The Night Brother

by Rosie Garland

‘We’re in Belle Vue!’

  ‘We can’t be. Look! When did they build all of that?’

  ‘Build all of what?’ says Gnome.

  ‘The castles.’

  ‘It’s a painting.’ He sniggers. ‘A new one every year and this is the best yet. You are a dimwit.’

  Now that I look more carefully I can see it is a canvas banner: taller than two houses one on top of the other, longer than our street and riotous with colour. I gawp open-mouthed, bursting with gratitude that Gnome did not leave me at home.

  ‘As if I could,’ he says gently. ‘Anyway. Shut your trap. There’s a train coming.’

  There’s a general shushing as a gaggle of men in scarlet uniforms charge across the platform, bayonets glinting in the torchlight. I can pick out the noble hero by his flamboyant gestures and clutching of his breast. His mouth opens. The wind is rather in the wrong direction, and I only catch the words spirit and devour, but no one minds terribly much and we applaud his brave speech all the same.

  Cannons roar; mortars boom. Beams of electrical light fly back and forth, sharp as spears. Two vast ships heave into view, one from the right and one from the left. We cheer our jolly tars and boo the enemy, who are dressed as Turks. Their ship shatters like matchwood at the first assault and they pitch into the lake, yowling like cats. I watch them struggle to the shore and squelch up the bank, shivering. They’ll catch a chill and Lord knows what else from that mucky water.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Gnome. ‘They have sandwiches waiting.’

  ‘Is this the Relief of Mafeking or the Battle of the Nile?’ asks the lady beside us.

  ‘Who cares?’ says her companion, tugging his side-whiskers with gusto. ‘It’s a right good show, that’s what it is.’ He sweeps off his hat and waves it around his head. ‘Blow ’em to kingdom come!’ he cries.

  The crowd shriek like demons and the fireworks answer in hellish agreement. The night sky of Manchester is wallpapered with flame. Spinning cartwheels roll on roads of fire and set the lake ablaze. I spy serpents and stars, Catherine wheels and Roman fountains. Rockets burst and bloom like flowers hurled into the heavens and rain down silver dust.

  I look around. Lit by the flicker of firecrackers we have been transformed into demons: eye sockets pierced deep as death’s heads, black flared nostrils, teeth bared in rictus grins. The lady to our right moans and groans like a cow trying to give birth, or at least that’s what Gnome whispers in my ear. I titter at his naughty joke. No one hears my little scrap of laughter over the din. No one wags their finger and tells me to be a good girl. The realisation of such delicious liberty occurs to us both at the same time. Gnome’s eyes glitter, teeth sharp as a knife.

  ‘Come on. Make a racket.’

  ‘I can’t.’ He grabs the skin of my arm and twists. ‘Ow!’ I squeak. My skin burns as though he’s stubbed out a cigar. ‘Stop it, Gnome.’

  ‘Not till you scream. No one can hear you.’

  In agreement, a barricade of bangers is let off. My stomach pitches and rolls.

  ‘Aah!’ I try, hard as I can. All that comes out is a feeble mewing.

  ‘Do you want me to pinch you black and blue?’ Gnome growls.

  ‘Aah!’ I cry, a bit louder.

  ‘More. Still can’t hear you.’

  I am struck by the realisation that tonight will never come again. I will not be able to claw back so much as one second.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Gnome. ‘Drink every drop. Live every minute. Yell!’

  My voice breaks out of my throat. ‘Aaaah!’

  ‘Yes! Open your cake-hole and let rip!’

  I stretch my lips wide and shriek. Gnome joins in and together, our shouts punch holes in the clouds and soar to the stars.

  ‘Oh!’ he cries. ‘Wouldn’t it be grand to grab the tail of a rocket and fly all the way to the moon and live there and never come back?’

  I think of my warm bed, the comforting arms of my grandmother, kind-hearted Uncle Arthur on his monthly visits. The thought of losing them makes my heart slide sideways.

  ‘Isn’t the moon awfully cold?’ I say nervously.

  ‘Not a bit. Don’t you ache to spread your wings?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  He waggles his hands in frustration. ‘Don’t you ache to be free?’

  ‘Free of what?’

