Angel of Brooklyn (8 page)

‘Are you coming inside?’ he asked, his voice a little gruff, his cheeks a little pinker. ‘You can’t walk the streets for the rest of your life with nothing but a dollar.’

‘I suppose not,’ she admitted, looking at her boots.

It was dark inside the lobby, and it took a little while for her eyes to start adjusting to the light that came flickering from a small hissing gas jet just above their heads. There was a staircase in front of them. Torn burgundy carpet. The stale air carried the scent of raw onions, dead flowers and the smell that often sits inside your shoes.

‘I think I’ll be heading back now,’ swallowed Beatrice.

The man clicked the door shut. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I won’t hear of it. You’re here now. You might as well stay for five minutes. I’ll get you a drink. A little bite to eat.’

‘I’m not very hungry after all.’

‘But I won’t take no for an answer,’ he said, sounding like her father, pressing his hand into the small of her back, and pushing her forwards. ‘I have macaroons. I have Danish sultana cake and muffins.’

‘They’ll wonder where I am.’

‘Let them,’ he said, waving his chubby hand. ‘Isn’t that why you ran away from home in the first place, to make them fret a little?’

He guided her into a room on the right-hand side of the staircase. She could feel all his fingers, tapping on her ribcage.

‘Home sweet home,’ he puffed, throwing his keys onto a table. Beatrice stood stock-still and stared. The room was crumbling. The walls were so full of cracks they looked like complicated wallpaper patterns. A table was covered in dirty crockery, cigar butts and an assortment of dirty drinking vessels. Holding her breath, she squeezed her purse tight.

‘No woman’s touch,’ he said, batting away a bluebottle. ‘Don’t let the debris spoil your appetite. The food I am offering you is fresh; it’s still in paper bags and smelling of the bakery.’

‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry. I don’t think I ever really was. The thing is, when someone mentions food, you just think that you’re hungry, but I know now for a fact that I’m not, and my brother, he’s told me that fasting is good for the soul, and it does you no harm in moderation, and when I think about it, I’ve probably eaten far too much food in my life already, and I –’

‘Enough!’ the man shouted. Then he smiled, his dentures, though a little loose, were a brilliant shade of white. ‘Now I think we need to wash before we eat anything, don’t you? I propose that you take off all your dusty clothes and shake them out, and I’ve some lovely buttermilk soap that will take away all those fetid smells of the day. Do you like buttermilk soap?’

She nodded. Her lips were so glued together, and her teeth were clenched so tight they were almost in danger of crumbling.

‘Whilst you are removing your things, I will go and run the faucet,’ he said, lips twitching, shrugging off his jacket with the twenty-four gold buttons, two on each collar. ‘It’s nice to feel refreshed, especially after such a long walk as you’ve had. The dust can get everywhere. It can find its way into every crack and cranny.’

As soon as he’d gone into the other room, Beatrice tried the sitting-room door. Of course it was locked. She could hear him whistling
again
, running the water and moving around. She tried the handle both ways. She pushed and pulled it. Nothing. Then the water stopped.

‘Are you ready?’ he called, in a high-pitched sing-song voice.

‘Not quite,’ she managed. ‘Just a few more minutes.’

‘All right, slowcoach. Then I will start without you.’

Quickly, she scanned the table. Ashtrays. Coffee cups. A saucer full of fingernails. There were ketchup bottles. Spent matches. Trails of loose tobacco. And there, beside a leaflet headed ‘Great New Inventions’, were the keys.

She took them. Fumbling, she pushed the first into the lock, but it was too big. The second key turned, but he’d heard her.

‘Where are you going?’ he shouted, half lurching out to her, but by this time, she was out of the door, her legs like jelly, but they could sprint, and the front door was now unlocked, and he was too big, and old, and his trousers were caught around his ankles.

She ran. The sidewalk bounced beneath her feet. Down the narrow streets, past houses with boys sitting on window frames, churches, closed stores, the cannery. Finally, she slowed, bent at the waist, retching into the gutter. Had he followed her? All she could see was a man with his horse, and a dog sniffing hard at some railings.

She was in Fennel Street. It was close to home. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. The clock was chiming six. She’d only been gone an hour.

‘Where’ve you been?’ said Joanna. ‘I made you some cookies. Your father has gone to see a man about a dead squirrel but Elijah’s been waiting. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Cormac brought you some flowers. I’ve put them in your room.’

