Chapter 10 #4
On the dock, she has to fight her way through crowds who have come to meet the Grosse ?le ferry, through those who are waving and calling to the new arrivals, lurching forward to embrace them.
Enda keeps her eyes ahead; she shoulders her fiddle; she asks an elderly man how she might find the street on the address but the man looks at her blankly.
Enda tries another person, then another.
She is able to communicate what she wants but the problem is that she cannot understand their answer.
Trying to quell her rising panic, she shows the piece of paper to a woman carrying a bag on her shoulder; she squints at it, then nods, waving her hand in a direction away from the river.
That way, she says, with a guttural lilt, that way. Zat way.
The city unfolds to Enda, like a map, as she walks, toiling up the slope.
Streetcars, drawn by pairs of blinkered horses, rattle past, and carriages, driven by uniformed men wielding whips.
She passes beneath awnings and signposts advertising medicinal powders, household wares, haberdashery, millinery, fresh produce, good clean meats of all varieties.
On the corner of a steep flight of stone stairs, a gang of squealing children overtakes her, almost sending her flying, pursued by an angry man in an apron, shouting at them in furious French.
Enda trudges along a dusty street, up a staircase, then another, stopping to check the directions with anyone who can understand her or who can read the words written on her paper.
Québec is so full, so busy, the streets swarming with dust and grit, the brick buildings solid and unapproachable, and the people so various, all speaking different languages, wearing outlandish clothes.
The ladies in waisted jackets with fur collars, the men in high-domed hats.
Enda rests on the edge of a marble fountain, around which children push their dolls in tiny perambulators or bowl wooden hoops as they run beside.
Nursemaids in starched caps sit on wrought-iron benches, surveying their charges.
Dipping her hands into the water, Enda dabs the dust and sweat from her face with her wet sleeve; she carefully unfolds the red embroidered skirt from her pack and steps into it.
Several nursemaids glare at her but she doesn’t care.
She ties the skirt around her waist, on top of the trousers, but never mind—she can remove them later.
She takes off her cap and runs her wet hands through her growing-out hair.
She smiles to herself: she is transformed.
She is Enda again, not Liam. She has shed him and is back to herself—her new self.
She presses on, enjoying the flip and swish of the elaborate skirt’s movement, leaving behind the shops and fountains, through some squares where the houses are imposing and smart, into a neighbourhood of low-lying ramshackle buildings.
The people here don’t move as fast as they do in the places with streetcars and fountains: they loiter, they stare.
She pauses to ask a man sitting in a doorway if she’s going in the right direction; he is eating what looks like some kind of vegetable smeared in a scarlet sauce and the smell of it is at once enticing and alarming.
The inside of his mouth, and all his teeth, are stained the same bright red as he tells her that, yes, she must walk along this street, then another.
Dusk is beginning to fall when Enda reaches the place.
She is greeted by a man wearing a grimy collar and tie; he pinches Enda’s cheek in an overly familiar way—and Enda is momentarily shocked because during her weeks at sea she has forgotten what it is to be female.
The man grins, stepping aside to let her in, and Enda discovers that, yes, these are people from her country, but an incredible number of them.
Beyond the door, in the room, which is on the ground floor of a makeshift slatted building, there are perhaps twelve or fifteen men and women, some sleeping on the boards, some on a bare bunk, others standing by the small stove, and more people by the window, looking out into the street.
It is as bad as the hold of the ship, perhaps worse.
Enda is told she can bed down by the door in exchange for a few coins.
She is offered a plate of cabbage, for more coins, which she accepts, and tobacco, which she refuses.
The night is long, disturbed by people coming and going, by others snoring, by a man who arrives back the worse for drink, stumbling over Enda’s feet.
She keeps her eyes shut, hoping that if she doesn’t look at him he will leave her be.
The next moment, however, she is conscious of the blanket being lifted, then an inquisitive hand landing on her wrist and another being shoved unceremoniously between her legs, and then the person is at her, slobbering on her neck, breathing beery fumes into her face, scraping her skin with stubble.
Enda twists sideways, hissing, revolted, bringing up her leg to knee him; the drink has made his reactions slow and she is able to land a hefty blow on the underside of his chin.
He swears, grappling with her clothing, the conundrum of both skirt and trousers, muttering curses and obloquies, grinding the bones of her wrist together, but she can feel that his heart has gone out of it.
She shoves at his shoulder, again and again, kicking him hard on the shins, and after a moment, he rolls off her with an offended air, as if she has been impolite not to go through with it, and he falls almost instantly into a noisome, snorting sleep.
The fear that he might make another assault keeps her awake until the sun comes up.
She leaves, shouldering her pack and her fiddle, certain she will never return, and spends some hours searching for a boarding house for women.
The first she finds is too expensive; the second is so grimy she can see the bedbugs crawling along the creases of the mattress.
In the third, she is offered a bed, which she would have to share with four others and a large, filthy dog; Enda says she’ll think it over.
It is the end of the day by the time she climbs the steps to the fourth boarding house, where a woman, whose accent reminds Enda of the soldiers her father worked for, shows her a room to be shared with one other, a nice clean girl from Belgium, the woman promises, and Enda nods.
She is overcome with relief and exhaustion and wants nothing more than to hurl herself down on the bed and pull the sheets over her head.
The woman names a weekly price, to be paid in advance, every Friday; Enda agrees, and reaches into her pocket for her purse.
But her fingers encounter nothing but the calico lining, sewn by her mother.
Enda checks her other pocket. Nothing. A cold panic rinses over her and she feels along the lining, where she sewed her savings into the seam.
The stitches have been ripped apart, the seam opened. Her money has gone. The drunk man from last night was perhaps not as drunk as he seemed.
The woman is waiting, her hand out, one eyebrow raised.
“I had money…” Enda falters. “I did. I’ve…I’ve been robbed. There was a man and he…I’ll have money by tomorrow, I promise, I just need…”
She trails away. Perhaps this woman will take pity on her, perhaps she will help her.
Within seconds, Enda finds herself pushed unceremoniously outside onto the steps, the front door slamming shut behind her.
Darkness has fallen. The streets are emptying.
A few stray carts are toiling slowly along, the horses tired out, the candles low and guttering inside their glass lanterns.
Enda walks quickly, wishing to give the impression that she has a place to go, a destination in mind.
She moves away from the boarding house, holding tight to her fiddle, turns a corner, then another.
She passes a grocery shop where a woman in a white cap is sweeping the floor, a child at her feet.
She passes a house where a man with a pipe in his mouth is drawing the curtains, and a tavern where the windows are smeared with steam, behind which indistinct human shapes move, cleave and separate.
Who will help her? What should she do? It is important not to panic. She tells herself this.
She goes over the facts in her head. She is in a strange city, where she knows no one.
She has had all her money stolen. It is night-time.
She has nowhere to sleep. She could go back to the place she stayed last night and have it out with them.
You took my money, she might say to the man.
Give it back. But she fears worse might happen if she does.
Her feet lead her to the square with the fountain, the place where she shed Liam’s identity and resumed her own.
The gates have been locked; the place is dark and deserted, its gravel paths empty, but the fountain is still running, throwing its plume of silver drops up into the air.
She stands for a moment, holding on to the railings.
She checks over both shoulders, then grips a branch and the top of the spiked railings.
In half a minute, she is on the other side.
She moves quickly, keeping to the grass, which absorbs the sound of her footsteps.
At the bench where the nursemaids had sat in judgemental rows, she crouches.
She pushes her fiddle and her pack underneath, then crawls in after them, pulling herself as far back as she can.
She curls onto her side and tucks her hands into her sleeves for warmth. She is too frightened to cry.