I Am Queenie Gunn

Islington, 1963

Sid Nolan paid Queenie two shillings every Saturday to stand behind his crockery stall on Chapel Market and shout about saucers. He’d have paid a boy half a crown, and he told her so, as if she ought to be grateful for the information.

“Boys break things,” Queenie said.

“So do girls.”

“Not your things, I don’t.”

She had him there, and Sid knew it, so he fished a broken custard cream out of his coat pocket and gave her that instead of an argument. Most of Sid’s disagreements ended in biscuits. He was a soft, round, worried man with a moustache that looked borrowed, and he ran the stall as some men ran a bath, letting it fill up and hoping nobody noticed the floor getting wet.

Next to Sid was the toy stall, run by an old woman called Mrs Gilly, who wore a headscarf knotted so tight under her chin it looked like it was holding her face on. You’d never have known she sold toys, because the only thing she ever shouted about was carrier bags. Empty ones. “5p a bag! 5p a bag!” from eight in the morning till the lamps came on, whether there was anybody in front of her or not. Nobody on Chapel Market knew what a p was, and nobody had ever had the nerve to ask her. Queenie had timed her once on Sid’s watch. Every three seconds. Across the way, a man with forearms like hams sold T-shirts out of cellophane bags and had his own song going. “Small, medium, large and extra large! Take ’em out the bags and have a look at ’em!” Between the two of them, nobody on that end of Chapel Market had heard themselves think since the war.

Behind Sid’s pitch was Crowther’s, the pie and mash shop, with green tiles and gold letters on the window and a smell of liquor that came out of the door and stood about on the pavement like a customer. Old Mr Crowther had opened it in 1946, and his daughter Hilda had been carrying plates in it since she could see over the counter. Hilda was thirteen, a year older than Queenie, and already had arms like a docker. Queenie had arms like knitting needles, a pointed little face with a great many opinions in it, and a dark plait that Rita did so tight in the mornings it held her eyebrows up till dinnertime. Every Saturday at one she came out with two portions of mash in a paper tray and sat on Sid’s crates with Queenie to eat them.

“He’s robbing you, Queen,” she said, every week, with her mouth full.

“I know.”

“Two bob. I get three and I don’t have to shout.”

“You have to smell of eels.”

“Everybody smells of something,” said Hilda, and ate Queenie’s pastry lid as well, because Queenie always saved it till last and Hilda never had.

The trouble was tick. Half of Islington bought their cups from Sid on the never never, and Sid didn’t write any of it down. Writing it down, he said, made it look like he didn’t trust people, and people round here didn’t like being not trusted. Queenie thought people round here didn’t like paying for gravy boats either, but she was twelve and he was the one with the stall.

So she kept the book herself. In her head.

Mrs Chalk from Elia Street owed one and nine for a gravy boat since Easter, and walked the long way round past the pie shop so she didn’t have to pass the stall. The Murphy twins’ mother owed four bob for six egg cups, which was a lot of egg cups for a family that, as far as Queenie could tell, ate cornflakes. Old Mr Pask owed sixpence for a cracked jug and would pay it a penny at a time, apologising each Saturday as if he’d run over Sid’s cat. Queenie liked Mr Pask. She’d have let him off, but it wasn’t her jug.

Then there was Mick Delaney.

He came along the market about eleven, when it was busiest, so everybody could see him do it. Camel coat in September. Hair that had been told what to do and had done it. He smelled of Brylcreem and something sweeter, and he called every woman on the market darling and every man chief, and somehow nobody minded either.

“Sid, you’re a gentleman.” He picked up a teapot from the good end of the trestle, the end Queenie wasn’t allowed to dust. “What’ll you take for this beauty, Sid?”

“Twelve and six, Mick.”

“For my mother’s birthday.”

“Lovely.”

“Put it on the slate there, good man.”

Sid’s moustache went through several feelings at once. “Course, Mick.”

Queenie watched the teapot go into the camel coat. She’d watched a milk jug go into it in March, and two cups and saucers in May, and on both occasions it had been his mother’s birthday too.

“That’s three,” she said.

Mick Delaney looked down at her as though one of the saucers had spoken. Then he laughed, properly, a big warm laugh that made two women at the veg stall turn round and smile, and he ruffled her hair.

“Three what, sweetheart?”

“Birthdays. Your mum’s had three this year. March, May and now. Does she get a telegram from the Queen every time, or just the once?”

