Boodgie

Story 15, 2 January 2023

He came back not with money, but a monkey. A spidery fella, crawling all over his shoulders, like, chattering, cheeky, with a nasty bite on him; gerroff, he used to tell it. It couldn’t stand the weather, but she wouldn’t let him keep it indoors, in case it bit the kids. So he came ’ome with a boodgie and that she kept, in a cage by the winder, looking over the barren yard where the nappies sagged soaking wet like they still had turds in ’em. She was made up, Dolly, but didn’t give the bird a name. Not at first. Little did the kids know it was a saint.

The monkey he sold, for porter, mostly, along with tall tales of his adventures sailing round Cape Horn to exotic lands where he swapped a banjo for it with some cannibals. But when Barney fell outa The Saddle he could barely navigate Kirkdale let alone the South Seas as he washed through red streets and down the jigger at the back where the men rolled dice and were chased by busies who beat ’em when they caught ’em, singing a shanty at the top of his voice as he barged like a tug through a plank of a gate painted green in a different century.

They beat him, too, when they caught him, but it wasn’t for rolling dice. The soft lad twatted a gaffer at Waterloo Dock for being a dollar short. An unwise comment, a quip, who knows, but they battered him at the bridewell all the same, and he was never really himself after that Dolly said. The lights were on but there was no one ’ome.

When she looked at that boodgie, she thought of him, her fella, all fisticuffs and curses, afraid of nottin’ earthly but fearing the moon, who made her laugh terrible, like, g’wed girl! He knew those docks like the back of his ’and. He knew ’em that well he robbed a haunch of beef so muscly when the coppers were on strike it was all his own mam could manage to string it under the table with rope then spread a tablecloth, so when the scab constables with squaddies smashed down the door to pick on him ’cause of all the looting they found nottin’ but a ya wha?, a pot of tea, and a wisecrack there on a posh plate.

And I’ll ’ave my honourable member Tay Pay speak to your superintendent I will, sure I’m his best friend, he told ’em all smiles with a missing tooth as he steered ’em out to go and bother someone else, you can’t throw the king’s weight round here any more ’cause us in this ward put a mark against a free Ireland, we did, and that’s democracy for you. A constable told him to watch his tongue as he was leaving, but he never did, and that’s why the gaffer resented him so, and stole his dollar, and that’s why Granda’ broke his jaw in twenty places then found himself in the bridewell.

It’s in the paper, Dolly said proudly, and she read it to him at that same table when she came courtin’ and he laughed behind those vicious bruises ’cause the shoite had it coming, but me Da said she once told him years later she’d worried about what was coming after that and she was right to do so. It was never the same, him the blacklisted stevedore trudging to the wharf to line up with the men before they snubbed him. Scraping, that marriage was, from the start. A bit of seafaring, a monkey, then coal boats with cutthroats to Glasgow. 

The father at St Alphonsus knew the score and the big Kerryman paid a visit and Dolly made a hoo-hah and set a place for him at the table and sent yer man for a jug and the father blessed that ’ouse and Granda’ said thanks father and sliced the meat, which was a treat then ’cause that was for the month and they stuffed it all down in one go. If only the priest had known it was knocked off as well. He was too hungry to bother and had a giant’s appetite.

Then Granda’ was gone, crushed under steel wheels as if he’d jumped into Dolly’s mangle, a tragic accident said the coroner, an untimely slip on the rails skirting the docks like a corset.

The neighbours gossiped ’cause he had it coming, his fate dark, and some were no doubt pleased to be rid of him ’cause they couldn’t beat him in a fight. They were used to death, those gobshites. Me Da said Dolly invented nicknames for every last one of ’em, and there were some had killed their wives, or been killed by ’em. It was razors at dawn in those days.

Another dock wharf heavy labourer dead. No pension. Nottin’ but memories of a monkey and a clan of scrapping brothers squeezing the box and playing the bones as they spilled through the front door that no one used across the cobbles where the neighbours danced as well ’cause everyone knew everyone else in those days and there were no secrets.

It was his shoe that told the story when the hospital ’anded her his clobber, his kecks, like, all twisted, a hideous sight that made her faintly. God only knows what she did with it. She wouldn’t let the kids near.

