When the literary gentleman, whose flat old Ma Parker cleaned every
Tuesday, opened the door to her that morning, he asked after her grandson.
Ma Parker stood on the doormat inside the dark little hall, and she
stretched out her hand to help her gentleman shut the door before she
replied. The skin on the back of her hand had a greenish, sickly pallor and
a line of stitches peeped out from under the cuff of her coat. "He's
breathing easier now, sir," she said quietly before tugging her coat sleeves
back down to her knuckles.
"Oh... good! I'm delighted to hear that," said the literary gentleman.
In spite of the good news, Ma Parker looked worse than usual. Any trace of
colour had withered away, leaving only sallow grey skin and unsettlingly
pale eyes staring out of dark and swollen eyelids. A worn, greasy scarf was
wrapped about her neck, bulging at each side as some hidden bulk forced it
out. But he felt awkward. He could hardly go back to the warm sitting-room
without saying something―something more. Then because her sort set such a
store by the meanest sorts of education he said kindly, "The young lad will
be in school soon?"
"Beg parding, sir?" said old Ma Parker huskily.
Poor old bird! She did look dashed. "I hope the boy will begin, ah,
school," said he. Ma Parker gave no answer. She bent her head and hobbled
off to the kitchen, clasping the old fish bag that held her cleaning things
and an apron and a pair of felt shoes. The literary gentleman raised his
eyebrows and went back to his breakfast.
"Taken ill, I suppose," he said aloud, helping himself to the marmalade.
There was no other explanation for her strange behaviour and disturbing
appearance.
Ma Parker drew the two jetty spears out of her bag and hung it behind
the door. She unhooked her worn jacket and hung that up too. Then she tied
her apron and sat down to take off her boots. To take off her boots or to
put them on was an agony to her, but she had been in agony for days. In
fact, she was so accustomed to the pain that her face was drawn and screwed
up ready for the twinge before she'd so much as untied the laces. That over,
she sat back with a sigh and softly rubbed the stitches above her ankles.
The feet which were now attached to her legs were larger than her own had
been and concealing them under the boots had made the pain so much worse,
but what else was she to do?
*
"Gran! Gran!" Her little grandson stood on her lap in his button boots.
He'd just come in from playing in the street.
"Look what a state you've made your gran's skirt into!"
But he put his arms round her neck and rubbed his cheek against hers.
"Gran, gi' us a penny!" he coaxed.
"Be off with you; Gran ain't got no pennies."
"Yes, you 'ave."
"No, I ain't."
"Yes, you 'ave. Gi' us one!"
Already she was feeling for the old, squashed, black leather purse.
"Well, what'll you give your gran?"
He gave a shy little laugh and pressed closer. She felt his eyelid
quivering against her cheek. "I ain't got nothing," he murmured...
*
The old woman heaved her body upright, seized the iron kettle off the
gas stove and took it over to the sink. The noise of the water drumming in
the kettle deadened her pain, it seemed. She filled the pail, too, and the
washing-up bowl. The extra tendons the doctor had inserted into her forearms
made light work of the lifting, but the weakness in her chest prevented her
from taking any pleasure in it.
It would take a whole book to describe the state of that kitchen. During
the week the literary gentleman "did" for himself. That is to say, he
emptied the tea leaves now and again into a jam jar set aside for that
purpose, and if he ran out of clean forks he wiped over one or two on the
roller towel. Otherwise, as he explained to his friends, his "system" was
quite simple, and he couldn't understand why people made all this fuss about
house-keeping.
"You simply dirty everything you've got, get a hag in once a week to
clean up, and the thing's done."
The result looked like a gigantic dustbin. Even the floor was littered
with decaying toast crusts, envelopes, cigarette ends. But Ma Parker bore
him no grudge. She pitied the poor young gentleman for having no one to
look after him. Out of the smudgy little window you could see a dark
alleyway with a thin strip of sad-looking sky, and whenever there were
clouds they looked very worn, old clouds, frayed at the edges, with holes in
them, or dark stains like tea.
While the water was heating, Ma Parker began sweeping the floor. "Yes,"
she thought, as the broom knocked, "what with one thing and another I've had
my share. I've had a hard life."
Even the neighbours said that of her. Many a time, hobbling home with
her fish bag she heard them, waiting at the corner, or leaning over the area
railings, say among themselves, "She's had a hard life, has Ma Parker." And
it was so true she wasn't in the least proud of it. It was just as if you
were to say she lived in the basement-back at Number 27. She'd had a hard
life, but now? Now what did she have...?
*
At sixteen she'd left Stratford and come up to London as a kitchen-maid.
Yes, she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare? No, people were always
asking her about him. But she'd never heard his name until she saw it on
the theatres.
