Playing Beatie Bow Popular Penguin

by Ruth Park

  The firemen, now augmented by several youthful soldiers from Dawes Battery, directed a stream of water onto the fire.

  It was not long before they had it under control.

  ‘It’s nobbut what you’d call an enjoyable blaze,’ remarked a voice near by, deprived of a treat on a dull Sabbath.

  Still, the shop was gone. Only smoking, malodorous black timbers showed where it had been. The excitement over, the crowd lingered, coughing melodramatically in the bitter smoke, chatting loudly. Mr Bow wasn’t to be blamed for the fire, by no manner of means, the way he suffered with the terrible wound he’d had in the battle at Balaclava. Some said he was a hero; he’d been in the charge of the Light Brigade and the Queen herself had sent him a little box of chocolates. They gave three cheers for Trooper Bow as well as the firemen before they dispersed. Fires were common in The Rocks, but it was still a free and exciting spectacle.

  Now that it was all over, Abigail’s legs wobbled. She felt she had run twenty miles. Her hands were black with smoke and she knew her face was, too. When she spoke, her voice came out as a squeak.

  ‘Look, Gibbie, by the bond store – Granny and Dovey and Beatie. Run to them now and let them see you’re safe.’

  ‘Aye, they’ll be worrited sick!’ said Gibbie gladly. He turned to Abigail and said with dignity, ‘You hit me, and broke my window and threw away my text and gave me to a Chinaman, and I willna forget to tell my Granny. Aye, and you look out for yourself!’

  ‘Okay. You do that,’ said Abigail. She leant against the castle-like wall of the warehouse, feeling that if she took a step her knees would give way.

  She saw Judah bound out of The Cut. He ran straight to Dovey and enfolded her in his arms, lifting her off her feet, rubbing his cheek against her smoke-stained one. Abigail could not take her gaze away. His tenderness and anxiety were beyond question. Ah, Abigail knew the melting sweetness in his heart, for it was in her own for him.

  He held Dovey close to him, her dishevelled hair under his chin, while he questioned Granny and Beatie. His free arm went out to hold Gibbie, who had hobbled beside him and plainly was indignantly describing his experiences.

  It was several minutes before Judah looked around for Abigail.

  Abigail turned her face against the sun-warmed stone of the wall.

  ‘Good-bye, Judah, good-bye,’ she said.

  Chapter 11

  The mighty butcher and his thin, goitrous wife took them in. Abigail was washed, fussed over, acclaimed. The constables brought back Mr Bow, who had relapsed into his melancholy trance-like state.

  ‘I’ll not put it down in my notebook this time, Ma’am,’ said the senior ponderously to Mrs Tallisker, ‘for the sake of the childer, like. But it’s got to stop, oh, yes, or there’ll be no way of keeping him out of the madhouse. Why, he could have had some poor creature’s napper off, snip-snap!’

  The butcher retrieved Dovey’s bride chest from the Chinese laundry, and brought it to them. He dropped a vast hand on Mr Bow’s shoulder as he crouched in the thin wife’s tidy parlour.

  ‘Don’t fret, Sam, me old cocksparrer,’ he assured him. ‘I’ve already put two of me stoutest apprentices in to see none of the villains about here get into what’s left of the cottage during the night, and nab your bits and pieces. And as for rebuilding, why, we’ll get some of the lads together and have you back in business afore you can say Walker!’

  Granny, very wan and shrunken, but somehow tranquil and content, was with Abigail. ‘Well, lass, you did what you were sent for. You saved Dovey for Judah, and now the Gift will hae a double chance of survival.’

  ‘I think it’s immortal after all,’ said Abigail. She managed to smile. ‘I’d like that. I’m tired,’ she added inconsequentially. Her eyes closed in spite of themselves. She knew the mighty butcher gathered her up – for she could smell lamb chops and suet – put her into some bed, but she did not stay awake to find out where she was.

  ‘Stay awhile with us,’ begged Dovey the next day, ‘for you’re one of the family, Abby, true!’

  ‘No,’ said Abigail. ‘I have to go home; you know that.’

  Her green dress looked strange to her; it had been so long since she had seen it. She saw it was not very well made; it was not worthy of the lace-like crochet.

