Free Orphan of Angel Street by Annie Murray Page A

not plentiful to begin with – Mabel was pawning piece by piece. They were already poor when Albert left. He had not been getting regular work and the jobs he did get were now unskilled and insecure. He’d had two spells in Winson Green prison for drunkenness. At home he was neither raucous nor violent. Sober, he was gentle with Susan. Drunk he was silent, lost.
    And then he was gone. On a beautiful summer day when birds sang in small gardens and there was a breeze to blow the city smoke away, he left and never came back. Mabel who had believed, whatever his state, however distant they grew from one another, that he would always be there, was more shocked than she’d ever thought she could be again. She knew he wasn’t coming back – in the summer warmth he had taken his coat and hat.
    Her time living as a respectable married woman was over. Now she and Susan were on their own. She was that workhouse nobody again, living in the slums where you had to burn the bugs off the ceiling with a candle before you could get to sleep, and surrounded by slummy people whom she hated almost as much as she hated herself.

    ‘Mom!’ Susan’s voice rang up the staircase. ‘It’s finished – come and see.’ There was a pause. ‘Please?’
    ‘I’ll go up,’ Mercy said, muttering ‘miserable cow’ under her breath.
    Mabel’s hands gripped the cover on her bed, her teeth grating together. She heard the clatter of two pairs of boots on the stairs, an abrupt knock at the bedroom door and to her outrage Mercy and Johnny Pepper appeared.
    ‘Get out!’ she shrieked, sitting up in fury. ‘What the ’ell d’yer think yer playing at coming pushing your way in ’ere?’
    ‘Susan wants you to come,’ Mercy said in a voice of steel, standing firm in the doorway. She looked in disgust at Mabel whose appearance had deteriorated over the past months. She’d spread and sagged and her clothes were unkempt and often dirty.
    ‘Oh you always know what Susan wants nowadays, don’t you? Well, you can tell ’er from me she’s gunna ’ave a long wait, ’cos I ain’t coming just to see where Mr God-Almighty Pepper’s nailed a couple of wheels on to some planks.’
    She lay down on the bed again feeling Mercy’s piercing look of loathing through her back. Mercy and Johnny went back down again.
    Susan was sitting enthroned in her ingenious, very straight-backed chair at the threshold of the house. Her face fell as Mercy reappeared.
    ‘Never mind—’ Johnny set out to cheer her up. ‘Come on – ’ave a ride!’
    He took hold of the metal bar at the back of the chair and careered along the yard so fast that the neighbours had to scatter. Mercy’s eyes followed them. It had worked! She laughed with delight. Now she and Susan would be able to get out!
    ‘Johnny!’ Elsie bawled at him. ‘Go easy!’
    ‘She won’t come,’ Susan said as they skidded to a halt. ‘She ain’t feeling too well.’
    Everyone saw this for the thin excuse it was.
    ‘Never mind,’ Elsie said. ‘She’ll come round to the idea.’
    ‘Go on then,’ said Bummy. ‘Take it off up there again – I want to see ’ow well it’s going.’
    Susan managed to turn the wheels a little on her own, but being unused to any form of exertion was soon exhausted. Mercy completed this next lap of honour for her as everyone clapped, down towards the entry then back up to the factory wall, past the soot-dusted cabbages in the little garden at the front of the two cottages.
    ‘She’s evil, that Mabel Gaskin,’ Mary Jones spat out in Susan’s absence.
    ‘Nah.’ Her husband Stan, a taut, stocky bloke with black hair and a thin moustache was smoking, leaning against the brewhouse wall. ‘She’s all right really, she is.’
    ‘And what would you know?’ Mary turned on him. ‘You wanna keep yer eyes to yourself, you do.’
    ‘Eh, you two,’ Bummy said, then called to Susan. ‘D’yer like it then?’
    The expression on her face was enough of a