Fall on Your Knees (37 page)

Ain’t she sweet? She’s a’ walkin down the street.
Now I ask you very confidentially, ain’t she sweet?

Well-off people purchase liquor discreetly and consume it in a civilized manner at home. Ordinary people pass the jar in a convivial kitchen. Loose pegs and young trouble-seekers come to Jameel’s blind pig in the Pier to fight, play cards and pass out. Miners, merchant seamen and steelworkers, some as sweet and others as sour as soldiers. A few genuine formaldehyde drunks, the odd alienated contemplative just passing through, a vet with no visible injuries. No music — no one even cranks the old player-piano. This place is not sufficiently jovial to inspire more than a caterwauling chorus at closing time. The clientele are white with the exception of one or two of the American sailors. Certainly no one is here from The Coke Ovens itself. There are no women. There are no tourists — this isn’t Harlem. No slumming scions. Frances is the only fallen princess to have crossed the threshold. Her aunt Camille doesn’t count because she is not here voluntarily. She stays upstairs until it’s time to come down and empty the spittoons and swab the piss from the doorstep.

Frances arrives outside the steel door, takes a last breath of coke-oven air and enters the dim roar of the speak, passing under Boutros’s arm as if it were a bridge. The air is palpable, not just with smoke but with the dark mass of male voices and limbs, work-soiled clothes, the smell of axle grease, sulphur and sweat. A shifting, pitching anchorage of hard dirty hulls in the night, and Frances swims among them without so much as a paddle or a spar. What would be more frightening? To be noticed and netted? Or accidentally crushed? She finds Jameel and gets up the nerve to order a drink in what she hopes is the voice of experience, impatient for her first real taste of sin. Jameel tells her to forget it and get to work.

She looks about. Work…. No stage. No footlights. Certainly no hushed turning of heads at her approach to the piano. Where to begin? Frances wishes for a fairy godmother to swathe her in ostrich feathers; in breasts, hips, lips and lipstick — a husky contralto which she imagines to be Louise Brooks’s voice. No such luck. Five foot nothing, flat as two bumps on an ironing board, hips like chopsticks — at sixteen Frances is as grown as she’ll ever be. She stands before the piano since there’s no stool. It’s missing a few teeth, the rest are edged in decay, still others are intact but silent. Its pocked and yellowed music-rolls date from a long-dead turn-of-the-century parlour.

Frances turns to the indifferent bass throng and feels her knees turning to water. To stop herself running away, she kicks up her heels in the fake tap dance that earned her so many pennies on the docks. No response. Not even a “boo” — she is invisible. A tobacco-streaked wad of mucus lands next to her shoe by chance. She gags briefly, closes her eyes, clenches her fists and wills herself into song, belting at the top of her narrow lungs, “‘Mademoiselle from Armentières,
parlez-vous?
Mademoiselle from Armentières,
parlez-vous?
Mademoiselle from Armentières, she hasn’t been fucked in forty years, inky dinky
pa-arlez vou-ous.’”
To no avail. What is shocking in the schoolyard passes unnoticed at the speak.

She goes through her repertoire but it’s no use. Who wants to look at a skinny Girl Guide doing a solo second-hand foxtrot picked up from the movie screen, never mind listen to her spindly kewpie-doll voice? Jameel doesn’t. He wants her out on her ear. He grabs her neckerchief, she writhes free and, in a desperate last-ditch sally, lands on someone’s knee and steals his drink — “Hey!” — she downs the shot, gasps in shock, then quips in moving-picture parlance, “‘Oh gee baby, how did the angels ever let you leave heaven?’” She weaves out of reach between slim hips and broad shoulders, steals another from a man with three jacks — “What do you think you’re doin?” — and knocks it back, promising, “‘I’ve got what ain’t in books,’” coughing, sputtering, blowing a kiss. Jameel follows with a bottle, calming the waters, signalling to Boutros “Get rid of her.” When Frances has downed her third drink in quick succession from a “‘great big good-lookin some-account man’,” and is convinced that her esophagus and chest have been burned away, her feet suddenly sprout wings, they become hap-hap-happy, she cranks the player-piano. The mechanical thumping of a hobnail army renders “Coming thru’ the Rye” and Frances wriggles out of her uniform and down to her skivvies via the highland fling cum cancan. They start watching.

