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"Pick more daisies"
Perry Estelle © 2002
Liverpool docks, England. 22:15hrs. Present day.
Stephanie stared heavenward admiring the vast black velvet with its festoon. She found Venus. She remembered being told by someone that a Venusian day is longer than an Earth year. Almost as long as her day. Back on earth, she wished her client would finish the "Jousts of Venus" and pay her, so she could go home.
A year had passed since the loss of her baby. It was just a fetal four months old when she had thrown herself into the Mersey in a bid to avoid both their real fate. She was almost off the hook. She felt brief euphoria. A cure all.
Except, it was a barge hook that pulled her to the bank. A swarm of luminous bodies clambering in the snaking blue lights. Squawking sirens celebrating her guest appearance with the grim reaper.
A boy cyclist saw what he first thought was a life-buoy. Instead it was a near dead girl. Her body floating with no resistance to the current. Bobbing perpendicular and head bowed. A feint last gasp of oxygen in her brackish, saltwater filled lungs. The red leather jacket catching the boy's eye. It was the same paper route that had brought him down Mawson Street that same time every Thursday night for two years.
One boy's force of habit saved Stephanie. Not her unborn.
The heroic youngster appeared the very next November night posting his own headline at the same spot.
"Paper boy alerts River Police to drowning woman."
Stephanie Caroline Murray had cheated all her life but could not cheat her own death. She knew she would always be passed around at parties like a cheap bottle of wine. Men had taken everything from her.
Their manual dexterity like a blind watchmender with two dead hedgehogs for hands.
Men were the blots on her landscape.
At the age of nine years she was led by her priest to the vestry after mass to witness the error of his ways. She would always remember his missing finger and the smell of his stale breath. The collection of sweat on his fore-lip and saliva at the corners of his mouth. Yet, she strangely could never remember any of his sermons or how he liked his tea on his shepherding visits to her parents house. Her Mother refused to believe her daughter for the reason she started to wet the bed. She made her daughter seek forgiveness for her vivid imagination at confession the following Sunday.
To the man with the missing finger.
The clergyman more at home at a peepshow than a confession box coughed through the curtain.
"Well, my child, what can it be you need our Lord's mercy this day?"
He snorted a finger of snuff from the puffy stump of his right hand and brushed the brown fallout off his cheek and onto his cassock. One baggy eye still shut.
The wee girl stammered.
"F-father forgive me f-for I have sinned." Tears fought their way free. Her eyes unable to meet those of who had robbed her of innocence and betrayed the most fragile of trust.
The man of the cloth grew impatient and with rasping indignation raised his voice.
"Go on girl, I have no time for your dallying." He closed the other baggy eye and lifted his chin with pursed lips expectantly.
"Mother says I'm to apologise for last Sunday and not tell lies."
The girl looked down at her lap clenching her blue satin frock tight over her knees.
"Well, I agree with your Mother, it seems you were a little confused and the less said about the matter the better. Liars will not inherit the kingdom, child. I will pray for you…"
The man stared at the weeping girl with the sort of look he reserved for fools and drunkards.
"…no doubt you can seek the Lord's comfort with me next door and make your peace in secret.."
Stephanie looked up and saw his face pressed closer to the dark mesh and the diamonds of light playing a cruel game on his features. He grimaced the same grimace as last Sunday. She gasped with dread.
Stephanie shrieked with a little more than churlish dismay. Her cry piercing the dank air.
"If you touch me like that again, I'll, I'll…, phone the friggin' Pope up, 'an tell 'im 'ow you do rude things to little girls."
She drew herself up to her full height, turned, and burst through the curtain still sobbing, clutching the ring upon her necklace.
The 'lucky tanner' was a gift from her Father. A ring he had made by drilling a sixpence and beating it to shape and size in between shifts on the docks. The tiny inscription read. "Love Daddy." He gave it to his adoring daughter.
The priest was clutching something too. His chest. He slumped to his knees with the curtain wrapped around him after leaving the upholstery hooks one by one.
Father McDaid was treated at Jonathan Willits Hospice for coronary thrombosis. He gave up his calling due to ill health. Thank God.
Stephanie could no longer trust God to look after her affairs.
She left Him. She waved goodbye to the Seven sacraments. The Eucharist. Penance and Purgatory. She came to the conclusion that if you have to keep your 'hand on your ha'penny' in Church, then she would rather go to Hell in that case.
By sixteen, Stephanie was an accomplished cellist, beguiling audiences with Liverpool's Philharmonic all over the Northwest. Her Father had fought illegal brawls for money to pay for her lessons. It was his fists that paid for her success. Each time he heard the wind leave an opponent he cherished another kind of performance that would make him prouder. She was ignorant to her Fathers methods of financing her tuition. He was her best friend. She felt uneasy playing the Cathedral. A hypocrite coming back to spite God after her disenchanted departure seven years ago. Playing Mozart's Requiem with the shame of what she had been through as a child. If the choir knew her dark secret they would choke on every hymn.
