“I asked you a question.”
She looks up at him. He is something new. Not a nun, not a bad boy, not her father.
“Get outta here. Go on, beat it.”
He shoves her towards the door, Frances stumbles and blurts out, “I’m an entertainer.”
He stops and laughs, hands in his pockets — a mean mirthless laugh, his sharp tongue protruding past his lower lip as he jingles change with one hand. Beside him, big Boutros hasn’t changed his expression — still just looking at her. Maybe going to jump me and won’t give me no quarter neither, won’t take no. Frances looks around, but there’s nowhere to run. The dumb giant is planted between her and the door, why didn’t she leave when the greasy little man told her to? Frances wants suddenly to high-tail it home to Lily and Mercedes.
“What’s your name, kid?”
Frances says, “I have to go now. Sorry to bother you.”
The little man gestures to her to “come here”. Frances walks slowly back to him. He snatches the bottle from her hand. Everything about him is a coiled spring ready to pop you in the eye. Frances doesn’t see him move, she’s just suddenly sitting hard on her tailbone on one of the benches.
“Please, mister, I just want to go home.”
“Come on, sweetheart, what’s your name?”
Frances doesn’t reply. He grips her chin between thumb and forefinger — she realizes he’s stronger than he looks — he shakes her head till her neck burns. She starts to relax.
“You gonna be nice, now? Hey? You gonna answer me?”
This isn’t so hard after all. “Fuck off,” she says.
He seizes a fistful of her hair and yanks her back to her feet. Frances is elated at the power of the word, unleashed here for the first time on a grown-up. She laughs at him and spits, “Who do you think I am, look at the bottle, stupid.”
He smacks her efficiently, one eye already on the label. He examines it, lips still parted and curled. He looks back at her and shakes his head slowly. Frances straightens her beret. The man tosses the bottle to Boutros without looking and asks her, “He know you’re here?”
“No. But he will.”
“Bullshit.”
Frances just shrugs.
He repeats, “Bullshit, you tell him, he’ll kill you —”
“He’ll kill you second. You touched me.” She puts her chin up and looks down her nose. “Daddy wouldn’t like that.”
The man considers this. Then he says, “Which one are you?”
“Frances.”
He narrows his eyes. “What do you want, Frances?”
“A job.”
He starts to laugh again but Frances just looks him steady in the eye. He shuts up and asks, “What can you do?”
“I can dance. I can sing and play piano.”
He looks her up and down. “What else?”
She twists her mouth into a sneer she hopes is hard as nails. “I can do anything.”
He gives a short chuckle. Then another, and nods. “You’re all right, Frances.” Without taking his eyes off her, he says to Boutros, “Say hello to your cousin, b’y.” Frances looks up at Boutros. Concrete with eyeballs. She turns back to the small man. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m Jameel. I’m your uncle, doll.”
That’s when Frances sees, between yellow-grey curtains in the dusk of a rear doorway, a puffy woman staring at her in a way that shocks her. Only people who know me really well hate me like that. Who can she be? Then, with a sickening half-turn of her stomach, Frances identifies the other side of a coin she knew and loved so well.
“Camille, come here and meet your niece, dear,” says Jameel.
But Camille just turns and disappears into the back room. Frances hears her slow heavy foot up the stairs. It’s too horrible. Not these men, not the brown sputum in the cans, the butts on the floor, the stench of liquor and puke — but the fact that that hateful woman is Mumma’s sister.
The following Saturday, without waiting for James to leave on his midnight rounds, Frances gets out of bed, puts on her Guide uniform, ties two sheets together, knots them and fastens one end to the radiator. She climbs out the window and rappels down the side of the house. Lily reels the ladder back in once Frances has landed safely. Lily will sleep fitfully till just before dawn in the expectation of hearing a cinder against the windowpane. In helping Frances, she has chosen the lesser of two evils: even though it’s terrible not to know where Frances will spend the long night, it is more terrible still to picture what Frances’s face will look like if Daddy catches her. “Please dear God, please let Ambrose look after Frances.”
Ain’t she sweet? She’s a’ walkin down the street.
Now I ask you very confidentially, ain’t she sweet?
Well-off people purchase liquor discreetly and consume it in a civilized manner at home. Ordinary people pass the jar in a convivial kitchen. Loose pegs and young trouble-seekers come to Jameel’s blind pig in the Pier to fight, play cards and pass out. Miners, merchant seamen and steelworkers, some as sweet and others as sour as soldiers. A few genuine formaldehyde drunks, the odd alienated contemplative just passing through, a vet with no visible injuries. No music — no one even cranks the old player-piano. This place is not sufficiently jovial to inspire more than a caterwauling chorus at closing time. The clientele are white with the exception of one or two of the American sailors. Certainly no one is here from The Coke Ovens itself. There are no women. There are no tourists — this isn’t Harlem. No slumming scions. Frances is the only fallen princess to have crossed the threshold. Her aunt Camille doesn’t count because she is not here voluntarily. She stays upstairs until it’s time to come down and empty the spittoons and swab the piss from the doorstep.
Frances arrives outside the steel door, takes a last breath of coke-oven air and enters the dim roar of the speak, passing under Boutros’s arm as if it were a bridge. The air is palpable, not just with smoke but with the dark mass of male voices and limbs, work-soiled clothes, the smell of axle grease, sulphur and sweat. A shifting, pitching anchorage of hard dirty hulls in the night, and Frances swims among them without so much as a paddle or a spar. What would be more frightening? To be noticed and netted? Or accidentally crushed? She finds Jameel and gets up the nerve to order a drink in what she hopes is the voice of experience, impatient for her first real taste of sin. Jameel tells her to forget it and get to work.
She looks about. Work…. No stage. No footlights. Certainly no hushed turning of heads at her approach to the piano. Where to begin? Frances wishes for a fairy godmother to swathe her in ostrich feathers; in breasts, hips, lips and lipstick — a husky contralto which she imagines to be Louise Brooks’s voice. No such luck. Five foot nothing, flat as two bumps on an ironing board, hips like chopsticks — at sixteen Frances is as grown as she’ll ever be. She stands before the piano since there’s no stool. It’s missing a few teeth, the rest are edged in decay, still others are intact but silent. Its pocked and yellowed music-rolls date from a long-dead turn-of-the-century parlour.
Frances turns to the indifferent bass throng and feels her knees turning to water. To stop herself running away, she kicks up her heels in the fake tap dance that earned her so many pennies on the docks. No response. Not even a “boo” — she is invisible. A tobacco-streaked wad of mucus lands next to her shoe by chance. She gags briefly, closes her eyes, clenches her fists and wills herself into song, belting at the top of her narrow lungs, “‘Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous? Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous? Mademoiselle from Armentières, she hasn’t been fucked in forty years, inky dinky pa-arlez vou-ous.’” To no avail. What is shocking in the schoolyard passes unnoticed at the speak.