and brother played on ponies in fields of green, and we were the Muldoons again, only better.
    In the darkness, later, I was woken by my stepfather’s voice, thick with drink.
    —Mrs. Duffy. I could hear the rustle of covers as he pawed through them. —Oh Mrs. Duffy.
    —Shh, my mother laughed. —She’ll wake.
    —She won’t.
    They commenced to heave and roll about with sighs and explorations.
    I did not understand how Mam tolerated him, or just what was the rent she paid for the roof over our heads. Whatever the arrangement, she did not fight him off, and I pulled my hard pillow over my ears to shut out their noises and whisperings. We children of Cherry Street started our schooling in such matters at an early age, no different from the farmer boys and girls of Illinois, observing the livestock. If you wonder, did this vast education influence my future choice of profession? The answer is yes it did.

Chapter Nine

A White Rag
    M y mother’s child chose to be born on a day in February, so cold it froze the p*** of dogs, horses and men to a pale lemon color on the pavement. In the early morning when the Duffy brothers and my Aunt Bernie was out pursuing employment or swig, my mother called to me.
    —Axie? she said, her voice peculiar.
    When I got up from my bed she was standing in the middle of the cold front room. Steam rose off the water that broke and leaked out warm around her legs. While she mopped it she announced her baby would soon be born. She had gone downstairs to get Mrs. O’Reilly some time ago, but Mrs. O’Reilly had not shown herself. —Go down Axie now, Mam said, —and see why she hasn’t.
    Downstairs Mrs. O’Reilly was asleep in her