STEPH SWAINSTON

The Wheel of Fortune

Tuesday morning in May, bright sunshine. I came out of the shop, carrying a pole to pull the awning down. I was whistling. The shop door banged behind me and the cat fled off the step. The whole street was vibrant with the spring sun. There, sitting on the pavement and huddled against the terrace wall, was Serin. She was a pitiful sight, gin-dimmed eyes and head to foot in gutter dirt. I had last seen her Saturday, on stage at the Campion Vaudeville, and she was wearing the same dress now, a voluminous costume made of gold foil. Her reddish wings stuck out the back and bunched up against the bricks. The feathers rustled when she moved.

I knelt next to her. ‘Serin? . . .Are you all right?’

She shook her head and looked away. She was on the spiral downwards, that much was obvious.

‘What did they do to you?’

‘It’s the things they make me do,’ she sobbed.

I stroked her hair, the crackling material of her dress. ‘Did you come here to see me?’

‘Yes. To buy some scolopendium. Cat. Because people say you sell it.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do. You do.’

‘Not to you, Serin. You don’t need it.’

‘I want to.’

I pulled her arm gently. ‘Come inside. I’ll get you a cocoa; it’s better than cat.’

She looked at me gratefully, drawing a little consolation from my touch. Her hair was so ginger it looked fake, and stiff as wire. Her green eyes would put a Rhydanne to shame, but her face was purple with dirt. It was a bizarre contrast. She began to wail. I hushed her and helped her inside the shop.

It seemed dim after the daylight and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. I flipped up the counter, guided Serin through it and helped her onto a stool by the till. I pulled my worn black jacket off the peg and wrapped her in it like a child. ‘God, what did they do to you?’

‘They don’t pay me,’ she sniffed, and wiped her nose on her wrist. ‘For two weeks Crispy didn’t pay me at all and the landlord threw me out.’

‘Have you been living rough since – ?’

‘Saturday. Yeah . . . I got this dress.’ She scrunched two handfuls of the skirt.

This city sickened me. I folded my arms and glanced at the shelves. She needed a bath and she needed a place to stay. ‘I’ll get you that cocoa,’ I said. At that moment the green linen strips hanging in the doorway whisked aside and Dotterel bustled through from the passage. He looked over his glasses at the girl. ‘Well, well. What in the name of pathos do we have here?’

‘This is Serin, sir,’ I said.

‘Your partner in grime. Ha ha.’

Serin stared at him. I explained everything, omitting, of course, my drug dealing, while giving Serin a warning glance, and ended lamely by saying, ‘I’m just going to get her some cocoa.’

‘Cocoa. An excellent idea. And plenty of water, and a nip of brandy. And then we shall have breakfast. Do you have a hangover, Miss Serin?’ He added something kindly in Awian and she brightened up and replied. Her tears had cleared white patches around her eyes and she looked like a reject doll. ‘Light the fire and run the bath,’ he said to me.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then come back and man the shop. This doesn’t entail a day off, you know. Young lady, if you don’t mind wearing a shirt and trousers until you can buy some clothes.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ she said.

‘Well, that just depends whether you can help run a shop.’

Her eyes shone. ‘Do you mean . . .?’

‘Yes, yes. Well, we shall see.’ He turned and started taking down jars for me to make the day’s pastilles. ‘When one is caught in a tempest it is important to steer the ship, is it not? There’s no point bewailing life’s vicissitudes when they rise up, up, up as well as down. And you, young lady, are on the up. Do you know of the Wheel of Fortune? It is always spinning. You can climb it to the top, but those on top have to be careful, because it can carry them swiftly down again. And serve them right! If you languish at the bottom, bear in mind you can rise to the heights. In a city like this you need a firm place to set your foot.’

‘She has a voice like a nightingale,’ I said, and blushed. I don’t know where that came from.

‘Jant. Kitchen.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I slipped through the waxed green linen strips. As I coaxed the stove to life, and warmed the tiny pan full of milk until it frothed, I was kicking myself for saying such a weird thing. But it seemed to have effected the best introduction, for talking and snatches of laughter came through from the shop, and when I brought the cocoa in on a tray, I saw that both the stage grin and the blank stare had gone from Serin’s eyes. Dotterel had managed to make her smile through her tears.

u

 

After breakfast I showed her how to make pastilles. She was wearing one of my shirts, tied with a scarf round her little urchin waist. We had taken menthol, sugar syrup, essence of peppermint and a little liquorice, and stirred it around in a mason bowl. I folded the mixture over into itself and it went quite stiff.

