don't i
Time drains like a maelstrom in a huge hourglass. I’m the glass, the sand, spiralling, choking, sleeping. Eventually, I wake.
I’m in a strange, cramped bed. The mat plunges and tips like a twig on the river. I reach for a steadying wall, but there’s only more mat, next to me, pointing up like the world is bending. My head floats. Then it’s whirling down.
I can’t speak. Walls eat my words, snap, snap. A muted clatter.
A face swims near, brown and wavery. One of my hands is cupped in both of his.
“Stop swimming,” I say.
“I’m not swimming.” His growl is soft. I smell his warm smell, herbs and leaves drying in the sun. He’s wrong. Everything’s swimming—
I open my eyes. A familiar wispy spider hangs in its haunt in the corner. My bed at Opal Alley.
I manage to sit up, but I’m cast iron, heavy as death. A damp cloth flops off my forehead into my lap – hot as anything.
I urge my legs over the side of the bed, though they might be sacks of stones. All my muscles ache like I’ve been running for hours.
Grit – no, dry sand – clings to my calves and feet.
I can hear singing, the refrain from one of Ruzi’s songs. Don’t leave me here. This is not my home.
The song is inside my head.
I’m wearing a strange nightdress with long trailing sleeves that ruffle out over my knuckles. Absurd Skøl fashion. The skirt reaches halfway down my shins. I draw it up to look at my knees – both bruised, the right one torn.
I sift through fragments of memory that feel as though they’ve been chopped up for the pot by Renny’s cleaver. Wasn’t I with Felicity Greave? She had a secret to share. I think I found something out about our magistrate friend. Now I’m here, ragged with thirst. There’s a flask I don’t recognize on my table. I’ve half a memory of drinking from it.
Cold water, I imagine, struck with a weird terror.
My thighs are shaking. I drink from the flask. It’s not water but some brew with a slightly bitter, almost mushroomy taste. I turn to take it back to bed, but my knees buckle.
I fall loudly, too spent to move. The puddle spreads across the boards, a sea edging up a wooden shore, the flask rocking like flotsam.
Light from the kitchen gushes in, and Kit’s scooping me up.
“I finally get you into bed.” His grin looks forced. He tucks the covers around me.
I don’t know what to say. He looks so different. His hair is all shaved off. His ears stick out.
He retrieves the flask. “Did you drink any before you spilled it?”
“No. What is it?”
“Red lichen. Do you good.”
“Where’d you find lichen?”
He shakes his shorn head. “I know a peddler. How’re you feeling?” The tips of his fingers brush my forehead. “Do you remember what happened?”
“I saw a shearwater,” I say suddenly, but that’s all the memory is – a flash of a bird flying low.
“Really? Where was the shearwater?”
“I don’t know.” My thoughts are all gummed up. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve had a nasty fever. Gave us all a scare. We found you on the shore in the middle of the night – day before last. That’s one way to get out of coming for an orange ice with me.” There’s an edge to his easy laugh. “You were delirious.”
A day and a half. All blank.
“Do you remember what happened? Were you swimming?”
I don’t remember anything. “Felicity,” I mumble. “She was worried.”
“You saw Felicity?”
“Think so… But was it that day? We talked to some children in the square.”
“Which square?”
“I can’t remember.”
My memory’s still in bits. Like one of the blowers fashioned my missing day from glass and then chucked it on the reject pile.
I feel like the cloth Ruzi uses to wipe our table – limp, ragged, crusty.
“It’ll come,” Kit murmurs. “Are you still thirsty?”
I nod.
“Hungry?”
Feel like I haven’t eaten in an age.
He clatters around the kitchen and returns with a steaming cup of milky fikka, a bowl of soup – I knew I could smell something – and a wedge of thick gristbread that I recognize as the handiwork of the bakery downstairs.
He talks while I eat. “Strike’s over, I’m afraid,” he says. “Venor had them shut it down. Pretty brutally, by all accounts.”
“What happened?”
