by Alex Reeve
‘I can’t.’
‘Then my advice is worthless and we should go back to playing chess, especially as I’m winning. As ever, you will do exactly what you want.’
I was at the hospital by five-thirty in the afternoon the next day, getting my overalls and itinerary from young Perch and learning the new layout of the store room – office supplies at the back, medical disposables at the front, and otherwise the same as before.
My first task was to collect the mail. This involved carrying a basket around the offices and emptying the trays of outgoing letters into it, before lugging the whole thing down to the mail room. I wasn’t even halfway through my round when the basket was already full, so I went down and waited at the stable door of the mail room as if hoping to be petted.
On the wall there was a map, peeling at the edges. I put my finger where the hospital was, on the curve of the river as it wriggled through London. I traced it east, through Barking, Dagenham and Basildon, places I’d never been to, and then past Canvey Island, which wasn’t really an island at all, to Southend-on-Sea, a minor town on the estuary where the Thames sucked the filth of London out into the English Channel.
I had found a postcard from Southend-on-Sea in Jack Flowers’s wallet. According to Audrey, he had worked for Bentinck, and I wondered whether Maria had known him.
I was preoccupied through the rest of my shift, such that I didn’t even hear Nurse Coften when she hailed me.
‘Someone’s calling you. Are you deaf?’ asked the old goat in the wheelchair I was pushing, which was fine coming from him after I’d just wiped his shit off the corridor floor.
She looked tired – the nurses rotated shifts – but happy to see me. ‘Mr Stanhope!’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’ve recovered.’ She glanced down at my overalls with the unspoken message: even though you’re so diminished.
‘I’m sorry I was rude to you before. I know you were trying to help me.’
‘Yes, well, you weren’t yourself I’m sure.’
After she’d gone, the old fellow twisted round and gave me a curious look.
‘I’m always myself these days,’ I said to him, by way of explanation. ‘But I used to pretend to be someone else.’
He laughed so hard he coughed up blood into his hand.
By the end of my shift I was almost falling down with exhaustion, counting the minutes on every clock I passed. My muscles and bones were aching to get horizontal and stay that way for at least eight hours. I’m not a man who can do without sleep.
My last task was the post again, this time delivering the new morning’s letters and parcels from the mail room to all the wards and offices. It was as interesting as it sounds.
My travels took me past the children’s wards, the last of which was a small room filled with cots all lined up, as if the babies were displayed for sale. You heard it before you saw it, squalling infants protesting on the shoulders of the nurses, whose patience and calm were a thing to witness. The nearest girl smiled at me as she stroked the back of the baby she was soothing, singing in a low voice and rocking to and fro, almost dancing.
I thought of the strange woman I had met, the midwife. How had she known Maria? Was it no more than the obvious reason? In all my time with Maria, I had never really considered the possibility of her becoming pregnant, but Jacob was right, it was a natural consequence of what she did. She must have believed she was facing it alone, but she wasn’t. I would have raised a child with her. I would have done anything she wanted.
When I got home I fell asleep instantly, fully dressed and still wearing my coat. I woke up not even an hour later covered in sweat from a bad dream, my fear still hanging in the room even though I couldn’t remember what I’d been afraid of.
It was two weeks since I’d last seen her alive.
I was determined not to rush. Something of Ripley’s ponderous manner must’ve rubbed off on me. I got dressed and brushed my hair, waiting for my better judgement to tell me not to be such a fool, but it didn’t, so I pocketed Alfie’s spare key, put on my bowler hat and left the house.
I just couldn’t believe the police would ever find Maria’s killer. Audrey was right: Ripley wasn’t interested, not really. A girl like Maria, he thought she’d brought death upon herself. He’d arrested me because I was the most obvious person, and then he’d let me go because someone higher up had told him to. I still couldn’t fathom who or why. Why would anyone be interested in me?
