Chasing Schrödinger’s Cat - A Steampunk Novel (12 page)

Chapter
XXXII:

Back
at Schrödinger’s
Esoterica
– Percy’s Invitation

You might be wondering how I was
feeling, now that I had launched a new career as a murderer.
 
After all, I was new at the trade.
 
The fact is, I felt astonished at myself
rather than remorseful.
 
I could
understand not being sorry since I had been protecting Sarah, but how to explain
my heightened sensations?
 
I noticed
everything on the way back to London.
 
Every bird song, every smell, every color.
 
It was almost as though I had come awake for
the first time in my life.
 
I hoped it
was nothing more than a post-traumatic high. There was no way I wanted to
become some kind of inter-dimensional Ted Bundy.

I put my anxieties aside to
concentrate on the task at hand.
 
We
needed a place to hide out since that is what wanted fugitives do.
 
We talked it over and decided to go to
Schrödinger’s shop since there was probably a key to the place hidden somewhere
in the van.

But nothing in life is ever
easy.
 
There was some kind of a notice on
the front window of Schrödinger’s when we got there.
 
We couldn’t read it from the van and we
couldn’t get out in our blood-soaked clothing so we had to look for a change of
dress in Schrödinger’s theatrical trunk.
 
I finally settled on the black trousers and stiff-fronted white shirt
from his stage costume while Sarah made do by wrapping herself in his scarlet-lined
cape.

T
he sheet of
paper on the door turned out to be an eviction notice which put a stop to our
plans to use the place as a hideout.
 
The
last thing we needed was to be found on the premises when the bailiffs showed
up.
 
I can’t speak for Sarah but I was
overwhelmed with an overpowering feeling of weariness.
 
We were filthy and hungry and we had run out
of options.

“Well there’s no point waiting
around here,” I said finally.
 
I turned
back to the van when someone called to me from the other side of the street.

“
Oy
Bob,
is that you?
 
What you doing dressed like
that?”

It took me a moment to recognize
Percy, the hall boy from
Newford
house.
 
It was only a short time since I had last
seen him but he looked different.
 
His
hair was longer and he walked with the swagger of a young man.
 
His eyes widened in disbelief as he caught
sight of my companion.

“Lady Sarah?”

“It’s Mister Cowan, isn’t it?” Sarah
said, as though there was nothing unusual about encountering one of her
family’s servants on a disreputable East End London street.
 
“You are one of the staff at our house.”

“Not any more I
ain’t
.
 
They gave us all the sack when Lord
Newford
was called to the country.”

“Oh I am sorry.”

“That’s all right.
 
I’d had just about all I could stomach of
that bugger Coates anyway.
 
Working on
the docks now,
ain’t
I?
 
So what’s all this about then?” he continued,
taking in the disheveled state of our clothing and the battered wreck that was
now Schrödinger’s van.
 
“I’d say by the
looks of things you two have run into a spot of bother.”

“You might put it that way,” I
said.
 
I gave him a highly censored
version of our recent adventures, leaving out the fact that I had killed a man.

“Sounds like you need a place to
duck and dive,” he said.

“If you mean hide out, you’re right.”

“You could stay at my mum’s.
 
We got an extra room now that my brother’s
gone for a soldier.”
 
He stopped and
looked dubiously at Sarah.
 
“It
ain’t
fancy mind, and there’s only one bed.”

“I can sleep in the van,” I said.

Chapter
XXXIII:

Percy’s
Mum – The Truck Gang – Sarah’s New Career

P
ercy’s mum
glared at me as though I were the sole cause of Sarah’s sorry state which I
felt was unfair.
 
The major cause, yes,
but not the sole cause.
 
“Get them
clothes off this instant Lady Sarah,” she said.
 
“I expect I can find something to fit you while I get ‘
em
clean.”
 
She made
no reference to the fact that Sarah’s clothes were covered with blood
spatters.
 
They play by different rules
in The East End.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Cowan,” Sarah
said.
 
“And please, just Sarah.”

“And you can call me Edith dear,”
Percy’s mum gave her a reassuring pat before turning to Percy and me.
 
“What are you two idle devils doing hanging
about?
 
Go make yourselves useful.
 
You can start by putting that van in the
shed.”

“S
orry about
mum having a go at you,” Percy said as we pushed Schrödinger’s van into a
wooden shed facing the lane behind the Cowan family’s row house.
 
“She means well.”

“Your mother is an angel Percy,” I
said.
 
“She can talk to me any way she
wants.”

Percy reddened at the compliment
and I had the unfamiliar sensation of having said the right thing.

E
dith Cowan was
a woman with maternal instincts of Olympian proportions.
 
