Little Bones
Authors: Janette Jenkins
Seven: Small Dark Eyes & Little Hands
Nine: The Sky is a Dangerous Thing
Twelve: The Saint of Hopeless Cases
Thirteen: Letters From Outside
It’s 1899. London. A young girl is abandoned by her feckless family and finds lodging and work assisting a doctor. But Jane Stretch is no ordinary girl, and Mr Swift is no ordinary doctor ...
Jane does her best to keep up with the doctor, her twisted bones throbbing, as they hurry past the markets, stage doors and side shows to appointments in certain boarding houses across town. The young actresses who live there have problems, and Mr Swift does what is required, calmly and discreetly. Grateful to her benefactor and his wife, Jane assists him and asks no questions – the desperate young women not minding that it is a cripple girl who wipes their brows ...
When this unlikely pair become involved with a rakish music hall star, Johnny Treble, who calls on Swift’s help for his rich mistress’s predicament, it seems that Jane’s spell of good fortune is not going to last. The police come knocking – how will the doctor explain the absence of his medical certificates? How will they explain their connection to Johnny Treble’s sudden death? And how will Jane argue her innocence? It seems that no amount of wand waving will make their problems disappear.
Little Bones
conjures a tawdry, tantalising, troubling world of unclear morality and conflicting sympathies – richly evocative and full of curiosities. Two people act against their consciences simply to get by, and the choices we make are called into question. Is it possible to commit abhorrent acts without being corrupted by them?
Born in Bolton in 1965, Janette Jenkins studied acting before completing a degree in Literature and Philosophy and then doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was in Malcolm Bradbury’s final class, along with Toby Litt, John Boyne, Richard Beard and Bo Fowler. She is the author of the novels,
Columbus Day
,
Another Elvis Love Child
and
Angel of Brooklyn
. Her short stories have appeared in newspapers and anthologies, including
Stand Magazine
, and have been broadcast on Radio 4. In 2003 she was awarded an Alumni Fellowship by the University of Bolton. She lives in the city of Durham.
ALSO BY JANETTE JENKINS
Columbus Day
Another Elvis Love Child
Angel of Brooklyn
For my daughter, Emily
Janette Jenkins
Brighton, August, 1889
Between shows they take in the briny, watching the sea as it shivers over the pebbles, like eggs, Mamie thinks, coming to the boil. A small group of boys runs towards them, asking Fred for a trick they can take back to their friends, and he pulls a coin from his pocket, placing it into his palm, making a fist,
tap, tap, tap
, and the coin disappears.
‘How’s it done, mister?’
‘Magic,’ says Fred, producing the penny from behind the boy’s small ear, and by and large they seem satisfied as he takes Mamie’s arm, strolling towards the kiosk with its jugs of lemonade.
‘Should we buy a glass?’ asks Mamie. ‘And what about some whelks?’
‘No time for whelks,’ Fred tells her, checking his watch, because it would not do to be late. He likes to be prepared, to lay out his tricks, his felt-covered table, and his dark starry cloak. Fred likes to say a little prayer to his father, God rest his soul, who got him
into
this line of business with his childhood box of tricks, and away from the wet-fish shop, where his brother will be ankle-deep in ice, gutting the catch of the day.
Walking to the theatre, the sunlight bounces from the ornate metal railings, the flagpoles, and the hatpins of the women brushing sand from the folds of their skirts. As Fred takes her elbow, Mamie glances over the tramlines, where the streets beyond Dean’s Restaurant are always in the shade. It doesn’t feel like Brighton anymore.
Fifty minutes later, swaying in the wings, Mamie can hear the chatter of the crowd, the little theatre bursting with folk hoping for respite from the sun, and if they haven’t bought a fan (oriental, over-priced), they’re using folded advertisements for Little Sally’s Tots and Brewster’s Dancing Ponies, a fine equine entertainment, though the smallest dropped dead in the heat. As the baritone makes his entrance, a few ale-soaked souls are drowsing, waking now and then with the cacophony of music and the ripples of damp applause.
‘Miserable bleeders,’ the baritone moans, pulling off his shirt as soon as his boots hit the wings. ‘Good luck, my friend, you’ll need it.’
Next up they have the hilarious Monty Dale, all the way from Leeds, ‘a little man with a giant reputation’, though on this sweltering afternoon he can barely shuffle his way over the boards, never mind the jesting. As one sparky lad shouts, ‘Look, Ma, his face is melting!’ Those still awake squint their eyes to see Mr Dale’s greasepaint dripping slowly into his collar.
By the time Fred the Magnificent and his voluptuous assistant Mamie appear, the audience is thinking of ice-cream cones, bottled beer or their limp salad suppers. A woman in the front row yawns loudly as Fred makes her husband’s watch appear from his own trouser pocket.
Their Grand Finale: Mamie has to swish a large satin sheet, Fred will make a globe float above it, but now Mamie can feel the stage veering left and right, she’s tipping, the limelights are burning her ankles as she collapses in a heap, taking the shiny sheet with her. The audience are murmuring, though Fred, appearing unruffled, makes a few dramatic sweeps of his cloak, tapping the dark silky mound with his wand, until eventually Mamie stirs, rubbing her eyes as he pulls the sheet from her. With her head still lolling, she manages to stand, wobbling at first, the audience going wild, thinking perhaps this is what they call a trance. The globe appears to be hovering, and now they’re all on their feet, a few are even whistling. Fred feels ecstatic as they both take their curtain calls. He knows the manager is thinking of pulling some acts, but he has never heard such a thunderous ovation. She has saved them. For the rest of the season Mamie will faint every night; three times on Saturdays.