It was that more than anything. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened: her death, my imprisonment and unexpected release, the mysterious midwife. But if I told Ripley about it, he’d jump to the most perfunctory conclusion: that Maria had been pregnant and was killed because of it, by a jealous wife or an angry customer or someone. He wouldn’t really care who.
On the Embankment I followed the crowds to the Metropolitan Railway Station, a squat building with arched windows, mock-columns and a curious stepped roof. It was small yet grandiose, like the gatehouse of a minor country estate. I bought my ticket and descended the steep stairs, underground. The walls were plastered with advertisements for all sorts of things: shampoos, chocolate, Three Castles cigarettes and Steedman’s Soothing Powders. The air was dense with smoke, swirling in shafts lit by the skylights overhead.
It was full of people, and more were arriving all the time. I wove between them to the end of the platform, and stood under a sign saying ‘Third Class’.
In just a few minutes there was an explosion of light and noise as the train burst out of the tunnel, propelled on a billowing surge of steam. As it pulled to a halt, the doors flapped open and dozens of passengers were disgorged.
The train had seemed huge from the outside, but inside it was barely high enough to stand, with a curved ceiling so it could slip through the tunnels like an earwig. I had travelled this way a few times before, when I first got my position at the hospital and was living in Camden Town, but my unease had never completely worn off. Not so for the fellow opposite, who was fast asleep, nodding in agreement with the urgings of the engine.
As we accelerated, I opened a window to let the wind rush on to my face, stinging my eyes. It was exactly how I imagined it would feel to fall from a great height.
A minute later the train slowed down again, brakes screeching. At the platform an attendant in uniform shouted: ‘Westminster Bridge!’
After an hour, and more than a dozen stops, we reached the morose-sounding Moorgate Street, where I exited the station, blinking in the sunshine.
I set off, following the map Alfie had lent me, watched by two old men smoking bacca pipes on a doorstep. Most of the buildings I passed were derelict, and even those that weren’t were hunched and creaking, their foreheads almost touching across the alleyways.
Cripplegate was an apt name.
Between the meagre curtains I could see people sleeping, eight or ten to a room, huddled close together like baby mice. The alleyways were murky, but there was movement in the shadows. I passed an old woman all in black, dipping and slipping like a wounded crow, carrying a sack on her back that probably contained everything she owned. A little girl ran away from me, hurtling through the doorway of a tenement on bare feet, a cadaver of a place with dark, impenetrable windows like eye sockets long since excavated.
Finsbury Street sloped upwards, unlit and unmade, bitten deep by gutters full of rancid water and excrement. There was a pub just in view at the end, and a number of young men were drinking outside. Men don’t usually stare at other men for long, but these did, unbothered by the potential for conflict, perhaps even welcoming it. I was scared but also slightly thrilled. What more masculine experience could there be than to face up to another man and look him in the eyes, knowing that one of you will be defeated?
Her house wasn’t hard to find. The second door on the right had a brass plaque on the wall reading: Madame Moreau, Midwife.
She opened the door wearing an apron, with her sleeves rolled up. ‘What do you want?’
&nbs
p; ‘I’ve come like you said. My name’s Leo Stanhope. We met at the cemetery.’
She blinked three times in quick succession and opened the door wider, looking out along the road both ways. ‘I see. Well, you’d better come in then.’
9
I followed her into the parlour and immediately recoiled. On one wall there was a rack of implements that looked like household tools: pliers, tongs, a serving spoon with a sharpened edge and a whole row of metal crochet hooks. In the middle stood a large table, six feet or more in length and at least three feet wide, with a butcher’s-block groove around the edge. A black bloodstain spread out from the centre and down the sides, and at each corner a strap hung down to the straw-covered floor.
Madame Moreau beckoned me through a further door and into the back room. It was difficult to believe they were parts of the same house. There was a dining table and four upholstered chairs, a piano against one wall and a finch in a cage hanging above it, fluttering and angling its head at me. On the opposite wall, Jesus hung from a cross bleeding cracked red paint down his hands and feet.
