The Ballroom Read online

  ‘Occupation, Miss Fay.’

  ‘Spinner.’

  ‘And for how many years have you worked as a spinner?’

  ‘Since I was twelve.’

  His pen scratched out over the paper. ‘And before that? Did you work as a child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He wrote it down. ‘Since what age?’

  ‘Since I was eight.’

  ‘And what did you do then?’

  ‘Doffer.’

  ‘And, remind me, that is …?’

  ‘Doffing rolls of thread when they’re full. Tying up the ends and that.’

  He nodded and wrote some more.

  ‘Are you married, Miss Fay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘According to the papers I have here, you no longer live with your family, is that correct?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And where do you live then?’

  ‘With … other women. We all pay.’

  ‘And do you have your own quarters there? Your own room?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I share it.’

  ‘With how many others?’

  ‘Three.’

  He nodded. Wrote again.

  ‘And what about your father and mother?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  She shook her head. ‘My mother.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He’s alive.’

  More writing, more scratch scratch scratch.

  ‘And what’s his address?’

  The room was quiet. Outside, clouds raced each other across the sky as though they had somewhere better to be. She saw the house where she had grown up. A black house, a house that was never safe. ‘Fifty-three Victoria Street.’

  The doctor nodded, wrote and then stood and crossed the room towards her. He took her wrist in his fingers and pressed lightly. With his other hand he took a pocket watch out and stared at it. ‘Tongue.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put out your tongue.’ He spoke sharply.

  He peered at it, then went back to the other side of the table and wrote some more. She watched the letters spooling from his pen, marching from left to right like a line of ants she saw once on a baking summer afternoon, crossing the path on Victoria Street. She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside – the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound. She had stared at the ants. They looked as if they knew just where they were going. She wondered what would happen if she followed them. Where she would end up.

  ‘It says here, Miss Fay, that yesterday morning you attempted to damage a machine in the factory in which you are employed.’ The doctor was looking at her again, a keenness to him now.

  ‘I’m not mad.’

  ‘Do you deny you did this?’

  ‘I …’

  How to explain? How to speak of what she had seen – of the women and the machines and the windows that blocked everything out. It had been so clear then but would muddy before this man, she knew.

  She shook her head, muttering. ‘There was no damage. Only the window, and I’ll pay for that. I’ve already said. I’ll find a way.’

  He bent down and wrote in his book.

  ‘I’m not mad,’ she said, louder now. ‘Not like those women in that room anyhow.’

  He carried on writing.

  The room got closer then, darker. Pulsing. Her face was hot. Bladder hot.

  ‘What are you writing?’

  He ignored her.

  ‘What are you writing?’ She raised her voice. Still, he ignored her. The only sound the scratching of his pen. The furniture, heavy and silent, watching her too.

  She hit the table in front of him. When he didn’t look up, she hit it again, stood and smacked her hand right down on his papers, his pen clattering on to the floor. The ink splattered over his hand. He snapped back in his chair. Took a bell and rang it, and two nurses appeared, as though they had been waiting in the hall just for this.

  ‘It appears Miss Fay is feeling violent. Please take her downstairs. We can finish the assessment when she’s calm.’

  The nurses grabbed her, but she landed a bite on one of their arms and wrested herself free. And then – the door – not locked, running across the entrance hall, the black flowers. The big front door, unlocked too, and her outside on the steps, and the fresh air smacking her face, and her gasping for it, sucking it down, pelting across the gravel. Whistles blaring, shrill and hard. A nurse making towards her. Her turning to the left, to the far side of the building. Then only more buildings, and running from them too, out across the grass. A cricket pitch. Tall trees. Lungs burning. This way only fields, brown and muddy, stretching out, and sheep, and a lane ahead. The top of a small rise. Two men, standing in a hole. One of them waving his arms, shouting. Turning, seeing the nurses behind her, gaining on her. Swerving to miss them, but slipping in the mud, her ankle turning over and her falling, hard on to her front, pitching and rolling down the hill.

