Fan awoke to a seagull calling to her through the open window. The air was already warm, which meant the ocean would be as flat as one of Ma’s oatcakes.
Her bathing suit gaped a bit around the arms and chest – ‘up top’ as Aunty Florence so delicately called it – but Ma reckoned there was no money for a new one and it would have to see out the summer. Under her bare feet, the floorboards crunched with sand. So much for Ma and her ‘sweep up that mess, young lady’. Fan probably still had sand in her hair and up her nose and goodness knew where else, but Ma didn’t have a broom for those places.
In the kitchen, Ma was reading a letter.
‘Ma, I can’t find my hat,’ Fan said.
‘Isn’t it on the back of the door?’ Ma asked.
‘I looked.’
‘You should be more careful.’
‘Aunty Florence usually brings a spare.’ Fan noticed an envelope on the table. ‘Who’s that from?’ She reached for it, but Ma snatched it away.
‘None of your business.’ Ma shoved the envelope into her apron pocket and pressed it to herself like she thought Fan might dive in for it. ‘You planning on leaving the house in that state of indecency? Where are your clothes?’
‘I was hoping you’d let me go for a quick dip on my own, early, ’cos it’s already warm. Please, Ma. I’ll look after Tom and Ned all day for you. Promise.’
‘All day? You must be keen. All right. Just this once and only’ – Ma pointed her finger at Fan – ‘only if there’s somebody else on the beach.’
Fan stared open-mouthed at her mother.
‘Don’t die of shock, Fan. I said just this once. Don’t go in if it’s rough. Or where you can’t touch the bottom.’
‘It won’t be rough, but yes, I know, I know,’ Fan said. ‘You worry too much. I’m the best swimmer in the whole of Semaphore.’
‘I wish you’d stick to dry land,’ Ma said. ‘Your dad says you’re more fish than girl.’
‘You should try it one day, Ma.’ Fan kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘I might be a fish, but you’re chicken.’
Fan ran past the corner shop where she’d once nicked an apple on a dare, only to spit it out because she’d felt so guilty. Past the butcher, whose window had cracked years ago but which he’d never bothered to get fixed. Past the apothecary’s shop, whose newly painted walls were already peeling from the salt and wind and blinding summer sun. She ran past the houses that got bigger the closer you got to the seafront, and over the road that divided where she lived from where she swam. Fan took a flying leap across the dunes, reaching through every inch of her arms and legs towards the bright blue sky. Then one big breath in, and the more-fish-than-girl was underwater, opening her eyes, nothing but the heartbeat of the ocean thudding in her ears.
The water held her steady and her hair spilled like ink as she surfaced. Floating on her back with everything bright and sparkly, Semaphore Jetty looked so close. Fan knew she could swim and swim and look up and still feel like she’d got nowhere. One day she’d do it – she’d swim from Semaphore to Largs and barely come up for air. Bloody hell, she’d swim all the way to Brazil, as Ma and Uncle Ernest would say. Ma would huff and bluster, no doubt about it, but Uncle Ernest would talk Ma round as usual and say, ‘Agnes, don’t worry about Fan. She’s a good swimmer,’ and then he’d make a big fuss about swimming with her even though Fan wouldn’t need the help. And Ma would no doubt hurry along the sand shouting at her from the beach, ‘You stay close to Ernest or God help me I’ll throttle you myself!’ Funny how Ma only ever talked about God when she was mad as a snake about something, and then it was always assumed that God would be on Ma’s side.
Fan licked salt off her lips. Why would God have given her these long arms, these strong legs, this mermaid hair, if she wasn’t supposed to be at home in the water? Fan let herself sink to the bottom. She dug her hands into the seabed and opened her eyes and watched brown seaweed float by. Surely this was all the God anybody could want.
From the end of the road, Fan could see somebody sitting on the front step. She ran, to make it look like she was in a hurry in case it was Ma waiting to yell at her. It was Dad, sitting where he’d sat most of last week and the week before, whittling a piece of wood. He hardly acknowledged her, didn’t even tell her off for trailing sand into the house. Maybe Dad was having a summer holiday, although Ma hadn’t said anything. Fan would’ve thought somebody on holiday would smile a bit more, but she hadn’t seen Dad smile for weeks.
When the letter had arrived a few days ago, the shock of seeing her name and address on an envelope from Western Australia had made Agnes cry out. She scanned the page and skimmed news of a move to a new house away from the stench of the East Perth river, a place with a tram line and the promise of electric lights. She hurried through the weather, an arthritic hip and a fickle milking cow. She re-read the pages looking for one word: Walter. It wasn’t there.
I can no longer live with your father for various reasons. His heart and mind are failing and the drink has ruined him. I have asked him to leave. You must take him on.
Agnes’s head ached between her eyes. After so many years of silence, it was the same old Annie, pointing out the mess and asking someone else to clean it up. She wondered if Annie had meant to write take him in.
‘Is he dead?’ George asked.
Agnes shook her head.
‘Is it Walter?’
‘I wish there was something, anything, about Walter. But it’s just chit-chat, and …’
‘What, love? What’s wrong?’ George rested his hand on hers.
‘She says she can’t live with him anymore. She’s thrown him out and expects me to do something about it.’
‘How can a woman throw her husband out?’ George took the letter from Agnes and began to read.
‘Annie’s never been one for doing things the usual way.’ Agnes rubbed her forehead. ‘And you don’t know my father.’
George kissed her hair, spoke in a soothing voice. ‘So she thinks he hasn’t got long.’
‘However long he’s got is too long,’ Agnes said. ‘I don’t know why she thinks it’s got anything to do with me.’
In the distance, the bell rang at the port.
‘There’s the bell, love,’ George said. ‘Here we go again.’ He flexed one arm up like a circus strongman. ‘Who needs those young wharfies, aye?’
Agnes kissed his forearm. ‘I’m sure things will pick up soon, love.’
In an hour, George was back, grim-faced and silent.
‘Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure.’ Agnes rested her hand on his shoulder, but he flinched and pushed it away.
‘You’re all the family I need,’ Agnes was fond of saying to Ernest, Florence and Sarah, but today the trip to Rosewater made her feel nauseous. She’d barely opened the door before her news spilled into the room: the letter, Annie, her father, the throwing out and the taking on.
‘Annie was always so tolerant of your father’s … temper,’ Ernest said.
‘He was on his best behaviour when you lived with us,’ Agnes said. ‘Walter and me hardly recognised him. He didn’t want our cousin saying anything bad about him.’
‘Ernest, darling, what do they do in the west with the old men who have no family or nowhere to go?’ Florence asked.
‘They sleep rough. In the streets,’ Ernest said. ‘Boarding houses. The churches do what they can.’
‘Well then, it’s settled,’ Florence said, patting Agnes’s hand. ‘Annie can find him a room in a boarding house.’
‘You must have known this day would come.’ From the armchair, Sarah tapped her walking stick on the floor. ‘He must be nearly eighty, Agnes. He’s outlived all his brothers, including my dear Sam. Do you want your eighty-year-old father sleeping on the street?’
‘It won’t come to that, Mother.’ Ernest put his arm around Agnes’s shoulders. ‘Poor Ag. Florence is right, you know, as always.’
‘He’s an old, sick man with nowhere to go,’ Sarah said. ‘Perhaps he’s outlived all his mistakes, too. He’s still your father, Agnes.’
‘I’m not going back, and Annie’s not shipping him here like some kind of cargo.’ Agnes smiled at Florence. ‘You’re right. It’s settled.’
A week later, George fell into bed in the blackest part of night and rolled over to give Agnes a whisky-kiss. She curled around him. He stroked her hair and whispered, ‘Guess what, Agnes, love, I asked around. I know where I can get all the work I want. Plenty of it.’ And the way he fumbled with her, well, Agnes knew he was his old self again.
