Laceys of Liverpool Read Online Free Page B

almost as tall as she was. ‘You need to humour him.’
    Orla sniffed. ‘Can I go round Betty Mahon’s house, Mam? She got Monopoly for Christmas.’
    ‘If you want, luv.’
    ‘Can I come?’ Fionnuala said eagerly.
    Orla hesitated. Why couldn’t Fion find friends of her own? Not only was she getting dead fat, but she was a terrible hanger-on. She remembered her sister had also been unfairly treated by their dad. ‘OK,’ she said.
    Alice sighed with relief when the girls left; two less people to worry about. She opened the parlour door. ‘Maeve, would you like to help me make some tea, luv?’
    ‘I
hate
Christmas,’ Maeve declared in the kitchen. ‘It used to be nice, but now it’s awful. Will Dad ever be in a good mood again?’
    ‘Of course, luv. He’s still getting over the accident.’
    ‘But Mam, it wasn’t
our
fault he had the accident. Why is he taking it out on us?’
    Alice had no idea. Maeve had inherited her mother’s easygoing nature. It wasn’t like her to complain. John was gradually alienating every member of his family. Only Cormac seemed sweetly oblivious to the change in his dad.
    She made tea and Spam sandwiches, spread a plate with biscuits, took them into the parlour, told Maeve that, yes, it would be all right if she stayed in the back and read her new Enid Blyton book, then excused herself from the company, saying she had to go round to Myrtle’s and make sure she was all right.
    The acrid grey fog that had enveloped Bootle earlier in the day was beginning to fall again. On the nearby River Mersey, ships’ foghorns hooted eerily. The pavements glistened with damp, reflecting the street lights in glittering yellow blurs. It was lovely to see the lights on again after five years of blackout.
    Hardly anyone in Amber Street had closed their parlour curtains. Alice passed house after house where parties were going on. She had been born only a few streets away, in Garnet Street, in another cramped terrace house that opened on to the pavement, and had known most of these people all her life. They felt like family. The Fowlers were having a riotous time, doing the ‘Hokey Cokey’. Their two lads had returned unharmed after years spent in the Navy. Emmie Norris had all her family there, including the twelve grandchildren. The Martins were playing cards, a whole crowd of them in paper hats, laughing their heads off.
    Everywhere Alice looked people were having the time of their lives. The strains of ‘Bless ’Em All’ came from the Murphys’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ from the Smiths’.
    Apart from Orla, no one had sung at the Laceys’. They had pulled crackers, but hadn’t bothered with the paper hats, not even the children. It just didn’t seem right for some reason. For the first time Alice felt like a stranger in the street that was as familiar to her as the back of her hand, as if she no longer belonged, as if her life was no longer on the same keel as those of her friends and neighbours.
    She sighed as she went through the entry into Opal Street. Myrtle’s was in darkness, upstairs and down. She remembered being at school with the girl who had lived there when it had been an ordinary house. It was more than twenty years since Myrtle had moved in and it had become a hairdresser’s. The wall between the parlour and the living room had been knocked down and turned into one room. Mam had taken her there to have her hair cut. Myrtle had seemed old then, going on sixty. She claimed to have worked for some posh place in London doing rich people’s hair.
    ‘Debutantes,’ she boasted, ‘titled personages.’ No one had believed her.
    Alice unlocked the door. ‘Myrtle,’ she shouted. There was no reply. She went up to the bedroom, where the bed was empty, still unmade. Myrtle must have gone to tea with her friend, which was a relief.
    Downstairs again, she sat under the same dryer as she’d done the night before, the middle one. She was even more miserable now than she’d been