“There’s a new gaffer,” Clare said, “Fred someone.”
“How old is he?” Geraldine set down her bottle and pulled a lipstick tube from her smock. She leaned towards a freshly silvered mirror propped up on the workbench and began applying scarlet lipstick. Her widely spaced pale green eyes looked back. The lipstick was livid on her pale face. She tugged at a short piece of wiry, sand-coloured hair and shoved it under a hairpin.
“I’m not sure,” Clare said. He was starting to bald but he didn’t seem old. She pictured him, quick and light on his feet. “Maybe early thirties.”
“Is he single? Is he handsome?” Molly said eagerly.
“Or does he have a face like a bag of spuds?” Geraldine said.
“Single? How would I know if he’s single?” Clare said. “Handsome? I’ll let you decide. Jack’s sending him here with his work for checking.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” Geraldine screwed the top back on her lipstick and tucked it in her pocket, where she found a humbug. She pulled it out, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.
Clare shrugged. “Apparently, he’s on probation. Looks harmless enough, but something about him has got Jack het up.” She sat down beside Geraldine, pushing close, into the smell of her peppermint humbug.
Clare leaned towards the mirror and studied her oval face and dark eyebrows with a serious gaze. Leo had written her that it was her eyes he remembered when he thought of her. Her pupils rimmed with gold, he said, splintering into grey-green irises, the colour of the winter sea at Arisaig, he said.
Geraldine pouted her red mouth and turned back to her work. She picked up a sugar bowl, etched with a starflower pattern. “Hattie,” she took a long suck at her candy, “got a letter from Ronald the other day.”
The girls sat up, alert.
“You remember him, that enormous boy with the ginger hair? From Yarmouth?” The girls drew closer. “The one she brought to the harvest fair?”
Clare remembered Geraldine’s friend Hattie curled in his lap like a child on the hayride, his big feet in their army issue boots, ankle-deep in straw, his hand disappearing under her skirt just above her bony knees.
“He proposed just before he left,” Geraldine said. “Hattie read me his last letter.” Geraldine closed her eyes and recited in a husky voice, running her hands over her neck and breasts and wrapping her arms around herself. “I am hungry to feel my arms around you again dearie. When I return, can we meet in some quiet place where we could go off by ourselves? Tell me how you picture it? I can almost feel you trembling. If it was summer I’d want to go to the pond behind the barn, where we could lie down, hidden behind the willow branches. If it was winter I’d want to be alone in a room with all the curtains drawn and the door locked so I could look at you and love you without anyone intruding. What do you say girly dear?”
This last question was barely audible over the shrieks of her audience.
As the laughter died away, they became aware of a man standing at the open door. It was the one Clare had watched in the glass-blowing shop. He stood with a box of glassware in his arms, all grace gone, looking awkward.
“I’m to show you my work.”
Clare felt suddenly sorry for him. His tense face revealed he had no idea what these innocent-looking girls would make of him the moment he left. “I’ll look at them.” Clare stood, moving down the bench to her own spot.
He carried his box to her, and set it down with exaggerated care. Then he pulled a chair from a corner. “Fred Baker,” he said and dropped his long frame stiffly onto the chair.
The girls turned back to their work, Geraldine and Molly checking glass and the others wrapping and packing the glass into wooden boxes, each casting glances from beneath downcast eyes.
Clare faced the man as he passed her scientific glassware, distilling flasks, columns, beakers, and tubes, which she held to the light. The backs of his hands were covered with pale golden hair. The fingernails of his left hand were even and short, his right uneven. Ah, so he lived alone. He smelled of sweat and shaving soap, the same brand as her father’s. She turned the glassware, embarrassed for him. His work was very fine. Humiliating to have it checked by a mere flaw girl.
She handed the last one back. “I don’t see any problems.”
“They must be perfect.” His eyes were the clearest blue.
“Yes,” she said.
“They would be useless otherwise. The chemical reactions will not proceed properly …”
The room fell silent. The man got up, wiped his hands on his apron, then clasped them and gave a little bow. “Well. Good then. I’ll just, uh, get back to the shop.”
