Jilly felt like a little kid, bundled up in her boots and parka, with long johns under her jeans, a woolen cap pushing down her unruly curls and a long scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face, cocooning her so completely that only her eyes peered out through a narrow slit. Turtle-like, she hunched her shoulders, trying to make her neck disappear into her parka, and stuffed her mittened hands deep in its pockets.
It didn’t help. The wind bit through it all as though unhindered, and she just grew colder with each step she took as she plodded on through the deepening drifts. The work crews were already out with their carnival of flashing blue and amber lights, removing the snow on Gracie Street and Williamson, but here in the Tombs it would just lie where it fell until the spring melt. The only signs of humanity were the odd little trails that the derelicts and other inhabitants of the Tombs made as they went about their business, but even those were being swallowed by the storm.
Only fools or those who had no choice were out tonight. Jilly thought she should be counted among the latter, though Geordie had called her the former when she’d left the loft earlier in the evening.
“This is just craziness, Jilly,” he’d said. “Look at the bloody weather.”
“I’ve got to go. It’s important.”
“To you and the penguins, but nobody else.”
Still, she’d had to come. It was the eve of the solstice, one year exactly since the gemmin went away, and she didn’t feel as though she had any choice in the matter. She was driven to walk the Tombs tonight, never mind the storm. What sent her out from the warm comfort of her loft was like what Professor Dapple said they used to call a geas in the old days—something you just had to do.
So she left Geordie sitting on her Murphy bed, playing his new Copeland whistle, surrounded by finished and unfinished canvases and the rest of the clutter that her motley collection of possessions had created in the loft, and went out into the storm.
She didn’t pause until she reached the mouth of the alley that ran along the south side of the old Clark Building. There, under the suspicious gaze of the building’s snow-swept gargoyles, she hunched her back against the storm and pulled her scarf down a little, widening the eye slit so that she could have a clearer look down the length of the alley. She could almost see Babe, leaning casually against the side of the old Buick that was still sitting there, dressed in her raggedy T-shirt, black body stocking and raincoat, Doc Martens dark against the snow that lay underfoot. She could almost hear the high husky voices of the other gemmin, chanting an eerie version of a rap song that had been popular at the time.
She could almost—
But no. She blinked as the wind shifted, blinding her with snow. She saw only snow, heard only the wind. But in her memory…
* * *
By night they nested in one of those abandoned cars that could be found on any street or alley of the Tombs—a handful of gangly teenagers burrowed under blankets, burlap sacks and tattered jackets, bodies snugly fit into holes that seemed to have been chewed from the ragged upholstery. This morning they had built a fire in the trunk of the Buick, scavenging fuel from the buildings, and one of them was cooking their breakfast on the heated metal of its hood.
Babe was the oldest. She looked about seventeen—it was something in the way she carried herself—but otherwise had the same thin androgynous body as her companions. The other gemmin all had dark complexions and feminine features, but none of them had Babe’s short mauve hair, nor her luminous violet eyes. The hair colouring of the others ran more to various shades of henna red; their eyes were mostly the same electric blue that Jilly’s were.
That December had been as unnaturally warm as this one was cold, but Babe’s open raincoat with the thin T-shirt and body stocking underneath still made Jilly pause with concern. There was such a thing as carrying fashion too far, she thought—had they never heard of pneumonia?—but then Babe lifted her head, her large violet eyes fixing their gaze as curiously on Jilly as Jilly’s did on her. Concern fell by the wayside, shifting into a sense of frustration as Jilly realized that all she had in the pocket of her coat that day was a stub of charcoal and her sketchbook instead of the oils and canvas, which were all that could really do justice in capturing the startling picture Babe and her companions made.
For long moments none of them spoke. Babe watched her, a half smile teasing one corner of her mouth. Behind her, the cook stood motionless, a makeshift spatula held negligently in a delicate hand. Eggs and bacon sizzled on the trunk hood in front of her, filling the air with their unmistakable aroma. The other gemmin peered up over the dash of the Buick, supporting their narrow chins on their folded arms.
All Jilly could do was look back. A kind of vertigo licked at the edges of her mind, making her feel as though she’d just stepped into one of her own paintings—the ones that made up her last show, an urban faerie series: twelve enormous canvases, all in oils, one for each month, each depicting a different kind of mythological being transposed from its traditional folkloric rural surroundings onto a cityscape.
Her vague dizziness wasn’t caused by the promise of magic that seemed to decorate the moment with a sparkling sense of impossible possibilities as surely as the bacon filled the air with its come-hither smell. It was rather the unexpectedness of coming across a moment like this—in the Tombs, of all places, where winos and junkies were the norm.
It took her a while to collect her thoughts.
“Interesting stove you’ve got there,” she said finally.
Babe’s brow furrowed for a moment, then cleared as a radiant smile first lifted the corners of her mouth, then put an infectious humour into those amazing eyes of hers.