  Abigail put on the dress. It fitted more tightly across the chest. My figure’s coming at last, she thought. Inside she was cold and without feeling, like a volcano covered with ice.

  Granny examined the crochet again.

  ‘Well,’ she said gaily, ‘I’ll hae to live long enough to make it! So maybe ‘I’ll be with you all awhile yet!’

  Granny agreed that it must be Beatie alone who took Abigail to the corner of the lane in Harrington Street where she had so unexpectedly stepped through the door in the century.

  ‘And with the dark coming down, as it was in your time,’ she said.

  Abigail began to get anxious that the time would not go fast enough, that whatever numbed her heart would vanish and let the pain free. Especially when she had to say good-bye. Dovey wept as she kissed her.

  Abigail thought, ‘I ought to be feeling that I could kill her, but I don’t.’ She said, ‘I wish you happiness, Dovey. You deserve it.’

  Judah. Could she say good-bye to Judah?

  He kissed her cheek, a swift, brotherly dab.

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Abigail in a low voice. He looked for a moment into her eyes. Did he shake his head, ever so slightly, before he let go her shoulders and hastened away to rejoin his ship? She did not look after him.

  ‘What are ye dilly-dallying for?’ cried Beatie tetchily from the door. ‘Do you think I want to come home in the pitch dark?’

  Gibbie was asleep in bed and Mr Bow did not look up as she said good-bye, but Granny held her close to her corseted bosom.

  ‘Ye think ye’ve been badly treated, hen,’ she said. ‘Not so. I told you once and I tell ye again, the link between you and us Talliskers and Bows is nae stronger than the link between us and you.’

  ‘Oh, Granny!’ cried Abigail. She gave the old woman a hug. ‘I wish you were my Granny in truth!’

  ‘For the love of blanky heaven and all eternity will ye come!’ yelled Beatie. The little girl hopped from one bare foot to another. Her face was like a thundercloud.

  So Abigail went, hastening down Argyle Street with Beatie, not looking back, for she was afraid to do so.

  ‘There’s no reason to be still angry,’ said Abigail.

  ‘You shunna kissed him when he was Dovey’s,’ snapped Beatie. She snorted. ‘Any road, how do I ken you won’t be back, worming your way ‘twixt Judah and Dovey? Because I saw the manner he looked at you when he said good-bye, oh, aye, I saw!’

  Abigail suddenly felt weary, tired of Beatie’s tantrums, and angry with her, too. She was glad to feel angry, because the anger drove down the sadness.

  ‘I won’t be back because as soon as I get home I’ll burn the crochet, that’s why!’

  Beatie slid her a look. ‘Honour bright?’

  ‘Take it or leave it!’ said Abigail cantankerously.

  They marched in grumpy silence down the street. It was as crowded as a fairground, for Monday was market day. Outside the Penny Dance Hall hung ornate gas lamps on curly brackets. Though the dark had not come they were lit, their long blue and yellow tongues lolling in the salty breeze.

  Abigail saw Maude the dress-lodger outside, surrounded by disarrayed redcoats, already half drunk. The girl was in the most vivid of grass-green dresses; a pork-pie hat full of velvet pansies crowned her fantastic coiffure. The sweet smell of hot gin filled the air.

  ‘Look,’ said Abby, pulling at Beatie, ‘there’s one of the girls from the house in the Suez Canal.’

  Beatie pulled her arm away haughtily.

  The street was full of stalls and barrows and roped-off enclosures where there were dancing dogs, an Indian juggler, and something mysterious called The Infant Phenomenon.

  They turned the corne
r of Harrington Street, past the Ragged School, where the infants of vanished parents, gutter children who lived in cracks in the rocks and under counters and old doors, were taught the rudiments of civilisation side by side with the children of the respectable poor such as Beatie Bow.

  ‘Beatie,’ said Abigail. After a moment she shouted, ‘Take that blanky look off your obstinate little mug, will you?’

  Beatie unwillingly snorted a laugh, quickly retrieved it, and growled, ‘Well, what d’ye want? Spit it out!’

  ‘I want to say that you can hate me or whatever you like, but please go to Mr Taylor and tell him what you already have learnt, tell him that you wish to be educated, girl or not. Ask him if he’ll tutor you privately.’

