The Ballroom (2 page)

The old lady shook her head. ‘Not till babby’s eaten first.’ She began to unbutton her dress.

‘There’s no baby,’ the other woman said, raising her voice. She grabbed the shawl and shook it out, holding up the holey piece of cloth. ‘See? There’s nothing.’

‘Babby! You’ve hurt my babby!’ the old lady screamed, and fell to her knees, scrabbling on the floor. The uniformed woman hauled her up by her elbow. More women joined the commotion then, as though they’d all been given the signal to bawl. At the height of it, a bowl shattered on the floor.

‘What did you want to do that for?’ It was the same hard-faced woman from last night. The Irish one. Ella put her thumbs in her palms to grip them.

‘You want the tube?’ said the woman. ‘You want the tube again?’

Baby-woman was shaking her head from side to side and crying as she was dragged to her feet and pulled from the room.

Across the table, Clem was eating calmly. When she had finished, she put her spoon to the side of her bowl and folded her hands in her lap.

Ella leant forward. ‘Where did they take her? Where did they go?’

Clem’s gaze flicked up. ‘To the infirmary.’

‘Why?’

‘So they can feed her through a tube.’

‘Where am I?’

‘Sharston Asylum.’ Clem’s eyes were a still and steady blue. ‘Why, where did you think?’

Ella looked down at her hands, clasped into fists; she stretched her fingers on the table: eight of them, two thumbs. But they did not look like her own. She turned them palms up and stared. She wished for a mirror. Even that old piece of cracked rubbish they had at the end of the spinning sheds. The one they’d all elbow each other out of the way for on a Friday. Even that. Just to see she was still real.

She looked up. Doors. Nurses standing at each like jailers, carrying one of those big rounds of keys.

Sharston Asylum.

She’d heard of it. Since she was small. If you ever did anything stupid: the asylum. For the lunatics. The paupers.
They’ll send you to Sharston
,
and you’ll never come out.

She stood, grabbing one of the passing nurses by the hand. ‘Wait. There’s been a mistake!’

The woman shook her off. ‘Shut up and sit down.’

‘No! You don’t understand – there’s been a mistake. I’m not mad. I just broke a window. I’m not mad.’

‘Breakfast’s over now. Get back in line.’

A scraping of benches. The clatter as several hundred women stood, lining up by the door. More uniformed women appeared, a huddle in the doorway. One of them was older, wearing a smaller headdress and badge. She was looking over. Now she was crossing the room towards her. There had been a mistake. They knew it now. Relief made her shaky.

‘Ella Fay?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m the matron here. You’re to come with me.’

Ella clambered out from the bench.

‘Good luck,’ said Clem.

Ella didn’t look back. She followed the woman, walking out into the corridor, and when the doors were locked behind her, her knees went, as though they had been kicked from behind. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself.

The matron clicked her tongue in the back of her throat. ‘Are you ready then? Come with me.’

‘Am I leaving now?’

The woman’s jaw twitched, as though a fly had just landed there and she couldn’t brush it off. It didn’t matter. Soon she would be outside. There were two shillings sewn in the hem of her dress, and she would spend them this time. Do what she should have done yesterday. Take the train. Far away.

They marched through one set of doors – two, three, four. Every time they reached one, the silent nurse held Ella by the shoulders while the matron clanked around with her keys. They came to a lighter corridor and beyond it was the green of the entrance hall. She could see the plants, hundreds of them, and the thousand little tiles on the floor. She was marched past the front door into a stuffy room with a couple of chairs and a table and not much else.

The nurse shoved her into a seat, put down the papers she was carrying, and Ella was left alone. The windows had no bars in here. Through them was a wide gravel drive. The door opened, and a man entered. Humming. Fair hair. A long moustache, pointed at the ends, ears that stuck out and were pink at the tips. He eyed Ella briefly before coming to sit, and his eyes were blue and pale. He reached out and slid the papers towards him. He wrote something down and then read some more. He carried on humming as he read.

