by Lily Hammond
It didn’t matter, had no relevance. Only, Eliza couldn’t get used to it. She looked down at her hands, wanting to count on her fingers how many days she’d been in this strange city. She got to seven or eight and then doubted herself. She’d lost count and didn’t know if she’d ever get used to stepping outside into this bright heat that shocked her, rocked her on her heels, made her confused.
She still stood in front of the café, and self-conscious, turned to look in the window. In the shadows of the shop the waitress stared back out at her, tray of crockery in hand, her untidy brows dark over her eyes. Eliza’s mouth twitched and she looked away, stepping forward into the trickle of people on the footpath.
Maybe her father was back. In one of her pockets was her purse with its little rattle of coins, but in the other was the letter her mother had brought with them. She’d shown it to Eliza, put it in her hands and pointed to squiggles of writing on the backside of the envelope.
‘That’s your father’s address,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to find him. There’s nothing else to do; they’re turning us out of this place, and with no jobs, what choice do we have? It’s this or the workhouse.’ Her voice had been querulous, and Eliza had looked from the faded ink on the envelope to her mother’s face and nodded. They’d lost their jobs at the laundry back when the trees had been losing their leaves, and now they were being turned out of their rooms as well. Her mother was terribly afraid of the workhouse.
‘Best to go now, while we’ve still enough money for the passage.’ Her mother’s face quivered and Eliza wanted to ask what a passage was, but just nodded again, waiting patiently for it all to make sense.
Passage, as it had turned out, meant a squalid berth on a ship that rolled and groaned with the great green waves of the sea. It meant goodbye to the cat that sometimes crept into Eliza’s room and curled itself under her eiderdown with her, purring in the darkness in wordless contentment.
It meant a constant seasickness for her mother that hadn’t abated, that had sucked all the moisture from her body, turning her sunken and hollow-eyed, no matter how often Eliza had held the cup of water to her mouth.
Eliza shook her head and pulled the scuffed envelope from her pocket. She’d taken it carefully from amongst her mother’s things and stared down at it now, knowing what it was despite not being able to match the knowing with the written words.
Looking around, she oriented herself against the warren of streets. In the days since the ship had expelled her onto the shore of this city, she’d mapped carefully her every step. She’d not gone far yet, but she was memorising her surroundings street by street.
The address on the envelope was for a boarding house. One of the women on the ship had found the place for her the first day, depositing her on the doorstep like she was a piece of jetsam before sliding away to vanish into the crowds.
Eliza held the envelope in her hand like a talisman and turned the first corner, the one with the butcher’s shop on one side, rows of sausages hanging from hooks in the window and making her mouth water. She looked quickly away from them. The boarding house was two more streets away.
For a moment, she didn’t know which building it was that her father lived in. There were three much the same, their stone walls grimy with dust. But it was the one with the cracked pane of glass above the door. She remembered it. The crack radiated out like branches of a gnarled old tree. She knocked on the door and waited, letter clutched in a sweating hand.
‘You again.’ The door opened wider and Eliza peered down into the gloom of the hallway as though her father lurked there waiting for her to spot him.
She nodded.
‘He’s still not here, love.’ The woman looked down on Eliza from her perch at the top of the steps. ‘Like I told you last time, he’s moved on.’ Her great cheeks wobbled with the words and Eliza watched them in fascination. They were red and round, as though the woman had been bent over a hot stove moments before answering the door. Eliza lifted her head slightly and sniffed, but there was no aroma of fresh baking bread, or mutton, or anything but a musty sourness from the darkness beyond the door.
‘You listening to me?’
Eliza snapped back to attention. Held out the letter. Pointed to the name she knew was scrawled there. Her father’s name. She wanted to tell the woman everything she knew about her father but was afraid that even had she been able to, it was precious little enough. He’d been gone four years. She’d been eighteen when he left. Her mother had received letters from him two or three times a year, and most of the time there was a bit of money with them. He was a good man. Her mother had tucked the money away and said so.
