A person can be many things, can they not? Most people are merely acting the parts they’ve been given anyway. Life is an instrument thrust into the hands of a small child; they play the violin because it’s the only one they’ve been shown how. She had been an Elizabeth before and would be again, soon, but for now she must make do with being this Liz. She didn’t much like it: Liz sounded hard, like a hiss or a grunt. The English had a million ways to reduce a person to nothing. ‘Eliz-a-beth’ had a melody. It rose and fell. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The name was a story, and how Elizabeth loved stories. She would keep going until hers was a good one.
Elizabeth took care to avoid the mirror, a pointless square of blackened glass that hung from a nail driven into the wall made fat with damp. She had whitewashed the wall that morning and now she’d moved on to cleaning the men’s rooms. This being Elizabeth’s regular haunt, she had the benefit of the odd piece of casual work thrown her way.
Despite her best efforts, she caught her own eye in a small portion of the mirror and studied her complexion; the skin was dry, the bones appeared a little too close to the surface and the line of her jaw had become slack. Her eyes had shrunk, and her lashes, which always used to be long, looked as if they’d been filed down. She slapped her cheeks hard to bring the life back into them, then yanked at her bodice and thrust her shoulders back.
‘I can always be another,’ said Elizabeth.
‘What was that?’ shouted Ann from the next room.
‘What?’ said Elizabeth.
‘You said something,’ Ann said as she marched into the room, wiping her hands on a cloth, shiny-eyed and half laughing. ‘You’re doing it again, Liz. Gabbling away to yourself. First sign of madness, that is.’ She tapped a finger to her temples, then waddled back to where she’d come from.
Elizabeth bristled at the joke. She did not find it funny. She hadn’t been able to rely upon her mind of late. It was the strain of remembering all the details. If she wasn’t the tragic sailor’s widow from the Princess Alice, or Long Liz, she might be the farmer’s daughter, the musician’s maid, or any number of other parts she’d played. The one thing she did know was that she was not English, even if it had been two decades since she’d come from Sweden, hounded out for whoring, which did not bother this part of London so much. All these stories were jumbled up in her mind and tended to leapfrog each other. It was the thoughts that raced too fast and tried to escape her lips; she must take care to keep her lips still, else people think her mad.
It was gone six when she returned to Flower and Dean Street and paid for her bed. She stopped by Catherine and asked her to take care of some green velvet as she was going out. Then Elizabeth brushed down her clothes, taking care to pull the velveteen bodice of her black dress this way and that before donning the jacket with the fur trim. She discreetly slipped a packet of cachous to freshen her breath into her pocket.
‘You’re a bit quiet. Nervy, even – that’s not like you,’ said Catherine. ‘Where you off to? Or rather, who you off to see all dressed up like that?’
For her age, Liz was quite attractive. Considering the way she lived and how much she drank, this made her something of an enigma. She wasn’t in the habit of wearing a bonnet, and yet here she was stuffing newspaper into the back of one – newly acquired, it would appear.
‘Never you mind,’ Liz snapped, taking off the bonnet again and then fussing first with her nosegay and then with the red rose on her lapel.
Catherine didn’t mind the snapping; they were all getting on a bit. Life was a little easier if one had a fella to partner with and since Liz was faring better than others her age, why shouldn’t she try and fix herself up with a better type. Catherine would have done the same herself if she’d had the teeth or the inclination.
There was no point asking Liz what she was up to. One thing Catherine had learned about her was that you couldn’t trust a word that fell out of the woman’s mouth, and she often forgot the finer detail of her own lies. They weren’t bad lies. Not really. Catherine had known girls like Liz before. Sometimes a little embellishment made life easier to bear. Liz wasn’t a bad sort. Unlucky maybe, and not the wisest, but not bad. Whatever she was up to, Catherine hoped she would get away with it.
*
Israel kept his head down, careful not to catch anyone’s eye on his way home from the synagogue. He had stayed too long, he knew that. With each minute spent in the familiar company and comfort of his own kind, he was at greater risk on his walk home. But it was a wrench to leave the friendly faces, the warmth, the conversation that came so easily, all so welcome after having given oneself a headache trying to understand the strange sounds from the strange mouths. London was a desolate place, considering it was so crowded.
It was well beyond midnight when he took himself off down Commercial Street. A wide, clear road, and with that the relative safety of other people, but also the likelihood that they were not his own. It was not easy to blend in. His curls, his features, his clothes… All signposts, clues to those who hated his kind. They had never met him, they could not know that Israel was anything but a threat, but the hostility and anger he felt from them as he struggled to understand their words always felt so personal, so specific to him, that he often questioned whether he might have been mistaken for someone who had done something terrible. These days he avoided such interactions. The language was odd, and the words changed from one person to the next.
His breath quickened; lungs left behind because of the pace his nervous legs insisted on keeping. He hustled with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement. He turned into Berner Street in the pitch black. It was really too late; he should have left a lot earlier. He would be stricter with himself in future. This was too dark, too dangerous.
Up ahead, he could see the black shapes of what he thought were a man and woman. His chest loosened when he saw it was a couple; the presence of a woman made the pair less threatening. As he approached, the man suddenly lunged at the woman, grabbed her by the arm and threw her across what would be his path and down onto the pavement. The woman screamed, three times in all. A shrill, piercing sound. No one else came. It was only them and Israel and he was stuck to the spot. His pulse started to thump between his ears, everything screamed inside his head that he should run, but his legs would not move. When eventually he managed to cross the road, he felt bad. He should be going to the aid of the woman, but he’d always been told never to become involved in such disputes because invariably he would find himself the outsider.
Israel quickened his pace as the woman struggled to her feet. All his senses were trained on the two of them. When another man appeared from the shadows, his heart nearly burst and he leapt off the pavement and onto the road. The man had emerged from the darkness to light his pipe and Israel was sure he was looking at him. Israel was half running now, and when he turned to check, his stomach lurched. The man was chasing him now, shouting something. Israel couldn’t be sure, but he thought it sounded like ‘Lipski’. The name of the alien Jew they hung for murder only last year. That was all he needed to hear. He fired up his legs, and he ran and ran. He didn’t stop running, even when his lungs seemed about to burst into flames and his legs grew too tired to carry his body. He tripped and he stumbled, but he kept running until he fell upon the door of his home.