The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (15 page)

The sleep is falling steadily. I could go out and gather it. I could pat it together. My hands would know what to do. I used to be a pilot, did I mention that? I would like to make one more flight. This time I would not let my chance go by.

I could leave my life. I could change completely. Is it time?

It wasn’t steady work, no, no more than once a month, and then it was terrible hard work for a few days. But the pay was good. I can’t complain. It was a sight better than singing “Mother, Is the Battle Over?” at the crossroads and plying my broom before the gentlemen and ladies—I was always more clever than pretty, and made less for all my winking and scraping than the other girls did just sitting there. I thank my stars for the night I fell in behind the blood wagon; I made myself such a pestilential bother with asking questions that Scratch Jill finally took me on as apprentice and I never missed a period the next twenty year. I was a devil for working. I worked on the docks in between, though I needn’t have and some like me didn’t, but just lazed around until the monthly came again.

Out in the country they let it come up wherever it pleases. Well, they can’t stop it, can they? My sister lives in Kent. Once a month the blood wells up in the cow prints. Perfect little cups of it, she says they are, and make a pretty trail through the cowslips. Blood runs down the bark of trees, why I don’t know, maybe the roots drink it in below, and it comes out above. It fills the ruts and runs between the cabbages. Why make a fuss about it, my sister wants to know. It helps the plants grow, is what they say, and does no harm to animals either, and even humans will take a nip on the sly, for the power it is said to have to bring true dreams of love and put a powerful charm of attraction on the drinker.

Whether it brings love to them as drinks it I don’t know. It brought love to me, but I was soaked in it from top to toe every
month for twenty year. But Sally is gone now, and I don’t care to speak of her.

I was a blood-lark, yes, that’s what they called us back then. We wasn’t pretty, we was a sight to strike fear into the hearts of men, or women, and I won’t say we didn’t take some pleasure in that, rollicking down the street gin-drunk (they always allowed us a tipple on the job to keep our spirits up; it was hard work, and dirty) heading home at five in the morning in our red coats dripping for all we had squeezed them out into the cart. And singing one of our carols, which were that tuneful, I still find myself humming them, though not one woman in a hundred could join in, for they’re forgotten now. But I won’t sing one, and you oughtn’t to ask. The words would bring up your green bile, if you wasn’t used to them, most people being able to handle blood on its own, or lewdness, but the combination being a mite strong for them. Now it’s not such a jolly profession, now they do things proper and they’ve got the machines.

Oh, I wouldn’t go back to the old ways, I’m not saying that, just that we had good times and we was always helpful with one another, and indeed we had to be, stuck up to our necks or our ankles depending on which way about we went in, mucking out the blood by main strength if we was in a hurry, or for those as took life more sanguine, just lying and soaking it up slow in our napkin coats. Sanitaries, they called them, but I don’t know that they were all that sanitary. Of course, they called them that to have a way to refer to them with gentlefolk, like the ladies what took such an interest in our little ones, the tiddlers we employed back then to swab out the smallest holes. Tiddlers? Children, I mean. Sent them up into the tight spots with cotton balls clenched in their teeth, we did, and pinched their toes if they were slow about it, but we was gentle with them, if they didn’t
argue too much, and they mostly didn’t, you see, because they knew we would drop them in the drink if they did, and they were scared of the blood.

That wears off. Blood is blood, for us as have to wade in it and make our living off it, and it’s bonny stuff once you get over being squeamish. There’s no place for squeamish girls, not in our trade; we threw ‘em right in the catch, heels over head, and had a good laugh, too, while they pulled themselves out, for there isn’t a dimity handkerchief in the world what could mop up that mess. Bonny? Yes, that’s what I said. Isn’t it the very soul of red?

I suppose there was a time the blood came up in the city same as everywhere else. But I don’t know when that was. As far back at least as the Romans they was devising ways to keep it away from the city, let it flow as strong as it likes elsewhere. They had lead pipes, and aqueducts, and they sank wells and flushed the gutters with buckets of water and these methods didn’t change much for oh, hundreds on hundreds of years, and I suppose they worked well enough, but people was always trying to come up with new ways to draw off the blood and send it somewhere else, the men being most especially particular about it, not having the feel for the blood that women do, and not thinking it right to turn the faucet once a month or work the pump and it runs red, or winch the bucket up and find it brimming with blood. And it’s true enough that it is not the stuff to be washing the fine linens in nor to water a delicate wine, though as it only comes once monthly I’d not bother about it if it was up to me.

So here in England they dug and tunneled under London and fashioned the wells and the catches and what all, what were the wonder of the modern world and ain’t matched even
yet in poorer countries. All the little veins collected the blood and ran it down into the catches and that more or less kept it from rising up in the streets like it used to do, though you could still see beads of blood in city gardens in the morning, for you can’t keep the earth from doing what the earth must, and I for one don’t want to. Yes, it still come up and pinked the water from the tap and beaded between bricks and cobblestones and trickled down gutters, but most of it was caught in the big catches the little veins run into.