“WELL, WHAT DO YOU THINK is his secret?” Geraldine said slyly as they watched his retreating back. “Weak lungs, contagious diseases, hidden deformities? There’s got to be some reason he’s not in France.”
“Maybe he’s just too old,” one of the others said.
“He’s awful stiff,” Jenny, a girl with ruddy cheeks and a fat bun pinned at the nape of her neck, said.
“Got a poker up his arse,” Molly said, gathering in her small features, which already seemed too closely concentrated in the middle of her face. And then, bored with the topic of Fred Baker, “Lordy, I’ve got the cramps today,” she moaned, pressing her hands on her belly.
These women were so different from the farm girls Clare grew up with. They laughed out loud, mouths wide, and read Harper’s Bazaar. Sometimes they dropped their voices and talked about how in the big cities women “had relations” with anyone they chose. How they had ways of making sure they didn’t get in a family way, getting a hold of things you couldn’t get in Halifax. Once, Jenny brought one of those contraptions back from her cousin in New York. She’d pulled it out of her smock pocket and the rest of them had leaned in, the smell of Molly’s liberally applied L’Heure Bleue perfume, sent to her by her brother in France, rising from her cleavage.
“Looks like something a kitten would drink milk out of,” Geraldine had said as they greedily examined the soft rubber bowl, poking it gingerly, until Molly grabbed it and started twirling it on her index finger. The device slipped off and Jenny caught it. She laid it meticulously back in its leather case, explaining, as if to children, “You just stick it, you know, up, so that it’s snug, like a little cap.”
How shocked Clare’s mother would have been. There’s no reason for you to busy your hands “down there!” Ada had said sharply one night when she was tucking Clare under her starburst quilt. Clare, eight or nine, had been exploring the mysterious folds and openings between her legs. When her mother caught the scent on Clare’s fingers, a look of embarrassed distaste had passed over her face. She’d yanked Clare’s nighty down and tucked the blankets in tight around her, with Clare’s arms outside the covers. Clare had waited until her mother’s heels tapped downstairs before she continued to explore.
CLARE PICTURED LEO and hurriedly opened a barrel of water glasses, clear, unadorned, the sort she drank from every day on the farm. They warmed as she turned them and reflections swam into her vision. A figure formed — a man so distant, so small she could not see his face; an arm budded from the figure, lifted and dissolved. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, refocused with will, searching for flaws, the hairline cracks where the glass would one day shatter. She worked quickly through the barrel, with little mental effort. When Clare was at loose ends after Leo enlisted and left for training in Halifax, she found a room at Rose’s boarding house for herself. It was Geraldine, the other boarder, who had told her about the job a year ago; she had explained that flaw-checkers were always women. They were much better than men. And Clare had proved adept at finding even the smallest imperfection. The trick was not to look too hard, but rather, to turn the glass, let the light reveal what was concealed.
As she worked, Clare’s thoughts returned to this morning’s talk with Mrs. Beddow, who’d sat behind her desk, a short, square woman, the waistband of her dark whipcord jacket done up to the last buckle h
ole. “You’ll be a very long way from home.” She had levelled her gaze at Clare, planting large hands on her hips.
Clare had had a hard time not staring at the dark hair on Mrs. Beddow’s upper lip.
“I’ve lived away from home for almost a year.” She would have to go home to Grafton soon to tell her parents. She was dreading the scene with her mother. You’ll be a very long way from home.
Restless, Clare set her glass aside, got up, and walked to the long windows at the room’s end. It still gave her a little thrill to stand and look at the dense life spread out below her, as if by coming to the city she had finally joined some greater flow, a river that might take her somewhere surprising.
She pushed her hand into her apron pocket where she had put Leo’s latest letter. She would read it again today in some dusty corner, without Geraldine’s peppermint breath on her neck, insisting that she “read the naughty bits” aloud. Clare lingered over the memory of his words: The memory of that day in the hidden corner of the gardens, the thought of holding you again …
Would he be in a tent this morning, with a dozen bunks crowded around a tiny stove? She watched him throw back his wool blankets, sit up, and swing his legs onto the floor. Did they issue pyjamas in the army? Shorts? Would he be naked? She flushed, feeling the heat of his skin under his uniform shirt, the ropey muscles of his back and arms. But, of course, it wasn’t morning in England. It would be, she calculated — late afternoon, almost dark.
