Authors: Mary Gibson
‘You all still sweating in the beds?’ she called. ‘Come on, you lazy—’ She stopped short at the kitchen door, silenced by the scene that greeted them. Her mother sat white-faced and rigid. Behind her, holding the curved blade of his double-handled tanner’s fleshing knife to her throat, stood the old man. Amy leaned like a frozen, toppled statue against the mantelpiece, her lip cut, blood oozing from a gash in her forehead. She shot Milly an unnecessary warning look. She had fought him.
He looked a wreck. Two years of unlimited booze had coarsened his features, so that nose, mouth and eyes had swollen into a bulbous, undifferentiated mass, the colour of raw meat. He was unkempt, long greasy hair falling to the collar of his stained, worn jacket. Whatever he was, he’d always been meticulously clean, but now the unwashed smell coming off him was obvious even to Milly, standing across the room. His lip curled in a snarling smile when he saw her.
‘So, Lady Muck’s arrived, still looking like a slut. How does your drip of a grocer like the leftovers?’ He licked dry cracked lips and Milly felt revulsion replace the initial fear that had stopped her. Only her mother’s obvious terror prevented her from taking two steps across the room and flattening his swollen features.
‘And you look like a filthy tramp. I can smell you from here.’
The old man yanked her mother’s hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat. The curved blade nicked loose flesh and a thread of crimson appeared. All three sisters started forward, but their mother called out, ‘No! He’ll kill me, he will!’
‘What do you want?’ Milly asked carefully, standing her ground, for she’d edged a little nearer to her mother.
‘I only come for what’s mine. I left money here and a full bottle of drink, but she’s a fucking wicked liar, says she’s got nothing in the place.’ He tugged her mother’s hair. She whimpered.
‘We didn’t think you’d be back for your brandy after all this time, and I swear I haven’t got a penny!’
‘She’s telling the truth! If you must know, I drank your soddin’ brandy!’ Milly hoped to draw him off, anything to get him to let her mother go.
He looked at her with contempt. ‘Still leeching off me, houseful of women, fuckin’ useless the lot of you, when I’ve got two sons in the grave worth ten of you!’
‘And another son who’d rather go out to get killed at sixteen, than stay home with a bully like you!’
‘Shut yer trap! You’re a fuckin’ liar, just like your mother!’
‘He told me himself, and that’s why he stayed in the army too. It’s you drove him away!’
‘He went to war out of respect for his brothers, something a whore like you wouldn’t understand. And when he come back, there was nothing for him ’cause the women had took all the jobs!’
Milly gave a bitter laugh. ‘I can just see our Wilf peeling oranges all day. He wouldn’t work for the pittance we get anyway.’
‘Looks to me you’re set up all right. I’ll have some of it off you. Gis yer bag over.’
He stuck a hand out and she saw the knife wobble in his other trembling hand. His strength must be sadly diminished, if he could barely hold the fleshing knife that he used to wield with such skill and speed. Her father had boasted of dehairing a hide in under a minute. She took her chance and lunged forward, swinging her bag to knock the knife from his hand, but stumbled to her knees as she did so. The scimitar-like blade skittered across the floor, landing at Jimmy’s feet. Instinctively he picked it up and handed it to his grandfather. Before she could scramble up, the old man had bundled Jimmy under his arm. He swung the knife in a wild arc around him, edging towards the door.
‘You want to see what it’s like to lose a son? Do ya?’ he screamed at her, veins standing out in his neck, as if they might burst.
Barging Elsie out of the way, he charged up the passage and out of the front door. The sound of Jimmy’s long wail galvanized Milly into action and she shot up from the floor, like a sprinter from the blocks. She ran like the wind, pounding along Arnold’s Place, long legs pumping, following the old man’s lumbering flight, till she lost sight of him at Dockhead. She slammed to a halt. Which way? Then she heard Jimmy’s cries; they were coming from the direction of Hickman’s Folly. As she entered the narrow alley she caught a glimpse of the old man disappearing into George Row. He was heading for the river. She cut through a gap in the houses, skirted the Ship Aground and ducked down Farthing Alley, trying to cut him off. But by the time she reached Bermondsey Wall he was already on Southwell’s jetty. Now he stopped. Turning on her like a cornered wild beast, he held Jimmy above the water like a kitten in a sack.