“That gathering in the square they were planning with the clerks – you remember?”
“All went pear-shaped.”
“Where’s Ruzi?” I’m suddenly afraid of why he’s not here.
“He’s fine. He’s at work. He wasn’t there.”
“What did they do?”
“Well, they decided to march to the branders’ station – show of solidarity with the clerks still in the drunk tank there since the vigil. They sang a song outside – that one the dockers are always singing. And the branders came out swinging. There was a fire. It got ugly.”
“Do you know if Cordi and Vertie were there?”
“They’re fine. Eat your food before it gets cold.”
I have to focus to keep the ridiculous trailing sleeves out of the bowl. “Where’s this nightdress from?”
“It’s Missus Scarlet’s.”
“Maybe that’s why I feel eighty years old.”
He chuckles strangely. I realize he looks drained, his eyes almost bruised. This cropped hair’s not a style I’ve seen on him since detention, after the Cull. The Skøl shaved us. Said our hair was dirty.
“And the strike’s over?”
“Strikes are banned. Songs are banned. Marches? Banned. Standing with a frown while holding a candle outside? Banned. Blinking at Venor? Also banned. His answer to everything – ban it or burn it.”
“Brickhead.”
I finish eating, and he takes the bowl away. I shiver. Can’t stop my drooping eyelids.
“Going … to sleep,” I tell him.
“Good idea.”
When I wake, the sun’s lower.
Kit’s leaning on the door frame as if I’ve dreamed him there. I’m overwhelmed with a sudden flood of feeling.
“Don’t sit up,” he says. I slump back down.
He flops on to the covers beside me at an angle, his head almost touching mine, his legs dangling off the side. He drums his collarbone with one thumb.
“Any more news from Zako?” I ask.
“No.”
A memory snags. Someone was asking me – What’s B and T? They were angry. Who was it? Was it real or a dream? My heart’s going like a gong.
“What did you do to your hair?” I blurt out, pushing away the terror.
He swipes his hands over his face and exhales slowly before he speaks again. “You said you remembered a shearwater?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Don’t see them much close in.”
I turn the vision of the shearwater over behind my eyes. But it’s a memory of a memory now, attached to nothing more than a whiff of saltwater, a slight rocking.
His head moves until his forehead rests against mine. His eyes are closed. He lets out a long breath. I’m half asleep again when I hear the outer door creaking open. Kit rolls to his feet before Ruzi’s inside.
“Thank you, son,” comes Ruzi’s voice from the kitchen. “How is she?”
Since when did Ruzi call him son? The shock ripples through me, but not enough to wake me fully. I hear Kit taking his leave. I roll my cheek into the pillow where his head was and sink further into sleep.
It’s night when I wake next, though a dim lantern stands on the table, beside a potted geranium. That’s new. Ruzi’s sat with his head fallen back, mouth agape, drooling on the Portcaye Post spread like a bib over his chest.
I croak a greeting. “Ruzi.”
He wakes with a grunt, dragging his chair closer.
“How you feeling?”
I don’t feel as chilled as I did before. “Where’d the plant come from?”
“Cordi brought it for you.”
“Well, that was sweet of her. I feel silly, you sitting vigil like I’m not long for this world.”
Ruzi blinks. Tilts his head.
“Yesterday we thought we’d lost you,” he says. “And … well…” He touches my hand gently. “Your wrists.”
I pull back the trailing sleeves. My wrists are marked with bruises and scabbed-over abrasions. They hurt, I realize.
“Someone tied you.”
A tremor runs down my back. “I don’t remember.”
“Kit says you saw a shearwater. Were you out on a boat?”
“I don’t know.”
“We found your keys at the Works. You dropped them outside the stables. Found you on the sand, half drowned. Cold as ice, you were.”
“I can’t remember,” I say, panicking.
He watches me for a moment, then shakes his head. “You’re all right. It’ll come when it’s meant to.”
He sounds so sure. I want to believe him. I want to remember.
Don’t I?