Liverpool Daisy by Helen Forrester

she washed her fat thighs thoroughly and then, after looking down at them cloudily, she washed her feet. She dried herself hurriedly — the draught coming in under the door was bringing her out in goose pimples. The sudden, hard scrubbing made the louse and bug bites on her itch; normally the bites did not swell — she was almost immune to irritation from them — but now they bothered her and she scratched furiously.
    She had no other clothes so she put on again those she had taken off. She remembered that, though her mother had had no clothing other than a nightgown provided by the lady from the Welfare, she had clung to her shawl and kept it round her shoulders to ease the winter cold in the frigid room upstairs. The shawl was still up there.
    “Come morning I’ll take it to the wash house and wash it,” Daisy promised herself, “before that Meg wakes up to it being there.”
    She rinsed out her stockings in the same water in which she had washed and hung them over a piece of string stretched across the front of the mantelpiece, to dry in the heat of the dyingfire. She stood contemplating their woolly length steaming at the end nearest to the fire. There were holes in both heels and toes. She decided suddenly that since she did not have to feed her mother any more, sixpence out of her ill-gotten money might be expended on another pair of stockings.
    “Nobody’ll notice them,” she comforted herself. “Black stockings is black stockings — they all look the same.”
    “And what about a new petticoat then — and a pair of winter bloomers?” inquired an extravagant devil within her.
    At the thought of a pair of thick cotton bloomers, brushed to a warm fluff on the inside, she felt a craving for comfort that had never struck her before. She could not remember when she had last worn knickers of any kind. Her mouth watered as if the garment was something good to eat.
    “I’ll do it,” she promised herself exultantly. “Nobody’s going to see me bloomers, so they can’t ask no questions.”
    “They’ll ask questions if they see you buy them in Parkee Lanee or anywhere hereabouts. You’ll have to go down town again to Hughes’s in London Road.”
    This reminder brought her up short. She would have to venture again into the city; and do it alone. While she emptied the basin in which she had washed she thought about this.
    Still nervously undecided, she lit a candle and trailed up to bed, but as she laid her head on the lumpy pillow she muttered, “I’ll go. Nowt worse could happen to me than happened today.”

NINE
    Daisy woke with a start. A male voice was shouting “Mrs. Gallagher!” The front door was banged impatiently. “Are you there, Missus?”
    “Oh,” she groaned, as she swung herself off the bed. Though her head did not ache as it had done the day before, the floor had a curious tendency to come up to meet her. “Bloody so-and-so! Always coming early. Who the hell is it?”
    Aloud she shouted, “Coming!”
    When she opened the door, she found, fidgeting on the doorstep, Bill Donohue, a small, elderly man with a walrus moustache made ginger by tobacco smoke. He held several rolls of wallpaper tightly to his shabby suit jacket. From his little finger dangled a pail.
    “Thought you’d never come,” he said irritably as, uninvited, he walked into the living-room and looked around for a place to lay down the wallpaper. Every surface was cluttered from end to end, so he dropped it on to the floor.
    “Didn’t expect you so soon,” replied Daisy sourly. “What colour you brought?”
    Mr. Donohue looked affronted. “Same as always, of course — pink roses on a trellis with a white background.” He sniffed. “All my customers like pink roses — they’re proper pretty.”
    “I wanted blue for a change,” said Daisy, not because she did, but because Bill Donohue was not going to get away with five shillings from her without suffering.
    “They don’t make it,” replied Mr. Donohue