‘Fremantle, love,’ George said. ‘Word has it there’s loads of work there. Other Sunderland men say so. Shifts every day. Wages every week.’
‘I told you, I’m never going back.’ Agnes pulled away from him.
‘Your old man could pay us something for board and lodgings. You want it to keep going like it is here?’ George’s voice had a flinty edge. ‘We need the money.’
Agnes rested her head on his chest. ‘Annie can find him a room in a boarding house or one of those places the church has for old men down on their luck.’
‘Agnes, love.’ George sat up on his elbows. ‘I know you said things were bad when you left Perth, but what kind of daughter leaves her father to die on the street?’
‘It’s not like that.’ Agnes’s eyes welled. ‘I’m not a monster, George.’
‘I know, love. I’m sorry.’ George held her. ‘Maybe the old man’s mellowed with age.’
‘Not him.’
‘We could give it a go in Fremantle. I know I can earn good money there.’ George kissed her hand. ‘I tell you what, if it doesn’t work out, we can always come back.’ He stroked her hair. ‘I promise.’
Semaphore beach was crowded with families in colourful hats. The water teemed with swimmers and beyond the jetty, tiny white waves flickered and disappeared. Fan and Tom ran ahead to their usual sheltered spot in a shallow dip of dune. Ernest and Florence’s children followed in a straggly line. Ned was last of all. Agnes, Ernest and Florence followed the trail of footprints until they caught up to the children. The sky was bright and clear but beyond Largs, around the blind curve of coast, Agnes noticed the horizon was stained with purple cloud, and she shivered. Perhaps there was more than one storm coming today.
Florence pulled a hat out of her bag. ‘Please don’t send this one to Fan’s Mysterious Hat Graveyard.’
‘Oh, Aunty Florence, it’s beautiful.’ Fan put it on. The hat itself was plain, but Florence had tied two white ribbons around it and they danced in the breeze. She pulled the brim down low and tight, then just as quickly tossed it on the sand. ‘Race everyone to the water!’
‘I’m swimming with you all today,’ Florence said, ‘so none of the usual tiresome rules will apply.’
The scramble of arms and legs and bathing suits began and the children disappeared into the water. Even from this distance Agnes knew the bony curve of Tom’s spine, Ned’s lopsided walk. And, of course, Fan’s unruly hair, her sweet, clear voice shouting some order at the others, always with her head half-turned towards Agnes and half-turned towards the open sea.
Agnes had packed marmalade sandwiches and brought enough money for ice-creams. The children stayed in the water much later than usual, long after the breeze began whipping the waves up, and Agnes resisted calling them in. Fan declared she was the last person in the whole of South Australia to leave the water that day.
‘The best day ever, Ma. The best.’ Shivering and dripping, she pressed a small stone into Agnes’s hand. ‘I got it way out there. Aunty Florence didn’t mind how deep I went.’ Fan twirled. ‘See? I’m still here, it didn’t swallow me up.’
‘Florence has eyes in the back of her head, young lady.’
‘I got that stone ’cos it reminds me of you. See how dark it is? But when the sun warms it up it goes lighter and you can see lots of pretty colours.’
‘Thank you. I think.’ Agnes put the stone in her pocket and took George’s old jumper out of her bag. ‘Put this on.’
‘Best day ever,’ Fan repeated, and pulled the jumper over her ears. The arms hung almost to her knees. ‘Ma, I’m thinking about something important.’ Fan bit her lip like she always did when she was nervous. ‘I know you think I can’t, but I want to swim between the jetties. I know I can do it.’
‘It’s a long way, Fan. And dangerous. Most grown men can’t do it.’
‘Can’t I at least try?’
Once everyone was dried off and dressed, they walked back towards the tram. Ernest and Florence herded their children on board.
‘How about next time?’ Agnes said to Fan. ‘Next time we all come here for a Sunday beach day, you can try the swim.’
Fan threw her arms around Agnes. ‘You’re the best, Ma.’
That evening, the rain crashed loud and shrill on the tin roof.
‘I bloody well hate you.’ Fan’s eyes blazed.
‘Mind your language,’ Agnes said.
‘I’m not going.’ Fan kicked the leg of the table.
‘That’s enough,’ George said.
‘I knew something was up. Marmalade sandwiches. Ice-cream. Swimming between the jetties. I hate you, Ma.’
‘I said that’s enough.’ George’s jaw tightened. ‘Watch how you speak to your mother, young lady.’
‘What about Ma? Why don’t you tell her off for all her big, fat lies?’
‘Shut up, Fan. You’re making it worse,’ Tom said. Ned’s bottom lip trembled.
Fan ran from the kitchen. Down the hall, a door slammed shut.
Agnes did her best to answer the tide of questions from Ned and Tom. Things were tough on the Port Adelaide docks and there would be more work for their father in Fremantle. Her father – their grandfather – had fallen ill and his wife, Annie, couldn’t look after him anymore. He would be coming to live with them. Ned mouthed grandfather, a word he didn’t know, and Tom repeated it slowly. Tom said a grandfather was some kind of family but Ned still didn’t understand.
‘What’s he like?’ Tom asked. ‘How come you never said anything about him before?’
‘There was nothing to say before.’ Agnes reached for George’s hand. ‘My father came out from England many years ago for better prospects – to seek his fortune, like so many men did, when things were bad in England. Your dad did the same.’
‘That I did,’ George said. ‘Never wanted to go back.’
‘I left Western Australia when I was young,’ Agnes continued. ‘I met your father in Adelaide, and here we are.’
‘Is there a beach?’ Ned asked. ‘Will it be like here?’
‘A port, a beach, a roof over our heads,’ George said. ‘Just like here.’
Agnes lay awake long after George had gone to sleep. It wasn’t long before the rain slowed, but the low sobbing from behind Fan’s closed door made everything feel damp.
Edwin struggled. His back had ached constantly for the better part of a week. He lined the wooden trunk with newspaper and put in a pair of boots, his tailoring bits and pieces. He covered all that up with another layer of newspapers, then put in his few remaining books. A couple of waistcoats and shirts. His good jacket.
He coughed with the effort, but he was determined not to ask Annie for help. The days of helping each other were long gone. After so many years, he could usually tell what she was thinking, but not today.
He pulled on his threadbare socks. These days he was grateful for cooler mornings, because his feet and ankles always swelled up in the heat. Years ago, Annie knitted him a new pair of socks each winter. He made her a dress each summer. It was one of the little things they had begun to do after Walter had left and there was an unspoken need in the house for kindness. Edwin would say how warm the new socks were and Annie would twirl and unpin her fine, grey hair and parade like a tailor’s model. He couldn’t remember when they had stopped these exchanges. Just that one winter, he’d pulled on a pair of socks and realised how old and full of holes they were. He was wearing the same pair now.
He put the almost-full rum bottle in his pocket. He’d need it to help get to sleep if Agnes’s children were noisy. He’d need it if Agnes’s children were quiet, if truth be told.
‘Don’t forget that.’ Annie pointed to an old brown leather bag. It was no bigger than something you’d keep a pair of boots in.
‘I’m unlikely to forget it.’
‘Good. I don’t want nothing of you left behind.’
‘Except the house,’ Edwin said. ‘You’re happy for me to leave that behind.’
‘It’s the least I deserve after serving my sentence with you.’
It had been Annie’s idea to sell up and buy a little plot this far south of the river, with its promise of trams and electrics, and he took joy in blaming her whenever something went wrong. Despite the stench from the slaughter yard and the often-stagnant river, he hadn’t wanted to leave East Perth. Even after that terrible winter when Smith deserted his family for the goldfields and Mad Molloy shot two blacks and then himself, Edwin refused. Told her all her talk of land and curses meant she’d been talking to lunatics too long. It was only when she’d said, ‘What if Eddie comes back? If we stay in East Perth, he’ll always know where to find you,’ that he’d felt a tightening in his guts. He felt it now, although it was probably just too much rum and not enough dinner.
