The Rising of Bella Casey Read Free

tugged her by the elbow.
    ‘Come away out of that,’ he said. ‘Leave it be. It’s looters’ leavings . Some gurrier will be back for it, you can be sure, and we’ve had enough strife for one day.’
    But she could no more have left it than she could have abandoned a child.
    ‘Here,’ she said, looking hurriedly around her, ‘you catch it by the other end.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘We cannot leave it here like this. It’ll only get destroyed.’
    He looked at her aghast.
    ‘Are you mad, or what, Mam?’
    She
was
mad, maddened with desire, or greed. She was not even sure of the difference. Who knew what had taken hold of her, a respectable fifty-year-old widow eyeing up a piano in the middle of a battlefield and wanting it for herself.
    ‘Are you going to let your mother struggle with this alone?’ she demanded.
    Her voice came out shrill and panicky to her own ears. But it galvanised her son. He put his shoulder to the piano and none too gently began to push. The strings let out a timorous screech. With Valentine at one end and her at the other, they loosed the piano from the rut which had obviously defeated their thieving predecessors and with enormous effort, they levered it on to the kerb and got it rolling on its brass casters. Valentine set his shoulder against it and began to push. Mrs Beaver pulled from the front as if leading a reluctant beast. Every so often she would halt their progress. The strings would issue a celestial sigh of relief. She would lift the lid and check the shivering keys. Then she would throw her shawl over the top. It looked pathetic as if she thought this would disguise what they were at.
    ‘Ah Mam, give over with the inspections or you’ll get us killed,’Valentine shouted at her. ‘Or bloody banged up in a polis cell.’
    His mother let the oath pass, a sure sign she was not in her right mind. She was forever chastising him for rough language. Twice he was sure he heard a policeman’s whistle but it was only the casters shrieking for want of oil.
    ‘We are like Sisyphus with his burden,’ his mother said between gasps of exertion. Valentine Beaver loved his mother, but sometimes he wondered if she was a bit soft in the head. As they heaved and pushed, he kept a scouring eye out on every side-street they passed for signs of the law. As if reading his mind his mother said: ‘If we are challenged, we will say that I am the Principal Teacher at the Model School in Marlborough Street and this here’s the school piano that we are trying to save from the ravages of war.’
    The notions! As if anyone would mistake his tenement-thin mother for a professional lady. One look at her dour, serviceable skirts, her speckled grey hair all awry and escaping from the grasp of a gap-toothed comb, her front tooth cracked where his father had given her a belt once, would give the game away. They rumbled their prize on. As they progressed, they had to halt several times for his mother was quite out of puff and it is heavy labour shunting a piano. The casters were wayward and apt to follow their own direction. No more than his mother. Each time they stopped, sweat pouring from his brow, he would beg, ‘Let’s leave it here, Mam, and be done with it.’
    But her only reply was to lean into the haunch of the damnpiano as if she were involved in birth labour.
    They were not stopped, not by anyone in a uniform that is, though they got some queer looks from the few citizens they passed. As they travelled his mother seemed to grow bold, a haughty jib to her jaw, so by the time they’d made it to the Five Lamps, he swore she would have cowed any challenger with a mere look. He was never so glad to reach Brady’s Lane with all the doors thankfully shut for they would have faced the third degree had the neighbours been about.
    ‘Mam has entirely lost her wits,’ he declared as they struggled to push the Broadwood over the threshold. ‘She made me lug this yoke all the way from Mecklenburgh