She sat at the table. ‘It’ll be three shillings, in advance.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Three shillings. More if it’s the later months, but you’re not far gone from the look of you. Guaranteed, otherwise your money back.’
‘Money back for what?’
She folded her arms. ‘Are you pregnant or not?’
‘No! I’m a …’ but I trailed off. It was ludicrous to insist that I was a man after that question. And she knew my name. I glanced back at the door.
She smiled thinly and patted my hand. ‘Don’t worry. What you are means nothing to me. I’ve seen it all: women who dress up in suits and ties, gentlemen who wear dresses and grow their hair, and wealthy ladies who are best friends, inseparable day and night, more in love with each other than their husbands. I have an eye for it. And an ear. Are you sure you’re not pregnant? One little slip, easily done.’
‘No,’ I replied, realising my mistake. This wasn’t a place where women came to give birth, this was something else altogether. No one would come here unless they had to, unless they were desperate. Women were sometimes brought into the hospital after such procedures, and the nurses would whisper the word to each other in the corridors, eyes alight at the wickedness of it: abortion. The destruction of a life not yet started.
She produced a little bottle with a colourful label from her apron pocket. ‘If you don’t want the hook there’s Widow Welch’s, but it don’t always suffice. No money back for that.’
‘I’m not pregnant.’
‘The clap then?’
‘No!’
She raised her eyebrows and blinked several times. ‘Then why in heaven’s name are you here?’
‘You gave me your card at the funeral of Maria Milanes, remember? Maria Mills, I suppose. I just wanted to speak to you.’
‘Oh, I see. I assumed … well, that you were in trouble. It don’t do to discuss these things in public.’ She stood up and tapped the cage, arousing the little bird to a frenzy of excitement. She poked a nut through the bars, holding it there and making kissing noises while the finch scratched at it with its beak.
‘Androgyne,’ she said. ‘That’s the word for your type. You’re an androgyne. A person who thinks they’re the opposite of what they are.’
I shouldn’t have cared, but it was irritating to be so patronised, so reduced, by someone who did what she did. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I don’t think I’m a man. I am a man.’
‘Is that a fact?’ She didn’t seem at all bothered by my sharpness. ‘There was a man here this morning as it happens. I don’t get them often, which is why I mention it. Sitting right where you are now, drinking my tea, leaving his mucky boot-prints all over my floor. He came in with a girl, not married or nothing, and put his hand in his pocket, no quibbling over the odd farthing like some of ’em.’
She paused, as if she expected me to say that at least the fellow had done the decent thing, but what was decent about it? Paying for that wasn’t decent, it was an abomination.
When I didn’t reply, she continued: ‘So I chatted to her while it was going on, giving her something else to think about, you know. She told me how he’d tried to worm his way out of it until her two brothers caught up with him. One of ’em has a bit of a reputation. Anyway, after that, she said, her lad had begged to be allowed to take her straight down to me, and pay for it and everything. Don’t know what she saw in him. She was a pretty thing and he wasn’t a looker in any light and had the manners of a hog. Do you know what she told me?’
‘How could I?’ I was becoming impatient. Would she ever get to the point?
‘Well I’ll tell you.’ She interlaced her fingers, reminding me bizarrely of my father, who would rather have slit his own wrists than sit here and listen to this woman. ‘The girl said, “If I’m not with him, then I’ll have no one.” And there you have it. She’d rather be with that gormless waste of skin than be on her own.’
‘Not all men are the same.’
‘No, not all. Some are worse. He didn’t beat her or rape her as far as I know, though of course she had them brothers, so maybe it was fear of them rather than any forbearance on his part.’
I folded my arms. ‘You’ve made your point. You don’t like men.’
