Little Bones (8 page)

‘Are we underground, sir?’ she asked, but the doctor had stopped and the passage had come to a junction. He hesitated.

‘We will go west,’ he said, ‘and if west is wrong, we will turn around and proceed in an easterly direction.’

West was lucky. A short portly man wearing a shiny green suit puffed his way towards them, so the doctor could now ask for Mr Duflot’s whereabouts.

‘
Monsieur
Duflot is behind the door adjacent to the noticeboard,’ the man said. Jane could see a little bottle of gin sitting in his pocket. ‘Are you with the freak show?’ he asked.

‘I most certainly am not.’

‘I meant the girl, though now I come to think of it, she’s more cripple than freak, and please do not take offence, because I never meant any. I love a freak show as much as the next man – the two-headed babies are fascinating, the way they sit in those jars like pickles. I once saw the man who was supposed to look like an elephant, only he didn’t, he looked like something melting.’

‘I am a doctor.’

‘You are?’ he said walking away. ‘You surprise me.’

The doctor told Jane to wait in the passage and then knocked on the door and entered. Jane waited pensively by the wall, where the hazy gas jets flickered. She could hear the muted sound of laughter, talking, and stop-start piano music. A man led a miniature pony down the corridor, stopping now and then to take a swig from a hip flask, and Jane tried not to show her surprise when he offered the pony a drink.

Her head began to ache, the pain rising from her shoulders and up through the back of her neck. Leaning against the wall put her in mind of how a beggar might stand, and though her feet were sore, she moved away from it, walking down the passage and back again.

Years ago, her father had sent her out with a sign saying ‘H
ELP
’. Standing with a small tin cup on a busy West End corner she had been spat at, offered a bed for the night by a seemingly well-meaning clergyman, and received dried beans, brown phlegm and a recently extracted molar, which fell into the cup with a sharp, resounding ping. The most she had received was halfpence, which her inebriated father quickly spent on a pie.

Jane stopped to read the noticeboard. A woman called Josie was having a ‘Better Late Than Never’ New Year’s Eve party. Mr Robert Sullivan had lost his astrakhan coat and was offering a small reward for its hasty return. Mr Peake was looking for lodgers who were both ‘clean-living’ and ‘tolerant’.

From around the flickering corner a man appeared,
swaggering
as if he owned all the world. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face, his hair so full of black pomade it shone like fresh paint in the gaslight. Ignoring Jane altogether, he started composing himself before knocking on the manager’s door, straightening his collar, rubbing the tips of his boots on the back of his trousers, and quietly clearing his throat.

‘Ah, Johnny!’ said the Frenchman as the door swung open. ‘Finally, you found us!’

Ten long minutes later, the door re-opened and the doctor beckoned Jane inside, where the air was almost blue with the fug of their acrid cigar smoke. Through this thick rancid cloud she could make out a small, tidy office, with garish pictures of jugglers, clowns and a woman with very large breasts. Jane could see they’d been drinking. It looked like watered milk. The manager smiled, and the man called Johnny turned his head away from the door so Jane could barely see the outline of his face.

‘Your serving girl?’ the Frenchman asked Dr Swift.

‘My very discreet assistant,’ the doctor told him, tapping the side of his nose.

‘Discretion,’ said Monsieur Duflot, ‘is a wonderful, honourable thing.’

‘Here,’ said the doctor, rifling clumsily through his pockets and throwing Jane a sixpence. ‘Buy yourself a bun at the kiosk. We might be here some time.’

‘Should I make my way back, sir?’ she asked, because shouldn’t she be seeing to the girl they’d left in Axford Square that morning, a nervous ingénue who, in her jumpy agitation, had pulled all the buttons from her coat?

‘Oh, most definitely not,’ said the doctor. ‘You must stay inside the theatre.’

The Frenchman laughed. ‘Oh, yes indeed, you must stay here, then he can tell his wife he’s been working hard all afternoon, like a slave in fact, and he has not been lounging around with absinthe and Gentleman’s Relish.’

Monsieur Duflot pointed Jane towards the kiosk, and she turned into the passage, picking out landmarks for her safe return – the noticeboard, a hatstand, a giant cardboard tree. Her head felt worse as the smell of gas thickened. She could hear a woman asking for a bottle of alcohol rub, a piano repeating the same hollow tune, over and over. Then a man holding a thin white dove looked Jane very carefully up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were somebody else.’

