Playing Beatie Bow (14 page)

‘Going to the theatre is the devil’s work,’ said Gibbie in his parson’s tone. ‘You fall straight into hell fire ten miles down.’

‘Sounds fun,’ said Abigail. Gibbie blanched.

It was no wonder, thought the girl, that Granny and Dovey thought he would be the one to die. And this conclusion, she knew, would not lie easy on their minds. She recalled Dovey’s devotion to the child, her sleepless nights and endless patience with a youngster Abigail felt was as unlovable and obnoxious as a child could get.

The attic had a sloping roof covered with flowered wallpaper. There were framed texts on the walls. In the sharp angle of the ceiling and floor was a small casement window.

‘Dunna you open it,’ said Gibbie in a fright. ‘’Twould mean my death of cold, immediate!’

‘I’m just looking,’ said Abigail. The attic window looked over the back of the house, over midget back yards; ‘wee hoosies’; and incredible masses of rubbish: old iron bedsteads, broken hen-coops, rusty corrugated iron. The skillion roof of the Bows’ kitchen ran below the window, to extend half over the next yard, where someone had strung a line of deep-grey tattered washing. A small pig was tethered on the roof, rooting listlessly at a heap of rotting cabbage leaves. In the next yard two Chinese with pigtails worked industriously over a steaming copper.
Their
laundry was dazzling white. Baffled by this, Abigail returned to the bed, where Gibbie was watching her with big eyes.

‘Why do you look so different from us?’

‘You’ve got me there,’ said Abby. ‘Haven’t you anything to do besides pick your nose? Haven’t you anything to read?’

‘I dinna read very well, but sometimes Granny tells me stories of the fishermen, and the big storms and such things; and when Judah is home from a voyage he tells me of shipwrecks and rafts, and the forest where the cedar is cut, and how he’s going to be master of his own ship, and sail to the Solomons and see the savages.’

‘That must be interesting,’ said Abigail. The little boy’s face had momentarily lost its pinched, old-monkish look, and become vivacious and excited. Then he said in his dreariest tone, ‘But I’m going to heaven instead to be with Mamma and the angels, and I daresay that is twice as worthwhile as the Solomon Islands.’

‘Poor little rat,’ thought Abigail. Then she caught herself: ‘I’m going on as if I believe he’s going to die, just like the rest of them.’ Aloud she said, ‘Do you know the story of Treasure Island?’

Gibbie’s eyes glistened. ‘I do not. Can you tell it to me?’

Abby began: ‘Once upon a time there was a pirate called Long John Silver …’

‘But if he doesn’t die,’ she thought, ‘there’s only Dovey and Judah.’ The room seemed to fill with Judah’s warmth and liveliness, his boy’s joviality and his man’s sense of responsibility towards his family. She could almost hear him telling this sick child of tropical forests and coral reefs, never mentioning all the hardships and perils of an apprentice seaman on a coastal brig.

‘Won’t ye be goin’ on?’ pleaded Gibbie. ‘For I’m fair mad to hear about this pirate.’

‘He had a wooden leg,’ said Abby absently.

‘Oh,’ she thought, ‘don’t let it be Judah; it mustn’t be Judah!’

In a way, she felt as she had felt when her father went away and left her. Fright, anger and helplessness, the sense of being nobody who could make things happen. But then she had been only ten. Four years of schooling her face to be expressionless, her thoughts to be her private property, had not gone to waste.

After her first despair, she thought, ‘I won’t let them beat me. If that dress is hidden around the house I’ll find it. Or I’ll bribe Beatie, or coax Judah, into telling me where it is.’

She had learnt a lot about herself in this new rough world. Her own thoughts and conclusions of just a month before filled her with embarrassed astonishment when she reviewed them.

‘What a dummo I was! I knew as much about real life as poor little Natty.’

She stopped being silent and distraught and asked Granny if she could help in the house and the shop until whatever it was that she was fated to do as the Stranger was revealed.

Granny put her arms about her. Orkney folk were an undemonstrative people, as she had realised, and Granny’s action touched her. ‘My heart aches for you, Abby, but ’twill be worth it, for you as well as the rest of us. It is my duty to see the Gift handed on. I can do no other.’

Abigail nodded gravely. Granny’s eyes twinkled. ‘And if you are planning on finding your gown, hen, it’s nae guid. It’s where you’ll n’er look for it.’

‘Oh, damn you all!’ Abigail was furious.

‘Fair enough,’ said Granny, her eyes still twinkling.