“Interesting, yes,” she said. Her voice had an accent Jilly couldn’t place and an odd tonality that was at once both husky and high-pitched. “But we—” she frowned prettily, searching for what she wanted to say, “—make do.”
It was obvious to Jilly that English wasn’t her first language. It was also obvious, the more Jilly looked, that while the girl and her companions weren’t at all properly dressed for the weather, it really didn’t seem to bother them. Even with the fire in the trunk of the Buick, and mild winter or not, they should still have been shivering, but she couldn’t spot one goose bump.
“And you’re not cold?” she asked.
“Cold is…?” Babe began, frowning again, but before Jilly could elaborate, that dazzling smile returned. “No, we have comfort. Cold is no trouble for us. We like the winter; we like any weather.”
Jilly couldn’t help but laugh.
“I suppose you’re all snow elves,” she said, “so the cold doesn’t bother
you?”
“Not elves—but we are good neighbours. Would you like some breakfast?”
* * *
A year and three days later, the memory of that first meeting brought a touch of warmth to Jilly where she stood shivering in the mouth of the alleyway. Gemmin. She’d always liked the taste of words, and that one had sounded just right for Babe and her companions. It reminded Jilly of gummy bears, thick cotton quilts and the sound that the bass strings of Geordie’s fiddle made when he was playing a fast reel. It reminded her of tiny bunches of fresh violets, touched with dew, which still couldn’t hope to match the incandescent hue of Babe’s eyes.
She had met the gemmin at a perfect time. She was in need of something warm and happy just then, being on the wrong end of a nine-month relationship with a guy who, during those many months of their being together, turned out to have been married all along. He wouldn’t leave his wife, and Jilly had no taste to be someone’s—anyone’s—mistress, all of which had been discussed in increasingly raised voices in The Monkey Woman’s Nest the last time she saw him. She’d been mortified when she realized that a whole restaurant full of people had been listening to their break up argument, but unrepentant.
She missed Jeff—missed him desperately—but refused to listen to any of the subsequent phone calls or answe
r any of the letters that had deluged her loft over the next few weeks, explaining how they could “work things out.” She wasn’t interested in working things out. It wasn’t just the fact that he had a wife, but that he’d hidden it from her. The thing she kept asking her best friend Sue was: having been with him for all that time, how could she not have known? So she wasn’t a happy camper traipsing aimlessly through the Tombs that day. Her normally high-spirited view of the world was overhung with gloominess and there was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that just wouldn’t go away.
Until she met Babe and her friends.
Gemmin wasn’t a name that they used; they had no name for themselves. It was Frank Hodgers who told Jilly what they were.
* * *
Breakfast with the gemmin on that long gone morning was…odd. Jilly sat behind the driver’s wheel of the Buick, with the door propped open and her feet dangling outside. Babe sat on a steel drum set a few feet from the car, facing her. Four of the other gemmin were crowded in the back seat; the fifth was beside Jilly in the front, her back against the passenger door. The eggs were tasty, flavoured with herbs that Jilly couldn’t recognize; the tea had a similarly odd tang about it. The bacon was fried to a perfect crisp. The toast was actually muffins, neatly sliced in two, and toasted on coat hangers rebent into new shapes for that purpose.
The gemmin acted like they were having a picnic. When Jilly introduced herself, a chorus of odd names echoed back in reply: Nita, Emmie, Callio, Yoon, Purspie. And Babe.
“Babe?” Jilly repeated.
“It was a present—from Johnny Defalco.”
Jilly had seen Defalco around and talked to him once or twice. He was a hash dealer who’d had himself a squat in the Clark Building up until the end of the summer, when he’d made the mistake of selling to a narc and had to leave the city just one step ahead of a warrant. Somehow she couldn’t see him keeping company with this odd little gaggle of street girls. Defalco’s taste seemed to run more to what her bouncer friend Percy called the three B’s—bold, blond and built—or at least it had whenever she’d seen him in the clubs.
“He gave all of you your names? Jilly asked.
Babe shook her head. “He only ever saw me, and whenever he did, he’d say, ‘Hey Babe, how’re ya doin’?’ ”
Babe’s speech patterns seemed to change the longer they talked, Jilly remembered thinking later. She no longer sounded like a foreigner struggling with the language; instead, the words came easily, sentences peppered with conjunctions and slang.
“We miss him,” Purspie—or perhaps it was Nita—said. Except for Babe, Jilly was still having trouble telling them all apart.
“He talked in the dark.” That was definitely Emmie—her voice was slightly higher than those of the others.
“He told stories to the walls,” Babe explained, “and we’d creep close and listen to him.”
“You’ve lived around here for a while?” Jilly asked.
Yoon—or was it Callio?—nodded. “All our lives.”
Jilly had to smile at the seriousness with which that line was delivered. As though, except for Babe, there was one of them older than thirteen. She spent the rest of the morning with them, chatting, listening to their odd songs, sketching them whenever she could get them to sit still for longer than five seconds. Thanks goodness, she thought more than once as she bent over her sketchbook, for life drawing classes and Albert Choira, her arts instructor at Butler U., who had instilled in her and every one of his students the ability to capture shape and form in just a few quick strokes of charcoal.
