“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know how I shall get over it. They’re burying her tomorrow afternoon and then I shan’t have nothing left at all.”
May’s voice was rusty, cracking with disuse, a crone’s voice, not a twenty-year-old girl’s. The deathmonger pulled up the fraying stool, then sat down at May’s feet and took her hand.
“Now, Mrs. Warren, you listen to me. You’re not to tell me you’ve got nothing left. You’re not to even think it of yourself. If nothing’s left, what was your child’s life worth? Or any of our lifetimes, come to that? It’s all got value, else none of it has. Or do you wish you’d not had her at all? Should you prefer that you’d not seen me once if you were going to have to see me twice?”
She took it in and found it was all true. Put like that, asked in such straightforward terms if little May were better never born then she could only dumbly shake her head. The lank red strands, uncombed, fell on her face. She’d not got nothing, she’d got eighteen months of feeding, burping, going down the park, laughing and crying, changing tiny clothes. The fact remained, though, that she’d not got May. She’d got her memories of her little girl, favourite expressions, gestures, favourite sounds, but they were painful in the knowledge that there’d be no new ones added to the list. And that was just her sorrow’s selfish part, her pitying herself for what she’d lost. It was her baby should be pitied more, who’d gone into the dark all on her own. May looked up hopelessly at Mrs. Gibbs.
“But what about her? What about my May? I want to think she’s up in Heaven but she’s not, is she? That’s just what you tell kids about their cat or dog when all the time you’ve found it with its back broke in the street.”
At this she wept again despite herself and Mrs. Gibbs gave her a handkerchief, then squeezed May’s hand between her papery palms, a bible closing on May’s fingertips.
“I don’t hold much in Heaven, personally, nor in the other place. It sounds like tosh. All I know is, your daughter’s upstairs now, and whether you believe me or you don’t is none of my concern and none of hers. That’s where she is, my dear. That’s what I know, and I’d not say it if I wasn’t sure. She’s upstairs, where we all are by and by. Your dad’s told you already, I dare say.”
The mention of May’s father made her start. He had said that. He’d used that very word. “She’s upstairs, May. Don’t fret. She’s upstairs now.” In fact, now that she thought, she’d never heard him speak of death in any other way. Not him, her kin, nor anyone round here. They never said “in Heaven” or “with God”, nor even “up above”. They said “upstairs”. It made the afterlife sound carpeted.
“You’re right, he did say that, but what’s it mean? You say it’s not like heaven in the clouds. Where is it, this upstairs, then? What’s it like?”
In May’s own ears her voice was sounding cross, angry that Mrs. Gibbs was so cocksure about a thing as terrible as this. She hadn’t meant it to come out that way and thought the deathmonger would take offence. To her surprise, Mrs. Gibbs only laughed.
“Frankly, it’s very much like this, my dear.” She gestured, at the armchair, at the room. “What else should you expect it to be like? It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.”
May wasn’t angry now. She just felt strange. Had someone said those words to her before? “It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.” It sounded so familiar and so right, although she’d got no idea what it meant. It felt like those occasions, as a girl, when she’d been let in on some mystery, like when Anne Burk told May the facts of life. “The man puts spunk on the end of his prick, then puts it in your crack.” Though May had thought spunk would be soap-flakes in a little pile, spooned on a flat-topped cock-end into her, she’d somehow known that the idea was true; made sense of things she’d previously not grasped. Or when her mam had took her to one side and gravely told her what jamrags were for. This was like that, sat here with Mrs. Gibbs. One of those moments in a human life when you found out what everybody else already knew but never talked about.
May glimpsed the coffin at the room’s far end and knew immediately it was all junk. Upstairs was heaven with a different name, the same old story trotted out again to console the bereaved and shut them up. It was just Mrs. Gibbs’s atmosphere, the way she had, that made it sound half-true. What did she know about the hereafter? She was a Boroughs woman, same as May. Except, of course, she was a deathmonger, which gave the rot she talked that much more weight. Mrs. Gibbs spoke again, squeezing May’s hand.
