She told these stories to her son. He took them in, eyes shut, laid out across her lap. He did not understand the half of what she said, a quarter of the words. What could it mean, the key was wiser than the stool? That knives are boys and scissors girls? And rain was pips and pods? And sea was saddle? A normal child of four or five would think it all a strange and – finally – a tiresome game, to bend words in a way that was confusing and not funny. Kids of that age would know the shorthand of the street, the beg and tell of play, the arrow accuracy of simple words. They’d know how smell and shape and distance made sense of sound, how words were rounded, focused tools which served the moment, did the job, and left no waste. But as we know, Victor was no normal child. For him the words his mother spoke were two-dimensional, a sheet of sound, a shallow wash of stories from his mother’s village and the past. He had no role to play except to keep his head and body still, and listen hard.
He did not know – despite his age – the trick of speaking sentences or how to make his mark with words. He had not learnt to shout, or tease, or burble rhythmic nonsenses like other children do. On those few times – at night or when his aunt was minding him – when he was spoken to by strangers or Princesses or by the family from whom they hired their room, he could not form replies. He could not speak. He was in that respect, and others, too, a baby still. He was comforted by breast. He did not have the skill to feed himself. His bladder and his bowels had open gates. Anything he chanced upon – an apple core, a pin, a cockroach case – he tested with his mouth. He was not happy on his feet. He never ran. He could not dress himself or tie the laces on his shoes. You would not guess he had a temper, or that he wanted anything beyond the milk, the honey, and the whispers that seemed to keep him calm.
In one respect, Victor, in those years before our city was hustled like so many others into war and weaponry, was more adult than his years. He had, at least, a muscular and exercised imagination; that is to say the tales his mother told confused him, yes, but still they entered him and filled his mind as music enters infants far too young to grasp its geometric principles, its hieroglyphs, its rhythmic cunning. So when Em retold Victor for the third?, the thirteenth? time how he had come about – ‘we thought you up amongst the mushrooms’ – he formed a picture in his head concocted from the wooden tubs of mushrooms which he knew in the marketplace and the single mushrooms which dropped and rolled from time to time within Em’s reach at her station on the approaches to the Soap Garden. He saw himself a pink but ragged mushroom, odorous, peaty, one day old. The basket was his crib. It was a frozen fairy tale for him, an illustration from a children’s book. The tighter that he pressed his eyes together the clearer the image was; the larger and the pinker the mushroom; the rounder, the smoother, the waxier the forests and the fields which were the backdrops to his ‘thinking up’. The world of passersby, of market porters, trundling barrowloads of cauliflowers, fruit, which Victor saw when his mother did not talk and he was tempted to turn his head and lift his lids a little, was chaotic and without pattern when compared to that village world he structured from his mother’s words.
The irony was this, the richness of his life was richness second-hand. His mother’s childhood and her adolescence in the village landscape was made shiny and intense by distance and by time. It was Victor’s milk and honey now. He fed on it. It kept him quiet and still and satisfied. He was a country boy. The city was the dream. He opened half an eye to fall asleep. He woke to find the nightmares crowding in. He dozed, caressed by Em’s refurbished better times, and by higher skies and fresher winds and more magical conjunctions than any city could provide. Imagine what an inner world – bright and sanitized – a boy would make of all this country talk, curled up as warmly and as darkly as a sparrow in a wolf’s mouth. It would be nowadays, what? a theme park marketed as Rural Bliss? The film-set for a country musical? The sort of hayseed Kansas encountered on the road to Oz?
How could a child not be charmed by rural nights when skies were punctured by white stars, and dreams disturbed by falling fruit in orchards where the plums and pears and oranges grew side by side in such harmony that it would seem they shared the branches of one tree? How could he resist the baffling cussedness of grandpa’s anticlockwise cottage door?: Put the key upside down into the backward lock. Turn it the wrong way. And lift! What boy would not desire a village party feast, with a table placed outdoors, or set his heart upon a birthday chair decked and garnished in the finest greenery to be his country throne?
‘I promise you,’ Em told her son, ‘that when the warmer weather comes we’ll put our things into a bag and walk back home.’ She rolled the candle stub across his cheek. ‘We’ll put a light to this. We’ll lie awake at night and listen to the apples drop. When you are six you’ll have a leafy birthday chair.’ She meant it, too – though it was clear that Victor was not strong enough to walk much further than the market rim.
She could not carry him. He was too big and badly ballasted. But she was clear what they would do. At night the marketeers left wooden trolleys parked in the cobbled alleyways between the dormant trading mats and baskets. She’d help herself to one. The market owed her that. She knew which one to take. A trader who was kind to her and gave her fruit and greens when they were cheap possessed a painted cart which was not unlike a child’s perambulator. It had solid rubber tyres and, when he pushed it, it seemed quite light and manoeuvrable.