  The fierce slap of mud. Everything red and black. A hot wetness spreading between her legs.

  A face before her, a dark man – hand stretched out, palm open. ‘Are you all right there?’

  People around her. Upon her. She on her hands and knees, spitting black earth to the ground. Her arms, yanked behind her back. Pain tearing as she was pulled up and made to stand by people she couldn’t see.

  The dark man there still. Standing, watching her. A little way apart. Looking as if he pitied her.

  No one pitied her.

  ‘What?’ she screamed at him. ‘What are you looking at?’

  John

  ‘COLD ENOUGH FOR you, mio Capitane?’

  ‘Aye.’ John took his place beside Dan in the line. ‘Cold enough.’

  Eight of them out here in the low tin light, waiting for their shovels, their breath meeting the air in vaporous clouds. The men coughed, blew on their hands, moving their weight from foot to foot, and went up one by one to Brandt, the attendant, to give their name and be told where to dig. It was always the same faces out here; not so many could be trusted with something hard and sharp.

  ‘Mantle Lane,’ said Brandt, when it was John’s turn, passing the heavy shovel over. John could just make out the thin lines of the man’s face.

  He hefted the spade on to his shoulder and followed the grey outline of Dan’s bulk down the gravel path that led behind the main buildings, over the railway bridge and then out to the furthest reaches of the grounds. Their boots crunched on the frosted grass, and John hunkered into his jacket. It was a raw morning all right, with the wind coming down off the tops and finding the gaps in your clothes. When they reached the graveyard, they made their way to the hole they had been digging last week, covered over now with thick wooden boards. Dan crouched beside it, lifting one of the planks and peering inside. ‘Two of them in there.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Four more deaths then until it would be full.

  It was a little lighter now, and John could see the frown on Dan’s face as he brought two thin, sappy twigs from his pocket, twisted them into quick knots and laid them carefully in the hole, speaking a few low words as he did so.

  There were always six to a grave. No headstones, just patches of earth raw with soil that had been dug and put back in.

  John traced a rectangle on the ground with his shovel, marking the plot of a new grave. Dan soon joined him, and when the two men lifted their spades the metal struck the ground with a high, ringing sound.

  They did not speak as they worked. It was always like this at first: silence until you got your rhythm up. Your boot finding its place on the lug. The shaft against your knee. Your breath finding its way. Only the sound of your shovel cutting into the ground and the odd grunt of effort. The cold no longer bearing on you, as all of you went into the digging, making the sides sharp and smooth.

  They were good at it, and the hard jobs were the good ones – the ones that made you forget.

&n
bsp; Occasionally there was a shout from one of the other men and the high shriek of the train as it arrived on the branch line from Leeds, casting a trail of smoke above the trees, but mostly there was silence. It took a day for the two of them to dig a grave: twelve foot deep, to fit as many as possible in the hole. That was fair going. Even though the tools were useless. Not like the ones from home, the narrow loys, which were made to fit a man, to fit the job, whether it was cutting turf or digging potatoes or sod. These shovels were factory made. They were fast enough though, since John had cut earth since he was old enough to grasp the spade and Dan was the strongest man there.

  They dug on, the heat rising in their bodies, while the sun smeared its late-winter dawn over the black buildings at their back and then hid itself behind thick grey cloud. While Brandt paced on the top of the rise, with the long stick that all of the attendants carried, keeping his beady eye on them and the other scattered working groups, ready with his whistle should anything occur.

  ‘Here,’ said Dan, when they were a good couple of feet down and standing in the hole. He palmed a bit of shag from his pocket, jerking his shoulder towards the fence that hugged the field. ‘Wouldn’t take much to climb that now, would it?’

