Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

A six-inch panel thwacks open and two brown eyes take aim at her beneath a single eyebrow. Frances holds up a bottle of James’s finest. The panel slides closed and after a moment the steel door opens. Standing there is a big man. Wavy black hair, nose like a fist, arms like cannon, would-be olive skin but he obviously doesn’t see much sunlight. Young and, Frances has to figure, dopey. He stares down at her blankly, blocking the inner gloom she is so longing to glimpse.

“Close the friggin door, Boutros, it’s broad fuckin daylight, b’y.”

A small man elbows the younger one aside and, with a glance not at Frances but over her shoulder, grabs her arm. “Get in, get in.”

She’s in.

The interior of the speakeasy lives down to its exterior. It’s the only drab house in The Coke Ovens. Peeling grey paint, boarded windows, you’d have to know what you were looking for to find it because it appears deserted — with the exception of the upper storey, where a few tired petunias and chewed marigolds cling to life in a window box overlooking the slag dump of Dominion Iron and Steel. Above is the train bridge. This is Railway Street.

Frances blinks into the dusty shadows and the room takes shape. Benches line the walls. Wallpaper strips with traces of lords and ladies flap from ceiling corners dingy with nicotine and neglect. On the floor, a genuine brass spittoon awash in brown slime, and several rusty tin cans that serve the same purpose. A pile of cigarette butts has been swept to the centre of the floorboards. A makeshift bar — sheet of scrap metal on two oil drums — bottles and barrels, not a mirror, not a shot glass, no engravings of ships or trains, no regimental photo, no boxing heroes grace the walls. In the far corner stands a scarred player-piano.

Frances looks into the taut sallow face of the small man. His black stubble matches his eyes.

“Who sent you, you’re not selling cookies.” He snickers. Frances feels suddenly ridiculous in her Girl Guide uniform, which she thought was the perfect disguise.

“It’s a costume,” she falters. “I’m a….”

“You’re a what?”

She can’t answer. Her eyebrows quiver. She’s mad at herself — baby. Sooky baby, Frances. She bites her cheek and looks down.

“I asked you a question.”

She looks up at him. He is something new. Not a nun, not a bad boy, not her father.

“Get outta here. Go on, beat it.”

He shoves her towards the door, Frances stumbles and blurts out, “I’m an entertainer.”

He stops and laughs, hands in his pockets — a mean mirthless laugh, his sharp tongue protruding past his lower lip as he jingles change with one hand. Beside him, big Boutros hasn’t changed his expression — still just looking at her. Maybe going to jump me and won’t give me no quarter neither, won’t take no. Frances looks around, but there’s nowhere to run. The dumb giant is planted between her and the door, why didn’t she leave when the greasy little man told her to? Frances wants suddenly to high-tail it home to Lily and Mercedes.

“What’s your name, kid?”

Frances says, “I have to go now. Sorry to bother you.”

The little man gestures to her to “come here”. Frances walks slowly back to him. He snatches the bottle from her hand. Everything about him is a coiled spring ready to pop you in the eye. Frances doesn’t see him move, she’s just suddenly sitting hard on her tailbone on one of the benches.

“Please, mister, I just want to go home.”

“Come on, sweetheart, what’s your name?”

Frances doesn’t reply. He grips her chin between thumb and forefinger — she realizes he’s stronger than he looks — he shakes her head till her neck burns. She starts to relax.

“You gonna be nice, now? Hey? You gonna answer me?”

This isn’t so hard after all. “Fuck off,” she says.

He seizes a fistful of her hair and yanks her back to her feet. Frances is elated at the power of the word, unleashed here for the first time on a grown-up. She laughs at him and spits, “Who do you think I am, look at the bottle, stupid.”

He smacks her efficiently, one eye already on the label. He examines it, lips still parted and curled. He looks back at her and shakes his head slowly. Frances straightens her beret. The man tosses the bottle to Boutros without looking and asks her, “He know you’re here?”

“No. But he will.”

“Bullshit.”

Frances just shrugs.

He repeats, “Bullshit, you tell him, he’ll kill you —”

“He’ll kill you second. You touched me.” She puts her chin up and looks down her nose. “Daddy wouldn’t like that.”

The man considers this. Then he says, “Which one are you?”

“Frances.”

He narrows his eyes. “What do you want, Frances?”

“A job.”

He starts to laugh again but Frances just looks him steady in the eye. He shuts up and asks, “What can you do?”

“I can dance. I can sing and play piano.”

He looks her up and down. “What else?”

She twists her mouth into a sneer she hopes is hard as nails. “I can do anything.”

He gives a short chuckle. Then another, and nods. “You’re all right, Frances.” Without taking his eyes off her, he says to Boutros, “Say hello to your cousin, b’y.” Frances looks up at Boutros. Concrete with eyeballs. She turns back to the small man. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m Jameel. I’m your uncle, doll.”

That’s when Frances sees, between yellow-grey curtains in the dusk of a rear doorway, a puffy woman staring at her in a way that shocks her. Only people who know me really well hate me like that. Who can she be? Then, with a sickening half-turn of her stomach, Frances identifies the other side of a coin she knew and loved so well.

“Camille, come here and meet your niece, dear,” says Jameel.

But Camille just turns and disappears into the back room. Frances hears her slow heavy foot up the stairs. It’s too horrible. Not these men, not the brown sputum in the cans, the butts on the floor, the stench of liquor and puke — but the fact that that hateful woman is Mumma’s sister.

The following Saturday, without waiting for James to leave on his midnight rounds, Frances gets out of bed, puts on her Guide uniform, ties two sheets together, knots them and fastens one end to the radiator. She climbs out the window and rappels down the side of the house. Lily reels the ladder back in once Frances has landed safely. Lily will sleep fitfully till just before dawn in the expectation of hearing a cinder against the windowpane. In helping Frances, she has chosen the lesser of two evils: even though it’s terrible not to know where Frances will spend the long night, it is more terrible still to picture what Frances’s face will look like if Daddy catches her. “Please dear God, please let Ambrose look after Frances.”

Ain’t she sweet? She’s a’ walkin down the street.

Now I ask you very confidentially, ain’t she sweet?

Well-off people purchase liquor discreetly and consume it in a civilized manner at home. Ordinary people pass the jar in a convivial kitchen. Loose pegs and young trouble-seekers come to Jameel’s blind pig in the Pier to fight, play cards and pass out. Miners, merchant seamen and steelworkers, some as sweet and others as sour as soldiers. A few genuine formaldehyde drunks, the odd alienated contemplative just passing through, a vet with no visible injuries. No music — no one even cranks the old player-piano. This place is not sufficiently jovial to inspire more than a caterwauling chorus at closing time. The clientele are white with the exception of one or two of the American sailors. Certainly no one is here from The Coke Ovens itself. There are no women. There are no tourists — this isn’t Harlem. No slumming scions. Frances is the only fallen princess to have crossed the threshold. Her aunt Camille doesn’t count because she is not here voluntarily. She stays upstairs until it’s time to come down and empty the spittoons and swab the piss from the doorstep.