‘Then we’ll make another pot after this one.’
She turned to put the kettle on the hook. As she did so, I picked up my cup and the one free of poison and said as she was returning, ‘I best give it to him. He’ll think it strange if you serve him.’
She nodded, and time slowed as she took that blue-rimmed cup in her tiny fingers. She urged me forwards, keen to see her revenge unfold, and I knew, with a dreadful sickness, that the last thing she would ever see would be the faces of the people who had ruined her life.
I walked, as one does in dreams, as if through water. I gave Frank his tea and took the seat beside him. My face felt strange, and I touched my fingers to it and found that the corners of my lips were lifted; I was smiling.
‘A nice cup of tea,’ Frank said, slurping it up. He prodded me with his elbow, and I sipped the drink.
‘It’s hot. Be careful,’ I said, to neither of them in particular, and I don’t know why I said it for it was not hot at all, it was almost cold, in fact. I was just trying to fill the silence.
‘So, Luella, what’s it that you do down by the seaside? You got a nice old mistress to take care of like Bonnie does?’
The conversation swirled around me. How I wished to shut Frank’s mouth; I would have taken a needle and sewn it tight if I could have. It was not enough to kill her; he had to mock her too.
‘That’s right.’ Luella’s voice sounded a long way off in the corner of the room.
There was more silence. I drank again.
‘Do you know a place called Bridgefield? It’s not too far from here.’ Frank was playing with her, throwing embers at her and seeing if they would catch. ‘We used to work there, didn’t we, Bonnie? Nice place, though Bonnie didn’t get on too well with the man of the house.’
‘Frank.’ My tongue was thick as I talked. ‘Luella doesn’t want to hear it.’
‘You are friends, are you not? Same line of work. I’m sure Luella’s had her fair share of nosy old men, finding things out they shouldn’t.’
‘Frank!’
I did not know who he was trying to torture more: me or Luella. I dragged my eyes upwards, and they took a while to focus, but when they did, Luella was glaring at me, her cup still full in her hands, the liquid rippling as she quaked. It was the same kind of stare as when I’d first seen her on the green outside Miss Grey’s house, that same intensity, and it brought that day back to me.
Monday … My first thought. Monday and fair of face …
How had I not asked? All these days together, never knowing …
‘Luella.’ My lips moved before the sound came. I drank some more. ‘What day were you born?’
The question surprised her. ‘Not sure.’ Her voice was slowing; was that the poison? ‘I think Thursday … Thursday seems familiar.’
‘Thursday.’ I laughed a little. I was starting to feel rather giddy, and my head was becoming lighter on my shoulders. ‘I would never have said Thursday.’ I laughed again, and the sound was peculiar. My hand was cool as I felt the pulse in my neck, and I wondered at how slow it seemed. ‘Far to go … Thursday’s child has far to go.’
‘That’s right. Drink your tea now.’ Frank pushed the cup to my lips and tilted it so that the tea swamped my mouth, and I had no choice but to swallow. I swallowed and swallowed until all of it was gone.
My lips were wet. The air on them was cold. I lifted my hand to wipe them with my sleeve, but nothing happened. My hand would not move. I stared down at my body, so still and calm.
Thoughts came and went from my mind. It was like a blanket had been thrown over me, and I was descending lower and lower. The blanket was muffling everything, making the room around me grow dark, making me feel warm and safe and glowing, though somewhere in the pit of my stomach there was a panic.
I forced through the fog in my head and pushed my eyelids wide. To my left, Frank. To my right, Luella. Both with full teacups. Both staring at me, waiting.
In the darkness, the last thing I heard was my cup smashing on the tiles as it fell from my hand.
Part II
Luella
Chapter 7
The thing about Bonnie were that she thought everything were all about her. It were, I suppose. This were all about her, right from the beginning.
There’s no use starting from where we’ve left off. You wouldn’t understand. You’d think me mean, double-crossing, maybe a whore. I were all of them things in a way.
Where should I start? The death of my pa? That’s just a small thing to me now, so I’ll tell that later. When I first saw Bonnie? I think that will wait. The murder of Mr Campbell? But he meant nothing to me, even though it were at the heart of all this.
I’ll start less than two weeks before Bonnie drank that tea. I’ll start at the start of August in the year of 1865. It’d been eight years and one day since Pa’s killing, and I were outside Grandma’s cottage with my arms deep in water, rinsing the laundry in the early morning, when a boy ran up and threw a letter at me and scarpered before I’d had chance to get my hands dry.
They all did that; ran to us, all the way out there by the woods, and then they ran away from us quicker. I were the daughter of a murderer, see. I couldn’t be trusted. Though they trusted us with their dirty sheets and their drawers with shit stains in them.
I took up the letter off the stone wall.
The paper were fair enough. The handwriting were neat, but there weren’t much of it. The person what wrote it didn’t think it worth including the details. Who needed details anyway when they was told their own ma were dead and had done it herself?
Grandma heard the silence and knew I weren’t working. It were that what drew her out away from her ironing, all red-faced and glaring like usual. She held her tongue when she saw the state of me, though. I weren’t crying. I’d say it were shock, but that’d be a fib too. It were just a sort of numbness and, deep, deep down, something like a tight ball of fire what I’d not felt burn for some time.