‘No need to watch me pack,’ he said to her.
‘Oh, but it’s the last pleasure you’re ever going to give me, Edwin. I want to make sure you’re really going.’
‘By God, you are the worst of all my punishments.’
‘My dear Edwin.’ Annie folded her arms and smiled. ‘Despite my daily prayers, you ain’t dead yet. You could have years left. Who knows what punishments the good Lord’s still got up his sleeve?’
After she left him alone, he drank more rum and tried to remember the last time he felt anything for Annie but sour contempt. It had been years since she made up a bed for him in the sleep-out and locked the door to the house at night. Edwin opened the brown leather bag and took out a bundle of letters. Sometimes he read them and sometimes he didn’t, but he needed to know they were there. He opened the tobacco pouch and held the lock of straw-gold hair to his cheek.
He drank more rum. Would he recognise his daughter? Agnes was barely eighteen when she left and now she had children of her own. Edwin stared into the blank years and tried to imagine an older version of his brown-eyed, gritty daughter, better than Walter at all the things that mattered, the only girl who’d lived. His eyes burned, his heart burned, he rubbed his chest – the damn drink.
Annie shouted some insult or other from the next room. He thumped the door in reply. He drank more rum and unfolded the blue cloth and traced his calloused fingers over the embroidered image of Lichfield Cathedral. There were moth-holes around the cloth’s edges, and the white thread had yellowed, but Eliza’s stitching had lasted. His sister had always been so much smarter and better at everything than he was. He could imagine her examining his life and finding shoddy workmanship: ‘The tailor’s son had all the advantages, but in the end everything he made fell to pieces.’
His skill, Eliza once said with a grin, was that he could put decapitated men back together.
Edwin ran his fingers around the collar. His stitches were small, perfectly spaced. They would give the shirt an uprightness no amount of starch could imitate.
‘Three more before you’re done,’ Mum said. The pins she held between her lips wobbled up and down.
‘You said that three shirts ago.’ Edwin yawned. Not even midday and the tiny room at the back of Thomas and Samuel Salt, Gentlemen’s Tailors Since 1800, was hot and airless. Eliza hummed and stitched cuffs to sleeves. James, pimply and butter-fingered, was trusted only with buttons. Mary, old enough to be married, squashed her sausage-fingers into scissor handles. As usual, Sam Junior was nowhere to be seen, and Mum didn’t seem to care.
Eliza poked out her tongue. Edwin stuck his finger in his mouth and mimed vomiting.
‘I’m warning you two,’ Mum’s voice cut like scissors. ‘Your father needs those shirts finished today.’
‘It’s Edwin’s fault,’ Eliza said. ‘He pulls stupid faces.’
‘You pull stupid faces,’ Edwin said. ‘Or is that your normal face?’
Mum clipped him over the back of his head. Eliza smirked.
Six twelves are seventy-two. I before E, except after C. The longest river in England is the Severn. Edwin silently repeated what he’d learned at the school for tradesmen’s sons, a rosary of facts to save him from the sameness of sleeves and collars.
‘Eliza’s too slow,’ Edwin said. ‘Get Mary to help her. It takes two girls to do the work of one man.’
‘Don’t be daft. I’m all thumbs,’ Mary said.
‘That’s not what I heard from William Neville,’ Eliza said. Mary’s cheeks flushed deep red. Edwin sniggered.
‘Young lady!’ Mum said, and pins rained from her mouth.
Eliza threw her finished shirt at Edwin. ‘Beat you again. First to the cathedral gets all their sins forgiven.’
‘You’re too young for sins,’ Edwin said.
‘It’d be a sin if I beat you again.’
Edwin dropped his half-finished shirt. The collar gaped like its throat had been cut. Edwin shoved Eliza out of the way to get through the door first.
It was a quick sprint down Sandford Street to the Crown Inn, the smell of hay and horses in his nostrils and the clip-clop and rattle of departing coaches in his ears. The sky was hazy and the air was sweet and ripe with late summer. Edwin was not a natural runner. At fourteen, his calves were already stocky like his father’s, and his arms were ropey with muscle. Since Eliza turned twelve, she’d grown taller, developing grace and speed. Her cotton skirt swished behind him.
‘Women’s vestments slowing you down?’
‘Never.’
They ran past an inn, the butcher, the milliner with a faded pink hat in the window. The Birmingham coach trotted past in the opposite direction and as always, Edwin couldn’t take his eyes off it: the whip rippling against the horse’s flank, the driver’s shouts. He caught sight of a black-gloved hand waving to him from the carriage and in the few seconds it took for the coach to pass, he invented a life, a story, a reason for this passenger’s journey.
Eliza passed him in a blur of blue dress. ‘You stop for the coach, but the coach isn’t stopping for you!’
He took off again. Up ahead, Lichfield Cathedral loomed. He pumped his arms hard, his fists fighting through the air. His feet jarred on the lumpy cobbles.
They passed Minster Pool and sprinted to the cathedral. They were neck and neck. He could see Eliza’s skirt tangling around her knees. She scowled, her lips pressed hard together, the same expression she always had when she tried hard at anything.
Edwin made noises like he was giving the run everything he had, but he let her fly past him. Eliza hurled herself at the ground under the biggest tree, their imaginary finish line. Edwin lunged forward and flung himself down next to her.
‘Another victory for the little sister,’ Eliza said, panting.
‘Hardly. By an inch, if that.’
‘An inch is as good as a mile, old man.’
Edwin stared at the cathedral’s three spires. He squinted and tried to make them merge into one. Lichfield Cathedral was unique in the whole of England, he had learned, because of those three spires. They made shadows that lengthened and shortened across nearby fields like a sundial. On a hot July day last summer, he and Eliza had sneaked in and touched the tomb of a long-dead bishop. It was as high as Edwin’s waist and wide as two coffins, and even though the blue-and-yellow stained-glass windows split the sunlight into a million pieces, flooding the cathedral with light, Edwin had shivered in the presence of death.
‘He’s stone dead,’ Eliza had said, and he’d admired her wit and been afraid for her intelligence at the same time.
‘Look.’ Eliza pointed at a cloud of birds. ‘Swallows. Wish I’d brought my charcoals.’
‘Me too. At least when you’re drawing, you’re not talking so much.’
Departing swallows meant the end of summer. Before long, the sky would be dark at four in the afternoon and it would be cold enough for the milk to freeze. Mum had already told him there’d be no new coat again this winter.
‘I might sneak in, see if I can wake up Saint Chad,’ Eliza said.
‘Best of luck. He’s been dead for six hundred years.’
Eliza sat up and leaned on her elbows. ‘Just think about something else, when you’re doing the tailoring.’
‘I do. Birmingham. Liverpool. London. Sometimes I forget I’m even here.’
‘You know he wants to put your name on the sign.’
‘Not my name. He wants to paint out Grandfather Thomas and write Samuel Salt and Son.’ Edwin picked at the dirt. ‘Invisible. Worse than being dead.’
‘I don’t want to be helping Da forever,’ Eliza said.
‘You’ll have to, at least ’til you get married. That’s if any man’s ever mad enough to ask you.’
‘Shut up.’ Eliza whacked his arm. ‘They’ll let women be teachers one day. Young ladies. I’m good enough. And when the railway comes, who knows where I’ll go? I might go to London, become a great artist or a … a thinker.’
‘You already think too much. They’ll never let the railway near Lichfield, Eliza. You’ve heard Da. The coachmen, the innkeepers, the tailors – they’ll all vote against it because they don’t want to lose their customers. Rich ladies and gentlemen have got to come to Lichfield now because it’s halfway to somewhere else.’
‘The tailor’s children will be hemmed in while the world passes them by.’
‘Well, I’m leaving the first chance I get.’