Nothing remained of Stratford except that "sitting in the fire-place of
an evening you could see the stars through the chimney," and "Mother always
'ad 'er side of bacon, 'anging from the ceiling." And there was something―a
plant, there was―at the front door, that smelt ever so nice. But the plant
was very vague. She'd only remembered it once or twice just before the
operation, when she was lain out like a corpse on the table and the gas
filled her lungs....
It had been a dreadful place―her first place. She was never allowed out.
She never went upstairs except for prayers morning and evening. It was a
fair cellar. And the cook was a cruel woman. She used to snatch away her
letters from home before she'd read them, and throw them in the range
because they made her dreamy.
When that family was sold up she went as "help" to a doctor's house, and
after two months there, she married her husband. He had been a baker and she
had been desperate to leave the doctor's house. The doctor had scared her
from the first day. He wasn't a cruel man; he was kind in his own strange
way but she had been terrified by those unnatural experiments in the
attic...
"A baker, Mrs Parker!" the literary gentleman would say. For
occasionally he laid aside his tomes and lent an ear, at least, to this
product called Life. "It must be rather nice to be married to a baker!"
Mrs Parker didn't look so sure.
"Such a clean trade," said the gentleman.
Mrs Parker didn't look convinced.
"And didn't you like handing the new loaves to the customers?"
"Well, sir," said Mrs Parker, "I wasn't in the shop above a great deal.
We had thirteen little ones and buried seven of them. If it wasn't the
'ospital it was the infirmary, you might say!"
"You might, indeed, Mrs Parker!" said the gentleman, shuddering, and
taking up his pen again.
Yes, seven had gone, and while the six were still small her husband was
taken ill with consumption. It was flour on the lungs, the doctor told her
at the time.... Her husband sat up in bed with his shirt pulled over his
head, and the doctor's finger drew a circle on his back.
"Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs Parker," said the doctor,
"you'd find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good
fellow!" And Mrs Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether
she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dead
husband's lips....
But the struggle she'd had to bring up those six little children and
keep herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old
enough to go to school her husband's sister came to stop with them to help
things along, and she hadn't been there more than two months when she fell
down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker had
another baby―and such a one for crying! ―to look after. Then young Maudie
went wrong and took her sister Alice with her; the two boys emigrated, and
young Jim went to India with the army, and Ethel, the youngest, married a
good-for-nothing little waiter who died of ulcers the year little Lennie was
born. And little Lennie―her poor little grandson. She would have done
anything for him....
*
The piles of dirty cups, dirty dishes, were washed and dried. The
ink-black knives were cleaned with a piece of potato and finished off with a
piece of cork. The table was scrubbed, and the dresser and the sink that
had old sardine tails swimming in it....
*
Lennie had never been a strong child―never from the first. He'd been one
of those fair babies that everybody took for a girl. Silvery fair curls he
had, blue eyes, and a little freckle like a diamond on one side of his
nose. The trouble she and Ethel had had to rear that child! The things out
of the newspapers they tried him with! Every Sunday morning Ethel would
read aloud while Ma Parker did her washing.
"Dear Sir, Just a line to let you know my little Myrtil was laid out for
dead... After four bottles... gained 8 lbs. in 9 weeks, and is still putting
it on."
And then the egg-cup of ink would come off the dresser and the letter
would be written, and Ma would buy a postal order on her way to work next
morning. But it was no use. Nothing made little Lennie put it on. Taking
him to the cemetery, even, never gave him a colour; a nice shake-up in the
bus never improved his appetite.
But he was gran's boy from the first....
"Whose boy are you?" said old Ma Parker, straightening up from the stove
and going over to the smudgy window. And a little voice, so warm, so close,
it half stifled her―it seemed to be in her breast under her heart―laughed
out, and said, "I'm gran's boy!"
*
At that moment there was a sound of steps, and the literary gentleman
appeared, dressed for walking.
"Oh, Mrs Parker, I'm going out."
She kept her back to him, rude though it was, for fear he would see her
arms and grow curious. "Very good, sir."
"And you'll find your half-crown in the tray of the inkstand."
"Thank you, sir."
The door banged. She took her brushes and cloths into the bedroom. But
when she began to make the bed, smoothing, tucking, patting, the small lungs
in her chest ached, making the job almost unbearable. She thought of little
Lennie and his suffering. It hadn't been right. That's what she couldn't
understand. Why should a little angel child have to ask for his breath and
fight for it? There had been no sense in making a child suffer like that.
*
A sound as though something was boiling came from Lennie's little box of
a chest. A great lump of something bubbling in his chest that he couldn't
get rid of. When he coughed the sweat sprang out on his head; his eyes
bulged, his hands waved, and the great lump bubbled as a potato knocks in a
saucepan. But what was more awful was when he didn't cough he sat against
the pillow and never spoke or answered, or even made as if he heard. Only he
looked offended.
