Felicia's Journey

25

‘Have they closed the breakfast place?’ a man from the cardboard settlement inquires on the street. Yes, it’s closed, Felicia tells him, and he mutters a cacophony of curses, glaring furiously in the direction of a charity hall that is similar in all respects to the one Felicia was brought to, a long time ago, by Lena and George. She has queued for breakfasts in many since. ‘You have to get there early,’ she tells the man, but he ignores the admonition, continuing to swear to himself. When he ceases it is to ask the time. She doesn’t know. She sold her watch a while ago, with the cross she used to wear round her neck. She tried to sell her handbag but no one wanted it. It was Tapper who showed her how to dispose of the watch and the cross, to a friend he knew well and trusted. Forty pence she got; fairly good, that, Tapper said. The city she has come to, moving on from other cities and other towns, is no longer strange to her. She knows the way to the river and, as she walks towards it now, what comes into her head is Effie Holahan saying she saw the Virgin, and Carmel saying it was only a dream. Typical Effie, Carmel said, typical not to know the difference. Poor Effie with her dull eyes and her chilblains, and her way of dropping things! ‘Sure, doesn’t everyone have dreams like that?’ Carmel was scornful, and they all laughed, swinging their legs on the convent wall, and Effie Holahan was flustered, red as a sunset. It’s a long way away, that sitting on the convent wall; it’s further by ages than Lena and George; it’s history, as the voice in the police station said that day, which is ages ago also. Felicia doesn’t beg as she continues on her journey. At this time of day people don’t like being bothered because they’re in a hurry to get to work. She’s not in a hurry herself. The sun comes out, dispersing wispy clouds, warming her face and hair. With a bit of luck, it’ll dry the clothes that got wet last night. Ages ago, too, her first couple of carrier bags disintegrated; after careful examination, in case possibly they were of further use, their remains were thrown away. She has other bags now, five in all because she likes to collect things as she moves about. It’s surprising what people are finished with. Walking slowly, she nods over that, and what comes into her head is the first time Mr Logan opened his cinema, when he stood on the steps in his suit with the chalk line on it, and his blue bowtie. A masher, her father called Mr Logan, and she didn’t know what it meant until he told her. Cagey, her father said another time; cagey to gauge the entertainment business the way Mr Logan had, making a success of his dancehall and his cinema, still a bachelor in his fifties. The Woman in Red the film was the night of the gala opening, and Rose said if Mr Logan was looking for a child bride she wouldn’t say no, and the girls on the wall, even Carmel, gasped to hear a thing like that. You have to move about. You get to know the windows of the shops, the streets in different weather, faces you’re always seeing, the H. Samuel clock, post-office clocks and clock-tower clocks, the parking-meter women, the obstruction of scaffolding on the pavement, red-and-white plastic ribbons to warn you, the street lights coming on. You move about because you want to, the bits and pieces coming into your head. Hail Mary, full of Grace: the first time she repeated it she felt grown up, the beads cold to the touch, smooth in her fingers. Blessed art thou amongst women… The votive light on the stairwall never went out, a red speck in the dark, a tiny glow you could overlook in the daytime because you were used to it. Her father stood for the Soldier’s Song whenever it was played, still as a statue while people shuffled away, particular about that he was. God’s will, he called it, the day her mother died, and her brothers wore black diamonds on their sleeves, sewn in by Mrs Quigly. The sun shone, the day of the funeral; they were back in the house by twelve, before the Angelus. ‘The cross we bear,’ Mrs Quigly said on another day. ‘Every month a reminder.’ Yeah, definitely, Carmel said. ‘Every blooming month.’ And Rose said calmly what’s wrong with an older man if he brings home the bacon? People collect cartons of coffee from a take-away: office-workers, girls with their make-up fresh and bright, young men in long coats, belts tied at the back. They march along the streets she dawdles in, stepping round her, one man conversing on a telephone he carries with him. A plate-glass window is being replaced, the new glass not yet taken from the clamps on the side of a van. Five workmen stand ready to lift it into place when the timber sheet that covers the damage has been removed. A passing taxi driver greets one of them, shouting a joke. ‘Hullo, Felicia.’ She is greeted herself, by an Indian who’s arranging fruit on the stalls outside his shop. He always speaks to her when she passes if he isn’t busy with a customer. He gave her some kiwi fruit when he was packing up his wares one evening, because it wouldn’t last the night, he said. She doesn’t know his name. Last night a woman she begged from in this street said no, then changed her mind and broke open a sliced loaf in her shopping-bag. Have that instead, she said, offering four slices, saying she knew for a fact that any money given would be spent on drink. Felicia didn’t contradict the assumption; you get used to what people say to you; it doesn’t matter. She knows she is not as she was; she is not the bridesmaid at the autumn wedding, not the girl who covered herself with a rug in the back of a car. The innocence that once was hers is now, with time, a foolishness, yet it is not disowned, and that same lost person is valued for leading her to where she is. Walking through another morning, fine after a wet night, she accepts without bewilderment the serenity that possesses her, and celebrates its fresh new presence. She dropped the bar of the fire-grate because her hands were nervous; she turned the light on because she was fumbling at the hall door, unable to find where the latch was. She didn’t think she’d get away; she prayed it would not be painful, that when it happened it would be swift. The novice at the convent said your mother’s waiting for you in heaven, Felicia; she thought of that as she turned the Yale latch. And then the light from the open hall door illuminated the fog, only just reaching the small green car on the gravel. He was bent over the steering wheel, crouching away from the light that had come on, covering his face. When she ran, the car didn’t follow her. But the strings of the carrier bags cut into her fingers because she was hurrying so, not holding them the way she’d taught herself to. The houses were shrouded, the street lights blurred; her feet made the only sound there was until she reached the wide main road where traffic thudded and headlights were dim before they burst out of the fog, white or yellow. ‘Hardly saw you,’ the driver of the lorry said, and later added that he had two daughters of his own, his crinkly hair grey in the light of the cab when he drew in to dissolve an Oxo cube in his flask. On the steps of some building in the town near where he dropped her she watched the sky lightening; the fog was gone then. A woman, raving, sat beside her for a while, and a street-cleansing vehicle crept by, hosing and brushing as it moved. When it was quiet again, sparrows sang. ‘We was married one time,’ the woman confided. ‘Benny Hill it was.’ Voices spoke to the woman, Benny Hill, Gary Glitter. ‘Lovely, them boys. Do anything for you, dear.’ Thrown into a bin attached to a lamppost, a coffee carton miraculously remains upright, the liquid it contains unspilt. Felicia drinks it, and finds most of a muffin still stuck to the paper it was baked in. ‘Young for a bag lady, ain’t you?’ someone going by said two days ago, and she said yes, liking to agree. ‘Cheers,’ an old man greeted her last night, tidy in an overcoat and hat, stepping out of the crowd to tell her she looked like Marilyn Monroe, swaying because he had a few drinks in. ‘Santa Ponsa,’ a girl says now. ‘Fantastic!’ And a man drops a section of a newspaper, the pages slipping from beneath his arm. Someone else calls out, shouting to the man that he has lost his paper, but the man says it’s only the Sport and Business. Felicia picks the pages up because they may be useful later on. ‘Can’t stand that Lovejoy,’ another girl says, and her companion argues, insisting that Lovejoy’s sexy. A shop window is full of wigs and beards and false moustaches. Theatrical Needs! a red sign flashes. The Big Emporium! In the field by the old gasworks a nettle stung her leg, and it didn’t matter, she hardly felt it. The only guilt is that she permitted her baby to be taken from her: she shouldn’t have done that, but there you are. She looks out now from where she is, and does not brood: what’s done is done. She does not brood on her one-time lover’s treachery. She walked away from a man who murdered girls. She was allowed to walk away: that is what she dwells upon. When she reaches the river she settles on a seat that is pleasant in the autumn warmth. By chance her eyes pass over her clothes and over her hands and feet, the shoes she found in a disposal bin, the skirt a woman gave her. Her appearance, or the tale it tells, doesn’t interest her. The Little Sisters of Africa come into her mind, their white habits damp in unhealthy jungle heat. Pray for our Little Sisters, Sister Francis Xavier enjoined. Kneel with us in the Gathering House, Miss Calligary begged, trudging from door to door. St Ursula stood steadfast by the helm, consoling her girl-companions when the vessel was tossed about on the waves. The Little Sisters nursed