It was easy to see that the father was not there. But the sight that did meet his eyes had him pulling off his constabulary hat and running a hand over his hair.
The lodgings-house was one of those that had been born decrepit, and by now was held together by dirt, damp, and the stained news sheets that papered the wallboards. The bare floorboards were rough enough to draw blood from incautious feet, and the furniture amounted to one bed, two stools, four mismatched tea chests acting as storage, and a rickety table set with a single candle-stick in which rested a stub of cheap tallow candle.
But unlike most—unlike any other the policeman had seen in this district, come to that—the thin blanket on the room’s bed was neatly pulled up; the smaller mattress in the room’s corner similarly tidied. The tea crates held folded clothing, the family kitchen-ware (two plates, three mugs, and a few spoons), and some old toys. An attempt had been made to clean the floor. The spalled paint around the door was scrubbed to the wood beneath, and the sash window—the constable had to walk over for a closer examination. On the inside, the cracked panes were spotless; on the outside, the lower half of the window had been similarly scrubbed. He turned to measure the older girl’s arm with his eyes: the end of the clean patch looked about the distance that Clarissa Hudson’s arm could reach without her actually standing outside on the frame.
As he said to his wife over the dining table a few hours later, that half-clean swath of window was one of the rummest things he’d ever seen.
In front of his knees was the table, one leg broken and propped on a brick. The light from the half-cleaned window fell across another thing he didn’t see much in these parts: books. Four of them, all but one looking as if they’d been kicked about on the cobblestones. Beside them was a slate with a painfully drawn series of ABCs on it, written with the morsels of pale chalk-stone gathered in a clam-shell.
He picked up the new-looking book, wondering who she’d stolen it from. “McGuffey, eh? Who’s the schoolgirl?”
The two girls spoke simultaneously.
“Me,” said the little tow-head.
“We both are,” said Clarissa.
He turned his head to look a question at the brown-haired child he’d nabbed stealing apples.
She explained. “Alicia goes to school, then she comes home and learns me. Helps her remember.”
And, he thought, helps the older one not to forget.
“You’ve had some learning yourself, I think.”
The girl raised her chin. “My mother taught me. She died. I told her I’d take care of Allie—of Alicia. So I do.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s at work,” she said promptly. Her dark eyes were as open and honest as the sky. If he didn’t know better—if he didn’t know his patch as well as he did—he’d almost have believed her.
“Sure he is. Well, you tell your Pa to come find me. I want a word with him.”
“Indeed I shall tell him.” The policeman laid the book back on the table, hiding his smile at the girl’s proper accents.
But the younger child was frowning up at her sister. “Clarrie, why’re you talkin’ so fun—”
“Hush, All—Alicia. And call me Clarissa.”
“But, Clarrie—”
“Thank you, sir, for bringing me home.”
“And don’t you take what don’t belong to you, hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
A right lie, he thought.
His heavy tread across the room set the window to rattling. He turned at the door to look again at that hard-won arc of clear view, then at the table.
“I might shout you a couple of slate pencils and the odd book, if it helps you mind your ps and qs.”
From the expression on the girl’s face, he might have been tantalising her with the offer of a full Sunday roast.
—
That night when their father came back, Clarissa said nothing about the police. As soon as his snores began to change the next morning, she slipped out to beg a mug of tea from downstairs, setting it onto the table with yesterday’s uneaten crust of bread.
When Hudson sat up, dropping his feet to the floorboards and his head to his hands, she scrambled up from the corner where she’d been helping her sister sound out words, and stood before him with cup and bread in hand.
He squinted at her. “What’s this, then?”
“Mrs Murdy had the billy on, she gave me a cup.”
“Good of the old bat. What’d you have to give her for it?”
“Just a smile.”
“Little liar,” he said, but not without affection.
He took a swallow of the powerful, tepid liquid, then tore off a corner of the tough bread with his stained teeth and washed it down with more tea. Alicia had come up to watch the bread disappear. When there was one bite left, he noticed her stare “Had your breakfast yet, Allie girl?”
