by Edward Carey
‘We’re not supposed to tell new Iremongers, they’re to learn it later.’
‘Then you shan’t have it.’ I raised the spoon to my mouth as if I was going to eat.
‘No, wait! I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.’
I lowered the spoon.
‘It is,’ said the girl, ‘city dirt, London dirt. Collected from dustcarts and haulers and pounded in the kitchens. One spoonful every night-time.’
‘Truly,’ I said, ‘what is it?’
‘City dirt,’ said the girl, offended, ‘what I told you.’
This girl, I thought, shall be no friend of mine, to bait a person who’s just arrived, a person that’s such easy prey, no sport in that. In any case, I wasn’t going to eat that muck. Around the room I saw all those serving Iremongers licking their spoons and their lips.
A bell was rung again, and I was taken by some Iremongers to a dormitory, one of the women’s dormitories. By then I was very tired and hoped that after some rest all might seem better and less strange. It was a peculiar place sure enough, filled with peculiar behaviour, well so what, I thought, people are peculiar. And people with money are at liberty to be as peculiar as they like. And so what, too, if this place was such a long way from anywhere else, people are private are they not, and people with money may be as private as they like. And so what even if it was below ground, and we lived like rabbits in a burrow, and these cellar halls and rooms were very like a warren, so what when I, tomorrow, should go up the stairways and be above the ground. And I must never forget, I told myself, that I was out of the orphanage, I had a job, the food but for that spoonful was good, I had even perhaps something of a future. I lay down, stroked my arm which did ache a bit, but it was all, I told myself, for my own good, and then very soon I was quite asleep.
I dreamt of matchboxes, of the matchbox I had been shown, I dreamt of breaking the seal, of slowly pushing the cardboard drawer open and hearing then that there was something in there, something other than matchsticks, something living, something muttering, something horrible. I woke up frightened. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping, my arm was very stiff. There was whispering in the dormitory, perhaps it was the whispering that had woken me.
‘She hasn’t said much,’ came a voice.
‘But she will, she’ll give it up, she’ll tell us everything. The stories. The news.’
‘She must give it up.’
‘What a thing to keep to yourself.’
‘I cannot believe she’ll be so selfish.’
‘She’s very fresh.’
‘I like her.’
‘I’ll like her if she tells us, not until.’
‘But she does look new, doesn’t she? Very new.’
‘So, so fresh.’
‘But she’s asleep. Totally sleeping. Out and out, we shan’t get nothing tonight.’
‘So then, what do we do?’
‘Tell some history or other.’
‘Piggott’s definitely sleeping?’
‘Think so.’
‘Then I’ll be Grice. My name is Grice W—’
‘You were Grice Wivvin last week.’
‘It’s not her turn, it’s mine, and I don’t want to be Grice, I want to be Helun Parsinn. My name is Helun and I was born –’
‘No! Not you and not Helun, it’s me and I’m going to be Oldrey Inkplott. Hello, this is little Oldrey, I am from London –’
‘How about being her?’
‘Who, the new Iremonger?’
‘Yes, why not? I’m sick of the old stories.’
‘Yes! Her! But . . . but we don’t know her story.’
‘Guess it. Guess it. Let us have a new history!’
‘What was her name, her name! Does anyone remember it?’
‘I do. I do!’
‘Say then. Go on.’
‘It was . . . oh it was . . . ah it was . . . Lossy Permit.’
‘Oh, Lossy! Lossy Permit!’
‘My name is Lossy Permit.’
‘Where are you from, Lossy? Oh, Lossy, do tell us.’
‘I am Lungdon born and bred, I am from Spittingfeels.’
‘I, Lossy Permit, grew up in a mansion smelling of soap.’
‘I, Lossy, am from the circus – my mother had a beard and my father was as tall as a house.’
