by Lori Baker
My mother disliking the duty, as I grow it is I who am sent to the market. There I am a spectacle in all weathers with my mother’s basket on my arm, judging, along with the housewives of Whitby, the spoiltness of mutton, the freshness of oysters, the relative percentage of spiderwebs to dough in the bread, whether the butcher’s scale is weighted fairly, whether the potboy charges fairly for the ales. The ocean sighing beneath, shifting its broad, grey back under the sodden, louring tent of sky. Voices hiss behind me:
Poor barne!
Well! She’s a red’un, ain’t she?
Yais, terrible red.
Big for her age.
Verra big.
She don’t favor her mother at all.
No. Nor the father, neither.
Which father, dear?
Hush. Hush now. She’ll hear.
They go quiet as I approach, then resume behind my turned back. There’s a joke that I don’t understand. The word argument is meaningless to me, in the sense that they intend it. What does it matter? I am spectacular here. I am a youthful, ginger giantess, a startling and incongruous figure, possessing the broad back and large feet of my grandfather, Felix Girard; spectacular, in Market Street with my basket, my child’s breath rising on the frosty air as I jostle earnestly in and among the housewives. While my mother remains at home. Tending to other matters. Or none.
It’s quite a misfortune, ain’t it? About the hair an’ all.
Yais. And them feet. On a girl. Pity.
Yais. Such a pity.
• • •
But there are other attentions, too, which contradict the first. Old Leng at the fish stall, who reaches across his display of bulbous, gape-eyed, put-upon herrings, his prawns and smelts and winkles, to grasp with grubby fingers a curling tendril of my hair. Elizabeth Hendley in the dry goods, a kind woman usually but in my presence suddenly uneasy, broad rump shifting nervously behind a counter thick with buttons and spools, needles, handkerchiefs, bits of lace. I have come to buy my mother a spool of thread. Here’s trouble coming. You can see it in them blue eyes, a’right. Give it a year or two. It’s coming sure eno’. Her own eyes small, black, evasive. Then the carriage that one day follows me home in the rain, all the way up Bridge Street, until finally at the gate I turn to look—only then, the driver spurring the horses on, does it rush past, the blurred ghost of movement at a drowning curtained window the sole hint of the interest within. The maids who pluck and pull at me in the market, saying, Aww, it ain’t real, is it? She’s like a doll or sumpin’—I’d like to take her home wi’ me—
From which I come to know about other species of desire than the sort that I, as a child, feel—to bite sharply through the fibrous, exotic caul of an orange so as to receive upon my tongue the tangy, shocking gush of pulp; or to hold in my own hands the warm, frantically pulsing body of the pullet newly beheaded by the butcher’s remorseless blade.
These are my desires.
• • •
Hey, Red. Walk my way, why don’cha?
• • •
From which it may be seen that there are continuities, old world to new.
• • •
Among my admirers it is the boy who is the most persistent. The others leave off, lose interest, after a time. But not him.
• • •
To understand this is to understand that in the absence of my parents’ attention, in the gap that they have created, I am swept out into the streets—into Whitby’s damp, convoluted alleys and passages and tunnels, its secret staircases made of stone, winding down toward the sea. I am in the company of other children who likewise swarm there, some as lost as I am; no, not that, it’s untrue what I have said, in fact very few are lost; most are the subject of someone’s urgent though temporarily distracted attention—I imagine anxious mothers of six, with husbands, lost or not, at sea. Except of course for the boy, he seems as orphaned as I am—I, orphaned by anticipation; he, by fate; this interpreted by both of us as freedom, while being, really, something else, something we’d rather not think about, not yet, at least; no, not yet. We are too young for that, still.
I notice him first one morning by the fishmonger’s stall. It is raining again—always raining in that place; and cold—the sky aslant with coruscation of sleet. I have just settled a damp sleeve of plump, deeply pink langoustines into my—my mother’s—my housewife’s—basket when I see him, though without seeing, hunched at the corner of the stall. It is the son, I think, if I think anything, of the man who pulled my hair; but really I think nothing. I am moving on, moving on, barely noticing. Then, though, I see him again, in the afternoon, as I emerge from the bakery with three small lemon cakes wrapped in a towel for tea. Then and most disconcertingly in Sandgate Street as I lean in close to the window of Cariole’s toy shop to get a better look, forehead touching glass, angel of breath appearing under nostrils, I am so intent upon what is there—a mechanical duck that, when fully wound, quacks, preens, then shits a pellet of dark green wood—there he is, reflected in the glass beside me, this boy, his reflection alongside, on top of, practically merging with, my own—
It is only then, I think, it strikes me that I have seen him before.
He is ubiquitous enough to be invisible, almost. Like other Whitby boys, he has sandy, indistinct hair, pale blue, nearly colorless eyes, translucent white skin, sharply raised cheekbones across which meander a few noncommittal pinkish-beige freckles; and a malicious ferret’s grin, absent one or two teeth. He wears a grimy, formerly white, untucked shirt, trailing in the back, open at the neck to reveal a painfully concave hint of breastbone, and nubbly, hand-me-down knickerbockers a size too large. There is, in other words, nothing to distinguish him from many others, all approximately of my age, none achieving my height or anything near to it, whom I encounter in the course of my daily errands, or in the street wanderings, eclectic as they are, that follow.