"It's not your poor old gran's doing it, my lovey," said old Ma Parker,
patting back the damp hair from his little scarlet ears. But Lennie moved
his head and edged away. Dreadfully offended with her he looked―and solemn.
He bent his head and looked at her sideways as though he couldn't have
believed it of his gran.
She couldn't lose Lenny, not while she still had breath in her body. She
went to see the son of her old employer―a doctor, carrying on his father's
work―and asked him about one of those experiments in the attic. She'd been
cleaning when she'd come across it all those years ago―a rabbit pinned to a
tray of wax, severed in half and stitched back up across the belly, and a
large number of wires clamped here and there, and even sewn into the
creature's chest and temples.
"Ah, I see you're admiring my latest patient," the old doctor had
appeared at her shoulder, making her start.
"Sorry, sir, I was only..."
"No, need to apologise. It's fascinating. The power of electricity. We
still know so little about its true potential, but I have been conducting my
experiments and if you'll now observe..." He switched on a contraption by
the table and with a crackle the rabbit jerked in a violent spasm. Then its
little chest moved up and down, and it turned its head ever so slightly
towards her, and blinked...
The doctor's son had carried on his father's work, and seemed excited at
the prospect of some human subjects.
"You understand there'll be risks," he said. "I may be able to get your
lungs into the little boy, but you'll almost certainly perish while I attend
to him. Should the reanimation process then bring you back it may have
serious complications. There's a very real possibility of tissue damage in
the extremities―lower limbs, hands, feet and so on."
"Do whatever it takes, sir. Just help my Lennie."
What was the good of her having a strong pair of lungs in her old body
when little Lennie suffered?
Lennie thrived after the operation and was stronger every day. She had
woken into an unlife of fresh agony. How long would her aching body struggle
on in this wretched state? The doctor had no answers to comfort her. She
had died on the surgeon's table, her body torn open and her lungs removed.
Little Lennie's twisted lungs had filled her chest cavity and some pickled
hands and feet had replaced her own. An intricate clockwork ticked away
beneath her sternum, keeping the dead, foreign body parts in time with the
spark of life that the electricity had rekindled. When she asked him about
the layers of muscle and bone that he had grafted to her healthy limbs, the
doctor had chuckled and said that his curiosity had got the better of him.
*
"What's it matter if Lenny lives and breathes?" she whispered, rubbing
the trail of surgical thread round her throat beneath her collar. The steel
bolts protruding from either side of her neck tingled as her fingers―the
pickled fingers of a long dead woman―brushed against them. Now even the feel
of her boy's warm arms about her neck gave her pain, but she couldn't let
him know that. She couldn't wince at the sharp twinges of the stitching at
her throat, wrists, and ankles. She couldn't let herself cough though the
small lungs in her chest were so clogged that she felt that she might never
breathe clean air again.
"I can't ever let him know."
As she said those words she suddenly let fall her brush and doubled over
in a fit of violent coughing. She found herself in the kitchen, unable to
breathe as though she was drowning in a sea of flour and ash. It was so
terrible that she flung open the back door of the flat, gasping for air. Her
breath caught in her throat at the sight of a man leaning against the wall
in the alleyway. He was tall and thin, a knitted cap pulled low over his
brow and the collar of his worn, dark coat turned up. He smiled at her,
broad yellow teeth showing behind a coarse beard.
"Stuffy in there, eh?" he asked, pushing off from the wall and
swaggering toward her. His right hand was pressed against his leg, and she
saw a sturdy black poker swinging behind his coat. Its sooty end bore a
nasty looking hook.
Ma Parker stepped back into the kitchen without a word and swung the
door shut, but the man lunged forward and thrust the tip of the poker into
the gap. Ma Parker staggered back, her heavy feet clumsy beneath her. The
door swung open and the man stepped into the kitchen, still smiling.
"I saw the gent leave," he said, lifting the poker and resting it on his
shoulder. He looked around the room, picked up a silver salt shaker from the
bench.
"He'll be back any minute, I'm sure," Ma Parker said, backing up against
the door to the hall.
"Oh, I don't know as that's fer certain." The man's smile faded and he
unbuttoned his coat with his left hand and licked his lips. "I reckon
there's like to be plenty of time."
Ma Parker knew she could not run. Even before the surgery she'd moved
slowly. Now she could barely manage more than a shuffle. She straightened
her apron and muttered, "You'd best be on your way."
There were no more words. The man crossed the kitchen in two quick
strides, brought the poker up as high as the low ceiling would allow, and
swung it with deadly force. Ma Parker thought of her little Lennie, his
bright face and scarred chest with her lungs inside, and she smiled.
The poker caught her in the neck. The force of it was terrific―enough to
knock her off her feet. She sprawled onto the kitchen floor and waited for
the darkness to take her. She saw the man step over her then push open the
door to the hall. His feet were enormous. So were his hands.
