The Glass Ocean (29 page)

If I knew others my age, I’d know. But I don’t. They aren’t where I am. Very few girls like me, out there on the streets.

I am
otherwise
and
elsewhere
.

•   •   •

As I am still young and ignorant, this is not yet painful.

•   •   •

It is he who comes to me, in the end. I return from marketing one day to find him crouched like a small, brown animal, very still, in the deep bruise of shadow at the corner of my father’s shed. With his northern knack for colorless ubiquity he has very nearly succeeded at blending in there, though the windy
flap-flap
of the buttonless knees of his plain-woven knickerbocker pants gives him away, so that I hear before I see him as I round the corner out of Bridge Street; but then I do see him, with his eye pressed up to a gap in the wall of my father’s shed.

•   •   •

He with his mischievous sneer, his eyes the color of water, of sky, of no color at all. He will press me up against the brick walls and half-timbers in the alleys, between the market stalls where the sellers hawk their marrows and crockery and bolts of cloth. We will linger together in the recessed doorways and cobbled yards until the housewives chase us out, brandishing their buckets and their brooms; or in between the higgledy-piggledy pews in ancient crumbling St. Mary’s Church, where the ossified finger bone of the saint herself reposes on a cushion inside a glass and silver reliquary. Many times we’ll gaze upon it with a kind of silent, half-mocking awe, then run away, giggling, jostling, tickling each other nervously in the armpits, on the ribs, around the belly. We’ll fear the saint is judging us, perhaps; touching us, unbearably, with luck, or with madness.

His eyes the color of ocean, of air, of no color at all. His indistinctness a distinction. It is so easy to lose him. With his help I will continue the exploration of who and what I am and who I might become, until he decides that he is done with me again, and disappears until next time.

Until next time. Whenever that is, it all will have changed by then—next time, the when and where of it, all will be up in the air, and myself, too, back arched against the ancient bricks, unseeing of the future.

•   •   •

He saunters as if being caught spying at my father’s shed is nothing.

What’s doing in there?
This nonchalantly said.

I am openhearted, unaccustomed to spies.

He’s making
, say I.
Making glass.

As if this, too, is nothing to marvel at. This as well as the strange yet tender experiment we are about to launch upon, by which we will create, with fumbling hands and lips, the outlines of each other, and ourselves.

But not yet. Not yet. It hasn’t started, yet.

He reaches out then, and removes a tangle from my hair. So things begin, by small gestures, incrementally.

Is your Ma in there with him?

Nah. She’s in house.

The cold rain is coming down on us, sharp with icy insinuations.

Golden, is she? Your Ma.

Yes: she is golden. Very golden. With her white skin, slender body, tiny, delicate feet. The whorl of her ear like a seashell. Her teeth are pearls, her lips are corals. Hip grins his rat-toothed grin and I feel myself stung with something—some nettled, tangled thing inserting its hooks, they won’t come out easily. They will rub and rub me now, chafe. I haven’t been jealous of her before, not like this. Other ways, but not this way.

She’s in t’house, playing piano.

Oh.
Disappointed breath upon the air.
I thort I saw her, is all.

You didn’.

My basket is on his arm by now, we are making our way down Bridge Street, over the rioting turmoil of the river, toward the market. He will accompany me, or so it seems. Except when we reach the turning for Grape Lane, suddenly he says he must tend his master’s horses. It is hard for me to imagine this. I try to picture him with currycombs, buckets of mash, raking out the warm, soft straw, none of this is possible. Hefting his master’s suitcase. No. No. Not he. He does not work at anything, though later he will attribute certain of his absences to
My master’s travels.
Hip has no master, I feel this strongly, a form of intuition. Work leaves its mark, and he doesn’t have it. He’s been marked by something else. I don’t know what.

Nonetheless, very quickly, with an action like the dissipation of smoke in air, a conjuror’s trick, he is gone, and I alone as usual must make my way wherever it is I am going.