I turn around, and he’s gone.
Just like that.
He always did have the knack of disappearing like smoke. Hip, that is. Hippolyte.
What kind of name is that? say I, on hearing.
What kind of name is Carlotta, says he. Ferret’s sneer so quick it does not occur to me to ask how he knows my name, since certainly I have never told him it.
But we have advanced by then, Hip and me. I am ahead of myself now.
• • •
It is, I suppose, not quite credible that I should have an admirer: I, a child, a ginger, a giantess. Unsubtle of foot. Nonetheless, it is true.
Though not immediately. I must chase him first, through all the passages and tunnels, vast and various, that constitute the underneath of Whitby. There is great pleasure in the play of giantess’s legs, hot in pursuit of that-which-must-be-pursued; and the boy is always ahead of me, a grey figure in a grey ground of Whitby winter: up, over a wall, into somebody’s yard, scattering buckets and nets and tarps and ladders, startling chickens, setting the dogs to barking; up over another wall, up an alley, past a shut-up, still-stinking latrine, a smallboat wintering in a mummy’s wrap of canvas, a garbage tip heaped with bones, it’s death here, all death. We are mocked all the while by the icy, tinkling chatter of frozen laundry hung out on a line, a man’s voice shouting Stop that din or I’ll whang ye, I will!—the angry gestures (shaken fists, upraised elbows, pointed fingers, others) of housewives surprised in the act of smoking bedbugs out of mattresses—we create our messes, he and I—wheelbarrows thumped, pots tipped, spilled milk mingling with spilled bitter, night soils unceremoniously scattered; and all the time, just ahead of me, the tantalizing tail of the boy’s grimy shirt as he rockets over another wall, around another corner, over another cesspit—and then finally, inevitably, one day, at the corner of Grope Street and Lantern Lane, down, into the passages.
I’ve heard about those. Pirates are said to have inhabited the passages once. Now there is just the cold, strangely stilled air, smelling deeply of brine; the echoing drip, coming from somewhere, of water; an
d endless, deep sighings of the sea. Then, too, growing farther away with every moment’s hesitation, the galling patter of footsteps in the dark, the single laugh, high, clear, contemptuous, carried up from below. It’s because of this that I finally make the leap.
Then it is footfalls pinging in the dark, mine and his, his and mine, spiraling down through the dark, dank, sea-spattered brickwork, grey harbor glimpsed in chinks and gaps, until at last I emerge, alone, huffing, into the tarpaulin-shrouded boatyard with its towering piles of timber, raw mast and spar and decking, giant spools of canvas, rigging, the boats themselves up on blocks, waiting for spring. Skeletal creak and twang, clank of winch, soughing of wave, that is all; not even a laugh: he has evaded me, again.
Such a long walk it is, back up the hill, to the remains of my shopping, which I’ve dumped in my pursuit: the salmon stiff with cold, egg yolks stuck to the cobblestones, onions muddied but salvageable. Lurking then around the door of my father’s shed I hear at last the hot, reassuring breath of the bellows; he is working again, on his rightful work, that is what I think, creating his glass. His glass ocean. I do not try to enter. I am distracted anyway, with puzzles of my own.
• • •
What a peculiar thing it is, this admiring and being admired. For me especially. After all, I’m an anomaly. Not like other girls my age. Though I don’t know it.
If I knew others my age, I’d know. But I don’t. They aren’t where I am. Very few girls like me, out there on the streets.
I am otherwise and elsewhere.
• • •
As I am still young and ignorant, this is not yet painful.
• • •
It is he who comes to me, in the end. I return from marketing one day to find him crouched like a small, brown animal, very still, in the deep bruise of shadow at the corner of my father’s shed. With his northern knack for colorless ubiquity he has very nearly succeeded at blending in there, though the windy flap-flap of the buttonless knees of his plain-woven knickerbocker pants gives him away, so that I hear before I see him as I round the corner out of Bridge Street; but then I do see him, with his eye pressed up to a gap in the wall of my father’s shed.
• • •
He with his mischievous sneer, his eyes the color of water, of sky, of no color at all. He will press me up against the brick walls and half-timbers in the alleys, between the market stalls where the sellers hawk their marrows and crockery and bolts of cloth. We will linger together in the recessed doorways and cobbled yards until the housewives chase us out, brandishing their buckets and their brooms; or in between the higgledy-piggledy pews in ancient crumbling St. Mary’s Church, where the ossified finger bone of the saint herself reposes on a cushion inside a glass and silver reliquary. Many times we’ll gaze upon it with a kind of silent, half-mocking awe, then run away, giggling, jostling, tickling each other nervously in the armpits, on the ribs, around the belly. We’ll fear the saint is judging us, perhaps; touching us, unbearably, with luck, or with madness.
