Rain sluices through the guttering as she passes under the overhanging eaves of the tight packed buildings. Raindrops drip off her nose and cluster on her eyelashes. The cobbled streets glitter like scales under lamplight, and her heels echo loudly down the alley. Two years, since last she walked these streets.
It was sunny the day she left, steamer pass clenched in her fist like a winning lottery ticket. On that day, love had been the cost of a ticket out. Its power infinite, stretching like the freedom the ocean promised.
She remembers how it had percolated in her bloodstream, rippling her skin like the memory of roughened hands and short grated nails forcing the ticket into her own. ‘Go now,’ her Jim had said, ‘so you can choose to come back.’
Watching Jim stride off, back into the smoke-stack city that had swallowed their childhood, she’d felt her stomach swoop low to her knees. She’d been dizzy like she was after hours spent running the streets for Uncle Jack. Her guts screaming like another night going hungry, and it was a type of hunger she’d felt then. The hunger of the desolate. The hunger of a girl cut loose.
This must be love, she’d thought, because surely only the greatest love could cut so cruelly.
Standing by the ship deck rail as a big white moon looked down on the glass black ocean, she’d reconsidered. Love was an anchor, she’d decided. It held you firm when your soul wanted to soar, but it made sure you knew how to find land again. Because she knew her Jim. She knew his liar’s tongue and honest silences. When he’d said Go, he’d really been saying, There’ll always be a home here for you when you’re done with the world.
She wasn’t done with the world yet, but she was home all the same.
The sights, the sounds, the tastes of the world had filled her up, plumping her hollows, smoothing over the pieces of her Uncle Jack had worn away and adding colour to a spirit she’d thought could only ever stay as pitch drab as old coal, blackened by the choices she’d never had. She wondered at herself, at the madness of returning at all. But it was like over-eating, she thought. She’d glutted herself on adventure and she’d come home to digest.
Stories burned the tip of her tongue as she hurried passed the boarded up store front of Tag’s bookies, wondering what had happened to put the old crook out of business. Her pace quickened to the point of danger as she skedaddled over slick cobbles, longing tightening her throat. Excitement bright as stage footlights seared her insides.
This is love, she told herself. It must be. Only love could feel so dire.
She longed to tell tales of sled races through snowstorms in grand northern cities and how the cold was so fierce it stabbed the throat and stole the breath. She longed to whisper of warm surf and bone white beaches while huddling together in the attic chill, her Jim’s shoulder pressed to hers warmer than sunlit sand. She wanted to pluck the taste of spice from the tip of her memory and offer it up on a platter of words. She wanted to paint a picture of a ballroom rendered by the spinning shimmer of a rainbow chandelier.
She’d been a thousand different people, met two thousand more, and she’d learned to fly, free to choose her own who and where, and why. But she’d always known she’d return to the dingy, dark house on Etward Street with its broken ground floor windows, weed choked garden, and a single light always burning in the attic.
Because she’s got a lot of stories but there’s only one person she wants to tell them too, and that too must be love, she thinks, because why else would she come back here, to this place that had made of her girlhood a prison?
The light in the attic burns still and the house is exactly as she remembers it, like something out of a picture book. Dark and narrow, drain pipe peeling off the wall, gutters choking on the rain. The fence barely strong enough to take her weight as she hauls herself over and lands in the weeds. The key under the broke-nose gnome, the ruddy paint long since washed off his fat cheeks.
She lets herself further into the world of her memories and shudders. Plates in the sink, beer bottles on the pokey table, stale smoke in the air. It’s like she’d never left, except that Uncle Jack’s chair is gone from the little parlour, and the window’s been replaced. There’s a new runner on the stairs as she creeps up and up, passed the hall where her bedroom door remains closed. Up to the attic, where the light shines down.
He’s waiting for her. New suit, smart buttons, shoes shined. Hair slick. Eyes like she remembers, at once sorrowful and shrewd, spidery hands clasped to his knees. New scar through his lip. Expensive watch. She remembers Tag’s derelict store and thinks, did he take out the competition?
There’s no hello. No welcome. No surprise to see her back. Just the weight of expectation in those eyes.