“Yes, she did,” Clarissa answered, but when Alicia shook her blonde head, he held out the bread. She snatched it and crammed it in her mouth. He rumpled her curls, ignoring her shift away from his hand, and looked at his other daughter. “You got more tucker for yourself?”
She had not. “I’ll eat later, thank you, Papa.”
He nodded and finished the last of the tea. “Thanks for that, child. We’ll have our own kitchen again soon.”
“Papa, Officer Taylor wants a word,” she said.
His eyes narrowed. “Why? What’d you do?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all, he just…I was down the greengrocers, lookin’ at apples, and he—”
“Were you stealing again?”
She eased back, one eye on his hand, but this time it was the younger sister who flung down an intervention.
“Clarrie did an act, Pa,” she said. “For the copper.”
The distraction worked. Hudson’s gaze moved over to Alicia. “An act?”
Clarissa glared at her sister, but that just urged Allie on. “Yair, like she was flash ’n’ all.”
“What’re you talking about, child?”
Alicia turned to her sister, all sweet innocence to hide her glee. “Show him, Clarrie! Talk like you did.”
If Pa got into his head that Clarrie was sometimes acting on him, telling him things he wanted to hear instead of the truth, she’d suffer. She ought to get out now. Let Allie take the brunt of it for once. But she gave her sister’s wide blue eyes a last glare, then turned to the man on the bed. “Papa, it’s just a game I was playin’ with the copper. Acting, like. If you sound more, well, quality, people sometimes leave you alone.” He stared hard at her, and she grew uneasy: any threat to Papa’s pride was a venture onto dangerous ground. Still, his frown did not seem to be one of anger, for once, so she held off leaping for the door.
“Show me,” he said.
“Pa, it’s just a—”
“I want to see. How you talked to Officer Taylor.”
Papa’s breath stank, his eyes were red pools, he hadn’t shaved in a week, and she wanted, wanted, so wanted her real father back. But ten-year-old Clarissa Hudson took a deep breath and obediently summoned the personality she’d worn for the copper.
“Sir, I really don’t know why you wish me to perform this task of—”
“Ha!” her father barked, shooting upright on the bed.
Clarissa flung herself backwards with Allie, but Papa didn’t lunge at them, just sat with an astonished look on his once-dear features. “Do it again,” he demanded.
So, keeping Allie firmly behind her, Clarissa rehearsed for a moment the accent and attitude of the women she heard going into the fancy shops. When she could feel their clothing on her skin—taste their words on her tongue—she took a breath, raised her chin, and stepped out onto her father’s stage. This time, he did not interrupt, just let her go on, his eyes slowly losing their focus as he followed some thought into a distant place.
Eventually, she let her voice run down. Her body relaxed into the posture of a slum-child. Alicia peeked around her
elbow. Their father sat motionless for a long time before he drew breath and focussed on his elder daughter as if he’d never seen her before. “Your Mum could do that. Change accents. Like a parrot, she was.”
“I remember.” A trip to the shops with Mama could be like going down the street with half a dozen different women, as she shifted from her natural brogue to the stretched-out sounds of the local shopkeepers and then into the clipped English of the hat-maker, dipping into the exoticisms of the Greek fishmonger and his Chinese wife. All so naturally, Clarissa wasn’t even certain her mother had been aware of it.
“How do you do that?” he asked. “How do you learn what people sound like?”
“I dunno. I hear things, I guess. Fit my tongue around them.”
He looked down at her thin body, seeing no sign of the raised chin and straight spine that had gone with the accent. “It’s not just your tongue. You’re a right little actress, that you are.”
He dry-washed his face, grimacing at the sound of stubble, then leant to retrieve his trousers from the floor where he’d left them. He swayed a bit as he stood, but managed to work the buttons and pull on the braces without getting tangled.