I sat up then, I’d have no more of their nonsense. I cleared my throat and said, ‘I have thick red hair and a round face and a nose that points upwards. My eyes are green with flecks in them, but that’s not the only place I’m dotted. There’s punctuation all over me. I’m freckled and spotted and moled and have one or two corns on my feet. My teeth are not quite white. One tooth is crooked. One of my nostrils is slightly bigger than the other. I chew my fingernails. My name is Lucy Pennant.’
‘Oh yes, oh yes please. Can you tell us?’
‘Tell us, do please, your history.’
And I told them. I remembered much more back then.
I told them and I told them and still they were not happy, they wanted to hear it again. Everything about Filching and Lambeth, the Old Kent Road. One girl just wanted to hear about the kite I once had made of an old straw hat, a crunched boater, blown from the heaps into our courtyard. And from that I must tell them about my old doll (made of bits of piping) and how I played in the dirt park, and my friends at school, and the building I lived in and everyone who lived there and how my parents suddenly stopped, and all the rubber suits of men and women who worked in the heaps.
‘We have rubber suits when we go out here too,’ one of them told me.
‘And anchors,’ said another, ‘did you have anchors?’
‘So that we can be pulled back in if need be.’
‘But sometimes no matter how hard the rope is pulled –’
‘Stop it!’ one of them called. ‘That’s not for now. We’re talking of the new girl.’
‘How often do you get to go out into Filching?’ I asked. ‘Into London?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How often do you leave the house?’
‘Leave it? To go out in the heaps do you mean?’
‘No, no, I mean for a break, go out into the city, see London, stretch your legs.’
‘Oh, we don’t go out.’
‘Talk sense,’ I said.
‘We stop here, why would we go out into London?’
‘Well, I’ll be going out, after a bit,’ I said, ‘when I’ve found my legs. A bit of a wander. See my friends.’
‘Friends!’ cried one. ‘How lovely!’
‘You were saying, new Iremonger, about your home.’
‘Do tell us please.’
And I told them. One quiet person liked most of all the end of my story, the part when I had arrived in Iremonger Park, when the servants had come to me and took my things, she liked that part best because she was in it.
‘I am in your story,’ she told me very quietly, ‘I am a part of it. To think of it, there I am, right at the end and that’s good, isn’t it? Me, I found my way into a history!’
Asked of her own history she couldn’t remember it. Others could drag out very little things, such as having their hands slapped with a ruler, or being picked up, or a balloon popping, or a man with a beard, or a dress, or someone holding their hands, or being read to. The younger Iremongers in the dormitory could remember more, but many of these had been born in the house and talked of nothing else but playing in the cinder box, but one or two tried very hard and could almost remember a mother or a father, but these were shadows of parents, they were only hats or dresses trying to be parents, an occasional floating moustache, a necklace. They were parents made of faint smells and whispers.
There were two old women Iremongers, dressed in the same white nightdress as everyone else, their creased and bent bodies put into the same cloth as the young lively ones. These women did not join in the excitement, they did not listen to my history even though one of the girls went over to their beds to whisper some of it to them, but th
e old women shifted over turning their backs, they closed their eyes and put their prunish hands to their large ears and would have none of it. One of them kept telling us to pipe down, even threatening to call out for Mrs Piggott.
There was a girl too, like the old women, who did not come out to see me. She was a little thing with a great nose that looked as if it should’ve been someone else’s.
‘And who’s that one?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry about her. You mustn’t let her upset you.’
They told me that before I came she had been the last new Iremonger to arrive here, and that they had used to go to her bed every night and listen to her stories, but now, she was left alone, she was no longer news.
‘Come along,’ I called to her, ‘I’d like to hear your story.’
She put her head and her nose beneath the covers and it did not come out again until morning.
‘Your birth object is a matchbox,’ said a girl beside me and with great pride as if she was bursting to tell me a secret though I had told her, and others talked of seeing it not half an hour before.
‘What’s all this fuss,’ I asked, ‘about a matchbox?’
‘They’re very important, birth objects are.’
