A Petrol Scented Spring (7 page)

She turns her face away from him. At temple and nape, her hair is damp. His tongue prickles with the taste of salt.

The stethoscope tells him nothing new. And yet he doesn't like this listlessness. He has seen patients let go of life, their heartbeat weakening, their lungs refusing air. He has closed their eyes and signed the death certificate with no medical diagnosis, no reason but despair.

She asks, ‘How long have I been here?'

‘Almost two weeks.'

The eyelid visible to him flutters. ‘Is that all?'

‘Thirteen days.'

A memory surprises him, surfacing from a quarter-century ago. His sister Jane playing keek-a-boo. The silky-gingery back of her head. She is only just walking. Tottering, really. She will drown in the cattle trough before she is old enough to talk.

‘Sister, let me see your face—'

He starts. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the wardresses' hands touch. He hates their superstition as he hated his mother's, feeling its tug within him. The prisoner's eyes stare up through the ceiling.

‘—I go home. Past the cracked tile in the close mouth. Up the stairs. Through the storm doors . . . ' Her voice drops to a whisper, ‘There she is, at the window. But she will not turn round.'

How to cut a path through the thicket of another's mind without destroying what we would reach? Yet to enter the tangle unarmed, ducking and twisting through the thorns, is to risk being lost forever.

He asks Thompson if Prisoner Scott is often like this.

‘It's the loneliness, sir. A night-time thing. It comes and goes.'

‘With the palpitations?'

They all hear the urgency in his voice.

The wardress shrugs. He turns his back on her. ‘Have you pain elsewhere?'

Prisoner Scott's eyes roll towards his, then away. When Dunlop came she was an Amazon. He wants to shock her into life, put the spark of fury back in her voice, but to speak harshly to her would be like kicking a dead thing. At once monstrously cruel, and useless.

‘How am I to help you if you won't tell me?'

At last she turns her gaze on him. ‘There is nothing you can do for me.'

He touches her cheek. ‘Never say that.'

The wardresses are watching.

The lightning comes again, the thunder immediately after. She moans.

‘Arabella?'

He has never spoken her name before.

A sudden wind drives a volley of rain against the window. Her eyes close. She is beaten. What else has he striven for? And he can't bear it.

The crisis passes. Next morning she resists the feeding again. He envies her capacity to recover. For forty years his body has been a tireless and uncomplaining servant, now it nags at him with aches and pains. He cannot remember when he last felt rested. His mental stamina, too, suffers. Nothing that others would notice, but a slackening in his former rigour. He knows he can cure Prisoner Scott, but how can he give her the attention she needs? Three new suffragette prisoners are about to arrive, all hunger strikers. There is so much to keep control of, one emergency after another. He is losing weight, too preoccupied to taste the food he puts in his mouth. A couple of bites are all his clenched stomach can take. He works every hour he is awake. Past midnight he returns to his tied house outside the prison gate, falls into a dead sleep, and opens his eyes at dawn, unrefreshed, to begin the next day.

 

He falls into the habit of visiting the women's hospital at night. The wardresses think he's trying to catch them sleeping on the job, but it's Prisoner Scott's sleep he comes to watch, her humid skin and softly-rasping breath. Experience has taught him that the more guarded the patient is by day, the more helplessly exposed at night. Sooner or later, she will give herself away. She's a sleep talker, but in scribble, like infants just on the threshold of speech. Her noises have the tantalising rhythm of adult conversation but, no matter how close he brings his ear, he can make no sense of them. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes whimpers, or writhes or flails her arms or thrashes her legs like a dog that dreams of running. It is maddening, to be shut out of this night-time world of hers, this secret life of mirth and sorrow and flight.

Next morning, he will use the force required to feed her, no more, no less. If it involves bruises and blood and broken teeth, that's her decision. She has the wherewithal to end it. But in the night, bending over her sleeping form, squinting with the effort of trying to read the movement of her lips, he has this feeling. A tunnel opening inside him, a flower blooming. No. Even at night, these are not his thoughts. He reminds himself to avoid cheese for supper.

 

One evening she opens her eyes. His skin jumps.

‘You should be asleep.'

Her expression says this is too fatuous to merit a reply.

‘You need rest.'

‘Why? Am I gaunt with fatigue, jittery with exhaustion?' She looks up into his face. ‘Like you.'

‘I'm not sleeping much,' he admits.

‘Troubled by a bad conscience?'

Both wardresses are slumped in their chairs, mouths agape, dead to the world. At mention of the Doctor's conscience, one of them snorts. Doctor and prisoner smile. Then realise that the other, too, is smiling.

‘What day is it?' she asks.

‘Monday. July sixth.' For a moment his face belongs to another man.

‘What?'

‘It's Glasgow Fair next week.'

She smiles, ‘I always wanted to go, when we lived in Dunoon—'

He had forgotten that she, too, hails from the west coast.

