Chapter Six continued.
As she began to move towards the door, she
thought that she heard vague music. She stopped and listened. Where was it coming
from? But no, it was not really there at all. The silence encased her, the meat
between two slices of bread, and the space between filled with an aching of
nothingness. She felt unsteady, on the point of collapse… of complete
disintegration. Like a vampire, she would fizzle away to nothing as the light
fell upon her. A spark of light caught her eye, a red light; it winked from the
side of the projector. Louise moved slowly towards it, puzzled. Hadn’t she seen
Nigel just…? She moved slowly through the thick air, layer upon layer, folding
in upon itself like a molten Swiss roll from a silver spoon. She felt like a disembodied shadow of
herself, the essential soul sliced through with a sharp knife. Her conscious self
had become threadbare, shredded; now she didn’t know where she was, she wasn’t
in control any longer. Moving slowly, she was moving slowly… as though walking
under water. As if wading through the memory of a dream, her limbs moved as if
disconnected from her body. The red light, the red light winked and her hand
paused on the switch, swimming through time. Her fingers touched the warm body
of the projector and lingered over it as though they were sliding over a
different surface, an alternative flesh. Falling over the frame of her bones,
cascading around her ankles like a soft shell, a vain effort to disguise her
body from herself. Standing over the projector, she was drawn down; her head
was drawn down and her eye became fixed on the viewer. She heard the music,
sensed the atmosphere, and knew the bustle of life like it was her own, even
before she actually saw anything. She felt as if she was falling; things
shifted around her, the entire projection room was turning inside out. There
was nothing to grip on to, essence dripping through her fingers, slipping like
vapour through the crevices in the concrete wall. Music filtered through the
membrane of her ears with a soft, padded footfall, growing louder and she knew
she was there, there, amongst the audience, clapping and singing along with them.
She heard singing; discordant voices rose to a shriek in gravelly union, tinged
with a ginny hysteria. Colours, many colours argue and fight for supremacy;
vivid cotton frocks, cheap materials, jostled one another for the best view of
the stage. The blurred figure, the toothless grins, the place vibrating with
energy. And she can see herself – that is, she can see Harriet; she can feel
Harriet; she can feel the fumes of cheap gin filling her head, the pain in her
shoulder where her landlord had pushed her against the edge of the front door
and the continual empty ache of her stomach. Her bones seemed to touch each
other, she was so thin; they were brittle and weightless, like dried out reeds
or quill pens. She realised how weak
she was and felt she must sit down. She could feel rivers of sweat running down
her back and the tightness of her skin stretched across her face, every pore
filled with grime and city filth. The sense of dirt clung to her. Her eyes
watered needlessly and she saw everything through a film of moisture; she had
to close her eyes tightly to stop the air rushing past her, the headlong flight
through time. She was aware of a woman on the stage, wearing a red velvet gown
and black fur stole, elbow-length black gloves and a huge hat with a long black
feather which drooped down her back and trailed along the stage behind her as
she stepped quickly across the boards. She carried an elegant black cane, which
she tapped lightly against her hip in time to the song she was singing. Harriet
remembered her meeting with Mr. Ross and the spilled blood on the cobbles
dripped behind her eyes; was it all a dream? Or had it actually happened? The
woman on the stage shrieked out the words, encouraging the crowd to sing along
with her, to raise their glasses, abandon their factory lives and immerse
themselves in the gaudy decorations around them. The posters and the playbills
that covered the shabby walls, the coloured lights and coloured feathers, the
discordant music, the pianist dropping his sheets of music every time he turned
over a page… the words stretched out like raw and rising dough, mouths wide in
unison. Harriet leaned against the back wall of the theatre, having left her
friends somewhere in the crowd. She felt dizzy and flushed; she wondered if she
had caught a chill from sleeping in doorways and under railway arches, as she
had been forced to do the past few nights.
“You
alright? You don’t look too well.”
Harriet
started, surprised to find a man standing next to her, leaning back against the
wall. She hadn’t seen or even sensed his presence there though he stood so
close to her, he almost touched her. For a moment she was unsure whether he had
really spoken to her or not; for he didn’t look at her. His eyes - which were a
startling green - looked oddly out of place in his pale, unshaven face, with
his matted dark hair, which obviously hadn’t seen a comb in quite some weeks.
His thick, heavy eyebrows formed a straight line across his forehead and they
were pulled so far down, that they almost concealed the fragile beauty of his
eyes. He wore an old, patched jacket and a large yellow cravat knotted around
his neck. The cravat gave him the appearance of a Regency buck; Harriet
wondered if he wore it in an effort to distract attention from the shabbiness
of the rest of his clothes. If so, it worked admirably.
