India Dark

by Kirsty Murray

  Ruby whimpered again. ‘He promised . . .’ She stopped and a fat tear rolled down her cheek from behind her closed eyes. ‘I only wanted to go home. He said he’d help me. That he’d help me for free. I didn’t know . . .’

  Her voice grew more staccato, more urgent. She looked terrified and she lay back on the bed and started to writhe.

  ‘Tell me, tell us what is happening, Ruby,’ I said.

  Poesy jumped up and stood behind Ruby, resting one hand on her shoulder. ‘We don’t need to know this,’ she hissed. Then she took Ruby’s face in her hands. ‘Wake up, Ruby.’

  It had said in the book not to wake people suddenly. I tried to push Poesy away from Ruby. ‘Leave her. You’ll ruin it.’

  But Ruby didn’t seem to hear either of us or even notice we were there. Her face grew clouded with confusion.

  ‘It’s all right, Ruby,’ I said, kneeling in front of her. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe.’

  But Ruby wasn’t listening. She started pushing away some imaginary person and crying out, ‘Stop, please, stop. You’re hurting me.’ Her face turned a peculiar colour and she began to moan and cry.

  ‘Wake her, Tilly,’ shrilled Poesy. ‘You have to wake her.’

  I didn’t need Poesy to tell me what to do. I could see things had turned sour. I snapped my fingers. ‘Ruby, I command you, wake.’ But Ruby kept writhing and her cries grew to screams. It was as if an evil spirit had possessed her.

  I grabbed the book and riffled through the pages. ‘It says she should wake up when I say that.’

  ‘Keep saying it, then,’ said Poesy.

  ‘Wake up, Ruby. I command you, come back to the present.’ I was almost shouting but still she wasn’t listening. I even tried to shake her awake, but as soon as I laid hands on her, the screams grew ear-piercing.

  ‘She’s gone insane,’ said Iris.

  ‘What should we do?’ squeaked May.

  The other girls stood in a huddle, as far from Ruby as they could. Some of them pressed their hands against their ears. They backed away and stood staring at Ruby as she fought off the invisible man while I kept searching for a solution in the pages of the blue book.

  And then Poesy took charge. She had such cheek to talk to me like that. ‘Go and get Miss Thrupp, Tilly, quickly,’ she said. I was going to do that anyway but now it looked as if I couldn’t think for myself.

  I dropped the book and ran from the room.

  By the time I returned with Miss Thrupp, Ruby was sitting up, her head in her hands. Beryl and Pearl sat on either side of her rubbing her back. Something had shifted.

  ‘We could hear her cries all over the hotel,’ said Miss Thrupp. ‘What will the servants make of it? They’ll think you’re a pack of savages.’

  What could she have been thinking, to not have come running until I fetched her myself?

  ‘It was only a game,’ I said, ‘but it went wrong.’

  ‘Indeed it did,’ said Miss Thrupp. ‘The games you girls play. Not girls at all. Savages . . .’ I heard her voice trailing off as she led Ruby from the room. Suddenly, I was shivering. I lay down on my bed and hugged myself. It hadn’t been a kids’ game. We were playing with the grown-ups now.

  32

  A MOMENT IN TIME

  Poesy Swift

  The morning after Tilly’s awful mesmerism fiasco, we were bundled out the hotel door and into carriages. It was a relief to be doing something other than lying on our beds in our underclothes. We’d been in Calcutta nearly a week but we hadn’t done a single show. Something had gone wrong with our booking at the Opera House. Mr Arthur reassured us that any moment we’d be on stage again. In the meantime, we were all going to have photographic portraits made of each of us. I’d never had my picture taken. Once a man came to the door of Willow Lane and offered to take a photograph of us and our house but we had nothing to pay him with except the milkman’s money. Now I was to have fifty photos of myself.

  All the Lilliputians who had come on the last tour had a bundle of portraits. After every show they would wander through the audience, selling them to anyone who would part with a coin. Daisy and Flora had sold all their pictures in Singapore and some of the other children had run out as well. Only Lionel and a couple of the older girls still had any left. It was terrible when people didn’t want your picture. I was torn about whether I wanted to sell my portrait to strangers. But sometimes the children were allowed to keep the money and I did like the idea of having a few coins. It was almost too much to believe that anyone would give me a whole rupee in exchange for my picture.