Eliza stood up and brushed dirt off her skirt. ‘We’d better get back. Mum’ll have our guts for garters.’
‘You go.’ Edwin watched the swallows circle the three spires. ‘I’ve got something to do first.’
‘Are you meeting a girl?’ Eliza slapped her hand to her heart and blew a loud, spit-filled kiss into the air. ‘Ooh, Edwin, take me away from this drab life!’
Edwin threw a handful of dirt at her, but Eliza had already run off down the hill.
In the coldest, darkest months of a bad winter, Stowe Pool had been known to freeze over, but today it was glossy and still. Edwin rolled up his trousers and waded in. The water stank a bit, but he didn’t care. He peered into the nettles growing in the shade of an overhanging tree. He picked up a stick and poked around.
In a flash of brilliant white, the bird appeared. It moved towards him on its stick-like legs and looked at him with black eyes. Edwin stood as still as he could. In all his summers he’d never seen a bird so strange. Its feathers were bright white, its beak flat and round at the end as if it was holding a spoon. He could tell just by looking that it didn’t belong among Lichfield’s mud-coloured ducks or the swallows and starlings that nested under the eaves of Saint Mary’s church.
The bird scooped mud from the edge of the pond. Edwin inched towards it. He expected the bird to flee, as it had done yesterday and the day before and the day before that. But it did not move.
Edwin fumbled in his pocket for the stale bread he had brought. He lobbed it towards the bird.
A plop and a splash. The bird grabbed the bread.
Edwin took off his shirt and tossed it up onto the bank. Without it he felt daring, transparent, an exotic animal made for somewhere else. He took a careful step forward and tossed another lump of bread. Then another and another. Mum would kill him for being so reckless with any kind of bread, even the stale stuff. The bird jabbed out its beak and gobbled every piece.
He took another step forward. He was so close that, if the bird had been a man, they could have shaken hands. It lifted its beak and they stared at each other. He marvelled at its elegant neck, its foreignness. Where was it from? Would it be leaving with the swallows?
Edwin stretched out his hand and dropped the last piece of bread as close as he dared.
The bird flapped its wings and a deep pain worse than the stab of a needle shot through Edwin’s fingers. He took a fast swipe with his fist, his fighting fist as William Neville had christened it after a scrap. The bird screeched and Edwin felt warmth, and the softness of feathers.
The air was heavy and still. The bird had nipped the ends of his fingers and they were bleeding. He swore, and pressed his hand under his armpit. The bird floated close to him, half-submerged, its black eye glassy. Edwin nudged it but it didn’t move.
He waded towards the opposite bank, kicking the water to help propel the lifeless bird back to the place where he was used to seeing it appear. He willed it to flutter or squawk or even try to bite him again, but there was nothing. He bent down and peered into a dank clump of plants, parting them with his uninjured hand.
‘Damn!’ He felt the burn of nettles.
Edwin picked up the dead bird and lobbed it deep out of sight. He scrambled out of the water.
‘Damned bird. I was only trying to feed you.’ He looked up at the cathedral’s spires and squinted, but he couldn’t make them merge. He turned away. He couldn’t stand them looking down on him.
‘For pity’s sake, Edwin.’ Samuel Salt was a short, squat man, but his voice was whiny and thin. He lifted Edwin’s swollen hand, wrinkled his nose at the stagnant, swampy smell of his son. ‘How will you do the collars?’
‘There are machines that could do it in half the time,’ Edwin mumbled.
‘The hands can feel, the hands can judge, they help the eyes see how to make a man look more than he is.’
‘Da thinks the machines are a fad.’ Eliza fetched a jar of ointment. ‘Just like the railway.’
‘How could you be so careless?’ Mum said.
Edwin flexed his hand. His fingers still throbbed. The nettle sting on his arm was red and lumpy. His heart thudded in his chest. The clock on the wall said he’d been at Stowe Pool only an hour, but it felt like a week. He might be hurting, but by God he knew he was alive.
Mum threatened so often about stopping him going to school that he finished five collars most days before sunrise and begged her to reconsider. She showed Da his fine workmanship.
‘See what Edwin can do when he’d rather be somewhere else?’ Mum said. ‘If you want his best work, looks like we’d better keep him in that confounded school.’
Sometimes Edwin wondered if the threatening and the giving in was more for Da’s benefit than for his. Now he was late. He slunk into an empty desk at the back.
‘The railway will bring the world to your front door.’ A woman stood at the front of the schoolroom. A woman. In front of the boys’ class as ordinary as if it happened every day. She had skin the colour of peaches and a voice sweet as church music.
‘One day, for just a few pennies, ordinary people like you will be able to travel to Birmingham or London. And beyond.’ She traced an imaginary line on the map from Lichfield to Birmingham. She tickled the blank fields of Coventry and slid her finger lower until it rested on the black circle that was the capital city of the British Empire.
Edwin trembled so violently he was afraid she’d hear his knees knock together.
Who is she? Edwin mouthed to William Neville. William licked his lips crudely.
‘Better late than never.’ The woman waved her hand at Edwin. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Edwin Salt, miss.’
‘See me afterwards.’
She smelled of lavender. The room was cold enough to see your own breath when you coughed but Edwin felt bathed in sunshine.
‘Edwin Salt.’ She looked closely at a large book of handwritten notes.
‘Sorry I was late, miss. My Da – the shirts.’
‘Never mind that.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘My husband’s mother has been taken very ill and he has travelled with her to Derby, where her people live. I have stepped in until he returns.’ Her vowels were cultured and southern and made the dullest thing sound important. ‘Mr Atkins tells me you are one of his brightest boys.’
So this was the schoolmaster’s wife.
‘I like arithmetic. And reading, miss.’
‘With hard work, a bright boy like you could find a clerical position. Work with your mind instead of your hands.’
‘My Da wants me to be in the shop. Samuel Salt and Son.’
‘I’m sure he wants the best for his sons, and his daughters, too.’ She patted his hand and all the blood in his body seemed to rush to his fingers to take full advantage of the moment. ‘The railway is changing the world,’ Mrs Atkins whispered, as if she and Edwin were the only ones who could grasp the enormity of this fact.
‘But the Lichfield councillors voted against the railway.’ Edwin was finding it difficult to concentrate. ‘The new line only went to Tamworth and that’s nine miles from here.’
‘The railway will stop for no man.’ She let go of his hand and all the blood flooded back into his body: arms, legs. Other places.
The back room of the shop felt even smaller and more airless than usual. He tried to concentrate on the latest batch of collars but his hands were clammy.
The railway will stop for no man.
Work with your mind instead of your hands.
Edwin imagined long lines of neat stitches, miles of track stretching from Da’s cottage in Sandford Street, up past Minster Pool, circling around the cathedral a couple of times and then running south to Birmingham, London and beyond. He blinked and imagined himself as the map on the schoolroom wall, unfolding under Mrs Atkins’s fingertips, her gasps of delight. The famous Edwin Thomas Salt, the brightest boy at the school for tradesmen’s sons, the tailor’s son made good, the new centre of the Empire.
Six sevens … The longest river in England … His thoughts unravelled. He couldn’t concentrate.
A few hours later, when the air was icy and tasted metallic as it does before snow falls, Edwin crept outside to the freezing privy where, for a few agonising minutes, his desire for railways and London and lavender and peaches grew white-hot until it disappeared into blindness.
Months passed. Edwin finished shirts more quickly and accurately than his brother and sisters could manage in twice the time. He cut generous allowances for flabby arms and sagging bellies. While he worked, he memorised the capital cities of countries he knew he would never visit. Then, once he had done with the times tables, he started on the square roots and the cubes. He let Mrs Atkins’s words roll around in his mouth like a sweet reward for the numbness of the work. His father unfolded Edwin’s shirts for the gentlemen’s inspection and joked about his own father, himself and his eldest lad. Thomas, Samuel and Edwin Salt. ‘Cut from the same cloth,’ he’d say, and Edwin’s neck would tighten with irritation.
