Free Little Bones by Janette Jenkins

pockets and throwing Jane a sixpence. ‘Buy yourself a bun at the kiosk. We might be here some time.’
    ‘Should I make my way back, sir?’ she asked, because shouldn’t she be seeing to the girl they’d left in Axford Square that morning, a nervous ingénue who, in her jumpy agitation, had pulled all the buttons from her coat?
    ‘Oh, most definitely not,’ said the doctor. ‘You must stay inside the theatre.’
    The Frenchman laughed. ‘Oh, yes indeed, you must stay here, then he can tell his wife he’s been working hard all afternoon, like a slave in fact, and he has not been lounging around with absinthe and Gentleman’s Relish.’
    Monsieur Duflot pointed Jane towards the kiosk, and she turned into the passage, picking out landmarks for her safe return – the noticeboard, a hatstand, a giant cardboard tree. Her head felt worse as the smell of gas thickened. She could hear a woman asking for a bottle of alcohol rub, a piano repeating the same hollow tune, over and over. Then a man holding a thin white dove looked Jane very carefully up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were somebody else.’
    Towards the end of the gloom Jane found the door to the auditorium and, pushing it with her shoulder, she found herself at the side of the empty stalls – this magical space, this place of transformation, was in half light, and the few lamps left burning made trembling yellow pools across the closed velvet curtains. Transfixed, she stood with her hands on the back of a seat, staring at the ornate plaster ceiling, painted to look like the sky. Walking down the raked aisle, she could taste face powder, damp tobacco and orange peel. She made her way towards the empty stage, looking into the dark wide mouth of the orchestra pit.
    Her mother had known a girl who had sold programmes at the music hall, and if they waited in the alley, she would let them sneak in through a side door , where they’d climb the stairs and stand dizzy in the gods, and Jane might get a view of a man’s filthy overcoat, or a sweating fishwife, or a glimpse of the rosy-lit stage, with its acrobats, fat lady singers, and those girls dressed as West End dandies that the audience went wild for. Agnes preferred the ballet scenes or the animal acts, though their mother (by this time awash with gin and fried potatoes) once got so excited by Mr Sammy Street, ‘the smoothest balladeer’, that she pushed her way down to the stalls, then, feeling quite giddy, made her way to the edge of the stage, where she began waving a less-than-clean handkerchief towards Mr Street, who was now dancing with his cane. Oh, how Agnes had averted her eyes and Jane had pushed her burning face into the nearest scratchy overcoat. Meanwhile, a burly gentleman, an employee of the theatre, had lifted up her mother by her elbows and managed to cart her kicking into the alley, but not before she had shouted, ‘You can have me, Sammy Street! I’m here! I’m waiting! I’m yours!’ which set the audience roaring and ruined half the song.
    Swallowing a smile Jane looked towards that narrow shelf they called the gods, a heart-stopping, precarious place, with such a long drop it was a wonder those beery sixpence ticket-holders didn’t fall to their deaths every night. Lowering her eyes, she gazed across the circle, with the curving red seats, the gilt, and the little opera glasses you could set free for a penny. Jane curled her hands around her eyes in poor imitation of those glasses, and to her amazement, she could see the outline of a girl – and the girl, dressed in grey, looked like Agnes. With her heart thumping, Jane began to wave. The girl didn’t move. Jane found the stairs to the circle and started climbing to where the grey girl was sitting. By the time she got there, she knew it wasn’t her sister. ‘I sneaked inside because I was cold,’ the girl whispered. ‘Don’t tell on me, will you?’
    At the kiosk, the woman offered Jane, whose head was