Uninspired, she arrived home after the applause that night to the indigestible news that her Father had been killed in a street fight. She refused to believe her Father would hit anybody.
Home was now Hell too.
Her Mother's insatiable appetite for male company since her Father's death made breakfast an ordeal. Stephanie stuffed her pillow tight to her head with contempt for the rice paper thin walls.
Next morning, Stephanie dragged herself to the breakfast table like an unwilling hostage. A bundle of stubble and a diesel soaked vest bumped past her in the hallway, apologised and let himself out.
"Mam, what was last night all about? God knows what the rest of the street thinks, an' in Dad's bed 'nall."
The response from her unnatural Mother made Nagasaki look like a firecracker in the backyard. Smudged make-up looked up from the Ryvita and coughed a large un-masticated lump in the direction of the dog. The hound lazily finished consuming it. She pulled up the corner of her kimono dressing gown and dried her watering eyes.
Eyes, that showed an abyss of disbelief.
The outraged woman snapped her legs together and made a face like someone had ripped off a length of sticking plaster from between her thighs that had previously remained there throughout countless baths and showers. She jumped up from the table sending a toast-rack and pot of tea in one direction and threw a full cup and saucer at her cowering daughter.
" What kind of bloody business is it of yours, you nosy little bitch?" She seethed, with the dog barking his own contribution.
Stephanie stood at the open front door facing her. The bewildered milkman leaving two 'goldtop' and an expression like he did not want his photograph taken. She grabbed her satchel and glared at her Mother long and hard. Her Mother looked back harder still, like a poker player who was about to bet everything on pair of two's. Tightlipped, Stephanie threw her house keys at her Mothers feet like they were worthless. They were now.
She knew that this was the last time she would see her Mother. Stephanie ran down the street gripping her precious necklace.
"I miss you Dad, help me Daddy, help me please."
Her thoughts of him fluttered back and forth, like fantails in a loft.
The punter gasped, dismounted and fumbled in his dishevelment for his wallet.
Stephanie cursed, noticing her skirt was now soiled and wet with another substance which was not rain.
"I've only got a fifty, have you got change?" The punter grumbled averting her impatient eyes. Stephanie looked at him like he had just crawled out of a swamp. She flew at him with unbroken verbal sub-machine gun fire through gritted teeth.
"I suppose you should of thought of that before you chose this godforsaken venue. This will just about cover me dry cleaning bill, or perhaps you could ask your poor little wifey to wash me kit for me, eh?"
The well spoken, poorly prepared man stubbed the crumpled note in her hand like it might explode. Then retreated between shadows. Stephanie muttered some abuse after the scurrying blot in the distance. She stole into the night feeling another relentless wave of bitter resentment had crashed over her. The same feeling after doing business that she always gets. Lower than a snakes belly.
She stared through the drizzle at the timetable. It was a few minutes until the number 12 would take her back to her bedsit. An accurate description for a bed and a chair. She sucked on a B&H and finished reading, noticing her reflection in the glass bus shelter. Hunched out of recognition was a non-descript figure looking like a bad hologram covered in birdlime. Apart from her vital signs she felt dead anyway. Hell would be a welcome change of scenery and less lonely than Christmas in Bootle. Without Dad again. One year he cycled home with a tree under his arm and fell off trying to weave into the yard. His giggling daughter rubbed snow in his face. Cuddles, watching Captain Blood and Bing Crosby. He always tricked her 'lucky tanner' out of her ear.
Her 'lucky tanner'.
She stroked it affectionately as she stared emptily into the night. A thread of smoke wound around her finger and led up her cheek wanting to mix with her tears. She searched for a tissue to delay her soft sobbing. A futile exercise.
The bus hissed to a halt and the door threw open.
She rifled her bag for loose change. Only the fifty pounds appeared. Stephanie slapped the dirty cash in the concave tray.
"Haig Street flats, please." A catch in her voice.
"Have ya nothin' smaller, pet? I'm not a flamin' building society on wheels."
The driver scowled and huffed. Another blot of a man, leering over his heavy glasses with a curious part of an egg sandwich hanging grimly from a straggly beard, defying gravity. The sort of blot of a man that had spent his whole childhood wanting to drive a bus. Now that he had to do it ten hours a day the novelty had quite obviously worn off. He poised a hand on the ticket barrel in readiness, like he had done for the past thirty years.
"S'all I have, Christ, what do you want a blowjob instead?" A modest bluff for Stephanie.
The weary passengers stopped dozing and seemed to inhale in unison.
The blot dropped his mouth and gave an expression like he had just worn a new shirt without first removing all the pins.