‘Here’s an arithmetic problem for you. How many hours d’you think you’ve done for Da this past twelve months?’ Eliza asked one day, as they walked back from one of their races to the cathedral.
‘More than the rest of you put together,’ he retorted.
‘And you think you’re the smart one,’ Eliza said wryly.
Edwin’s brown eyes were always watchful. He knew that something would come along one day, just like Mrs Atkins had promised, and despite the blisters and pinpricks on his hands, he would be ready to grab hold of it the moment it emerged.
In 1845, when Edwin was more or less nineteen, gangs of men arrived out of nowhere and began to cut open old Parkin’s fields, a mile and a half out of town. The men all looked the same, faces grimy with sweat and dirt. They worked the same, too: cursing, lifting, digging, hammering. Edwin and William and a few other lads watched them from the road, but weren’t game to venture any closer. A tent near the main line became known as a place a man could buy a gill or two of gin. William said he’d heard if you smiled kindly at the girl who poured it, you could buy a bit more than gin.
One afternoon, as they made their way to the tent, a skinny man in a smart serge jacket pushed past them, his chin in the air as if he was somebody important.
‘Jesus. Isn’t that Jack Bullock?’ William said.
‘Look at him swagger like lord of the manor.’ Edwin stared, disbelieving. Last time he’d seen him, Jack was bloodied and bandaged after an accident in the fields during harvest. ‘Let’s see what he’s got to say for himself.’
They had to duck their heads under the sagging canvas roof. William bought a couple of gills of gin from a girl who called him ‘sir’ readily enough, but curled her lip into a smirk when she said it.
‘To your good health,’ Edwin said. He downed his drink in one go and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Christ.’
‘Christ indeed.’ William coughed.
‘Let me buy you another.’ Jack nodded to the girl and held up three fingers. ‘How’s the tailoring business, Salt? Still scraping by?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’ Edwin looked Bullock up and down. His uniform jacket was too big. ‘You dressing formal for ploughing fields now?’
‘I’ve gone up in the world, Salt. Once the railway’s finished, who knows where I’ll go.’
‘You working for the railways?’
‘The Excise.’
‘You’re an excise man?’ Edwin shook his head. ‘So you’re still digging dirt, but for Her Majesty instead of your father.’
‘Whatever you say, Salt.’ Jack handed the girl some money and winked at her. ‘Keep the change.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ The girl smiled at Jack. Edwin felt a stab of envy.
Jack grinned at Edwin and William. ‘I can afford it.’
If Jack Bullock was happy to buy gin, Edwin was happy to drink it. The gin made his eyes sharper and the shabby tent seem brightly lit. He and William stood with other lads he recognised as the sons of millers and farmers, but who now wore the jackets and smug expressions of railway clerks and excise men.
Before sunrise, his head gin-foggy and his mouth sour, he continued to stitch collars, cut arms and torsos out of serge and fix Mary’s botched buttons and cuffs.
The railway will wait for no man.
Work with your mind instead of your hands.
Keep the change.
One cold Tuesday morning in 1848, when fog draped over Stowe Pool, Samuel Salt climbed a ladder, took down the sign above his shop and sent Edwin to the merchant for paint. It was late afternoon before Edwin returned.
‘In the name of all that’s holy, what took you so long?’ Samuel said.
Edwin looked directly into Da’s rheumy eyes. ‘I went to the Excise Office. I’m sitting the entrance exam on Tuesday.’
Mum kissed Edwin’s cheek and watched her husband carefully.
‘Well, well. My eldest son is destined for greatness.’ Samuel stood back and sneered at Edwin, then clapped slowly. ‘Congratulations, son. But before then, you’ve got work to do. Those buttons won’t stitch themselves.’
‘For the right man,’ Mr Brown emphasised, ‘Her Majesty’s Excise represents an opportunity. Young men with a certain … tenacity will find rewarding employment in the collection of Her Majesty’s government revenue.’
Edwin paid close attention as Mr Brown talked. Taxes paid on tobacco, sugar, tea, whisky – even paper and soap – enabled Her Majesty’s government to provide important services for its soldiers and fine citizens.
‘Makes it sound not so bad,’ William Neville whispered. ‘Taxes, I mean.’
‘The salary is adequate for a single man otherwise destined for the fields or the factories.’ Mr Brown stalked between the desks, peering at each young man in turn, noting who flinched and who looked him in the eye.
‘Or a tailor’s shop,’ Edwin said to himself, but in the small room, his voice echoed. Mr Brown looked at the list of names he carried with him, then back at Edwin.
‘If I may continue, Mr Salt, any one of you could find yourself in London or beyond at a moment’s notice. There are many opportunities. For the right man.’
Mr Brown returned to the front of the room. ‘Most of you will be particularly grateful to know that the uniform includes a brand-new winter coat and a sturdy pair of boots.’ Mumbles of approval rippled through the room.
‘So ask yourself,’ Mr Brown’s voice boomed. ‘Are you the right man?’
Edwin leapt to his feet. ‘Yes, Mr Brown, I believe I am.’
The others began to fidget in their seats. William mouthed Sit down, you fool, and sliced his finger across his throat. Edwin remained on his feet, his arms straight by his sides as if this were the army.
‘Sir, you said you wanted tenacity,’ Edwin gulped. ‘If I’m not brave enough to speak up in a room like this, how can I hope to do the job Her Majesty requires of me?’
Mr Brown walked slowly up to Edwin and stood so close Edwin could smell sweat on his shirt.
‘Congratulations, Mr Salt.’ Mr Brown offered his hand. ‘You are precisely the kind of man Her Majesty is looking for.’
A week later, he joked with Mary, James and Sam Junior about visiting him in the big city. Mum hugged him goodbye and held on until the coach driver insisted they had no more time. Eliza rode with him to the railway station.
‘Don’t worry about Da,’ Eliza said as they reached the end of the road. ‘He’ll calm down.’
‘Too late now. He’s got James, and Sam Junior.’
Eliza rolled her eyes. ‘Sam Junior. Really, Edwin.’
‘Well, you and Mary, at least.’
‘Samuel Salt and Daughters,’ Eliza grinned. ‘Careful. He’s having enough trouble coming to terms with the railway.’
People were already boarding the train. Young girls shrieked at the steam sputtering from the funnel, and young boys ran up and down the platform slamming doors and opening them again.
‘My goodness,’ Eliza said. ‘It’s like a living creature.’
‘Look after Mum.’ Edwin kissed the top of Eliza’s head and opened the nearest carriage door. He squashed into a seat and pressed his boots hard into the boards until the train had gathered speed and Eliza’s cry of ‘Good luck, old man!’ melted into the shrill hiss of steam and the high-pitched grinding of metal.
Edwin pushed through the crowd of families to the opposite window, or at least the place the window glass would have been, had his ticket cost more than the cheapest penny fare. He leaned out as far as he dared.
Dry, coaly air and specks of soot blasted Edwin’s face. Past the canal, past the postage stamp–sized patch of land that was all that remained of Parkin’s field, past the place where the gin tent used to be.
‘There it goes.’ A young lad pointed towards the cathedral spires growing smaller, smaller, smaller.
Mam scooped little Walter up into her arms and took Agnes’s hand. Da held her other hand and they walked in a gang, Da whistling. It was such a comical noise, high-pitched above the thrum of crickets hissing in the heat of the morning. If Da was whistling, it meant he was in a better mood. He winked at Agnes. She squeezed his hand tighter, and hoped this would make his cheerfulness last.
‘Thank the Lord for whatever’s got into you, Edwin,’ Mam said. They passed through a thicket of trees and reached the shaded riverbank. The hot air burned Agnes’s throat. Figures seemed to move in the trees, then disappear. Mam sat Walter down under a tree and plonked herself down beside him. Da pulled his boots off and sighed so loudly it was if his liberated feet were doing the sighing.
