Mrs. Engels (10 page)

My punishment, so, is not the belt or the starvation. Nor is it the water pump or the locked door. Rather, it's the needle.

“Come and help me with the stitching,” I says to her. “Come, please, and salvage my efforts.”

And she comes. And she looks at my work: a bundle of botched and broken thread like a wild shrub. And she bursts out. And I can't help but join her. We hang off each other now and laugh till we're sick.

X. A Free Education

I'm not clever with the needle. I can't keep my mind full on it. When it comes time for it—this hour after lunch is the usual, though I'm told some ladies can't stop and have to have it torn from them at bedtime as a babby from the breast—but, aye, when the lunch is cleared and way is made for the buttons and patches, I'm hindered from settling into it by a draft that, no matter what the weather outside, comes under the door and cuts into me like a knife.

Over my shoulder, it does blow, and into my ear. Then, whirling in my head, it swings my weathercock round and points it backwards and northwards, and sets me to believing that because I've done my time spinning cotton, I ought be handy at this fancywork too. “Lord bless us and save us, Lizzie Burns,” the wind roars. “All those years at the mill and you can't do a simple cross-stitch?”

I know it's only the devil trying to make me pucker a seam or prick my finger; it's only himself trying for my soul before the Lord calls for it. So I try to pay no heed. Though it gives me an ache to have to listen to him, speeching off like one of the mill men—“What we do today, London does tomorrow!”—or whistling the sound of the mule, dandier to him than a lark, I make as if I'm taken up with the feeding of thread and the making of loops, for I don't need to answer for myself.

That's just how it went in Manchester. The way it was, we were the ones who went out to earn the fire and candle, and it was the men who sat home and did the darning. That was the custom of the place, on account of our wages being the lower. I can't be faulted for that.

Mr. McDermot, down Parliament Passage, he even does it for the mint, like he's a seamstress. You pass your clothes in to him in the morning—he has a basket set out under the window, so all you have to do is drop them through and shout in your name—and he sews them up grand while you're at work and has them ready for collecting the same p.m. Mrs. McDermot is a spinner like the rest of us, but at one of the shabbier mills that doesn't let you out till nine or ten, so when you pass by and gander in, you see her man there, pinny-tied and stool-sat, sewing panels and fixing hems and putting strings in caps, looking all alone only for the bits of clothes and children spread about him. You only ever see him getting up to stir the supper.

They wouldn't believe you in London if you told them.

Nor would they understand—though it's a simple thing to grasp—that when you're out working all day, you don't learn how to knit or to mend, or to have any of the home virtues other missuses might have. Indeed, if today I've any skills to boast of at all, it's only thanks to the Jew, Mr. Beloff, from up Ancoats Street way.

I run in with Beloff during my second year at the Ermen & Engels. Having served out his year at the mill, Frederick has gone back to Germany, leaving Mary with a head full of dangerous notions. She thinks he's coming back. She believes that, one day soon, when he's done with his business on the Continent, he'll ride back into Manchester and carry her off to the good life, the foreign life. It's a bad moment. When she's not demented with high feeling, she's sitting in the dark and letting the blue demons waste her. And on those frightening occasions when she's neither up nor down but normal, she's entertaining men, one after the other, in an effort to forget. I often fear she is near to downbreak. But I don't know how to reach her. My words she screams over. My attempts at embrace she throws off and resents. “You don't understand,” she says, “and you never will.”

It's not long before I feel worn away by it all, and I begin to spend my evenings from home, and my Sundays too, in the dramshops and the pubs. Soon enough I'm getting thick with a boy called Sully from Spinning Field, who takes to walking me over to where the Medlock meets the Irwell, and to kissing me, and to putting his hands inside my dress, and to telling me that Manchester is in England, and England is in London, and as soon as he's saved a bit of money, he'll quit the whole damn place and boat it back to Ireland, make a big family there. Sully has no regular situation. He spends his days collecting bits of smoked cigars from the gutter, which he then dries out and sells back to the tobacconists for a price. And when there's no cigar butts to be had, he looks over the streets for sticks and handkerchiefs and shawls that have been dropped in the night. Or he digs out the cracks between the paving stones with rusty nails to find a penny. Or he collects dried-out dog-dirt for the tanning yards, and bones for the glue makers. And he never sticks to anything. Spends most of his time wandering about, looking for a bit of amusement. And when I've finished my day at the mill and have no desire to go home to Mary and her wailing, I join him, for I like his way of living outside.

Push to shove, we fall in with the mudlarks, and we fare grand with them. We sit by the Medlock, Sully and his gang and me, waiting for the tide's retiring, throwing stones and shouting oaths at the old women who make a headstart by wading straight into the water and fishing down to their elbows, not minding what they stand on, for their feet have long gone to leather. We wrap scraps around our own to keep them safe, but we're young and still have imaginations about what we can't see, so we decide it better to bide for the mud. What we find in it, we sell. Bits of coal, we knock off to the neighbors at a penny a pot. A pound of bones gets you a farthing at the rag shop. Dry rope is worth more than wet. But copper nails are the real treasure: fourpence, you get, a pound. You get naught for the bloodworms, their having no use or value, but we collect them anyhows, fill our pockets with them and then take them out in fistfuls to show the fine ladies on Deansgate.

The worms are all the wildlife there is in Manchester, apart from the pigs in the courts. But oddtimes—it's true—a wind comes down the Medlock and brings a seagull with it. You don't remark on it hanging there till one of the others points it out to you. Then you're not able to stop remarking on it, the way it stays up without moving a limb, and you go all envious, like a fool.