‘It’s not a question of liking. I see what I see. And what I don’t see is why any woman would pretend to be one. Do you want to be Prime Minister? Or a priest? Or stand outside the pub making suggestions to every woman passing, is that it? You can act like a man if you want but you can’t win a pissing contest or grow a beard worthy of the name. You still bleed. Men fight and drink and plant their seeds in any woman who’s willing, and some who ain’t. Why would you want to be like that? Is it to get work?’
My position at the hospital had nothing to do with why I was a man, though it was true no woman would ever be offered it. I was a man because, underneath my skin, I had a man’s beating heart. Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes I wondered whether I might go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning the way I should have been. And if that miracle were to happen, nothing would change, and everything would change. I would have the same lodging, the same life, the same love for Maria, but I would be whole. I would be one person through and through.
But no one else would ever understand that.
‘I’m just here to ask a question, that’s all. I’m trying to find out about Maria. There are things she wasn’t altogether truthful about.’
Madame Moreau shrugged. ‘Well, that was her choice, wasn’t it? Not your business. You should go home. I only deal with females as a rule.’
I stood up, frustrated. The finch chirruped, still pecking at the nut on the floor of its cage. Its plumage was a perfect bright yellow with black on its wings and head, but its eyes were mismatched. One of them was glossy black but the other was milky. Half-blind. I could still remember one hazy summer day, peering through binoculars while my father whispered in a state of high excitement: ‘Look, Lottie. It’s a siskin! In our garden! A siskin!’ But it flew away before I could get a proper look.
‘Did Maria come here for … to see you on a professional basis?’
She creased her whiskery top lip into dark, vertical lines. ‘Did you hear what I said? Go home.’
‘Please. I need to know. It can’t make any difference now. Was she pregnant? And if so, can you tell me who was the father? Does the name Jack Flowers mean anything to you?’
‘No, and don’t be idiotic. She was a whore, so how would she tell? Elizabeth Brafton likes to believe she’s running a high-class establishment, but it’s still a dolly-house, isn’t it? There are still consequences, though she doesn’t want to think about them.’
‘You mean pregnancy?’
‘I mean abortion. I’m an abortionist, and not ashamed of it. And a seller of remedies for various ailments, including the clap, which you haven’t got, apparen
tly. No one wants me around unless they need me.’
‘I see.’
‘No you don’t,’ she said with another thin smile. ‘Perhaps you are a man after all.’
‘I work in a hospital. I see women come in bleeding from such things. Some of them die of it.’
‘Not my doing. That’s what happens when ladies are too proud or too scared to come to me and get it done proper. Too afraid of being found out. But we’re all sinners, aren’t we, Mister Androgyne?’
‘Stanhope.’
‘If you say so.’
She ushered me towards the door and I caught sight of a photograph on her wall. It was a group portrait of men and women in uniform. The woman at the front, with eager eyes and a pointed cap, was certainly Madame Moreau, perhaps fifteen or more years before. They were posed of course, looking ahead, backs straight, soldiers and doctors and nurses, pushed together for this moment, but still they were delightfully animate. They seemed on the verge of breaking into laughter and ruining the whole thing. They were barely holding it back. I wondered where the photograph had been taken and who these people were. Other people’s lives, I thought. Some far-off place, some far-off war.
‘Goodbye, Madame Moreau.’
I hadn’t yet reached the corner of the street when four men stepped out of an alleyway in front of me.
‘Hand over your wallet.’
Their leader was cocky, not even twenty years old. In the gloom he seemed entirely grey: face, hair and jacket. The others were of a similar age but were more restless, shifting their weight from foot to foot. I backed up as they spread out on either side. No matter which way I turned, one of them was behind me.
My skin was tingling. I was no longer excited by the idea of fighting – now I was shaking and couldn’t stop. People were killed this way, for a few pennies or an item of clothing. The span of my male life wouldn’t even exceed my female one. My body would end up naked on Mr Hurst’s table: female, roughly 25, multiple wounds, death from blood loss, no culprits identified. He wouldn’t recognise me.