  Beatie was startled out of her sulks. ‘’Twould be improper to approach a gentleman. Faither wouldna permit me!’

  ‘Oh, damn Faither!’ cried Abigail. ‘You have to look out for yourself, you dummy! How will you ever get anything if you don’t march in and bullyrag people into giving it to you? Or maybe you’re too chicken-hearted?’

  Beatie turned scarlet. She clouted Abigail on the arm with her hard little fist. ‘I’ll punch ye yeller and green, drat ye!’

  Abigail saw ahead of her the lamp that lit the steep stairs to the alley which ran down to the playground. Beatie kicked angrily at the kerbstone. Her face was undecided, back to its crabbed urchin look.

  ‘I know you hate me because I fell in love with your brother. Well, he doesn’t love me, never did and never will. And I did save Dovey for him.’

  ‘’Twas no more than what you were sent for,’ said Beatie churlishly.

  Abigail lost her temper. ‘Oh, you know everything, don’t you? Let me tell you, you sulky little pig, you know nothing about love, that’s one thing. You have to experience it to know how powerful it is.’

  Here she stopped, dumbstruck, remembering who had said the same words to her.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I lost, didn’t I? So good-bye and good luck.’

  But Beatie said nothing. She did not even look at Abigail. Abigail left her and went down the stairs. Half-way down the lane she saw the brightly painted loco engine, the space rocket, and the monkey bars, waver out of the twilight, like a superimposed photograph.

  She looked back, quickly, saw Beatie growing transparent. The bottle-green shawl turned into a cobweb, the pale little oval of her face shone for a moment and was gone. Did she see an uplifted hand waving her good-bye?

  ‘Beatie!’ she cried.

  But there was nothing at the alley’s top but the worn stairs. The blank walls of tall warehouses made walls for that steep crevice, brightly lit by shadowless electric light from some unseen globe.

  Abigail turned away. Her eyes blurred. She saw Mitchell spring into sight, incredibly tall to one now accustomed to little houses scarcely higher than sunflowers. It was a fantastic obelisk, its curved windows reflecting a phantom city of another age.

  She gazed at this sight as amazed as Beatie herself might have been – and as she did the last note of the half-hour sounded from the Town Hall clock.

  Was it possible? That no time had passed at all? That all the weeks, months, she had lived in another world, the kind of growing-up she could never have experienced in this one, had occurred between one sonorous clang and another?

  The thought was so eerie she began to tremble. Time … who knew anything about it? Because it passed at the common rate in 1873 was no reason at all to believe that time had also passed in the next century. But it was still winter, as it had been when she left her own time. In the light cotton dress she was chilled to the bone. The brown leaves of the plane-trees, desiccated and fragile as brown paper, skidded past her.

  ‘But which winter?’

  Nervously she approached the playground. The children seemed to be wearing anoraks and woolly caps that had not changed. Overhead a jetliner arrowed. In its design she could see no change from those she knew.

  The lobby of Mitchell beamed with light, but she was afraid to approach it.

  ‘Even if it’s next year,’ she thought, ‘and Mum has gone, what will I do, what will I say?’

  But she could not stand there in the freezing wind for ever. Resolutely she approached Mitchell. Something about her feet felt strange. She raised the hem of her skirt and saw that she was still wearing Dovey’s circularly striped wool stockings, and Granny Tallisker’s best shoes.

  ‘I’ll never be able to get them back to her now,’ she thought. ‘Oh, what will she think of me?’

  She ran then into the handsome lobby, into the lift, and upstairs. Suddenly she thought, ‘The key of the unit, where is it?’ But it was still safety-pinned inside the deep pocket of her dress.

  As she unlocked the door she heard what was music to her – Vincent having one of his howling, kicking tantrums next door, and Justine bellowing at him as if she were about to go out of her mind.

  ‘Thank God, thank God,’ said Abigail. She switched on the lamps. The clock said twenty to six. A morning paper was tossed on the kitchen bench. Abigail seized it greedily. The date was still the 10th of May. It was incredible. So much had passed, terrors and friendships and shocks, the painful blisses and tender hurts of first love: and it had all happened between one bong from the Town Hall clock and another.