‘That’s your carriage passing by,’ she’d tell her son. ‘It’s full of winter melons now – but soon you’ll be travelling in it like a little king.’ Em smiled as sweetly as she could at her innocent benefactor and the means of her escape. It was not theft to take this cart from such a kindly man. She’d cushion it for Victor with all their clothes and they’d set off at night. She was not the sentimental sort, nor given to ungrounded optimism, yet at those moments when her mood was grey or stormy she could calm herself with just the thought of Victor in the cart at that point where the trams and city stopped and turned, and where blue fields began.
6
IT WAS AT DAWN, in fact, in May, when Victor was a month short of his sixth birthday, that Em at last gained freedom from the town. More freedom than she’d bargained for. She was asleep, and warm enough to have pushed her blanket back and stretched her naked arms beyond the pillow and her head. Her forehead was red and wet with perspiration. Her nose was blocked and whistling when she breathed. She had not been well. A cough had kept her sitting up until the early hours. The floorboards and the blankets puffed stale air and dust. The room was heavy with the smell of damp clothes and candle smoke and sleep. If she awoke she’d find her head was aching, a ring of pain which was most fierce and unforgiving behind her eyes and in the shallow dell between the tendons of her neck.
Victor had slept, of course. Or lain still, at least, throughout the night. But when the morning light started to infiltrate the room’s single whitewashed window glass, he sat up and crawled across the floorboards to the pot. He straddled it on hands and knees and spread his legs. He pissed like donkeys piss but with less steam. He had a donkey’s aim as well, and wet the floor a little. He watched his urine sink into the wood and make dramatic grains in what had been a grey and lifeless board. He called for Em to wake and see the patterns that he made. When she did not wake he kicked the pot – in irritation – with his heel, so that the triple waters of the night were spilled.
It was in part an accident, but one which suited him. He knelt and rocked upon his hands to watch the family waters as they sought the cracks and contours. The stewed-apple smell of urine. The apple yellow-green of bladder juice. He let the fluid swell and flow and soak. He let it coil and curl round knots of wood. The snoozer snake again. He watched the stream gain power on the floor until it reached the impasse of a raised timber. It formed a pool; it leaned and strained and then set off at a new angle. It had almost reached Aunt’s shoulder when Victor pulled her arm to wake her up. He called, ‘Water down!’ His words made Aunt sit up in a
larm and look around, expecting ceiling leaks or Judgement Day. Em was too tired to wake for leaks or Judgement Day. The best that Aunt and Victor could do was watch the urine seep away, as Em slept on and coughed.
‘We’d better wash it down,’ Aunt said at last. ‘Get the water can.’ She dressed him in a pair of knee-length trousers and a jacket, no underclothes, no shoes, and put on her own coat and hat above her nightcloth.
‘We’ll see if we can earn ourselves a nice fresh loaf, as well,’ she said.
Together they went down the stairs, Aunt first, then Victor, bumping on his bottom down each step. They left the water can beside the tap in the yard and went outside. They walked along the central street, nipped narrow by the district’s pair of wooden gates, into a squint too rough and angular for carts or crowds. There was a bakery two streets away. The first loaves of the day were cooling in their tins. The men who sold them on the city streets from shallow raffia trays were gathering to load their merchandise and check that all the bread they took was free of pockmarks, burns, and splits. The loaves with blemishes would not be sold and so the traymen made the baker take them back into his shop. There’d be disputes. And sometimes, when a loaf was badly deformed or split enough to earn the name of Devil’s Hoof, the baker would toss it to the pigeons or to the early vagrants waiting there. Most mornings all they had to breakfast on was smell, though even the odours of a fresh, warm loaf are more filling than the scents of other streets where there are riches but no food. As luck would have it that day, the ovens had not let the baker down. His yeast had risen evenly. His dough had not bubbled into caves, or cloven like a devil’s hoof, or browned in patches. It all looked good and saleable and – with flour priced the way it was – expensive, too.
Aunt would not carry Victor, though he lobbied her for a piggyback. She made him walk, but let him hang onto her arm or hold her hand. He seemed unnerved to be out on the street and not pressed closely to his mother. He was free – if he wanted – to do what any other boy would do, that is to run ahead into the smell of bread which beckoned them. They moved through the almost empty, almost daytime streets, between two smells. The smell of loaves. And, now, behind them, out of sight, the smell of burning wood.
Which Princess knocked the candle over, or struck the careless match, it is hard to say. The girls themselves all blamed it on the one they liked the least, or else said arsonists (in the landlord’s pay) or some spurned man or neighbours with a grudge had set the attic room alight. Who said that candlelight was luck?
Why there should be matches, candles, arsonists in the apex of that building at dawn no one could readily explain. But what was sure was that there was fire and smoke. By the time the first Princess had woken, the flames had found a carriageway of draughts and were unrolling like a lizard’s tongue across the room. Less surreptitious, simpler flames climbed walls and snapped their lips at curtains and at paint. The smoke at first was almost white and then, when the fire had reached the Princesses’ mattresses and their clothes and had brewed sufficient heat to peel the blackened paint off window ledges, the smoke became heavier and darker. It was laden with the ash and dust which had been buoyed and agitated by the flames. Its colour now was blacker than the worst burnt loaf. It smelt and tasted like a new-shod horse.