It was only when she saw the flowers, pink and white, standing in the jug that she began to cry. Her whole body ached with it. She’d had a lucky escape. Running away was dangerous. Especially on your birthday. She’d be careful next time. Plan it all out. That night she dreamed about the buttons.

5. Allergy

Beatrice Lyle was allergic to goat’s cheese.

6. Amethyst Rings

One of Beatrice’s favourite relations was Aunt Jess Simpson, her mother’s younger sister. Aunt Jess lived with her friend Alicia Wellaby in Springfield, Illinois. She had never married. The first time that Beatrice met her, she wanted to ask a whole lot of questions about her mother. She’d written a list and memorised it. Had she liked dancing? Was she a naughty child, or a good one? Had she been a skilled seamstress, or just as bad at sewing as Beatrice? Had she liked children? Would she have liked her? Did she fervently believe in God? How did she find and fall in love with her father? Was she allergic to goat’s cheese? In the end, Beatrice, who had been given coffee to drink for the very first time, was too jumpy with caffeine to mention her mother at all. And Jess didn’t either. So Beatrice spent the afternoon with her aunt, and her friend Alicia Wellaby, playing old maid, wondering how the two women were connected, why they wore identical amethyst rings, and called each other ‘My lovely’.

7. Scar

‘It wasn’t my fault, the knife just slipped.’

‘Onto your sister?’ said Joanna.

‘She was standing too close. She was nudging into my arm.’

‘It was deep. It needed three stitches. Dr Jarman’s coat was covered in her blood.’

‘It did look messy.’

‘You’ve scarred her for life.’

‘The bottom of her thumb? Who will see that?’

‘People look at hands all the time.’

‘I’ll save up. I’ll buy her some gloves.’

‘She has three pairs already.’

‘I’ll pray for it to heal quickly. I’ll ask Him for forgiveness.’

‘Never mind Him. What about her?’

‘She can pray too. Two prayers are always better than one,’ said Elijah. ‘And I’m sure He won’t mind, if she doesn’t put her hands together. At least not for a while. Not in the circumstances.’

8. School

Beatrice and Elijah attended Bloomington School, on South Street.

Beatrice would turn left into the entrance marked GIRLS, leaving Elijah to Mr Harland and the large rowdy classroom their father had once been so familiar with. (His framed picture of Jesse Fell, ‘founding father’ of Normal, still hung beside a map of North America and an illustrated account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.)

Beatrice sat beside Bethan Carter and in front of Norah Billings who was the niece of Miss Billings the teacher and who could get away with murder. Norah Billings liked dipping Beatrice’s braids into her pot of black ink. Beatrice pretended to like it.

‘It’s an unusual shade and it makes them look distinguished, don’t you think?’ she’d say to Bethan, when Norah was close by. ‘And I have heard that ink is as good as almond oil for giving it a shine.’

Soon after, Beatrice was summoned to the headmaster’s office, where Mrs Billings and a red-eyed snivelling Norah were already waiting. Norah’s head was covered in her mother’s Sunday shawl.

‘Show her!’ Mrs Billings said. ‘Go on!’

‘Do I have to?’ Norah cried.

‘Yes!’

Slowly, Norah pulled off the shawl. Her once dirty-blonde hair was streaked with blue and green. Beatrice covered her mouth with her hand and allowed herself a smile.

‘Ink,’ said the headmaster. ‘Is this your doing?’

‘No, sir,’ Beatrice told him, honestly.

‘But you said!’ Norah squealed. ‘You said!’

Beatrice tried to compose herself. She focused on the large globe of the world, fading on the window ledge; that pale Atlantic Sea.

‘I just happened to mention,’ Beatrice said carefully, ‘that I had heard that ink might be good for the hair.’

‘Then you were obviously misinformed,’ said the headmaster.

‘What are you going to do about it?’ said Mrs Billings, rising to her feet. ‘My daughter looks … hideous!’

Norah began to cry again.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Beatrice. ‘I had no idea that you would want to wash your hair in ink. I know I wouldn’t.’

‘The impudence!’ said Mrs Billings.

The headmaster, who was very fond of Beatrice, punished her
reluctantly.
He could not face using the cane, so he told her that she must copy out Psalm 119, not because it was particularly relevant to the so-called crime, but because it was the longest.