  An oxen cart followed our carriages through the streets of Calcutta and then coolies carted our costume trunks up narrow flights of stairs to the photographer’s studio.

  ‘He shouldn’t have brought us down here,’ said Tilly, glancing nervously along the laneway. ‘We’re practically in the heart of Blacktown. It’s bad enough that our hotel is so close. Surely he could have found someone other than this babu to do the pictures.’

  ‘What’s a babu?’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ said Charlie. ‘A babu is an Indian gentleman, a perfectly respectable gentleman.’

  Tilly rolled her eyes. ‘Charlie’s turning into a right little sahib, aren’t you, Chaz?’

  Charlie shrugged and pushed past us, taking the creaky stairs two at a time. He never paid attention when Tilly tried to bait him.

  The photographer’s studio was made up of two rooms on the second floor of an old building. It was very plain, almost shabby, and the hallway where we waited our turn had a funny, oily smell. I don’t know what I expected but I’d always thought that having my picture taken would be a little more glamorous. When I was finally allowed inside, I found there was a fake curtain hanging at one end of the room and a chaise longue with a small marble table beside it. As I drew closer, I realised the flowers that stood on the table were all made of paper and covered in a fine layer of dust.

  Mr Arthur said Lionel and Lizzie should be in a photo together to try to help Lionel sell more pictures. Lionel had to wear a three-quarter-length coat, a cap with a red band and a pair of military trousers with a red stripe down the leg. He knelt in front of Lizzie as if he were her beau. She wore a pale blue dress with lamb-chop sleeves and a striped underskirt. On her lovely dark curls was a wide-brimmed bonnet with ostrich feathers that fell forward as she offered her white hand to Lionel.

  I wished I could look like Lizzie, so full and soft and deliciously plump. But did I really want a boy to look at me the way Lionel mooned over Lizzie? I suppose he was only acting but it made me feel itchy to think of him looking at me like that. Then I imagined Charlie on bended knee and smiled. Perhaps it depended on the boy.

  When it came to my turn, I looked in the mirror and knew it would be hard for me to sell my pictures too. I was dressed as a gypsy girl, dancing with a tambourine above my head, and my elbows looked horribly sharp as they stuck out from the puffy short sleeves. The full skirt billowed out when I twirled in a circle and the little bells along the hem rang merrily, but when the photographer made me stand with my hands stretched high, it only made me look skinnier than ever.

  After me, the Kreutz brothers had their picture taken together, each in silly costume as Tweedledee and Tweedledum in battle. ‘Ours sell like nobody’s business,’ they said as they whacked each other over the head with rubber batons.

  Then, as I was changing out of my gypsy costume, Flora stepped in front of the camera. She was dressed in a miniature full-length gown with shoestring shoulder straps and jewel-encrusted dropped straps as well. She had a silver belt around her waist and a crown of stars on her head – stars so big she almost looked like a tiny Statue of Liberty. She held a handful of the skirt fabric in her fat little fist to stop it dragging along the floor. When she raised one small hand in a regal wave everyone laughed, but you knew why Mr Arthur would order at least a hundred copies of the image.

  Everything seemed to be going smoothly until Lizzie stepped forward for
her solo photo as a geisha girl. She wore a heavily embroidered kimono and flowers and pearls in her hair, and her eyebrows were elaborately pencilled in a faux oriental style. She raised an ivory fan and fluttered it gracefully beneath her chin. Lionel stood beside me and stared, slack-jawed. Mr Arthur was watching too. His face changed.

  ‘Who chose that costume, Eliza?’

  ‘I did. I thought you’d like it,’ she said. ‘I’m a geisha, like Madame Butterfly.’

  Mr Arthur blanched.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You are not and never will be a geisha. Go and change. I’ll not have you selling images of yourself dressed like that.’

  He mopped his brow with his handkerchief and whispered something to the photographer and then barked rudely at Lizzie to hurry up and change her outfit. She lowered her fan and sighed with disappointment but did as she was told.

