James Stack
Auckland
May 1865
Two weeks, and already James had slotted into the routine of night work and day sleep, though it didn’t feel natural. Collecting human excrement didn’t feel natural either. Respectable houses were at least modest enough to cover theirs with dirt before putting their buckets out; but most weren’t and the contents slopped as he tipped them into the cart. Others didn’t care about the new collection scheme, and still threw their cack into the open gutters. All of it stank. James just couldn’t get used to it, and although he scrubbed his boots and hands in the lake at Western Springs before coming home, he knew he stank too.
Mary-Jane hadn’t ventured outside the boarding house at all since their arrival. The first morning, she fainted while trying to get out of bed. James hoped she might be with child, but it was the fever and she lay in bed silent for days. Then the cough started. A tickle at first that grew in violence and kept James awake day in, day out, helpless to do anything but watch her cling to the front of her nightdress each time it raked her throat.
‘The mist has settled on her chest,’ Mrs Eagleton offered with a tsk of resolution.
‘Nothing can be done,’ the doctor said. Pneumonia, he called it.
‘Captain of all deaths,’ Mrs Eagleton warned when they moved to the cheaper room.
It didn’t take long for James to decide he hated Mrs Eagleton.
‘Good God Almighty! Can a man not get any rest?’
James lifted himself from the bed that bounced to every one of Mary-Jane’s hacking coughs. The fire burned too hot, but the doctor had instructed it be kept alight. The room was thick with the smell of it, her sickness. It perspired from her like condensation on compost, rich and sticky, with a halo of poison. It didn’t help that Aileen was back, either. Whenever he did manage a slice of sleep, she’d be there waiting for him, the Aileen he didn’t know, the devil Aileen, taunting his dreams with forget-me-not eyes.
He slid the window up and leaned out. The cold breeze kissed his face and chest. High above the rooftops, clouds travelled in different directions, each layer hurrying to be somewhere else. Below, the daily squabble of Queen Street rose into their small front room. Mrs Eagleton had been right about the noise. Backyard dogs harped on and on, and horses and carts rattled through the filthy street, kicking up the smell of it. He pulled back inside the window and looked across at Mary-Jane. She was clasping her chest. The noise of the street was no bother to her. The bed was her island. Nothing was louder than the crashing of her own waves.
‘My lungs are creaking,’ she said.
‘You need some air, you do.’
James reached for a chair and placed it beside the window in a wedge of winter sun. Everything was within reach in the new room. Mary-Jane’s body was stiff in his arms, like a scared rabbit acting dead. He placed her carefully on the chair. She twisted, flinching in the sunlight, and her lungs lost their air again. She fought with desperate choking coughs, grasping at it, one breath crashing in on the one before, until she collapsed on the floor, coughing, coughing and spitting phlegm.
James kicked the chair out of the way and lifted Mary-Jane back to bed. Her attack subsided into short, shallow breaths that came too quick to catch. Hair stuck in sweaty patches to her forehead, and her eyes were pools that drained in streams down her temples. James wiped the hair from her face. Her eyes widened, and the terror surged from her. James couldn’t look; turned away, lifted himself from the bed to fumble for the cloth in the basin on the nightstand. He squeezed the cloth tight, wringing its neck of all the water, closed his eyes and wiped his own face first. It brought no relief. He threw the cloth at the basin to refresh it for Mary-Jane but hit a bowl of cold soup instead, sending it plummeting to the floor, the spoon clanging as it bounced on wooden floorboards.
‘Mother Mary,’ he pleaded. Where was she when he needed her?
Bedcovers lay tangled at Mary-Jane’s feet where she’d kicked them off, and James decided to leave them there, damn what the doctor said. He wound a corner of the wet cloth around two fingers, the rest balled up in the palm of his hand, and gently wiped the sweat from her face. Hot breaths brushed the skin of his wrist. She was calm again, her mouth relaxed.
‘You smell like shit,’ she said, each word grating against her throat.
He dropped the cloth and raised his hand as if to slap her. Mary-Jane grimaced. Without opening her eyes, she knew. He gritted his teeth and forced himself not to hit her. He clenched the damp fabric of her nightdress, pulling her up with a shake.
‘Why’d you go get sick then?’ he cried. ‘Why?’
Her eyes remained closed, her mouth taut; she was resolved not to forgive him. He leaned in right up to her face, nose to nose.
‘Why’d you have to get sick?’