She was surprised to find that the pain of the blow was quick to fade.
It had ripped fire across her throat when the poker struck, but now it was
back to its dull ache. She raised a hand to her neck and there was blood,
but not the fountain she'd expected. She sat up. Taking a polished pot from
the stove, she inspected her reflection. The bolt on the left side of her
neck was bent and her stitches had pulled, but that was all. She slipped off
the apron and inspected her collar bone. Blood oozed from the scar where the
clockwork had been inserted down into her chest cavity. And yet, she was
alive. Or undead. Whatever the case, the assault had not left her worse for
wear. There was no guarantee that her attacker would leave her unmolested
as he made his exit, though. Ma Parker rose to her feet, looked to the open
door to the alley, hefted the pot, and stepped into the hall.
She found the man in the sitting room, bent over the literary
gentleman's writing desk. Ma Parker stepped into the room and tightened her
grip on the pot handle.
"I've had a hard life," she said. She shuffled forward on tender ankles.
"Hard and brutal and full of grief."
The man turned, his face drawn. His eyes flicked toward the hall, where
his poker rested against the wall, then back to Ma Parker. He looked from
the pot to the neck bolts to the swollen purple scars which crossed her
collar bone and disappeared under her dress.
"There's no need for you to get hurt," he said, raising his calloused
hands, palms open.
"Too late for that," Ma Parker replied, eyeing him up.
"'Ave it your way," the man growled, slipping a short-bladed knife out
of his belt. He tried to circle round her but Ma Parker shuffled back in
front of the doorway.
"That's a nice voice you've got. Must have a good set of lungs in
there."
She shuffled forward, the pot hanging loose from her hand. He fired a
quick rabbit punch into her leering face then brought the knife up in a
thrust intended to slip under her ribcage. It hurt more than she'd expected
as the blade lodged in the extra bones that the doctor had used to reinforce
her chest. She nearly fell, but she managed to get a hold of his coat with
her free hand and steady herself. As he tried to barge past her and reached
for the poker she brought the pot around in an underarm arc and struck him
on the elbow of his outstretched arm. There was a wet crack and the lower
half of his arm swung up, then hung like a meaty pendulum. He would have
screamed, but at that moment she let go of his coat and seized the back of
his head. She meant to crack his forehead against the door frame, but as she
gripped the back of his skull and pulled back in preparation for the blow,
she felt something in her forearm tugging. Ma Parker could feel the new
sinew and bone slipping into place, could feel the strength in her new limb,
muscles yearning to be used. She gave in to the urge.
The back of the man's head burst like a rotten egg. Ma Parker felt her
fingers stretch then puncture the skin at the back of his head as his skull
shattered. He twitched and danced for a moment, then slumped forward into
the hall. Ma Parker looked down at her pickled hand, the tightly corded
muscles in her forearm, the chunk of flesh with matted hair and blood in
her fingers.
"What 'ave I done?" said old Ma Parker.
As she said those words she suddenly let fall her hand. She stumbled
back into the kitchen, as though by leaving the hall she could escape her
actions.
She couldn't go home; Lennie was there. The blood would frighten Lennie
out of his life. She couldn't go outside and sit on a bench anywhere; people
would come asking questions. If she even sat on the doorstep a policeman
might come by and speak to her.
Wasn't there anywhere where she could hide and keep herself to herself
and stay as long as she liked, not disturbing anybody, and nobody noticing
her?
Her chin began to tremble; there was no time to lose.
She shuffled back to the hall with her heavy mop and bucket. "Nothing
fer it. I'll have to clean this mess up."
When the literary gentleman returned he found that the hallway carpet
was quite wet, and faintly pink. Methods of cleaning being a mystery to him
he thanked Ma Parker, who had stayed unusually late, but asked her to be
less vigorous with the furnishings in future. She nodded as she left, her
clumsy feet and shuffling gait as pitiful as ever. She didn't seem overly
troubled by the enormous bundle she carried over her shoulder, something
angular and bulky wrapped in two wet coats. She coughed up a gob of blood as
she left, but it didn't seem to trouble her much.
"Fresh," she muttered to herself as she stepped out into the biting
wind. "Head's no use, but still plenty of good parts left."
It was cold on the street as she began her long journey to the doctor's
house. People went flitting by, very fast; the men walked like scissors; the
women trod like cats, but nobody paid any notice to the shuffling old woman
with the heavy bundle.
The icy wind swept up the street and blew out her apron into a balloon.
And now it began to rain.
A bit more than two years ago I had the great pleasure of reading and posting on Linda Lappin's wonderful novel centering on Katherine Mansfield Katherine's Wish. I have now read her first novel, The Etruscan and I was spellbound by the plot lines, the characters while being amazed by the beauty of her prose style. 
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