  ‘Just once, I wish you weren’t such a stickin-the-mud, Edie. I’m never able to do what I want. Always chained to you, shackled like a prisoner—’

  The barrage of words finds its target and stings.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  He frowns. ‘Dash it all, Edie, I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t take on so.’ But he does mean it, exactly like that. ‘Forget I spoke. I should hold my tongue.’

  He makes amends by sticking out his tongue and pinching it tight. I try to smile, but it is not easy. I don’t understand how he can say such a cruel thing. I never demand that he come and play with me. I never force him to stay. If he finds me so tiresome, I don’t know why he insists on my company. It is confusing.

  Gnome piggy-backs me home. He does not grumble, not once.

  ‘I thought you said I was as heavy as a hod of bricks,’ I mumble.

  ‘So you are. But I am strong as a bricklayer.’

  I squeeze him so tight we can’t breathe. ‘Don’t leave me, Gnome. Not ever.’

  He doesn’t answer; too busy hoisting me on to the roof of the outhouse, up the pipe and through the window. We tumble through, tickling each other and rolling on the floor like puppies.

  ‘Get into bed,’ chides Gnome, herding me towards the cot he hauled me out of such a short time before. ‘It’ll be light soon.’

  I skip across the floor, ears buzzing, fingertips shooting sparks as though I’ve brought the fireworks home. ‘No it won’t.’

  ‘It’s usually you who is the sensible one.’ He tries to be stern, but I can hear glee at the back of his words.

  ‘How can I sleep after such an adventure? It is quite impossible.’

  ‘No, you are quite impossible. Hurry up. Get out of these britches,’ he says, fumbling with the buttons. I try to help but I’m all fingers and thumbs. ‘Leave off,’ he cries. ‘I’ll be quicker.’

  He wrestles with the fly and wins. The trousers fall to my ankles. I take a step, trip and fall flat upon the mattress. Marbles scatter across the rug. He seizes his opportunity, pins me down and endeavours to drag the shirt over my head.

  ‘We’ve got to fold the trousers and put them away tidily,’ I mumble.

  ‘No time,’ he says with an odd urgency. He sounds an awfully long way off, as if he has turned into a gnat and is whining in my ear. I flap my hand but it is stuck half in and half out of the shirt. ‘Stay still,’ he says, so grave and unlike his usual self I can’t help tittering.

  All my clothes are off. The blanket is scratchy, coarse.

  ‘Tell me a bedtime story, Gnome,’ I say, halfway gone.

  Breath close to my ear, hot and stifling. He folds his hand in mine. My hand in his. I think of Nana folding butter into flour. I flutter my fingers and hear Gnome giggle.

  ‘That tickles.’

  Perhaps I say it. Perhaps it is Gnome. I’m so sleepy I’m no longer sure where he ends and I begin. Nor does it matter: I have never known such bliss and I know he feels it also. I know everything he has ever known, feel everything he has ever felt. It is so simple. I did not realise—

  The door flies open. Ma stands against the light, her candle shivering the walls with shadow.

  ‘Come now, Edie,’ she says. ‘What’s all this noise?’

  ‘Ma!’ I cheer, still fizzing with excitement. I reach for her to gather me into her arms.

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ She plonks down the candle, marches across the room and closes the window.

  Shh, hisses Gnome. Don’t tell.

  The space between my ears is spinning with red and yellow lights; rockets are bouncing off the walls of my ribs. I can’t help myself.
/>   ‘I’ve been to the fireworks!’ I crow. ‘It was wonderf—’

  ‘You naughty girl!’ she exclaims, pushing aside my grasping hands. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times. You’re too little to step out on your own.’

  ‘I didn’t. Gnome held my hand.’

  Don’t say my name! says Gnome. Not to her.

  ‘What?’ Ma swallows so heavily I see the muscles in her neck clump together. ‘Who …?’

  ‘I told Gnome you’d be cross, but he wouldn’t listen …’

  ‘Gnome?’ she gulps. ‘No.’

  Her eyes stretch so wide they look like they might pop out of her head. I hold my hand over my mouth to push the giggle back in.

  That’s torn it, says Gnome.

  ‘No. No. No,’ she mutters, over and over, shaking her head from side to side. ‘I’ll not have it. There’s no such person.’

  ‘There is! He’s here every night.’

  I don’t know why Ma is being so silly. The candle flame wobbles. Her expression twists from disbelief to belief, belief to shame, shame to fear, fear to anger. She slaps the back of my legs. Not hard, but it stings.

