A Star Called Henry Read Free

to make her stand up and walk back, to see her as she had been. I take three stone off her, I lift her mouth, I try to put fun into her eyes. I give her hair some spring, I change her clothes. I can create a good-looking sixteen-year-old. I can make her a stunner. I can make her plainer then, widen her, spoil her complexion. I can play this game for what’s left of my life but I’ll never see Melody Nash, my sixteen-year-old mother.
    She worked in the dark and damp all day. She squinted to fight back the light. Her hands were ripped and solid. She was a child of the Dublin slums, no proper child at all. Her parents, grandparents, had never known good food. Bad food, bad drink, bad air. Bad bones, bad eyes, bad skin; thin, stooped, mangled. Henry Smart looked at Melody Nash and saw what he wanted to see.
    —What’s your name, girlie?
    —Melody Nash, she said.—How did you lose it?
    —I haven’t a bull’s clue, said Henry.
    He looked down at the ground where his foot should have been, and hopped away out of the porter he’d just thrown up. He wanted nothing to do with it; he was already a new man. He was thinking quickly, planning. She’d seen him falling on his face and then getting sick, one of his legs was missing - he knew he hadn’t been impressing her. But there were other ways to catch fish. He looked at Melody, and back down at the ground.
    —It was my good one too, he said.
    —Your good one?
    —Me Sunday leg.
    —Oh, said Melody.—It’ll turn up, mister, don’t worry. Maybe you left it at home.
    Henry thought about this.
    —I doubt it, he said.—I lost that as well.
    She felt sorry for him. No leg, no home - the only thing holding him up was his vulnerability. She saw honesty. The men Melody knew showed off or snapped at her. Mitchell the rosary beads, her father, all men - they were all angry and mean. This man here was different. She’d knocked the poor cripple onto the street, his face was bleeding, he’d no home to hop home to - and he didn’t blame her. She saw now: he was smiling. A nice smile, he was offering it, half a smile. He didn’t look like a cripple. She liked the space where the leg should have been.
    —Will we go for a stroll, so? he said.
    —Yes, she said.
    —Right.
    He wiped the blade of the shovel on his sleeve.
    —Let’s get this gleaming for the lady.
    He let the spade hop gently on the path. Melody heard music.
    —Now we’re right, said Henry Smart.
    He held out his arm, offered it to Melody.
    —Hang on, said Melody.
    She took off her shawl and wiped his face with it. She dabbed and petted, removed the blood and left the dirt - that was his own, none of her business. It didn’t bother her. Dirt and grime were the glues that held Dublin together. She spat politely on a corner of the shawl and washed away the last dried, cranky specks of blood. Then she put the shawl back on.
    —Now, she said.
    They were already a couple.
    He leaned on the shovel and offered her his free arm. She leaned on him and off they went, on the ramble that would still deliver her smile when she recalled it many moons later, when she told us all about it on the steps of all the tenements we were thrown into and out of. A Sunday in June, 1897, when the Famine Queen, Victoria, was still our one and only. A glorious summer’s morning. It took getting used to, the rhythm of their stroll. He’d lean out over the abyss that was his missing leg. She, clinging to his sleeve, would follow him out there. Then he’d haul himself in and forward on the handle of the shovel. She’d be pulled after him, then out again and forward. There wasn’t much room for talking. The cobbles were tricky, corners were impossible. So they went straight ahead, out to Drumcondra and the countryside.
     
     
    Who was he and where did he come from? The family trees of the poor don’t grow to any height. I know nothing real about my father; I don’t even know if his name was real. There was never a Granda Smart, or a