She opened her mouth and breathed her hell breath into his face. He pulled back, then lifted her to him again. The collar of her nightdress tore away in his hand. Mary-Jane dropped onto the pillow, wheezing. James held the collar in his open palm. Aileen. The shock of it numbed him to Mary-Jane’s struggle for breath. He reached into his trouser pocket and brought out the matted wool mess that was Aileen to him, held it up in his right palm. In his left, Mary-Jane.
A blackbird warbled on the open window ledge, tilting its head as it looked in to the room. James swore loudly, but the bird didn’t move – not until he threw one of Mary-Jane’s boots after it and they both flew away from the sickroom, the bird warbling from another ledge, the boot tumbling down the roof and dropping from the gutter.
A blackbird on the doorstep: a sure sign of death. James could almost smell the mint of his mother’s breath, hear her voice willing it to be true. But what did she know? Did she know her husband was a murderer? Did she know he made her son bury wanderer babies while they still breathed? No, she was too busy looking for signs, picking fruit from the very tree, sending James up the branches as she stood on the ground where the arms and legs lay rotting just below the surface. The strawberry tree, full of bright-red prickly fruit, but no signs to show her how scared her own son was of that place.
James picked up Mary-Jane’s other boot, the one with the hole too big to mend, and threw that out the window too. Someone yelled from the street below, but he didn’t care.
Between spasms, Mary-Jane lay peacefully as if she were gone. She had given up, James knew that, and he hated her for the weakness. Then the rust scratched her throat and the panic started all over, grinding, grinding …That was it. James pulled on his trousers and tucked in his shirt. His father might have been a murderer, but he was also a practical man, he got things done.
‘Smell, do I?’ He did his boots up and put his hat on. ‘Damn it, girl, you smell ’n’ all!’ He slammed the door shut behind him.
There was no sign of the man in the street who’d been hit by the flying boot. James walked over and kicked the boot hard. It tumbled a few times, then settled on its side, the hole in the sole facing him like an insult.
With each heavy step, Queen Street dipped away, down towards the waterfront. Ships’ masts waved on the tide there, beckoning him to come, to leave, to go back. But he had a better idea.
All Mary-Jane needed was hope – to see he was a man who could look after her. Then she’d get better, he was sure of it. James hoisted his trousers and picked up his pace.
Further down he stopped outside Keesing’s shoe store, where assortments of women’s shoes were displayed in the window. Some had buttons, some had bows, but none of them were the sort Mary-Jane would wear. He watched through the window as an assistant fitted a pair of white boots on a child. Her mother shook her head, but the little girl had her heart set, and pleaded.
The assistant went out the back for more shoes and James stepped inside, sidling past a partition displaying men’s boots. Anticipation pounded; every sound in the shop seemed accentuated. Towards the back, just short of the counter, practical women’s boots lined three shelves. James picked a pair that looked about right and measured them against the flat of his palm. He knew the size of Mary-Jane’s feet. Her small, cold feet.
‘Be with you in a moment, sir,’ the assistant called.
‘Right you are,’ James said.
James didn’t bother to look at the price. He knew he didn’t have enough, especially after the doctor’s visit. Instead, he moved behind the partition, waited until the child had demanded the attention of the shop assistant, then tucked the boots into the front of his trousers and covered them with his jacket. The child screamed at her mother. James used the distraction again and made for the door.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ the assistant called, but James was already off, one arm swinging, the other pressing the boots to his stomach. Two doors down, he turned back to see a policeman attending to the alarm. Bad timing, but James kept moving as though it wasn’t him; it was too late for anything else. He ducked into an alleyway and burst into a sprint. Chancery Lane was just ahead, the slum that rose on piles of rubbish and hid a multitude of sins.
Rag-doll children lining Bacon Lane paid no attention to the stranger in their midst. The policeman’s whistle bleated somewhere in the street behind, and the children’s faces lifted like sunflowers following the light. They scampered away. The whistle grew louder, and James found himself suddenly alone in the street. It was too late to run, so he dipped into a narrow passage between two shacks, only to discover it was a dead end.
The window of one of the shacks opened and a young woman looked down.
‘Hey, what you doing down there, you peeping Tom? Go on, get out of here ’fore I …’
The whistle blasts in Bacon Lane stopped her. She looked towards the street, then back at James. He made for the window, hoping she would hide him, but she pulled it shut with a knowing thud. James ducked behind a mound of rubbish. The whistle stopped its bleating. All was quiet except for the pounding of James’s heart and the tread of the policeman’s boots edging towards the rubbish pile. James bunched his fist ready. He wasn’t going anywhere without a good fight.