by Gavin McCrea
Our first p.m. in the new house and Frederick went out to the Club to celebrate. “Karl is insisting,” he said. “There are some people he wants me to meet. I’ll be back before ten.” At midnight and no sign of him, I went to bed. Alone among the unfamiliar walls, I slept in a state close to waking. Now—some unholy hour—the weight of man collapses onto me. When God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers.
“My Lizzichen,” he moans, grappling for a grope through sheet and dress, “forgive me, but I’m in need.”
“You rotten scoundrel,” I says, using my elbows against him. “Get you to your own chambers.”
“Come now, mein Liebling, show some mercy.”
“I’ll show you more than mercy, Frederick Engels, now skedaddle. Away with you. Can’t I put my head down a minute?”
He kneels over me and, mocking-like, clasps his hands together as if to beg. “Have pity on a rogue,” he says. “Am I not good to you?” he says. “Is a moment of comfort too much to ask?” he says, and other such phrases that he thinks will wheedle him in.
“Mary Mother, give me patience.” I yank up the linen to stole myself. Knowing neither my own forces nor the degree of his impairment, this sends him rolling—thump!—onto the carpet. I sit up and hold my breath. Rain is falling outside and there’s a barking of animals off and yonder. Bellows of laughter rise up from under the bed. I fall back and sigh.
Boys kept like monks by their mothers go one of two ways: they turn womanly or they turn wild. Frederick’s rearing among the Calvins—kept behind curtains drawn tight and doors too thick for the world’s vices to get in—has done naught for him but disease his head with what it’s been deprived of, and now look at him: single-minded and seeing no ends that aren’t low. He keeps pictures. He makes foreign requests. It’s not always the Council he runs off to.
After some scratching about and some fumbling, there’s a striking at lucifers and the lamp flares up. I cover my eyes from the sudden light. “Still in fit shape, I think you’ll agree,” he says. I see, when I’ve come to terms with it, that he has his clothes off and is showing himself. He clasps his hands behind his neck, which makes the skin run up over his bones and the hair jump out from under his arms. He holds this pose as long as the lush in his veins allows it. Now he wobbles and, giggling like a little girl, staggers over to lean on the wall. The lamp shines hard against him.
Growing up, no one sits down and tells you what the man’s bit is going to look like. Knowledge is got from the snatches you catch. The hole in your father’s combinations. The neighbor man washing at the pump. The surge in the gent’s breeches on the bus. The Jew Beloff pissing in the bucket. Frederick’s is like none of those. In its vigors, it points up and a bit to the side. Its cover goes all the way over the bell and bunches at the end like a pastry twist. Before he does anything, he spits on his hand and peels this back. Then you know he’s right and ready.
Personal, I have my limits with it. There’s things I’ll not be brought to do. I’ll maw it: no harm in that if he doesn’t shove too. And I’ll let him turn me over: let go of your vanities and there’s pleasure to be got there. But the hooer’s trick, that’s crossing the pale. What’s the draw of an act so cruddy? And what’s the purpose, anyhows, when the normal carriage road has been clear of courses these past twenty years? “Keep dreaming, General,” is what I says whenever he starts to rub up that way. “Not for love nor lush.”
Tonight, though, he wants the usual, and I don’t quarrel with that. I bring my hands down his back and put them on his arse, his little arse that hasn’t dropped with the years but has stayed upwise and firm. Where it meets the leg is like the underneath of swollen mammies, and when he pushes, its sides dip in to make dishes smooth enough for your morning milk. It turns heads, the round of it under his breeches. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. When it’s late in the parlor and hot with bodies, and when he himself is sticky from all the hosting, he sometimes takes off his coat and turns to throw it somewhere; that’s when they nab their peek.
He puts his arms under my knees and bends my pins over them. I know he’d like them hooked over his shoulders—my ankles clutching his neck, my toes taking hold of his hair so sleek, his whiskers tickling skin that usual only feels the itch of a stocking—but I’m no longer the young thing I once was, and neither is he, though he likes to think his physical senses are as hale today as when he first fetched a lass.