‘This is the good bit.’ I tipped the ball of candy out onto the clean work surface and rolled it into a sausage. It was transparent, and marbled through with the black streaks of liquorice. I let Serin pick it up and place it on the pill press, which is a ridged brass plate. A similar plate went on top, squashing the mixture, then with a quick motion I whipped it across and rolled the mixture into little balls of satisfyingly equal size. ‘Cough drops.’ I said. ‘They set within the hour and then they go in one of these tins. But you have to keep the flies off them.’

‘I see,’ said Serin. ‘What about scolopendium?’

‘That’s proper chemistry, not cooking.’

‘Show me how to make it.’

‘No. It’s the hardest drug there is.’

But she’d seen my glance to the distilling apparatus on its mahogany-topped table alongside the wall. ‘Do you use that?’

‘Don’t get involved.’

‘Everyone says you deal it. Vance said you’re in with the Wheel gang, and you give them scolopendium, and it’s the best in the city.’

‘I’m not in any gang.’

‘But you sell them cat.’

‘. . .Yes.’

‘Cool.’

I shrugged and began to measure warm sugar syrup for the next batch. Selling drugs wasn’t cool. I’d only wanted a little money to see out my apprenticeship, but the Wheel was like a whirlpool and every night sucked me further in.

‘You want to dive straight into danger and drown,’ I said. ‘You can sing and you can dance. Stick to that.’

‘At the Campion? It’s not serious acting. It’s like a sideshow at a whorehouse. I could be Ata in The Mayor of Diw if they’d let me.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Six drops of liquorice.’

 

I packed medicines with Serin all day while the city’s shadows lengthened. The cat stole in, and leapt on the counter, and was shooed out again. I sold two ounces of clove oil for toothache, camomile for stomach gripes and a dose of pennyroyal for carelessness, all decanted into stoppered flasks and carefully labelled.

Outside, the blue sky gave way to mare’s tails, then thick cloud. A cold front battered in off the estuary and the temperature began to drop. It was colder still when we finished our meal and Dotterel retired to bed. Serin followed to sleep in the box room, but my day was just beginning.

I left the shop and walked out of Galt district towards the docks. The Moren Canal strides in there to meet the slovenly river at a basin full of barges. By day it’s busy with the trade and shipment of all sorts of goods. Now at nearly ten o’clock it was deserted, except for a dull glow and rowdy conversation spilling from the dockers’ Kentledge Arms.

All was silent as I followed the towpath below blind mill buildings and warehouses, deeper into the docks. Last on the wharf, by the mighty canal lock, the Fulling Mill’s barred windows were as lightless as the cold expanse of estuary. Its great hammers that beat woollen weave into fine cloth were stilled for the night, and the enormous waterwheel that drove it stood motionless. It hung above its reflection, seen now and then on the murky water, when a few spare lights from the road picked out the ripples in black and white.

On the six spokes of the waterwheel the Wheel gang had nailed another of their victims. The body of a teenager hung there, arms and legs outstretched, head dangling. Six inch nails through his denim wrists and ankles held each limb to a different spoke. His blood had drained straight down, staining his jacket and the wheel’s enormous timbers. Then they had used him for crossbow practice.

I passed with a shudder. The warehouse at the end of the quay looked terribly lonely. I slipped inside and found myself surrounded by tall shapes: neat piles of barrels that reached up to the corrugated iron roof. There were sacks of barley, crates of candles, bolts of cloth. I walked between them like a thief.

In the middle of the warehouse various members of the Wheel gang were lounging around on woolsacks. They had piled hundreds of these sacks into the shape of a tall throne, and high up on it, looking down on us all, sat a young man in an exquisitely tailored grey silk suit.

‘You’re late,’ said Felicitia.

He reposed with his chin on one hand, the other hand dangling. He was adorned with the most expensive makeup and fine gold jewellery, his long hair combed down straight.

Debrah and Vance stopped playing poker and watched.

‘Have you got the drugs?’ he asked.

‘Have you got the money?’

