Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Frances arrives outside the steel door, takes a last breath of coke-oven air and enters the dim roar of the speak, passing under Boutros’s arm as if it were a bridge. The air is palpable, not just with smoke but with the dark mass of male voices and limbs, work-soiled clothes, the smell of axle grease, sulphur and sweat. A shifting, pitching anchorage of hard dirty hulls in the night, and Frances swims among them without so much as a paddle or a spar. What would be more frightening? To be noticed and netted? Or accidentally crushed? She finds Jameel and gets up the nerve to order a drink in what she hopes is the voice of experience, impatient for her first real taste of sin. Jameel tells her to forget it and get to work.

She looks about. Work…. No stage. No footlights. Certainly no hushed turning of heads at her approach to the piano. Where to begin? Frances wishes for a fairy godmother to swathe her in ostrich feathers; in breasts, hips, lips and lipstick — a husky contralto which she imagines to be Louise Brooks’s voice. No such luck. Five foot nothing, flat as two bumps on an ironing board, hips like chopsticks — at sixteen Frances is as grown as she’ll ever be. She stands before the piano since there’s no stool. It’s missing a few teeth, the rest are edged in decay, still others are intact but silent. Its pocked and yellowed music-rolls date from a long-dead turn-of-the-century parlour.

Frances turns to the indifferent bass throng and feels her knees turning to water. To stop herself running away, she kicks up her heels in the fake tap dance that earned her so many pennies on the docks. No response. Not even a “boo” — she is invisible. A tobacco-streaked wad of mucus lands next to her shoe by chance. She gags briefly, closes her eyes, clenches her fists and wills herself into song, belting at the top of her narrow lungs, “‘Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous? Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous? Mademoiselle from Armentières, she hasn’t been fucked in forty years, inky dinky pa-arlez vou-ous.’” To no avail. What is shocking in the schoolyard passes unnoticed at the speak.

She goes through her repertoire but it’s no use. Who wants to look at a skinny Girl Guide doing a solo second-hand foxtrot picked up from the movie screen, never mind listen to her spindly kewpie-doll voice? Jameel doesn’t. He wants her out on her ear. He grabs her neckerchief, she writhes free and, in a desperate last-ditch sally, lands on someone’s knee and steals his drink — “Hey!” — she downs the shot, gasps in shock, then quips in moving-picture parlance, “‘Oh gee baby, how did the angels ever let you leave heaven?’” She weaves out of reach between slim hips and broad shoulders, steals another from a man with three jacks — “What do you think you’re doin?” — and knocks it back, promising, “‘I’ve got what ain’t in books,’” coughing, sputtering, blowing a kiss. Jameel follows with a bottle, calming the waters, signalling to Boutros “Get rid of her.” When Frances has downed her third drink in quick succession from a “‘great big good-lookin some-account man’,” and is convinced that her esophagus and chest have been burned away, her feet suddenly sprout wings, they become hap-hap-happy, she cranks the player-piano. The mechanical thumping of a hobnail army renders “Coming thru’ the Rye” and Frances wriggles out of her uniform and down to her skivvies via the highland fling cum cancan. They start watching.

On Monday, Frances skips school and heads for Satchel-Ass Chism’s barber shop. She shows him a picture of Louise Brooks. He shakes his head.

“I don’t know how to cut ladies’ hair —”

“I’m not a lady.”

“Listen, dear —”

She grabs his scissors, lops off one of her braids and says, “Now fix it.”

“Lord love ya, girl!”

The other men glanced up from Chinese checkers at her entrance; they raised an eyebrow when she plopped down in the barber’s chair, and now they grin at her. “That’s the stuff.”

Satchel-Ass shakes his head and does his best. “I don’t know why you don’t go into Sydney to a proper beauty parlour.”

The checker players chuckle and lisp and call him “Pierre”.

“I don’t got time to be gallivanting off to Sydney,” says Frances, savouring her new gun moll grammar, “I got things to do.”

Twenty minutes later she emerges onto Plummer Avenue, her head a bobbing mess of rusty bedsprings. Canada just got another sweetheart.

She swings into MacIsaac’s Drugs and Confectionery. “Hello Mr MacIsaac, may I please have a packet of pins?”

“I like your haircut, Frances, it’s right jazzy.”

When he turns, she swipes a pack of Turkish tailor-made smokes. He hands her the pins along with a lemon drop and asks her, “What are your plans when you graduate next year, lass?”

“Why, I think I’ll go in for teaching, Mr MacIsaac. I believe it is most important that children get a good start in life, and that’s what a good teacher can give them.”

“You’re smart, you girls. You’ve a gift, each and every one of you.”

She pops the lemon drop into her mouth and leaves the pins on the counter.

She enters the schoolyard throng at morning recess. Frances has decided that today is her last day of school. If she isn’t expelled after what she plans to do, then there’s no justice. She lights a cigarette and looks around for the means to her end. Inside, Mercedes is washing a blackboard. She looks out the window to see her sister smoking right out in the open. And what on earth has Frances got on her head? A strange little cap … of hair. Good Lord. By the time Mercedes gets outside, Frances has taken off somewhere with Puss-Eye Murphy. What can she possibly want with poor sweet Puss-Eye?

Actually, “Puss-Eye” mutated into “Pious-Eye” some time ago, until now most people call him “Pius” or “Father Pie,” so certain is everyone, including himself, of his priestly vocation. So Mercedes stands on the school porch, beating shammies against the stone steps, unable to shake an uneasy feeling, even though she knows that any girl would be perfectly safe with Cornelius “Father Pie” Murphy.

When the bell rings to signal the end of recess, Puss-Eye staggers from one of the derelict outhouses on the edge of the playground and runs sobbing through games of shinny, skipping ropes and hopscotch, across the street into the ballpark, all the way home. Why is he holding his crotch? Mercedes scans the sea of pupils for Frances and spots her strolling away from the outhouses. What in heaven’s name has happened? Students pour up the steps and past Mercedes, speculating as to the nature of Frances Piper’s latest crime — “Kicked him in the nuts.” “Put a snake down his combinations.” Mercedes watches till Frances is out of sight, then she takes a deep breath, collects her brushes and shammies and returns to class, hoping for the best.

That afternoon James receives a note from Sister Saint Eustace. Frances has been expelled.

Midway through supper, Frances arrives home and joins her family at the kitchen table. “Mmmm, boiled mush with mush.”

Lily is amazed at the sight of Frances’s shorn head but, before she can comment, James excuses her and Mercedes from the table. They set down their knives and forks and leave without a word. James stands and raises his hand. Frances doesn’t wince. She doesn’t even look up, none of her involuntary muscles contract in expectation. She just reaches for Lily’s fork and starts eating. James lets his hand drop to his side. He says, suddenly tired, “Don’t bring it home.” She just chews. He carefully moves the plate out of her reach. “Do you hear me, Frances?”

She looks up, affecting good-natured distraction. “What’s that?”