Still, rather than maunder around with nothing to do, Abigail fitted herself into the household routine. She learnt to rake out the shop fire and carry the ash in pails to the ash-pit in the yard. Some of this ash was saved and sifted and used to make soap. Though many of the inhabitants of The Rocks washed themselves, during their rare personal ablutions, with the harsh lye soap, the Talliskers and Bows used it for laundry soap and never applied it to their skins.

‘You’d be as chapped as a frost-bitten potato in a week, lass,’ explained Granny. They all, even the men, used oatmeal in muslin bags with which to scrub themselves, and as the days went by Abigail noticed her own brown skin taking on the fineness that was characteristic of all the family’s complexions.

She scrubbed and dusted, washed and polished the lamp chimneys, and learnt how to set a wick so that the paraffin (which she called kerosene) burnt clear and without odour.

She did approach Beatie about the dress, but the girl said downrightly she had no idea where it was, and would not tell if she did.

‘But Beatie, if I could escape to my own time, maybe you could come with me, and go to school, and learn all you want, with no one to discourage you.’

A look of intense yearning passed over the younger girl’s face.

‘I’d sell my ten toes for it, as ye weel know,’ she said, ‘but how could I leave Dovey? For she’s all in all to me now my mother’s gone. Aye, I’d do without anything in life rather than leave Dovey.’

Abigail best liked working in the shop. Very quiet and mild since his last frenzy, Mr Bow was a pleasant companion, though given to bursts of tears, turning away unexpectedly and wiping his eyes on the corner of his apron.

‘I’m as right-minded as any man when I don’t touch the spirits,’ he explained. ‘But the pain in my head gets that bad, and hain’t it a temptation then to have a halfer and relieve it a little? But I didn’t hurt you bad, wench, eh, did I?’

‘Only a little, Mr Bow,’ Abigail assured him. She said frankly, ‘I expect you know that Mrs Tallisker thinks I’m the mysterious Stranger?’

‘Don’t I just,’ he replied, ‘and it must be a heart scald for you, kept here amongst folk not your own. But I ain’t saying nothing about it, Miss, because I’m skeered to do so, if you must know the truth of it. For ’tis true, you know, the Gift and that.’

‘But, Mr Bow,’ protested Abigail, ‘you’re English. You can’t believe this Orkney fairy-tale.’

He looked at her sadly. ‘I do, dear Miss, and that’s a fact. Didn’t my pretty ’Melia, when I was a-courting her, tell me that she’d die afore me and leave me with enough sorrow to break my back? I laughed me head off, for you know I was near twenty years older than ’Melia, and in the course of nature it was to be expected that I would be taken afore her. But I said two years of your company, my pretty dear, is worth a lifetime of tears. And I did better than that. Nigh nineteen years we was wed, and never a frown.’

Here he turned away quickly.

‘Did you ever see Florence Nightingale?’ interposed Abigail hurriedly.

He wiped his eyes, turned once more to his patient pulling and slapping of the rapidly congealing toffee over the great hook. ‘Nay,’ he said ‘not to remember like. I mind only filth and the stink of wounds and green water. And then the ship and England. And after a long time I rejoined my regiment and, unfit for active duty as I was, we was posted to New South Wales to the garrison. And there I served out my term, four years agone now. And what I’d do without Granny and Dovey I can’t bear to think, for there’s Beatrice needs a mother, and Gibbie a-fading away, and myself that mazy sometimes I dunno if I’m on head or heels.’

Abigail realised dolefully that Mr Bow would never cross Granny in order to help her.

But this did not mean that she did not stealthily investigate every available place where her dress might have been hidden. In such a tiny cottage she was rarely alone, and she was abashed and angry when caught scrabbling behind the sacks of sugar in the cellar under the shop.

‘It inna worthy of you, pet,’ said Granny quietly. Abigail was crimson.

‘It’s all your fault,’ she retorted. ‘You took my dress and hid it. I’ve never before snooped amongst other people’s things in my life!’

‘And you’ll not have to again,’ said Mrs Tallisker, mildly, ‘for I’ll tell ye where the gown is laid away. In Dovey’s bride chest, which is locked.’

Abigail groaned. ‘You know very well I’d never as much as lift the lid of Dovey’s bride chest, let alone break the lock. You’re as crafty as a fox; you ought to be ashamed!’

‘Aye,’ agreed Granny tranquilly, ‘but ’tis all in a good cause.’

‘I just want to go home, you know,’ whispered Abigail.

