Writing Dickens - Chapters IX and X
In which we meet Sissy Jupe and Kit becomes Mrs Blackpool
IX – Sissy’s Progress
As the clods rained down on Little Lizzie’s coffin, Ailise started singing, her voice drifting through the darkness, up towards the thick blackness of the night skies.
‘Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning
Close by the window young Eileen is spinning’
She had a beautiful voice, she did, even if it were a little breathy from all the years she’d spent in the mill herself, and the tears she were holding tight inside her. I’d heard the song before. It were one that Rachael had sung as she stood beside me by the loom, fragments of it reaching my ears through the wads of cotton stuffed inside them and the keening of the machines. She told me once that it were the song her own Grandma used to sing her when she were nowt but a bairn herself, to remind herself of the homeland across the sea that she’d left with her husband to start life anew in Liverpool. Back then, spinning was a real skill, and spinners were sure of a good place. But that was before all those machines came in and took our jobs, and our livelihoods, needing us only to keep them going, to feed them with our labour, and cotton, or thread, or even our own blood and bones as Little Lizzie did, piece by piece by piece.
‘Bent o’er the fire her blind grandmother sitting
Crooning and moaning and drowsily knitting.
Merrily cheerily noiselessly whirring
Spins the wheel, rings the wheel while the foot’s stirring
Sprightly and lightly and merrily ringing
Sounds the sweet voice of the young maiden singing.’
Except, of course, Little Lizzie weren’t never going to sing no more. It got harder to hear the song after that, especially when Rachael joined in, her own voice holding up her Ma’s.
‘Eileen, a chara, I hear someone tappin
'Tis the ivy dear mother against the glass flapping
Eileen, I surely hear somebody sighing
'Tis the sound mother dear of the autumn winds dying.’
Dying. We’d all seen enough of that. What we hadn’t seen enough of us was living. Something inside me was all wound up and tight, like I was spun cotton myself, and all I wanted was for someone to leave go of me so I could spin and spin and spin and be free. But my feet were planted in the mud of the ground, rooted to where Little Lizzie had been laid to whatever rest she could find, given they’d had to bury her in murky ground in the pitch black of the night.
‘There's a sound at the casement, the sound of her true love
And he whispers with head bent, I'm waiting for you love.’
We all looked at our Billy then. The lad looked ashen, his head bowed, his lantern held limply by his side. Everyone knew how soft our Billy had been on that lass. He looked like he wanted to sink into the ground with her. The light of his lantern looked like it were letting the darkness in, as if the flame of his candle were drowning in the wax. I’d never known a night so black.
Ailise and Rachael stopped singing, the song leaving us stood in the cold silence of the night, the rain nowt more than a drizzle mixing with our tears. It were a pretty poor send off for a lass that had done nowt wrong. There weren’t going to be no arvills for Little Lizzie. Even that last bit of kindness were denied her. Her Ma had wanted to offer them up, but someone had whispered in her ear that it weren’t proper. I think that whoever told her it weren’t proper had the right of it. But they were probably also thinking that money were going to be right tight for Rachael and her Ma what with them being down a wage, and with Rachael still having to pay off the bill of that bone setter that had sawn off the rest of Little Lizzie’s arm. Bounderby had made sure that had been totted up against Rachael’s future wages. It were going to be some time before Rachael and her Ma had cleared the debt. At least they woudn’t have to pay for the funeral too. The lads had dug that hole for nowt but a warming mug of tea and a kind word from Ailise.
It were right odd it was, that once the child was buried, and the singing had stopped, no one could say owt to shift us along. There weren’t no man of the cloth to tell us to go in peace, so I stood there in the awkward silence with all the rest, shuffling from foot to foot, trying not to let any more of the damp seep into my feet, riveting me to the cold. A stony chill had settled in my belly, and Lord knows that I was in need of something warm to shift it, so I whispered to the lads that we should go. Stephen weren’t too happy, though. He telt me plain I’d had enough to drink. I telt him, plainer still, that it weren’t for him to tell me when I’d had my fill. Not yet. Not when I’d had to stand witness as they put Little Lizzie into that quagmire, that dark hole that passed as her grave; watch Rachael’s face twisting into something ugly as she tried not to cry; watch our Billy turn darker and darker, his hands tightening into fists, as the clods of earth had rained down on that wooden box that Little Lizzie lay in, cold and unmoving, instead of curled up in a warm bed by his side, that red hair of hers falling over her pale shoulders as my brother traced his hand over her like she was the most precious thing in the world to him. Even now, when she’s been long buried in that ground and the bright yellow daffodils sprout over where she’s laying, it’s still right hard to think of the lass in that grave of hers, cold and alone, that beauty of hers swallowed up by the mud and the dirt. I know that she’ll be nowt but bones now, but that hair of hers, I still see it in my head sometimes. I wonder what happens to hair like that when it’s left to fester in the earth.
