Free Ace, King, Knave by Maria McCann Page A

eyes. Under the coat he’s wet to the bone, his shirt sometimes soaked with rain but always with sweat. Christ, how he sweats. She pictures the booze boiling up in his belly and squeezing itself out through his skin. His coat is mouldy; when she hangs it up over the fire it breathes death through their two little rooms, their cups and plates, their bed.
    The death carried in on that coat has spread through everything. Sam hardly eats, but he’s developed a pale, greasy fatness like a maggot. His brain’s dead, his mouth’s dead (devil a word does she get out of him, these days), his prick’s been dead a fortnight at least. Try resurrecting that, Sam Shiner!
    Tonight he’s out again. Hail tattles on the window; she wonders if the ground will be soft enough for working. All the more time to drink. The hail drums more loudly. A wonder if he doesn’t come home with pock-holes bored in his face.
    She’s pulled the covers off the bed and brought them over to where she’s lying by the fire. They never had such a blaze when she was a kinchin. Ma would light a fire in a bucket, ash or birch if they were lucky; it was hard to get the good firewood and keep it dry. Here in Romeville it’s coal, nothing but coal. The smoke’s foul, a stinking yellow-grey, but it makes a brisk fire and Betsy-Ann makes bold to order plenty. She can afford to: she shakes Sam of his blunt while he’s still boozed up, not all of it, just enough to go unnoticed. It makes up for the nights when he doesn’t come home. Then in the morning she asks for her cut in the usual way.
    She lies down, lays her head on one side and gazes into the fire’s depths.
    Sheer folly, on nights like this, to think of the panney, but she can’t help herself. She has everything laid up in store, sour pickles and sweet plums; she preserves it, cherishes it, deep in her mind where Sam can’t see, and she has a little taste each night before she goes to sleep.
    Tonight she’s tasting the sour: her coming to Romeville. For all its sourness, it’s a common tale, common as sparrows: herself, Mam and Keshlie, huddled round a cold hearth.
    Mam hung down her head. ‘I should never have sold the horse.’
    Betsy-Ann was silent. This was what came of trusting in Harry, in the fine bragging letter he’d paid someone to write. They should join him in Romeville, such a life! Aye, and such fools as they’d been, to follow on. Harry was to make all their fortunes: Mam talked of nothing else.
    Now she never mentioned Harry’s name.
    ‘The pain’s worse,’ she said. ‘God help us if it’s the wolf. If it’s the wolf, it’s the end of me.’ She kept on about the wolf until Betsy-Ann went out for gin and made her drink it. At last Mam got into the bed, which was for one person, and went off into a sleep. Her girls got in on either side of her. The sisters were used to sleeping close.
    Betsy-Ann woke to find her mother cold beside her. She rose in the dark, pulled the sheets over Mam’s head and sat by her an hour or two, letting Keshlie sleep on. It was strange sitting there, not crying. People always cried, but Betsy-Ann felt hollow and numb. She wondered did she love Mam enough. When her sister finally woke, Betsy-Ann lifted her out of the bed saying Mam was tired and needed her rest. After a while, though, Keshlie wanted to be talking to Mam, and like the little fool she was, must go tugging at the sheets behind Betsy-Ann’s back. She wept and wailed enough for two but still Betsy-Ann couldn’t cry. She pulled back the sheet and lifted Mam’s shift.
    ‘What are you doing, our Betsy?’ Keshlie asked.
    Mam’s titties were meagre and sagging: men liked what they called ‘pouting bubbies’, and smacked their lips when they spoke of them, but women of Betsy-Ann’s acquaintance were rarely plump enough for pouting bubbies. She knew the wolf came first from the sides and gnawed its way in from there. You could feel it under the skin. Timidly, she touched Mam in the