“As I say, dear, it doesn’t matter much if we believe these things or if we don’t. The world’s round, even if we think it’s flat. The only difference it makes is to us. If we know it’s a globe, we needn’t be frit all the time of falling off its edge. But let’s not talk about your daughter, dear. What’s happened can’t be helped, but you still can. Are you all right? What’s all this done to you?”
Again, May found she had to stop and think. No one had asked her that, these last two days. It wasn’t something that she’d asked herself, nor dared to in the wailing, echoing well her private thoughts had recently become. Was she all right? What had this done to her? She blew her nose on the clean handkerchief that she’d been given, noticing it had no butterflies, just one embroidered bee. When she was done, she screwed the hanky up and shoved it in one jumper-sleeve, a move that meant Mrs. Gibbs letting go May’s hand, although once the manoeuvre was complete May slid her fingers voluntarily between the digits of the deathmonger. She liked the woman’s touch; warm, dry, and safe in the wallpapered whirlpool of the room. Still sniffing, May attempted a reply.
“I feel like everything’s fell through the floor and dropping down a tunnel like a stone. It doesn’t even feel like I’m meself. I sit and cry and can’t do anything. I can’t see any point in doing things, brushing me hair or eating, anything, and I don’t know where all of it shall end. I wish that I was dead, and that’s the truth. Then we’d be put together in one box.”
Mrs. Gibbs shook her head.
“Don’t say that, dear. It’s both a cheap and silly thing to say, you know it is. And anyway, unless I’m wrong, you don’t wish you were dead at all. It’s just that you don’t want to be alive because life’s rough and don’t make any sense. Those are two very different things, my dear. You’d do well to be sure which one you mean. One can be put right and the other can’t.”
The clock ticked and the tumbling dust motes stirred in sunbeams that fell slanting on the floor while May considered. Mrs. Gibbs was right. It wasn’t that she truly wanted death, but that she’d lost the reason for her life. Worse than this, she had started to suspect that life, all life that walked upon the earth, had never had a reason from the start. This was a world of accident and mess without a divine plan that guided things. It weren’t that God moved in mysterious ways, more that you never saw him move at all. What was the point of going on with it, the human race? Why did everyone keep on having babies, when they knew they’d die? Giving them life then snatching it away, just so you’d have some company. It was cruel. How had she ever seen things differently?
She tried conveying this to Mrs. Gibbs, the senselessness that was in everything.
“Life don’t make sense. It’s not made sense to me since Dr. Forbes said May had got the Dip. The fever horse come trotting up the street over the paving slabs where there’s no road, when generally carts wait along the end. Just like that, she was gone. They took her off in that dark wagon, off and down Bath Row, and that was that. I stood there in the road, roaring, and chewing on me handkerchief. I shan’t ever forget it, standing there …”
Cocking her bun-crowned head upon one side, Mrs. Gibbs silently renewed her grip on May’s hot hand, bidding her to go on. May hadn’t realised until now how much she’d needed to recount this to someone, get it all into words and off her chest.
“Tom was there. Tom had got me in his arms to stop me running off after the cart. Me mam, at number ten, she stayed inside to keep our
Cora and our Johnny quiet, so that they’d not come out and join the fuss.”
Mrs. Gibbs pursed her lips enquiringly and then chimed in with what was on her mind.
“Where was your father, dear, if I might ask?”
May seemed to ponder this, and then went on.
“He was just standing out on his front step and … no. No, he were sitting. Sitting down. I hardly noticed him, not at the time, but thinking now, he was sat on that step as if it were a Sunday in July. As if there wasn’t an emergency. He looked glum, but not upset or surprised like everybody else. To tell the truth, he seemed more rattled back when she were born.”
She paused. She squinted hard at Mrs. Gibbs.