On Monday, Frances skips school and heads for Satchel-Ass Chism’s barber shop. She shows him a picture of Louise Brooks. He shakes his head.

“I don’t know how to cut ladies’ hair —”

“I’m not a lady.”

“Listen, dear —”

She grabs his scissors, lops off one of her braids and says, “Now fix it.”

“Lord love ya, girl!”

The other men glanced up from Chinese checkers at her entrance; they raised an eyebrow when she plopped down in the barber’s chair, and now they grin at her. “That’s the stuff.”

Satchel-Ass shakes his head and does his best. “I don’t know why you don’t go into Sydney to a proper beauty parlour.”

The checker players chuckle and lisp and call him “Pierre”.

“I don’t got time to be gallivanting off to Sydney,” says Frances, savouring her new gun moll grammar, “I got things to do.”

Twenty minutes later she emerges onto Plummer Avenue, her head a bobbing mess of rusty bedsprings. Canada just got another sweetheart.

She swings into MacIsaac’s Drugs and Confectionery. “Hello Mr MacIsaac, may I please have a packet of pins?”

“I like your haircut, Frances, it’s right jazzy.”

When he turns, she swipes a pack of Turkish tailor-made smokes. He hands her the pins along with a lemon drop and asks her, “What are your plans when you graduate next year, lass?”

“Why, I think I’ll go in for teaching, Mr MacIsaac. I believe it is most important that children get a good start in life, and that’s what a good teacher can give them.”

“You’re smart, you girls. You’ve a gift, each and every one of you.”

She pops the lemon drop into her mouth and leaves the pins on the counter.

She enters the schoolyard throng at morning recess. Frances has decided that today is her last day of school. If she isn’t expelled after what she plans to do, then there’s no justice. She lights a cigarette and looks around for the means to her end. Inside, Mercedes is washing a blackboard. She looks out the window to see her sister smoking right out in the open. And what on earth has Frances got on her head? A strange little cap … of hair. Good Lord. By the time Mercedes gets outside, Frances has taken off somewhere with Puss-Eye Murphy. What can she possibly want with poor sweet Puss-Eye?

Actually, “Puss-Eye” mutated into “Pious-Eye” some time ago, until now most people call him “Pius” or “Father Pie,” so certain is everyone, including himself, of his priestly vocation. So Mercedes stands on the school porch, beating shammies against the stone steps, unable to shake an uneasy feeling, even though she knows that any girl would be perfectly safe with Cornelius “Father Pie” Murphy.

When the bell rings to signal the end of recess, Puss-Eye staggers from one of the derelict outhouses on the edge of the playground and runs sobbing through games of shinny, skipping ropes and hopscotch, across the street into the ballpark, all the way home. Why is he holding his crotch? Mercedes scans the sea of pupils for Frances and spots her strolling away from the outhouses. What in heaven’s name has happened? Students pour up the steps and past Mercedes, speculating as to the nature of Frances Piper’s latest crime — “Kicked him in the nuts.” “Put a snake down his combinations.” Mercedes watches till Frances is out of sight, then she takes a deep breath, collects her brushes and shammies and returns to class, hoping for the best.

That afternoon James receives a note from Sister Saint Eustace. Frances has been expelled.

Midway through supper, Frances arrives home and joins her family at the kitchen table. “Mmmm, boiled mush with mush.”

Lily is amazed at the sight of Frances’s shorn head but, before she can comment, James excuses her and Mercedes from the table. They set down their knives and forks and leave without a word. James stands and raises his hand. Frances doesn’t wince. She doesn’t even look up, none of her involuntary muscles contract in expectation. She just reaches for Lily’s fork and starts eating. James lets his hand drop to his side. He says, suddenly tired, “Don’t bring it home.” She just chews. He carefully moves the plate out of her reach. “Do you hear me, Frances?”

She looks up, affecting good-natured distraction. “What’s that?”

“If you’re going to live here … whatever you get up to … keep it away from Lily.”

Frances reaches for the plate and says, “Don’t worry, Daddy.”