  Later, as we sat waiting on the stairs for the others to finish, I asked Lizzie, ‘Did you mind Mr Arthur snapping at you like that? Even Lionel thought he was rude.’

  Lizzie sighed and tucked one of her curls behind her ear. ‘It’s not his fault,’ she said.

  ‘You never think anything is his fault. Why do you always take his side? He was mean to you, Lizzie.’

  ‘It’s not easy being in charge. And Calcutta is full of sad memories for poor Mr Arthur. He came here after his brother died in Rangoon and his father fell ill and died not long after when he was still only a tiny boy. He’s had such a hard life.’

  ‘Lizzie, do you have a crush on Mr Arthur? Is that why you always take his side? I know you say he’s your friend as well as your employer, but you’re simply friends, aren’t you, nothing else?’ I held my breath. I almost didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Lizzie took my face in her hands and stroked my cheeks with her thumbs. Her hands were smooth and silky soft. ‘Poesy, you are a funny little creature. Of course I don’t have a “crush” on Mr Arthur.’

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the lovely scent of Lizzie. She smelt of lavender and rosewater and soft powder. A sweet relief washed over me. I took Lizzie’s hand and kissed the back of it.

  ‘That’s the truth, isn’t it?’ I asked, needing to be sure.

  ‘Why would I lie to you, Poesy Swift?’

  33

  SWADESHI

  Tilly Sweetrick

  When we finally began our season at the Minerva Theatre, the stalls were only half full and there was no one in the galleries. The Butcher tried to blame Mr Shrouts for not doing his job properly but it wasn’t Mr Shrouts who was in charge. There was only one person to blame.

  The morning after opening night, Lionel sat with the newspaper spread out across his knees. I picked at my breakfast. I didn’t really like the sort of food they served us. The fruit made my mouth sting and there were bits of old fish in our breakfast rice.

  ‘It ain’t going to be a good season,’ said Lionel.

  I swear, that lumpy boy is simply the Prince of Gloom.

  ‘Since that Alipore bombing, people aren’t keen to come out at night. Didn’t you notice? Even the babus and nabobs and boxwallahs, all those rich Indians, the ones who would have come ordinarily, even they stayed away.’

  ‘A bombing!’ exclaimed Poesy.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said Lionel. ‘Two ladies had a bomb thrown into their carriage and they were both blown to smithereens.’

  ‘They didn’t mean to kill the women,’ interrupted Charlie. ‘They were trying to blow up a judge or someone important.’

  ‘Not very good shots, were they?’ said Lionel, snickering.

  Awful boy. How could he snicker about people dying!

  ‘Would you please explain what you are talking about!’ I said, feeling rather cross.

  ‘The natives blew up two English women last year,’ said Lionel, rather full of himself. ‘The bombers are on trial right now, right here in Calcutta. They’ve already hanged one of them and the other shot himself rather than get caught. They’ve got a third one, this Ghosh fellow, he’s in prison and they want to hang him too. He’s a right stirrer.’

  I must have looked a little confused because Charlie said, ‘They want independence.’

  ‘Independence from what?’

  ‘Crikey, Tilly, don’t you know anything!’ said Lionel. ‘Britain, of course.’

  I would have rather liked to slap him. Instead I squashed a piece of fruit onto my plate and let him prattle. ‘They say this Ghosh is being painted as a freedom fighter or something ridiculous like that.’

  He shook out the newspaper. ‘Listen, this is what the babu lawyer said: “Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this court, but before the bar of the High Court of History.” What a lot of twaddle. High Court of History!’

  Charlie looked uncomfortable, pushed his chair away from the table and left the room.

  I took the paper from Lionel and read and reread the article about the nationalists, trying to understand it. Then my eye drifted down the page to the theatre section and I felt an electric shock. There was a review of the Lilliputians, a rather mixed one, I might add. But it was the interview with the Butcher on the same page that made my flesh creep. He talked about how ‘closely guarded’ he kept us ‘to make sure we stayed ordinary, quiet, well-behaved kiddies’.