‘Just give me the damn phial.’ He slipped lightly down and landed in front of me. I took the phial from my pocket and gave it to him. At once he flipped its cap, poured it into a glass of brandy ready on the table and drank it down straight. Then eyelids flickered over wide-pupilled eyes. He caught a breath and looked at me shrewdly. ‘Your payment is protection,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We caught two of the Bowyers gang hanging round your shop. Didn’t we, Vance?’

‘Yeh.’

‘They won’t bother you again.’

‘Was that one outside on the wheel?’

‘Yes,’ said Felicitia.

‘What about the other one?’

He beckoned to me and we went outside. At the edge of the lock he rested his arms on the railing and gazed down at the black water. Vance, the docker, spun an iron wheel and the water level began to fall. The water drained away and revealed a metal ladder bolted to the slimy wall. Tied to the ladder, and drooping away from it, was a pale and waterlogged corpse.

‘Oh god,’ I said. ‘Oh, god.’

Felicitia leant his head on my shoulder. I could see the powder particles of his eye shadow and smelt his brandy breath.

‘Stay, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Stay the night.’

He steered me back into the warehouse. Vance pressed a glass of brandy into my hand. Debrah involved me in a game of cards, and I stayed.

 

I was asleep, lying on the firmly filled woolsacks below the throne. The last candles in a stolen crystal chandelier that hung from the airy warehouse beams had failed, and all was dark.

I was woken abruptly by an urgent hiss and a hand on my shoulder: Felicitia. ‘What?’ I asked, shrinking from his hand.

‘Sh!’ he said. ‘Get up.’

What the fuck was going on? I thought that perhaps the Bowyers were about to attack, but lamplight leaking in from the docks illuminated an excited smile on Felicitia’s face – far from the usual sardonic expression he affected to match his expensive clothes. He walked towards me and I backed off, over the straw-strewn floor until I walked into the chair in which Vance had been sitting. Its cold metal pressed against the back of my legs. Felicitia giggled, shaking his hair that was dyed in stripes, for god’s sake. It reached to his shoulders and flowed into his black coat, so he seemed featureless, a strip of darkness sliced from the night. He moved with a woman’s delicacy, did it better than a woman, more like a cat.

Vance stepped out from behind a pile of barrels and grabbed me with a hand on each bicep. I struggled to pull away but I had no chance. The greasy-haired bodybuilder tapped me on the shoulders and I sat down on the chair. He began to pull a length of cord from his pocket.

Felicitia watched with his head on one side. ‘Why are you looking at the door, Jant? Even you can’t move that fast.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Tut, tut. If you’re going to sound so terrified you should shut up.’

Vance looped the cord around my wrists, then pulled it appallingly tight across the back of the chair. I began to lose the feeling in my fingertips.

‘Aren’t you on our side?’ I appealed.

‘Yeh, well if I wasn’t, you didn’t put up much of a struggle.’ He tied my legs to the legs of the chair; wrought iron against my shins and impossible for me to lift.

‘Everybody in the Wheel has this done,’ said Felicitia slowly. ‘You want to belong to our gang, don’t you? You want to be one of us.’

He brushed past me as he stood up and I felt his erection hard in the front of his trousers. Over the last year I had often glimpsed our symbol on Vance’s shoulder and I had watched him carve it on Debrah’s arm when she joined us, but I had always hoped the ritual would pass me by.

‘Everyone has to witness it,’ I tried to stay calm. ‘You said so. You said we do scarifications in the Kentledge, in the beer garden.’

‘Tonight it’s just you and me.’ He pulled the sheath off the blade.

‘You never cut Layce,’ I said desperately. ‘Is that because you love her?’

A pained expression crossed his face. He poked the knife under my chin and lifted it so I had to meet his gaze. ‘Well, I would fuck Layce. But I’d be thinking of you.’ He stepped back and began to slit my sleeve carefully.

My adrenaline was hiking up, while he opened a bottle, dripped disinfectant onto a pad of lint and rubbed it over the blade. The light from his lantern gleamed along its edge. I was high on the peak of anticipation, teetering with the void before me. I knew if I tensed myself the agony would be worse, but I was rigid with fear. ‘You goatfucking son of a bitch,’ I spat in Scree.

‘Keep talking. I love it when you speak foreign.’ He rolled back his cuffs and spread his hands like an artist contemplating a canvas. He pressed the tip of the knife against my skin, which dented, then the knife sank deep.

