by Ajay Close
Glasgow Fair. Every summer of his twelve years he has heard the words spoken and, just after, seen this secret look between his father and his uncles. Like they ken fine it’s a parcel of rogues, with the cheapjacks’ gold rings that turn your fingers green, and African princesses covered in boot-black, and counting pigs, and a six-fingered hag who says you’re to meet a bonnie black-eyed lassie, and still the Watsons can’t wait to have the wool pulled over their eyes. So here they are, his uncles and cousins, with that hawk-fierce Watson stare in their pleasant country faces. And, now that he’s old enough to find his way back to the railway station if he gets himself lost, Hugh is with them.
On the journey, they drew straws to decide who’d keep an eye on him. It’s his big cousin Robbie he’s trailing. Thirteen and holding down a man’s job in the fields this past year, with yellow callouses on his palms from gripping the scythe in the haymaking. Hugh’s big for twelve and can look Robbie in the eye, but he doesn’t have his wide shoulders or the curly brown hairs his aunt trims with the scissors every few days to save his soft chin from the razor. The other cousins laughed when Robbie drew the short straw, but he doesn’t seem to mind Hugh tagging along, if he keeps a couple of paces behind. Close enough to clamber into a swing boat with him, but not so close that folk can see he’s minding the wean. This mix of company and solitude suits Hugh well enough. He’s a singular one, his teacher says, not of the common herd. Thinking of her smell of lavender, the blueish underside of her wrist, the way she will lower her voice when she draws him aside after class, he feels a flutter behind his ribs. He has done his last sum at Ochiltree School. Once the harvest is by, he’s off to the big school in Ayr. Ten miles there and ten miles back every day, and the townies making fun of his accent, and his father having to get by without the extra pair of hands he was counting on, and the uniform to be paid for, and his books, even with the scholarship money. But he won’t think of that just now, because the crush of merrymakers he’s caught up in – men, and women in their Sunday hats, and undergrown weans with old-looking faces – this river of folk is now past the tenements and bursting upon the Green.
Robbie has agreed to make a circuit of the whole fair. Hugh is tempted by the crazily-painted helter skelter, but he can’t fritter his money on bairns’ rides. He needs to go home with a story. A tattooed lady, an Indian swami, a dragon from across the China seas, something to make his brothers gasp. And that’s only half the challenge. He has to make the right choice, distinguish himself from this crowd of country bumpkins, justify his teacher’s faith in him. So he takes his time, breathing in the smell of gingerbread and frying sausages and the sweetness of trampled turf, filling his eyes with the gaudy painted booths, the striped canvas, the flashes of gilt on the steam carousel’s prancing horses, the wee monkey in his red jacket collecting pennies from the crowd around the hurdy-gurdy. What a din! Like a fiddle bred with the bagpipes. And all tangled up with it, a dozen bands playing different tunes, and bells ringing, and girls on the sea-on-land screaming, and barkers calling through speaking trumpets, promising three murders and a ghost in the theatre tent.
He passes boxing booths where bookies’ runners and tailors’ apprentices are queueing to shed their jackets and take a swing at a chisel-faced professional. Thimble-riggers slide cups to and fro across fold-up tables. The stereorama tent promises views of Venice and Paris. A moustachioed dwarf in a chimney-pot hat beckons him in to meet the amazing bloodless man and the world’s strongest woman. Daft laddies hurl wet sponges at their pal in the Aunt Sally. There are jugglers and tumblers, coconut shies and shooting galleries, cages of goldfinches and canaries, a menagerie with leopard and tiger and laughing hyena. And, tucked between the Cabinet of Curiosities and Doctor Darwin’s Missing Link, a dancing booth with a fiddler sawing away inside, and a barefoot lassie tossing her long black hair, her skirts changing colour when she turns her hips to the music, swinging her arms to make her chest shoogle.
‘Hello there,’ she calls in her foreign-sounding lilt, ‘will you take a turn with me?’
He looks into her laughing eyes. His heart is racing. ‘Kitty,’ he says.
The laughing look turns confused, and wary.
‘It’s me,’ he says, ‘Hugh Watson from Cawhillan Farm.’
And now she knows him. ‘Hugh,’ she breathes, ‘you’re a ways from home.’