Then he thrust his hand into a pocket, and frowned. Clarissa’s breath stopped. Would he remember how much he’d had the night before? No: not this morning. The hand came out and laid a few coins on the table. “Get yourself some breakfast, you and your sister,” he said, then paused to look at the younger one. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“It’s a Sattiday, Pa.”
“So it is. Well, to celebrate, I’m going for a bath. See you two urchins later.”
“You won’t forget about Officer Taylor?”
“I won’t forget.”
He mussed Alicia’s hair again, missing her look of annoyance, then picked up his hat and was gone the rest of that day. (Hudson did, in fact, go to see the burly policeman, who took credit, in later years, for having set the family back onto the straight and narrow. At least, until things began to come out.)
The coins Pa had left (added to those Clarissa had taken earlier) were plenty for a day’s food, and even stretched for the luxury of an ice from the Italian man. Clarissa took one slow lick, then handed the rest over to her sister. They sat in the last of the afternoon sun, Alicia greedily sucking in the cold sweetness and Clarissa smiling at her sister’s pleasure.
She kept enough back to buy a candle—a real bees-wax one—and that night after their Saturday bath (fourth-hand and near cold after Mrs Murdy’s family had finished, but still) they snuggled together in bed while Clarissa sounded out the words of Dombey and Son, a satisfyingly long time after darkness had fallen. The smell was so delicious, she could practically taste the honey on her tongue, and she didn’t even have to get up every few minutes to trim the smoking wick.
Nearing the end of both chapter and voice, Clarissa broke off at the sound of unfamiliar footsteps trotting up the stairway. Most of the other residents were nice enough, but every so often a stranger came. When that happened, Clarissa and Alicia took care for a day or two until they were sure he was harmless: that flimsy door would come down to other shoulders than a constable’s.
So at these footsteps, Clarissa stopped reading. Allie was nearly asleep anyway, and in a minute she’d close the book and blow out the candle, to go to sleep with the simple warmth of a sleepy younger sister at her side. But the stranger’s feet did not continue down the hallway. Instead, they stopped right outside the door, as if the man had noticed candlelight leaking around its edges. Clarissa’s heart began to race as she planned out a defence—and then came Pa’s voice, no more slurred by drink than the footsteps had been.
“Open up, Clarrie.”
Clarissa scrambled across the room to slide the bolt, then stared up at the vision that entered: James Hudson, shaved, trimmed, smelling more of soap than of gin, under his arm a paper-wrapped parcel, on his body a suit of clothes she had never seen before. He even wore a new hat, tipped at a rakish angle. He looked like…what was Ma’s word? A toff?
“Pa?” Alicia sounded none too certain.
“Yes indeedy, it’s your Pa,” he said, sounding more tipsy than he looked. “And a sorry old bandicoot he’s been, these months, neglecting his two girls something awful. But I’m back, and I’ve brought you some treasures for your pretty selves. Go ahead, take a look.”
Alicia slipped out from under their blanket and pounced on the tantalising parcel that he tossed onto the foot of the bed. She gasped, and drew out a fistful of glory: hair-ribbons, dozens of them, every colour under the rainbow and then some. Clarissa was drawn over to them, reaching a wondering finger to the gleaming tangle of beauty.
But Alicia was already digging back into the paper, coming out with a pink frock—pink!—and a pair of stockings more delicate than anything either girl had seen before, and a hair-brush and—
Jim Hudson pulled a stool around and watched the girls go through his gifts. After a bit, he realised that he could not tell what colour the little shawl was, and he suggested to Clarissa that she light a second candle.
“I…we only have the one, Papa.”
The room went still. Clarissa tensed at his expression, but in the end he laughed it off, and said that tomorrow he’d buy them a whole box. “Put the dress on, dearie,” he suggested. “No, not you, Allie—it’s for Clarrie.”