‘And don’t go praying for my forgiveness,’ she told her brother that night, her hand already aching. ‘Because I’m entirely innocent. And anyway,’ she added, ‘it was worth it.’

9. Housekeeping

From the age of six, when her father had left teaching and the neighbours left him to it, Beatrice’s life had been full of fly-by-night housemaids who had baulked at the dust, the birds and her father’s unpredictable temper. Joanna had appeared soon after her eighth birthday and had stubbornly refused to let the dirt and feathers get the better of her. When she went away two years later, her cheeks blazing, prematurely forced into the arms of her nurseryman (they had five blissful weeks before the horse got him), she left a rambling three-storey house that was cluttered and in need of a top-to-tail clean at least once a fortnight, what with two messy children, a man living in his own feathery fog, sixty-five dead birds, forty-four small stuffed mammals, and various ornaments that practically begged the dust to land on them. It was a difficult job for anyone.

At first, no one noticed the mess, though in any case, her father barely noticed anything, apart from his creatures and solutions, the
Journal of Native American Wildlife
, and
How to Mount
, by J. A. Flindermann, which he always brought to the table, flicking between ‘Arsenic as a Preserve’ and ‘Skinning Small Mammals’.

These meals were now haphazard affairs. Joanna, though not much of a cook, had usually managed to assemble something that passed as wholesome – a broth, vegetables in abundance (courtesy of Cormac), a piece of grilled meat or fish, and all at set times. These times rarely altered, and even the erratic Mr Lyle seemed to have an inbuilt alarm, perhaps his very own cuckoo clock, that told him when his plate was on the table. Now that Joanna had gone, meals were cold, or lukewarm by default. They came from inside packets and cardboard boxes. Saltines, lumps of cheese in wax paper, jars of compote, German ham, occasionally a loaf. These things were ripped apart, and often never left the table, from where the family were able to graze.

Mealtimes were now any time you felt a rumble, an ache, a feeling of emptiness, when cracker boxes would be reopened, the crackers spread with jelly, peanut butter, chicken paste, shrimp mousse, in fact anything that happened to be left over from Joanna’s last big foray to the grocers, the bill still tacked above the groaning kitchen sink.

Then one day Beatrice saw it, all at once, like her eyes had been washed. Hacking at a square of pressed beef, she suddenly saw the clutter, the crumbs, the dust hanging in the air like a curtain, silverfish, grease, the grey smeary tint on the windows.

‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ she said, putting down her knife, suddenly feeling queasy.

‘What?’ Elijah looked up. He was flicking almonds into his mouth.

‘This filth. Can’t you see it? This whole house is filthy.’

Elijah shrugged. He could see their father passing the kitchen window, carrying a barrel. He flicked another nut and it landed at the back of his tongue, making him choke it into his hand.

‘Just look at us,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you ashamed? I don’t know how you of all people can stand it.’

‘Me of all people?’

‘Isn’t cleanliness next to godliness?’

‘Well,’ he said, contemplating another almond, and then going for the beef, ‘I think we’re talking about purity of the soul here, rather than anything physical.’

She swooped on the crumbs. ‘Are you going to help me?’ she asked, rubbing them into the sink, a sink that was already clogged with bowls and plates, globs of fat, shrunken cherries, a shrimp.

‘I don’t know, it’s a very big job.’

‘Think of it as a mission.’

‘By the time we finish, the house will be all messed up again. It will be a complete waste of time.’

It took nine days and a pile of fresh rat droppings to persuade him. They pumped water into pails, and found some disinfectant. They scooped debris into sacks. Beatrice mopped the floors until her elbows numbed. Then she washed the windows. Upstairs, Elijah changed the blankets and the greasy crumpled sheets that had been nibbled by moths. Somehow, he felt good about it. He even cleaned the bathtub, the solid black rim, the plug caught up with those wet angelic feathers. It was a big job. Huge. It took them ten days. Then Beatrice asked her father for some housekeeping money.

‘Money? What on earth for?’ He was studying a catalogue from a firm in Minneapolis, specialising in realistic glass eyes and reproduction beaks.

‘Food?’

He looked up, as if he didn’t know what the word meant, and then suddenly it dawned on him.

‘You can cook? A real cooked meal, all set out on a plate, and everything?’