Arrivals & Departures
Covent Garden, London, 1899
THEY WERE NOT
a pretty sight. Having left their lodgings three hours since, stopping off only for a pie at Mrs Brannighan’s (very dry and gristly), they had been walking through the cold November drizzle, their belongings stuffed inside a large pigskin bag and a tatty bed-sheet.
‘This is it,’ said Ivy Stretch, throwing down the bag. ‘I’m running out of boot leather.’
Towards the end of Gilder Terrace a sign in the window read:
ROOM TO LET
, and after several loud knocks, a woman appeared at the door, looking somewhat dishevelled in her dressing robe.
‘We have come regarding the room,’ Ivy told her, in the refined voice practised after one too many gins. ‘Might it still be vacant?’
The woman, who said her name was Mrs Swift, beckoned the family into a parlour, where a fire burned brightly and the cushions had been plumped. ‘You may sit,’ she said, sinking noisily into her own chair
and
easing her heels from her slippers. ‘Is there a gentleman with you? A husband?’
Shaking her sodden head, Ivy produced an almost clean handkerchief and a few short sniffles. ‘I am a widow,’ she explained. ‘My husband died last June in a very terrible accident.’
‘You can still manage the rent?’
‘I work at Tilling’s Coffee House. My eldest daughter, Agnes, takes in mending and runs errands.’
‘And the cripple?’
‘Jane works as hard as she can.’
Mrs Swift, a wide doughy woman of indeterminate age, though she might be nearing forty, managed a sympathetic wheeze in Jane’s direction. The girl was certainly a curiosity, with her large head, enormous grey eyes and feathery brown hair, which seemed to fly in all directions. Her crooked body tilted, her hands were very small, and her legs, from what Mrs Swift could see of them, appeared to be so slight that for the girl to walk at all must be something of a miracle – yet the girl had walked, albeit with a tipsy kind of gait.
‘Why did you remove?’ she asked, reaching for a poker and stabbing it into the fire.
‘Oh, we had to,’ Agnes piped. ‘We were living over an offal yard and the stink was something terrible.’
‘Offal?’
Pressing a hand against her bosom, Mrs Swift set down her poker and glanced at their boots. Were they clean? Had they left bloody entrails on her thick Turkey carpets? ‘As you can see, plain as daylight, this house is nothing like an offal yard, this house is the home of a doctor, a most respectable man.’
‘And I see it’s quite a little palace,’ said Ivy, with a
painful-looking
smile, because either Mrs Swift was in dire need of eyeglasses, or her own poor housekeeping skills were better than she’d thought. ‘It feels so cosy and heart-warming; nothing like those shabby billets we were shamed to call our home.’
‘You would be renting a small plain room upstairs.’
‘Which would more than suit our needs; we lead very simple lives.’
‘You do?’ Mrs Swift looked them up and down, wrinkling her nose, because perhaps they were not the kind of tenants she’d been hoping for. An office worker with ink on his fingers? A teacher of classics? Or a pious family of milliners? Still, for all its velvet drapes and high pretensions, the house was nudging Seven Dials, and the card in the window hadn’t moved in a fortnight. Pulling her ample chin into her floppy lace collar, Mrs Swift gave her new lodgers one last going over, before allowing them a smile.
‘All right,’ she said, ringing a little brass bell. ‘You had better follow Edie; she will show you to your room.’
The room on the second floor had a wide iron bed with a picture of a bulldog in a cheap bamboo frame hanging over it. There was a leaking spirit stove and a rickety three-legged stool. The green plaster walls were speckled with so much soot and damp it looked like a swarm of giant fleas had settled there and melted.
‘Well,’ said Ivy, lying on the bed and circling her ankles, ‘we’ve had worse.’
While Agnes sulked on the stool examining her fingernails, Jane leant out of the window to watch traders winding their way home or into the taverns. Boots dragged cabbage leaves and all manner of rotting
vegetation
. Girls wrapped like onions walked closely together. Men with hunched shoulders puffed damp clay pipes. Boys jostled. And through the crowds a man appeared, singing an old country ballad, chin tipped towards the window, a bunch of stringy violets in his raised left hand.
‘It’s Pa,’ said Jane. ‘He’s found us.’
For a while the singing continued, the plaintive lyrics visibly affecting several passers-by, until eventually Ivy went out to her resurrected husband who, after gathering quite an audience, fell to his scrawny knees, presenting his paltry blooms. Arm in arm, they meandered their way towards a cheap-looking alehouse, while the girls were left with a row of guttering candles and a bottle of diluted lemon syrup they would not like to drink, because there were black things floating in it.
‘Where is he?’ Agnes asked a couple of hours later, when Ivy eventually returned. ‘Where’s Pa?’
‘Packing.’ She lurched, quickly grabbing hold of the mantelshelf. ‘He’s finally found employment, on a cow farm in Kent.’