She took the letter from me, but we both knew she didn’t understand it.
‘Ma’s dead.’
Something passed over her face, like a grimace, as if she might have had a heart after all. She folded the letter.
‘Right.’
She went inside, dipping to fit under the doorway, and left me standing there with the sun on my shoulders.
If the letter came that day, Ma probably finished herself the day before. The anniversary – at least it wouldn’t be trouble for me to remember. I were thinking this as I walked inside the cottage. I could only see the fire burning until my eyes got used to the dark. Then I saw the irons what was facing the flames, cooking nicely, and the shirt what was on the table, steaming and setting. Grandma were in the next room where we slept. I heard her sniffing and the paper crackling in her hands.
‘I’ll go then,’ I said, and then she came through. Her eyes didn’t look wet. She threw the letter on the fire before I could catch it.
‘Be damned.’
I thought she were saying that about Ma, not me, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘You ain’t going.’
‘Who will get her things?’
‘Leave them. They’ll sell them or burn them.’
I thought of Ma’s things in a furnace, the last of her going to nothing but dust, and I couldn’t bear it.
In the next room, there were a trunk. The bits from our house – mine, Ma’s, and Pa’s before everything went wrong – were in there. There weren’t much. Anything what had been worth anything were sold long ago, except for the dress. It had been full of muck and silt last time it had seen daylight, but it were good enough; Grandma had washed it well. We’d kept it in case I ever needed it, and now I did.
Grandma didn’t help me get it on. Ma died three years ago to her, and she didn’t wear black then. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, scowling at me.
‘Stubborn. Your father’s daughter,’ she said now and then as I struggled to do the buttons on my
back.
We’d no black hat. I wore my straw bonnet like always and it looked right out of place, but better to have a covered head than nothing at all. I’d no gloves neither. The black showed up the red cracks on my white skin, and a thought passed me: at least it would be a day away from the wash bucket.
A day away from the wash bucket! Going to see the corpse of my ma – a holiday!
Grandma were still huffing and puffing at me. How would she cope? We’d got a big load to do. Did I see the burn on her wrist? That were from rushing already. Her fingers was too stiff to be working in water all day.
I’d long stopped listening to her. I didn’t say nothing as I took the pennies off the windowsill – the ones which was mine – and grabbed my bag what I’d had since I was a little ’un and walked out the cottage. I walked a good twenty feet and wondered if Grandma were watching and cursing me, but when I turned round, the doorway were empty.
I walked down to the lane and kept going until the buildings came into view. Bridgefield. Home. Hell.
It were busy with women and maids out shopping. All of them turned at me, thinking me someone new to the place, and then dropped their mouths like dead fishes when they recognised me. They hadn’t seen me in black for years. I guessed they knew why I were wearing it now, and not one of them approached to offer their condolences.
I didn’t look at them. I kept walking. I went straight through the high street. The smell were ripe because of the sun, and although I hated that cottage I had to call home, I hated the stench of Bridgefield town even more where pigs rotted as they hung on their hooks and vegetables turned to slime on the kerbsides.
I walked all the way down the hill and saw the river. It were low. The island in the middle of it below the bridge were showing (it’s flooded most other times of the year), and there was ducks on it. I crossed the bridge and glanced once at the water and felt the cold of it on me, and my head got dizzy at the memory, so I turned my gaze to the paving stones.
On the other side of the bridge, a quarter of a mile downriver, were the carpet factory belching out noise and stench. I turned my back on it and followed the road out of Bridgefield, heading east, and as I walked, I felt myself get lighter and also crushed.
My ma were dead.
She’d been away so long it were like she’d been dead for a while anyway. But I always knew, at the back of my mind, that she were somewhere nice. I used to think of her sitting in one of them window seats looking over the gardens and the city and hoped it would take her mind off things. I used to think of her eating roast beef when we had nothing but bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper. I used to think of joining her for a while, pretending. It wouldn’t have taken much to be admitted; I could’ve faked it. I’d rather’ve been with the lunatics than my own grandma most days, but I’d lost my nerve.
I walked until I were on the main road, and then I sat under the shade of a tree. A stagecoach would be coming by sometime. Better a stagecoach than a train. Never liked trains. Pa used to like trains; we’d have whole days on them. I couldn’t hear them hoot nor see their steam without thinking of Pa and that smile of his, the way he wrapped his hand around Ma’s waist as the train set off, and the way he rubbed the top of my head all excited as if we was the only things he’d ever need.
I would not set foot on a train for as long as I lived.
So I waited.
I were at the asylum before teatime.
I had to walk to the building from the city centre. I saw it looming, all grand and big at the top of the hill. It were a pretty place; who’d have thought lunatics would need such nice surroundings? It were supposed to help, so I were led to believe. The fresh air. The views. Digging up spuds. Keeping your bed tidy. Pruning the bushes. Washing and ironing. It were supposed to calm you, and that were what most lunatics needed: calming.
Didn’t do my ma no good.
