Liverpool Taffy by Katie Flynn Page A

above, as she well knew, since as soon as Luke and Kenny were in the kitchen having their breakfast she was supposed to rush up the stairs and make their beds. Kenny had lately taken to making his own, presumably hoping to get round her, but Luke probably didn’t know how, certainly he had never somuch as plumped a pillow in the nine months that Biddy had been working here.
    Better try the living-room first. She opened the door, and knew before it creaked back that the room would be empty. She stood back, her heart beginning to pound; this was definitely odd. She had never known Ma Kettle go out on a Sunday afternoon without very good reason and the church service she attended was long over. Jack was home, to be sure, but he went out with his mates, not with his Mam, and Luke had recently met a young lady – not that Ma referred to her as such, she was that nasty, scheming hussy so far as Ma was concerned – and liked to visit her home on a Sunday afternoon.
    Best look in the bedroom, then. No doubt Ma was laid down on her bed for half an hour …. Biddy opened the door and stuck her head round it. The big brass bedstead was empty, her own small truckle bed pushed almost out of sight beneath it. Biddy could just see her rag doll’s small, round head lying on the pillow.
    With a frustrated sigh, Biddy closed the door and went downstairs. Was Ma Kettle in the shop, going over her accounts or checking stock? Or in the tiny scullery beyond the boiling kitchen, perhaps pouring water into the big copper so that Biddy could start on the sheets as soon as she returned? But the shop was deserted so Biddy went through into the scullery and looked rather helplessly about her.
    The little room was dark and dank and at first Biddy could make out very little in the gloom, then she spotted the note. It was propped up on the copper as though Ma assumed she would go there as soon as she got back from church. The message on it was simple.
    ‘ Do laundry ,’ it said. ‘ Cook dinner .’
    Biddy stood looking at the note for a long time. Ma Kettle had not bothered to say where she had gone or why, nor for whom the note was intended. She had expected Biddy back after Mass, of course, so if she had left quite early she might have reasoned that Biddy would get the sheets on the line in plenty of time to get them dry. Or she might simply have thought to herself that Biddy must not begin to believe she might enjoy a few hours off without paying the penalty.
    Finally, Biddy left the scullery. She went up to her room and rooted around under the bed. The old carpet bag was still there. She took off the blue coat andskirt, the cheap shoes, the little straw hat with the ribbon round the crown, and put on her working clothes and the cracked old shoes she had worn when she first came to Kettle’s Confectionery. Then she checked her change of underwear, which had lived in the carpet bag ever since she moved in because Ma Kettle had never suggested she might have the use of a drawer or two. Next she picked up her pillow and thrust her hand through the hole in one end and deep into the feathers, withdrawing the lumpy little scrap of torn linen which contained all her worldly wealth.
    Then she picked Dolly off the bed and put her in the carpet bag on top of the underwear, and after that she turned and looked around the small room. She felt a little pang, but only a little one: it had been, after all, a refuge of sorts.
    Downstairs, she went back into the shop and found her lettering pen and the big bottle of blackish ink. She fetched the note from the scullery and sat down at the table. She read Ma Kettle’s words again, then smiled and bent her head, beginning to write.
    Presently she stood up and propped the note against the ink bottle in the middle of the table, where no one coming into the room could fail to see it. It now read, in Ma Kettle’s spidery hand, Do laundary, cook dinner , and under that, in Biddy’s neat script, Do it yourself .
    ‘I