Anticipation

by Tanya Moir

  I’m finding it harder to be angry with Maggie now. It’s exhausting, staying angry at the dead — for starters, there are so many of them. And you have to do all the work yourself; they won’t give you a thing to go on. So if I manage to summon up any rage at all, it isn’t over silence — the things my mother didn’t say, or do. The things she didn’t give me.

  It’s what she did do — that’s what I still find waiting for me, some nights, down in the dregs of the chardonnay. The way she kept going, when she could have stopped. The way, as another Christmas rolled round to Bradbury Street, my mother would, once again, get out the empty boxes.

  Literally. I can see her now, down on her hands and knees in the spare room, sliding them out from under the bed.

  By the end of 1981, we had quite a collection: Maggie had been saving them for years. Shoeboxes, with their crisp corners and lids, were ideal. But too many would look suspicious, so we also had old biscuit and chocolate boxes, photographic paper and darkroom fluid cartons from the Oreti Reporter, a couple of poster tubes, a selection of fruit trays from the greengrocers on Tay Street, and that perennial favourite, the big box from the Charlie gift-set Roger gave her the Christmas before he died.

  It would take Maggie days to wrap them up, co-ordinating papers and ribbons and bows, twisting mini-wreaths of silk flowers and tinsel and fir cones. Each year, there’d be a different theme.

  It was American Rustic in ’81. Pale blue and bright red. Stone-washed denim and gingham rosettes, striped candy canes knotted into red-ribbon bows. She baked gingerbread stars for gift tags. She even employed my idle fingers — usually trusted only to hold down the centres of bows — to thread never-ending bowls of popcorn into chains, which she looped around our perfectly symmetrical, no-mess plastic tree.

  It was some of her very best work. With all the boxes arranged, just so, at the foot of the matching blue-and-red tree, our Christmas really did look every bit as good as the one on the cover of Family Circle.

  ‘Look at all those presents!’ Mrs Cousins would exclaim, every year. Then she’d widen her eyes at me. ‘You lucky girl. You must be so excited.’ And to Maggie, with only the barest hint of reprimand, ‘Really, dear, I don’t know where you find the time.’

  It was a valid point, in retrospect — especially that summer. Because in December 1981, despite appearances, Invercargill’s best Christmas tree was not my mother’s only project. Maggie was trying to whip up something else as well — a saviour, you might say. A Christmas miracle. The redeemer of our genes.

  She had no idea what form this saintly Harding might take. Certainly, the raw materials of their begetting didn’t bode well — those grubby, well-used strands of Hardynge DNA would have to be transcended. But Maggie had thought of somewhere to start looking — in the nursery at 30 Fournier Street. Innocence, surely, was a good place to begin. And what could be more innocent than Baby Babs — Joshua’s daughter, Harry’s aunt — on Christmas Eve, quiet in her cradle? Like Great-aunt Nora before her, Maggie decided to wake Babs up, and see what she turned into.

  She didn’t have to. She could have left well enough alone, let sleeping Hardings lie. As could I, three decades later.

  I could stop my story right here, get up and make a cup of tea, turn the telly on instead. Find some old sitcom or reality show to fill up the dark, the flickering brotherhood of late-night TV, sleepless on sofas everywhere, laughing and crying together at the ludicrousness of human nature. I could watch an old film. A classic movie in black and white, the sort where men in narrow three-button suits clench their jaws and wave goodbye, take their secrets to the grave.

  I’m not going to, of course. We both know that. I’m going to pour myself another wine and tell you about Babs. I said I would, didn’t I? And it doesn’t do to break a promise.

  I’m going to summon up my great-aunt. I know perfectly well I should take a leaf out of Grandpa William’s book, keep my hands in my pockets, my luggage shut. But Babs makes such a racket, banging around in there, demanding to be let out of my head.

  Or is she trying to get in? It’s hard to tell. The territory looks much the same, either way — the interior of her skull and mine are built to the same pattern.

  She’d have made a good salesperson, Babs. My opportunistic aunt, the good clever girl who listened and never complained, and always made the most of whatever she was given.

  Babs

  ONE

  On Christmas Day 1805, secure on the second floor of 30 Fournier Street, my great-great-great-great-aunt Babs is delighted to receive an orange. She turns it round and round, so bright on this dull December morning, feels the bumps of its skin between her hands.