I grow preoccupied then, once I am alone, without him to distract me. I haven’t thought of her this way before, the way he has just made me think of her. Certainly, I have thought of her attention, all directed elsewhere, not on me; anywhere but on me; and have been pained thereby. Never, though, have I considered the attention of others, drawn away from me, inevitably, onto her.

Of course it’s inevitable.

This stings, now that I know it, it’s like a burr up my sleeve, something I can’t get rid of. I know I’ll think of her this way again, perhaps always, it’s unfortunate. She was one thing, and now she’s become something else, both more and less than herself.

•   •   •

I see him often, after that. A galvanic process has taken place, a fusing, however imperfect, by which we find each other again and again in the dark winter afternoons and the nights aglow with the cold reflective sheen of snow, white nights, during which a girl may lose herself in the secret alleys and passageways of this city, in the many places where a boy may be met, or not, depending on his mood, and hers, outside the watchful gaze of parents’ eyes—particularly if those parents are not watching—if they are turned away, eyes averted; father at his bench, mother at her spinet, not bothering; everyone knows mothers watch best and closest, though in my case, not at all.

•   •   •

I seen your Ma
, he says,
in the window, her hair were like a shiny rope, hanging down.

•   •   •

It clutches at me, around the heart.

She weren’t in the window
, say I.

She were.

I know it is a lie.

•   •   •

In this manner a new year begins.

•   •   •

It is my first outside, in the street.

Tonight it is the New Year’s night,

tomorrow is the day,

And we are come here for our right,

O sing Hagmena-heigh!

O sing Hagmena-heigh!

•   •   •

Snatches of song are borne back to us on the wind, along with sharp, stinging flakes of snow that have begun to fall in the dismal twilight, borne inland off the metallic convexity of the sea. They touch coldly, cling to hair and brows.

If you go to the black-ark

bring me an X mark

Ten mark, ten pound

Throw it down upon the ground,

So me and my friends may have some,

Hagmena-heigh!

•   •   •

From up the river comes the dull
thwuck-thwuck
of hammers in the shipyard; and up above and behind us the lamps are being lit, street by street, the ghostly blue flames of gas illuminating doorways and windows, alleys and passages, the curving stairs and sea-stinking grottoes of Whitby—as well as the haphazard, glittering, guttering, peripatations of the snow.

It is four o’clock in the afternoon, dark already, on the eve of the brand-new year.

Despite the weather and the darkness, the streets are busy, the housewives hustling home with their bundles, the cook-maids straight from the bake house with fragrant, warm loaves of bread wrapped and cosseted beneath their arms. Just outside the tantalizing, gaslit window of the milliner’s shop a puppet show is enacted, accompanied by hectic strains of hurdy-gurdy: a skeleton, stark white, dances, bones departing one by one across the tiny stage until only the skull remains, gyrating wildly, upon a background of worn black felt. Snatches of song rise up—

Tonight it is the New Year’s night, tomorrow is the day—

And just as quickly fade.

Groups of children, roiling together like schools of fish, tight packed, jostling, in threadbare coats and trailing scarves, emerge from the ill-lit alleys, disappear shrieking down damp and ancient passages descending toward the sea.

We are abroad, Hip and I. The foam that trails the wave. From shop to shop they go, begging money; we do not beg. It is something else that we are after.

If you go to the bacon-flick, cut me a good bit

Cut, cut and low, beware of your maw

Cut, cut and round, beware of your thumb,

So me and my friends may have some!

Sing Hagmena-heigh!

•   •   •

The detritus is what we are. Unstable stuff. Left in the wake.

We don’t want what they want.

Come on,
says Hip,
you mus’ see this!

•   •   •

His eyes of any color or no color at all glint eagerly in the gaslight, transparent yet simultaneously opaque as coins, as flat. Shifting. Coins on black felt. His fingers graze my elbow. I feel a sensation, as of bubbles rising rapidly through dark water, silver spheres rushing upward around me, and myself sinking, sinking through the cold and black; this is a premonition, though I do not know of what.

Come on!