infants who were misshapen, famine infants whose bones came through their skin. See those brightly coloured birds! Miss Calligary urged. Smell the fragrance of those flowers! Do the girls who died and were never missed stroll now among the fragrant flowers, and listen to the birdsong? Do they keep company with St Ursula, who travelled to escape a marriage bed, and the Little Sisters who left their towns and townlands? Do those faceless girls occupy the heaven the novice spoke of, and touch the real fingers of the Holy Virgin? Elsie Covington and Beth. Sharon and Gaye. Jakki and Bobbi. Chosen for death because no one would know when they were there no longer. What trouble made victims of them? Did they guess their fate a moment before it came? Her mourning is to wonder. She roots in one of her bags and finds the newspaper pages she picked up. Tommy Griffiths up, Lone Ranger has won at five to four; an Olympian champion is in disgrace; a football manager has retired. She reads for a moment, then Tapper’s back again. Well, there’s a sight: the fountains and the four black lions, the first time she ever saw them. Frigging marvellous, Tapper said, the empire in its frigging day, Charles James Napier on a pedestal on account he had a way with soldiers. They didn’t put John Reginald Christie on no pedestal, a different bag of tricks on account he had a way with women. That’s where they run him in, Tapper said, pointing on the bridge. That’s where he ate his last in freedom, bacon and cabbage, the Lacy Dining Rooms. That’s where that woman ran a nightclub, the one that shot a racing driver. This city’s full of sights. All human life. Redland Sells Three Steetley Offshoots, the business pages say. U.S. Currency Holds Key. Fancy a blow by the briny? Tapper said and they went down by train, tickets he found in a handbag. Take a gander at that, he said, when two men in teddy-bear coats got out of a polished car and held the doors for two women. Excuse me, sir, Tapper said on the promenade, the sea dirty green beneath the foam, and the man said get off. No offence, another man said in a bar the time there were wrestlers on the television. No offence, but I think you picked up my fags. Tall as a telegraph pole, Tapper. Leaning down to tap the punters’ shoulders; part of the game. Alaska’s the place, he said, then again Johore Bahru. But more like Tapper’s gone inside. That’s Tapper all over: he said it himself, and maybe Lena said it too, you can almost hear her. You lose touch with a person who’s in and out; only a week it was she knew Tapper, longer than Lena and George that time, longer than Kev and the woman with one arm. The sun is warm now, the water of the river undisturbed. Seagulls teeter on the parapet in front of her, boats go by. The line of trees that breaks the monotony of the pavement is laden with leaves in shades of russet. Within her view, figures stride purposefully on a distant bridge, figures in miniature, creatures that could be unreal. One seagull eyes her, expecting crumbs, the others fly away. Somewhere a voice is loud on a megaphone. A klaxon sounds on the river. She isn’t hungry. It will be a few hours before she begins to feel hungry and then there’ll be the throwaway stuff in the bins. The sky is azure, evenly blue, hardly faded at the edges at all. She moves a hand back and forth on a slat of the seat she’s sitting on, her fingers caressing the smooth timber, the texture different where the paint has worn away, streaks of wood-grain raised. Died with others, 1938, was carved on another seat, and George said he’d sent a card to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and put in the rhyme he knew, greater are none beneath the sun than oak or ash or thorn. Carmel with a heart round it someone carved on a tree in the Square, Packy Egan or Lomasney, Rose thought it was. Rose might be Mrs Logan now, in a flashy house on the Mountrath road. Stranger things happen. The gap left where a tooth was drawn a fortnight ago has lost its soreness. She feels it with her tongue, pressing the tip of her tongue into the cavity, recalling the aching there has been. ‘There’s a woman dentist’ll fix you up.’ It was the Welshman, Davo, who said that, and they went along together because he knew the way. Not many would bother with your toothache, Davo said; not many would think toothache would occur in a derelict’s mouth. ‘Always come back,’ the woman dentist said. ‘Don’t be in pain.’ Felicia folds the Sport and Business section several times, and slides it back into one of her bags. ‘OK?’ the driver of a lorry carrying furnaces asked, and she said yes because it was only fair in return for a lift of two hundred miles, all the payment she could offer, and she had to go back. It took a night and part of a morning, three different lorries and a van, but she had to do it: she couldn’t not go back to Duke of Wellington Road. She had to know, and then she did: the estate agent’s board outside the house, and someone told her. Then a voice called out when later she was resting on a public seat. ‘Child,’ Miss Calligary cried, and there were tears of anguish on Miss Calligary’s cheeks while forgiveness was begged and the dead man vilified. Felicia takes off her headscarf and opens her coat to the sun. The seagull is motionless on the parapet, its beady observation of her continuing. A breeze rattles the pavement trees and the first tired leaves of another September loosen. One floats down softly, slowly descending until she reaches out and catches it on her palm. For minutes she gazes at it, not yet withered, taken before its time; and then her thoughts begin again. Wretched, awful man, poor mockery of a human creature, with his pebble spectacles and the tiny hands that didn’t match the rest of him, his executioner’s compulsion. Her living brought his death, but she didn’t say so, listening to him vilified that day; she didn’t say he was more terrible than a man who stole a distressed girl’s money; she didn’t mention murder, for what use would that be, now that he had murdered himself? ‘Please, child, come back to us!’ Miss Calligary cried, but she shook her head, even though she remembered the generosity and the friendliness of the Gathering House when first she arrived there. She shook her head at each repeated invitation, hearing between one plea and the next about the visits made to Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, and how its occupant’s manner had seemed like madness to Miss Marcia Tibbitts, and how there’d been an occasion at a police station after the death occurred, a sergeant who’d been dismissive. In the end, reluctantly, Miss Calligary and Miss Marcia Tibbitts walked away, passing for ever out of her life. Again her thoughts shift: to a mother collapsed on the kitchen floor, and seaside shells brought back later in kindly compensation; to speckled green bird’s eggs, and John Count’s singing, no sign then of her father’s bitter eyes; to the inflicted wound that answered the ignominy of a husband gone away, and love for a son, as gentle as a cancer. Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been. Such contemplations, alien to her once, fill Felicia’s day. She seeks no meaning in the thoughts that occur to her, any more than she searches for one in her purposeless journey, or finds a pattern in the muddle of time and people, but still the thoughts are there. Alone, no longer a child, no longer a girl, with the insistence of the grateful she goes from place to place, from street to street, binding her feet up, wet by rain that penetrates her clothes, frozen when there is ice on the gutter puddles. By day the clouds scutter or hardly move, or crowd away the sun in shades of grey, or blackly advance in bunched-up density, like ominous monsters of the sky. They’re there again in wind-blown tails of smoke, in big white bundles soft as down, in scarlet morning streaks. Sometimes all day there is an empty blue, hazy with mist or cleanly bright, backdrop for spindly winter trees, and backdrop again for summer greenery. At night, there is a city’s afterglow. There is a happiness in her solitude at dawn. The leaf blows from her palm in another soft breeze. The watchful seagull struts the parapet, still hungry for crumbs that are not there. Someone stopped who need not have, and called an ambulance for Dumb Hanna when she lay senseless on the street. The ladies come at night with soup, well-meaning, never forgetting, no matter what the weather. The woman dentist said don’t be in pain. The woman dentist has dedicated her existence to the rotten teeth of derelicts, to derelicts’ odour and filth. Her goodness is a greater mystery than the evil that distorted a man’s every spoken word, his every movement made. You would say it if you could, a new thought is, but sometimes saying isn’t easy. Idiot gawking, fool tramping nowhere: shreds of half-weary pity are thrown in the direction of a wayside figure, before the hasty glance darts on to something else. There will be other cities, and the streets of other cities, and other roads, Tappers and Georges and Lenas, Kevs and Davos and Dumb Hannas. There will be charity and shelter and mercy and disdain; and always, and everywhere, the chance that separates the living from the dead. Again the same people wander through her thoughts: the saint and the Little Sisters, Elsie Covington and Beth, Sharon and Gaye and Jakki and Bobbi, her mother not aged by a day. Are they really all together among the fragrant flowers, safe and blessed? She might be with them if it had happened; but she reflects, in modest doubt, that the certainty she knows is still what she would choose. She turns her hands so that the sun may catch them differently, and slightly lifts her head to warm the other side of her face.