“I’m alright,” she
said finally, trying to assess him by his appearance and attitude towards her
for the amount of money he would be willing to pay. But she found it very difficult to glean any information from
him, other than that he was neither rich nor poverty-stricken and that he was
unmarried, which she could always tell at once. When he finally caught her eye briefly, she dismissed him
instantly as a prospective client, seeing something else in that shifty,
sidelong glance, though she was not sure what.
He looked away from her again and spoke almost without moving his lips,
so that his words were disembodied the moment they appeared, lost alley cats wailing
amongst the dustbins.
“Well,
you don’t look it.” The man’s voice was
hoarse, as if he had been standing on a street-corner shouting for hours. Perhaps that was how he earned his living,
hawking stolen goods in those parts of Whitechapel that ‘bobbies’ would not
venture into alone and then only in daylight.
Harriet watched him remove his battered black cap and push his unruly
hair out of his eyes. The movement
seemed to belong to a young man, though she doubted if he could be much younger
than her. As he caught her eye again
she felt his glance take in her whole body, the state of her clothes; she felt
stripped naked, exposed and left on a rock for the carnivores to feed
upon. She looked away from him,
“'s'pose yer lookin' for a room.”
It was a statement rather than a question one to which Harriet felt she
could say nothing. So she pulled her shawl tighter around her and stared
furiously at a group of men standing in front of her, sailors killing a few
hours in the East End before returning to St. Katherine’s Dock for their night
passage home.
“I’ve
got a room yer can use.”
Harriet
looked at the man sharply, wondering if she had heard him right. She knew that he would expect something in
return. However, she knew also that she
was in no position to refuse a reasonable offer.
“'Ow
much?” she asked quickly.
In
reply the man shook his head, still not looking at her. He gestured with his head towards the doors,
which led out of the music hall round to the back of the stage.
“Me
name’s Tom,” he said, beginning to move off.
Harriet followed, having almost to run to keep up with the man’s
strides. She hadn’t noticed before how
tall he was; he stood nearly two heads above her, despite her own fairly
generous height. As Tom turned into a
narrow passageway, which ran away from the music hall itself, he stopped
abruptly by an unmarked door and took out a bunch of keys on a chain. He opened the door, glancing quickly left
and right as he did so. Harriet
hesitated before following him into the room.
It was tiny and cramped, with almost every inch of space taken up by an
old iron bed, covered with a few tattered, greying sheets and a blanket rolled
up to use as a pillow. At the foot of
the bed was an obviously unused fireplace and on the floor beside it, a pile of
old newspapers, a kettle, cup and a chamber pot. There was a window along the wall facing the door, but it was so
blackened by soot and grime that it was impossible to see out. Harriet had to squeeze between Tom and the
doorframe in order to distinguish anything through the thick layer of gloom
that coated the room like a London fog.
She turned as she felt Tom nudge her and press something into her hand.
“’Ere’s
yer key.” He replaced the other keys in
his pocket and began carefully to retie his cravat, bending to see in a tiny,
spotted mirror, which hung on the wall beside him. Harriet watched him, unsure what to do or say. “What’s yer name?” he asked, straightening
up and looking at her directly.
“’Arriet,”
she answered nervously.
“Well,
make yerself at ‘ome, ‘arriet. I’ll be
around.”
And
he was gone, striding away down the passage, closing the door quietly behind
him. Harriet stood where she was,
staring blankly at the closed door.
Finally she sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unpin her straw
bonnet, the mechanical motion of her fingers reassuring her, lulling her nerves
into a smooth concoction, laying down all the ragged edges. Numbness washed over her, a great physical
relief and she lay back on the bed, which seemed to her to be unbelievably soft
and welcoming. She threw both her arms
out and closed her eyes, knowing that she was smiling to herself for the first
time in several days.
Louise could still hear the distant sounds of the music hall as she
opened her eyes. She was lying on her back, with her arms outstretched and at
first she couldn’t recognise anything around her. She felt as though she were
hanging suspended from the ceiling, or had been stuffed carelessly on one of
the shelves along with the reels of film.
She felt heavy, huge and clumsy; she could hardly lift her arm, or raise
her head. Her eyes stung as if she had
been looking into the wind. She sat up slowly. There were several squashed
cardboard boxes beneath her. She was
sitting on the floor of the projection room, at the foot of the projector; the
sounds of the music hall were gradually weakening, until they were nothing more
than shelves around the silence, dim shapes like ghosts which touched her
still. As she got to her feet she was
sure that she could still smell the gin and the greasepaint, still feel the
aching fatigue that belonged to Harriet, not Louise. As she reached her hand to switch out the red light on the
projector, she noticed that she was trembling uncontrollably. It seemed that she was looking at someone else’s
hand.
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