It was a hard day, it was, burying the lass, so I telt Stephen I was getting myself a nip or two. Besides, as I telt Stephen, he hadn’t promised himself to me yet, so he had no business acting on like that with me, telling me what I could and couldn’t do. He weren’t neither my husband nor my intended. Have to confess it, part of me wanted to goad him into making his pledge there and then. If there was a lesson to be had with what had happened to Little Lizzie, it was that there were little point in waiting around for life to happen to you. It were only going to come out bad if you did. So, I wanted him to say it. Say that he wanted to make me his missus, even if he had been making eyes at that Rachael over Little Lizzie’s grave. Eeeh, the hide of him really. Acting on like I was wrong for wanting a drink or two, while he was leching over his marra’s woman. But I was all wound up from the burying, and I wanted more from him than his sad, hopeless eyes and the ever-constant wringing of his cap. What I wanted, I suppose, was to make him say out loud that he had no intention of marrying me ever, even though we’d been courting for many a season, and it weren’t just me that were expecting us to wed. Our Jackie and Billy were waiting on him saying the words too, that he would make me his lass, proper-like. But he was a canny lad, that Stephen, and with our Jackie and our Billy both watching as Stephen and me had words, he weren’t going to be baited by me. Instead, he kept his gob shut, and just plodded along beside us, and yes, wringing that wretched cap of his in his hands, chewing on the ends of his neckerchief, looking back towards the mound of earth that Rachael and her Ma were still stood beside, their shawls drawn over their heads, clutched close under their chins, as the rain went miserably weeping on, as if it too mourned for Little Lizzie, who we had to leave behind. We made our way to the alehouse. We picked our way over the sodden earth and headed to where a warm fire awaited us, together with the promise of something warm, wet, and welcoming to help us slip into the bliss of forgetfulness.
The alehouse were right busy when we got there, it was, some of Sleary’s lot having taken the rooms upstairs. But my heart sank right into the pit of my belly when we walked in, and saw that the gaffer were there, with some other man that looked like he didn’t want to be there, and some frantic looking young lass at his side. I wondered what the gaffer’s business was there, as that Josiah Bounderby was not a man to mix with the likes of us in a place like that alehouse. It was far too rough for a man that liked his turtle soup and venison, not the rabbit stew that were dished out where we liked to drink. In that moment, I hated him something fierce, I did. Born in a ditch, he’d say, as though he were proud of it. But we’d just come from burying Little Lizzie in something no better than a ditch, and he hadn’t said nary a word about it. In fact, he hadn’t said a dickie bird about Little Lizzie since the moment they’d carried her and that arm of hers out his factory. It was like she didn’t matter no more. That none of us mattered. Thought himself better than the rest of us, he did, and it tipped me off kilter to see him, on that awful day, somewhere he shouldn’t have been. I knew I’d never settle in while he was about. None of us would. I could see on my brothers’ faces that they were none too happy at seeing him neither. I didn’t have to wonder too hard what he wanted with that little lass he was with, though. She was about the right sort of size and shape to please him, and young enough to harden him in the worst of ways. The plight of young lasses always moved him, and it were never to kindness. Not as I know the man, anyway.
My eyes were already right heavy with the burying, and I couldn’t bring myself to lift them to look at him. Not here. That Bounderby weren’t supposed to be in this place. T’was a place for our lot, not for him. He could get himself off to the Gaffer’s if it were a drink he were after. I was trying to get a hold of myself, but something was crawling at my skin, and it weren’t the lice or the fleas, and I wanted to scratch and scratch at it, as though peeling off the scabs that man may as well have left on me. But I couldn’t tell our Jackie and our Billy about that. I’d never said a word about that to a soul. How could I have done? If I’d tried to say the words out loud it would have made it real, it would. Besides if I’d telt my brothers about Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, what he was, what that gadgie liked to do to a lass too young and too scared to stop him, to scream, to tell him no, they would have had for him. And the only place that would have landed them was on the wrong side of the hangman’s noose, dancing on nowt but air, leaving me with no kin to call my own. I was starting to get a panic in my chest, like I’d breathed in the worst of the clouds of cotton that floated through the air of the factory, and it was choking me, closing my airways, strangling me, not letting me get a breath of air into my lungs.
But then he and the man he was with followed the lass who were fretting upstairs. That was the first I saw of that lass. A right clever bit she is. Sissy Jupe, that’s her name, a girl who was born no better than me, but seems to be able to take every chance that came her way, rather than squandering it as I would have done, wasting any luck that came my way on drink and debauchery, as that Josiah Bounderby would say. I’ll come back to Sissy later, I will, if you keep on standing me another round. I can tell you some good stories about her, I can, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after. Cause I can keep a man happy for hours, you see, if there’s a drop or two to keep the wheels well-oiled, if you know what I am getting at.
