A Mersey Mile Read Free

take five minutes in the car to eat in peace. Polly’s was busy at
the best of times, but Mondays were always crazy. Crazy? His old girl was the crazy one, buying yet more houses to be let and looked after. West Derby and Wavertree, this time.
    He started to think; thinking was not a good idea. Ellen and Polly had been friends since infant school, and Polly had helped at the end with the nursing. Polly was the closest he would ever get
to Ellen, and she was as needful as he was. Only she had a lot on her plate – a lot on dozens of plates. Oh well, she was still lovely and a good laugh. The food was a bit cold, but he was
starving, so he ate.
    Inside, Polly was starting her first big clear-up while Ernie ate his free breakfast. The half past eight lot had begun to leave, but there’d be another, smaller influx between nine and
ten. Where a business had more than one worker, they swapped breakfast shifts. Some couldn’t afford breakfast, of course. They would have a bite at home or bring a pie or a pasty for
lunchtime and starve till then. The world wasn’t fair.
    The carry-outs had been and gone. They bought breakfast in the form of bacon butties, because they were Scotty Road’s lone rangers, with no help at all in their shops, and they worked long
hours. Again, she thought how unbalanced the world had become. Ellen dead, poor Frank stuck with his mam, Cal working from a wheelchair, all appliances adapted to suit his lowered position in life.
Frank had seen to all changes, of course, but he wouldn’t have told his mother how little he’d charged in rental increase. He was a good man, worth ten of the woman who’d birthed
him.
    She walked through to the back of the property. Cal worked in a scullery, which had been enlarged by Frank’s team of builders. There were eight gas burners on hobs, two large ovens and a
massive grill. Sculleries were known as back kitchens in these parts. The living room, which usually had a range fire installed, was called the kitchen, while a front room was nominated the
parlour. Polly’s parlour was larger than most, and was used as a cafe. But parlours in nearby houses were tiny, hallowed, unused except for visitors, and as well furnished as possible.
‘All right, love?’ she asked her brother. ‘Shall I push you through while I wash up?’
    ‘OK.’ Cal Kennedy had become a man of few words since his accident. The middle room was his, though it doubled as a living area for both resident siblings. It housed a sofa, a small
table and four chairs, a sideboard and his bed, which was under the stairs. He had gone from lugging heavy loads on the docks to frying eggs for the cafe. Hard work helped him to ignore his
problems.
    Sex, the most favoured of his pastimes, had been eliminated from his life, while the girl he had loved had fled to London three months after his accident. And he was left now with Polly, who
needed her own life. She’d been abandoned, too, when she’d insisted on looking after him. She slept in the back bedroom upstairs, as the front one had been turned into a hairdressing
salon. She never stopped. It was his fault that his sister was working herself to a standstill. Could he ever repay her?
    Every morning and night, a male attendant arrived to get Cal out of or into bed. During the day, Polly had to cope with him, and that was what he hated most. Once the cafe closed at three
o’clock, she helped him on and off the commode, kept him clean, did for him things she should have been doing for the children she might never have. He had wrecked her life as well as his
own.
    Cal found comfort in his second hobby – drink. The lads sometimes came for him in the evening, wheeling him down to one of many pubs, but much of his drinking was done alone. He
didn’t hide the evidence, partly because he couldn’t, but mostly because she understood. As long as he was sober while cooking, she left him to it.
    ‘Pol?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You need a baby.’
    She