Theatrical Needs! a red sign flashes. The Big Emporium! In the field by the old gasworks a nettle stung her leg, and it didn’t matter, she hardly felt it. The only guilt is that she permitted her baby to be taken from her: she shouldn’t have done that, but there you are. She looks out now from where she is, and does not brood: what’s done is done. She does not brood on her one-time lover’s treachery. She walked away from a man who murdered girls. She was allowed to walk away: that is what she dwells upon.
When she reaches the river she settles on a seat that is pleasant in the autumn warmth. By chance her eyes pass over her clothes and over her hands and feet, the shoes she found in a disposal bin, the skirt a woman gave her. Her appearance, or the tale it tells, doesn’t interest her. The Little Sisters of Africa come into her mind, their white habits damp in unhealthy jungle heat. Pray for our Little Sisters, Sister Francis Xavier enjoined. Kneel with us in the Gathering House, Miss Calligary begged, trudging from door to door. St Ursula stood steadfast by the helm, consoling her girl-companions when the vessel was tossed about on the waves. The Little Sisters nursed infants who were misshapen, famine infants whose bones came through their skin. See those brightly coloured birds! Miss Calligary urged. Smell the fragrance of those flowers! Do the girls who died and were never missed stroll now among the fragrant flowers, and listen to the birdsong? Do they keep company with St Ursula, who travelled to escape a marriage bed, and the Little Sisters who left their towns and townlands? Do those faceless girls occupy the heaven the novice spoke of, and touch the real fingers of the Holy Virgin? Elsie Covington and Beth. Sharon and Gaye. Jakki and Bobbi. Chosen for death because no one would know when they were there no longer. What trouble made victims of them? Did they guess their fate a moment before it came? Her mourning is to wonder.
She roots in one of her bags and finds the newspaper pages she picked up. Tommy Griffiths up, Lone Ranger has won at five to four; an Olympian champion is in disgrace; a football manager has retired. She reads for a moment, then Tapper’s back again. Well, there’s a sight: the fountains and the four black lions, the first time she ever saw them. Frigging marvellous, Tapper said, the empire in its frigging day, Charles James Napier on a pedestal on account he had a way with soldiers. They didn’t put John Reginald Christie on no pedestal, a different bag of tricks on account he had a way with women. That’s where they run him in, Tapper said, pointing on the bridge. That’s where he ate his last in freedom, bacon and cabbage, the Lacy Dining Rooms. That’s where that woman ran a nightclub, the one that shot a racing driver. This city’s full of sights. All human life.
Redland Sells Three Steetley Offshoots, the business pages say. U.S. Currency Holds Key. Fancy a blow by the briny? Tapper said and they went down by train, tickets he found in a handbag. Take a gander at that, he said, when two men in teddy-bear coats got out of a polished car and held the doors for two women. Excuse me, sir, Tapper said on the promenade, the sea dirty green beneath the foam, and the man said get off. No offence, another man said in a bar the time there were wrestlers on the television. No offence, but I think you picked up my fags.
Tall as a telegraph pole, Tapper. Leaning down to tap the punters’ shoulders; part of the game. Alaska’s the place, he said, then again Johore Bahru. But more like Tapper’s gone inside. That’s Tapper all over: he said it himself, and maybe Lena said it too, you can almost hear her. You lose touch with a person who’s in and out; only a week it was she knew Tapper, longer than Lena and George that time, longer than Kev and the woman with one arm.
The sun is warm now, the water of the river undisturbed. Seagulls teeter on the parapet in front of her, boats go by. The line of trees that breaks the monotony of the pavement is laden with leaves in shades of russet. Within her view, figures stride purposefully on a distant bridge, figures in miniature, creatures that could be unreal. One seagull eyes her, expecting crumbs, the others fly away. Somewhere a voice is loud on a megaphone. A klaxon sounds on the river.
She isn’t hungry. It will be a few hours before she begins to feel hungry and then there’ll be the throwaway stuff in the bins. The sky is azure, evenly blue, hardly faded at the edges at all. She moves a hand back and forth on a slat of the seat she’s sitting on, her fingers caressing the smooth timber, the texture different where the paint has worn away, streaks of wood-grain raised. Died with others, 1938, was carved on another seat, and George said he’d sent a card to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and put in the rhyme he knew, greater are none beneath the sun than oak or ash or thorn. Carmel with a heart round it someone carved on a tree in the Square, Packy Egan or Lomasney, Rose thought it was. Rose might be Mrs Logan now, in a flashy house on the Mountrath road. Stranger things happen.