Mary's livid about my larking. “When you sink so low,” she says, “it isn't easy to pick yourself up again. What if the mill people find out what you're doing? What if one of the foremen sees you running about like Miss Jim Crow, all torn and covered in muck? What would Frederick think? You're going to ruin everything!”

And eventual things do go Mary's way. I get a nail in the foot and, in the same unlucky week, a bit of glass in the other, which leaves me lame. I can't get up from crawling and have to go about the place like a dog. I'm still suffering for it in the knees.

“Serves you right,” Mary says. “That'll learn you.”

All the same, she makes sure to put a word in for me at the mill, and she gets a promise—it's no secret how—that I'll get my job back once I'm healed.

I spend most of the days pent up in our room. But if the weather's nice, I sit on the step outside and watch the course of the passing day. Sully from Spinning Field doesn't find his way to me—he must be a dullard or just a laggard, for I told him precise how to get here—but as chance has it, the Jew Beloff passes by regular to visit the boghole, his own court having none. And one day, when he gives me a farthing for no more than a salute, I get to speaking with him.

“See you about the place, sir,” I says, for he's hard to miss, as tall as he is, all long and black, and with very little whisker on him; not a bit like Karl. “I see you about, but I'm not familiar with your people. Is it Irish you are?”

He enjoys that, he does. He stops and gives me his gums and leans on the wall beside me and tells me his kin isn't a bit of Irish but comes from the other direction, far out East.

“Out Ardwich way?” I says.

“Farther,” he says.

The way he explains it, the Jews live in England like a people apart: private rites and holidays, and a separate parish to give out relief. Most of them work as clothesmen, like himself and his own father before him, buying and selling. Hats, he says, are valuable and always will be, as long as there's heads to put them on. He opens out his bag and shows me his wares, and I'm surprised how quality they are, fit for a different caste altogether.

From now on, every time he comes by, he stops to talk, and when I'm not on my step but inside, he takes it on himself to knock on the door and ask for me, much to the fright of Mary, who sees no good reason for a Jew to be calling and wants him sent away. I do no such thing, of course, for I'm fain to go out to him, and we get to knowing each other well.

When we're together I even forget he's a Jew, for it isn't like when you see a darky musician in the halls or a stray Chinaman off the Liverpool boats and your heart falls to thumping and you don't want to get close. With Beloff you can pass the day beside him and not think about it, for he's skin-colored and doesn't appear that queer when you check him over proper, and you can laugh with him just the same as with one of us. Like the time he tells me he gave me that first farthing because he thought I was a cripple and a cripple is as good as a corpse in his book, no good to the living except as a weight to carry around, and there's something about that—the picture of the living carrying around the dead—that makes us buckle.

From my blather, he gets intimate with our affairs. Mary warns me about talking to strangers and letting on how hard things are for us, and dragging us through the muck that way.

“The less people who know our worries the better,” she says. “No name is a good name.”

But the way I see it, Beloff knows anyhows that we're down a wage on account of my wounds, and he can hear the bang and clatter of Mary inside, and can see for himself how hard it is to be cooped up with it all day, obeying rules made by an ill woman. He isn't blind to the thin stick of my arm either. It won't do me harm to play it up a portion is what I think.

And sure enough, one day he says to me, he says, “As soon as your feet are better and you can get around again, you should come and work for me.”

And in that moment I come to the knowledge that a man can indeed help you rise in the world. All you have to do is pick him out right and play him well.

A matter of weeks and I'm going to Beloff's house every Friday p.m. after the mill, and again on Saturday till nightfall, for that's when the Jews keep their Sabbath and won't touch anything, so he gives me my vittles and a couple of bob to do it for him. Snuffing the candles is what I do, and poking the fire and scrubbing his collars and doing the dishing-up, and he says if I ever get good at it, I'll one day be able to do the sewing too: the sewing of all the clothes that come to him broken. What he gives me in return isn't enough to get a room of my own, but at least it gives me time away from Mary, with the added thrill of a regular lot to eat: supper on Friday and fried fish on Saturday, and dinner then, and tea, and supper after that, and that suits me.

A one-room, back-to-back in a court same as our own, is all he has, but he has the luck to live alone, his wife being passed over and his children gone to try their chances in London and such fields. This means it's only ever the two of us: me going about my business and him at the table or on his mattress, rolling cigarettes and calling out his orders. “Do it with two hands is better.” “It's not going to come out, Lizzie, if you don't bend down into it.” “You'll take your eye out like that. The needle needs to come at you and over your shoulder, not away from you like you're doing.”

I don't see it yet, but what I'll eventual realize is that he's training me for home service, for that's the only way out of the mills.

“You're ignorant on the fundaments,” he says. “It's best not to show you know anything, they'll not stand for a know-all, but for the sake of your mind and the mind of your people, you should know the fundaments, everyone should know the fundaments,” and then he starts pumping me on subjects I feel young yet for grasping.

I don't trust him at first, for there's one thing I do know for myself: there's always someone trying to improve you, especial if you're Irish. But over time I come to understand that Beloff is different from the higher-ups who pity you to the amount of a lecture. Over and above being a Jew, he's a separate species of man and fond of learning, and wants to pass it on, for he thinks that important in itself. He thinks learning alone can smarten you. He even thinks it's better than mint or land.

One day he notices my suspicions and he says to me, “What motivates me isn't charity, Lizzie. Ask anyone who knows me, I don't have a compassionate bone in my body. Nor am I looking to have power over you by making you a fool to myself. Believe what I say only when it agrees with the dictates of your own common sense. When it doesn't, I want you to speak up, for perhaps there is intelligence you can give me in return,” and that gives me pause to consider, and the fears I have of him turning me into a queer body like himself fade, and I begin to hearken proper.