Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [71]
'Abi?' The mistress's voice on the stairs. The maid tipped the hot water into the slop bucket and went into the tiny pantry for the bacon.
Abi wasn't her real name, of course, only the sound she answered to in the house on Inch Lane, except for the times she pretended she hadn't heard. She'd had as many names as fingers, over the course of her thirty years. When she was a baby in Africa she'd had an infant name. Then when she'd started turning into a woman the old ones had picked her a name that meant bush heavy with berries. She hadn't heard another mouth form the sounds of that true name since she'd been hoisted onto the ship—clinging to her mother's fingers—at nine years old. On the voyage to Barbados she'd had no name at all; she'd been all at sea, slipping down a gap between the old self and the new.
The Joneses called her Abi because it was short for Abigail, which meant a maidservant, according to Mrs. Jones. Abi remembered other names that other masters and mistresses had given her, back in Barbados. Each of them hovered round her head for a year or two: Phibba, Jennie, Lu. They made no difference. She had cast a name off like a shift, every time she'd changed hands.
Mrs. Jones ran in on light feet. 'Abi? Don't forget to rinse the lettuce well this time, won't you?'
Abi nodded mutely, and carried on trimming the bacon. Lettuce! You might as well chew on the grass of the field for all the good it would yield up. But it wasn't her place to comment. She'd learned the first rule of survival, back on her first plantation. Keep your head down, child, her mother told her before she died of the yaws; don't ever meet nobody's eye.
The bacon was purple, like a bruise. It had taken Abi years to learn to cook this food. Even the names were peculiar and unappetising: milk pottage, mess of dried pease, chine of mutton with egg-sauce, quaking pudding. None of this pallid food had any sun in it; even the dried pepper and cinnamon kept in jars on the chimney piece were only ghost spices. When Abi sat down to her own food in the kitchen after each meal—she ate alone and preferred it that way—her plate of leftovers tasted of nothing; her mouth never even began to tingle.
There was the newcomer, the London girl, standing in the doorway with a slightly uneasy look. Hoping to find the kitchen empty, was she? Abi carried on carving hard rind off the bacon and pretended not to notice the girl's presence.
Ah, Abi,' said Mary Saunders as if she were the mistress, 'I just came down for a cup of small beer.'
Abi let her head swing like a bell, meaning no.
The girl drew herself up. 'All I want—'
'Nothing till dinner,' Abi interrupted. 'Is rules.'
Mary Saunders chewed her upper lip.
'Anything go missing, I get blame,' added Abi levelly.
'Quite so. But those dusty rugs have given me a dreadful thirst; I'm sure Mrs. Jones would agree that it's a special case—'
'You nobody special,' pronounced Abi, looking the girl in the eye.
A long pause. The Londoner's pupils were black as cinders. She turned on her heel without a word.
Trouble: Abi could smell it like something gone bad under a floorboard. That was foolish, what she'd just done. She'd let her temper rise. The day had gone wrong from the start; it was that Ash woman's fault for looking skew-ways at her with those colourless eyes at breakfast. Just now Abi had been provoked into forgetting another rule of survival that her mother had taught her: whatever white folks says, is so.
By one Mary's stomach was grumbling. Dinner was at two, in the parlour. Salt bacon in pottage, with raw leaves; Mary lifted them with her fork, to check for slugs. She'd never eaten anything so green in her life.
'You won't be used to fresh salads, Mary?' said the mistress. 'They're a gift from Mrs. Ha'penny's own greenhouse, imagine!'
Mary smiled back as if she were grateful. She folded a leaf into a tiny parcel and washed it down with weak beer.
Conversation was mostly a matter of 'Pass the pepper-pot, would you, Daffy?' or 'Pickles, Mr. Jones?' Occasionally the master expounded his views on