December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  She pushed the coin into my palm and all the way to the pharmacist I thought of the red and the pus and the pain and how Angela was doing that day in day out and Madame Camille didn’t give a damn.

  I thought about it happening to me. Because it could.

  In the board house, I helped out a bit with the children, but they were mostly in bed when I got back. I usually worked the day shift and the girls who were mothers would work the nights, so that they could tend to the children in the day. Not one of us ever spoke about the fathers of our children or why we had come to be here. We didn’t need to know and in a way, I was happy to be with them, in my condition. They were the only people who couldn’t judge me.

  Coming up to Christmas, there was a raid on the kip house. I had just left for the evening and the constables came thundering in, all charging with their batons, smashing the place up and pulling the girls outside in all manner of undress, arresting them and throwing them in jail for the night. The men scarpered, not one of them in trouble.

  The next morning, we were surprised to get a knock on the door of the board house from Madame Camille herself and she came in all business like and told us we were setting up a new shop and we all had to help. She said the girls would have to take on extra shifts and I saw her eyeing me up, taking in my stomach.

  I met her eyes and folded my arms. Our agreement was after. I wasn’t doing anything that would harm this baby.

  I minded the children that day, playing tic-tac-toe on the floor with a bit of chalk I found, tickling them and telling them stories like my daddy used to tell me. In the evening, one of the girls told me I had to go in for the evening shift at the new place.

  I set out in the cold, wrapping my old coat around me, it was so thin it felt like a sheet of paper. The streets were busy. She’s a clever one, Madame Camille, she’d set up in a place closer to town, with more people about. She knew how to find the right places, with the right punters around.

  I thought the new place looked cheap. There was no linoleum or velvet curtains, just a plain old house with beds that had been put in that day, there were no lamps or plants yet, just the bare trays, glasses and enough whiskey to keep us going. Madame Camille wasn’t going to miss out on the Christmas trade, police or no police.

  I did my best, flying around cleaning, trying to get things in proper order. It was still in the back of my mind that I might be put to work. We were short and the men were starting to gather in the hosting room, some looking shy, the rest, drunk and fondling anything that went past.

  I had just brought a man up to a room, when I came back to find three men standing, blinking in the lights of the hosting room. One of the men was broad shouldered and all confidence and he reached out to one of the girls and pinched her bottom. Beside him was a skinny fella, red spots on his cheeks, his first time in a kip-house by the looks of it.

  Then I saw him, the jaw nearly dropping right out of my skull, the sight of him shocking me white. Henry Brabazon. In London. In my kip house. And me with my big belly on me.

  I whipped around and scuttled straight back to the corridor. He couldn’t see me here. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want anyone to know about my condition or where I was.

  Then I remembered Montgomery. About his murder. About me.

  Angela came walking out of her room. I grabbed her.

  ‘There’s a man,’ I said, my eyes like saucers. ‘I can’t go out.’

  ‘What?’ she said, startled.

  ‘There’s someone out there, I can’t be seen.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says and she walks out to the front room to take a look.

  ‘Your man?’ she says and I know she means the man with the shoulders.

  ‘No,’ says I, ‘the taller one.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. And then she points at my belly and says, ‘Is he ...’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, he’s not. But he can’t see me, I can’t be here.’

  My heart is racing in my chest. I cannot believe that he is here, walking in off the street like that. In London. Why this kip house? He had to have come to find me - those two men with him could be secret police officers.

  Seeing my face, Angela leads me down the short flight of stairs to the kitchen.

  ‘Wait here,’ she suggests. ‘Or outside maybe?’

  She points to the back door, where the bottom of an iron fire escape screwed to the wall. I decide that’s what I’ll do. I don’t want to be anywhere near upstairs or him. I open the door, go out and close it behind me, the December air swirling all round me. It’s fresh and nice for a minute.

  The thoughts are flashing all through my mind. He could come down those kitchen stairs and arrest me and take me to a jail cell and then bring me with him on a train and a boat all the way back to Ireland.

  Because only he knows. Only he could connect me to Montgomery and Dowth that day. In London, I’d pushed all that from my mind, even in the black of the night when Martha had been snoring in her bed, I could crush the thoughts one by one, stopping them from creeping in.

  I hadn’t ever expected to see Henry Brabazon again. Now he was here and so too were my memories. I try to push them out of mind again and think about something else, about the cold, about the baby, about the girls - anything else.

  It is cold. The freshness I felt at first has gone now and all I can feel is the freezing air around my head and neck, up through my nose as I breathe in and out, hitting the back of my throat like wet ice.

  I hug myself to keep warm. It’s not working. I stay there, shivering now, peering out into the dark, making out an overgrown garden, bushes black against black. I hunker down. There’s nothing to sit on, apart from the cold, hard mud and I don’t fancy it much. Instead, I rock on my heels till my knees get sore and I get back up, looking at the yellow squares of light in the walls, of the shadows moving behind them, of the people in the buildings all around.

  I can hear laughter and shouting coming from the streets where the Gentleman’s Clubs are. Somewhere, there’s a baby crying, a sharp painful cry and I think, how will I ever get used to that?