She welcomed Sarah as her surrogate daughter
and me as us as her ne’er-do-well son who needed constant watching.
 
She never so much as hinted we owed her
anything but Sarah and I were determined not to impose any extra financial
strain on the already-meager resources of the Cowan household.
 
At first we paid our share from Sarah’s
dwindling supply of money but it soon became obvious we would have to get jobs.

Finding employment was relatively
easy for Sarah.
 
She had been taught
needlework by a series of governesses so she was soon sub-contracting work from
local seamstresses.

For me, it was a different
story.
 
As you may have gathered, my
education had not provided me with many saleable skills.
 
I finally convinced Percy to introduce me to
his foreman on the St. Katherine's Dock in spite of his doubts as to whether I
was ‘the right sort of bloke’ to be working there.

Once I got to know the docks, I
couldn’t imagine what he thought the ‘right sort of bloke’ might be.
 
The dockworkers I met included decayed and
bankrupt butchers, bakers, publicans and grocers; discharged soldiers, sailors,
almsmen and lawyers' clerks; Polish refugees, broken-down gentlemen, servants
and thieves.

Whatever his background, a
dockworker’s day was long, hard and dangerous.
 
I once saw a deal porter slip on a gangway while carrying a bundle of
planks on his shoulder.
 
The bundle burst
and landed on top of him as he floated face down in the fetid water.
 
By the time his mates fished him out, he was
dead.
 
They stretched a scrap of canvas
over his sodden corpse and continued unloading the ship.
 
Who came to collect him and where they took
him, I cannot say.

I
was on the
truck gang, the lowest level in the dockworkers’ pecking order.
 
I spent twelve hours a day pushing wooden
trolleys filled everything from
untanned
cowhides to hogsheads
of tobacco over distances ranging from a few feet to hundreds of yards.
 
I once calculated I travelled about thirty
miles in a typical day.

My first day on the gang was as
close as I ever hope to come to hell.
 
I
kept losing my footing on the slippery duckboards and the skin began peeling
from my hands.
 
Percy found me an old
pair of leather gloves which I had to soak off at the end of the day because
they were stuck in place by the fluid oozing from my blisters.

I was too tired to eat when I got
back to The
Cowans
’.
 
I lay down on the daybed in Schrödinger’s van and fell asleep with my
clothes on.

The rest of the first week was much
the same.
 
Every shift was a battle for
survival.
 
I learned to treat each ship-to-warehouse
trip as separate challenge, unconnected to the day as a whole.

Things got a little bit better by
the second week.
 
My hands had become
callused and I was able to dispense with the gloves.
 
My muscles still ached but I had started to
learn some tricks to reduce the amount of physical energy needed to move the
trolleys.

It took about five weeks for me to
hit my stride.
 
Muscle had replaced the
flab on my upper body and thighs and the palms of my hands were like shoe
leather.
 
My personal graduation day came
one blistering hot afternoon when we were running a load of molasses through
the weigh station and onto a sloped wooden ramp leading to the loading dock.
 
The foreman, a burly
Glasewegian
named
Dalzeil
, had been promised a bonus if we got
the job done by the end of the day and was riding us mercilessly.
 
I had just finished trolleying another barrel
onto the scale when I heard the sound of someone cursing.
 
I looked over and saw that one of the
molasses barrels had fallen from the loading ramp and was now lying across
Dalzeil’s
right knee, pinning him to the floor.

“Well don’t just stand there, ye
great
gobshite
,”
Dalzeil
roared.
 
“Run and get Billy Preston
before this
hoor
crushes me leg.”

Preston, the strongest man on our
crew would have had no trouble shifting the barrel, but I had no idea where he
was.
 
In any case, I could see that the
reason the barrel had come loose was that one of the ramp’s side rails had
broken leaving a second barrel teetering dangerously over
Dalzeil’s
head.
 
If the second barrel fell, a
broken leg would be the least of the Scotchman’s problems.
 
 
I ran over
to the foreman and wiped the sweat from my eyes.
 
Bending my knees, I wrapped my arms around
the underside of the barrel and tried to straighten my legs.
 
At first I couldn’t get a grip and my hands
came loose.
 
I wiped them on my pants and
tried again.
 
This time the barrel
shifted and I managed to stand it on end.

Dalzeil
rose
unsteadily, clutching his bruised knee.
 
I could see he was in extreme pain which made me treasure his next words
all the more.
 
He pulled himself erect,
spat on the floor and looked me directly in the eye.
 
“
Ye’ll
do,” he
said.
 
The sense of pride I felt was
overwhelming.
 
Better than the day I got
my Masters.

