People of Abandoned Character

I thought she was already dead, but I must have been mistaken and it didn’t feel fair. Her wiry white hair was a tangled mess from all her rolling around. She had eyes like a spooked horse, and the skin of her wrinkled face was almost purple. She was still writhing in agony, like a woman trying to birth a child too big, and clawing at her mouth. I stopped with the sheets, sat down on the corner of the bed, held onto the brass finial, closed my eyes and waited for the noise to stop.

When she was finally still, I was desperate to tell Mabel the good news. I crawled back below the bed to find her, but Mabel was facing the other way, so I pulled on her hair to get her attention. Her hair wasn’t wet any more; it was dry and the colour of dark copper. When she turned around, it was Aisling and she was smiling. The skin on her face was smooth and luminous, still peppered with freckles, and the small scar on her chin was there. I touched it and she giggled. I remembered her neck and searched for where that scar should be, but I couldn’t find it. She kept laughing, then slapped my hands away, kissed my face and pulled my head onto her bony chest.

‘How did you get yourself in such a mess?’ she asked.

‘Because you left me all alone. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t. Are you back now?’

‘No, I came to tell you one thing: you must trust only yourself. Have you not heard me shouting? I scream and scream, but you never seem to listen.’

We lay underneath the bed together. It was the most beautiful feeling of freedom I’d had in such a long time. My nightdress was covered with mud and blood; Aisling’s was clean and stark white. I ran my lips against the skin of her cheek, to remember how soft she was, and how she smelled of violets. She loved violets.

‘I should have told you about my grandmother, then this might not have happened,’ I said.

‘I left my boy in Kildare,’ she replied. ‘I filled his mouth with peat from my father’s bog. I covered him in it like a blanket, left him there, quiet, it’s as if he fell asleep. I left him and ran away.’

A slow, drawn-out rhythm struck the floor – heel, toe, heel, toe – and a pair of man’s legs made their way around the edge of the bed. I pulled Aisling close and we both lay stiff as twigs; only our eyes moved as they followed the man’s boots. He sat down on the edge of the bed and it sagged with his weight, close to our faces. Aisling stroked my wet hair, her skinny fingers catching in the knots and tangles. Then she disappeared, and I was alone again, and now I was frightened. The man’s weight on the bed shifted. He bent down and looked underneath and saw me, and I screamed. His head was upside down, the blood in his face draining the wrong way; it was Thomas, grinning and wide-eyed, his whiskers grown out and unkempt, and there was blood on his face and in his teeth. His eyes were that bright, freezing blue; soulless.

I woke up at that point.

*

I lost the dignity of a normal routine and began to keep odd hours. It felt like my eyes were disappearing further and further into the back of my head and as if my face was a blank, wax-like ball that had been pushed in on one side. My features were bloated and puffy, my cheeks had red blotches; I was taking too many drops. The bruises faded to brown, to yellow and finally to a dull grey shadow, much like my complexion. I was possessed of a quiet dullness, as if my overworked nerves were padded with cotton wool. I could see things from a distance, form an opinion if I tried, yet I didn’t care.

It was a pleasant feeling to be dazed and indifferent when the whole of the city was living in perpetual fear. Perhaps I had less fear because I knew what a monster looked like. I opened my bedroom door only for Sarah to pass me the daily newspapers and more drops when I sent her out for them; otherwise I kept it locked. They sent up meals on a tray, but I worried they might be poisoned. I nibbled at the edges, assuming any poison would be administered in the middle, then left the tray on the floor outside my room.

I continued to devour the papers. At Annie Chapman’s inquest doubts were raised about the time of her actual murder. If it had taken place at the exact time the witnesses stated they had found her, the murderer would have been walking around in broad daylight covered in blood. The crowd burst out laughing at this. It was explained to the better classes, who remained without a clue as to what was so funny, that due to the hundreds if not thousands of small private slaughterhouses in the maze that made up the Nichol, it was not uncommon to have to leap out of the way of a stampede of sheep or oxen as they were driven through the narrow streets to their slaughter. Those who worked in such places often wandered the streets dripping in blood. The murderer would walk unnoticed.

One journalist observed that after the laughter subsided, an uneasy silence descended on the courtroom. He found himself wondering whether everyone in that room inhabited the same small island-nation or not. When men had such vastly different experiences of the same few square miles, especially when one considered the size and breadth of the empire, let alone the world, could they really call themselves countrymen?

Annie Chapman was buried on Saturday the fifteenth of September. Thomas had not come home for a week.

25

Not