I swear the first cut went straight to the bone. He put all his weight against the blade and dragged it through skin and muscle with a butcher’s precision. I struggled, pulled away. The line he was cutting curved and he cried out in frustration. He seized my shoulder and held it still. He drew the circle deep into my flesh with the knife. He lifted out the blade, then began the first spoke. I clamped my mouth shut and never made a sound – I wouldn’t give him the pleasure. I stared straight ahead into the warehouse. Three lines made six spokes: on the second line my vision went dark around the edges. Blue spots, then unfocussed black patches clouded it. I couldn’t breathe enough oxygen; I dropped my chin to my chest. I could hear blood pattering off my arm, dripping off his hands. Felicitia hummed to himself and started the third line. I fainted.

At length I became aware of him slapping my face. My arm and my whole side were searing pain. He cut the cords because blood had soaked the knots too tight to undo. I fell out of the chair onto my hands and knees, and rested my forehead on the floorboards. Blood was running in rivers down my arm, over my wrist, and drying stickily on the floor.

Felicitia had never scarred any other gang member this deeply. Every spoke was a punishment for a time I’d rebuffed his advances. He stepped back and admired his handiwork, then slipped behind me. I felt him grope my arse and his hand sank into the crack. At the same time he reached round and deftly undid my belt buckle. In a trice I was up and glaring at him, squeezing my shoulder.

‘Cool it,’ he said. He pointed to the disinfectant and I picked up the pad and pressed it against the cuts, trying to staunch the flow.

‘Get away from me,’ I slurred.

Vance yelled at Felicitia: ‘You go too far!’

‘Everybody has it done. You did.’

‘Not that deep!’

‘I want to know what Jant will do in return,’ he said softly.

I tried a step and the warehouse spun. I fell to one knee again and my hand went almost automatically to my stiletto knife tucked in the top of my boot. But when I looked up he was again pointing his dagger at me. And smirking.

‘Fuck off, Felicitia.’

‘Oh, stop giving me ideas. You are so very young . . . and so very pretty.’

I knelt and concentrated on the pain, thinking I was about to die of it, or of blood loss, and I couldn’t bring myself to move for what seemed like hours. He nudged me with his boot toe. ‘Get up, Jant.’

‘Can’t . . .’

‘You’re a drug dealer, aren’t you? Go and deal yourself some drugs. Roll up your sleeve and shoot some of that stuff you sell me. Hook yourself up with a dose of cat; I know it takes all the pain away.’

‘Felicitia Aver-Falconet, you’re living on borrowed time.’

‘Promises, promises.’ He stepped back and bowed, beckoned to Vance and they walked off without another word. I stood up carefully, hunched over my pain, holding my arm, and the warehouse was reeling as I made my way across it.

As I left the quayside, a figure began to trail after me, scarcely distinguishable in that stinking canal night. Well, let it: I was thanking god silently that the distance was not too far.

Dripping blood all the way, I staggered down the underpass that led beneath the watermill’s conduit. It was desolate and stank of piss. Concrete stalactites hung from seeping cracks in the ceiling, and muddy footprints streaked the tiles. I hurried through as quickly as I could. At the crossroads by the Moren Bridge, street lamps cast my shadow long across the road. Two rats were fighting in the gutter. They snapped at each other like stunted dogs. I limped past them and painedly made my way from the docklands back to Galt, through the four a.m. landscape of twisted roofs and slippery pavements bordered with open drains, while the amber moon’s sick light laughed at me.

I crossed over into Cinder Street, off the cobbles onto the wet brown pavement, past the Campion Playhouse, alongside its iron railings. I reached the chemist’s shop, its shutters fastened for the night, and sighed with relief. I fumbled with the key, shouldered the door wide and stumbled inside.

I kicked the door closed and made my way by a combination of touch and memory across to the counter, and ducked underneath. The counter stood as an ebony barricade between the shelves and outside, the street still visible through the pane in the door. I lit a candle one-handedly and searched the shelves, which were lined with boxes and jars full of potions and pills. Painkiller, I was thinking. Felicitia was right that cat will work. That’s what the addicts tell me it’s like. The ones I sell it to: they care for nothing else. I knocked over a couple of little bottles, spilling some silver liquid; and the dregs of red powder from another, swearing loudly. I didn’t expect Dotterel to be awake yet; he was far too old, and slept as if already dead. My moonlight customers and I were glad of that.