"If I were your Father, I'd put you over my knee, young lady." He hissed the reproof looking over his shoulder for support from the gaping audience, while waving her on.
"Yea, well your not me Father and if you want me over your bleedin' knee it'll cost you a sight more than fifty quid, ya bloody dirty sod." Stephanie thrust her chest out, held against its wishes by one or two buttons that would not of remained had they read the job description.
The bus moved off with a jerk. The driver also.
Stephanie walked the plank of the bus aisle defying comment from those who pretended to look out of the window than pass judgement. An old man bearing a grin like a vandalised cemetery looked her up and down. Too old to conceal an erection, he winked at her approvingly. She slid onto her seat as the bus lurched off into oblivion.
Stephanie looked down at her tight fists and opened her right palm to see the twist of paper money. She stared at it as if she were a conjuror hoping to make it disappear. Her face scrunched like hot lead had been poured down the back of her neck. She stifled more tears. She stood up and threw the window open stuffing the grubby note outside where it flew upwards and over the top of the swaying bus.
Goodbye to a weeks rent or a chance to score.
"Please, Mary Mother of god." Stephanie clawed the edge of the greasy seat and forced her whispered prayer as if it had to be a natural birth.
She wept again. She shut her eyes and reached in her clutch bag where her fingers closed on a small cylinder that she had forgotten. A bottle of anti-depressants begged her to open it. She fought with the childproof lid and extricated the cotton ball. Nervously, she jiggled the contents into her hand and looked at the blood red spheres. The bus jolted and several bounced out of her hand and cartwheeled under the seat behind her. She put two in her mouth and swallowed. Then another. In a few moments she will be with her Father.
Just like Christmas.
She grabbed her 'lucky tanner' and stroked it for the last time.
"Excuse me, ma duck, did you drop summit? Looks like one of those 'Smarties' or similar, but they've been on t'floor, best chuck 'em out windy, if I were you."
Stephanie re-clasped the rest of her pills and then threw them back inside her bag. She looked up to see an elderly woman that belonged to the strong Yorkshire accent. The woman sat down beside her and carried on talking. For a moment Stephanie felt she knew her from somewhere. She had not noticed her get onto the bus. She looked at the woman intently while she chatted. Although her forehead was a grid of laughter lines, the rest of her complexion was that of eggshell for a woman who was getting on in years. She wore strange clothes. A lot of them, ivory in colour. Neat and clean. With buttons firmly stitched on with the same care as to make the mend invisible. Her silky white hair perfectly groomed and in a fresh cut. She had the softest of grey eyes that had a mischief about them.
"You know, I've seen you many times before, m'duck. Hundreds of times. I've watched you grow up into a lovely girl and I've seen you go through a lot in your little life, sweetheart. That time you fell from a tree and hit your head, oh, you did give us all a start….."
Stephanie listened and was at the point of interrupting. She must have her confused with someone else. The lady with the dancing eyes began to relate stories about her childhood as if she were there. Stephanie listened in awe as she read her life to her like a precious scrapbook. She told each event with such accuracy it was like this old woman had taken the pictures and carefully pasted them in herself.
"This is your stop m'duck but before you go let me just say something to you I have been wanting to say to you since you were very tiny. Your Dad always used to say "worry don't butter no bread," he were right y'know?" Stephanie nodded. The lady took Stephanie's hand which felt a small electrical discharge.
"Pick more daisies, luvvie!" She paused and breathed deeply. "Pick more daisies, and run barefoot in the wood, go on, lots of 'em, now off you pop," The lady smiled and gave one more squeeze from her frail hand. Another fizz of static jumped across her shirtcuff knuckles, as she pressed something into her hand. Stephanie smiled back and said nothing. She got up, turned and walked toward the front of the bus. She looked over her shoulder to see the sweet old dear, wave and blow a kiss. She jumped clear of the puddle at her stop as the door started to snap shut. She tore it open again realising she had left her bag of pills under the seat.
"Hold on will ya, I forgot my pur………….." Her tongue froze with the rest of her astonished body.
"What now, for chuff's sake?" The driver pleaded.
Stephanie looked at where she had spent the journey. She scanned the bus and rubbed her eyes already raw from crying. Not to wipe the tears this time, but to stop them lying to her. She ran up to the seat, retrieving the bag.
The woman had gone. She looked hard through the streaked window and saw no kindly lady escaping into the night. Her reflection was different now. Contentedly rueful. Flushed and smiling. Peace swept over. The first ever. She opened her hand. The same fifty pounds again. A tight ball of money wrapped around her Father's ring. Her necklace was intact but her 'lucky tanner' had leapt from it. Daddy had never left her. He had been at her side all along.
The date is now February 12th 2011.
www.mothersteph.eyeconfess.com
click…
"Forgive me Mother Stephanie, for I have sinned."
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