Mansfield with Monsters (16 page)

“Dear Sir, Just a line to let you know my little Myrtil was laid out for dead… After four bottles… gained eight pounds in nine weeks,
and is still putting it on
.”

And then the egg-cup of ink would come off the dresser and the letter would be written, and Ma would buy a postal order on her way to work next morning. But it was no use. Nothing made little Lennie put it on. Taking him to the cemetery, even, never gave him a colour; a nice shake-up in the bus never improved his appetite.

But he was Gran's boy from the first…

“Whose boy are you?” said old Ma Parker, straightening up from the stove and going over to the smudgy window. And a little voice, so warm, so close, it half stifled her—it seemed to be in her breast under her heart—laughed out, and said, “I'm Gran's boy!”

 

 

At that moment there was a sound of steps, and the literary gentleman appeared, dressed for walking.

“Oh, Mrs Parker, I'm going out.”

She kept her back to him, rude though it was, for fear he would see her arms and grow curious. “Very good, sir.”

“And you'll find your half-crown in the tray of the inkstand.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The door banged. She took her brushes and cloths into the bed-room. But when she began to make the bed, smoothing, tucking, patting, the small lungs in her chest ached, making the job almost unbearable. She thought of little Lennie and his suffering. It hadn't been right. That's what she couldn't understand. Why should a little angel child have to ask for his breath and fight for it? There had been no sense in making a child suffer like that.

 

 

A sound as though something was boiling came from Lennie's little box of a chest. A great lump of something bubbling in his chest that he couldn't get rid of. When he coughed the sweat sprang out on his head; his eyes bulged, his hands waved, and the great lump bubbled as a potato knocks in a saucepan. But what was more awful was when he didn't cough he sat against the pillow and never spoke or answered, or even made as if he heard. Only he looked offended.

“It's not your poor old gran's doing it, my lovey,” said old Ma Parker, patting back the damp hair from his little scarlet ears. But Lennie moved his head and edged away. Dreadfully offended with her he looked—and solemn. He bent his head and looked at her sideways as though he couldn't have believed it of his gran.

She couldn't lose Lenny, not while she still had breath in her body. She went to see the son of her old employer—a doctor, carrying on his father's work—and asked him about one of those experiments in the attic. She'd been cleaning when she'd come across it all those years ago—a rabbit pinned to a tray of wax, sliced in half and stitched back up across the belly, and a large number of wires clamped here and there, and even sewn into the creature's chest and temples.

“Ah, I see you're admiring my latest patient,” the old doctor had appeared at her shoulder, making her start.

“Sorry, sir, I was only…”

“No, need to apologise. It's fascinating. The power of electricity. We still know so little about its true potential, but I have been conducting my experiments and if you'll now observe…” He switched on a contraption by the table and with a crackle the rabbit jerked in a violent spasm. Then its little chest moved up and down, and it turned its head ever so slightly towards her, and blinked…

The doctor's son had seemed excited at the prospect of some human subjects.

“You understand there'll be risks,” he said. “I may be able to get your lungs into the little boy, but you'll almost certainly perish while I attend to him. Should the reanimation process then bring you back it may have serious complications. There's a very real possibility of tissue damage in the extremities—lower limbs, hands, feet, and so on.”

“Do whatever it takes, sir. Just help my Lennie.”

What was the good of her having a strong pair of lungs in her old body when little Lennie suffered?

Lennie thrived after the operation and was stronger every day. She had woken into an unlife of fresh agony. How long would her aching body struggle on in this wretched state? The doctor had no answers to comfort her. She had died on the surgeon's table, her body torn open and her lungs removed. Little Lennie's twisted lungs had filled her chest cavity and some pickled hands and feet had replaced her own. An intricate clockwork ticked away beneath her sternum, keeping the dead, foreign body parts in time with the spark of life that the electricity had rekindled. When she asked him about the layers of muscle and bone that he had grafted to her healthy limbs, the doctor had chuckled and said that his curiosity had got the better of him.

 

 

“What's it matter if Lenny lives and breathes?” she whispered, rubbing the trail of surgical thread round her throat beneath her collar. The steel bolts protruding from either side of her neck tingled as her fingers—the pickled fingers of a long-dead woman—brushed against them. Now even the feel of her boy's warm arms about her neck gave her pain, but she couldn't let him know that. She couldn't wince at the sharp twinges of the stitching at her throat, wrists, and ankles. She couldn't let herself cough though the small lungs in her chest were so clogged that she felt that she might never breathe clean air again.

“I can't ever let him know.”

As she said those words she suddenly let fall her brush and doubled over in a fit of violent coughing. She found herself in the kitchen, unable to breathe as though she were drowning in a sea of flour and ash. It was so terrible that she flung open the back door of the flat, gasping for air. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of a man leaning against the wall in the alley-way. He was tall and thin, a knitted cap pulled low over his brow and the collar of his worn, dark coat turned up. He smiled at her, broad yellow teeth showing behind a coarse beard.