His eyes are open. He doesn’t ever close them doing it. He likes to pin you, pierce you through. I swear with those eyes he’d stare into naught and find something. Even when he’s lushed they stay clear and bright, and seem to let you into his head, though this can only be a fancy, for afterwards there remains the mystery of what he thinks when he gets on top of you, whether it’s dark or light or what.
I begin to feel it, the quiver down in my cunny, but I’ve to conjure it up if I don’t want it to fade, the last lick of oil in a lamp. I help it with my hand like he himself has taught me—a French recipe—and I let out a gasp. Reading this a sign, he comes down bricks on me.
If he says anything now, dear Jesus, I’ll credit it.
There’s never been anyone like him.
It’s rare I sleep the whole night when he stays. I go off easy enough, but am woken early by his kicking. For some reason, I can’t bear to roll over and see him there grunting and happy. There’s others, I’m sure, who lie and watch for the sun to rise up out of him. He’ll not get that from me. I stay with my back turned.
In actual fact I ought be up already, doing the round. The maid doesn’t get here till Sunday and I’ve to look after everything myself. The pulling back of the blinds and curtains. The opening of the shutters. The drawing up of the kitchen fire and the polishing of the range. The checking of the boiler. The putting on of the kettle. The cleaning of the boots and the knives. Then the other fires. And the hearth rug. And the grate. Then the rubbing of the furniture. Then the washing of the mantelpiece and ledges. Then the dusting of the ornaments. Then the scattering of the tea leaves and the sweeping of them up. So many things, and for every one a thought. So many thoughts at a time, for so many things, it’s hard to know the ones you ought be hearkening to. By thinking you’re forever running behindhand you make things the master of you.
The worst, though, will be the answering of the door. I can already see it in their faces: “Why her?” The butcher boy, the shop girl, the milkmaid, the grocer, the letter carrier: “Can’t see what makes her stand out.” Every day of every week, somebody, some way: “If she can do it, any old beggar can.”
I’ll try to turn blind from it. I’ll pass them my coins and tell them my orders and make as if I’ve not remarked a thing. But afterwards, I know, I’ll be left with something inside, a prickling feeling like a hair in my collar or a pea in my bodice; a reminder of the fact that, when it comes to my hike to the higher caste, there’s no getting away from the chance of it. Would I know what I know, would I have done what I’ve done, would I be here today, swelling it up, if I’d gone down different alleys, taken up with other souls?
Fortune first spins her wheel in my favor in the summer of forty-two. It’s the summer the wages are cut and the mills are turned out. The summer the coalpits are shut and the boiler plugs are pulled and the workers gather and the riots flare and the soldiers march. And while all this is happening I’m at home, locked into the basement with Mary. Though I don’t know it yet, though it will take me time to understand, my being here, inside away from it all—my sitting it out—will be the chancest thing I ever do.
I want to join in. There’s rebellion enough in my heart to spark a hundred rallies. But Mary has other plans for me.
“If you go out that door,” she says, “you’ll not be getting back in.”
“Well, maybe I won’t want to get back in.”
“You want to be a corner girl, is that it? You want to be a loafer and a beggar till you die? Go out there now and that’s what you’ll be, and that’s what you’ll
stay. If anyone from the mill sees you with that crowd, or even a girl who looks like you, you’ll have no hope of a situation when the mill opens again, no hope in hell. And I’ll not support you. I’m over with looking after you and being your mother.”
She touches something with that, the proud bone in me. With Mam passed over, and now Daddy at the workhouse, I’ve come to depend on Mary for what I can’t beget on my own, and though I’m grateful for her good offices and will live to thank her for them, they come at a dear cost.
“You want me to be a knobstick, is that it? You’re telling me to break the strike?”
“I’m telling you to pull your weight. When a girl gets to fifteen, she ought know how to walk for herself and not tug on other people’s sleeves.”
“The neighbors will make it hard for us. They’ll shut us out.”