The wake was a cacophony and it was unlike Dolly to be so upset at a send off and she didn’t even let ’em prop up the box or remove the lid and forgot to open the window to lerrout his soul. Uncle Pat played The Leaving of Liverpool on the accordion and it was so doleful the widows wailed until they were as dry as wrinkled prunes, but a clatter of children who didn’t recognise tragedy still ran in and out, and our kid drank some of the ’ard stuff and got belted. There was a photograph in a studio, like, and Granda’ was tall and ’andsome in his double-breasted suit with the queer fella at his feet and Dolly smiled with confidence at the baby on her lap and it seemed they had survived everything that had gone before.

Then Da left school ’cause he was the oldest and it was the right thing to do, but he wanted to anyway even though the Jesuits were bereft ’cause they had in their possession a young man with a fierce mind whom they did not ’ave to beat the living daylights outa ’cause he was excellent. He had that serious dignity they never got the measure of.

Dolly quietly shaped the legend, raising seven kids with a fishwife’s sigh, like, although baby Anthony caught the whooping cough and died the poor fella and she buried him on a Wednesday in a tiny wooden box painted white. Me Da said our Marie rested a daffodil on it and an auld fella placed it in the hole then took off his cap. The rain crushed the petals.

Then me Da became everyone’s da and was king of the castle and by all accounts did very well too, given the bombing and all. The kids refused, flat refused, to go to Wales and the sheep farm ’cause they said it would be boring and stink of animals, so they all stayed there with their mam even though the Germans were bombing to buggery the Liverpool Irish and no one in that ward knew why ’cause they weren’t sure who the real enemy was.

After that, Dolly started calling the boodgie Barney and me Da said our Marie said it gave her the creeps, like, but she was just a weep away from the memory of her man and who were they to say anything ’cause they were kids and knew their place and she was queen bee and did what she wanted and now he wasn’t even there to stop her with the back of that hand of his.

And then the boodgie croaked, and the way me Da told it, like, a saint was born, truth.

Dolly had filled the parlour with auld clobber for Paddy’s Market begged from the big ’ouses in Walton on the wagon me Da made from a perambulator, and it was musty in the back room ’cause she was pressing and the air was steamy when the bombs started and this time were closer than the night before. The lorrof ’em were used to it by then, and didn’t bother with the shelters ’cause me Da said our Marie said the men touched the girls in the dark and Dolly could not forget that two hundred people died in Edge Hill under a college, God rest their souls, so a lot of good ’em shelters were.

But then her eyes popped out, and that ’ard round face of hers froze ’cause she was looking at the boodgie cage and a ghost strolled into that room, all casual, like, then and there. Mother of God, me Da said his mam said when she saw that bird put its neck between the bars and twist till it was dead, like. Mother of God Mother of God. More death. An echo. He said she did not even shut the curtains but tramped ’em straight up the stairs, all six, like they were on a crusade to say prayers for a bird to a crucifix nailed to a crack with its source in the River Mersey.

He said he could still remember chanting Hail Maries when they were lifted from the floor by the blast with a supernatural force and suspended, like ’em cherubs in the paintings, all sound sucked from the air, which then rushed into the vacuum with the roar of the Devil as the chimney breast from across the way barrelled into the back, hammering chunks from the damp walls and stuffing the parlour where they’d been with a hundred tons of rubble like up the arse of a roast chicken.

It smashed the ’ouse to smithereens and ruined his mam’s market ware, ripped to shreds it was. She made me Da pick through those bricks one by one till he found the boodgie cage, which was contorted like me Granda’s shoe, and there inside was the dead Barney, stiff and sweet and dusty. It would’ve killed ’em all, that explosion, stone dead like their own da and little Anthony, had it not been for that boodgie. Mother of God Mother of God. A sign. The sign of the cross. Kissing her crooked finger.

They buried that bird in a shoe box in the jigger opposite what was left of Hitler’s ’ouses, the only soil between the Welsh streets and the waterfront, even though it smelt of piss.

Dolly said a prayer, like, a real prayer with words, for the feathered dead. Me Da said Father Malley would’ve squawked ’cause animals don’t ’ave souls, but to our nan we reckon that boodgie was something other, a saint reincarnated, her man resurrected.

And for going on forty years on a Sunday, after mass, Dolly said that prayer, until the council moved her to the new estate and she forgot about it.

A version of this story was published by No Parties magazine, Issue 3.