Yes, another drink. And that’s what me and my brothers did, the day they put Little Lizzie in the ground. We had drink after drink, ‘til the last of our tin was spent, and it was all we could do to hold each other up and start to make our way home. It was still raining when we spilled out of the alehouse into the gloom and darkness of a Coketown night, and my dress, which had dried out in front of the fire as we’d worked our way through our grief, started to get right heavy with water again, and it were hard to walk, slipping through the mud and the darkness, the skies black, with not one star in the sky to help guide us home, no light but the dimness of the flickering lamps in the distance, and our lanterns with their devilish halos of candlelight. I bundled the skirt of my dress up in my hand to try and keep it from clarting up with mud, trying to keep up with the lads who never had to mind about how hard it could be to just to put one foot in front of the other. And the cold air and the rain seemed to hit us something hard, it did, waking us up just enough to realise we were well watered, but not enough to clear the haze of it. And our Jackie, the lad just wouldn’a keep his gob shut. He kept on and on about how he would go and see Rachael on the morrow, make his promise to her that he would make her his lass, but I could see, even through the night sky and the veil of rain we were walking through and the fog of the drink, that our Billy’s hands were curling into fists again. Our Jackie couldn’t shut it, even though the rest of us could see that it was upsetting our Billy. And who could blame him? Our Jackie was being a right plonker, he was. Our Billy’s lass had just been buried while I still had Stephen, and our Jackie had Rachael. It was our Billy who was left with nowt but a memory, and it was a right cold one to hold on to. Our Billy, who had nothing left of Little Lizzie but the dirt of the earth under his fingernails. Yet our Jackie kept blathering on about how much he loved Rachael, and how he was going to get the banns read so that they could get married good and proper.
‘It’s your fault.’
Our Billy had stopped and grabbed a hold of our Jackie by the front of his shirt. ‘It’s all your bleeding fault.’ That’s what he said to our Jackie, his voice low and angry. And our Jackie, all he said, was: ‘Give over, man. It weren’t no one’s fault. It happened. And it’s dead sad, it is, but it weren’t my fault.’
But our Billy was a bit too far gone with his grief, and the drink, and he just couldn’t leave it. ‘It were you,’ he said, his words blurring into each other, but cold and hard, they were. ‘At the factory that day of the accident. It were you. You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you? Ya had to stick your oar in, be the big boss man, and then when I telt ya to leave us be, you raised a hand to me, your own brother, like you were going to larrup me. And that’s when she forgot where she was. To stop you from having at me, she forgot to mind herself, cause she was all heart and better than what I deserved. And that’s when she got caught, you right bloody bastard. You killed her.’
Our Billy was in a right rage he was, fired up by the drink and his fury, his face right up next to our Jackie’s, holding him close by the front of his shirt, his lantern dropped, as his other hand curled into a tight fist like he wanted to land our Jackie a right proper one. Stephen was looking right miserable, like he knew he was going to have to put himself between my brothers and their fury, like walking into a house on fire, because we could all see that our Jackie, he was too full of the drink to talk sense, and our Billy too full of it to listen, anyways, no matter what our Jackie might have said. Our Jackie pushed our Billy away from him, and telt him he better not even try it. They were looking at each other with something close to hate in their eyes, like it weren’t going to take much for one to have at the other. It were no wonder it played out like it did.
I was watching my brothers like it were something on a stage. It didn’t feel real. They’d been scrapping since they were lads, that were true enough, but this felt different. There weren’t no play in the way my brothers were facing off against each other that night. Our Billy had a right fire in his belly, and he wasn’t letting up.
‘And that day,’ he said. ‘That day when she went into the river. It were you that told me to stop running after her. If it weren’t for you, we might have got to her before she got to the bridge over the river. She was a lameter, she was. We could have stopped her.’ That’s what our Billy said to Jackie, practically spitting the words into his face. Our Billy’s grief had made him like a madman, it had, and I could see Jackie rising to it. It were going to end in bloodshed, we could all see that. But then, Stephen, bless him, told our Billy it weren’t no-one’s fault, that no-one could have stopped Little Lizzie in the state she was in. He telt him that he had to remember how black his Little Lizzie had been. That she hadn’t been herself. And because she hadn’t been herself, that she was all in a muddle in her head, that no one could have known that she would head to the river. Or that she would throw herself into the waters in the way that she had. I don’t know why our Billy listened to Stephen, when he wouldn’t hear it from Jackie, but Stephen said it calm and patient like, and what he said seemed to ease something off in our Billy, because his body went slack, and he lowered his fist, and leaving loose of Jackie’s shirt, he walked away. But he looked right beaten down, he did, even though our Jackie hadn’t laid a finger on him. That night, in that moment, our Billy made me think of my Pa, both just men beaten down with nowt worth owt left inside them.
