Free Lady of Fortune by Graham Masterton Page B

agonisingly thin girl of thirty. You couldn’t have possibly called her a woman: she had never had the mental or physical nourishment to grow beyond seventeen, when she had given birth to her first baby. Now, she had nine, between thirteen and two months, and the tenement rooms behind her were a filthy jumble of blankets, newspapers, empty bottles, unwashed dishes, toddlers’ shit-encrusted nappies and trousers, fish-heads, green-mouldy loaves, and sodden shirts. She carried her latest baby on her hip, as casually as if she didn’t care whether she dropped it on the stone floor or not; and when she looked at Jamie and Fiona and Effie, her eyes were uncomprehending and unfocused.
    â€˜I brang you the sugar you wanted,’ said Jamie. ‘I managed a whole pound.’
    â€˜Well, that’s good of you,’ said the girl, thinly. ‘Will you come on in? You’ll forgive the room. It looks like a midden. I haven’t done my cleaning the day.’
    Jamie stepped over a sleeping child of two or three years old, and followed Doris McFee into the scullery, where a rusty tap dripped into a grime-encrusted sink. ‘Is it Monday, your cleaning day, then?’ he asked her, knowing full well that she never cleaned the tenement at all, preferring to be punched by her husband than have to go through the tiresome business of scraping mutton-fat from around the range, and brown excrement from the walls of the room where the children slept. It was extraordinary that she tried to keep up any pretence of gentility or human dignity at all: but she did, and when Effie stepped into the scullery, she patted her greasy hair and tugged at her skirt. The baby on her hip started to greet at being disturbed, and she jogged it up and down, and coaxed it, ‘Hee-balou, baby; hee-balou.’
    â€˜Jimmy’s not here, then?’ asked Jamie.
    â€˜I haven’t seen him these two days past.’
    â€˜Did he not tell you where he was?’
    â€˜He didn’t have to,’ said Doris McFee. ‘He’s at Grey Michael’s.’
    â€˜Oh, aye,’ said Jamie. Grey Michael’s was a well-known drinking circle, where any man who wanted to forget that he had nine gowling bairns and a forfairn wife could drink whisky all day and all night, until he had forgotten which was conscious and which was unconscious, and even which year it might be.
    â€˜Is there anything you badly need?’ asked Fiona Watson, stroking the new baby’s forehead.
    â€˜I could do with some tea.’
    â€˜Tea, you’d like? Anything else? Clean clothes for the children?’
    Doris McFee’s cheek muscle twitched as if it were a frog’s-leg that had been touched by an electric current. ‘A few blankets, that I could make into coats. And maybe a cast-off petticoat, if that’s not too much to be asking for.’
    â€˜Of course not,’ said Fiona, gently. ‘I’d be only too glad.’
    Jamie said, ‘Is something wrong? You seem to be worried today. You know that Jimmy won’t harm you when he comesback from Grey Michael’s. All he’s going to want to do is sleep.’
    â€˜It’s not that,’ said Doris. ‘I’ve taken my good share of skelps, and I’m not concerned about more. But I am worried about the children; the older two, Gavin and Eliza. They have to share the same bed now, and I’m worried that they might be up to some sculdudrey.’ Sculdudrey was an old-fashioned word for fornication; which Jamie knew, but Effie didn’t. Fiona could guess what it meant, though, and glanced at Jamie with a frown.
    â€˜You’ll have to separate them,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s against God’s law, for a brother and a sister.’
    â€˜I’ve asked them, God help me,’ said Doris McFee, jinking the baby on her hip. ‘They always say no, and how could I think such a thing of them. But Jimmy took Eliza, I know that