Both girls gaped, first at him, then at each other. Alicia’s little fists tightened on the pink fabric before, reluctantly, she let it go. In disbelief, Clarissa picked up the dress: presents and pretty things were for Allie, never her. But the universe soon righted itself when the dress turned out to be too small.
“This is Alicia’s size, Papa,” she told him. “She’ll look better in it anyway.”
“No, I—” He caught himself. “Right, well, we’ll find one that fits you when the shops are open. Meanwhile, you can help yourself to the ribbons.”
The ribbons, too, would be fine in Alicia’s pale curls, the curls Clarissa battled so hard to keep combed and clean, but as for her own head…Maybe Pa thought she’d cut it by choice, instead of to get rid of the lice? Obediently, she picked up the least shiny of the colourful pile and tied it around her short-cropped head.
Her father’s smile dipped a little at the effect, but again he rallied. “A bonnet,” he said. “That’ll be the thing. Now, my child, tell me again about those voices you do.”
For some reason, the glorious colours on the bed instantly lost their gleam. “What about them?”
“Tell me why you do them, to start with.”
“Just a lark, really.”
“But it’s not. You know the story about how your Ma acted the slattern to get herself shipped here on His Majesty’s shilling, you’ve heard me tell it often enough. And remember how she’d put on a fancy manner if she wanted to impress the vicar’s wife or something? Is that what you do?”
Clarissa didn’t know what a slattern was, and she’d never met a vicar’s wife, but she could guess, a little, what he meant.
“I s’pose so. People who talk like big bugs—rich, like—they get away with things. Even if their clothes don’t match. When Officer Taylor caught—when he brought me home, I thought maybe he’d leave Allie and me be if he thought we were, I don’t know, gentry down on our luck instead of…” Her voice trailed away: Papa’s temper was never more uncertain than when he was coming out of a drunk.
“Instead of no-good brats,” he filled in. But his hands stayed down and his eyes studied her face. “You used to talk like your Ma, more. Scottish.”
“I suppose.”
“Do it now.”
“Talk like her? Why?”
“Because I want to hear it.”
Clarissa didn’t like to think about her mother, and had no wish to stir up all those empty feelings. On the other hand, this was the most attention she’d had from her father in a very long time—and, she really didn’t want to make him angry. So without thinking about it much, she
brought the R sound up onto her tongue, lengthened some of the sounds and softened others, and spoke. “Aye, faither, wall i’s a fair way to town and the day wa’ dreich, so I slid onta tha tram amongst a fat lady’s bairns, but I dinna ken the right stop and—”
Her father’s stool went over backwards as he jerked upright. Clarissa cringed away behind one raised arm, but again, he merely stared for what seemed a very long time. Then he wiped his mouth and reached around to set the stool aright. He sat.
“Pa, what is it? You’re scarin’ Allie.”
“Am I? Sorry, little one. So, can you do that parroting with other accents?”
Clarissa could, although it wasn’t just the accents, it was the attitudes: a Sydney boy, a girl from Queensland, a dark-skinned woman from the Outback who lived down the road, a wealthy American she’d followed for a few streets, hoping he might set down the packet he carried. She had no idea what Papa wanted, but this felt like the first time, ever, that her father had looked at her rather than Allie. The fact that her trick seemed actually to please him was enough to make the squalid room seem brighter.
He interrupted her impersonation of the sari-wearing Indian woman she’d seen in the park the week before. “Darlin’, I think you have a skill. And I think you and me, we might be able to make something of it. You think you can teach yourself to cry?”
Clarissa looked at her father, plainly intent on cajoling her into something. Why did he think she was not going to like it?
The shock of the gun in Samuel Hudson’s hand froze me like an electric current. The world stopped: sound, breath, heart, dust-motes in a moment of sunlight. My universe narrowed down to a pair of truths: a round black gunmetal hole at the end of Samuel Hudson’s arm, and the too-sweet smell of his hair-oil. Absurd thoughts were the only thing that moved: In my own sitting room? flitted across my stunned brain, followed rapidly by, God, what will Holmes say?