  She wanted to fall into the bear chair and cry for days. A burn on her arm stung, her bones ached, the back of her neck was still sunburnt from the cockling expedition. Her heart was beginning to hurt. She would never see Judah again, never in this life or any other.

  ‘I can’t think about that,’ thought Abigail frantically.

  But she knew that after the scene at the shop that day (so far away now she could hardly remember what had been said) her mother would come home early. She ran into her bedroom in panic, ripped off the shoes and stockings and threw them behind the drawer of her divan bed, where all her chief treasures had always been hidden, old diaries and broken beloved toys, and the dress-up clothes of her childhood. A piece of paper fluttered out. On it was written in a childish hand, ‘I hope Jann gets pimpels and if I knew a which she would, too.’

  Abigail threw it back in amongst the treasures and the dust. How little she had understood anything!

  She would think about burning the dress tomorrow. She ripped it off and pulled on sweater and pants. Her face, had it changed? In some indescribable way it had: the skin was paler and finer, and her eyes seemed darker. Or had her eyelashes grown?

  ‘Oh, sugar! My hair!’ It had grown nearly to her waist. She shook it out of its plait, still tied with a piece of red ribbon from Dovey’s bridal chest, took the scissors and whacked it off to shoulder length. It was crimped horizontally from months of plaiting; her mother would be sure to notice. She knelt down and put her head under the bath faucet, scrubbed her scalp hard.

  The front door opened. ‘Are you there, Abigail?’

  ‘Sure thing, Mum!’

  Quickly she whisked a towel around her wet hair, hid the slashed off hair under her mattress, and went out to the living-room. Kathy was all fluffed-up like an angry bird. Abigail couldn’t help smiling like an idiot at her, for she was so pleased to see her, not a day older, not a bit different, just Mum, volatile, loving and her very own.

  ‘What are you grinning at, you little wretch? How could you do such a thing, running away like that without a word?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum. It was a childish thing to do. But I was upset and mad with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable.’ Kathy stopped dead and stared at her daughter. ‘Funny, for a moment I thought you looked quite different. Older or something.’

  ‘It’s my sheikh of Araby get-up,’ said Abigail, pushing the towel turban rakishly over one eye. But Kathy took her by the shoulders and turned her to the light.

  ‘It’s amazing … you do look different … I suppose I just haven’t looked at you properly lately.’ She flung her hand-bag in a chair. ‘Oh, I’ve been in a flurry, not thinking straight. You
know how I get. No brains to speak of, just fluff.’ She stared at Abigail again. ‘Just for a moment there I could see what you’d look like in a few years’ time. It was sort of – eerie. I forget you’re growing up, you see.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Abigail. She threw her arms about her mother and almost lifted her off her feet. ‘If only you knew how glad I am to see you.’

  ‘Gosh, it was so awful today,’ murmured Kathy. ‘Imagine us fighting!’

  ‘I did a lot of thinking on the way home,’ began Abigail, but Kathy put a finger to her lip. ‘Not a word about it. Not tonight, anyway.’

  Abigail nodded.

  In bed that night Abigail wondered if Beatie had got back home safely.

  ‘But she didn’t come into my time. I think Granny was right. Beatie had the Gift just for a little while, during and after the fever. Well, that will please her, little stirrer.’

  But most of her thoughts were for Judah. She could not drive him out of her mind. The look in his eyes when he embraced Dovey, all his northern restraint gone, his gratitude and relief.

  ‘Love, you fool, not relief,’ said Abigail cruelly to herself. ‘He loves her, and why not? She is much nicer than you in every way. But if he could have looked at me that way, just once …’

  She tried to turn her thoughts in another direction. Tomorrow she would wait till her mother had gone to Magpies, and she would burn the crochet in the downstairs incinerator. Then the door in the century would be closed for ever.

  But Judah was so alive, so vivid to her. He filled her mind as he filled her heart.

  ‘I miss him, that’s all,’ she said.

  She knew girls felt like that when they were fourteen or so. She remembered Samantha Peel crying for a solid week when some pop star or other was discovered dead. ‘I would have looked after him and made him happy,’ Samantha had sobbed, ‘even if he was a druggie.’ She remembered girls falling crazily in love with teachers and older girls, making pests of themselves with constant ringings-up, and notes, and gifts, and waylayings.