There were an avenue of trees. I couldn’t name them. They had thin trunks and apple-green leaves and stood up properly without slouching. They blocked my view of the asylum as I walked through the middle of them, and when I came out from between them, I were at the foot of a short drive and facing me were a great big wooden door and so many windows! The windows shocked me. Like unblinking eyes in the building’s face, they was, and I wondered who might have been watching me from behind them.
Around me, I could hear the lunatics working in the gardens, though I couldn’t see them. The sound of my own shoes bounced off the trees as I walked up to the door and were allowed inside.
The smell of cleaning and carbolic hit me. I were led down one of them long corridors. Rooms broke off from the corridor, but I couldn’t see what were in the rooms because the doors was heavy and locked. I heard voices though, the odd cry and screech, and I kept close to the woman in the uniform what were walking too fast in front of me.
I couldn’t say which way she took me. I don’t know how anybody found their way around that place and through all them doors what needed unlocking and locking again so that there were the constant jingle of keys as the woman fiddled with her set on a great iron ring. I wondered how my ma had found the place when she were here, if she’d ever known there were an administrative block where the attendants and the superintendent slept, or that there were a dead room somewhere, waiting for her arrival.
The dead room came up on us quick. I were just getting used to the endless march, and the nervousness had left my stomach – I thought we’d never find Ma and that I wouldn’t have to see her and wouldn’t have to believe that she were really gone – when suddenly the next door opened into a room what were cold and small and fair on dark but for the high windows.
And there she were. On an old table with an old shroud to cover her. There were a bowl, a jug of water – cold, so I were to find out – and a cloth so that I could wash her. For a moment, I didn’t move. I couldn’t go to her and see what she had become. I wanted to run out of there, and I thought I’d smash through the locks if I had to, just to get some air.
‘Have you money for a burial?’ the attendant asked. It were the only thing she’d said to me, and her voice were kind compared to the look of her.
I shook my head.
‘Pauper’s it’ll be then.’ She touched me on the shoulder because I’d started to weep.
‘Can I go to it?’
‘It’ll be at night, what with her … you know.’ Killing herself, she meant to say.
‘They won’t take her, will they? The doctors. They won’t cut her up?’ Like they’d done with Pa’s body. The body of a murderer, a man in his prime; they couldn’t wait to hack him down. It hadn’t seemed too bad for Pa to be cut, but Ma! So small and thin and pretty. I couldn’t bear for them to slice into her lovely skin.
‘We’ll get her in the parish,’ the woman said, but she said it in a way what sounded like she couldn’t be certain of her own promise.
She left me then, and when the door shut, I were sure she’d locked me in, and I couldn’t get my breath for a while. I had to put my head between my knees and breathe slow before I could walk to Ma.
She’d changed since I’d last seen her. She looked healthier now than she had done when she’d first come here. The hollows of her cheeks had plumped out, and though her skin were grey with death, it were clear, and I thought it must have been pearly before she’d taken herself.
Her hair were plaited close to her scalp, and the ends was fixed up on to her head; I were grateful that she hadn’t been shorn. There were a little pair of blunt scissors by the wash things, and I cut out them ties and let her hair fall free. She had such lovely hair. Nicer than mine because it were so smooth. I cut a few inches off it and brushed it against my cheek, knotted it, and placed it in my bag so I could keep a bit of her with me always. And then I set about washing her.
You’d have thought nothing were wrong with her. Not a bruise on her skin, not a blemish. Just as beautiful as I’d always remembered her. You’d have thought she’d have died peaceful in her
sleep, taken by the Lord because she’d asked so nicely, until you got to her wrists. They was bandaged, but the blood had come through, and when I looked more closely – it were hard to see in the dimness – I could make out the brown marks on her hands and arms and some smudges on her face where the blood had dried on, though the attendants had tried to wipe most of it off. I scrubbed her hands and cleaned her nails until I were fair on sweating, and when I’d finished, I hid her arms under the shroud so that none of the violence she’d done to herself showed; she were just a pretty head at the top of a white shroud with pretty hair splayed around her face like she could’ve been an angel.
The door opened then, and I wondered if there were some kind of peephole that the woman could see through. She waited just inside the room for me.
‘How did she do it?’
The attendant cleared her throat. I don’t think she wanted to say, but I waited until she did. ‘A fork. Took it from the dining room. Hid it up her sleeve.’
She’d told me about them forks in the one letter she’d sent me when she’d first arrived. They was webbed most of the way up, she’d said; just the very tips of them was like a proper fork, and she couldn’t get used to eating with them. She must have used some force. What a state she must have been in under them bandages!
The thought made my vision go dark. I leaned over Ma, looking only at her face, and kissed her cold forehead. Then I walked out that room and left my ma forever.
I didn’t notice the locks this time, nor the voices from the other side of the doors. I watched the woman’s rubber shoes on the black-and-white tiled floor and focused on my breathing until suddenly we was in the administrative block again and she were handing me a box with Ma’s things in it.
The box lid were dusty. The last time someone’s hands had been on it must have been three years ago when Ma arrived, when her things still held a bit of her warmth.
Convenient Women Collection Page 10