The man looked up. ‘My name is Dr Fuller.’ He spoke slowly, as though she might be deaf. ‘I am one of the assistant medical officers here. It is my job to admit you.’

‘Admit me?’

‘Yes.’ He sat back in his chair, fingers touching the edges of his moustache. They were sharp, as though you might prick yourself on them. ‘Do you know why you are here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh?’ He leant forward a little. ‘Go on.’

The words fell from her. ‘I broke a window. In the mill. Yesterday. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for it. But I’m not mad.’

The man’s eyes narrowed as he held her gaze. He gave a brief nod then looked back at his paper and wrote something down. ‘Name?’

She said nothing.

His tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth. ‘What is your name?’

‘Ella. Fay.’

‘Thank you. Occupation?’

‘I’m not mad.’

‘Occu
pa
tion, Miss Fay.’

‘Spinner.’

‘And for how many years have you worked as a spinner?’

‘Since I was twelve.’

His pen scratched out over the paper. ‘And before that? Did you work as a child?’

‘Yes.’

He wrote it down. ‘Since what age?’

‘Since I was eight.’

‘And what did you do then?’

‘Doffer.’

‘And, remind me, that is …?’

‘Doffing rolls of thread when they’re full. Tying up the ends and that.’

He nodded and wrote some more.

‘Are you married, Miss Fay?’

‘No.’

‘According to the papers I have here, you no longer live with your family, is that correct?’

She nodded.

‘And where do you live then?’

‘With … other women. We all pay.’

‘And do you have your own quarters there? Your own room?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I share it.’

‘With how many others?’

‘Three.’

He nodded. Wrote again.

‘And what about your father and mother?’

‘Dead.’

‘Both of them?’

She shook her head. ‘My mother.’

‘And your father?’

‘He’s alive.’

More writing, more scratch scratch scratch.

‘And what’s his address?’

The room was quiet. Outside, clouds raced each other across the sky as though they had somewhere better to be. She saw the house where she had grown up. A black house, a house that was never safe. ‘Fifty-three Victoria Street.’

The doctor nodded, wrote and then stood and crossed the room towards her. He took her wrist in his fingers and pressed lightly. With his other hand he took a pocket watch out and stared at it. ‘Tongue.’

‘What?’

‘Put out your tongue.’ He spoke sharply.

He peered at it, then went back to the other side of the table and wrote some more. She watched the letters spooling from his pen, marching from left to right like a line of ants she saw once on a baking summer afternoon, crossing the path on Victoria Street. She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside – the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound. She had stared at the ants. They looked as if they knew just where they were going. She wondered what would happen if she followed them. Where she would end up.

‘It says here, Miss Fay, that yesterday morning you attempted to damage a machine in the factory in which you are employed.’ The doctor was looking at her again, a keenness to him now.

‘I’m not mad.’

‘Do you deny you did this?’

‘I …’

How to explain? How to speak of what she had seen – of the women and the machines and the windows that blocked everything out. It had been so clear then but would muddy before this man, she knew.

She shook her head, muttering. ‘There was no damage. Only the window, and I’ll pay for that. I’ve already said. I’ll find a way.’

He bent down and wrote in his book.

‘I’m not mad,’ she said, louder now. ‘Not like those women in that room anyhow.’

He carried on writing.

The room got closer then, darker. Pulsing. Her face was hot. Bladder hot.

‘What are you writing?’

He ignored her.

‘What are you writing?’ She raised her voice. Still, he ignored her. The only sound the scratching of his pen. The furniture, heavy and silent, watching her too.

She hit the table in front of him. When he didn’t look up, she hit it again, stood and smacked her hand right down on his papers, his pen clattering on to the floor. The ink splattered over his hand. He snapped back in his chair. Took a bell and rang it, and two nurses appeared, as though they had been waiting in the hall just for this.

‘It appears Miss Fay is feeling violent. Please take her downstairs. We can finish the assessment when she’s calm.’