Frost pressed the window glass. The sun had just cleared the thin membrane of sea fog, catching the black-and-white dazzle pattern of a supply ship, turning on its anchor, in answer to some wind or tide, facing east, the direction it would be steaming, out of Halifax and into war. Her pulse quickened. Soon she would be on her way across that ocean.
A GREAT ORANGE BALL shot up from the harbour below, and into smoke rising from a moored ship. Several retorts. Gunshots? An engine of sound rolling up from the harbour. Clare’s own distorted reflection as the window billowed inwards like a transparent sail. Everything shattered, even screams.
SHE WAS THROWN INTO BLACKNESS and delivered almost instantly back into the sound of falling glass, like the roar of a tide. Searing light burning in her left eye, her eyelid drawing back from a hot blade. Someone bending over her, “Oh my god …” A hand hovering over Clare’s eye as if to pluck it.
“Don’t touch me!” Clare screaming, scrambling to her knees, hunching into herself, wiping her bloody face. Something in her eye.
“Glass,” Geraldine’s horrified whispering. “A piece of glass. Oh god, it’s stuck in her eye.”
Around her, the others as if nailed to the floor, awash in Fred Baker’s perfect flasks and beakers.
“A COAT!” Geraldine’s voice. The girls staring at a large red stain on the front of Geraldine’s smock. Thrusting her hand into the pocket, she pulled out a flattened tube of lipstick, smashed it to the floor. “For Christ’s sake, someone give me a hand!” Geraldine, hauling Clare to her feet, which collapsed under her.
Clare leaned into Geraldine who half walked, half dragged her through the vanished window into the frigid wind, warm blood running between the fingers of her hand cupping her left eye, her right eye wide open.
A huge pillar of smoke bloomed like a black flower high over the city. Pieces of steaming metal strewn around the yard. The roof of a house across the street had collapsed. Flames licked out the front door. A woman, wearing what looked like her husband’s boots and wrapped in a flowered curtain, ran past them screaming, “Andy! Violet! You get back here right now!”
The black tower of smoke boiled outwards, fireballs shooting up into it, blanching grey then white, shining in the sunlight, pushing slow motion against an absurdly blue sky.
“What in God’s name?” Geraldine’s hair somehow undone, loose down her back.
A man struggled to hold a carthorse’s halter tight while the animal pawed the rutted road and rolled the whites of his eyes.
Clare swayed against Geraldine. The day turned darker. The cloud covered the sun, the entire sky. The carthorse brayed and pushed backwards against his cart.
“Fritz’s got us! There’ll be another bomb any minute. They’ll want to finish us off!” Ernie Ryan, one of the glass-makers, raced by, shouting, one shoe on.
Men and boys kept pouring from the factory, dirt from the shop floors stuck to bloody hands and faces. A shirtless man leaned on Fred Baker, who was still in his shirtsleeves and apron.
“We need help!” Geraldine called.
“Empty your cart!” Fred shouted to the cart driver, a moustached man with a large head perched on a thin neck, around which was wound a tartan scarf. The man turned from the roiling mushroom cloud, and looked uncomprehendingly at Fred, then at his cart, still piled with frozen fish, staring at the sky.
Fred jumped onto the cart kicking fish, and flinging it in great armfuls, bouncing them onto the road. He ran to Clare, picked her up in his arms. She smelled his leather apron, sweat, salt, and smoke; her blood soaked into his shirt collar.
He thumped her into the fishmonger’s cart and jumped in after her. Others started climbing in: the shirtless man, holding himself as if he was made of glass, men with torn shirts wrapped around their hands. Someone helped up the boy Clare had watched that morning making bottles, his eyes fixed and dry. He didn’t seem to notice the long, deep gash from his temple down his cheek to his chin. Geraldine hoisted her skirt and pushed her way through to Clare.