He feels more than tired as he looks at her. The insolent face, the freshly hacked curls. Lost. And gone for ever. What happened to her? My little Frances. James sighs. He can’t think about all that right now. There’s too much of it. It’s too dark in there, and he doesn’t have the energy. He watches her, elbows on the table, humming as she chews. Then he leaves without having laid a hand on her. She’s as beat as she’ll ever be.

Frances told Puss-Eye she needed his advice about a terrible sin someone had confessed to her. Once inside the darkness of the boonie with its antique reek, Frances knocked him down and, with a fistful of his hair and her knee gouging his breastbone, she jammed her other hand down his pants. She grabbed and jerked while he cried. The harder he got the harder he cried, he couldn’t help either one and it didn’t take long, he was only fifteen.

Frances wiped her hand on the floor and left. Mission accomplished. It’s not like I hurt him or anything.

Puss-Eye’s mother knew at the sight of him when he arrived home, he didn’t have to say much except to name his attacker. His father was dead, lucky for Frances, and Petal was far away. Widow Murphy went to the school and told Sister Saint Eustace, in as few words as possible.

If there was any lingering faith on anyone’s part that deep down Frances was good, it has been obliterated.

The next morning, Mercedes arrives at school early as usual and has just enough time before the bell to fill a bucket with soapy water and wash away the cinder scrawl on the side wall, “FRANCES PIPER BURN IN HELL”.

Cheap Women ’n Cheatin’ Men

Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon
,
all I want is having you and music, music, music
.
I’d do anything for you, anything you’d want me to …
,
all I want is loving you and music, music, music
.

Now that there’s entertainment, men start bringing the occasional date to the speak. Jameel sets up a couple of tables. Puts on an apron. The women watch the show with varying degrees of disbelief, scorn or fascination while their men affect indifference. Frances has gutted the player-piano of its music rolls and she hammers away at the keys, at first playing Mumma’s old vaudeville music from the hope chest, and then by ear from the records that sailors bring her up from New York City.

Frances is a bizarre delta diva one night, warbling in her thin soprano, “Moonshine Blues” and “Shave ’em Dry”. Declaring, an octave above the norm, “‘I can strut my pudding, spread my grease with ease, ’cause I know my onions, that’s why I always please.’” The following Saturday will see her stripped from the waist up, wearing James’s old horsehair war sporran as a wig, singing, “I’m Just Wild about Harry” in pidgin Arabic. She turns the freckle on her nose to an exclamation mark with a stroke of eyeliner, rouges her cheeks, paints on a cupid’s-bow mouth and dances naked behind a home-made fan of seagull feathers, “‘I wish I could shimmy like my sister, Kate’”.

She invests her early profits in face paint and costumery. She’ll start out as Valentino in a striped robe and turban. While one hand teases the piano keys, she removes the robe to reveal Mata Hari in a haze of purple and red. The seven veils come off one by one to “Scotland the Brave” and, just in case any one’s in danger of getting more horny than amused, there’s always a surprise to wilt the wicked and stimulate the unsuspecting. For example, she may strip down to a diaper, then stick her thumb in her mouth. “‘Yes my heart belongs to Daddy, so I simply couldn’t be ba-ad…. ’”

Her act is fuelled by “jazzoline,” for at first Frances takes most of her pay in liquid form, till she gets wise. Drink is just a means to an end: it inspires her one-woman follies, and it makes her untouchable when she takes the men outside one by one. Because the real money is not in the speak. It’s out back.

Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn’t matter where she’s been or who’s pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it’s for sure no one’s going to be able to steam her open. Frances will bounce in your lap with your fly buttoned for as long as it takes for two bucks. Expensive, but consider the overhead in wardrobe alone. A hand job costs two-fifty — she has a special glove she wears, left over from her first communion. Another fifty cents buys you patter, a song, any name you want to hear. Touch her little chest and cough up an extra buck; nothing below her belt. That’s the menu, no substitutions. If she laughs at you don’t whack her or she’ll holler for Boutros.

Frances starts to make money. Once she has acquired enough trinkets and trash to keep her gussied, she starts saving her money in a secret place. It’s for Lily. Not for a “cure” — Frances does not subscribe to Mercedes’ devout yearnings. In fact, Frances is unsure why she is sure the money is for Lily. She is putting it away “just in case”. In case what? In case.