Her depression and the sick feeling in her stomach had gone away, and her heart didn’t feel nearly so fragile anymore, but all too soon it was noon and time for her to go. She had Christmas presents to deliver at St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged, where she did volunteer work twice a week. Some of her favourites were going to stay with family during the holidays and today would be her last chance to see them.
“We’ll be going soon, too,” Babe told her when Jilly explained she had to leave.
“Going?” Jilly repeated, feeling an odd tightness in her chest. It wasn’t the same kind of feeling that Jeff had left in her, but it was discomforting all the same.
Babe nodded. “When the moon’s full, we’ll sail away.”
“Away, away, away,” the others chorused.
There was something both sweet and sad in the way they half spoke, half chanted the words. The tightness in Jilly’s chest grew more pronounced. She wanted to ask, away to where? but found herself only saying, “But you’ll be here tomorrow?”
Babe lifted a delicate hand to push back the unruly curls that were forever falling in Jilly’s eyes. There was something so maternal in the motion that it made Jilly wish she could just rest her head on Babe’s breast, to be protected from all that was fierce and mean and dangerous in the world beyond the enfolding comfort that her motherly embrace would offer.
“We’ll be here,” Babe said.
Then, giggling like schoolgirls, the little band ran off through the ruins, leaving Jilly to stand alone on the deserted street. She felt giddy and lost, all at once. She wanted to run with them, imagining Babe as a kind of archetypal Peter Pan who could take her away to a place where she could be forever young.
Then she shook her head and made her way back downtown to St. Vincent’s. She saved her visit with Frank for last, as she always did. He was sitting in a wheelchair by the small window in his room, which overlooked the alley between St. Vincent’s and the office building next door. It wasn’t much of a view, but Frank never seemed to mind.
“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, anytime, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”
Jilly was one of those who’d rather know what was going on and try to do something about it, than those who preferred to pretend it wasn’t happening and hoped that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had learned long ago that trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it. But at eighty-seven, she felt that Frank was entitled to his opinions.
His face lit up when she came in the door. He was all lines and bones, as he liked to say. A skinny man, made almost cadaverous by age. His cheeks were hollowed, eyes sunken, torso collapsed in on itself. His skin was wrinkled and dry, his hair just a few white tufts around his ears. But whatever ruin the years had brought to his body, they hadn’t managed to get even a fingerhold on his spirit. He could be cantankerous, but he was never bitter. She’d first met him last spring. His son had died, and with nowhere else to go, he’d come to live at St. Vincent’s. From the first afternoon that she met him in his room, he’d become one of her favourite people.
“You’ve got that look,” he said after she’d kissed his cheek and sat down on the edge of his bed.
“What look?” Jilly asked, pretending ignorance.
She often gave the impression of being in a constant state of confusion—which was what gave her her charm, Sue had told her more than once—but she knew that Frank wasn’t referring to that. It was that strange occurrences tended to gather around her; mystery clung to her like burrs on an old sweater. At one time when she was younger, she just collected folktales and odd stories, magical rumours and mythologies—much like Geordie’s brother Christy did, although she never published them. She couldn’t have explained why she was drawn to that kind of story; she just liked the idea of what they had to say. But then one day she discovered that there was an alternate reality, and her view of the world was forever changed.
It had felt like a curse at first, knowing that magic was real, but that if she spoke of it, people would think her mad. But the wonder it woke in her could never be considered a curse and she merely learned to be careful with whom she spoke. It was in her art that she allowed herself total freedom to express what she sa
w from the corner of her eye. An endless stream of faerie folk paraded from her easel and sketchbook, making new homes for themselves in back alleys and city parks, on the wharves down by the waterfront or in the twisty lanes of Lower Crowsea.
In that way, she and Frank were much alike. He’d been a writer once, but, “I’ve told all the tales I have to tell by now,” he explained to Jilly when she asked him why he’d stopped. She disagreed, but knew that his arthritis was so bad that he could neither hold a pencil nor work a keyboard for any length of time.
“You’ve seen something magic,” he said to her now.
“I have,” she replied with a grin and told him of her morning.
“Show me your sketches,” Frank said when she was done.
Jilly dutifully handed them over, apologizing for the rough state they were in until Frank told her to shush. He turned the pages of the sketchbook, studying each quick drawing carefully before going on to the next one.
“They’re gemmin,” he pronounced finally.
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“Most people haven’t. It was my grandmother who told me about them—she saw them one night, dancing in Fitzhenry Park—but I never did.”
The wistfulness in his voice made Jilly want to stage a breakout from the old folk’s home and carry him off to the Tombs to meet Babe, but she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t even bring him home to her own loft for the holidays because he was too dependent on the care that he could only get here. She’d never be able to carry him up the steep stairs to her loft.