‘We should go home,’ I telt them. They looked at me, surprised, like they’d forgotten I was there. To be fair, maybe I shouldn’t have been there. I mean, what sort of a lass would be walking home dead drunk in the black of the night, even if she was with her brothers and the lad she was courting? Stephen came and took my arm, right steady he was, like he was meaning to help me through the mud that lay between us and our beds. We all started off again, walking back towards that misery of a place that my brothers and I called our home. The place where our Ma had died in birthing me. The place where Pa had faded, leaving us to shift for ourselves. There’d be no flickering fire waiting to warm us, no food to fill our bellies. It weren’t much to look forward to, truth be told. I was cold, and I was wet, and I thought if we didn’t get on I would never warm up. But truth was, that worn-down alehouse we’d been walking away from had more warmth in its belly than our home did, and that’s where my body was aching to be, safe and warm with a drink in my hand, with nowt to think on but staying there. But there we were, outside in the cold, in the pitch black, the wet lying clammy on the ground, going back to a home that had done nowt to deserve the name we gave it. Home. It was just a place we laid our heads in between our shifts in the factory.
That bloody idiot Jackie must have had the same things in his mind as I had in mine, cause he only went and started on again about how he were going to marry Rachael, and then he’d have a proper home to come back to, with a proper woman keeping house, warming his bed. He was looking at me when he said this, his eyes creasing like he was cross at me. Maybe my own brother thought I weren’t no proper woman for being with them on the drink, instead of at home, like his Rachael were.
Our Billy never said a word this time. He ran towards our Jackie and started laying into him, like the devil himself was driving him, pounding his fists on his brother like he weren’t never going to be able to stop. But our Jackie, always just that little bit bigger, and little bit stronger than our Billy thanks to all those bales of cotton he carted from the river to the carding room, took a step back, like what our Billy was doing weren’t harming him none, curled his fingers and thumb into a fist harder than rock, before landing it on the side of our Billy’s head. The crack it made, when fist hit skull, it were like one of those explosions you hear coming from the mines, even though it’s miles off and underground. Causes the earth to shake, and a fear to fill your soul, because you know that it must have killed someone.
He dropped without a sound, our Billy did. On his belly, in the mud, puddles of water surrounding him, his face to one side, his arms sprawled out uselessly beside him. It were like everything stopped, like that moment when the shift bell rings for knocking off time, and the machines screech to a halt and fall to silence, and the shock that you can hear nowt but the ringing in your own ears hits you almost like a slap in the face, and you just stand there trying to take in what happened to you. It were like that too, the first time with that Bounderby when I was just a little lass. And like when Little Lizzie had her arm ripped off, and I stood as if a statue, feeling nothing while seeing everything. It were just like that with our Billy.
First, we didn’t move. Not me, not Stephen, and not our Jackie, who was looking right stunned that he’d floored his kidda like that. But then, something started tearing at my insides, a terror that crept up on me, sinking under my skin, and squeezing the breath from me, wanting to rip me open, and flood out with the blood turning to sharpened ice in my veins. Cause our Billy didn’t get up. He weren’t moving. He weren’t moving at all. Not a muscle. Not even a rise and fall in his chest. And his eyes were open, fixed on the dirt and slime he were lying in. I’d seen eyes that looked like that before, I had. Cold, empty, full of a silenced horror. I’d seen them in Little Lizzie when she was floating in the river, looking to the black sky, dead, dead, dead. Our Billy, not looking to the heavens, but looking to the seeping earth, like he was looking for Little Lizzie in it, the only one he really wanted to go home to, to sink into her one-armed embrace, joining her in her grave, man and wife at last, but in a dark, sodden darkness, in which neither one of them would ever see the dismal light of this miserable earth ever again.
X – Stephen Blackpool
‘You’ve kilt him.’
It were Stephen that spoke first. Our Jackie was frozen, his arms hanging lifelessly by his sides, yet another bloody broken ragdoll with all his stuffing gone. Now that I think on it, it seems to me that any man I ever loved ended up like our Jackie was in that moment, a limp and useless lump of nothing, standing over a mess of his own making.
‘I carn’t have.’ That’s what he said, his voice dull, looking at his hands, like he couldn’t believe they had the power to murder any man in them, let alone our Billy, his kidda.