  On Boxing Day, she takes her orange out visiting. She plans to show it to her Aunt Marguerite at Mr Warburton’s house in Hoxton. But Marguerite, shivering in her fireless room, has an odd look about the eyes today, and Babs keeps the present in her pocket.

  On their way out, the Hardings call on Dr Schöneberg in his office.

  ‘Fröhliche Weihnachten!’ he cries, removing his calipers from the shaven skull of an elderly inmate. ‘Merry Christmas! Come in, come in!’

  ‘What are you doing to that man?’

  ‘Hush, Babs,’ hisses her mother.

  ‘It is Dr Gall’s new science from Germany. The skull’ — Schöneberg places both hands on the old man’s head — ‘grows around the brain, yes? So we can feel, from the shapes of the cranial bone — yes? — in which parts of the brain there is the abnormality. Where is the madness.’

  Babs stares at Schöneberg’s fingers.

  ‘Here, for example, I palpate a malformed ninth faculty. This, this, bump — yes? — covers an excessively large acquisitive organ, causing Robson here to pick up that which does not belong to him and, while his other faculties do not attend, to place it in his pocket.’

  Babs can almost feel it herself, the knobbly, stubbly, tattle-tale skull, the old man’s skin beneath her hands. Almost, but not quite.

  ‘Kneel down,’ she says to the friendless boy digging over the kitchen garden at 30 Fournier Street. ‘I want to feel your head.’

  ‘You what, miss?’

  ‘Do it, or there’ll be trouble.’

  Obediently, he lowers himself to the path.

  ‘All I can feel is your hair,’ Babs complains. It’s thick and smooth as grease under her fingers. ‘We’ll have to shave it off.’

  The boy’s head jerks up in alarm. ‘No, miss!’

  Babs studies the shape of his forehead.

  ‘I’ll give you an orange,’ she says.

  Twenty-seven years later, at Marguerite’s post-mortem, Babs has a much better grasp of what she’s looking at. A copy of Dr Gall’s great work rests on her desk at home, next to a specially commissioned china bust on which the faculties of the mind are demarcated.

  She no longer borrows her brother’s clothes to attend anatomy lectures (George having put on a pound or two by now, and moved to Cloudesley Square), but has had a suit of her own made up by a discreet young Jew in Fashion Street. Over the years, she has observed — albeit from the back row, where the light is dimmest — a number of organs of the mind, both in toto and in section.

  On this occasion, however, Babs doesn’t need her disguise. Dr Chadstow would have consented to dissect Marguerite in front of the entire readership of the Lady, if required, so eager was he to receive the gift of a fresh body, untainted by the cholera pit, free of tar and lime.

  Her aunt’s brain, it surprises no one present to learn, is somewhat on the light side — it weighs in at just forty-five ounces. The cerebellum and spinal cord are atrophied, explaining the worsening bouts of palsy that had so inconvenienced Marguerite’s keepers. Otherwise, the organ reveals no secrets not long ago betrayed to Dr Schöneberg’s hands. A pronounced area of Destructiveness; under-developed Benevolence, Causality and Caution.

  On her way home, Babs calls at Cloudesley Square. Her sister-in-law, Maria, rings the bell for tea; little Harry, eager t
o show off his latest specimen, drags his aunt up to the nursery before the servant has chance to comply.

  ‘A large blue.’ Babs turns the jar, admires the iridescent wings that blink open and shut. ‘You should kill it quickly, Harry, before it damages itself. You don’t want it to get broken.’

  Harry shifts from foot to foot, and shakes his head. ‘I’m timing it,’ he explains, ‘with Mr Fortescue’s watch. We’ve worked out the volume of oxygen in the jar. When we divide that by the time it takes to die, we’ll know how much air a butterfly breathes a minute.’

  ‘Clever boy.’

  ‘Feel my head again.’

  ‘You have the brain of a scientist,’ Babs reassures him, pushing her fingers through his strawberry curls. ‘You will grow up to discover brilliant things. And …’ — she taps him affectionately under the chin — ‘you’re going to make someone a fine husband.’

  He blushes. ‘It’s certain, now?’

