The following evening, when Lily opens her eyes and looks into Mercedes’ praying mouth, it occurs to her for the first time that she must be dreaming, because why has Mercedes got a black tongue?
Lily slept through extreme unction and she slept through the doctor saying no point even amputating the leg now, and was she in the habit of sleep-walking? She slept through Daddy laying his head on her chest and sobbing. She slept through Frances bribing and threatening God, “You bastard, I’ll be good, okay? Just don’t murder her and I won’t smoke any more, okay? I won’t swear, I won’t make my fuckin maniac father mad any more, and I’ll say the rosary ten times a day and be a goddamn nun, okay? Amen.”
But what woke Lily were Mercedes’ whispered prayers.
Lily asks, “How come you’ve got a black tongue, Mercedes?”
Mercedes cries, “Oh thank God — Daddy! Daddy!”
He swerves into the room — “Oh thank God” — and kneels next to Mercedes at Lily’s bedside.
Lily says, “I’m hungry.”
Daddy and Mercedes laugh and hug each other and thank God again. Frances loiters in the doorway and tells God, “There’s no way I’m being a nun out of this.”
Mercedes is careful to avoid the slightest idea of Lily’s miraculous cure being at all connected with her own acts of contrition in the cellar. That would be inviting more of God’s infinite mercy. So she is relieved when Lily offers an explanation of her own.
“Ambrose cured me. He washed me in the creek.”
“Who’s Ambrose?”
“He’s my guardian angel.”
Mercedes tells the priest. He nods but tells her that it is of the greatest importance not to be premature about these things. Rome requires more than an isolated event, while the laity require almost nothing to make a shrine out of a creek and a saint out of a ten-year-old girl. Best to keep quiet and watch for signs.
So Mercedes does. She tries not to dwell on the signs that are suddenly evident in retrospect: Lily’s shrivelled leg — saints are often stricken in childhood. Her pretty face — the mirror of her soul. The tragic circumstances of her birth — poor motherless child. Just imagine if Lily were revealed to have a healing power. Or if she were the instrument of a posthumous miracle by Bernadette at Lourdes. Mercedes does her best to chasten these thoughts, knowing from bitter experience how the Devil masquerades. He is a mocker and a mimic, a dealer in reflections and parallel lines. Just look at all the supposed saints the Church had to burn a few centuries ago. Saints and satanic vessels tend to start out the same way. You have to watch closely to see which force will rush in to claim the highly conductive soul of the candidate — for it is bound to be one or the other. Mercedes knows that if the Devil catches the slightest whiff of ambition on her part, he will come and get Lily.
But since Mercedes can’t help but want Lily to be revealed as a saint, she tries to want it only for Daddy’s sake. The ultimate vindication.
Frances doesn’t need to tell Lily any more Ambrose stories after this because he has become Lily’s story. Frances has finally succeeded in giving him to her. Lily is okay. For now. Frances can get on with other things. Her life.
She raids the Lourdes tin. She puts on her Girl Guide uniform and stows away in the Hupmobile. Once at James’s still, she slides out and hides in the bushes till Leo Taylor’s truck pulls up. She waits till he’s finished loading and has returned to James to get his pay, then she makes a break from the trees to the truck, leaps into the back and disappears behind the crates and barrels.
“Thank you, Mr Piper.”
“All right, Leo. Drive safe.”
Frances pokes her head out between the tarpaulin flaps and watches the Shore Road speed away beneath her. She turns and grins like a dog into the sunny sea wind, and lets her braids fly out behind her.
The truck slows when they reach Sydney and stops in the Coke Ovens section of Whitney Pier. She ducks as Taylor gets out, comes round, and undoes the tarps for his first delivery. When his broad back is turned, she hops out, lightening his load by an additional forty ounces. She waits behind a tar-smelling timber of the C.N. rail bridge until he drives away. Then she walks over to the run-down clapboard house and knocks at a big steel door.
If I should take a notion,
to jump in to the ocean,
t’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, do, do, do….
I swear I won’t call no copper,
if I’m beat up by my Poppa,
t’ain’t nobody’s business if I do….
The roses all have left your cheek….
Saturday, August 31, 1918
Dear Diary,
I don’t know where to begin. I have to get it all down now while it’s fresh. I’m here under my tree in Central Park and we have all afternoon till supper-time. I’ll have to go back a few days because despite all that whining about nothing ever happening, I realize now that tons was happening and it was all leading up to what I have to tell you which is EVERYTHING.