“Let the neighbors act for themselves. They can throw stones at us, for all I’ll cry, as long as we can feed ourselves.”
“Who wants to work in the mill anyhows. It’s the mill is keeping us down. It’s the mill that’s killing us.”
“Fine sentiments, sister lady, but I hate to tell you, it’s the clemming that’s killing you right now, and unless you find yourself a swell and marry up quick, it’s the mill or a pauper’s grave for you.”
And true enough, it’s the hunger that eventual brings me round. Weeks, the mills stay closed, the Ermen & Engels the same as the rest, and without Mary’s wage, we’re brought to winking distance of the workhouse ourselves. I feel I’d like to cry, only I don’t have the forces, and I know then I’m in the last ditch and sinking, for I’d like to and I can’t. And in that moment I know that when the gates of the Ermen & Engels are thrown back, I’ll be there in the horde, elbowing and stepping on heads to get to the front.
An animal, that’s what chance makes of me.
On my first day, the girls are already talking about the owner’s son. “Soon he’ll be coming,” they says to each other, for there isn’t much else to amuse them in the yard. “Soon he’ll be coming from Germany to learn the strings, and one day he’ll be the boss man himself.” And they’re excited about this idea. They can’t wait to slap an eye on him, for they’ve heard he’s quite the looker.
They haven’t a good head between them. Most of them are yet young like myself, some of them well under the age, and every morning that he doesn’t appear makes the next morning a thing for them to look forward to. Me, I dread the next morning as a plague, for it only promises more of the same: a job that lays you low and saps you. And I can’t picture how the owner’s son, however dapper, could change it.
I’m unhappy, but more than that, I’m raging. In the place bare a month and I’m already having urges. To scream and shout. To climb on top of the yard wall, and from there to get onto the roof so there’d be no one in Manchester who didn’t hear me. But in actual fact, I do what I’m told. I stay quiet, just as Mary has warned me, and don’t let tell of my affairs. I keep my opinions and my illnesses hidden. I put a rag over my mouth to keep from coughing. And I work hard, harder than I’ve ever worked at anything before, by putting my cholers into it.
“The strikes came at a good time,” we’re told at assembly one morning. “The strikes came at a good time for you.” The mill has bought new machines, the latest crop of mules that need but a fraction of the hands to work. They were planning to let go of the people they no longer needed, given the advances. But—luck and behold—the job was done for them, the troublemakers weeded out natural. Leaving us, the new, leaner, better Ermen & Engels family to march with the banner.
Mary is thankful to be given one of the new mules. I think better of reminding her of the people her mule is replacing, people she knew and declared to care for; or of the meanness of her new wage, lower than what they were giving her before. I think better of it because she knows these things well and is choosing not to give them their proper weight, for if she did, they’d crush her.
I’m to follow her on the floor, pick up the new ways, and then take over a mule of my own. “Be fast,” she says to me. “Be fast and you’ll be seen, and you’ll move up,” for it’s a fine spinner she wants us to be, a spinner of the Diamond Thread, which she believes to be a situation that can’t be robbed by the machines or by the children. “If we don’t learn the fine spinning,” she says, “we’ll go the same way as the men. Out on our backs and not a situation in Manchester to be had.”
Though it makes me bitter to do it, I give in and learn, and what I do well I try to do better and faster, for that’s the way to beat the weariness and to sleep at night. I come early and leave late. I join in the talk in the yard. I spend my Sundays with the girls in the halls and the fairs. And when the time comes, in spite of myself, I have to own that he’s handsome.
He holds himself slim and erect, and has a good forehead, and—still so young—all the color is yet in his hair. At assembly he talks quick and short, ashamed, it seems, about the foreign in his patter. He’s going to make a tour, he says, and he promises to get to know each and every one of us, which makes everybody giddy. Except Mary. It makes her regular cross. “When he comes,” she says, “keep at it and put on you don’t even see him. The last thing he wants is a mill full of girls losing the run of themselves.”