‘Jackie, he’s dead. Billy’s dead. You’ve kilt him.’ That’s what Stephen said, the words, dripping with a stunned disbelief, hanging in the air between them. Stephen’s hands were opening and closing into fists, as though he were trying to hold on to something he couldn’t quite grasp. He reached for the ends of his neckerchief, just so he could cling ahold to something, because Lord knows that none of us could hold on to the truth that was staring at us all through our Billy’s cold, dead eyes. But as the rain kept coming down, and our Billy kept laying still, so still, Stephen started pacing to and fro in front of him, like he was trying to get the muddle of thoughts in his head all together, before turning and closing the distance between himself and our Jackie, as though he were going to have for him, an echo of only moments before, one man facing off against the other, an age-old story.
‘You’ve kilt him, I tell ya, Jackie, Billy’s dead.’
It were like the night sky were closing in on me, a shutter of steel shutting me in. I couldn’t take my eyes off our Billy, the poor lad lying like a slaughtered lamb in a puddle of mud. I couldn’t take in what our Jackie and Stephen were saying neither as the two of them started having words, getting louder and louder, the panic in their voices the only thing I could hear over the throbbing of my own broken heart and the rain falling on the sodden ground. But mostly, I couldn’t believe our Billy was gone. Dead, dead, dead, that’s what our Jackie and Stephen kept saying. I couldn’t take it in. Not our Billy. Not my brother. He couldn’t be. My brothers were just scuffling. They’d been doing it for the better part of their lives. I’d seen them lamp each other before. Seen the angry bruises changing colour on their skin. They could hurt each other bad, true enough, but kill? They were brothers. They were my brothers. They looked out for each other, they did, and they looked out for me. Jackie could no more kill Billy than he could me. That was the only thing I could think on. I’d been standing there like someone had fixed me solid to the ground, but my whole body took to shaking. It were cold, real cold. And I could feel the rain seeping into me, washing away the last of the warmth and haze of an evening spent drowning our sorrows. In that moment, I hated not being drunk enough, not being able to not feel what I had no choice but to see.
Our Jackie and Stephen were still arguing, like Billy and I weren’t there, like Billy weren’t lying like a felled tree, broken and splintered, in the mud. I ran over to our Billy, and cradled his head in my arms, stretching my ears for a heartbeat, for a breath of air, for something, for owt that would show a spark of life was left lit inside him. He’d only been on the ground moments, but already he was cold, so cold. The rain, it kept coming on down, like heaven itself was weeping over my poor brother. There were sleet in it, slithers of ice cutting into my cheeks. The cold of winter was upon us early that year. I couldn’t stop shaking. With my trembling fingers, I pulled my shawl from my shoulders and draped it over our Billy, trying to keep him warm.
‘It’s just the drink,’ I telt Stephen and our Jackie. ‘We’ve all had a drop too much. That’s all. He just needs a kip and he’ll be alright again.’
It’s funny the lies we tell ourselves, isn’t it? The lads were looking at me like I were a woman who had lost her senses, both of them silenced at last. But I could see a sad shadow in Stephen’s eyes, and a right fearful desperation in our Jackie’s. And I knew. I’d become a problem again, I had. Nowt more than a burden that had to be bundled up and handed off to another as my brother couldn’t carry it no more. Seems that no one could ever hold on to me for very long. I’m too much of a millstone for anyone to carry. Even the ones who claim to love me.
‘You have to promise me,’ our Jackie said, looking at me, but talking to Stephen. ‘Promise me,’ he said. ‘If not for me, even if not for Kit, you have to promise me… for Billy. It’s what he would have wanted. You know that.’ As he finished, our Jackie turned his face at last towards poor Billy, lying still on the ground, me with my arms around him, covered in my shawl like he was just a lad abed, but those ice-cold blue eyes of his staring blankly at the black pool of water aside him telt us all it was not just a sleep that had claimed him. The blood which had been trickling from his ear was frozen on his face, stopped still. Our Jackie looked right ashen, he did, like he could hardly stand the sight of what he’d done. Our Billy, a deathly silent judge and jury, condemning his brother who stood before him. But it were too late for regrets, and too late for guilt. Billy were dead and there were no coming back from that. Not for none of us. And the three of us that were left looking over him knew that. Stephen looked right ill, he did, clutching his cap close to his chest, looking from Billy to me to Jackie and back again, despair scratched on to his face liked the lines of an old man.
‘You can’t ask that of me, Jackie man,’ Stephen sputtered out. ‘It’s not right.’
‘I’m not asking it of you, Stephen.’ That’s what our Jackie said to him. ‘It’s what Billy would ask. You and he have been marras for many a year. Best marras. That’s what the two of you always said and have done since near enough you turned up at the factory door, looking for work. He looked out for you he did, had a word with the gaffer for ya, when there were plenty who wouldn’t. You said he were like a brother to you. Our Billy looked out for you when you had nee-one else who would. And I kept an eye out for you too. I looked out for you because you were mates with my kidda, Stephen. You said you’d do owt for our Billy. That were your word. Or does none of that mean owt to you now that he’s dead?’