Is this love dragging on her guts and leaving her breathless, or is it merely disappointment, she wonders. She feels the weight of the anchor pulling her down into the depths. She takes a fortifying breath, fearing it might be her last.
‘Uncle Jack?’ she asks.
‘Gone. Doing a long stretch. I found a man that could see it done,’ he says like it’s no big thing. Like the monster who ruled their world was nothing. Just a nuisance to be rid of same as her.
‘You couldn’t’ve done that before I left?’ she asks – no –she demands. All thoughts of sharing champagne tales and glittering reminiscences with this man forgotten.
He looks at her with his sorrowing eyes, eyes that can never hide the impatient mind behind them and says, ‘What difference would it have made? You was always going to leave.’
‘I should shoot you,’ she tells him very calmly. ‘You’re lucky my gun’s packed in my bag.’ She thinks about hurling the whole carpet bag at his head instead. Decides leveraging her dignity against his callousness is a better strategy. He’s no more likely to fall to her best throw than he ever did to Uncle’s Jack’s fists. Hard as hammers as they always were.
He has the audacity to smile. ‘You don’t know how to shoot.’
‘Met a man, didn’t I?’ she says smiling cruelly as he loses his. ‘Had a silver revolver, he did. Taught me how to shoot. Taught me a lot of things.’
He nods, ponderous and slow, like he thinks he’s wise. ‘You’ve done a lot, haven’t you, Tee,’ he says, scratching his cheek and looking across the small room.
Pinned to the flocked wallpaper is a yellowed poster with her smiling face on it. Her heels click over the old floorboards as she approaches, trailing her polished nails over cuttings of newspaper reviews, old advertisements and flyers revealing a meticulous record of her every tour and revue.
Was this love? An attic full of pictures snipped from magazines. A timeline pinned to a wall sketched out toward an inevitable reunion. Was she seeing the ghost of hope or just a mirage under the baleful glare of the bare bulb?
‘I’ve done enough,’ she says quietly, the lump of lead softening inside her. ‘Had fun. Learned to be myself and a lot of other people besides.’ It’s strange to see her exploits laid out like this. She feels almost robbed. Her mystery revealed before she was ready.
‘And now you’re back,’ he says, a curl of satisfaction in his voice.
‘Just a visit,’ she says, sharp and quick.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You belong to the world now, don’t you, Tee?’
‘I belong to myself.’
He nods. ‘Good.’
He doesn’t stand, doesn’t move, so she does. Sinking down beside him. She remembers this. Sitting shoulder to shoulder just like this, cowering from the world downstairs, his arm around her skinny shoulders. Just the two of them, Jack Skimper’s unwanted niece and his obstinate apprentice.
Things’ll get better, Tee, Jim’d say through a fat lip.
Yeah? How’s that? She’d ask disbelieving.
Well, the sod’s got to die someday, he’d laugh.
Back then they’d had something, even though she never believed a word he said. The warmth of body heat, the promise of suffering understood, the whisper of a shared and nourished hope. One that found life in a ticket taking her miles and worlds away. Love had lived in the silence back then. It had breathed in the promise of another day, another place, another them. A moment in time when they weren’t shaped by their desperation and made brittle by experience they didn’t want. Love had waited for them in the future.
What lived between them now? Obligation? Guilt? Nostalgia? Him trapped in his attic, her returning like a tourist to judge? Was love an anchor, a guiding light or the weight of a poisoned promise, she wondered. What was there for them here, when she had found freedom in the world and he had done whatever it was that got him that gold watch?
He stirs, like the ancient king under the mountain. ‘Missed you.’ A mutter, there and gone before she can feel its impact. He nudges her shoulder, ‘Tell me about the king’s fete, why don’t you?’
The air warms between them, like island sunshine. He takes her hand and his nails are still rough. Her breath catches. Hope stirs. Words burn her tongue. She tastes the memory of spice and thinks, here it is. Love.
It’s not much. A paltry ghost of sensation, just the brush of a thumb against her wrist. Just a moment plucked from time. Lost in a minute, remembered for hours. Not anything to live or die for. But it’s enough, she thinks. It’s enough that it is, here, now, and after.
ALDLIS CHRONICLES 