‘—is it as thrilling as they say?'

‘I only went the once.'

‘Something happened to you there?'

This catches him off guard. For a moment he stares at her. And then it is too late to deny it.

‘Something bad?'

Perhaps it's the tiredness. He answers honestly, ‘I didn't see it like that at the time.'

She slides to the edge of the mattress. He sits down.

‘Begin at the beginning,' she says.

 

It's going to rain. Every woman who's ever hung her washing out knows it, the same as every farmer's son, but still they say ‘Braw day, the day'. Their smiles sharper than the wifies back in Ochiltree, as if they're in on a secret. A gang of keelies down the street who'll snatch his cap and call him teuchter. A dipper waiting round the next corner to take the pennies from his pooch. He slides his hand in there to touch the coins, and saliva fills the hollow under his tongue the way it did when he was wee and put a ha'penny in his mouth. An old ha'penny, browny-black and worn, with the head chopped off at the neck. Not like the shiny new bun penny his teacher has given him to spend at the fair, the copper so fresh-minted he can see the pleats in the Queen's coil of hair and the plump breasts pushing out of her dress.

Glasgow Fair. Every summer of his twelve years he has heard the words spoken and, just after, seen this secret look between his father and his uncles. Like they ken fine it's a parcel of rogues, with the cheapjacks' gold rings that turn your fingers green, and African princesses covered in boot-black, and counting pigs, and a six-fingered hag who says you're to meet a bonnie black-eyed lassie, and still the Watsons can't wait to have the wool pulled over their eyes. So here they are, his uncles and cousins, with that hawk-fierce Watson stare in their pleasant country faces. And, now that he's old enough to find his way back to the railway station if he gets himself lost, Hugh is with them.

On the journey, they drew straws to decide who'd keep an eye on him. It's his big cousin Robbie he's trailing. Thirteen and holding down a man's job in the fields this past year, with yellow callouses on his palms from gripping the scythe in the haymaking. Hugh's big for twelve and can look Robbie in the eye, but he doesn't have his wide shoulders or the curly brown hairs his aunt trims with the scissors every few days to save his soft chin from the razor. The other cousins laughed when Robbie drew the short straw, but he doesn't seem to mind Hugh tagging along, if he keeps a couple of paces behind. Close enough to clamber into a swing boat with him, but not so close that folk can see he's minding the wean. This mix of company and solitude suits Hugh well enough. He's a singular one, his teacher says, not of the common herd. Thinking of her smell of lavender, the blueish underside of her wrist, the way she will lower her voice when she draws him aside after class, he feels a flutter behind his ribs. He has done his last sum at Ochiltree School. Once the harvest is by, he's off to the big school in Ayr. Ten miles there and ten miles back every day, and the townies making fun of his accent, and his father having to get by without the extra pair of hands he was counting on, and the uniform to be paid for, and his books, even with the scholarship money. But he won't think of that just now, because the crush of merrymakers he's caught up in – men, and women in their Sunday hats, and undergrown weans with old-looking faces – this river of folk is now past the tenements and bursting upon the Green.

Robbie has agreed to make a circuit of the whole fair. Hugh is tempted by the crazily-painted helter skelter, but he can't fritter his money on bairns' rides. He needs to go home with a story. A tattooed lady, an Indian swami, a dragon from across the China seas, something to make his brothers gasp. And that's only half the challenge. He has to make the right choice, distinguish himself from this crowd of country bumpkins, justify his teacher's faith in him. So he takes his time, breathing in the smell of gingerbread and frying sausages and the sweetness of trampled turf, filling his eyes with the gaudy painted booths, the striped canvas, the flashes of gilt on the steam carousel's prancing horses, the wee monkey in his red jacket collecting pennies from the crowd around the hurdy-gurdy. What a din! Like a fiddle bred with the bagpipes. And all tangled up with it, a dozen bands playing different tunes, and bells ringing, and girls on the sea-on-land screaming, and barkers calling through speaking trumpets, promising three murders and a ghost in the theatre tent.

He passes boxing booths where bookies' runners and tailors' apprentices are queueing to shed their jackets and take a swing at a chisel-faced professional. Thimble-riggers slide cups to and fro across fold-up tables. The stereorama tent promises views of Venice and Paris. A moustachioed dwarf in a chimney-pot hat beckons him in to meet the amazing bloodless man and the world's strongest woman. Daft laddies hurl wet sponges at their pal in the Aunt Sally. There are jugglers and tumblers, coconut shies and shooting galleries, cages of goldfinches and canaries, a menagerie with leopard and tiger and laughing hyena. And, tucked between the Cabinet of Curiosities and Doctor Darwin's Missing Link, a dancing booth with a fiddler sawing away inside, and a barefoot lassie tossing her long black hair, her skirts changing colour when she turns her hips to the music, swinging her arms to make her chest shoogle.