“Get us to a hospital,” Fred called to the driver, who, as if woken from a trance, snapped the cart reins. The cart lurched forward. Clare looked back at the rest of the girls, still lined at the broken window, faces in shock, Molly’s hand over her mouth, one arm squeezing Jenny, who was sobbing a series of silent Os. A coil of dirty smoke rose from one of the workshops.
THEY PASSED WALLS peeled back as the horse clipped down the street, the rooms inside like dollhouses: sofas, chairs, and beds turned over. A pile of bricks and a bathtub. A naked woman standing by missing stairs. Windows shattered. Plaster blown out. Dishes and bedclothes in disarrayed piles on lawns. The air hung thick and strangely silent.
Clare leaned into Fred Baker. Silver scales covered his apron. One of his arms held her tight, his right hand firm on her ribs, just under her heart. Every rut sent a bolt of pain through her eye and she squeezed Geraldine’s hand till it turned reddish blue. She kept her left hand cupped over her eye but she couldn’t tear her other eye from the scene before her.
A child stood in her nightgown at the edge of a second-storey room stretching out her arms to a man below. Bright flames licked up the slanting walls. The chimney suddenly crumbled, the floor tilted, and the child slid off the edge. The man shouted and dove forward. A black rain started to fall.
A grocer’s truck wove and skidded up the street towards them. The passenger door swung open before it came to a stop and a soldier leapt out, his uniform stained with sweat and ash. “Get up to the citadel!” His breath clouded on the frozen air. “There’s been an explosion at the pier. Get moving, there may be another!”
“These people are injured,” Fred called down to him.
The soldier flung his arm in a forward pitch. “Okay, go to Camp Hill Hospital. Then get right to the Commons until you’re told you can come down!”
The sun shone like a full moon. At Camp Hill Hospital, mattresses jammed the hallways. Stunned women held children in blood-soaked clothes. Others lay motionless. Some almost naked wore one boot or only the sleeves of a coat.
A nurse ran by, arms full of bandages. “Find a spot and wait,” she called.
Fred carried Clare to a corner and settled her against the wall.
“Stay.” She held hard to his hand. Looked up at Geraldine, standing beside him. “Please.”
Soldiers, until earlier that day patients themselves, wearing slings and dressings, carried stretchers. An army medic rushed by with a wee child, clothes hanging in burnt shreds.
“Clear this
hallway. All who aren’t injured must leave.”
ARCTIC AIR RUSHED IN OPEN DOORS and broken windows and sank in the corridors. Clare lost track of the hours she lay in the cold. At one point a doctor moving from patient to patient stopped near her. He looked up and down the corridor and placed one hand over his thick glasses for a moment, as if to block out the scene around him.
He knelt down to examine her. His face was expressionless, but when he pulled her hand away to look at her eye, she caught the brief grimace. “Someone will help you as soon as they can. Meanwhile …” He reached into one of his pockets, pulled out a bandage and began unrolling it. She flinched as he leaned towards her.
“I’m going to tie it lightly. If you sit still it shouldn’t bother you. We need to protect the wound.”
Her mouth went dry, bile rose in her throat. She pushed him away.
He sighed. “Okay, lean your head back.” He pulled a small vial from his breast pocket. She kept her arm extended.
“This is cocaine. It will help with the pain.” He opened the vial carefully, almost reluctantly, and dropped some of the fluid in her eye. Her skin was clammy but the eye went numb. He tied the bandage lightly around her head, easing it over the glass fragment. He picked up his clipboard and pulled a pen from his pocket.
“Your name and address?”
He tied a cloth tag to her wrist. After he left she lifted it to her right eye.
Clare Holmes, 120 Walnut Street, probable enucleation.
Clare could see only a smudged glimmer of light through the eye now. At first she rolled to face the wall. She slipped off, but the pain woke her again. Eventually she sat up, leaning back against the wall. She tried to rest her good eye but it flew open over and over, as if it alone had to shoulder the burden of the visible world now, and could not look away.
Men delivered more wounded through the night, climbing over her legs. The people they brought lay on the floor like fish hauled into a hold, bloody and wet. Some moaned. Almost everyone was covered with black soot. The sound of crying children washed down the darkness.
Dazzle Patterns Page 2