Dead, dead, dead. Another one of us dead.
Stephen’s jaw was clenched real tight, it was. Jackie was asking a lot of Stephen. Jackie was the one that had felled poor Billy, but Stephen was the one being asked to take it on the chin. Because I’d known since Little Lizzie’s burying that whatever it was that Stephen had once felt for me, love, or fondness, or whatever, it were gone. Long gone. It may as well have gone into the ground with Little Lizzie to moulder away with her. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. Just fancy words to help you mourn the loss of another something you couldn’t hold on to.
‘And you’ve been chasing after our Kit for years.’ That’s what our Jackie said, looking from him to me, tying us both in knots with his words. Our Jackie kept on and on at Stephen about me, layering the guilt on thick as treacle. Never did like that stuff. Thick, sweet, and nasty, all at the same time, and it takes an age to wash off your hands.
I’d stopped listening to them, I had. Felt like I was nowt better than cattle out to auction. I kept my eyes on our Billy, the poor lad felled afore life had giving him any real chance of happiness, specially once Little Lizzie was lost to him. And as the icy rain came down, down, always down, it was like I could hear him singing, his own sweet cheeky voice, warm and deep, worming its way into my ears. I sang with him, sang to our Billy one last lullaby, my voice lost in the wind and the rain:
When we look on our poor children, it grieves our hearts full sore.
Their clothing it is worn to rags, while we can get no more.
With little in their bellies, they to work must go,
Whilst yours do dress as manky as monkeys in a show.
You tyrants of England! Your race may soon be run.
You may be brought unto account for what you’ve sorely done.
I couldn’t remember all the words. It was our Billy, like Little Lizzie, who had the bonny voice, and a bit of a gift for music. He took to singing a lot our Billy did, and a right jolly tune it was, even if he did always sing that song with a darkness in his eyes as they landed on me. But then, as my mind struggled to get ahold of the memory, fragments of the song came back to me:
And now, my lads, for to conclude, it’s time to make an end.
End. The echo of that word went round and round in my head. Billy, my poor Billy. And with that, all the words got stuck inside me throat, making it hard to swallow, to take a breath. And I didn’t want to remember our Billy singing no more. Not when he was lying there in the mud, his own end having been made for him, his whole life having been given over to that bloody factory and the profits of that Bounderby. It grieved my heart full sore, alright. And anyways, I couldn’t hear the whispers of our Billy no more over our Jackie arguing with Stephen over what was to be done with me. I hated them both in that moment, a right fearsome hate that seared my heart so hot I thought I might burn with it.
‘Kit’s a right bonny lass, and you’ve been wanting her for long enough. I know I wasn’t keen afore, on account of her being just a wee lass, but I’m telling you now,’ he said, ‘not only will I not stand in ya way, I’m asking you to do it. Fact is, I’m telling ya to do it. For Kit. For Billy. You have to do it Stephen, you know that. It’s the only right thing to do. Ya have to promise me you’ll look after her. That you’ll be her family now. Promise me, Stephen.’ That’s what I heard our Jackie say, a creeping desperation in his voice, like a man trying to sell off or hide the last of his ready before the bailiffs came after him, looking for whatever dregs they could salvage from the swill at the bottom of the cup of a broken man.
‘Promise me you’ll marry Kit. And you’ll do it proper like. So that it sticks. I can’t look after either of you no more. But you can look after each other. It would hearten me to know you had each other. She’s ya family now. Promise me.’
Stephen nodded, slow like, looking at me with all the blood drained out of his face. White he was. White and pale, like a man disappearing before me in a mist of misery. And so our marriage was made in mud and in murder. Stephen stepped towards me, and while his face was white, his eyes were full of blackness, like a man walking through the doors of a dungeon, his hand stretched out to claim me, the manacle already wound around his wrist. All that were left were to tether me to him, slipping on to my hand the ring that would bind me to him, him to me. He knelt down, and taking Billy’s head out of my arms, dead gentle like, laid it back in the mud, and taking my hands, heavy with the weight of nowt in them, pulled me, shaking, to my feet, gathering me up like I were broken pieces of glass that needed picking up from the ground, but not wanting to get himself cut. I suppose, even then, he knew that I was a lass that had nowt but sharp edges.
Then our Jackie, he knelt down beside our Billy.