The women at the veg stall stopped smiling and started listening, which was worse for him. Sid made a noise like a kettle.

Mick didn’t stop laughing. That was the thing Queenie noticed, and kept, and would turn over later in bed. He laughed longer than the joke deserved, and he looked at Sid while he did it, a pleasant, friendly look with something folded up inside.

“Sharp little thing you have there, Sid. I’d mind that, if I were you.”

He went off down the market with the teapot, saying chief and darling all the way to the Penny Black.

“Queen,” Sid said, very faint. “Leave it, will you?”

“Use your loaf, Sid. He owes you two pound three and six.”

Sid stared at her. He’d always thought of Mick’s slate as a cloud. Nobody had ever told him it was a number before.

“How do you know that, then?”

“I added it up.”

“You can’t go adding up Mick Delaney, can you? Not Mick.”

“Somebody ought to,” said Queenie, and went back to shouting about saucers.

• • •

Home was the top floor of a house on Noel Road with a back window that looked straight down onto the canal. In summer the water smelled of diesel and something gone off. In winter it froze in grey plates along the towpath and the boys from the flats threw bricks to break it. Queenie loved it all year round, though she’d have been hard pressed to say why. Things went past on it. That was most of the reason.

Her mum was doing the tins.

Every Friday night after tea, Rita Lowe lined up her tins on the oilcloth like a general with a map. The Oxo tin was rent. The cocoa tin was gas. The Golden Syrup tin was coal, which in September sounded daft, except Rita said you bought it while it was cheap, before the weather turned, and only fools bought it in November. A Coronation biscuit tin with the Queen’s face rubbed half off held the Christmas club. A little Colman’s mustard tin was for shoes, because between Queenie’s growing and Minnie’s kicking, shoes went through money like water through a colander.

Saturday was the top up, from whatever was left.

“What did Sid give you?”

“Two bob and a custard cream.”

“Eat the custard cream.” Rita held out a hand for the florin without looking up. Queenie gave it to her. There had never been any question of keeping it, any more than there was a question of keeping the water in your bath.

Rita split it. A shilling went in the shoe tin. Sixpence went in the Oxo. The last sixpence she held for a moment, turning it over with her thumb, then got up and opened the cupboard by the boiler and moved the Brasso and the shoe polish and took out a tin of Andrews Liver Salts that nobody in that family had ever taken a liver salt from.

The sixpence went in. The tin went back. The Brasso went in front of it.

Queenie had known about the Andrews tin since she was nine. She’d never asked. Today, for some reason, possibly the teapot, she did.

“Does Dad know about that one?”

Rita sat back down. She was a small woman with big hands and a laugh like a drain unblocking, and she could make a neck of lamb last from Sunday to Wednesday by telling it stories.

“Your father,” she said, “is a good man.”

“I know.”

“He’s a good man, and he’s an optimist, and them two things together cost a family a fortune. If your father knew there was eleven pound behind that boiler, he’d think we was rolling in it. Then he’d do something kind with it.” She said kind in the voice other people kept for gambling. “He’d lend it to your Uncle Ted, who’d buy a greyhound, and the greyhound would die.”

“Uncle Ted’s greyhound did die.”

“That,” said Rita, “is my point.”

Queenie thought about this. “So it’s a secret.”

“Who said secret? It’s a tin.” Rita pushed the Christmas club back into line. “Secrets are for when you’ve done something wrong. This is for when somebody else does.”

Minnie came in from the landing wearing Rita’s good headscarf as a hat. She was eight and had decided that week to become an air hostess, which mainly involved walking slowly between rooms and saying good afternoon to everybody, including the cat.

“Good afternoon, passengers,” she said. “We are now flying over Islington.”

“We’re not passengers, Min, we live here.”

“Are we poor, Mum?”

Rita didn’t blink. “We’re careful.”

“Careful’s what poor people say.”

“Then you’ll be glad to hear that from Monday,” said Rita, “we’re going to be very careful with your pocket money.”

Minnie considered her position and flew back out to the landing.

• • •

Dennis Lowe came in at six, smelling of the sorting office and the number 19 bus, and sat in his chair with his tea while Queenie told him about Mick Delaney. She told it well. She’d been telling it in her head since eleven o’clock and had the telegram bit polished.

Her dad laughed at the telegram. He laughed again at Sid’s kettle noise. He stopped laughing when she got to the hair.

“He touched you?”