  ‘Ow! Ma, you’re hurting.’

  ‘Serves you right for telling lies.’

  ‘I’m not. Gnome!’ I cry. ‘Come back and tell Ma!’

  I can’t see him. Maybe he’s hiding under the bed. But Gnome doesn’t need to hide. He’s not afraid of anyone.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ma cuffs the side of my head. My ears whistle. ‘He’s not real. He can’t be! When are you going to get it through that thick skull of yours?’

  I shrink into the bed as far as I can, curl against the wall. There is no further I can go. I don’t know why Ma is so furious. She is strict, but not like this: wild, white-faced. I want the mattress to open its mouth and gobble me up.

  ‘It was all Gnome’s idea!’ I squeal. ‘He made me go with him!’

  It’s a terrible lie. The air freezes, pushing ice so far down my throat I can’t breathe. Ma seizes my shoulders and shakes me.

  ‘He’s not real! Say it!’

  ‘No!’ I wail.

  ‘Say it!’ she roars.

  My head jerks back and forth, my neck as brittle as a bit of straw.

  ‘Say it!’

  Roaring in my ears. Dark, sucking.

  ‘He’s not real,’ I moan.

  ‘Louder!’

  ‘He’s not real!’ I whimper, the thin squeal of a doll with a voice box in its chest.

  ‘What’s all this to-do?’ booms Nana. She can barely fit into the tiny room beside Ma, but fit she does. She throws a quick glance the length of my body and turns to Ma. ‘Well, Cissy?’

  Ma’s face contorts. ‘Lies. Nightmares,’ she spits. ‘She says she’s been to the fireworks. With – no. No! Her and her wretched imaginings. It’s enough to try the patience of a saint.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ says Nana pertly. She lowers herself on to the mattress and huffs a sigh that matches the springs in weary music. She pats the blanket. ‘Come here, Edie.’

  I shake my head the smallest fraction and cling to the bedstead.

  ‘No one is going to punish you.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ growls Ma.

  ‘Pipe down,’ snaps Nana, throwing her a glance that could burn toast. ‘Now then, Edie,’ she says very carefully. ‘Why aren’t you in your nightdress? You’ve not a stitch on.’

  I shake my head again. It seems to be the only thing of which I am capable.

  ‘Filthy little heathen,’ says Ma.

  Nana continues in her soft burr, coaxing me out of my funk. ‘You’ll catch your death. Here.’ She plucks my nightdress out of thin air, or so it seems to my fuddled brain. I clutch it to my chest. ‘I think we could all do with some sleep,’ she adds.

  I nod. My head bounces, broken and empty. Nana turns to Ma and frowns.

  ‘Look at her. She doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. Be gentle with her. As I was with you.’

  ‘Since when did any of that nonsense do any good? She’s tapped. I’ll have her taken away, I will.’

  ‘Hush. You’ll do no such thing. You’re frightening the child. If you let her play out rather than keeping her cooped up, she wouldn’t need to make up stories.’

  ‘Who cares about her? What about my nerves?’

  Nana ignores her and returns her attention to me. ‘You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Edie love?’

  ‘Yes?’ I say uncertainly.

  ‘So you haven’t really been to the fireworks, have you?’

  Ma glares over Nana’s shoulder, eyes threatening dire punishment. I am afraid of lying, terrified of the truth. My heart gallops like a stampede of coal horses.

  ‘No,’ I squeak.

  Ma smirks; Nana does not. I have satisfied one and not the other. I have no idea how to please them both.

  ‘Was it a nightmare, Edie?’ Nana purrs.

  I can tell the truth, if that’s what she wants. But I no longer know what anyone wants. ‘Yes,’ I lie.

  ‘Well, then,’ she says. ‘You were dreaming. That’s all.’

  Ma storms out of the room, grumbling about my disobedience. Nana pauses, screws up her eyes until they are slits. I have the oddest notion she’s trying to see through me and find Gnome. She leans close.

  ‘Herbert?’ she whispers.

  ‘Shh,’ I hiss. ‘He hates that name.’ She gives me a startled glance. ‘I’m sorry, Nana. I didn’t mean to be rude. But he likes to be called Gnome.’

  She looks over her shoulder, as though worried Ma is watching. I did not think grandmothers were afraid of their own children.