Kitty, the tinker lassie who calls at the farm twice a year with her father and half a dozen raggedy weans. It’s one of his earliest memories, the painted wagon drawing up with a rattle of tin cooking pots, and the weans with their snottery faces and their black-soled feet, and all the farm dogs barking. For years Kitty was just another urchin, the oldest like him, but they’d join the rest in a game of tig, shrieking as they chased round the farmyard. Until the year Kitty turned up with a clean face and her hair brushed, and gave the wee ones a telling when they startled the hens. He was shy of her for a couple of minutes, until he got used to the idea. Her father never changed: that brown and grey beard, the fleshy pink pearl on his cheek. Ma always bought half a dozen bone buttons, and a pair of boot laces, and his father got the sickles sharpened, and if any of the aunts had a birthday coming up, the tinkers left the lighter by a string of glass beads and a yard or two of ribbon or lace. But before they went, they’d sit down to a plate of stovies, and pass on the gossip from Cumnock or Sorn or whatever place they’d been last, and the tinker da would take up his fiddle and the red-headed wean his penny whistle, and Kitty would sing a mournful song about men who lose their sweethearts in her surprising singing voice. Like a heartbroken old woman elbowing the girl aside. This happened not four months back, and will surely happen again in another few weeks. Hugh doesn’t care for the tunes, but he likes to watch the throb of her smooth white throat as she draws out the keening notes. And there’s always the moment when she gathers up the plates and passes them across to him, looking into his eyes as he takes their weight. She’s a year or two older and used to be taller but, as he closes the distance between them, he finds he has an inch on her.
‘I’ll jig with you, Kitty,’ he says, ‘if you’ve no one else. But are you not meant to be watching the front of the booth?’
She laughs and says her daddy won’t mind, if it’s a friend of the family, but he’ll need to give her a penny. He frowns, not understanding, and she lays a hand on his arm. ‘They pay me to dance, Shuggie.’ And even though he’s never been called Shuggie in his life, he gives her his penny, and she draws back the heavy canvas.
Loose boards have been laid on a frame above the grass to form a dance floor. Nothing nailed down. The racket from the couples clumping to and fro across it almost drowns out the fiddle. A dozen dancers. Country boys like him, and a couple of farmers old enough to have a wife of their own to jig with. The tinker lassies all barefoot, all pretty, in dresses of some filmy stuff that’s hardly there, with their long hair flowing loose and their shoulders bared, and hectic spots of red on their cheeks. It’s hot in here, with so many bodies. Tilley lamps hung from the roof cast flickering shadows. The burning paraffin catches in the back of his throat, half thrilling, half sickening.
Up close, Kitty smells of something stickily, saltily delicious that he knows is forbidden, without knowing what it is.
‘Are you not worried you’ll get skelfs in your feet?’
Again she laughs. Is everything he says so funny? But it’s not cruel laughter. And he likes the way she puts her head back, offering him her white throat. He trusts her. Even if she doesn’t remember Cawhillan Farm and passing him the tin plates, she knows him. He has the feeling he gets with his teacher. Only Kitty’s knowledge is different.
He has danced the Gay Gordons the night after the harvest, and the Dashing White Sergeant, and a furious headlong Strip the Willow with his cousins all vying to see who can birl the lassies round the fastest. Waltzing is new to him. She says she’ll teach him, taking one of his hands in hers, laying her other hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to do the rest.
‘Here?’ he says, finding the dip where her back tucks in so neatly.
‘If that’s comfortable,’ she says.
He was right about the dress. It’s hardly there. He can feel the heat of her skin, slightly damp, through the material. He slides his hand down, and down again. ‘This is comfortable,’ he says, and they both laugh.
He thought it would be the leopard man, or the Highland Seer, or the cannibals from the Amazonian Jungle. But this is the tale he’ll take home to his brothers. How he met a lassie he’d known since he was wee, playing tig around the farmyard, and they stepped into a tent.
Afterwards his father will give him a row. Robbie was frantic with worry. His uncles and cousins had to leave off enjoying themselves and help with the search. They’ve been all round the Green twice, combed every inch of the fair, got themselves soaked to the skin in the downpour. They thought he’d been ambushed by a pack of thieves, and left for dead behind some booth. What the hell has he been doing? How come he’s bone dry?