Rosie, the black woman who lived with Da’s mate Mick McCarthy, said that the river was alive; a creature that had been here since before the world was born. This riverbank – their riverbank, as Agnes had come to think of it – was a branch apart from the main stretch of river, protected from the mess and stinks from the tannery and the slaughterhouse and deep enough for men and women to wade into. Rosie got tears in her eyes when she talked about bad stuff going into the river but she said they didn’t have to worry about the water down here – it was as fresh as the day it first tumbled as rain over rocks high up on the scarp.
Their little stretch of river certainly seemed alive today, swarming with the Smiths and their daughter Daisy, a clutch of whooping black children and a fluid group of others whose mams and dads all seemed to know Da from the hotels on Howick Street, or some place called Before. Mr Molloy sat under a tree, smoking and staring at nothing, ignoring Mrs Molloy, who talked constantly. Agnes sat down next to Walter and Mam. Mam wiped her forehead and brushed ants off Walter’s legs.
Da rolled his trousers up to his knees. ‘Time for a dip.’ He roared silly animal noises and ran in up to his waist, splashing Mam, who pretended to tell him off, while Walter waved his pudgy arms around. A bird with a red beak peered at him. Maybe the bird thought Da was mad, too.
‘Da’s happy,’ Agnes said to Mam.
‘It’s a good day when your father’s happy.’ Mam said it to Agnes but she kept her eyes on Da.
Suddenly Da lost his footing, stumbling and thrashing.
‘Cath! Help!’ he called to Mam.
Smith looked up and smirked. ‘Keep the noise down, Salt, you madman.’
‘Mam, help him!’ Agnes jumped to her feet.
‘You going in to save your prize-idiot father, Agnes?’
‘Help! Smith, Molloy!’ Da’s arms hit the water, making it bubble and surge.
‘Get on with it, Salt! Make it quick, it’ll save us having to throw you overboard,’ Molloy shouted, and Smith roared his mirth.
At the sound of the word ‘overboard’, Mam leapt up. ‘That’s enough!’
She ran to the edge of the riverbank, pulled off her boots and her stockings and strode in. Da thrashed around. As Mam reached him, Da beamed and he suddenly made a miraculous recovery, standing steady and opening his arms to receive Mam. She took hold of Da’s hands, and her skirt billowed up. Mam’s laughter, it sounded like bells.
Agnes watched Mam and Da sway in the water, their hands clasped, Da humming a cheery tune. Mam leaned her head on his chest as they moved, and the river held them. Agnes watched them and her racing heart calmed down. Nobody was drowning. Smith knew it, Molloy knew it, Mam knew it, Da knew it. He had been pretending to struggle all along, Agnes realised, just to get Mam to dance in the water with him.
Mam dozed on the bank with Walter. The sun dried her clothes and her hair. Da lazed under a tree, smoking and chatting with Smith and Molloy. The water looked golden and inviting. Agnes pulled her shoes off the same way as Mam and Da had done and walked to the edge. The river smelled of weeds and salt. She knew it was shallow enough in the middle for Da and Mam to stand up, but she couldn’t see the bottom from where she stood. When he saw her take off her shoes, Da stopped talking and jumped up, holding out his hand.
‘Let’s go for a dip, Agnes girl.’
‘Dunno, Da.’
‘Are you scared?’
Agnes shook her head but didn’t move.
‘Hold tight!’
She gasped as the riverbank seemed to tilt and she felt herself fly up towards the sky. It was Da, lifting her up so she could sit on his shoulders. She shouted in surprise and clasped her hands tight under his stubbly chin.
Da held her up high and walked into the water. The sun bled through the treetops. The water was clear enough to see Da’s white, lumpy feet lumbering around on the riverbed. He walked her into the middle of the river and then kneeled down carefully so she could kick her feet in the water. It was surprisingly cold. From here, Mam and Walter looked smaller. A thin curl of smoke escaped from Smith’s pipe. The Molloys took no notice of them.
‘What d’you think?’
‘It’s good.’ She swished her feet and made waves.
Da let go of her with one hand and splashed water on his face. He stood up and Agnes hurtled through the blue sky again. She panicked and grabbed onto Da’s hair to stop herself from falling. He swore and Agnes giggled.
‘I’ve got you, Agnes girl,’ Da said quietly. They walked around in the water like this for what seemed like hours. Da’s shoulders were strong and he seemed much taller than he did at home in the yard or sitting on the back step with a drink. He told Agnes about the first time he’d seen this river, so long ago it was even before he started working in that mongrel Henry Wood’s tailor shop. Agnes didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying but his voice was so soothing and calm he sounded like a different Da to the one who shouted about money, or the confounded heat. The sun lost some of its sting and the shadows of trees lengthened over the water. The Molloys and the Smiths waved their goodbyes. Agnes forgot to be scared, she held onto Da’s shoulder with one hand, let go with the other, and waved back.
It was a week later when Mam very near flew down the track to the road, Walter bouncing in her arms, and Agnes had to run her hardest to keep up. When they reached the river, Mam put Walter on the ground under a tree, ran over to the shallow bank and jumped in.
‘Come and have a dip with your mammy.’ Mam waded in until the water was up to her waist. It gave her dress a floaty life of its own. She unpinned her black hair and it uncurled past her shoulders.
‘Mam, what are you doing?’
‘Come on, love!’ There was music in Mam’s voice. That jingly lilt could make anything sound like a good idea. Da called it her Old Country accent, how she lingered in the middle of words, teased them out. Even ‘leeches’ and ‘cod liver oil’ and ‘a good hiding’ sounded like something you’d want, coming out of Mam’s mouth.
Agnes took her shoes off and walked in slowly up to her knees. Mam’s hair glowed blue-black in the sun.
‘What’s wrong with Da? He looked mad.’
‘Your father’s got’ – she paused – ‘company this afternoon. Family.’ Mam said ‘family’ like it tasted bitter. ‘You know how he gets sometimes.’
Agnes had never heard of Da having any family. The only people who came to the house were the Molloys, the Smiths and Henry Wood. When Da had got back from town today he’d been on his own except for some letters he’d thrown on the table. That had been when Mam grabbed her and Walter and said brightly, ‘Well then, Edwin, we’ll leave you to it!’ Mam was like a weathervane for Da’s moods – she sensed them before anybody else knew they were coming.
The water tickled Agnes above her knees and she hesitated. ‘I can’t.’
‘Don’t be a big baby. I’ll catch you.’ Mam opened her arms wide.
‘You better.’ Agnes held her breath, shut her eyes and jumped. She hit the water hard and paddled for all she was worth. Water went up her nose and for a moment there was only her blood throbbing in her ears, nothing to hold onto, nothing under her feet.
Mam’s rough hands on her bare arms, Mam’s heart beating against her ears.
‘My goodness, you made a meal of that!’ Mam kissed Agnes’s wet hair. ‘See? Not so hard for my brave girl.’
Mam led Agnes back to the riverbank and waded back in. Agnes pushed her hair out of her eyes and coughed. Her wet dress was plastered to her legs.
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can.’ Mam’s voice could also be like thunder, depending on her mood.
Agnes leapt. She stretched her arms out in front of her and kicked her legs as if she were fending off a wild animal. This time the river didn’t fight. Mam caught her again and this time, she clambered up to the riverbank by herself.
‘That’s the way, my love, you’re nearly there. And again!’
Agnes leapt. Her bottom hit the soft riverbed. She spluttered and reached for the sky. Agnes swallowed air into her middle, her ribs rising and falling like gills. She threw her arms around Mam’s neck.
The river tasted of salt and stones. Mam’s face was pink and shiny.
‘You look like an apple,’ Agnes grinned.
‘Cheeky.’ Mam wiped hair out of her eyes. ‘By Jesus, it’s hot.’
