Daughter of Mine. Anne Bennett

it, and she knew he could remember little or nothing of what had happened. That didn’t seem to matter and the magistrate tore into him. ‘Assaulting a police officer is a serious offence and one that can carry a custodial sentence,’ he told Steve. ‘But as you’ve told the court you’re in steady employment we don’t think it would be in the country’s best interests to lock you up.’

      Steve let his breath out in a sigh of relief. He’d never even thought of a jail sentence.

      ‘But, we don’t want to be considered as treating this as a trivial matter,’ the man went on. ‘No indeed, and if you come before me again there will be no doubt about the custodial sentence. This time, however, you are fined seventy-five pounds.’

      Seventy-five pounds! The sum reverberated in Steve’s head. How in God’s name was he going to find that sort of money? Christ! The image of Lizzie staring out at him from the window of the hotel suddenly floated before him, and he knew just who was to blame for the state he was in. He’d never forget it for as long as he lived.

      Steve and Flo weren’t the only ones blaming Lizzie, for she already did an adequate job of this herself. She thought she’d never get over the sight of Steve hauled into the van, handcuffs holding his hands behind his back, especially as she still thought it was her fault, at least in part. She certainly didn’t want to come across him, not for a while anyway, so when Tressa met Mike in her free periods, Lizzie would sit in her room and hem the sheets and blankets she had picked up cheap in the Bull Ring.

      ‘Come out with us,’ Pat urged. ‘We go to the flicks, or dancing at Tony’s Ballroom up the West End.’

      But Lizzie would shake her head, thinking that at the moment it was best to lie low. Tressa worried about her, and in the end Mike reluctantly agreed she could come out with them a time or two, but she wouldn’t do that either. ‘She’s frightened of bumping into Steve,’ Tressa said, ‘and making things worse for him.’

      Nothing could make things worse, Mike thought, for Lizzie’s decision had upset the man totally. He was paralytic each night, not tipsy or merry but fallingdown drunk, and before he got to that state he’d tell any who would listen about Lizzie and how much he had loved her and how he wished he could make her see that. He was hurting, and Mike was well aware of that, but he told Steve he had to keep well away from Lizzie. Steve knew that already and he drank himself into oblivion because that was the only way he could cope with it.

      Then, he’d started becoming friendly with a man called Stuart Fellows, who lived at the bottom end of Bell Barn Road. They’d all been to St Catherine’s together, but as Stuart was considered a troublemaker, Mike and Steve had kept well away from him. But now, with Mike meeting Tressa as many nights as he could, they’d sort of been thrown together, and Mike could hardly blame Steve for that.

      Stuart was only too willing to go after the women with Steve, despite having a steady girlfriend of his own. ‘Don’t it bother you?’ Mike asked him when the three of them were together one day. ‘What if your girlfriend finds out?’

      ‘She won’t,’ Stuart said confidently. ‘Anyroad, if she does, so what? It ain’t hurting her, it’s helping.’

      ‘How d’you work that out?’

      ‘Look, she don’t want to go all the way, frightened of finding herself pregnant; and she’s right to worry because I think her old man would kill the pair of us. This way I don’t have to push her.’

      ‘Tressa wouldn’t see it that way,’ Mike said, shaking his head.

      ‘You sleep with Tressa,’ Steve pointed out.

      ‘Well, we’re engaged.’

      ‘I ain’t going down that route, mate,’ Stuart replied quickly. ‘Have fun while you’re young, that’s me. But I don’t think it would stop me if I was engaged, or even married.’

      ‘Talk sense, man.’

      ‘Look,’ Stuart explained, ‘you can’t do nothing to stop having kids, can you, cos the Pope says so. Well, I wouldn’t want a houseful of kids and a wife like an old hag. Some of these women having a baby every year and living hand to mouth would take it as a bonus to have their old man dip his wick elsewhere once in a while, I’ll tell you.’

      Steve thought about that. Next door to them lived Bob and Chrissie Roberts. They’d been married thirteen years and Chrissie was pregnant with her tenth child. All the children were pitifully thin, dressed in rags and usually barefoot, and Steve had heard them crying with hunger and cold.

      And countless times he’d heard Chrissie pleading with Bob to leave her alone and the resultant slaps and thumps and punches, followed by her muffled moans and the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of their bedhead against the wall, and later in the quiet of the night he’d often hear Chrissie sobbing.

      The young, once beautiful girl was gone for good. Her golden locks were dark, lank and greasy and her skin had lost its earlier bloom and was heavily lined and sallow and thin. Added to that, her body was shapeless and she’d lost a lot of teeth. And the woman was too poor and wretched to take joy in anything. Would you want that for any woman you married? No, by God you wouldn’t.

      So, when Stuart said, ‘Seems to me the church has you by the balls every which way, and I’ll go on the way I’ve always done, wife or no wife, and no bloody church will tell me different,’ Steve could see the reasoning behind it.

      ‘Well, I have no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing,’ Steve said. ‘And I’m not doing without female company a minute longer. Are you coming along with us, Mike, or are you not?’

      Mike shook his head, and the other men laughed. ‘Suit yourself,’ Steve said, and with a wave they were gone.

       CHAPTER SIX

      ‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.

      Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.

      He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’

      Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’

      Bugger! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.

      ‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’

      ‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’

      ‘Where will we live?’

      ‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.