  I consider going back in. Maybe just to wait in the kitchen. I look at the fire escape, the rickety, old, metal ladder. I could climb it and hide up there either but then I think I might fall in my condition and I should probably just wait. So, I do.

  When I can’t feel my legs or feet anymore, when the sensation has gone out of my hands and my nose feels like there’s a red-hot lance going up it, Angela sticks her head out the door and says, ‘Molly, fucking hell, get back in here.’

  I put one foot in front of the other but I can’t really feel what’s in my shoes and when I get into the kitchen I sit on a small chair and think I might be dying of the cold.

  ‘You really didn’t want him to see you, did you?’ she says and I think, of course I didn’t, I bloody told you that.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she says.

  ‘Is he?’ I say, although my lips feel like they’re swollen and my teeth are chattering bad. It’s hard to talk.

  ‘He went not long after he arrived actually. Just said he was going home.’

  Now I know. He came to look for me. Because if he came to be with a girl, then he would have done that, but he didn’t.

  ‘And what about the other two?’ I ask.

  ‘Just gone,’ she said. ‘I had the spectacles. Poor sod.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Who, Spectacles?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘the man who left. The tall man. Did he mention me?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Does he know you’re here?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he’s looking for me.’

  ‘Well he never mentioned you,’ she says. ‘Honestly love, he wasn’t here long enough. He scarpered as soon as he caught sight of the place. Sobered up, I reckon.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. I wonder how I’m going to get through the rest of my shift for the worr
ying. I’m so cold. And so tired.

  * * *

  I take to bed with the fever. It folds over me after I come home that night. It creeps through my body, a sweeping mass of chills and heat, icicles and roaring fires in my limbs all at once. My arms and legs feel as though weights have been laid down in the bones and when I try to lift my head, my neck is a jelly with no power left at all.

  I pass in and out, coming back to the room and going again. At first the girls poke me and tell me to get up, Madame Camille won’t be too happy if I don’t get to my shift, but then they are gone again and I can hear murmuring voices at the door. Should they call the doctor?

  I watch a big shape on the wall. It’s grey and white and black and it moves like a kaleidoscope I’d seen once in Duffy’s hardware in town. Over and over it turns, changing shape, coming at me big and small. I wonder if it is a spirit or a devil, here to take me away, everything catching up with me, making me pay for what I’ve done. I’m frightened, especially as I can’t stay awake and the fire still burns and the spirit won’t go away, watching me, from the wall.

  One of the girls is at my head, cupping it, holding out a warm cup of tea for me to drink. But I can’t and as she holds it to my lips, it burns the dry skin that has formed there, cracked with the fever and the consciousness I was falling in and out of.

  I dream of my baby, that he is dying inside me. That the big black and white spirit on the wall is coming down to take him away from me, killing him in my belly and filtering him away in a big ghostly breath.

  I want to cry for him, to tell the spirit to leave me alone, to leave the innocent child, he has done no harm to anyone, but no sound will come out. Only sleep, hazy, fretful, sweating, and then there are people in the room, and I’m being lifted out of the bed, my weight supported by two people, my bump hard as they give me a Queen’s chair out of the room and into some class of carriage outside.

  There’s a blanket around me and more voices and then nothing else.

  Until I wake in a yellow room. The paint is cracked on the wall. My eyes focus on it, going in and out and I put my hand on my belly and it’s still there. The mound is there.

  I turn over a bit, my limbs sore as though they’re swollen, and I feel him kick me, hard behind the belly button. He’s still alive. And so am I.

  ‘Miss Thomas,’ says the nurse when she comes into the room some time later. I haven’t moved. I don’t have the energy to. My head is still sore, but not like it has been.

  ‘You’re awake,’ she says. And she’s over feeling my forehead, all gentle, and taking my pulse, holding a big silver watch that’s hanging on a chain on her pinny.

  ‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ she says, before I’ve had a chance to ask her anything.

  ‘Influenza,’ the doctor tells me, when he comes in, breathing heavily as he takes my pulse too. ‘You are very lucky. It was touch and go for a while.’

  They tell me I’ve been sick for five days, and yesterday, the fourth day, the priest had been called to say the last rites over me and my big belly. They thought I was going to die and I didn’t even know a thing about it.

  They help me up and give me some watery soup and as soon as I eat it my energy levels come back up and I begin to feel better. But my body is weakened, my muscles feel as though they’ve been torn at by dogs, every knot of my spine poking and hurting through my skin. Still the baby moves, twisting and turning, drinking the very life from inside me.

  That evening the nurse gives me a sponge bath and I feel soothed after she’s washed down my face and neck and hands. My hair is matted from the salt and sweat, and she helps me tie it all up and rinse the cloth around my hair line. She gives me a cotton smock to change into and I’m just settled back in the bed when the door opens. It’s Madame Camille.

  ‘You’re on the mend,’ she says and she’s smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, eying her suspiciously. I knew by now that Madame Camille only came around when there was something of interest to her. If there was business involved.