‘Lucky we’re in the water.’
‘One more try.’ Mam let Agnes go, the river held her and Agnes was finally swimming on her own. Brown weed tickled her ankles. Mam clapped and whooped. Agnes floated on her back and stared at the endless blue sky. Weightless, no sense of where she began or ended.
Agnes swam. Mam climbed out and played with Walter. Mam climbed back in again and brought Walter with her. Agnes held Mam’s hands and they made a circle in the shallows. Walter splashed between them, beaming as he floated in his illusion of freedom.
‘Now you can swim and you’ll always be safe,’ Mam said. ‘Even if you were being chased by a fire, you’d be able to get away.’ Mam’s voice rang in the hot blur of afternoon. Even the crickets stopped to listen.
The house smelled of rum. Da was asleep in his chair.
‘Da, Da, guess what I did today!’ Agnes’s voice was bright and loud in the quiet house. ‘I can swim now, Da, I can swim.’ She jabbed at his arm.
Da woke, startled, and slapped his hand at where the noise was coming from. He caught Agnes’s cheek and she yelped like a dog.
‘What the feckin’ hell you doing, Edwin?’ Mam pushed Agnes behind her.
‘Stop shouting, woman.’ He rubbed his eyes and said with care, ‘I didn’t mean to, Agnes girl. I was half-asleep, you gave me a fright.’
Agnes’s face stung and she blinked hard. ‘Sorry, Da.’
‘All caught up on your news from home?’ Mam’s voice could sometimes be like sharp bits of glass. She nodded towards the letters on the table. ‘How is your dear Eliza?’
Da scowled at Mam. ‘Get out, both of you.’
Agnes used the mangle to wring the river out of her dress, her underthings. Mam sat on the back step and let the hot twilight dry her off while Da smoked. She could hear Mam talking to Da in that breezy tone she used if he was ranting about Henry Wood’s laziness or if he’d had too much rum. When Agnes had done her clothes, she twisted the river out of her hair. Her fingers were wrinkled, her skin felt stretched on her bones. She rubbed her cheek where Da’s hand had caught her. It was sore. All the mangling made her tired and when she cleared her throat, up the river came.
The next day everyone pretended nothing had happened. Agnes blamed her sore cheek on river stones. Mam didn’t ask about dear Eliza. Da barely spoke and the air grew heavy with his not talking. Agnes hated the silences more than his ranting and she thought Ma probably did too, the way she talked in that singsong voice she used when she was trying to get Walter to go to sleep. Agnes thought about the river. The smell of it lingered on her and she wondered if some part of it ran inside her now. She wondered if Mam and Da could see it behind her eyes, how she was changed.
The days before they left slipped through Fan’s fingers quicker than normal days. She made herself wake up early in the hope she could sneak out for a swim, but the wind and rain lashed all the doors shut. Sarah and Aunty Florence and Ma went through every room and stood with their hands on their hips and somehow agreed on what could be taken and what could be left behind. All of a sudden Ma’s talk was full of ‘your grandfather’ this and ‘your grandfather’ that. ‘You’d better pull your socks up, Fan, because your grandfather won’t stand for your insolence.’ Fan had never heard of insolence or known that she had it. It had turned up the same time as her grandfather, who now filled up their lives as if he’d already moved in.
When they got to one box of old things, Aunty Florence and Sarah huddled and closed up around Ma like a clamshell. Ma clutched something and started to cry. It looked like an old blanket that might once have been white. It seemed to Fan like a big fuss over nothing. The three women stood together. Nobody noticed Fan and nobody noticed her leave.
The clouds were dark, even though it was daytime. The rain pelted. Fan was barefoot and in her swimming costume and she didn’t care who saw her and who was scandalised. She ran past the same old shops and the houses that got bigger. When she reached the spot where the road dropped away towards the sea, she opened her arms as wide as she could to take every last thing in, to leap over the dunes, to allow for the possibility of flight.
The tide was high. She plunged into the sea, which was oddly warm. It swelled and gently pulled her under. Fan put all her anger into her swimming, but the current was too hard to swim against. She slapped at the rain-puckered sea. Weed slithered against her legs.
Coughing and crying, she waded out of the water. She grabbed handfuls of sand, shells, whatever the tide had thrown up, as much as she could carry.
Ma would rage at the sight of her dripping and shivering in the rain. She’d just have to hang on until Ma’s anger passed. She didn’t dare guess at what Dad would say. He didn’t get mad often, but when he did, he talked real quiet and somehow made you feel like he’d torn a layer of your skin off.
Pools of rain and sea water collected at her feet. Fan opened the door and prepared for the worst. But Ma’s face was all waxy and bluish under the eyes and she opened her arms and held Fan so tight she wriggled and almost said, ‘See, Ma, I’m still here.’ But for once in her life, Fan kept her mouth shut and just rested against the familiar, bready scent of Ma’s hair.
Fan had been expecting a siren, a bell, a man blowing a whistle, some noisy signal. But, without warning, the queue of passengers heaved forward and carried her along like a rolling wave.
The press of Sarah’s skin against her cheek. Aunty Florence’s arm strong around her waist. Uncle Ernest’s big hug, his wide-open smile. Ma resting her head in the warm hollow where Uncle Ernest’s shoulder curved into his chest.
Then the sound of her own shoes hurrying across the gangplank. Dad gently pulling Ma away from Uncle Ernest.
‘Come on, love. It’s time.’
The hiss of steam and the smell of coal. The sparkle of sunlight on flat water before the darkness below deck. The letting go.
Birmingham turned his snot black. It gave his skin the translucent, grey pallor of a man who was constantly being woken up by shouting whores or whinnying horses in the alley below his lodging house. But he didn’t care. He loved the square-windowed factories, the hissing of machines he couldn’t see, the stench of rotting rubbish and the high-pitched hammering from the shopfronts in the Jewellery Quarter. He loved the stink of horse shit in his nostrils and too many people crowding him at his elbows, even in the few minutes it took to walk from his mouldy room in a house near the Bull Ring to the Excise Office in New Street.
His tailor’s eyes were quick to spot patterns in figures, to notice columns crossed out and rewritten and too neatly finished. The merchants turned up their noses and called him ‘that pompous excise man’. It wasn’t that Edwin Salt was cleverer than his fellows, although he held more in his memory than most. It was, as Matthew Sharpe the tobacconist put it, that he took such a bright-eyed pleasure in watching a merchant squirm.
At night, Edwin and his colleagues drank at the Anvil, a low-roofed tavern that backed onto the narrowest part of the Gas Street canal. In the smoky air of the Anvil he could say, ‘I am an excise man. The Queen relies on me to fill her coffers,’ and a girl would touch her hair and adjust her dress and giggle, ‘With a uniform like that, you can fill my glass with a gill, lovely boy.’ At first, he’d been suspicious; most of the Lichfield girls he knew rationed their affections with the ruthlessness of an army on a long march. But here, a certain type of girl was clear-eyed about what she wanted. After closing time, down nameless alleys or on mouldy mattresses and sometimes his own bed, he took advantage of Alice or Amelia or Sally or any other girl the ale or gin had made willing. Sometimes a girl rummaged through his pockets with one hand while she fumbled in his trousers with the other, and that’s when he took more liberties than the girl had strictly agreed to. If she whimpered or hissed obscenities, he felt a stab of guilt, but it always left him by the time he stumbled back to his room. Birmingham was a city built on transactions. He was an excise man, and everyone from the richest merchants to the lowest girl knew exactly what they owed.
Matthew Sharpe lit a fresh pipe and the room filled with the smell of wood and oranges.
‘Your arithmetic is faultless, Mr Salt.’ Sharpe smiled through stubby yellow teeth. ‘Where are you from?’
Edwin closed the ledger. ‘Near the Bull Ring, sir.’