‘Hello there,' she calls in her foreign-sounding lilt, ‘will you take a turn with me?'

He looks into her laughing eyes. His heart is racing. ‘Kitty,' he says.

The laughing look turns confused, and wary.

‘It's me,' he says, ‘Hugh Watson from Cawhillan Farm.'

And now she knows him. ‘Hugh,' she breathes, ‘you're a ways from home.'

Kitty, the tinker lassie who calls at the farm twice a year with her father and half a dozen raggedy weans. It's one of his earliest memories, the painted wagon drawing up with a rattle of tin cooking pots, and the weans with their snottery faces and their black-soled feet, and all the farm dogs barking. For years Kitty was just another urchin, the oldest like him, but they'd join the rest in a game of tig, shrieking as they chased round the farmyard. Until the year Kitty turned up with a clean face and her hair brushed, and gave the wee ones a telling when they startled the hens. He was shy of her for a couple of minutes, until he got used to the idea. Her father never changed: that brown and grey beard, the fleshy pink pearl on his cheek. Ma always bought half a dozen bone buttons, and a pair of boot laces, and his father got the sickles sharpened, and if any of the aunts had a birthday coming up, the tinkers left the lighter by a string of glass beads and a yard or two of ribbon or lace. But before they went, they'd sit down to a plate of stovies, and pass on the gossip from Cumnock or Sorn or whatever place they'd been last, and the tinker da would take up his fiddle and the red-headed wean his penny whistle, and Kitty would sing a mournful song about men who lose their sweethearts in her surprising singing voice. Like a heartbroken old woman elbowing the girl aside. This happened not four months back, and will surely happen again in another few weeks. Hugh doesn't care for the tunes, but he likes to watch the throb of her smooth white throat as she draws out the keening notes. And there's always the moment when she gathers up the plates and passes them across to him, looking into his eyes as he takes their weight. She's a year or two older and used to be taller but, as he closes the distance between them, he finds he has an inch on her.

‘I'll jig with you, Kitty,' he says, ‘if you've no one else. But are you not meant to be watching the front of the booth?'

She laughs and says her daddy won't mind, if it's a friend of the family, but he'll need to give her a penny. He frowns, not understanding, and she lays a hand on his arm. ‘They pay me to dance, Shuggie.' And even though he's never been called Shuggie in his life, he gives her his penny, and she draws back the heavy canvas.

Loose boards have been laid on a frame above the grass to form a dance floor. Nothing nailed down. The racket from the couples clumping to and fro across it almost drowns out the fiddle. A dozen dancers. Country boys like him, and a couple of farmers old enough to have a wife of their own to jig with. The tinker lassies all barefoot, all pretty, in dresses of some filmy stuff that's hardly there, with their long hair flowing loose and their shoulders bared, and hectic spots of red on their cheeks. It's hot in here, with so many bodies. Tilley lamps hung from the roof cast flickering shadows. The burning paraffin catches in the back of his throat, half thrilling, half sickening.

Up close, Kitty smells of something stickily, saltily delicious that he knows is forbidden, without knowing what it is.

‘Are you not worried you'll get skelfs in your feet?'

Again she laughs. Is everything he says so funny? But it's not cruel laughter. And he likes the way she puts her head back, offering him her white throat. He trusts her. Even if she doesn't remember Cawhillan Farm and passing him the tin plates, she knows him. He has the feeling he gets with his teacher. Only Kitty's knowledge is different.

He has danced the Gay Gordons the night after the harvest, and the Dashing White Sergeant, and a furious headlong Strip the Willow with his cousins all vying to see who can birl the lassies round the fastest. Waltzing is new to him. She says she'll teach him, taking one of his hands in hers, laying her other hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to do the rest.

‘Here?' he says, finding the dip where her back tucks in so neatly.

‘If that's comfortable,' she says.

He was right about the dress. It's hardly there. He can feel the heat of her skin, slightly damp, through the material. He slides his hand down, and down again. ‘This is comfortable,' he says, and they both laugh.

He thought it would be the leopard man, or the Highland Seer, or the cannibals from the Amazonian Jungle. But this is the tale he'll take home to his brothers. How he met a lassie he'd known since he was wee, playing tig around the farmyard, and they stepped into a tent.

Afterwards his father will give him a row. Robbie was frantic with worry. His uncles and cousins had to leave off enjoying themselves and help with the search. They've been all round the Green twice, combed every inch of the fair, got themselves soaked to the skin in the downpour. They thought he'd been ambushed by a pack of thieves, and left for dead behind some booth. What the hell has he been doing? How come he's bone dry?

His cousins, too, are furious. He has spoiled their day. When they go for cold beef and pickles and all his pennies are gone, no one treats him. But he can't take the smile off his face.

 

It's a sweet tale, and sweetly told, sparing with the details. Arabella can fill in the gaps. His first kiss. The press of young bodies, licensed by the dance. It could easily have been no more than this.