  ‘I was just passing and I said I’d drop in to check on you,’ she says. ‘You’re feeling better?’

  ‘Much better,’ I say.

  ‘The girls were very worried. I was worried,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I feel a bit vulnerable, wasted away in this hospital bed, her with her made up face and hair piled up high.

  ‘But I’m delighted to see you’re better.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. What does she want?

  ‘Well I’m sure you’ll be back to the house and back to work in the next few days?’

  I can’t imagine getting up yet. Dragging my body back to the house and back to work were not what I was thinking about, not yet.

  ‘I might have to rest a bit,’ I say, trying to think of what the doctor said to me. But my brain is muddled, as though I haven’t slept for a week, even though they told me that’s all I’ve done.

  ‘Another day in here,’ she says. ‘Then another day at home then back to work. I’ll be adding this to the slate.’

  She stands up.

  ‘I look after all my girls,’ she says holding out her long fingers and pushing them into dainty leather gloves. ‘Didn’t you receive the best care?’

  I nod.

  ‘You wouldn’t have gotten that on the streets, now would you?’ she says.

  I nod again. Because she’s right. If I was on the streets, I’d be dead by now. Deader than this, anyway.

  Chapter Fifteen

  GLADYS

  It was the happiest Christmas she could remember. Albert had a smile that he couldn’t seem to rid himself of. He whistled as he cleaned out the fire, sweeping the ash into a bucket, to help her. He carried baskets and helped her fold out the big sheets for changing the bed. The laundry was going out to a washer woman now on a Monday. She was to do no heavy lifting.

  It was difficult to break her routine - to let go of some of the practices she did without fail each day. But she found she could replace some of the heavier tasks with lighter ones to keep her patterns going, the ones that made her feel safe.

  He brought home a goose and she enjoyed stuffing it and basting it all Christmas morning, getting it nice and crispy, just the way he liked it. She paused while stirring the gravy, touching her stomach and looked across at Albert and smiled.

  ‘Kicking, is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Little bugger,’ she replied.

  Her hand rested on her corset. Between the corset and chemise was a flat cushion she’d cut and stitched to the front of the undergarment.

  ‘Do you think, could I touch him?’ said Albert.

  ‘No,’ said Gladys, shaking her head. ‘I can’t bear to be touched. My skin is crawling.’

  He looked disappointed, but she turned her back, watching the brown bubbles burst on the skin of the gravy.

  ‘I’ve a surprise for you, after dinner,’ he said.

  She smiled again, to herself this time. How happy she’d made him.

  They sat to a meal of sweetbreads and pate, salmon and goose. Albert had told her to create a feast; they were celebrating.

  ‘This’ll be the last Christmas, just the two of us,’ he said as he held his knife and fork up, ready to cut into the brown flesh of the goose. After dinner, Albert went out to the back yard and came back in, pushing the door open with his foot.

  ‘Look what I got,’ he said, smiling.

  It was a white painted cradle carved from oak, heavy, on a rocker and with blue edging all around.

  ‘I just know it’s going to be a boy,’ he said, kissing Gladys on the cheek.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, tears in the corner of her eyes. She bent down and ran her fingers along the edge of the wood.

  Yes.

  They were going to have a boy.

  * * *

  To clothe the baby, she had started to make binders and shirts from the softest cotton she could find. She carefully folded the shirts when they were finished, wrapping them in tissue pap
er and lavender and storing them in the nursery wardrobe; the baby’s room. She had picked a pretty wallpaper with tiny brown dots through it for putting on the walls.

  She had never seen Albert so happy or proud. He went off to work whistling and came back with an embrace for her in the evening. She was careful not to let him brush near the bump too much and he was happy to leave her alone, respecting her wishes to remain untouched. Most evenings he talked of nothing else but the baby.

  ‘I’m the proudest man in England,’ he told her.

  As part of her baby shopping, visiting haberdasheries in central London and general stores for all of the things she would need, she took to sitting in secluded parks, watching nannies and other mothers with their babies. She observed their behaviour, their smiles as they held babies in the air or cradled them in their arms. She looked forward to when she could take her own little boy to the park, to toss him in the air and catch him again, giggling.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ she would say, as she sat beside a young nanny.

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Four months. A good feeder. A lovely baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ she’d say and lean in real close and tickle the baby on the cheek.

  ‘Could I hold him? I’m expecting my own in a few months.’

  The nanny would look to Gladys’s stomach and then hand the baby over, and watch as Gladys stared at the baby’s face, holding it tight and swaying it gently up and down.

  ‘Is it your first baby?’ they’d ask, noticing her grey hair and deep lines around her eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m very lucky,’ Gladys would say while bouncing the child. ‘A miracle baby.’

  The nanny would smile and wait for Gladys to hand the baby back, which she would do slowly… reluctantly. Soon it would be time to find her own baby, a baby she wouldn’t have to hand back. She hadn’t decided where she would find him yet, but it pleased her to know that her baby was out there already. He was somewhere right now, growing, waiting to be born. She couldn’t wait to meet him. Whoever he was.