“Stuffy in there, eh?” he asked, pushing off from the wall and swaggering toward her. His right hand was pressed against his leg, and she saw a sturdy black poker swinging behind his coat. Its sooty end bore a nasty-looking hook.

Ma Parker stepped back into the kitchen without a word and swung the door shut, but the man lunged forward and thrust the tip of the poker into the gap. Ma Parker staggered, her heavy feet clumsy beneath her. The door swung open and the man came into the kitchen, still smiling.

“I saw the gent leave,” he said, lifting the poker and resting it on his shoulder. He looked around the room, picked up a silver salt shaker from the bench.

“He'll be back any minute, I'm sure,” Ma Parker said, backing up against the door to the hall.

“Oh, I don't know as that's fer certain.” The man's smile faded and he unbuttoned his coat with his left hand and licked his lips. “I reckon there's like to be plenty of time.”

Ma Parker knew she could not run. Even before the surgery she'd moved slowly. Now she could barely manage more than a shuffle. She straightened her apron and muttered, “You'd best be on your way.”

There were no more words. The man crossed the kitchen in two quick strides, brought the poker up as high as the low ceiling would allow, and swung it with deadly force. Ma Parker thought of her little Lennie, his bright face and scarred chest with her lungs inside, and she smiled.

The poker caught her in the neck. The force of it was terrific—enough to knock her off her feet. She sprawled onto the kitchen floor and waited for the darkness to take her. She saw the man step over her then push open the door to the hall. His feet were enormous. So were his hands.

She was surprised to find that while the blow had ripped fire across her throat, the pain had already faded to a dull ache. She raised a hand to her neck and there was blood, but not the fountain she'd expected. Ma Parker sat up and, taking a polished pot from the stove, inspected her reflection. The bolt on the left side of her neck was bent and her stitches had pulled, but that was all. She slipped off the apron and saw that blood oozed from the scar where the clockwork had been inserted down into her chest cavity and yet, she was alive—or undead—but whatever the case, the assault had not left her worse for wear. There was no guarantee that her attacker would leave her unmolested as he made his exit, though, so Ma Parker rose to her feet, hefted the pot, and stepped into the hall.

She found the man in the sitting room, bent over the literary gentleman's writing desk. Ma Parker stepped into the room and tightened her grip on the pot handle.

“I've had a hard life,” she said. She shuffled forward on tender ankles. “Hard and brutal and full of grief.”

The man turned, his face drawn. His eyes flicked toward the hall, where his poker rested against the wall, then back to Ma Parker. He looked from the pot to the neck bolts to the swollen purple scars which crossed her collar bone and disappeared under her dress.

“There's no need for you to get hurt,” he said, raising his calloused hands, palms open.

“Too late for that,” Ma Parker replied, eyeing him up.

“ 'Ave it your way,” the man growled, slipping a short-bladed knife out of his belt. He tried to circle round her but Ma Parker shuffled back in front of the doorway.

“That's a nice voice you've got. Must have a good set of lungs in there.”

She shuffled forward, the pot hanging loose from her hand. He fired a quick rabbit punch into her leering face then brought the knife up in a thrust intended to slip under her ribcage. It hurt more than she'd expected as the blade lodged in the extra bones that the doctor had used to reinforce her chest. She nearly fell, but she managed to get a hold of his coat with her free hand and steady herself. As he tried to barge past her and reached for the poker she brought the pot around in an underarm arc and struck him on the elbow of his outstretched arm. There was a wet crack and the lower half of his arm swung up, then hung like a meaty pendulum. He would have screamed, but at that moment she let go of his coat and seized the back of his head. She meant to crack his forehead against the door frame, but as she gripped the back of his skull and pulled back in preparation for the blow, she felt something in her forearm tugging. Ma Parker could feel the new sinew and bone slipping into place, could feel the strength in her new limb, muscles yearning to be used. She gave in to the urge.

The back of the man's head burst like a rotten egg. Ma Parker felt her fingers puncture the skin at the back of his head as his skull shattered. He twitched and danced for a moment, then slumped forward into the hall. Ma Parker looked down at her pickled hand, the tightly corded muscles in her forearm, the chunk of flesh with matted hair and blood in her fingers.

“What 'ave I done?” said old Ma Parker.

She let fall her hand and stumbled back into the kitchen, as though by leaving the hall she could escape her actions.

She couldn't go home; Lennie was there and the blood would frighten him out of his life. She couldn't go outside and sit on a bench anywhere; people would come asking questions. If she even sat on the doorstep a policeman might come by and speak to her.