The woman on the doorstep spoke again and Eliza focused on the voice, the words, her hand with the letter in it subsiding against her skirt.
‘He’s moved on, I’m telling you. Wasn’t here longer than three months. And that was a good six months ago.’ Her eyes, small and the pale blue of the sun-bleached sky, blinked over the red cheeks. ‘I told you all this when you came here before. No forwarding address.’ She laughed. ‘Not many gentlemen such as your father leave one of those. Drifters they are, especially now. Work a few weeks, take a few weeks more to spend the money, then move on to the next place.’ She stopped talking and stared down at Eliza. ‘At any rate,’ she finished. ‘I can’t help you.’
Eliza lowered her gaze to the letter in her hand. So, it was worthless. Her father didn’t live at this address and wasn’t coming back. She glanced beseechingly up at the woman again.
‘He’s gone, love,’ she repeated. ‘Likely for good.’
Did he leave anything behind? Eliza wanted to ask but took a deep breath on her own silence instead. She nodded and turned away from the woman to gaze out over the street at the bright sun. The letter fluttered from her numb fingers and she heard the door close behind her.
When she’d been here before, asking as best she could about her father, thrusting the letter in the woman’s face, she’d been given much the same bad news. She’d become frantic, hot, tired, stunned at the turn of events she didn’t even fully understand, and the woman had turned and shouted into the depths of the house. When a wiry old man appeared, she’d muttered at him and he’d looked at Eliza with rheumy, bloodshot eyes and scooted down the steps to the footpath, plucked up her two suitcases and made off with them.
She’d chased after him for two blocks. Until they’d banged up against another house and another woman with the same fat round cheeks as the other, and the old man had plumped her cases down in the hallway and held out his hand. Eliza had stared at his palm until understanding dawned, and with it, a weak gratitude that made her press two of the copper coins from her purse into his hand. Then the fat woman had held out her own hand for the purse itself, and in exchange for more coins, Eliza discovered herself with a roof over her head.
There was nothing more she could think of to do right now, and turning, let her feet drag her down the street to her own room. She was tired. Overhead, the sun was directly above her and under her hat, her head was hot. Hot on the outside from the sun against the dark felt, hot on the inside from the constant friction of her own thoughts. The letter lay in the dust on the footpath behind her, forgotten.
Her room was on the third floor, tucked into the swelter of the attic, a tiny, dusty space with bed and drawers, and a wooden rod across one corner with a single coat hanger dangling from it. The bathroom was down on the floor below, the water closet outside in the yard, stinking in the sun. She met no one on the stairs going up to her room, just listened to the hollow thud of her footsteps on the wooden boards. They echoed around inside the bony chamber of her skull.
Her room had one little window and she dropped to her knees before it, pushing her fingers against the flaking wood and wrenching the sash upwards, hoping for an enlivening breeze sweeping in from the sea and over the rooftops. She could see the harbour from her perch under the eaves, sitting in the sun in a glitter of deep green silk shot through with silver thr
eads.
There was a breeze, but it was nerveless, a limp thing, a warm and listless current. She closed her eyes and leaned out the window for it to touch her cheeks and licked the salt off her dry lips.
Chapter Three
Eliza roused with the dawn from under the weight of chaotic, unremembered dreams with a fast-moving river of darting thoughts dashing around trapped inside her head. She reached up and put trembling hands to her temples as though to hold her thoughts still, but they churned and leapt about like fish thrusting themselves desperately upstream to spawn. The pillow under her head was damp from tears that had seeped into the coarse weave of its fabric during the night and she patted at it with questioning fingers before sitting up and scooting back against the wall, drawing her knees up to her chest under the blanket.
For a long, suffocating moment, she had no recollection of where she was. Was she still on the ship? She listened for the deep-throated rumble of its engine. She pressed her hands against the mattress. It did not lurch or sway under her. Her fingers clenched the sheet between them. She turned blinking eyes to the dim porthole.