They couldn’t just leave it there. Oh, no. Blood does scab, don’t it, though the monthly scabs blessedly slow, without which fact we would be scab pickers not swabbers, and I for one thank my stars. Still, if they left it puddling there in the catch, even granted they flush the streets and the buildings and let the runoff go in the catch and water it thin, in a month’s time the catch would be one solid scab, like in the scab mines out east, but no use to anyone without a thousand years go by to press it hard and turn it to carbuncles, and meanwhile a more notable problem is the blood next time has no place to run to, all the catches being clogged.

I explain all this because I don’t know if you know it, and one day all this knowledge will be gone along with us who done the work. Already Little Tam is dead, and Camilla the C**t, and Red Rose, and Singsong Sally—we called her that, sir, because my Sal was always singing, down in the pipes, and an eerie sound it was to have float up from a hell red hole. And I hear Long Arm Lunnie is only just hanging on, and raving about the catches and the swabs and the napkins, and only a few of us able to know what she’s talking about, and she younger than me; and all the little blood-larks who came on after me and who I helped to train and pricked their heels to send ‘em into
the pipes when they was reluctant, they’re all grown women now with little ones of their own and don’t want to remember what they done before.

What did they do? Well, isn’t it obvious? Someone had to go down and clean out all that blood. In some parts of town you can still see the hatches, and I believe there’s unfortunate folk now living in some of the catches they overlooked when they went around walling ’em up. The city called them manholes, same as the other kind, but we right off renamed them lady-holes, that being the cleanest version of the name I can report to you, sir, and that was because we was almost all women who did the work, women being small-boned and, as I said, less inclined to get funny about the blood, but going about the work practical and easy with one another.

We marched off to work whenever we got called, though most of us could sniff out when a period was coming after just a few months on the job, we had such a feel for it. How did we tell? It’s hard to say, we just knew, that’s all; everyone got a little queerish right before, and especially when it was late coming, then all at once the whole city relaxed, and that’s when we got out our poles and our climbing boots. They never called us out before dark, they had some idea that nobody was to know when it was bleeding, that it would upset people of refinement. Whether that was true or not, we never made much secret of it and went to work singing blood carols like I said, and pass the gin, because we was happy to see each other again and happy to be working, the money often running thin enough by the time the next period came. Sometimes we hitched a ride in the swaddling cart, sunk in the mounds of stained batting.

The cart would stop at the particular ladyhole for which we
was responsible. The lads who stayed above to handle the batting started setting up the big reel, and we patted the horse and some of us patted the lads and down we went like ants into the ground. All over the city at the same time teams like ours was going down the ladyholes single file, hand over hand down the big staples stuck in the walls, with our lanterns fixed to our chests or hats to leave us both hands for climbing. In the circle of sky above, sometimes we could see the cart horse looking down if he came close enough to the fence we put up to keep the people coming late out of the pubs from joining us too sudden.

The first whiff of the blood smell always struck hard, but after that we didn’t notice it, it was not a bad smell anyhow, but strong and natural, like horses or a good clean pond with plenty of crawlies living in it. It’s foul work, you’ll be thinking. Yes. But I say, and others will say the same, that going down that hole, I felt my spirit rise to see the cardinal color on the bricks all around, in the wavery light, and the snowy coats swaying with the climbing, but made so stiff by the quilting they stayed almost the perfect shape of bells, and Sally already tuning up, so powerful a sound in the well, you looked everywhere else first to see who was singing before you came to her mouth moving, and then you was amazed to see the tiny figure who put it out.

There was always a fearful moment when the cozy, lit-up chimney bellied out below into the dark of the catch and we had to take our leave of the staples for the rope ladder. But once we got down far enough that our lights darted around the dome, it was a beautiful sight and enlarged the soul like a cathedral, and that helped with the dizziness.

I mentioned how my Sal was not much in the size department. In fact we was all tiny; us grown women were not much bigger than the tiddlers in training. There was even one proper dwarf among us, Big Bess we called her, because she was stocky, though no more than three foot tall. We had to be little to fit up the pipes. True, anyone agile enough to climb down could stand watch over the batting coming down, though you had to be monstrous fit to run up every other minute to pick it off any snags in the wall. Our own ladyhole had a slight sideways jag, barely enough to notice when you was climbing, but the tampon always stuck there. If we couldn’t worry it loose, we drew lots for who was going to catch on to the end and hang there like a clock weight until the batting tore off the snag, and tampon and swabber both splashed into the catch. There was no particular danger, sir, for we had ropes and planks all strung over and around the pool and we could spider about on them quicker than some folk on solid ground.

That’s where the bigger girls stayed, working the batting. The rest of us was for the pipes what fed into the catch from all directions, but we always stopped a moment to take in the sight of the white batting twisting and flinching as it come down from the hole in the dome. When the batting hit the silky surface red lights would ripple up the walls as good as a show. That minute, the cotton wicked up the blood a good five foot. After that the batting come down steady and slow without too much snagging. By the end of the night’s work, the pool would be gone, and the whole length of the batting would be lying in fat red swags on the bottom of the catch, with just the towrope hanging loose from above and rapping on the sides of the chimney. Then we’d help the lads reel it up into the cart, which was painted with
pitch so it was mostly proof against leakage, with a few of us staying below to mop the catch clean. Then the next night we had the whole thing to do over, and so on until the period was up.