Of course, it’s herself, then, who goes and loses herself entire.
His laughter comes into the room before he does, and it’s catching. “Lethal as the consumption,” Mary will say later.
“My lucky day!” he belts from the doorway, stretching out his arms to get the full lung into it. He looks around. Even from a distance I can see his eyes take in the world and see to the bottom of things, and though he keeps his face, I know he’s disappointed by us. Fine lookers between us, there aren’t many. There’s only Adele in the carding room, but she’s got very thin and looks to be down with something serious. And Maggie two rows up, I suppose, if that’s your dish of tea.
As he moves around, he waves his hand in front of his face to keep off the dust, and I’d like to tell him it’s a useless exercise, all that waving, for it only wafts the flyings in, but of course I keep my trap shut. He’s nowhere near me yet anyhows, and I don’t know if he’ll even get close, for time’s ticking on and work hasn’t been takenup proper, and he’s stopping at every girl and asking them questions—about themselves and where they’re from and their work and how they’re finding it—and he doesn’t seem to be putting on, he appears sincere enough and waits for their answers, though the bulk of them can only stretch to a blush and a curtsy.
Soon Mr. Ermen loses patience and hurries him on—something about having to finish the tour before Christmas—and then all he can spare is a flash of his whites as he passes. He doesn’t even stretch that far with me, but strolls by without so much as a glance. I see his cheek out of the side of my eye: skin like the back of a babby. He goes past Lydia, too, without a look, I’m glad to see. And Mary. And soon all there’s left of him is his little arse, swaggering away out of our lives.
Only what happens then is, he nigh on catches his side against a wheel. Mary rushes over to steady him, for she’s the closest. She takes tight of his arm and pulls him away from the danger, and while he’s still reeling in his boots, heedless to what’s happening to him, she says to his face a curse in the Irish, something our mother used to say when we were being hazards to ourselves.
The room catches its breath. Speaking out of turn costs you sixpence of your wage, and that’s on an ordinary day. Mr. Ermen makes for Mary and looks ready to handle her, but Frederick, now recovered, waves him away and tells him not to be so jumpy. Can’t he see this woman has saved him from an injury? Then, God bless him, he asks her to repeat what she said, for he loves a joke.
“Let us hear it,” he says.
She wipes her brow and looks about at all the faces, and in that moment I wish her looks were doing her better justice, for she’s recent taken on a touch of jaundice and isn’t as flush as God wants her.
“Come on, do share,” he says, and folds his arms across like someone biding to be impressed.
Mary coughs. “It’s only something Mammy used to say when we were little.”
There’s a shuffle of feet as we prepare for the worst.
“Go on,” he says, not annoyed but eager-like, fain to be on the inside of things.
“She used to say it when she’d see us knocking over things,” she says, and bites her lip and looks down.
He waits for her to look up again before addressing her. “Your accent, young lady,” he says, “is most unusual,” and he asks her where it’s from. She says it’s from Manchester, like herself, but the Irish part. Then he asks was it the Irish-Celtic her mother spoke when she scolded her.
She says, “Is that the old language you’d be referring to, sir?”
And he says he supposes it is.
And she says, “Well then, aye, it was.”
Then he asks does she speak the Irish-Celtic herself, and she says she does, but only the few phrases she has. And then he asks has she ever been to Ireland, and she says, “Nay, though I hope to go before it pleases God to call for me.”
There’s a tense air about the room. He’s spent more time with Mary than anybody else, and in a manner more intimate than most would judge her worth. But it’s to get worse, for instead of calling it a day and leaving it at that; instead of being happy with saving her a fine and taking his leave, he puts a hand on her back and draws her out of her place, as if to make something special out of her, a fine example. The two of them are standing apart now, Mr. Ermen several paces back, and he begins to ask her about the firesome spirit of the Irish he’s heard so much talk of, and he wonders if it’s true that we’re more related in character to the Latins—to the French and the Italians and the like—and if, like them, we’re more interested in the body—the body!—than in the mind.