  John rubbed his forehead with his cuff, a sweat on him now. Beyond the fence the land rose a little – not the high rise of the moor that could be seen from their ward, but gentler. A few houses dotted the horizon. He glanced at Brandt and, seeing the man had his back turned, leant in, took a pinch of Dan’s tobacco and rolled a quick thin cigarette for himself. Dan was right. The fence was just the height and a half of them. A leg up and they would both be over and away.

  ‘Where would I go?’ said Dan, in answer to a question unasked. ‘If I did a scarper? Well now, mio Capitane, let’s see.’ He struck a match, the flare of it licking the hollows of his face.

  John leant in to the small flame. He never knew how Dan managed to find and smuggle his lunts, but he had the knack of it. And a small piece of pride was always saved in not having to beg the attendants for a light.

  ‘Know what I wouldn’t do.’ Dan spat a stray piece of tobacco on the ground. ‘Nothing like them daft buggers who went wandering round the village.’ He gestured to the houses in the distance. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that. Not in this clobber.’

  Everyone knew about the four who’d escaped. They were out for less than a day and did nothing worth the effort, wandering around Sharston in the daylight, going into a newsagent’s, visiting a barber for a shave. The man read the labels on the eejits’ fronts while they were sitting in his chair.

  He and Dan were both wearing suits made of rough grey tweed, Sharston Asylum sewn on the outside of the jacket. Dan pinched the cloth of his label in his fingers. ‘I can’t hardly read, but even I’m not daft enough to think they wouldn’t brand us like sheep. No …’ He stepped back, eyes half closed now, smoke curling from his nostrils in the low winter light. ‘You wouldn’t head for the village. You’d head for the wood.’ He leant his weight back, gestured over to the west. ‘I’ve friends in the woods. They’d help me. They’d help you too, chavo. They always help an honest man.’

  John took a draw on his cigarette. He never knew quite what sort of friends Dan meant.

  He liked his stories, did Dan, looked like some strange sort of story himself, with his slab of a face and his strongman’s chest and his arms like great hams, inked all over with tattoos of birds and flowers and creatures that were half woman, half beast. He had been a sailor – twenty years of it – and called John his Captain, since he reminded him, so he said, of an Italian skipper he’d had: a right handsome omi, just like you. He’d sailed until he’d lost his registration ticket, then become a pugilist, knocking down lads for money in the fair. But he had many stories, and you never knew which ones were true.

  Most of the men in there had faces marked with something John knew – poverty, or the fear of it. Dan Riley’s face was different – the only marks a nose that had been broken many times and creases made by laughter and sun. In two years, John had never come to know quite why the man was in there.

  ‘And then I’d head to sea,’ Dan carried on. ‘The sea, mio Capitane. South Shields. That’s where to go. You turn up with nothing, and they’ll take you on a merchant ship. No questions asked. I’d travel by night.’ Dan gestured a winding way with his cigarette. ‘Keep away from the roads.’ He slowed up a little, savouring. ‘And when I got there, I’d go round Norah Carney’s house.’

  Norah Carney. The legend of Norah Carney had passed many an afternoon’s work.

  ‘I’d knock on her door, and she’d appear.’ Dan stepped back as though to make room for her between them in the hole of the half-dug grave. ‘She’d take me in, like she always does. First thing we’d do, we’d burn this lot o’ clobber in the grate.’ He gestured at his suit. ‘Then we’d up and off to her lente, and I wouldn’t get up till—’

  A high whistle sounded in the distance. Over Dan’s shoulder John could see Brandt waving his stick. Dan laughed, a ripe cackle that shook his body as he rubbed his butt out between his fingers and threw his cigarette on the ground. ‘What about you? Where’d you go, mio Capitane?’

  He had a way of asking questions, looking at you straight, as though he wished for an answer. As though he were interested in the answer you might give.

  The edge of a dress.

  A woman. A child.

  Before.

  ‘Nowhere,’ said John, and brought his shovel back down to cut the earth.