It was the wrong shape. On the ship, the window had been round. It had delighted her with its thick glass, a hole in the side of the boat, through which she’d been able to see the darkly emerald ocean.
Where was her mother? She should be in the bunk beneath Eliza, her breathing a wheezy, shallow whistling in the dimness of the dawn.
A deep, sonorous wardling cry sounded outside the shape of the window and Eliza let go of the sheet underneath her to grasp instead the blanket, eyes fixed on the lightening rectangle of glass.
She knew where she was. Her heart sank, weighted with the knowledge. She knew where her mother was – under the heavy green waves, dragged downwards to the ocean floor, there to float like a great white, sightless fish. Eliza shuddered, and the bird called again, a curious gurgling, throaty sing-song she’d never heard before. Blinking away the image of her mother’s dark red hair trailing out like seaweed in a drifting ocean floor current, Eliza leaned towards the window of her room, fixed on its brightening gloss. She hadn’t pulled the flimsy curtain across it the night before, didn’t in fact, remember climbing out of her heavy clothes and into the lumpen bed.
The bird called out again, and another answered it, farther away, its voice mysterious and romantic in the distance. Eliza let go of the blanket she clutched and crawled forward in the bed, dropping to the floor and reaching for the window.
She pushed upwards at the sash and the rising dawn spilled in like the incoming tide. The bird called again, and she worked her mouth silently around the sounds of its morning greeting.
Quardle ardle oodle. She mimicked the sounds in her head, her lips stretched in an unconscious smile.
‘Oodle ardle quardle,’ the bird answered her.
The sun rose outside her window and she stretched forward towards it, peering between chimney pots at the harbour. The water was blushed a slow, rosy pink from the sun, and she blinked at it, stunned at the simple beauty, at the fall of light over the dark hills that climbed up from the smooth, serene expanse of sea.
This was water she could imagine her mother in. Reborn as an exotic sort of underwater creature in this pink, pearly wash of water. She rocked back on her heels and sighed soundlessly.
Another bird lifted its voice to the view, and she cocked an ear towards it, never having heard such a halting, hesitant call, one note, a pause, then another, three in a row. She opened her mouth and imagined the notes dropping from her own throat. It called out again and she nodded along with it, sticking her head dizzily outside the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the magical bird in the cluster of trees that grew mysteriously between the building she was in and its neighbour, as though in determined protestation of the grubby city.
Suddenly around her bloomed a cacophony of bird calls, as the sun woke the city’s feathered citizens and they rose to the occasion of the great opalized dawn. Spreading wide her arms outside the window, Eliza snatched at the songs in the warmth of the rising sun, lost in the bird’s bantering greetings.
She didn’t know how long it took before the bird’s chatter subsided and the sun rose high enough in the morning sky for its rosy glow to spread wider, darkening over the harbour, its loose salmon-coloured frills disappearing under the growing day. She lost herself often like this, enveloped in sensation for which she had no expression, and the jolt back to reality, to thinking, came with a harsh cramp in her stomach.
Confused, she lowered her gaze to her middle and frowned. Pressed a hand against the fabric of her night dress, felt the heat of her flesh through it. Her stomach was tender with a yawning, greedy hunger. She swallowed, her mouth dry as though she’d been drinking sea water, sand.
When was the last time she’d eaten? Blinking, she tried to corral her thoughts into coherency. Yesterday. When yesterday? The scone she’d had with her tea? Had that been yesterday? Hadn’t she brought something home with her to eat? She’d meant to.
Sitting on the floor of her attic room, Eliza bent her head. Breathed in and out, slowly, deliberately, soothing her frustration with herself. It was all right, she said inside her head. She could do better. She could find her way.
But the thought of food took her back to the café. To the newspaper on the table, one corner smudged by the angry hand that had gripped it, discarded it in disgust at the rows of print that told of no jobs. No jobs. No jobs. She closed her eyes tightly, squeezed the lids together, dragged in another deep breath, the air warm in her lungs like brine.