The gap left where a tooth was drawn a fortnight ago has lost its soreness. She feels it with her tongue, pressing the tip of her tongue into the cavity, recalling the aching there has been. ‘There’s a woman dentist’ll fix you up.’ It was the Welshman, Davo, who said that, and they went along together because he knew the way. Not many would bother with your toothache, Davo said; not many would think toothache would occur in a derelict’s mouth. ‘Always come back,’ the woman dentist said. ‘Don’t be in pain.’
Felicia folds the Sport and Business section several times, and slides it back into one of her bags. ‘OK?’ the driver of a lorry carrying furnaces asked, and she said yes because it was only fair in return for a lift of two hundred miles, all the payment she could offer, and she had to go back. It took a night and part of a morning, three different lorries and a van, but she had to do it: she couldn’t not go back to Duke of Wellington Road. She had to know, and then she did: the estate agent’s board outside the house, and someone told her. Then a voice called out when later she was resting on a public seat. ‘Child,’ Miss Calligary cried, and there were tears of anguish on Miss Calligary’s cheeks while forgiveness was begged and the dead man vilified.
Felicia takes off her headscarf and opens her coat to the sun. The seagull is motionless on the parapet, its beady observation of her continuing. A breeze rattles the pavement trees and the first tired leaves of another September loosen. One floats down softly, slowly descending until she reaches out and catches it on her palm. For minutes she gazes at it, not yet withered, taken before its time; and then her thoughts begin again.
Wretched, awful man, poor mockery of a human creature, with his pebble spectacles and the tiny hands that didn’t match the rest of him, his executioner’s compulsion. Her living brought his death, but she didn’t say so, listening to him vilified that day; she didn’t say he was more terrible than a man who stole a distressed girl’s money; she didn’t mention murder, for what use would that be, now that he had murdered himself? ‘Please, child, come back to us!’ Miss Calligary cried, but she shook her head, even though she remembered the generosity and the friendliness of the Gathering House when first she arrived there. She shook her head at each repeated invitation, hearing between one plea and the next about the visits made to Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, and how its occupant’s manner had seemed like madness to Miss Marcia Tibbitts, and how there’d been an occasion at a police station after the death occurred, a sergeant who’d been dismissive. In the end, reluctantly, Miss Calligary and Miss Marcia Tibbitts walked away, passing for ever out of her life.
Again her thoughts shift: to a mother collapsed on the kitchen floor, and seaside shells brought back later in kindly compensation; to speckled green bird’s eggs, and John Count’s singing, no sign then of her father’s bitter eyes; to the inflicted wound that answered the ignominy of a husband gone away, and love for a son, as gentle as a cancer. Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been.
Such contemplations, alien to her once, fill Felicia’s day. She seeks no meaning in the thoughts that occur to her, any more than she searches for one in her purposeless journey, or finds a pattern in the muddle of time and people, but still the thoughts are there. Alone, no longer a child, no longer a girl, with the insistence of the grateful she goes from place to place, from street to street, binding her feet up, wet by rain that penetrates her clothes, frozen when there is ice on the gutter puddles. By day the clouds scutter or hardly move, or crowd away the sun in shades of grey, or blackly advance in bunched-up density, like ominous monsters of the sky. They’re there again in wind-blown tails of smoke, in big white bundles soft as down, in scarlet morning streaks. Sometimes all day there is an empty blue, hazy with mist or cleanly bright, backdrop for spindly winter trees, and backdrop again for summer greenery. At night, there is a city’s afterglow. There is a happiness in her solitude at dawn.
The leaf blows from her palm in another soft breeze. The watchful seagull struts the parapet, still hungry for crumbs that are not there. Someone stopped who need not have, and called an ambulance for Dumb Hanna when she lay senseless on the street. The ladies come at night with soup, well-meaning, never forgetting, no matter what the weather. The woman dentist said don’t be in pain. The woman dentist has dedicated her existence to the rotten teeth of derelicts, to derelicts’ odour and filth. Her goodness is a greater mystery than the evil that distorted a man’s every spoken word, his every movement made. You would say it if you could, a new thought is, but sometimes saying isn’t easy.
Idiot gawking, fool tramping nowhere: shreds of half-weary pity are thrown in the direction of a wayside figure, before the hasty glance darts on to something else. There will be other cities, and the streets of other cities, and other roads, Tappers and Georges and Lenas, Kevs and Davos and Dumb Hannas. There will be charity and shelter and mercy and disdain; and always, and everywhere, the chance that separates the living from the dead. Again the same people wander through her thoughts: the saint and the Little Sisters, Elsie Covington and Beth, Sharon and Gaye and Jakki and Bobbi, her mother not aged by a day. Are they really all together among the fragrant flowers, safe and blessed? She might be with them if it had happened; but she reflects, in modest doubt, that the certainty she knows is still what she would choose. She turns her hands so that the sun may catch them differently, and slightly lifts her head to warm the other side of her face.