  They dug for the rest of the morning and were left to it. Dan hummed and sang while they worked. He sang to suit his mood: sometimes a murder ballad, verses of blood and revenge, or scraps of wandering songs from the road, but most often a song of the sea:

  I am ragged love, I am dirty love, and my clothes smell much of tar,

  I have silver love in me pocket love and gold in great store.

  I am frolicsome, I am easy, good tempered and free,

  And I don’t give a single pin, me boys, what the world thinks of me.

  Then he changed the words, making them filthy, adding verses about slippery, lusty lasses called Norah, making himself laugh.

  And though the work was bleak – this digging of graves twelve foot down to be filled six deep – when the smell of the earth rose fresh to your nose, and someone was singing beside you, and the digging was hard and the sweat came, blinding you from time to time and stinging your eyes, the world was simple enough.

  Some time after the main clock had struck eleven, when they were a good few feet down, there came a commotion. Whistles, not one but many this time, being blown over and over again. They looked up and saw a figure coming towards them from the far side of the building, small, dark and hurtling.

  Dan let out a low whistle. ‘Would you look at that, chavo …’

  It was a woman, moving fast, heading right for where they stood.

  ‘Well I never,’ Dan grinned, ‘a dona in the morning.’

  John stared. Women were ghosts. They shared the buildings with them but were never seen. Other than on Fridays: the dancing. And he didn’t have anything to do with that.

  Dan pushed his cap back on his head. ‘Go on, lass,’ he said, under his breath.

  The girl was coming closer, arms pumping at her sides, face dark red with the effort of it. A wildness in her. A freedom. It pitched and turned in John’s gut.

  ‘Go on, lass!’ roared Dan, throwing his shovel to the ground and flinging out his arms. ‘Go on!!’

  Behind the girl, on the rise of the hill, not twenty feet away, was Brandt, his thin black shape gaining on her, and behind him, nurses: three, four, five of them, skirts flapping, arms flapping, useless birds that could not fly. John scanned the distance to the trees, breathing fast, as though it were him running, not the girl. She might make it. She might.

  ‘Stop her. Stop her!’ Brandt was shouting, mouth open, face twisted as he ran.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ said Dan.r />
  ‘Hear what?’ John spoke softly. Neither of them moved.

  Go on, lass. Go on.

  But the girl looked up then and saw them. And though both men put their hands in the air to show they meant no harm, there was terror in her eyes and she swerved in her path, stumbling, falling badly, rolling towards where they stood.

  For a terrible second she was still. John moved – did it before he thought – hauling himself from the hole and starting over to where she lay. He knelt on the mud beside her. ‘Are you all right there?’

  The girl was not moving. He reached out and touched her arm, and she rolled to her back. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheek a painful sight. Her wet dress covered with mud and grass. He put his hand out to help her up, and she reached for it, but it was smacked away with such force that John was felled, sent spinning on to the ground himself. And when he stumbled to his feet he saw that Brandt was on her, his knee in her spine, her arms already pulled behind her back.

  He watched, helpless, as the girl was pinioned and trussed, a rabble of nurses around her, squawking and squalling. Throughout it all, the girl’s red eyes were fastened on his, and he could not look away.

  ‘What?’ she snarled at him, as she was pulled to her feet. ‘What are you looking at?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, half to himself, and turned away.

  Dan was thigh-deep in the grave, his cap pushed back on his head. He let out another low whistle. ‘Thought she was going to scarper it good and proper then.’

  ‘Aye.’

  She had been running fast. She had been going to make it to the trees. She could have outrun Brandt. And then she had seen them and fallen, and now she was taken.

  The moment had stained the morning. As yet, its colours were unsure.

  John lifted his shovel to the hard winter earth. And he thought of where he was. And how long he had been there. And what was simple broke apart and became a shattered, sharded thing.

  Charles

  IT WAS ALMOST a relief when the call came; late afternoon and he was on the far side of the men’s quarters, over in ward five, playing Mozart sonatas to the epileptics.