  ‘Oh yes. The cranial bone has taken its final form. The foundations of character don’t change.’ She smiles. ‘That’s the beauty of science, Harry. We deal in certainties.’

  Back at Fournier Street, Babs closes the front door on a pungent August evening. She takes her anti-cholera galoshes off and makes her way as quietly as she can up the stairs and past her father’s door. Behind it, there is a moan and a crash, and an unmistakeable odour wafts out onto the landing. Babs shudders and hurries on.

  ‘Keep still, sir,’ urges Mrs Peters’ voice, inside. ‘Don’t mess about in it, now. Lord love you, sir, you’re getting it everywhere.’

  In her own room, Babs turns the key in the lock, undresses without aid and begins to prepare for her evening engagement. She unpins her long red plait and puts it away in the drawer. (It’s all her own — the requirements of science aside, Babs is very fond of her hair.) She brushes out her bangs, oils back her remaining curls and ties them low on her neck with a black band.

  Next, she works her wiry calves into gentlemen’s drawers. Uncorseted, her square-cut body is not so very unlike a man’s. Gloves hide her hands. False whiskers mask the line of her jaw. Her waistcoat is padded below the breast, her coat and trousers loosely cut, and once she reaches the street, her cloak will cover all.

  In a little under an hour, her toilette is complete, and at five to eight, the gentleman known to the district as Mr Jones leaves 30 Fournier Street by means of its well-grown fig tree.

  Babs doesn’t have far to go — just down the street to the Weaver’s Arms — but even so, she is propositioned twice before she gets there.

  ‘Not tonight,’ she tells evil-smelling old Annie Fynch.

  The child in the market doorway is new; she lifts his chin to the street lamp, and after a second’s examination, offers him a shilling if he will call on Miss Harding at Fournier Street tomorrow, after the seventh bell.

  Wrexsie is waiting for her — or rather, for Jones — at the bar. He has a film of sweat on his upper lip and a glassy look to his eyes. Babs sighs. As a drunk, the man is more tiresome than most. She buys him another pint, and herself an unwatered glass of disinfecting brandy.

  ‘Have you brought him?’

  ‘I’ve asked him,’ says Wrexsie, ‘if that’s what you mean. I never said as I was going to bring him nowhere.’ He draws his lip up over an ill-set tangle of teeth, like a ferret scenting blood, and stretching his neck, surveys the bar.

  Babs looks him up and down as only the sober can. ‘I hope you’re not wasting my time.’

  ‘He said he’d be here. Keep your lid on, mate. Cross Tony’s a man of his word.’

  She scans the happy crowd of drinkers. There’s many a skull my great-aunt knows in the Weaver’s Arms tonight, though few indeed belong to members of the once respectable trade for which the inn was named.

  ‘Evening, Wrexsie, Mr Jones. Out for some fun tonight, then?’

  ‘Rigby.’ Babs nods to a dealer in second-hand lace with the flattest brain pan she has ever measured.

  ‘All right, Riggers?’ Wrexsie enquires jovially.

  ‘Better off for another pint, mate. Know what I mean?’

  ‘You see that undertaker I told you about over at Bow?’

  ‘Buy a girl a glass of gin, sir?’ interrupts a voice at Babs’ left shoulder.

  ‘Not now, love,’ says another. ‘We got business.’

  Babs turns. Not two feet from her face is a bull-necked man with a recently broken nose, one black scab marking the new location of its bridge, and another beside it on his cheekbone. A knife scar running from brow to ear pleats the corner of his right eye, which, unlike the left, is grey as the Thames.

  ‘Jones. I got that right, ain’t I? You wanted to meet me.’

  Babs shifts her weight to her back foot. Meeting the gaze of those mismatched eyes, she feels a little dizzy, as if forced to focus, at this close range, on the faces of two different men.

  (Much later, when she is shaving his skull, her razor scraping delicately over the ridge of bone that divides its hemispheres, this sense of duality will return to her. Then, the schism is not so much in her subject’s head as in the room itself — as if two Fournier Streets and their occupants exist, each quite independent of the other.)

  ‘Cross Tony,’ she says to him now, at the bar of the Weaver’s Arms.

  He looks at her very seriously. ‘They don’t call me that,’ he says. ‘Not twice. My name is Anthony Boucher.’