  ‘Quiet now,’ she murmurs. She kisses my brow. ‘Let’s have no more of this talk. Not in front of your mother. You can see how it riles her.’

  ‘But he’s my brother.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I can’t explain. You’re too little. One day. Just don’t say his name again. A quiet life. That’s what we all want.’

  ‘Can we run away, Nana?’

  ‘Hush, my pet. Do you want your ma to come back in here?’

  She pinches my cheek. It is affectionate, but her eyes are desperate. She slides away, taking the light of the candle with her. I lie in a darkness greater than the absence of flame. I’m afraid. If Nana is too, there’s nowhere I can turn. Through the wall I hear them argue, voices muffled by brick.

  ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ wails Ma. ‘She’s ruined everything.’

  ‘She’s ruined nothing. She’s the same as you and me, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all? I raised her to be normal.’

  ‘Cissy, for goodness’ sake …’

  ‘It can’t be true. I won’t let it be.’

  ‘You can’t alter facts. We are what we are,’ says Nana, over and over. ‘We are what we are.’

  I smell home in all its familiarity: a stew of spilt beer, pipe smoke and damp sawdust. And something else: my hair, reeking of gunpowder. I crawl out of bed. Underneath is a pair of britches, ghostly with warmth from the body that wore them. Beside them are my boots, mud clumped under the heel. I press my finger to it: fresh, damp. Ma says I was lying. Nana says I was dreaming. If I didn’t go out, I must be imagining this as well.

  I tiptoe to the window. I can’t be sure if I opened it or not. I peer through the glass. I would never be brave enough to climb down the drainpipe, not in a hundred years. My thoughts stumble, stop in their tracks.

  ‘Where are you, Gnome?’ I sob. ‘I need you.’

  However many times Ma’s told me off, I’ve always been able to find his hand in the dark and hang on. He’s always been there. But tonight, there’s no answer. Something emptier than silence.

  I try to make sense of the senseless. Ma says Gnome is all in my head – a nightmare. Nana says he isn’t my brother, that he is imaginary. They would not lie to me. Grown-ups are always right. I am the one who is wrong. I am a naughty girl. I tell lies. I make things u
p.

  I must have been asleep. I must have dreamed the whole thing. I will be a good girl. I will scrape his name from the slate of my memory. If I say what Ma wants then it will be the truth and she will be happy. She won’t be cross any more.

  I double over in agony, as though I have been split in half and my heart torn out. I squeeze my nightdress, expecting to find it soaked with blood. All is dry. In the faint light I examine my chest, searching for wounds. My skin is whole, undamaged. I am just a girl, on my own.

  I throw the marbles out of the window; hear them click as they roll down the privy roof, and the fainter thud as they fall into the dirt. There is no such thing as luck.

  ‘Gnome?’ I say his name for the last time.

  The sound echoes off the ceiling. I have lost him. I do not know how to get him back. If he was ever here. For the first time in my life, I am alone.

  PART ONE

  MANCHESTER

  1897–1904

  EDIE

  1897–1899

  Stroll through Hulme of an evening and you will be forgiven for imagining it a den of drunkards. Brave the labyrinth of streets, row upon row of brick-built dwellings black as burned toast, and there, upon each and every corner, you will find it: haven for the weary traveller, fountain for the thirsty man – the beerhouse.

  Hulme boasts a hundred of them; a hundred more besides. There’s the Dolphin, famed for its operatic landlord; the Duke of Brunswick with a ship’s bell clanged at closing time; the Hussar and its sword swiped at Peterloo. If you can ignore their glittering siren song and press on, only then will you find us, breasting the tip of Renshaw Street like a light-ship.

  The Comet.

  Sparkling Ales is etched upon one frosted window, Fine Stouts and Porter upon the other. A board stretches the width of our wall, announcing Empress Mild and Bitter Beer. Above the door and brightest of all, the gilt scroll of my mother’s name: Cecily Margaret Latchford, Licensed to sell Beers and Stouts. Come, it beckons. Enter, and be refreshed.

  That is the full extent of our finery and flash. We are no glaring gin-palace for we boast neither piano room, spirit licence, nor free-and-easy on a Saturday night; we field no darts team, no skittle alley, no billiard table. You’d be forgiven for thinking us a temperance hall on account of the sober principles Ma polishes into the long oaken bar. We are so plain I scarcely understand why The Comet is full each evening; lunchtime too.