‘Leave him be, Dad! He’s done nothing to you!’ she pleaded. But she had little hope, for by now she was certain that whatever sanity or humanity the old man ever possessed had been obliterated by his years of drinking, all decency pickled and stripped from him, like a hide in the lime pits.
As Jimmy’s little legs flailed, the old man’s grip tightened. High tide was turning and the thick, oily water was dappled with huge flat pools of current slapping lazily into the jetty, before crashing into the foot of the river stairs. The old man backed to the end and suddenly leaped on to the nearest barge, one of six moored parallel to each other.
‘You don’t deserve a son!’ he called from the barge, which bobbed and dipped in the fast-running tide. ‘Why should you have one and mine all dead!’
‘You’ve got Wilf, you’ve got Wilf, please, Dad!’ Her voice, high-pitched and taut, sounded like a stranger’s.
‘Dead to me.’ He shook Jimmy, looked from him to Milly, then, almost as an afterthought, tossed her son high into the air. Milly screamed.
But instead of hearing the splash of Jimmy’s body hitting the water, there was a dull thud. He had landed on the barge furthest out into the stream. The old man began scrambling across the barge towards Jimmy, who looked as if he was trying to hide himself beneath the tarpaulin covering the hold. Milly leaped from the jetty to the first barge, springing over each vessel as, with feet barely touching the gunwales, she threw herself headlong at the old man, who by now had almost reached her son. The knife fell to the deck, and she caught it mid-air, swinging it up without pause in a slicing arc, catching the old man behind the knees. Toppling forward, he lunged for Jimmy, but the little boy had found a netting bundle in the hold and was heaving it up on to the gunwale. Hugging it tightly to him, he used all his remaining strength to roll with it over the side, and into the fathomless, soupy waters. The old man howled, for Jimmy was floating away from his grasp, buoyed up on a raft of coconuts, imitating the forbidden game he’d witnessed earlier that summer.
Milly didn’t hesitate for an instant. Thought no longer existed; nor fear. Her precious child was being washed away and where he went, she would go too. Stepping over the old man, lying hobbled in a pool of blood, she picked up another net of coconuts and launched it, and herself, on to the mercy of the great river.
The shock of ice-cold water winded her and she swallowed a mouthful of scummy foam. Jimmy was still within sight, but being carried further off by the minute. She struck out. With one arm draped over the coconut raft, she used the other like an oar, paddling furiously and kicking her legs in a doggy paddle. She was astonished at how fast the tide took her downstream. She began gaining on Jimmy, but even if she caught up, with the river running almost at the top of the wall, she could see no exposed foreshore where they could land. When it came to it, she would just have to grab for a piling or the next group of barges. With a surge of strength, she ploughed the water as though it were air, and calling to Jimmy, saw him turn his head. The bright morning sun bounced light around him and his dark eyes, surreally calm, locked on to hers. He held out his hand in a gesture as trusting and commonplace as if they were about to cross the road together. She gave an almighty kick, which propelled her forward on the running tide, so that she was within touching distance of him. Straining forward, her extended fingers caught his hand, gripped it tight, held him fast.
‘Mummy’s here!’ was all she had time or breath to utter, before the water entered her mouth and the notorious Fountain current sucked them both under, in its whirling embrace.
She had always known it would come to this. As the waters tugged at her hair and clothes, the coconut raft was ripped from her hand and she felt a certainty that whatever god inhabited the river was exacting his due. She had offered herself and her child to it and then drawn back. How stupid she’d been to think that the river god would be denied its tribute. Holding her son tightly to her chest, she gave herself up to the depths.
The strong undertow dragged Milly and Jimmy beneath the opaque waters, so that they were invisible from the foreshore. But standing on Fountain Stairs were two witnesses to their struggles, and now the eager eyes of Elsie and Amy scanned the surface of the water. They had followed Milly as she’d pursued the old man from Arnold’s Place, and had arrived just in time to see her plunge into the river with Jimmy. The two sisters had run the length of Bermondsey Wall, with Elsie lagging behind, and had tracked Milly downstream, desperately trying to keep up as the tide took her and Jimmy; waiting only for the chance to get close to the river. At Chamber’s Wharf they had glimpsed mother and son shoot by, seen Milly getting closer and closer to Jimmy, but they’d arrived at Fountain Stairs only to witness them both being sucked under by the current.