His eyes the color of ocean, of air, of no color at all. His indistinctness a distinction. It is so easy to lose him. With his help I will continue the exploration of who and what I am and who I might become, until he decides that he is done with me again, and disappears until next time.
Until next time. Whenever that is, it all will have changed by then—next time, the when and where of it, all will be up in the air, and myself, too, back arched against the ancient bricks, unseeing of the future.
• • •
He saunters as if being caught spying at my father’s shed is nothing.
What’s doing in there? This nonchalantly said.
I am openhearted, unaccustomed to spies.
He’s making, say I. Making glass.
As if this, too, is nothing to marvel at. This as well as the strange yet tender experiment we are about to launch upon, by which we will create, with fumbling hands and lips, the outlines of each other, and ourselves.
But not yet. Not yet. It hasn’t started, yet.
He reaches out then, and removes a tangle from my hair. So things begin, by small gestures, incrementally.
Is your Ma in there with him?
Nah. She’s in house.
The cold rain is coming down on us, sharp with icy insinuations.
Golden, is she? Your Ma.
Yes: she is golden. Very golden. With her white skin, slender body, tiny, delicate feet. The whorl of her ear like a seashell. Her teeth are pearls, her lips are corals. Hip grins his rat-toothed grin and I feel myself stung with something—some nettled, tangled thing inserting its hooks, they won’t come out easily. They will rub and rub me now, chafe. I haven’t been jealous of her before, not like this. Other ways, but not this way.
She’s in t’house, playing piano.
Oh. Disappointed breath upon the air. I thort I saw her, is all.
You didn’.
My basket is on his arm by now, we are making our way down Bridge Street, over the rioting turmoil of the river, toward the market. He will accompany me, or so it seems. Except when we reach the turning for Grape Lane, suddenly he says he must tend his master’s horses. It is hard for me to imagine this. I try to picture him with currycombs, buckets of mash, raking out the warm, soft straw, none of this is possible. Hefting his master’s suitcase. No. No. Not he. He does not work at anything, though later he will attribute certain of his absences to My master’s travels. Hip has no master, I feel this strongly, a form of intuition. Work leaves its mark, and he doesn’t have it. He’s been marked by something else. I don’t know what.
Nonetheless, very quickly, with an action like the dissipation of smoke in air, a conjuror’s trick, he is gone, and I alone as usual must make my way wherever it is I am going.
I grow preoccupied then, once I am alone, without him to distract me. I haven’t thought of her this way before, the way he has just made me think of her. Certainly, I have thought of her attention, all directed elsewhere, not on me; anywhere but on me; and have been pained thereby. Never, though, have I considered the attention of others, drawn away from me, inevitably, onto her.
Of course it’s inevitable.
This stings, now that I know it, it’s like a burr up my sleeve, something I can’t get rid of. I know I’ll think of her this way again, perhaps always, it’s unfortunate. She was one thing, and now she’s become something else, both more and less than herself.
• • •
I see him often, after that. A galvanic process has taken place, a fusing, however imperfect, by which we find each other again and again in the dark winter afternoons and the nights aglow with the cold reflective sheen of snow, white nights, during which a girl may lose herself in the secret alleys and passageways of this city, in the many places where a boy may be met, or not, depending on his mood, and hers, outside the watchful gaze of parents’ eyes—particularly if those parents are not watching—if they are turned away, eyes averted; father at his bench, mother at her spinet, not bothering; everyone knows mothers watch best and closest, though in my case, not at all.
• • •
I seen your Ma, he says, in the window, her hair were like a shiny rope, hanging down.
• • •
It clutches at me, around the heart.
She weren’t in the window, say I.
She were.
I know it is a lie.
• • •
In this manner a new year begins.
• • •
It is my first outside, in the street.
Tonight it is the New Year’s night,
tomorrow is the day,
And we are come here for our right,
O sing Hagmena-heigh!
O sing Hagmena-heigh!
• • •
Snatches of song are borne back to us on the wind, along with sharp, stinging flakes of snow that have begun to fall in the dismal twilight, borne inland off the metallic convexity of the sea. They touch coldly, cling to hair and brows
.
If you go to the black-ark
bring me an X mark
Ten mark, ten pound
Throw it down upon the ground,
So me and my friends may have some,
Hagmena-heigh!
• • •
From up the river comes the dull thwuck-thwuck of hammers in the shipyard; and up above and behind us the lamps are being lit, street by street, the ghostly blue flames of gas illuminating doorways and windows, alleys and passages, the curving stairs and sea-stinking grottoes of Whitby—as well as the haphazard, glittering, guttering, peripatations of the snow.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, dark already, on the eve of the brand-new year.
Despite the weather and the darkness, the streets are busy, the housewives hustling home with their bundles, the cook-maids straight from the bake house with fragrant, warm loaves of bread wrapped and cosseted beneath their arms. Just outside the tantalizing, gaslit window of the milliner’s shop a puppet show is enacted, accompanied by hectic strains of hurdy-gurdy: a skeleton, stark white, dances, bones departing one by one across the tiny stage until only the skull remains, gyrating wildly, upon a background of worn black felt. Snatches of song rise up—