‘Sorry, lad.’ That’s all our Jackie said, his fingers briefly touching our Billy’s cheek, dead softly, before clenching into a fist as he stood up. I could almost feel his anger, burning on him, hotter than the factory furnace. I thought, for one awful moment, that he were going to land one on me, even though I knew it were himself he were mad at, not me, and I shrunk away from him, stepping into Stephen’s shadow as if that could offer me some protection from my brother’s rage. But then, something softened in him, and he pulled me into his arms and held me tight, like I was just a bairn again, a little lass cold and scared. I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since my brother had held me like that. Part of me wanted to pull away. I didn’t like it when anyone got too close to me like that, when it took me when I weren’t expecting it. But when our Jackie held me on that awful night, even though we were out in the cold, and dark, with our Billy lying dead by his hands at my feet, it were the only time I’d felt safe in a long time. I felt tears mixing with the rain on my cheeks, and I took to sobbing, a gut-wrenching noise coming from somewhere dark inside me. I wished the world could stop, and I could stand there in his arms forever. Because I knew that when he let me go, we would have to part ways, and I was right afeard that I would never see my big brother, my Jackie, ever again. And that then I really would have no one to call my own. Because for all that he said that he that would take me, take me on, and look after me, Stephen didn’t want me. Not really. Surely Jackie could see that?
‘Kit,’ our Jackie said, trying to pull away from me.
‘No,’ I said right back, sinking into his chest, refusing to let him pull away from me, to leave me, like everyone I ever loved did.
‘Kit,’ he said again, all hoarse and gruff-like, this time pushing me away from him with a determination I could almost feel seeping out of his skin. ‘I have to go, you know that. But Stephen and I, we’ve agreed it all. He’ll look after you. He’s your family now. He’ll be all the family you ever need. I promise you. He’ll look after you, Kit.’ And taking my chin with his hand, dead gentle like he had been with our poor Billy, I looked him in the eye. I could see the sadness welling up inside him, and the fear that what he’d done would do for him. But I saw something more too, something I know he must have been hoping I wouldn’t see. I saw the promise of freedom dancing in his eyes. Our Jackie was finally getting shot of everything that were holding him here in Coketown, this miserable town that had us all in a grip so tight that the life were being squeezed out of us, breath by cotton-filled breath. All his responsibilities gone in one swift blow. He were free to go his own way now. ‘Be happy, lass.’ That’s what he said.
Happy. How was I ever supposed to be happy again? I looked at Stephen and I could see how much he hated what my brother had asked of him. The resentment of what he had to do was already eating away at him, settling into his stomach like fish gone bad. I could see it in his face. And I knew all too well that when a hate like that grabs hold of the soul of a man, no matter how good or nice he may seem, he has to push it out of himself somehow. I was only just gone twenty, but I’d already seen far too many women wearing the hate of their menfolk in the bruises on their bodies, their men’s anger smeared into them in a mottled mess on their skin. All that hate had to be shovelled onto someone else, even if it was nowt more than a lass cowering under his fists. How could our Jackie leave me with a man who was taking me on as a duty? Who would only grow to hate me? And even if he wasn’t trying to dump me on an unwilling man, truth was, I couldn’a bear to lose my brother, even if he had killed poor Billy. So, I telt our Jackie that he didn’t have to go. At least I tried to tell him.
‘It were an accident, Jackie. We all know that it were nowt but an accident. Stephen will tell the Law that. I’ll tell them too. You didn’t mean to kill him. You would never mean to hurt our Billy like that.’ That’s what I said, rabbiting on, trying not to let him get a word in edgeways because I could see it didn’t matter to him what I said. It never mattered to anyone what I said. Jackie took my chin with his hand again and tilted my head so that this time I had to look at him, straight in the eyes. And there were a hardness in them I didn’t much care for.
‘Kit,’ he said. ‘It don’t matter none that it were an accident. Do you think the Law will care if I meant to kill him? They’ll need to pin it on someone. A man is dead, and I’m the one who did it, accident or no. And if I stay, I’ll hang for it. Near a dozen folk saw us take a drop too much at the alehouse. They saw us all leave, barely able to put one foot in front of t’other. If I stay they’ll do for me. We all know that. But if I don’t leave, they might think you and Stephen had a hand in it. With me scarpered, though, they’ll blame it on me. Don’t you see? It’s only right I go. It’s the only thing I can do to protect you from the worst of what’s coming.’
I wonder, now, if he really believed that. Or, having kilt our Billy, he saw his chance and decided to run with it. Run. Run as far from me as he possibly could.
‘Then take me with you,’ I begged him. ‘Jackie, please.’
‘Kit,’ he telt me. ‘Your life is here.’ But that weren’t right, I remember thinking. How could my life be here with both my brothers gone? Did I even have a life that wasn’t bound up with someone else’s? I know my brother thought he was doing all for the best, but it sounded like a death sentence, it did. Our Jackie was running from the hangman’s rope, while leaving me with a noose round me own neck. Only difference being it was one that would strangle me slowly, rather than with a quick drop. And the bugger never bloody saw it. He saw nowt but the chance of freedom.