“And come to think about it, you did, too. You went white as a sheet when she came out. I had to ask if anything was wrong, and you said that you were afraid there was. You said it was her beauty, said she’d got an awful beauty, I remember it. Then later on, when you were leaving you took ages over your goodbyes to her.”
The penny dropped. May stared in disbelief. The deathmonger, impassively, stared back.
“You knew.”
Mrs. Gibbs didn’t even blink.
“You’re right, my dear. I did. And so did you.”
May gasped and tried to pull her hand away, but the deathmonger wouldn’t let it go. What? What was this? What did the woman mean? May hadn’t known her child was going to die. The idea hadn’t crossed her mind. Although …
Although she knew it had, a thousand times, scaring her in a score of different ways. The worst was feeling it was a mistake, this gorgeous child being given to her when it was clearly meant for royalty. There’d been some error, been some oversight. Sooner or later, it would get found out, like a large postal-order that had been delivered to an incorrect address. Somebody would be round to take it back. She’d known she wouldn’t get away with it, not with a child what shone like hers had done. Somewhere inside her, May had always known. That was the real reason, she now saw, why she’d took that woman’s remark so bad, that time in Beckett’s Park. It was because it told her something she already knew and yet was keeping from acknowledging: her daughter would be took away from her. They’d hear a knock upon the door one day, someone come from the council or police, or a Barnardo’s woman, looking sad. She’d just not thought it would be Dr. Forbes.
The clock ticked, and May wondered fleetingly how much time had gone by since its last beat. Mrs. Gibbs watched until she was convinced that May had took her point, then carried on.
“We know a lot more than we tell ourselves, my dear. Some of us do, at any rate. And if I’d said back when your May were born what I’d foreseen, then should I have been thanked? There’s no point served in saying things like that. If you yourself had taken notice of such premonitions as you might have had, it wouldn’t have prevented anything except for eighteen months of happiness.”
The deathmonger sat forward on the stool, her crisp black apron almost crackling.
“Now, you’ll forgive me saying this, my dear, but it appears you’ve took this on yourself. You think you’re a bad mother, and you’re not. Diphtheria don’t pick and choose like that or come to people ’cause of how they live, although the poor are very vulnerable. It’s a disease, dear, not a punishment. It’s no reflection on you or your bab, nor a result of how you brought her up. You’ll be a better mam for this, not worse. You’ll have learned things not every mother learns, and you’ll have learned them hard, and early on. You lost this child, but you shan’t lose the next, nor them that likely follow after that. Look at you! You’re a mam by nature, dear. You’ve got a lot of babies in you yet.”
May glanced away, towards the skirting board, at which the deathmonger narrowed her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn, or said something I shouldn’t ought have done.”
May blushed and looked back up at Mrs. Gibbs.
“You’ve not done nothing. You’ve just hit upon one of the things been going through me mind. Them babies in me, like you said. It’s daft, but I keep thinking one’s already there. There’s nothing what I’ve got to base it on, and half the ruddy time I think it’s just something I’ve dreamed up, to make up for May. I’ve had no signs, but then I wouldn’t do. If I’m right in this feeling what I’ve got, then I fell pregnant just two weeks ago. It’s all a lot of nonsense, I’m quite sure, just something I’ve come up with that it’s nice to think of, ’stead of crying all the while.”
The deathmonger began to stroke May’s hand, between caress and therapeutic rub.
“What is it, if it’s not too personal, that makes you think you’re in the family way?”
May blushed again.
“It’s nonsense, like I say. It’s just that … well, it was that Friday night, before they sent the fever cart for May. I’d been out round the park with her all day and she was wore out, the poor little thing. We put her to bed early, then we thought, it being Friday, we’d go up ourselves. So then we … well, you know. We had it off. But it was special, I can’t say just how. I’d had a lovely day, and I loved Tom. I knew how much I loved him on that night, when we were in bed getting up to it, and knew as well how much he loved me back. We lay there afterwards, and it were bliss, talking and whispering like when we first met. Upon my life, afore the sweat were dry I thought “there’ll be a baby come from this”. Oh, Mrs. Gibbs, whatever must you think? I never should have told you all of that. It’s nothing I’ve told anybody else. You only come round here to do your job, and here I’m dragging all me laundry out. You must think I’m a proper dirty cat.”