His cousins, too, are furious. He has spoiled their day. When they go for cold beef and pickles and all his pennies are gone, no one treats him. But he can’t take the smile off his face.
It’s a sweet tale, and sweetly told, sparing with the details. Arabella can fill in the gaps. His first kiss. The press of young bodies, licensed by the dance. It could easily have been no more than this.
She does not guess there is a coda to the story. And yet he feels strangely lightened. As if she knows it all.
His mouth is dry after so much talking. He stands, jarring the nearer wardress’s chair with his foot, jolting her awake. He could do with a cup of tea. Is it the sudden longing in the prisoner’s face that puts it in his mind? Doctor Lindsay is away. He would rather not feed her without assistance. If she will take a cup of tea then he will suspend the procedure tonight. Suspicion narrows her gaze. Just a cup of tea, he says: a fluid ounce of milk, four of five of hot water, some leaves. If she wishes to starve herself, it seems to him that foregoing her usual three eggs in a pint and a half of sweet milk would be a victory.
‘And you would hand me victory on a plate?’
He smiles. That loose crimp of his lips I will see two years later from the far side of Aunt Nellie’s parlour. And seeing it, I will feel his soft lips brush my neck, and after, the grind of five o’clock whisker. So sweet and sharp that my breath will catch. All this from across the room, before we have been introduced. So I know that smile and what it can do.
You would hand me victory on a plate?
‘In a cup,’ he says.
She drinks the tea.
ELEVEN
On his way back from the hospital he meets a wardress come to tell him that Prisoner Gordon is dying.
His thoughts are still with Prisoner Scott. It takes him a moment to understand. That thump in his lower abdomen, the rush of blood to his face. Get a grip on yourself, man. Every cell on this corridor is occupied. Twenty-three bored women. They can see nothing, but they know his tread, and they have a feral instinct for trouble. They call out to one another: ‘Doctor’s here’, ‘He’ll no be pleased’, ‘It’s the minister she needs’. He pushes open the cell door and sees the guttering candle, a wardress dabbing at the prisoner’s brow with a wetted cloth. The other wardress wringing her hands, not even enjoying the drama. That’s how bad it is.
He sends Lindsay to fetch the Governor. A wardress goes with him to retrieve the prisoner’s clothes. She must be liberated tonight. As soon as possible. The Governor protests there are procedures. He needs authorisation from the Commission secretary, who will have to contact the Chairman, who will have to contact the Secretary for Scotland. The doctor has to spell it out: the woman will die here, in his gaol, unless he gets her out right now. Is that what he wants? As it is, she may not survive the journey. There is no creditable outcome, it is a question of the least damaging course. Another half-hour might make all the difference. If they wait until morning he will not be answerable for the consequences. The Governor is not such an old fool. He knows he’s being threatened with the blame for a mess that is not of his making. He reminds Doctor Watson that his authority has been flouted at every turn . . . The words die on his lips as the flaring lantern catches the doctor’s expression.
So Prisoner Gordon is given a hasty bed bath and dressed in her own clothes. Only ten days since she wore them last, but the blouse hangs off her. The skirt has to be pinned, lest it drop from her shrunken hips. She looks like a rag doll propped in a chair. The wardress tries to make her tidy but has to stop when the comb comes away with clumps of hair. The Governor scuttles off to send his telegram. To have done everything that could be expected of him. Lindsay is on the street, trying to find a cab. The wardresses take the excuse of carrying away the reeking bedlinen, the pail of dirty water.
The doctor is alone with her.
The noise from the other cells has subsided. It’s so quiet, he can hear her shallow breathing. He waits for the rattle that will surely come. If not with this breath, then the next.
‘You are being released.’
Does she hear him?
‘Prisoner Gordon. Frances. You are a free woman. You are going home.’
Those mouse’s eyes open. She is listening.
‘You will leave here tonight. In a few minutes.’
What is she thinking? Or is she beyond thought?
‘You will wake tomorrow among friends. You will take a cup of tea, a little milk, for breakfast. Some toast, if you can. Not too much at first. Until you grow stronger.’