… I have no shame in front of you, Diary, for you are me. You won’t squirm, you can’t be shocked, you know that nothing in love is nasty so I will try to be as free with you as I am in my own thoughts. Lest I forget, let me offer up a sincere orison of thanks for Giles. She is the least curious person on the face of the earth. Without her total lack of vigilance my life could never have got started. If Daddy knew what a lackadaisical gatekeeper she is he would be down here in a second to board me with the nuns. Which reminds me, I’d better write him. Oh but I’m teasing you, aren’t I, Diary. You’re in an agony of anticipation. Be still, open your heart, and I will begin at the beginning and unfold it for you as it unfolded for me….
I’ve watched them fade away and die….
Book 5
DIARY OF A LOST GIRL
Baby Burlesque
A six-inch panel thwacks open and two brown eyes take aim at her beneath a single eyebrow. Frances holds up a bottle of James’s finest. The panel slides closed and after a moment the steel door opens. Standing there is a big man. Wavy black hair, nose like a fist, arms like cannon, would-be olive skin but he obviously doesn’t see much sunlight. Young and, Frances has to figure, dopey. He stares down at her blankly, blocking the inner gloom she is so longing to glimpse.
“Close the friggin door, Boutros, it’s broad fuckin daylight, b’y.”
A small man elbows the younger one aside and, with a glance not at Frances but over her shoulder, grabs her arm. “Get in, get in.”
She’s in.
The interior of the speakeasy lives down to its exterior. It’s the only drab house in The Coke Ovens. Peeling grey paint, boarded windows, you’d have to know what you were looking for to find it because it appears deserted — with the exception of the upper storey, where a few tired petunias and chewed marigolds cling to life in a window box overlooking the slag dump of Dominion Iron and Steel. Above is the train bridge. This is Railway Street.
Frances blinks into the dusty shadows and the room takes shape. Benches line the walls. Wallpaper strips with traces of lords and ladies flap from ceiling corners dingy with nicotine and neglect. On the floor, a genuine brass spittoon awash in brown slime, and several rusty tin cans that serve the same purpose. A pile of cigarette butts has been swept to the centre of the floorboards. A makeshift bar — sheet of scrap metal on two oil drums — bottles and barrels, not a mirror, not a shot glass, no engravings of ships or trains, no regimental photo, no boxing heroes grace the walls. In the far corner stands a scarred player-piano.
Frances looks into the taut sallow face of the small man. His black stubble matches his eyes.
“Who sent you, you’re not selling cookies.” He snickers. Frances feels suddenly ridiculous in her Girl Guide uniform, which she thought was the perfect disguise.
“It’s a costume,” she falters. “I’m a….”
“You’re a what?”
She can’t answer. Her eyebrows quiver. She’s mad at herself — baby. Sooky baby, Frances. Sh
e bites her cheek and looks down.
“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.
She goes through her repertoire but it’s no use. Who wants to look at a skinny Girl Guide doing a solo second-hand foxtrot picked up from the movie screen, never mind listen to her spindly kewpie-doll voice? Jameel doesn’t. He wants her out on her ear. He gra
bs her neckerchief, she writhes free and, in a desperate last-ditch sally, lands on someone’s knee and steals his drink — “Hey!” — she downs the shot, gasps in shock, then quips in moving-picture parlance, “‘Oh gee baby, how did the angels ever let you leave heaven?’” She weaves out of reach between slim hips and broad shoulders, steals another from a man with three jacks — “What do you think you’re doin?” — and knocks it back, promising, “‘I’ve got what ain’t in books,’” coughing, sputtering, blowing a kiss. Jameel follows with a bottle, calming the waters, signalling to Boutros “Get rid of her.” When Frances has downed her third drink in quick succession from a “‘great big good-lookin some-account man’,” and is convinced that her esophagus and chest have been burned away, her feet suddenly sprout wings, they become hap-hap-happy, she cranks the player-piano. The mechanical thumping of a hobnail army renders “Coming thru’ the Rye” and Frances wriggles out of her uniform and down to her skivvies via the highland fling cum cancan. They start watching.
On Monday, Frances skips school and heads for Satchel-Ass Chism’s barber shop. She shows him a picture of Louise Brooks. He shakes his head.
“I don’t know how to cut ladies’ hair —”
“I’m not a lady.”
“Listen, dear —”
She grabs his scissors, lops off one of her braids and says, “Now fix it.”
“Lord love ya, girl!”
The other men glanced up from Chinese checkers at her entrance; they raised an eyebrow when she plopped down in the barber’s chair, and now they grin at her. “That’s the stuff.”
Satchel-Ass shakes his head and does his best. “I don’t know why you don’t go into Sydney to a proper beauty parlour.”