‘Ha ha. Very good. I mean, of course, before you landed in our fair city.’ Mr Sharpe blew smoke from his pursed lips. He reminded Edwin of those cartoon pictures of the north wind. ‘You are uncommonly smart. I wondered about your background.’
‘Smart isn’t uncommon, where I’m from, sir.’ Edwin held Sharpe’s gaze. ‘Lichfield. Home of the great writer Dr Johnson, among others.’
‘A fine town. Fine cathedral. And some of the finest minds of our time.’ Mr Sharpe smiled even more broadly and pushed a small pouch across the desk. ‘Please accept a token of my appreciation for your work these past few weeks.’
Sharpe took a long puff on his pipe. Edwin stared at the pouch.
‘Oh, come on, Mr Salt. Don’t be so … provincial. Your supervisor tells me he’s tasted no finer blend.’
‘And what would you be expecting from me?’ Edwin picked up the pouch. It was about the size of his hand. Easily a fortnight’s worth of tobacco. He took some out and pressed it between his fingers.
‘Let me tell you how it works in the city, Mr Salt. Show your supervisors that you have a good relationship with the merchants and you’ll go far. Get promoted. Have you spent a winter living in Birmingham yet? Miserable.’
The tobacco pouch made barely a bump in Edwin’s jacket pocket, but he was convinced it was making him itch. He downed a gill, and another, and ordered a third. His mind remained stubbornly clear. He slammed the glass on the table and left.
Around the back of the Anvil, he peered out across the canal. The air stank of dead fish and rubbish. Lanterns swung on barges. He filled his pipe with Matthew Sharpe’s tobacco and took a long, slow draw. It was sweet, rich. He took a few more puffs but he couldn’t get beyond the bitter taste in his mouth.
‘For Heaven’s sake, throw ’em in.’
Edwin spun around. A young woman was staring into the water. She wore a plain blue dress and a shawl.
‘Throw your wishes in.’ She turned to him. ‘Quick, name one.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’ Now she grinned. ‘Name one wish.’
His mind was blank. He shook his head.
‘A man with no wishes. Never met one of them before.’ The woman had pale skin and silvery blue eyes. A strand of hair, the dark yellow of burnt straw, had escaped her bonnet.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Mr Wishless. Just that you look like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders.’ She nodded her goodbye and, as she hurried down the canal road, Edwin noticed her round hips, her chin tilted in the air as if she was much more interested in where she was going than in the stupid, wishless man she had just encountered.
‘Wait, miss.’
He ran after her, dodging two braying horses and a whip-cracking carriage driver. By the time he caught up, they’d reached a bridge. The sky was the colour of gunmetal and there were dark spots of rain on his jacket.
‘Wait, miss! Please wait.’
‘Are you following me?’
Up close, her eyes were the palest blue he’d ever seen, but there was a steeliness about her gaze that unnerved him.
‘No. Yes. I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Me? Why me?’ Her accent was corn-rough and suddenly he was in his mother’s village, the place of summer and fields he could only remember visiting once, but the buttery smell was in his nostrils now.
‘You were mistaken,’ he said, ‘about me being wishless.’
‘Was I indeed?’ She tilted her head back and laughed hard. Ha-hahaaaaah. He caught the sweet whiff of gin.
‘Yes. I have plenty of wishes. Dreams, too – big ones. Some so big they’d make your lovely hair turn white.’
She stared at him. His face flamed.
‘I could tell you about them, one afternoon.’ His voice was quiet in the cold air. ‘We could go for a walk.’
‘What work do you do?’ she said. ‘I’ve my respectability to think of.’
‘I am an excise man.’ He waited for something about this woman to open itself up a little more. ‘Paper, spirits, tobacco. Other things from the new world.’
‘I know what excise is. You collect taxes that nobody wants to pay.’ She turned to leave. ‘Even the Bible don’t like tax collectors.’
‘Wait.’ He reached for her arm.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Sorry.’ He let go of her. ‘Some of us are honourable men.’
‘I suppose there must be honourable men in even the lowest professions.’
They stood a body’s width away from each other.
‘Today a merchant gave me this.’ Edwin took the pouch out of his pocket. ‘I think it means I took a bribe. I’ll show you an honourable man.’ He tried to throw it into the canal, but she grabbed it from him just in time.
‘You’re quick,’ he said.
‘I’ve had to be.’ She opened the pouch and sniffed. ‘That’s fine stuff. Shame to waste it.’
‘I’d have stayed in my father’s tailor shop if I wanted to be pissed on by the likes of Matthew Sharpe.’
‘You took what he was offering. Looks to me like you’re already stinkin’ and wet.’ She wiped her hair from her eyes. She looked like she was waving away a butterfly. ‘Tell you what.’ She rolled a pinch of tobacco between her fingers. ‘You give this to me. I’ll make good use of it.’
‘And in return?’ He moved a little closer. ‘How about that walk?’
‘I suppose that would be fine, sir. That would be acceptable.’ She said acceptable carefully, as if she had learned the word a long time ago but hadn’t had any use for it until now.
‘My name is Edwin Salt.’
‘Mary Ann Hall.’
‘Delighted.’ Edwin took her hand gently, touched his lips to her knuckles.
Her cheeks coloured. ‘Goodness, aren’t you the gentleman.’
Some days Mam shooed Agnes and Walter out of the house and said she’d be along much later once she’d tended the vegetables, and taken care of Da. Some days Mam worked at the governor’s laundry and they didn’t see her at all, so Agnes and Walter amused themselves. On these days, Agnes swam and floated on her back and watched the flat blue sky for hours.
Agnes loved it best on the hot, still days when Mam put Walter to sleep under a tree and they had the whole river to themselves. That year, Mam’s belly got fatter. She waddled in the water and made Agnes giggle, but Mam swore it was the only thing that helped her swollen legs feel better.
Agnes and Mam held hands. Their clothes floated; their hair wisped around their shiny faces.
‘Agnes, love, this heat could melt us to nothing!’ Mam kissed the cross she wore around her neck.
So what if Da was asleep from rum on more days than he wasn’t? So what if Da was at home more than he was at work? So what if Mam was so tired from being a laundress and watching the beets and beans grow that she often fell asleep whenever she sat down? Mam came alive in the water. The blacks said the river had been there at the beginning of all creation, but Agnes knew different. With her feet so sure of the riverbed, with her arms wide open, it was Mam who invented it, Mam who mapped it, Mam who sang it into being, fresh and new for her squealing, grinning fish of a daughter, every single day.
They called the baby Cath, after her mother. She screamed all day and all night. Da screamed at Mam and slammed the door when he left for the Western Hotel. Mam screamed at the closed door about rum and laziness and the bloody luck of the Irish. If Da got home full of grog he screamed at Agnes. Where was her mother and why was there no confounded dinner on the table? Agnes put her knuckles in her mouth to stop herself from crying. She prayed to God that everybody would stop being angry. You could see it on Da’s reddening face and that ropey muscle twitching in his neck, and the way he clenched his hands together, over and over. It looked to Agnes like it took Da more effort to keep his fists by his side than it would have to hit something. Mam shouted that if she’d known she’d had to work this hard to coax anything out of this blasted soil, she’d never have left Ireland.
The shouting followed Agnes to bed and into her dreams. Mam said not to worry but Agnes developed a sick feeling in her stomach. The only time she didn’t feel sick or think about the shouting was when she was swimming. Jumping off the sheltered bank, lying on the bottom of the riverbed and drowning in quiet, Agnes wished she could stay there for another thousand years.
Days rippled into weeks. Agnes swam, dived, floated. No sound but the birds high up, the distant buzz of a sawmill. Underwater, nothing but the gentle pulsing of her own blood against her eardrums.
Until one afternoon, a cry cut through: not a sawmill, not a bird. A familiar rhythm throbbing in her skull. Agnes swam to the surface. It was Daisy Smith, standing on the riverbank, shouting her name.