  Though I snorted at the Butcher talking about us as if we were babies, it was when the reporter commented that the lyrics of our songs were rather suggestive that I really sat up. I could almost hear the Butcher’s voice as I read his remarks. He claimed we had no idea what the words meant. I thought of Iris and how the reviewers in Penang had said she was quite the coquette when she sang ‘Teach me how to love’. We knew exactly what we were doing, exactly what those songs meant. If he thought we were stupid little kiddies, he didn’t have the measure of any of us.

  Later, as we left the hotel, the streets seemed ominously quiet. We rode through the rising heat to the theatre for morning rehearsals. As I walked past the Butcher and onto the stage I heard him swear, ‘Damn this Swadeshi business.’ As if that was the only reason things were turning sour.

  ‘What’s Swadeshi?’ asked Poesy. I swear that child drifts around in a cloud of not-seeing.

  ‘They’re boycotting British goods,’ I told her. ‘Anything British, for that matter. They think if none of the Indians buy British things or come and see our shows, that it will drive the Britishers out of the country. Daft, if you ask me.’

  ‘But we’re not really British,’ said Poesy. ‘Maybe we should make sure everyone knows we’re Australian.’

  ‘We are loyal citizens of the British Empire,’ said Lionel.

  ‘Well, the loyal citizens of the British Empire won’t be staying here in Bengal much longer,’ I said. ‘It said in the paper that they’re going to move the government to New Delhi. We’ll have no audiences while the Indians are marching up and down the streets, protesting. I don’t like it one little bit.’

  ‘You’ve been swotting up on the newspapers then, have you?’ said Lionel, condescending prig.

  ‘Is it because of this Swadeshi business that we’re not getting many people in the audience?’ asked Poesy.

  I hadn’t noticed the Butcher sneak up behind us. ‘No,’ he barked. ‘It’s because you lot aren’t working hard enough. You’re like a line of bloody limp rags.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘You know that’s not true.’ It felt good to talk back. It was the first time I’d tried it and it was simply wonderful.

  The Butcher looked at me blankly. ‘Mind your tongue, Tilly,’ was all he said. I was surprised he didn’t box my ears. I almost wished he had. I knew Mr Milligan was watching from backstage. There was plenty going on for Mr Milligan to worry about.

  That night, Iris Usher looked positively peaky when she stepped out of the changing rooms. You could see sweat
glistening on her neck and brow, no matter how much powder she’d dabbed on it to hide the fact that she was feverish again, just as in Georgetown. She had too much rouge on and her eye make-up was a little smudged. I could see her trembling as she reached down to buckle her shoe.

  By the time Mr Arthur came into the dressing room for the first call, Iris could barely stand. He knew exactly what was wrong. He even asked her if she was all right and this time, unlike the last, she opened her little mouth and said, ‘I don’t think I can go on. I feel too shaky.’

  I felt my heart make a tiny jump. It should have been my moment. I could sing Iris’s role. The Butcher knew I could. But he knelt down in front of Iris and gazed into her face, feigning concern. ‘A trooper like you doesn’t throw in the towel, does she?’

  ‘I feel all wobbly, Mr Arthur,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want Tilly to sing your part?’

  It was a terrible thing to ask. He knew perfectly well it would make Iris steel herself. I willed her to crumple and watched as her face grew pinched with worry. Then she took a deep breath.

  ‘I suppose I could try,’ she said, her eyes flitting in my direction and then back to the Butcher.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘That’s the spirit.’

  Iris struggled through every song and had barely finished singing, ‘The lazy town is dreaming’ when she stepped into the wings and her knees buckled under her. She simply folded up like a rag doll. Mr Milligan abandoned his post in the lighting booth and scooped her into his arms. As soon as they’d stripped off her costume and wrapped her in a dressing gown, she was bundled into a gharry with Miss Thrupp and taken back to the hotel.

  I gathered up her damp costume from the floor and struggled into it, even though it really was too small for me.

  ‘Quick, help me fasten the stays,’ I said to Myrtle. ‘If we hurry, I’ll be able to sing “When the Little Pigs Begin to Fly” before anyone notices a lapse.’

  Myrtle had just finished lacing up my costume when the Butcher dragged Poesy into the dressing room.