The nurses grabbed her, but she landed a bite on one of their arms and wrested herself free. And then – the door – not locked, running across the entrance hall, the black flowers. The big front door, unlocked too, and her outside on the steps, and the fresh air smacking her face, and her gasping for it, sucking it down, pelting across the gravel. Whistles blaring, shrill and hard. A nurse making towards her. Her turning to the left, to the far side of the building. Then only more buildings, and running from them too, out across the grass. A cricket pitch. Tall trees. Lungs burning. This way only fields, brown and muddy, stretching out, and sheep, and a lane ahead. The top of a small rise. Two men, standing in a hole. One of them waving his arms, shouting. Turning, seeing the nurses behind her, gaining on her. Swerving to miss them, but slipping in the mud, her ankle turning over and her falling, hard on to her front, pitching and rolling down the hill.

The fierce slap of mud. Everything red and black. A hot wetness spreading between her legs.

A face before her, a dark man – hand stretched out, palm open. ‘Are you all right there?’

People around her. Upon her. She on her hands and knees, spitting black earth to the ground. Her arms, yanked behind her back. Pain tearing as she was pulled up and made to stand by people she couldn’t see.

The dark man there still. Standing, watching her. A little way apart. Looking as if he pitied her.

No one pitied her.

‘What?’ she screamed at him. ‘
What are you looking at?
’

‘C
OLD ENOUGH FOR
you,
mio Capitane
?’

‘Aye.’ John took his place beside Dan in the line. ‘Cold enough.’

Eight of them out here in the low tin light, waiting for their shovels, their breath meeting the air in vaporous clouds. The men coughed, blew on their hands, moving their weight from foot to foot, and went up one by one to Brandt, the attendant, to give their name and be told where to dig. It was always the same faces out here; not so many could be trusted with something hard and sharp.

‘Mantle Lane,’ said Brandt, when it was John’s turn, passing the heavy shovel over. John could just make out the thin lines of the man’s face.

He hefted the spade on to his shoulder and followed the grey outline of Dan’s bulk down the gravel path that led behind the main buildings, over the railway bridge and then out to the furthest reaches of the grounds. Their boots crunched on the frosted grass, and John hunkered into his jacket. It was a raw morning all right, with the wind coming down off the tops and finding the gaps in your clothes. When they reached the graveyard, they made their way to the hole they had been digging last week, covered over now with thick wooden boards. Dan crouched beside it, lifting one of the planks and peering inside. ‘Two of them in there.’

‘Aye.’

Four more deaths then until it would be full.

It was a little lighter now, and John could see the frown on Dan’s face as he brought two thin, sappy twigs from his pocket, twisted them into quick knots and laid them carefully in the hole, speaking a few low words as he did so.

There were always six to a grave. No headstones, just patches of earth raw with soil that had been dug and put back in.

John traced a rectangle on the ground with his shovel, marking the plot of a new grave. Dan soon joined him, and when the two men lifted their spades the metal struck the ground with a high, ringing sound.

They did not speak as they worked. It was always like this at first: silence until you got your rhythm up. Your boot finding its place on the lug. The shaft against your knee. Your breath finding its way. Only the sound of your shovel cutting into the ground and the odd grunt of effort. The cold no longer bearing on you, as all of you went into the digging, making the sides sharp and smooth.

They were good at it, and the hard jobs were the good ones – the ones that made you forget.

Occasionally there was a shout from one of the other men and the high shriek of the train as it arrived on the branch line from Leeds, casting a trail of smoke above the trees, but mostly there was silence. It took a day for the two of them to dig a grave: twelve foot deep, to fit as many as possible in the hole. That was fair going. Even though the tools were useless. Not like the ones from home, the narrow
loys
, which were made to fit a man, to fit the job, whether it was cutting turf or digging potatoes or sod. These shovels were factory made. They were fast enough though, since John had cut earth since he was old enough to grasp the spade and Dan was the strongest man there.

They dug on, the heat rising in their bodies, while the sun smeared its late-winter dawn over the black buildings at their back and then hid itself behind thick grey cloud. While Brandt paced on the top of the rise, with the long stick that all of the attendants carried, keeping his beady eye on them and the other scattered working groups, ready with his whistle should anything occur.