Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

There was a sharp, pointed stone almost within reach that would do for butchering. Miggy turned to pick it up, and stole a glance along the coast. It wasn’t Palmer Dolly on the path. This man was blond. It was the sailor from the Belle , the one who’d held her waist. Ralph Parkiss was honouring his sailor’s boast, to see what she’d got hidden in her breeches. He’d volunteered to walk the six miles to the ship to discover how it had fared since it had beached, but he was looking for the girl. He couldn’t fail to see her. She made a din — in case he passed her by.

‘Is that you, Miggy?’ He climbed up from the path across the winter bracken. ‘Well now, that’s fortunate. I never thought I’d see a friendly face.’ Miggy’s face was hardly friendly, though. She judged a smile to be unladylike, particularly as she had lost a bottom tooth and her lips were cracked and dry. She knew she had good eyes. Her mother told her so. She did her best to widen them, and not to blink. Ralph spoke the line that he had practised for six miles: ‘I came to see the Belle of Wilmington and found myself the belle of Wherrytown instead …’

‘It hasn’t shifted much last night,’ Miggy said. She wished she’d put a ribbon in her hair. They both looked down across the beach towards the Belle . It wasn’t showing any sail. Its masts and rigging looked as bare and clean-picked as finished fish-bones. The carcasses of three drowned cows were floating in the shallows.

‘I see you’ve roped yourself a cow. Is this one off the Belle ?’ Miggy let the rigging drop. She’d not be caught red-handed, poaching cattle. She was ambitious, but not for travel in a prison ship and not for Botany Bay.

‘I wasn’t stealin’ it,’ she said. ‘Don’t say I was.’

‘I’ll not say anything. Steal ten, and still I’ll not say anything.’ He picked the rigging up and handed it to Miggy. ‘Go on. The captain won’t miss one. He doesn’t even know how many got ashore. Don’t sell the steaks in Wherrytown, that’s all.’ He was unnerved by her round eyes. ‘Is that our ensign round your throat?’ he said. ‘It suits you better than the Belle .’ And when she didn’t reply, ‘I thought you were a boy. Those breeches aren’t for girls. You’re not a boy, I hope. How can a sailor tell?’

‘I got a dress at home.’

‘What colour, then?’

‘White. Blue ribbons. I got long hair, ’cept it’s up.’

‘You can let it down so I can see.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll not do anything. Why should I, anyway?’

‘I walked six miles for nothing, then? Must I go back without a kiss? Miggy? Miggy? It’s twelve miles, not six, by the time I’m back in Wherrytown. I tell you what. You kiss me once and then I’ll dream of you.’

‘I’ve got no time for kissin’. Kiss the cow if you’re so keen on it.’

‘I will, if you say no. And then I’ll dream of cows, and you won’t be my sweetheart any more.’

‘Am I your sweetheart, then?’

‘You are if you will kiss.’

What was Ralph Parkiss hoping for? The only girls he’d kissed before had been his sisters or, most recently, the cheap lorettes and dollar doxies in harbour inns in Montreal and Charleston. With prostitutes he’d put his lips and hands exactly where he’d wanted to, exactly when he’d wanted to. The women didn’t care if they were in his dreams or not, so long as he could pay and finish what he’d come to do in less than half an hour. There wasn’t any need for strategy or sweetness. They hadn’t touched or kissed him in return. He’d had to serve himself. There was no happiness in that. Yet Miggy — who, so far, refused to kiss — made Ralph Parkiss feel as fragile as a blown egg. And happy too. He didn’t mind her boyish clothes, her chilled, unsmiling face, her lack of decoration, her stillness and her secrecy. Such rapt, unconscious gravity was irresistible. Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

‘What will we do then?’

‘You can help me if you want.’

He helped her pull the cow out from the rocks and coax it down the incline to the path. He used a strip of gorse to beat the cow forward. He even risked a playful gorsing of Miggy’s thighs. Try as she might she couldn’t stop her smiles. Miggy had two creatures captive on her rope, the heifer and the man. She felt as mossy as the ground. She’d give Ralph a kiss of thanks when she got home for helping with the cow. Where was the harm in that? Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

They were halfway to the safety of the cottage and thinking only of themselves when Aymer Smith, touting his Duty along the coast, caught sight of them. He was in a cheerful mood. What a relief it was for him to be free of the bells, the guests, the corridors of the inn, to walk, and contemplate the fascinations of the coast. He had noticed, as he progressed away from Wherrytown, how one mile differed from the next, how landscape could transform in minutes from welcoming to inhospitable, how vegetation changed from rich to meagre, how time appeared to wind back on itself so that the 1836 of Wherrytown, its modest comforts and its steadiness, seemed a hundred years away as he approached Dry Manston. There weren’t many trees for shelter now. And what trees there were, compared to those around the town, were angular. They shrank and thickened; they turned their trunks against the wind, and wore more bark. The people did the same. Aymer could regard himself as lean and willowy compared to them.

He called to Ralph and Miggy to wait for him, with a directness and informality that in a town would be considered improper. A morning out of Wherrytown had taught him that the diffidence and the reverence that marked the Spirit of the Age when strangers of two classes or two sexes met on city streets had not yet migrated here. The kelping families he’d encountered hadn’t been paralysed by such a visitor. They didn’t gape or turn away. They spoke to him openly, shook his hand and asked unsolicited questions. Boys and girls — children in nothing else but size — investigated him, pulling his clothes, pressing the leather of his boots, and treated Whip, Aymer’s new companion, to strips of fish, yet didn’t offer Aymer anything to drink.

He rehearsed with their parents the innovations in the soap industry, and what it meant for kelpers. ‘We’ll manage without kelp, God willing,’ they said. ‘The fishing’s good enough these last few years. There’s pilchards up tonight and we’ll do well.’ Aymer wondered why he’d come so far, with such a conscience, if the damage to their lives when the patronage of Hector Smith & Sons was withdrawn would be so inconsequential. Perhaps, if they had offered some brief signs of dismay, he would have felt less slighted.

‘You’ll miss the money, surely?’

‘Hah! Mr Howells has most of it!’

The kelpers took Aymer’s shilling and some bars of soap, and called their daughters for inspection, the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump, the sour and the sweet, and all of them smiling wildly. This Kitty, fourteen years of age, was healthy and hard-working. She’d make a decent maid. This Mary, only ten, was useful round the house and would be glad of any work in Hector Smith & Sons. This Janie, seventeen, could work as hard as any man, ‘Look at her muscles, Mr Smith!’ and she could wet-nurse, cook or scrub. Did Aymer know of anyone who could offer employment to any of these girls? Aymer wrote their names down in his notebook and made promises he knew he couldn’t keep. They’d let him take their daughters there and then, he felt, and not expect to see them any more, so long as they had ‘prospects and positions’.