‘You’re as restless as a robin, child,’ said Mrs Tallisker. ‘But ’twill not be long now.’

There was a great difference in Mrs Tallisker. She had, all at once, become older and smaller. Only a few weeks before she had towered, or so it seemed, over Abigail. Now Abigail was almost as tall. Her skin had crumpled more deeply, more extensively, like a slowly withering flower. She could not work as hard as before, but sat more often in the parlour with Gibbie, knitting thick grey socks for Judah.

‘Aye,’ she said with her sweet smile, as Abigail secretly stared at her, ‘’tis a fearful effort to give out the Power when it has decided to leave. If I could do what I did for you, child, you can give me a little of your time, inna that fair enough?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Abigail, but in her heart she was grudging.

Sometimes she sat, pondering, in front of Dovey’s bride chest. It was a small, green-painted tin box with an arched lid decorated with faded tulips and rosettes. In there was her key to home, but her sense of honour prevented her from taking a knife and forcing the lid.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ she thought, ‘but it’s true. I can’t touch it. Oh, that Granny! She knows me better than I do myself.’

She had no curiosity about the contents of Dovey’s bride chest, knowing that from the age of seven every Orkney girl began to prepare household linen against the day when her hand would be asked in marriage. She thought it would be full of towels and sheets and little muslin bags to hold oatmeal.

The Rocks was an uncomfortable place to be at that time of the year. As often in Sydney, it was a time of spectacular electrical storms and erratic summer rain. Wild winds snored and spiralled off the Pacific archipelagoes, their fringes sweeping the Australian coast like the edges of cloudy shawls. Judah’s ship,
The Brothers
, had been driven onto the mud at Walsh Bay, and needed repairs. Though he was working on her all day, he was permitted to spend the nights at home, and so she saw far more of him than hitherto.

Now that she was familiar with the household routine, Abigail saw that it turned upon Judah’s comings and goings as if he were a pivot. He blew into the house like a bracing nor’ easterly, and everyone, from the mourning father to Gibbie languishing before the fire in the suffocatingly hot parlour, seemed to absorb vitality from him. He was unlike any boy Abigail had known in her own world. He was just a well-knit, sturdy person of middle height, yet his muscles were of oak, his mind far-reaching and vigorous.

At first Abigail observed him with friendly curiosity. The difference between him and boys of eighteen in her time was that Judah was a man. She thought of the likeable, aimless brothers of many of her friends, without discipline or ambition, and wondered uneasily how it had come to be that they were so different from this son of a poor family, who had done a man’s job, and thought it a right rather than a burden, from his fourteenth year.

He was artless and straightforward, with not the slightest interest in the world from which Abigail had so strangely come.

At first she thought he did not believe her when she told him of ships driven by atomic fission – some under the water – and told him that even ferries no longer used steam, but were oil powered.

‘Oh, aye,’ he said, unconcerned. ‘I believe you. Hanna I seen the Gift at work so often since I was in arms? My mother knew the very day I would return to dock, fair weather or foul, and would have a plum duff in the pot, for as a lad I was fair crazy for a slice of Spotted Dick. But what you tell me, Abby love, well, ’tis like all the fingle-fangles the Government men prate about – Henry Parkes and all that lot – Federation and free trade, and republicanism. I know ’tis true, but it hanna importance for me. ’Tis here I live, do you see, in 1873, and my labour is here, and my own folk, and I’m thankful to God for both. So that’s enough for me.’

‘But men landing on the moon!’ cried Abigail. ‘Don’t you think
that’s
fantastic?’

‘Damned foolishness, I call it,’ he said, and flushed. ‘Your pardon, Abby, for a word Granny would thicken my ear for, but ’tis no more and no less. What good to man or beast is that bare lump of rock?’

‘At least it makes the tides,’ snapped Abigail, ‘and where would you be without them?’

He laughed. ‘True for you, but no man has to go there to press a lever or turn a wheel for that!’

Having failed to interest him in the future, she turned to the past, and asked him was he ever homesick for Orkney, as she knew Dovey was.

‘Not I,’ he said. ‘Why, ’tis the past, and dead and gone. I’m a New South Welshman now, and glad about it, aye, gey glad!’ His eyes danced. ‘Ah, I’m glad to be alive, and at this minute, I tell ye! There’s few enough with my good fortune – for in a month or so I’ll be an AB, with a decent wage and prospects. Oh, aye,’ he added hastily, in case she felt slighted, ‘I’m sure the time you came from is a very grand place to be, but it’s no’ for me, not for all the tea in China.’