‘They are, I didn’t feel myself till I had my birth object.’
‘And what is it,’ I asked, ‘that it’s so important?’
‘’Tis a handbell.’
‘So much fuss about a handbell,’ I said.
‘Well mine,’ said another, ‘is a ladle.’
‘And mine is a dustpan.’
‘Mine a clothes brush.’
‘Mine an iron.’
‘Mine a needle.’
‘Mine poultry shears.’
‘They’re all there in her sitting room and Mrs Smith has the keys. And we’re allowed to see them once a week.’
‘Wonderful day!’
‘Upstairs they keep their objects with them, they’re always with them. But not down here, down here Mrs Piggott looks after them.’
‘But Madam Rosamud’s lost her object just this morning. And they’ve searched the whole house but still it’s not been found.’
‘A door handle it is.’
‘A lovely brass one.’
‘Then why not just give her another?’ I said.
‘Oh, it wouldn’t be the same.’
‘It wouldn’t be her door handle at all.’
‘It was a lovely thing, I’ve seen it myself. Once, there being a shortage, I was upstairs and allowed to be a body servant for her in her rooms.’
‘A body servant?’ I asked.
‘A body servant is an Iremonger from below who is allowed to dress them above us, to wait on their bodies. It’s a very privileged thing. No one in this dormitory is a body servant, body servants each have their own room.’
‘With chamber pot.’
‘Yes, while we share ours.’
‘But now we are especially not allowed to be in the presence of upstairs Iremongers, not since Madam Rosamud’s door handle went walkabout.’
‘They’ve looked everywhere. Mr Sturridge’s very nervy about it all, everyone’s unhappy. We’d all really love to find the handle, but no one knows where it’s got to. They’ve searched our rooms thoroughly, gone through the mattresses, turned out our pockets, everything, lord knows we’ve encouraged it too, but it’s not anywhere to be found. It’s such a small thing and the house so big.’
‘Do you know what Mrs Piggott’s birth object is?’ I asked.
‘Mrs Piggott’s is a corset, Mr Sturridge’s a ship’s lantern and Mr Briggs’s a shoehorn.’
‘Mr Groom’s is a pair of sugar cutters and Mrs Groom’s a jelly mould. Mrs Smith’s is a key, one key among all those others. I wonder what happened if you found it, I wonder if then you could unlock Mrs Smith!’
‘Think of what would come tumbling out.’
‘I shouldn’t like that at all.’
‘Oooh! Look out, Iremonger, you’re being eaten to death!’
Everyone then in a terrible panic started swiping at their nightdresses. I looked down at my own bare legs, there were insects climbing all around them. I had felt something before but in the darkness I presumed it was the gentle touching of some Iremonger’s fingers, because they had touched and petted me so, but now there was a whining and buzzing about my ears and small things crawling on me.
‘What are they?’ I cried. ‘Get them away!’
‘She’s been bit.’
‘Bit bad.’
‘All that new blood. They do like that.’
‘We’d better get to our own beds now. Pull the netting over you, Iremonger, or you’ll be so red and swelled up tomorrow you shan’t do anything but moan and weep.’
‘And scratch. Scratch and scratch.’
As we all ran back to our beds I watched our shadows dancing in the candlelight, but then I saw it wasn’t our shadows moving but great congregations of insects scattering about the floor, hurriedly fleeing.
‘Thank you for telling us your story, Lossy Iremonger.’
‘Lucy Pennant.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll tell it to you whenever you like,’ I said.
‘Will you?’
‘Will you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘We’d love that.’
‘I shall never forget it,’ I said.
‘That’s the spirit,’ someone called.
‘Everyone says that at first, but they always do in the end.’
‘Maybe she won’t.’
Somehow, at some point, though my legs were scratched and bleeding a little, and my arm so stiff, I found more sleep.