The eyes know he is lying.
‘Sit by an open window, but be sure to keep warm.’
She is dying. Even the Governor could see it.
‘It’s a couple of hours by train to Edinburgh. Doctor Lindsay will go with you.’
What’s that? A groan, a bubble of trapped air? Surely she cannot be laughing?
She stops breathing.
He is on her in an instant, one arm under her shoulders, the other under her thighs. Lifting her – so light – to lay her on the mattress. His ear to her chest, his mouth on her mouth, the air in his lungs poured into hers. Turning his head, waiting to feel her breath on his cheek, watching for the rise and fall. Nothing. Use the heel of the hand to compress the lower third of the breastbone by one third of the depth of the chest, taking care to avoid snapping the ribs. One hundred compressions a minute. Thirty for every two breaths. Compressions, breaths, watch, wait, compressions, breaths . . .
Her chest moves. Weakly, but it moves. Her heart beats. That’s my girl. That’s it. In and out. Come on. Come on. He lifts one rag-doll arm and chafes her cold hand. Her hold on life remains tenuous, but she is breathing.
Lindsay comes back. The hansom is in the yard. There’s a train to Glasgow leaving at ten o’clock. The Governor has sent a telegram. Her friends will be waiting.
Prisoner Scott is still awake. She shows no surprise at seeing him. The wardresses are despatched to quell the excitement in the women’s wing.
When they’re gone she says nothing. It is exactly what he needs from her. A minute’s peace. His breathing slows, his heart settles. Such a relief to close his eyes. It may be that he dozes for a few seconds. He dreams he is lying down while she sits upright in the chair. Her face is grave, but her eyes are warm. He feels the touch of her lips on his brow. He opens his eyes. She has not moved from the bed.
He asks her, ‘Do you pray?’
‘Of course. Don’t you?’
‘Not since I was a boy.’
She receives this without comment.
He says, ‘What words do you use?’
*
Do they know? Or are they too preoccupied by how the world sees them to notice what’s happening inside? In his case, I can believe it. But in hers?
I want her to have toyed with him – oh, entirely justifiably, wielding the only power she has left. Dropping confidences like bait: longings, betrayals, small defeats. Encouraging him to rec
iprocate, drawing him out, every switch from purring intimacy to shrieking insult coldly premeditated.
Is it too much to ask: for the one true passion of his life to have been a hoax?
I have lived in the shadow of a gaol. I have felt trapped and alone, and suffocated by a man who could not tell the difference between love and hate, but I have never been watched as she was, every micturition and defecation, twenty-four hours a day. And I have always eaten, or not eaten, of my own free will.
So I have to admit the possibility that Arabella is in no condition to manipulate her captor. The immobility, the stale air, her crusted lips and parched mouth, sore gums and chipped teeth, the hives from the itchy blanket, the constipation and the enemas, the cramp, the psychosomatic heart pains, the boredom and yet the agitation caused by the slightest departure from routine, the fighting and talking, talking and fighting . . . I have to concede, the strain of all this might break her spirit. For a while.
But she is the resourceful type, and she is being fed. Her young woman’s body is metabolising the eggs and sugar and pints of milk into hair and fingernails and blood and tissue, renewing the dead cells, doing the miraculous business of living. Her ovary releases its monthly egg to slip down the fallopian tube and burrow into its cushion of blood. The scent given off by her skin changes subtly. A subtle change, too, in sensation: a warmth down below, a tension across her stomach first thing in the morning, anticipation in her throat. That suspended moment when everything is just so. It would be delicious, if she paid attention to it, but Arabella is not a sensualist. Her curiosity is strictly above the neck. She has never sniffed her own bloomers, never wondered why she leaned forward when her father sat her astride his horse, never fingered the nubble between her legs. And yet, when the doctor arrives in the hospital, she notices the way he pushes through the door. Despite the frock coat, she knows exactly what her hands would find if they came to rest either side of his waist. That muscular solidity. She watches the deft way he turns up his shirtsleeves, the glinting ginger hair on his arms, the freckled back of each scrubbed hand. These too are just so, as purely and unmistakeably him as his jaw or mouth or eyes. All this noticing is her body’s doing, but sooner or later her head will catch up.