Mrs. Gibbs patted May’s hand, and she smiled.
“I’ve heard worse, let me tell you. Anyway, it’s all included in my shilling, dear. Listening and talking, that’s the biggest part. It’s not the birthing or the laying out. And as for if you’re pregnant or you’re not, you trust your instincts. They’re most likely right. Didn’t you say to me you’d have two girls, and then you’d stop and not have any more?”
May nodded.
“Yes, I did. And laying there that night I thought ‘here’s daughter number two’. Although it’s not, now, is it? It’s still one.”
She thought about this briefly, then went on.
“Well, it don’t make no difference. I still want two little girls, same as I said before. If it turns out I’ve got one on the way, I’ll have one more and then that shall be it.”
May marvelled, hearing herself saying this. Her darling girl was cold and lying in a half-pint box down at the parlour’s end, not six foot from where May was sat herself. How could she even be considering a baby, let alone one after that? Why wasn’t she just sitting here in tears and trying to get herself under control, the way she had done for these past two days? As though she’d found some stopcock in her heart, the waterworks had been at last shut off. She felt like she weren’t falling anymore, May realised with surprise. It wasn’t like she was filled up with happiness and hope, but at least she weren’t plunging down a hole that had no bottom, or light at the top. She’d hit some bedrock where she’d come to rest, a floor that didn’t give beneath her grief. There was a faint chance she’d get out of this.
She knew she owed it to the deathmonger. They handled death and birth and everything that come as part of that. It was their job. These women – always women, obviously – had got some place to stand outside it all. They weren’t rocked by the mortal ebb and flow. Their lives weren’t those arrivals would upend, nor would departures leave them all in bits. They stood unmoved, unchanged, through all life’s quakes, invulnerable to joy and tragedy. May was still young. Her daughter’s birth and death had been her first exposure to these things, her first instructions in life’s proper stuff, its gravity and frightening suddenness, and frankly it had all knocked her for six. How would she get through life, if life did this? She looked at Mrs. Gibbs and saw a way, a woman’s way, of anchoring herself, but the deathmonger had begun to speak again before May could pursue the thought.
>
“Anyway, dear, I’d interrupted you. You were just telling me about the day the fever cart took off your little girl. I butted in and asked about your dad …”
For just a mo, May looked at her gone out, and then remembered her unfinished tale.
“Ooh, yes. Yes, I remember now. Our dad, sat on the step while it were going on, like he already were resigned to it, while I stood roaring in the street with Tom. I barely noticed him, not at the time, and can’t hold it against him even now. I know that I go on about our dad, how he’s an old fool and he shows us up with all his climbing round the chimneypots, but he’s been good to me since our May died. Me mam, the others, I can’t talk to them without the whole lot ending up in tears, but our dad, it turns out, he’s been a brick. He’s not been down the pub or on his jaunts. He’s been next door in earshot the whole time. He don’t intrude. He pops in now and then to find out if there’s anything I want, and for once in me life I’m glad he’s there. But on that day, he just sat on the step.”
May frowned. She tried to go back in her mind to Fort Street on that Sat’day dinnertime, shuddering in her husband’s arms while they watched little May go trundling off inside the fever cart, across the listing flags. She tried to conjure all the sounds and smells that single moment had been made up from, sausages burning somewhere on a stove, the railway shunts and squeals come from the west.
“I stood and watched the fever cart roll off, and it come welling up inside of me, just losing her, losing my little May. It all come welling up and I just howled, howled as I haven’t done in all me life. The row I made, you’ve never heard the like. It was a noise I hadn’t made before, fit to break bottles and curdle the milk. Then, from behind me, I heard the same sound, but changed, an echo with a different pitch, and just as loud as my own screech had been.