I picked up the bottle against my chest, but didn’t have the strength to open it. I sat down, panting, and eased the stiffening sleeve of my shirt away from the network of cuts on my shoulder. This action made the bleeding start again. I promise I’ll kill that bastard.

I smashed the neck off the bottle on the counter top, poured the drug into a beaker and drank it. The pain disappeared – it didn’t ebb or dull, just snuffed out, like an extinguished candle.

I pawed my way through the shop, under the desk again, and unlocked the door that led down to the cellar, where I slept on a shelf. I made no attempt to bandage my arm, I didn’t care for it at all. I even smiled, thinking how good this stuff was, and how perhaps the addicts I sold it to were correct, all their lax philosophy, all their contorted sense of time.

Hours wore on and fever set in. When the pain began to pierce the shell of the scolopendium I’d drunk, I sipped more, lay on my impossible bed with the beaker clutched in one hand and listened to my own voice whispering.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ said a voice in the doorway. That feline silhouette lounged against the doorframe, its long, stripy hair now scraped back in a ponytail. ‘It’s the best drug in the world.’

Felicitia? Here? Or was it a hallucination?

‘Felicitia . . .’ I breathed. ‘Did you trail me as well?’

‘As well? As well as who?’

My mouth was dry and I gasped. ‘The Bowyers . . . followed me here. They’ll – ’

‘No, my love. I’m the one that was following you. I put a guard on your shop. . . you’ll be safe.’

I squeezed my eyes shut in frustration and tears forced out the corners. He swayed up to stand beside me. ‘You have such an interesting establishment. It belongs to us now – and so do you. Now we view the world in the same way, we should understand each other. Is there anything . . . at all . . . I can do for you?’

‘Take me to the hospital, you bloody bastard.’

He raised an eyebrow and laid his hand on my thigh. ‘In a while.’

A movement in the corridor made us both start. Serin rushed into the room, levelling Dotterel’s crossbow directly at Felicitia. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she snapped.

Felicitia backed off at the sight of the gleaming bolt, but then he shook himself and assumed an air of smoothness. ‘Jant, you didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend.’

‘Who are you?’ yelled Serin.

‘She must be quite something to have seduced our Jant.’

Serin closed her finger on the trigger. To her eyes he was one of the men who made her life a misery. She meant it.

‘I’m the Governor’s son,’ he said quickly.

‘What?’

‘Felix. The son of Kalice Aver-Falconet, Governor of Hacilith.’

Serin glanced madly from him to me, behind the crossbow that was far too big for her. ‘From the palace?’ she said.

‘Just shoot him,’ I said.

‘Such hospitality. I – ’

‘Out!’

She kept him at crossbow point as he walked around her. He winked at me as he left, and she followed him out. I heard the shop door bang. In a second she was back, shaking with relief and dangling the crossbow. ‘He’s gone.’

‘For now.’

‘God . . . what happened to you?’

‘This is what it means to join the Wheel gang,’ I said through my fever. She bent close and helped me lift my fingers away from my wounded shoulder.

‘He cut me,’ I said. ‘It needs dressing.’

‘Show me how.’

She helped me up to the shop and I sat on a stool while she cleaned my wound and bandaged it carefully. The sky was brightening from misty grey to a deeper blue every minute and a soft, peaceful dawn trailed into this side of Hacilith.

In the shade of the shop, Serin traced with her finger the lines of blood that were starting to show through my bandage. Her touch was so light – and caring. She whispered, ‘A circle with spokes . . . It’s the Wheel of Fortune. We’re at the bottom now, so the wheel will raise us up . . . won’t it?’

‘Out of the dregs.’

‘Yes. We have to.’

A wheel takes more effort to push upwards than it does to spin downward. I was suddenly determined. I would set my shoulders against the Wheel of Fortune and shove.

‘We’ll get out of this terrible city,’ I said.

Serin hugged me tight and kissed me. It was the first time I’d ever been kissed. An awed awakening broke upon me – she really cared! I drew close to her with an abrupt, fierce love.

‘We will escape.’ I promised. ‘The Wheel of Fortune will turn for us. We’ll turn it.’