Towards the end of the gloom Jane found the door to the auditorium and, pushing it with her shoulder, she found herself at the side of the empty stalls – this magical space, this place of transformation, was in half light, and the few lamps left burning made trembling yellow pools across the closed velvet curtains. Transfixed, she stood with her hands on the back of a seat, staring at the ornate plaster ceiling, painted to look like the sky. Walking down the raked aisle, she could taste face powder, damp tobacco and orange peel. She made her way towards the empty stage, looking into the dark wide mouth of the orchestra pit.

Her mother had known a girl who had sold programmes at the music hall, and if they waited in the alley, she would let them sneak in through a side
door
, where they’d climb the stairs and stand dizzy in the gods, and Jane might get a view of a man’s filthy overcoat, or a sweating fishwife, or a glimpse of the rosy-lit stage, with its acrobats, fat lady singers, and those girls dressed as West End dandies that the audience went wild for. Agnes preferred the ballet scenes or the animal acts, though their mother (by this time awash with gin and fried potatoes) once got so excited by Mr Sammy Street, ‘the smoothest balladeer’, that she pushed her way down to the stalls, then, feeling quite giddy, made her way to the edge of the stage, where she began waving a less-than-clean handkerchief towards Mr Street, who was now dancing with his cane. Oh, how Agnes had averted her eyes and Jane had pushed her burning face into the nearest scratchy overcoat. Meanwhile, a burly gentleman, an employee of the theatre, had lifted up her mother by her elbows and managed to cart her kicking into the alley, but not before she had shouted, ‘You can have me, Sammy Street! I’m here! I’m waiting! I’m yours!’ which set the audience roaring and ruined half the song.

Swallowing a smile Jane looked towards that narrow shelf they called the gods, a heart-stopping, precarious place, with such a long drop it was a wonder those beery sixpence ticket-holders didn’t fall to their deaths every night. Lowering her eyes, she gazed across the circle, with the curving red seats, the gilt, and the little opera glasses you could set free for a penny. Jane curled her hands around her eyes in poor imitation of those glasses, and to her amazement, she could see the outline of a girl – and the girl, dressed in grey, looked
like
Agnes. With her heart thumping, Jane began to wave. The girl didn’t move. Jane found the stairs to the circle and started climbing to where the grey girl was sitting. By the time she got there, she knew it wasn’t her sister. ‘I sneaked inside because I was cold,’ the girl whispered. ‘Don’t tell on me, will you?’

At the kiosk, the woman offered Jane, whose head was pounding, a glass of water, saying she looked quite done-in and a sip of cold water always made things better. ‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman. ‘Would you like a little square of ginger cake?’

Half an hour later Jane and the doctor attracted stares of amusement and disgust as they weaved their way home through the crowds and heavy traffic. Oh, they were a sorry sight! Jane, her head still swimming, appeared more crooked than ever, trying to guide the bulk of the doctor, whose legs seemed to have lost most of their solidity, his breath so full of aniseed booze you could almost see those rancid fumes escaping from his lips.

‘The pavement,’ he puzzled. ‘Why does it slip from my boots?’

Outside the Cock, the boy was standing with his sign, and though Jane pretended not to see him, he saluted with a grin so wide it seemed his face was in danger of splitting. The doctor stumbled, then, holding onto a wall, vomited very quietly into the doorway of a shop selling high-quality leather goods, the owner now banging on the window, the doctor producing a few sweaty coins from his pocket, which the owner promptly refused, saying he was a good Christian man and disgusted.

Back at Gilder Terrace, Edie made the doctor a cup of strong coffee. ‘I’ll tell the missus you’ve got a terrible headache then, shall I?’

The doctor managed a wincing kind of nod. ‘And if you would oblige, could you help me up the stairs? I would ask Jane, but she has already seen me through those gates of hell they call the Strand, and she needs to see to that poor girl whom I have pitifully neglected. She can’t be on my conscience,’ he said, tapping the side of his head. ‘It’s standing room only up there.’