Now they clung to each other, shivering and terrified, while the river sloshed and boiled up the narrow stairs, soaking them. Suddenly Amy pulled out of Elsie’s arms.
‘I’m coming, Milly!’ she shouted, launching herself through the foaming waves slapping against the stairs, and out into the fast-flowing tide.
Elsie’s cry was lost in the noise of water rushing against the river wall. She saw her sister’s arms whirling in an ungainly crawl which, however untutored, had been acquired in this same treacherous stretch of water. Amy’s forbidden Thames swimming expeditions with Barrel had taught her the secret of the Fountain and she was heading for the exact spot in the stream where the spout spewed out the lucky ones. She began treading water, but the tide’s pull threatened to bear her downstream – only by swimming against the current was she able to stay in the same position. Desperate seconds passed as Amy’s head whipped back and forth, willing the surface to break. Then there was a burst of air bubbles, and the thick green waters broke, as the river like some liquid leviathan opened its maw and shot forth Milly and Jimmy, with such force that they were propelled clear of the water. Today, the old river god had chosen to be merciful – they were free! Amy was on them in a heartbeat. Grasping Milly under the armpits, she shouted in her ear, ‘Hold tight to Jimmy!’
But the instruction was unnecessary, for though Milly could no longer hear her sister, she had Jimmy in a death-like grip, which not all the mighty force of the old river had been able to loosen. Amy turned on to her back and, supporting the two bodies, kicked out for the Fountain Stairs, but the force of water shooting over them and sucking back down threatened to break all three of their bodies on the stone steps.
‘Elsie!’ Amy called as she was dragged back by the undertow. ‘You’ve got to help me. I can’t get them out on my own!’
But Elsie was frozen, her deep childhood fear of the river rising up now, as it caught at her feet and smashed against her legs.
‘Elsie! I’m losing them!’
This time Amy’s cry seemed to unlock something in Elsie, and she began to descend the river stairs. Her skirt billowed out and her hands reached forward, feet slipping as water covered her legs, she toppled back on to the steps. Now, sitting up to her swollen stomach in water, she braced herself, made a grab for Amy and with an almost animal roar, pulled her up until she too was on the stairs. She strained her heavily laden frame, till, one step at a time, she hauled up Amy, who held fast to Milly and Jimmy. Finally, they were all at the top of the stairs, coiled in a sodden spiral of bodies, the sisters intertwined like a three-cornered triskele around the child at its heart.
The light was too bright, the air too thin. She must be in the wrong place. She knew she had surrendered herself to the river, opening her mouth to fill her lungs with its thick opacity. Drowning was heavy, she knew that, a slow strangling, bursting weight, that crushed the chest and dragged on the body. So why, now, did she feel so light? She knew she couldn’t be in heaven. Her mother had always said she made a bad Catholic, and at the end it wasn’t either the caddywack or the proddywack God she’d turned to, but the old river god – and even he hadn’t heard her prayers. The light hurt her eyes and she groaned, pulling her arms more tightly round Jimmy. But they closed around empty air. He was gone. Her groan turned to a soft whimpering, then a long moan.
‘Jimmy!’
She felt hands exploring her face, soft as butterfly wings brushing her cheeks. She opened her eyes. He gave her the smile she loved, broad enough to dimple his cheeks, bright enough to light his eyes.
‘Mummy’s awake!’ Jimmy said.
Gathering him into her arms, she squeezed so hard he protested, then the room seemed suddenly full of noise. Amy, draped in a huge grey blanket, sat on the edge of the bed where Milly lay and engulfed her in a scratchy embrace, then Elsie, wearing borrowed clothes, joined them.
A voice she recognized said gently, ‘Give her some air, girls.’ And she turned her head to see Florence Green at her bedside. The young woman took her hand, seeming to understand her confusion. ‘It’s all right, Milly, you’re back safe on dry land. Thanks to your sisters; they pulled you out of the river. You’re at the Settlement and we’ve sent for Bertie, and your mother will be here soon. Just lie back and rest now.’
Florence pulled the cover up over her and Jimmy, as Milly felt tears of gratitude begin to trickle down her cheeks. Her child was alive, here in bed with her
. She
was alive! As her sisters obediently moved away, she pulled them back.
‘No, let my sisters stay.’