“He ruffled my hair, Dad. Like you’d do a dog.”

Dennis put his cup down. He was a tall, lean, careful man who had spent nineteen years putting other people’s letters into the right holes at Mount Pleasant, and as far as he knew he had not lost one. Queenie had heard him tell a neighbour once, without any boasting in it at all, that a man was what he did when nobody would ever find out. She hadn’t understood it then. She half understood it now.

“I know Mick Delaney,” he said. “Everyone knows Mick Delaney. That’s his trade.”

“He ain’t got a trade.”

“He’s got that coat.” Dennis picked up his cup again. “Men like Mick, they don’t think they’re thieving, Queen. That’s what you want to understand. They think rules are a thing for people who can’t charm their way round them. Sid can’t. Mick can. So in Mick’s head, the teapot’s his. Sid’s just been minding it for him.”

“So how do you get money off a man like that?”

“You don’t. You stop serving him.”

“Sid won’t stop serving him.”

“Then Sid’s teapots are Sid’s business.” He looked at her over the cup with his other look, the one he used when he was trying to see a long way down a road. “Not yours. You hear me?”

Queenie heard him. That wasn’t the same as agreeing, and they both knew it.

• • •

The following Saturday Mick Delaney came along the market at eleven with his mother on his arm.

Queenie hadn’t planned that. She’d planned something else entirely, involving the market inspector and a long speech, and she’d practised it twice in the outside lav. What she hadn’t planned for was Mrs Delaney, who was small and upright and wore a hat with a pheasant feather in it, and who had the face of a woman who had been lied to by a great many men and had a fair idea which ones.

“Sid, you’re a gentleman,” said Mick. “Mammy wants a look at your sugar bowls.”

Queenie got there before Sid could open his mouth.

“Hello, Mrs Delaney. Happy birthday.”

Mrs Delaney looked at her. “It is not my birthday, child.”

“Oh.” Queenie made her face go puzzled, which was easy, because she’d watched Minnie do it every day for eight years. “Sorry. I only thought, with the teapot last week. And the milk jug in March. And the cups in May. I thought maybe you had a lot of them. Birthdays. Like the Queen does.”

There was a short silence on that bit of Chapel Market. Even Mrs Gilly stopped shouting.

Mrs Delaney didn’t look at Queenie again. She looked at her son. It was a long look, and Mick Delaney, who had a word for every woman on the market and a laugh for every man, didn’t seem to have either for this.

“How much is he into you for,” his mother said, without turning round.

Queenie told her. Two pound three and six.

Mrs Delaney opened her handbag. It took a while. She paid in a pound note, a ten bob note and a great deal of silver, counted onto Sid’s trestle one coin at a time while half the market watched, and when she had finished she closed the bag with a snap that made Sid flinch. She took her son’s arm again and walked him away up the market, talking to him low and steadily, the pheasant feather nodding the whole way.

Mick looked back once. He wasn’t laughing.

Sid sat down on an upturned crate and stared at the money as if it might go off.

“I told you to leave it.”

“I did leave it,” said Queenie. “I only said happy birthday.”

He gave her a shilling out of it. Then, after some thought, and a long look at the backs of the Delaneys, another. Then a whole custard cream.

• • •

That night she waited until Minnie was asleep, or as asleep as Minnie ever got, which was mostly elbows. Then she crept through in her socks, past her mum and dad’s door and the faint sound of the wireless with her dad’s snoring under it, into the kitchen.

She moved the Brasso. She moved the shoe polish. She opened the Andrews tin and put both of Sid’s shillings in with Rita’s sixpences, and put everything back exactly as it had been.

On Sunday her mum went to the boiler cupboard while the potatoes were on, and was in there a little longer than anybody needs to be to fetch the Brasso. When she came out she didn’t say anything, and neither did Queenie, and the potatoes were good.

Later, upstairs, Queenie knelt on the end of the bed with her chin on the window frame. Down on the canal a narrowboat was coming out of the tunnel with its lamp lit, painted all over in roses and castles, a man and a woman sitting up on the roof together with their legs dangling. The woman was laughing at something. There was music coming from inside, a man singing, though Queenie couldn’t make out the words.

She watched it go under the bridge and out the other side, and kept watching the place where it had been.

“Queenie.”

“What.”

“You’re thinking that loud I can hear it,” said Minnie, into the pillow. “Some of us have got a bleedin’ flight in the morning.”