Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [74]
Thick frost coated the black window, and snow was beginning to drift down. Abi's breaths came slow and sibilant, like the ocean. It was so silent outside, Mary couldn't believe there was a town out there at all. It seemed to her that this tiny house was adrift on a white sea.
Then she must have fallen asleep, because in her dream she was in the Piazza at Covent Garden, dancing with a bear. All round her, people were selling things out of barrels: frogs, and lit fireworks, and babies, and cups of gold. A tiny man opened a walnut and pulled out a skirt the colour of the stars. Carriages and carts dashed through the square, and two of them collided. A keg of blue water was overturned, and fish gulped and writhed on the cobblestones. But in the centre of the Piazza, undisturbed, fingers and claws barely touching, Mary and the bear maintained their stately gavotte.
Abi woke in the night with that crawling feeling that told her she was not alone. The Londoner lay beside her, snoring lightly; she had a reek of perfume about her, something acidic. Abi wrapped her arms tightly round herself to make sure their nightshirts didn't touch.
'You'll be company for each other, won't you?' was what Mrs. Jones had said, with her nervous little smile.
What she needed, Abi realised, was an obeah woman. These things were simpler back in Barbados. On the island, if some chit of a girl moved in, and tried to boss you around, and slept on your mattress without asking your leave—taking up nearly every inch of it with her pale sharp elbows—you'd naturally turn to obeah. That girl would know to be afraid. Even after the longest day in the fields, if you had a sore grudge in you, you could find relief by walking over to the old woman's hut with a gift of some corn mush or a tot of rum and simply saying, That new girl's a thorn in my foot, won't you put some good strong obeah on her for me?
Of course, the problem with thinking about Barbados was that every sweet memory had ten evil ones hanging on its tail. Scratching her shoulder blade just now, for instance, Abi's fingertips met the S in the word Smith. Smith was her first owner; he had bought a job lot of them off the ship, eighty-six women and girls all polished up with palm oil to look healthy. The branding-iron was red gold, she remembered, and when it descended a smell went up like fried chitterlings.
Most nights Abi said her name to herself—her true name, from Africa—over and over, to draw herself back into the arms of sleep. But now her bed was occupied by a stranger, she'd have to be sure not to whisper it, not even to think it secretly in her head, in case it slipped out.
All quiet on Inch Lane. Nothing stirred in the house.
In her narrow room, Mrs. Ash crawled onto her back. Moonlight slipped its blade between the shutters; it made her breasts ache. Times like this, in the awful accuracy of the night, she knew what she had become: a dried-up bitter thing of thirty-nine.
She always seemed to start out on the wrong footing. This London girl, for instance; Mrs. Ash had had the civilest of intentions, but somehow she'd taken an instant dislike to the creature, sitting at table all pert and bright-eyed in her stylish hoops. Mrs. Ash knew she herself lacked the gift of making herself liked. She was always on the edge of things.
Once upon a time there'd been a woman of twenty-two called Nance Ash; a new wife and mother in the tiny village of Abergavenny in the Black Mountains. She had no Welsh, so her husband spoke English to her, tenderly enough. She kept to herself, by and large, but she did no one any harm. Kind enough, her neighbours would probably have said, for all they knew of her. Kind enough,