There would be a job somewhere for her. Hadn’t her mother said they would be able to find work here in this strange city where some of the birds sang such odd, halting songs? She had said so.
But on the tail of that thought hung another by tooth and nail. She’d also said they would find her father, and that all of them would be together. That hadn’t happened at all. Her father had moved on. A drifter, the landlady had said. The word was light and heavy at the same time inside Eliza’s head and she repeated it to herself. Drifter. It conjured dust on a breeze. Nothing she could hold on to.
Another deep breath, and she pressed the palms of her hands against the bare floorboards. Forced herself to think without getting lost. Her thoughts circled on great dark wings inside her head.
What did she need? she asked herself. Something to eat. She had a place to stay – and that was a miracle of sorts, wasn’t it? She was safe up here in her attic room, looking down on the city, looking out over the harbour; she was safe here for a while – the landlady had taken a big handful of coins from her purse.
Her stomach groaned again in a sick swill of acid. Eliza climbed heavily to her feet and looked around for the purse. It should have been on the small shelf that jutted from the wall above the bed. She swiped a hand over the surface, even though she could see it wasn’t there. She patted her hands over the pillow and tugged up the sheet and blanket of the mean little bed, smoothing her palms over them, searching for the purse while her heart stuttered in her chest and her gorge rose to her throat as though she’d swallowed a stone. Not there.
Not on the dresser. There was a bowl and jug on it, the jug with a chip out of the neck where the water poured out. The bowl had an inch of water in it and she dipped her fingers in it as though it were holy water, but still the little red purse was hidden from view. On her knees again, her wet fingers dribbling little cat’s paw marks on the floor, she groped for her clothes scrabbled in a pile under the bed where she had kicked them the night before. She didn’t remember taking them off, or dropping them to the floor, but that was no matter – she often lost herself in the swirl of thoughts that suffered endlessly inside her head with no way out.
The purse was in the pocket of her skirt, and she huffed out a sigh of relief, clutching the red scrap of fabric fastened with a silver-toned clasp in her long fingers. Shaking it, she listened to the thin rattling of its contents and sighed again, then lumbered back to her f
eet, her face arranging itself into a look of stubborn determination.
Today she would have to go out again. She stood in the middle of the tiny room and nodded out the window at the rooftops surrounding her, at the grey and white gulls that swooped and squawked over the buildings, their feathers so thick and fine they looked more like pelts, like fur. They hadn’t had birds like that at home. But she and her mother hadn’t been near the sea. They’d lived on the outskirts of a small town, and she and her mother had walked every morning over the long road to the local mental hospital, going around to the side door and ducking down dark corridors to the laundry, where in winter, Eliza would be almost glad to warm herself over the big boiling vats of water, stirring in the filthy linens with a paddle that made her shoulders ache. At lunch time, she’d sit close to her mother, listening to her talk and laugh with the other women, none of whom ever took any notice of her. They all thought she was stupid because she couldn’t talk, and who knew? Maybe they were right. On their way home, Eliza would keep her face carefully turned away from the gaze of the patients at their windows, unable to stop herself wondering if she was more like the men and women in the big brick building than not.
She wished her mother were still with her. She needed her. Her mother had always looked after her, spoken for her, told her what to do, taken her along to the laundry with her when she got the job there. Without her mother, who would take care of her?
She swallowed silently. Looked out the window. Came to the same conclusion she’d been unable to avoid the day before. She had to take care of herself. She had to go outside and seek help. She had to do it all herself. Surely someone somewhere would help her? If she could find them?
Eliza remembered the woman from the boat. She’d had nice clothes, the fabric fine enough to make Eliza want to rub it between her fingers. Her face had been broad, uncreased, the eyes grey, wide-spaced under fair hair. She’d been kind. She’d brought Eliza ashore, a firm hand under Eliza’s elbow, and she’d taken charge. Helped Eliza show the men her papers that were in the suitcases. They’d taken a motor car to the street with her father’s boarding house on it.