He is always finding something for me to see. Last time, a house at the top of the cliff, half burned, outer wall peeled away like the skin from a skull. Remains of a life laid bare: the unmade bed and upturned chairs. Scorched dresser. A painting still hanging from a wire on a blackened wall. This was fascinating, he could not look at it enough, it was like theater, he said. There was a woman’s nightgown tangled around the legs of a chair, and a hairbrush on the dresser. Were there strands of hair in it still, stuck among the bristles?

A story.

I wonder what will it be this time.

We make our way up Church Street in the spitting, sparkling snow. This is where he takes me. Argument’s Glasswares is ablaze with light. But Hip has gone to the other, darker window.

Look. You mun see!

It is glass eyes in a wooden case, sizes and colors various, watching us watching them.

Tonight it is the New Year’s night, tomorrow is the day—

Look! You mun see this!

Now he is at the other, Argument’s blazing window.

Come on!

We shouldn’—

Nonetheless, above our heads a bell tinkles with irresistible cheer.

It is warm, inside.

Look!

We are surrounded by mirrors. He stands me in front of one; peering in I see myself: there I am, the ginger giantess, in my too-small winter coat, wrists protruding from sleeves (how long they are, my wrists, such embarrassment), and then there is the hair, the mess of mats and tangles, and the pale skin, flushed red from winter’s cold; and as if this unflattering object in its collective singleness is not bad enough, I see it reflected ten, twenty, a hundred vertiginous times in a hundred scintillating mirrored surfaces. I am made and remade. Hip has positioned me perfectly for this, clearly he has been here before.

It’s you!

But which is me? This is unclear. There are so many.

He does not laugh really, rather bares his teeth in a soundless, mirthful grin.

It’s you! Now me—

But he will never take his turn. Suddenly there is a movement. From behind a curtain at the back, a tall, thin man emerges, long of limb, dark of eye, smoldering.

Run!

There is a crash, reality splinters, my reflection multiplies, contracts, disintegrates before me in a waterfall of glass; the water rises around me, a deluge of black and cold, bubbles race past white and silver buzzing in my ears like bees, in the distance somewhere there is an incongruous sound, a cheerful, ridiculous tinkling. I am being plucked at: Hip has my sleeve, he is pulling me back to the surface. Reeling me in.
Come. Come on.
Run!
A dash upon the pavements and we are lost then in the roiling crowds. A right, a left, and suddenly we are in the tunnels with all the rest, two among many like ourselves, breathless, singing children. Except I am a giantess, and prone to be noticed.

We are come here for our right, sing Hagmena-heigh!—

•   •   •

I chide him later for the rock. I think he ought not have thrown it. The rest is lost on me, all his work. He says, laughing,
Let’s not have an argument
about it
—

•   •   •

For days I await the repercussions. But there are none. After all, Thomas Argument won’t come to our house, no matter how many mirrors I break. I have been dropped again, effortlessly, into the invisible space formed by three intersecting and averted glances. I have slipped through again unscathed.

•   •   •

It feels like magic. I am so many, so big, so red, so hard to find. Invisible.

Hip is hard to find, too, after. I won’t see him for a while. A shift of earth and time has taken place, all but imperceptible. A subtle mechanism, working.

Thus the turning of the year.

•   •   •

Winter in Whitby is perpetual twilight, perpetual rain edged sharply with ice. Roses long since nipped from the vine, the vine itself gone, shriveled against the whitewash, fallen. Grey twilight packed against the windows where green vines used to be. Inside the Birdcage we are held tight by clouded twilight, like the delicate objects of glass wrapped in cotton wool—those my father sends to London, those he doesn’t. Sunrise at half eight; sunset at half three; Hip gone; nowhere; absent. The three of us, then. Together.

Curtains drawn tight. Block it out.

•   •   •

I am upstairs in the bedroom, on the Turkish carpet, surrounded by what have been, in my life, companions: Señor El Galliñazo, formerly brilliant wattles greyed with time, peering down skeptically from the top of my mother’s dresser. He is not my only audience: there is a cayman, too, gap-toothed grin beneath wicked yellow eyes, coolly carnivorous. These do not unnerve me.