eyes crunched shut and wondered if the pain was a judgment on me for refusing to go to Confession.
I could not eat the slice of bread and margarine I had brought for lunch, but I drank eagerly a cup of coffee which Miriam poured for me from her own thermos flask. Miss Short, the Head Typist, kindly provided two more aspirins.
Forty grains of aspirin. I was not sure how much one could take without poisoning oneself. I knew that a hundred aspirins would cause death – it was a popular form of suicide amongst women. Mother took as many as twenty in a day. She had no physical pain to assuage, but she said they soothed her nerves; suffering from nerves was a socially acceptable ailment – Liverpool women often referred to ‘Me poor nairves’. Mother also smoked twenty to thirty cigarettes a day, as did Father.
The pain finally lessened, and when the other clerks returned from their lunch break, I went downstairs and reported shyly to Mr Ellis.
‘Oh, aye,’ he said absently, when I said I was feeling better. ‘Take t’ index cards and sort them – there’s a lot.’
I sat down at the corner of a table which was my place in the crowded room, and spent the rest of the afternoon sorting the little white cards into alphabetical order and then standing to file them in long wooden drawers. The aspirin and exhaustion combined to make me feel sleepy, and sometimes I felt as if I was floating on a sea of distant pain.
When the office girl brought in the afternoon tea, she also carried a message from the busy Cashier, who worked in the next room. How was I? Would I like some more aspirin? She spread out her grubby little hand to show two tablets. I swallowed them gratefully with the tea.
The secretary to the Presence – the Presence was my name for my austere employer – thundered away on her typewriter at the other end of the table, but on seeing me take the aspirin, she paused to inquire what the trouble was. Through tightly clenched teeth, I told her I had a monthly pain. She nodded sympathetically and renewed her thunder. The other clerks running about with piles of files in their arms had no time to stop to ask after my wellbeing.
It was the longest of afternoons. The noise and vibration of the typewriter in front of me, the sound of the buzzers and bells of the old-fashioned telephone switchboard behind me, the filing clerks pushing behind my chair as they ran to and fro, made the close-packed room almost unbearable. Clients crept in and out, to see the Presence in her office which led off the room I was in. Chairs were dragged across the floor for them to sit on and even that vibration went through me and made me hurt all the more.
It did come to an end, however, like everything else in life, and I had to admit to Mr Ellis that I had not completed my day’s work.
‘Humph, then we shall have to work faster tomorrow, shan’t we?’
I agreed humbly, and put the remaining cards in the table drawer.
In the cloakroom, I met Miriam struggling quickly into her overcoat. She stopped to inquire how I was.
‘Better,’ I said. With my eyelids drooping with fatigue, I turned to hang up my overall.
‘You usually walk home, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
She buttoned up her coat and picked up her handbag. ‘You’ll take the tram tonight?’
‘No.’
‘For Heaven’s sake, why not?’
I forced myself to look at her and said dully but honestly, ‘I don’t have any money.’
‘Oh, child! Why didn’t you say so before? I’ll lend you twopence – you can pay me on payday.’ She rustled round in her handbag and proffered the coins. I took them gratefully. I had been troubled all the afternoon wondering whether I would manage the long climb up the hill to home.
Liverpool trams swayed like a ship in a storm and I began to feel nauseated. I was glad when the vehicle came to a stop at the Rialto Cinema and I could descend, while its motor hummed like a hive full of angry bees as if to say it could not wait to let me off.
As I stood on the corner of Upper Parliament Street waiting for the traffic to clear so that I could cross the road, my eyes began to dim and I knew that I would probably faint. But where to take refuge on such a busy corner, with its lounging groups of unemployed men gossiping idly?
Facing me stood the Rialto Cinema and dance hall. It had a wide pillared entrance and a sweeping curve of steps. I could lean against one of the pillars, I thought, under the supervising eye of the girl in the cash desk. If I actually passed out, she would undoubtedly call for help for me. Two or three people obviously waiting for friends to join them were already standing on the steps. People would think I was waiting for a boyfriend to take me to the cinema.
The Commissionaire glanced at me. He was a shrimp of a man in a gilt-trimmed uniform too big for him. I leaned against the wall of the entrance at the furthest point from him, and closed my eyes.
‘You OK, love?’
It was a man’s voice. Wearily I opened my eyes. A man neatly dressed in a light raincoat, tightly belted, and a trilby hat rakishly tipped over one eye was standing in front of me smoking a cigarette.
I knew him by sight. He seemed to spend a lot of time hanging around that corner. Once, while I was buying groceries, he had come into the shop to purchase some cigarettes, and after he left the shopkeeper called him a damned pimp when speaking to another woman customer. ‘Got three girls, he has,’ she had said.
He had, however, the pleasant smile and easy manner of so many smart alecks making a living in the streets, and I answered, with a sob in my voice, that I was quite all right, thank you. I winced and turned my face away. He did not leave me. Instead, his voice quite compassionate, he asked, ‘Like a cigarette?’
The steps of the cinema looked wavy when I again opened my eyes, and my legs threatened to give way. I glanced at the proffered case. It was finely worked silver.
‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke,’ I responded.
‘Try one of these,’ he urged, poking at some small brown cigarettes in one side of the case. ‘They’re great for headaches – make you feel on top of the world.’
I sighed. ‘It’s all right, thanks very much. I’ll be OK in a second or two. I live quite near.’
He helped himself to an ordinary white-papered cigarette and threw the stub of the old one into the street. He tapped the new one on his thumbnail before putting it into his mouth, then closed the beautiful cigarette case and stowed it in an inner pocket. He produced a matching petrol lighter, lit the cigarette and exhaled leisurely through his nose. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know you. Seen you often.’
At this I stared, pain forgotten. Then I realised that if I knew him by sight, it was very likely that he knew me as a local inhabitant. I smiled wearily and straightened myself up. His cigarette had not lit properly and he flicked his lighter on again. The tiny flame showed for a moment a coarse but not unpleasant face, with calculating black eyes. I felt I was being weighed up.
‘What do you do, like – work?’
‘I’m a clerk.’
He nodded, and I said goodnight, and slowly walked the short distance home.
It is strange to think that if, in the acuteness of my pain, I had accepted the Indian hemp which he had offered me and it had created sufficient euphoria to dull it, I would have wanted to obtain it again. Undoubtedly, he would have approached me again, anyway, in the hope of my becoming hooked. Then he would have promised me clothes, food and a flat if I would work for him, and I would have slowly sunk into the dregs of Liverpool.
But I knew from reading and from one or two cases I had seen at work what hashish could do to people, and almost instinctively I had refused.