M
ax the cat
had no such problems settling in.
 
He
soon established himself as the neighborhood’s toughest feline brawler, no
small feat in a place where a cat’s life had all the civility of the exercise
yard in a Mexican prison.
 
He would come
back to the Cowan’s after a day’s combat and settle into Sarah’s lap, purring
while she cleaned his wounds.
 
Then he
would eat his dinner of fish scraps and settle into a corner with the contented
air of a cat who knows he has done his duty.

S
arah had
also made a place for herself in the east end.
 
Her defining moment came one evening courtesy of a fishmonger named
Horace Malone.
 
Percy and I were playing
pitch penny on the street in front of the Cowan’s house when we heard a cry of
“Bloody Hell!” from the fishmonger’s three doors down.
 
We looked and saw Malone, the fishmonger
clutching his left arm.

“Cut
meself
with a fillet knife,” he said when we went to help.
 
I looked at the blood gushing from the
six-inch wound and knew we had to do something fast.
 
I seemed to remember that the first thing to
do was apply pressure so I grabbed his arm with both hands and did my best to
clamp the separated edges of the cut together.
 
I had no idea what to do next.
 
Then I remembered what Sarah had said about studying nursing at the
Florence Nightingale Institute.

“Go fetch Sarah,” I told Percy,
“And tell her to bring a needle and thread.”

“T
he first
thing we need is boiling water,” Sarah said, when she arrived on the scene.

“Got some on the stove in back,”
Malone said, through gritted teeth.
 
“I
was just about to make tea.”

“Have you any salt?” Sarah asked.

“I wouldn’t be much of a fishmonger
if I didn’t,” Malone said.
 
“Over there
on the cutting board.”

Sarah dropped a large block of salt
into the tea kettle and waited for the water to cool.
 
She then poured the saline solution into the
open wound causing Malone to cry out in pain.

“Do be quiet,” she said.
 
“You’ve no one but yourself to blame.
 
Hand me my sewing kit would you please,
Percy?”

A large crowd of spectators had
gathered to watch Sarah fasten the skin flaps together and their murmurs of
approval gave way to a round of applause when she finished the last neat suture.

“Malone, you got more stitches than
a football,” someone observed.

“And a pig’s bladder like a
football,” said someone else.

“I won’t tell you lot what to do
with yourselves because I don’t want to offend our Sarah,” Malone said.

“Good point,” said one of his
tormentors.
 
“Way you handle that fillet
knife you never know when you might need her again.”

A
nd that’s
how Sarah became the go-to girl for small, and not-so-small medical emergencies
in the neighborhood.
 
Not only did you
get patched up, but you also got a free scolding with each repair.

“Do
be more careful next time.
 
Another inch
and you would have lost the eye.”

“Serves
you right.
 
Dogs don’t like it when you
tease them.”

“If
you must take shortcuts, try to keep them within ten feet of the ground.”

T
he east end
was hell on earth by the standards of the world I had left.
 
The air was thick with smoke, dust and the
smells of unregulated industry; the water around the docks was
rainbowed
with grease and filled with the carcasses of dead
animals and rotting fish; non-existent sanitation standards resulted in frequent
outbreaks of cholera and typhus.

Even so, I liked it there.
 
The shared struggle for survival gave the
place a sense of community that has been almost lost in 21
^st
century
America.

But not everyone shared my rosy
view.
 
The east-end seethed with
political turbulence.
  
Communists, Fabians,
Anarchists and Laborites offered competing solutions to the afflictions of
poverty, disease and squalor.

One of the activists, a red-haired
Irishman named Willie Fitzgerald, seemed to take a particular interest in trying
to convert me.
 
“Brother
Liddel
,” he would say.
 
“We’re holding a meeting tonight at the Bakers’ Hall.
 
We’d love to see you there.”

“Thanks Willie,” I’d answer.
 
“But tonight’s my night host the sewing
circle.”

“Sew us up a new flag then.
 
The old one’s getting stiff with the blood of
our martyred dead.”

For every action, there is a
reaction.
 
The civil authorities saw the
politicization of the east end as a threat to the rule of law and the vested
interests sensed a danger to their way of life.

The most visible sign of
upper-class unease took form as The British League of Fascists or BLF, led by
Sir Osgood Wellesley, the sixth Baronet of
Ancaster
.
 
Wellesley
was outspoken in his condemnation of the new working-class politicians, stating
they were ‘nothing more than a pack of rabble-rousers financed by Jews.’

These competing visions of Britain’s
future amounted to no more than a war of words at first, since the rival groups
never met face-to-face.
 
The false peace
ended one Sunday morning in a riot that was to become legend.