The Princesses, when they woke – or were woken with a shake – did not stop to check the cause of the fire. Already they could hardly breathe, and one or two, the screamers there, had singed their throats. They ran, not for water to put out the fire, but for fresh air and safety in the street. The stairs were narrow. There were falls, and breakages. A young girl broke her begging wrist (and made a fortune out of that for the nineteen months she kept the bandage and the splint in place). Another broke her neck, and almost died before she reached the bottom step. But not one Princess was licked by too much flame. Nor did any one of them get left behind, curled up in blankets, to suffocate in the airless caverns hollowed by the heat. They banged on doors as they went down into the lower levels of the building. They raised their neighbours out of bed, but no one took it on themselves to check in every room that there was not a pet cat or a sleeping child that should be saved. They simply passed the message on, and messages are bound to end when they reach deaf or hidden ears. Once the refugees had reached the street, and looked around to check the faces there and comfort those who were blackened or distressed, no one noticed Em was not amongst the crowd. In fact, some swore they saw her standing there, with Aunt and Victor, breakfasting on bread.
Em slept. She was so tired, and dreaming too. The noise and smoke, they said, must have been the scenery of dreams, so that they did not threaten her or make her wake. The smoke – they said, they said – would have sunk into her room from the attic and curled up where she lay and hugged her tight and dry before the flames came down the stairs. They said she would have dreamed her death and felt no pain. But who can tell? Perhaps the truth is this, Em woke. Who would not wake when there was so much noise and anarchy, when the timbers cracked and grumbled like Epimenides the Slumberer who woke, stiff and dry and fiery, from two hundred years of sleep? Her eyes were smarting; from dreams, she thought at first. But then the smell, the boiling vapours of the house, the smoke, the drumming hubbub of the flames, made confusions of that kind short-lived. She would have called at once for Victor, and gone down on her hands and knees to scrabble for him where she thought he slept. How long was it before she realized that he was safe? Or thought that he was dead? Or took the chance to save herself and all the rest be damned?
The smoke by then was far too thick and acrid for Em to see the window light, suffused by shadow and by whitewash even when there was no fire. She could only guess where the door was. Perhaps she found the wall and felt along it for the architraves. And then, empowered by some ancient sense of flight, found easy passage through her neighbours’ rooms into the hotter, fresh-brewed smoke which furnaced from the few remaining timbers in the flaming, disappearing stairwell. Did she die there, gasping, gaping like a fish on land for moist and icy oxygen and finding only pungent, scalding gas? Or did she simply curl up to drown beneath the fervent, swirling blanket of smoke in her own room, her husband’s unlit candle melting in her hand, her family’s spilt and puddled urine holding back the flames for just a trice, because she did not wish to live without her son? These are the questions everybody asked – and answered – for a day or two. But no one volunteered the truth, or called the owner in for questioning, or wondered why Princesses should play with fire at dawn. And no one asked, of course, how it could be that sixty-seven people slept in this four-storey house that had been built for ten. Or how they lived with just three taps and no gaslight and just two toilets in the yard. Or where the singed and heated dispossessed had found themselves new ‘homes’. Or why it was that no one came to name or claim the single blackened corpse.
Aunt should not take any blame. She and her nephew were moved away by policemen with the others in the crowd. The policemen did not care if those they moved were gawpers from the neighbourhood or residents. ‘Move on, move on,’ was all they understood, as if the drama of the streets was a private spectacle, cordoned off to everyone except those few who wore the ticket of a uniform. There were no firemen there or fire appliances. In neighbourhoods like that all epidemics, rioting and fires were left to run their course. The buildings, bodies, laws were not worth keeping thereabouts, it was thought. In fact, a city councillor had said the week before that the best prospect for the city was for all the tenements to be consumed by flames, for all the lawless poor to be dispersed by heat like rodents in a forest fire, for the squalid quarters of the city to be fumigated, cauterized. ‘Let’s build again. From scratch,’ he’d said.
Aunt and Victor were driven back along the street towards the bakery. Victor was crying from the shock and drama of the fire. He wanted Em. He wanted Mother now. He would not walk a pace, so Aunt was forced to lift him on her shoulders until the policemen judged that they had driven back the crowd to a sa
fe and sterile distance. They turned and watched the smoke knit grey scarves above the roofs, with flecks of dying orange made by airborne sparks. Aunt asked those Princesses she recognized if they’d seen Em. They thought they had. They weren’t sure. Yes, yes, they’d seen her standing in the street eating bread with Aunt and Victor just a while ago. Or no, they hadn’t seen her, not for days. Em who? They didn’t know her by a name.
Aunt did not panic. She was sure that Em was safe. She’d heard it said the building had been cleared. In any case, the fire had started in the attic rooms, and all the attic girls seemed well enough if not exactly dressed for shopping or a ball. Em would have had more chance than them to wake, to dress, to come downstairs, to go in search of her sister and her son. What could Aunt do except stay calm? She was the calmest woman on the street. She was just glad that she had remembered to put on her hat, her battered cloche. It’s known that flames make snacks of straw.