T. Boyle - Water Music

She finally stopped outside an old clothes shop to sift through a pile of refuse in the hope of coming up with something to quiet the child. There, in the midst of fouled rags and fragments of glass, lay a fish head, slick with wet and trailing a pale bubble of bladder and intestine. Her stomach turned, but the boy snatched for it. He crammed it in his mouth as if it were a crumpet or sugar bun and she began to scream, scream with disgust and despair and a mounting hysteria that fed on the thought that she had finally given way and would never be whole again, when the door behind her fell open and a pale stream of light trickled out over the cobblestones.

“ ‘Ere, ‘ere, wot’s the matter?” a rusty voice creaked at her back.

The massive wooden sign heaved on its hinges: Rose’s Old Clothes, it said, moving in the wind. Rose’s Old Clothes. An aged woman stood in the doorway. She was withered with years, her spine frozen at an angle, a bunch of skinless knuckles clutching at the head of a cane. Fanny’s screams caught in her throat. The child sat in a puddle and worked at the fish head with quick fingers and teeth. “ ‘Ere,” the old woman repeated. “Come in now and warm yerselfs by the fire. It ain’t much, but it’ll do ye better than the wet of the streets.”

Inside, Fanny and the boy hunched before the fire, dark mountains of clothes heaped up around them. The old woman shuffled out from the back room with a handful of coal and a bowl of crowdie for the boy. While the boy ate she settled herself beside Fanny and looked up at her with a knowing eye. Fanny was trembling, Saint Vitus’ dance and tic douloureux. She couldn’t hold the cup of broth the old woman forced into her hand. “Like a tumbler o’ Mother genever, dearie? Or is it somethin’ stronger ye’ll be wantin’?”

Fanny hung her head and asked for laudanum — if the old woman could spare it. “I’ve got a stomach problem,” she added, sotto voce.

The old woman clawed her way up from the floor and trundled off into a darkened corner where she rummaged through a mound of soiled garments for what seemed like hours. When she finally hobbled back to the fire, the breath whistling through her lungs, she clutched a blue bottle in her hand. “Tincture,” she read from the label, “of opium. That wot ye want, dearie?” The old woman was grinning. Suddenly a crazed primordial squeal flew from her lips: “Eeeee!” she cackled. “Eeeeeeeeee!”

Fanny grabbed the bottle from her and held it to her lips. Almost immediately the tightness in her throat was gone. The rodents stopped gnawing at her stomach, the blinding pain in her head began to soften, dissipate, finally losing itself in a pool of numbness. She took another drink, then another. After awhile she lay back and watched the ceiling revolve in an accelerating whirl of planets and satellites, fiery suns and the cold black reaches of space.

♦ ♦ ♦

She woke at dawn. A man and a woman were standing over her. The man sported a yellowish blood blister on the tip of his nose, the woman clutched a broom to her chest as if it were a shield. “Wot the bloody ‘ell you think you’re doing in my shop?” the man said.

Fanny sat up, dazed, and felt around her for the child. The child was gone.

“Well, speak up, you slattern,” the woman hissed.

Fanny felt as if she’d been thrown down a flight of stairs and hit with a mallet. Panic was beating at her ribs. “I–I. . the old woman—”

“Old woman?” the man said.

“She’s daft,” the woman spat, edging closer with the broom.

“No, no — you don’t understand. She’s got my boy. Right here, last night, she—”

“Out of it,” the man snapped. “Out before I calls the constable. ‘Ear? Get out.”

♦ ♦ ♦

She haunted the streets for a week, slept outside the shop on Monmouth Street every night. She ate nothing. The laudanum gave out. She lay in the alleyway back of the store, gasping for breath, her stomach punctured, heart torn out. She was a whore, an opium eater, a childless mother. All her beauty, all her stamina, all her resourcefulness had brought her to this. It was the nineteenth century. What else was a heroine to do but make her way to the river?

The month was October, the year 1801— but she hardly knew it. Napoleon was lulling the British with the Peace of Amiens, De Quincey was sixteen and bridling under the regimen at the Manchester Grammar School, Ned Rise was busy ducking Osprey and looking, with a sort of hopeless resignation for his lost love, for her, Fanny. Fanny, however, was looking for no one. Her son was gone, Ned was a memory. She made her way to Blackfriars Bridge one foggy night, pulled herself over the railing and toppled into the mist below. The flat dark water closed over her like a curtain drawn across a stage.

♦ NAIAD, YES INDEED ♦

The river is a murmur, a pulse, a dream of the body, schools of dace and shiners ebbing like blood, the tick-tick-tick of an arrested branch as persistent as a heartbeat. From down here, on a level with it, the surface seems to break into a thousand fingers, each one probing for direction, smoothing channels, skirting the worn black rocks that seem to dip and swell like shoulderblades as the current washes over them. Mungo leans back in the stiff high grass that overspills the bank, his face to the sun, the tip of his cane pole propped up against an overhanging branch. He is on holiday, at Fowlshiels, the playful cries of his children and the murmur of his wife’s chatter washing over him like balm. The earth breathes in and breathes out again. Beside him, Alexander Anderson lazily thumbs through an account of the West African slave trade and sips at a pint of porter.

After awhile the explorer props himself on an elbow and glances up the bank to where Ailie stands knee-deep in the cold swirling water while Thomas and Mungo junior play in the mud and grandmother Park rocks the baby in her cradle. Ailie catches his eye, a smile and a wave, and then she’s gone, slashing into the current like an arrow. The month is September, the year 1803. Two years have dragged by since the move to Peebles. Two years of on-again, off-again preparations for a second expedition to West Africa, two years of pacifying Ailie and trying to overrule a multitude of objections, two years of the most tedious and thankless work he’s ever done, tending the sick and cankered ingrates of Peebleshire. Two more years, two more children. Mungo junior came along in the fall of 1801, just after they got settled at Peebles; Elizabeth was born last spring.

All well and good. Healthy children, a loving wife. That’s what life is all about. But already the size of his family has begun to worry him. Four years of marriage, three children. He tries to imagine himself in twenty years, his hair gone white, fifteen children clamoring for meat and milk and sugar buns, new suits and dresses, schoolbooks, dowries, university fees, “Three’s enough,” he tells Ailie, but she just looks at him out of the corner of her eye, sly and suggestive, fertile as Niger mud. “I want bairns to remember you by when you go off and leave me,” she says, no trace of humor in her voice, each child a new link in the chain that binds him to her.

At night she lights candles before the carved black statue that squats in the center of her dressing table like an icon, and once he caught her rubbing its swollen belly before climbing into bed. Touch her and she’s pregnant again.

“I’m worried, Zander.”

Zander squints up from his book.

“The way the family’s grown and all. I feel responsible for them, I want to provide for them. . but I just can’t see going back to Peebles. This week down here at Fowlshiels has been heaven compared with the grind up there — heaven — and still I can’t enjoy it. I feel like I’m wasting my life away. Every time I get on that horse and tramp out to some godforsaken cottage in the hills to watch some old gaffer wheeze to death I can’t help thinking that’s the way I’ll wind up. Dying on my back. In bed. After forty years of boredom.”