  The next morning, even as she palpates the skull of a pickpocket’s stall in Newgate Prison, Anthony Boucher is still on Babs’ mind. He is everything Wrexsie promised her. A distillation of the residuum, bred blood and bone of the criminal classes. Three generations before him swinging from Tyburn Tree. His father and two uncles continuing the family tradition here at Newgate, and intercession on behalf of his unborn self the only thing to save his mother’s neck. A pure-blooded prince of the kleptocracy. A man born into a prison cell.

  His fabled left hand — the same that rested, briefly, upon her sleeve — has shattered jaws and broken heads for profit and diversion. He is a robber, of course. A scampsman, a padder, a low toby man. He has a way of punching a gentleman in the back that renders his prey immobile for half an hour. Some say he killed a man, once. Others make the tally higher.

  He is her perfect specimen. Free and whole, untouched — as yet — by the spoiling hands of the law.

  Thinking of the men he has robbed, or worse, Babs feels an odd little flutter, like the draught of a pigeon’s wing on the nape of her neck (a quiver her Aunt Marguerite might recognise, but she herself does not). She imagines his victims felled to the street, grown men made helpless as little friendless boys, all their power stolen away. Their last sight in this world, perhaps, Anthony Boucher’s eyes.

  TWO

  I have to admire Babs’ drive. These days, I’m finding it hard to get off the sofa myself. Sometimes the only thing that drags me upstairs at night is the thought of Jake catching me here in the morning, haggard and unmade-up in yesterday’s clothes. That, and the bloody dog, who can’t always be ignored.

  But I look across a hundred and eighty years, and there she is, my great-great-great-great-aunt, writing up her busy amateur observations with trainspotting zeal. She doesn’t need money, can’t expect fame. What is she hoping will come of all this? I’m buggered if I know.

  It’s easy enough for me. When I’ve had enough of myself, watched the sunset until it’s just a blue stain on the dark, I can turn on the TV. If I had to find some other way of slipping my itchy skin, who knows what I might choose?

  Babs can’t pop down the off-licence for a packet of fags and a frozen cheesecake. She can’t turn on a sitcom. And yet I can’t imagine her sitting up alone all night, drinking Joshua’s cellar dry and dwelling on her mad aunt.

  Or on how it feels to be her father, speechless, ataxic and incontinent in the next room. How it felt to be Marguerite. And who will hire the nurse for her when her turn comes. No. I suspect she fills her empty hours with the concre
te and constructive. My Aunt Babs has the measure of her own mind, as well as everyone else’s — I admire that about her, too.

  There was a time, I think, when I was the same. At the centre of my own head, clipboard in hand, directing the heavy machinery in a hi-viz vest and a hard hat. But I’m losing it now. All that control. I can’t always make my brain do as it should.

  A first symptom, perhaps, of dying anterior horn cells. Spasticity of thought. The siren before the gates begin to shut on the spinal tunnel from muscle to mind.

  Ella looks up at me from her blanket and sighs.

  Have another chardonnay, Janine.

  I think, as I brush my teeth, that perhaps I’ve been too hard on Maggie.

  And much later, listening to an owl hunt and a 747 climb through the night, the distant wail of an ambulance as it makes its way onto the causeway, that I can’t stand the wait any more. This ever-narrowing ledge between past and future. I want to make something happen. Bring it on.

  Perhaps, on one of those hot nineteenth-century August nights, Babs felt it too.

  ‘Ah,’ says Anthony Boucher in the study of 30 Fournier Street, when the butler has closed the door. ‘I see now. That explains it.’

  Babs, of course, ignores this. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Boucher,’ she says briskly. She indicates the low chair between them, in the centre of the room. ‘Please, won’t you sit down?’

  After a moment’s consideration, Boucher crosses the Turkey carpet to stand in front of the fire, from which position he studies Babs languidly, his battered head to one side.

  ‘I thought you were just a molly-boy, the other night. Wrexsie didn’t tell me.’

  ‘If you think we’ve met before, Mr Boucher, you’re mistaken, I assure you.’

  ‘Is that right, love?’

  Babs blushes. ‘Perhaps you mistake me for my cousin, Mr Jones. I’m told there’s a strong resemblance.’