And then he telt me that I had to leave our Billy lying in the mud, with nowt but the rain to shelter him, and that Stephen would take me home. Somebody else would have to find our Billy, he said, so that he would have plenty of time to get away from Coketown, to run from the law, away from any chance of being caught for what he’d done, or punished for killing our Billy, even if he never meant the lad real harm. Stephen and I were to tell anyone who asked that we’d snuck away from him and our Billy, so that we could carry on like any courting couple would, away from the eyes of my brothers, who wouldn’a want to see a lad with his hands all over their sister. If anyone asked, our Jackie said, we were to tell them that Stephen and me had left them somewhere after we’d been booted out the alehouse, that we’d gone back to Stephen’s bed, thinking nowt ‘bout him or our Billy. That we didn’t know what had happened, or why our Billy was dead. And he said it didn’t matter if people talked about what I was about sneaking off to let a man get his hands under my skirts. Because the man was going to marry me, and that would make it alright. It would make everything all right, that’s what our Jackie said, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything ever again. When you think on it, what a fool our Jackie was. And what a bigger fool I was for believing him, for letting him sway me into staying in Coketown while he buggered off. Maybe he was no fool, playing Stephen and I, staking everything he had, while risking nothing.
But I wasn’t to worry. That’s what our Jackie said. He and Stephen had it all worked out, they did. I never got a say in their plans. It was just taken by the pair of them that I’d be a good lass and go along with whatever they’d decided was for the best. There was a part of me that wanted to scream, scream out loud. But I let go of him and, as my own silence swallowed me whole, watched him walk back towards our Billy, watched him grab my shawl off his frozen form and walk back to us. I couldn’a bear to look at our Billy uncovered and cold. It felt like I were hurting him. So I turned my face away from him, kept it fixed on our Jackie, begging him with my eyes to stay. But our Jackie was blind to my need for him. He wasn’t going to let himself see anything other than what he thought he needed to do. And he needed away, he did. Away from his crime, away from Coketown, and away from me.
‘Remember your promise Stephen,’ he said, holding out my sodden shawl to him, Stephen taking it from him and folding it over his arm. Then our Jackie telt him, ‘You and Kit, you were never here. Probably for the best if you make yourselves believe that. That you never think on about what happened here tonight. That you saw nowt of what passed.’
Stephen never said a word. Just nodded, looking miserable. Our Jackie then came back to me but kept himself at a distance. I could see that there would be no swaying him into staying with us, taking a chance on the law leaving him a man living.
‘Bye, Kit.’
Two words. The last he ever said to me. I couldn’a find any words in me to say back to him. Any words I might have found were stuck in my craw. Instead, I watched him turn from us and head away from Coketown, into the dense and formless murky darkness of the night, and I watched his shadow til the blackness had swallowed him whole and I couldn’t see him no more. For me, it were like he’d walked into his grave. Gone. Our Jackie, gone.
It were only then that I realised he had never once mentioned Rachael. Never gave us a parting word to pass on to the poor lass that he’d been courting gone a year. Stephen and I were left standing together, alone in the dark and the rain, our Billy’s body unburied in the mud, unlaid in the ground. ‘What a right muddle,’ Stephen said, taking my hand, walking me away from that wretched moment, that wretched night.
I never did see my brother again. Still don’t know whether he’s living or dead. Or where he is. I heard whispers he’d found his way to the docks, slipping between folks like the man on the run he was, cap pulled down low so no one could get a look at the guilt on his face, hands in his pockets so none could see the blood on them. Some said he’d gone to Ireland. Others, that he’d gone on a ship bound for the colonies, pitching himself across the seas to a life in an unknown land. All I know is that he was gone. Is gone. Gone. I guess it don’t matter none where he is. Not now. I suppose anywhere is better than dead at the end of a rope. But the part of me that doesn’t hate him for leaving me here to my own wretched fate hopes he found somewhere where the sky is blue like it should be, and where you can see the stars shining at night. And anyways, even if he hadn’t been a man wanted for murder, why would he ever come back here, back to Coketown? What had he left behind, really, other than a life of misery in some factory or other, making money for some other man, his life wasted away drop by squeezed out drop? I mean you have to ask why any man in his right mind would want to come back here once the sun was shining on the back of his neck as he left this cursed town? Why any man seeking a better life in a new land with the light of the sun not covered by a cloak of blackness from the smoke the factories belched out, would ever come back to the darkness of this wretched hellhole ever again? Especially if, like our Jackie, he were leaving behind his own guilt and shame, with all the loose-ends tied up in one convenient knot. The marriage knot. And a right tight knot it was too. Just ask Stephen.