The next morning my arm still ached, one of the Iremongers looked at the spot where Mrs Piggott had poked that thing into me and said I was doing well, that there was barely any mark to speak of. In truth, it did not worry me so much as the bites on my leg. After breakfast, when we lined up for inspection, I heard the steam engine howling, heading back towards London, back to everything I knew. My duties were described to me, I was to clean certain of the fireplaces in the upstairs of the house. This I learnt was a privileged position, far better than being sent out into the heaps. They tried me out on the below-stairs fireplaces to begin with, so that I might get the hang of them before I was sent upstairs in the night-time when the family had gone to bed. They watched over me and made many comments. I had a wire brush and buckets and shovels and a hunk of lead to scrub the grates with. I had brushes and must carry with me also stacks of old London newspapers that I must roll into balls and fill the fireplace with after I’d cleaned it and then I must put some sticks on top of the paper and a few pieces of coal on top of the sticks. They were very particular about how it was to be done. Any part-burnt bits of coal were to be put back on the fire to be used another night, any large cinders were to go in one metal bucket, and the remainder of the ash was to be sifted into the largest bucket to be collected downstairs in the ashroom, where all the ash of the house was gathered up. It was a great sooty place and all who worked in it were smudged and begrimed, and coughed mightily, and had weeping eyes, and black streaks beneath their noses, but were cheerful and thankful to be in the house. Better to be inside, they said, than out beyond in the heaps.
I was so busy with my learning, which took up most of my first morning there, and was always timed: ‘You could be faster,’ the underbutler Mr Briggs insisted, ‘Iremonger, faster still,’ so that there were many moments when I forgot myself and became only one of the people who laid the fireplaces and no one else, and an hour might pass before I remembered who I was before I came to Iremonger Park and that I once had a father and mother. When I worked, more and more, I found myself thinking of that matchbox in Mrs Piggott’s room. I found myself yearning for it. Such a fuss over a matchbox, I told myself, pull yourself together. When I go upstairs, I told myself, into the greater part of the house, I shall be alone then and then I shall whis
per to myself everything about me, over and over again, and so doing keep myself to myself and not let me go. I shall keep my brain busy, I must stray off their rules a bit, I shall go about exploring, I shall go places I am not supposed to, I shall creep into rooms, I shall do all that. I am Lucy Pennant, that’s who I am and there’s no call to fuss over matchboxes.
At lunchtime, towards the end of the meal, Mr Briggs came up to me, he had kept his eye on me all day, and he asked me why I wasn’t having my spoonful.
‘City dirt, is it, sir?’ I said. ‘I don’t really want it.’
‘City dirt?’ he repeated. ‘Who said that? It’s sugar and spices, expensive stuff that we’re very privileged to have, it’ll keep you strong and stop you from getting ill, but tastes something marvellous. Try it.’
‘No thank you, sir,’ I said, ‘rather not.’
‘Try it,’ he said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.
‘Try it now, Iremonger, or I shall be forced to get someone to really encourage you. It’s very important you eat it, it’ll keep you well.’
‘Really, sir, I don’t want it.’
‘Want? Want? What have you to do with want? You’re a serving Iremonger, it’s them upstairs that can have wants. Take a bite now or I shall have to shove it in your mouth myself, and I’ll ram it down and I wouldn’t want to hurt but I’m not always so exacting. Just a taste,’ he said, ‘now.’
And so I raised the thing to my mouth and took the tiniest crumb of it into my mouth. And it was sweet and warming somehow. And felt, a little, like kindness.
‘Swallow,’ he said.
And I did, and I felt happier then than I had in a long while.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’
‘I like it,’ I said.
‘I knew you would,’ he said, grinning, ‘I just knew it!’
‘I do like it,’ I said, eating the rest.
‘Course you do,’ he said, ‘what’s not to like?’
After an afternoon and an evening still practising firegrates, keeping at it until the train hollered back from London, there was a break for supper. I sat beside the girl in our dormitory who’d refused to listen to my story, the one with the nose, I forced a place on the bench beside her.