When Jane had seen to the girl (who was now on her way home, head down, traversing the black pitted paving slabs, her coat flapping due to its recent lack of buttons), she walked aimlessly around the streets in wide uneasy circles. Near the Opera House a juggler threw plates to a woman in a fancy gold tutu, and she caught them with her eyes closed, though the lids had been painted with bronze-coloured irises. ‘My world is never dark!’ she told the crowd, and with a wave of applause they edged closer, and Jane moved with them, as a man shouted, ‘I could do that!’ The woman obliged him with a barrage of china, most of which he dropped, causing the juggler to hiss and bend his neck like an unsettled cobra.

‘You not scrubbing any floors today?’

Turning awkwardly, Jane saw the boy, who had left his pious sandwich-boards propped against a wall.

‘I don’t scrub floors,’ she said.

‘So, what do you do for a living?’ he asked, pushing her gently towards the edge of the crowd. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, that is?’

‘I help a doctor,’ she told him, embarrassed by the words.

‘So you’re a nurse?’

‘Not exactly,’ she admitted. ‘I just mop up mess and hand him things.’

The boy pulled a face. ‘You’re not carrying any diseases are you?’

‘Of course not, and why should you care?’

‘Because I’m standing right next to you, that’s why,’ he said, ‘and I’ve heard you can catch all sorts, just by breathing in air.’

‘And I’ve heard you die if you don’t.’

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Go on, cripple, force yourself.’

They walked to Kelly’s Cabin, a small crowded place where the costermongers liked to spend their ten-minute break, drinking cups of cheap tea, standing around the tightly packed counter, and flirting with Maggie behind it. Cupping her hands around the pulsing warmth of the cup, Jane looked through the flat steamy window, where the world outside might be melting.

The boy was called Ned, and told Jane he was almost fifteen. He was small for his age, with newly cropped hair and pale shrinking eyes. He didn’t seem shy, though Jane thought he should have been, talking about the preacher, now fast asleep in the Cock, and his father who was in the Navy, or at least wore the ill-fitting uniform when he appeared on their doorstep smelling of rum, though as Ned’s mother liked to point out, what kind of navy took a man who got sick
on
the Greenwich Pier ferry? Jane liked listening to him. It made a change from the doctor’s bleating showgirls.

‘And I don’t just carry that blasted sandwich board,’ he told her. ‘When I’m walking with it, I keep my eye out for other opportunities.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like picking fruit and veg what’s only just landed in the gutter and too good to be left for the maggots, only you have to be quick, because everyone’s up for that game.’

Ned collected horse manure. He looked for stalls and barrows needing an extra pair of hands, because if there was a large enough crowd, he could put fruit into baskets and crates, keeping the customers sweet, and only last Friday he’d earned a few pennies and a good free supper from the shellfish man, who’d had a queue as long as your arm of people wanting liquor, and the water needed keeping on the boil.

‘I’ll do anything,’ he told her blithely, and Jane wondered if he would catch a stream of stinking vomit, wash the face of a dead girl, or take a slap from another who didn’t like the taste of the pennyroyal tincture. But she liked Ned’s spirit, the tea and gabble had taken her out of herself, and when he went back for his sign, she strode towards the Thames, because she felt like seeing the water.

On the banks of the river a crowd had gathered to watch a troupe of travelling players, their platform a boat, just run aground. Undeterred, a man in a long black coat continued gesticulating with his arms, reciting blank verse. Next to him, a woman blue with
cold
and wearing a thin satin nightgown, beat her bird-like chest as if trying to restart her heart.

‘And they call it entertainment.’

‘Miss Bell?’

‘The very same. Are you fond of the bard, Miss Stretch?’

‘Who, miss?’

‘The man who wrote the lines this deluded ham is spouting.’

Jane listened again. Frowned. ‘I’m not sure I quite understand them,’ she admitted.

Miss Bell moved closer, wrapping an arm around Jane’s bent shoulders. ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘the words sound better when you’re not being blasted on all sides by these cruel winter elements.’

Wiping her hair from her eyes, Jane supposed she must be right, though surely the words would be the same whatever the weather, and wondered if the man was speaking English or half nonsense.

‘Now,’ said Miss Bell, as the woman on the boat started shrieking, ‘you must come back to my lodgings. Flora has been very clever and got herself a job, and we’re having a pig’s head with all the trimmings. Surely a pig’s head is better than turning to ice watching this third-rate excuse of a performance?’