Page 30 of The Show Woman

Vinegarhill Showground, Glasgow November 1910

29

Clackity clack

Rosie wakes to pitch black. She dresses quickly, a long cotton dress, worn boots and a shawl, patched and threadbare, wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Frost has formed spindles on the window and, even fully clothed, she shivers in the cold. Creeping out of the door, she casts a glance at the other figure in the wagon, blankets piled up high, but there is no movement from the bed.

Across the showground and out on to the Gallowgate, already thrumming with early morning traffic. Milk carts on their rounds, glowering trams whose bells clang their arrival through the mist, warning all and sundry to get out of the way, or else. She wishes she could afford to board one.

Instead she follows the road down to Bridgeton, past the old market, and on to Glasgow Green. Her boots crunch on the stiff grass as she crosses the great park, her breath leaving gales of steam behind her as she walks.

As Rosie arrives at the gates of the factory, she looks up. She has been told it is meant to resemble the Doge’s Palace in Venice, an Italian masterpiece, they say, but to her it looks forbidding and sinister, like the palace of an evil king in a story.

Round the back now to the weaving sheds, already filling up with weary-faced women clocking in for the day. There is banter and laughter, stale breath and the smell of unwashed clothes. Rosie keeps her head down, steps forward, moves through the shed to her station.

It is only when she is seated, the methodical rhythm of the machine in front of her, that steady clackity clack, that she allows herself to think of Violet, and what might have been.

There had been a doctor at the fairground that day, the last of its kind. He had been fetched to the tent, elbowed his way through the crowds, bent tenderly over Violet’s unmoving form. Lena stood, transfixed, looking down at her, as though she could not quite believe what she was seeing. Rosie was wailing, collapsed beside her, tried moving the head with its unseeing eyes on to her lap.

Then came men from the St John’s Ambulance carrying a stretcher, and Violet had been borne away on it, Lena following behind, Rosie entrusting Tommy to Tam, racing to catch up. Lena grasped her hand.

‘She must be alive,’ she said, breathless, tears streaming. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken her. Oh, Rosie. Did you see what happened? She slipped from the bar. She’s never done that. It can’t have been an accident.’

Rosie shook her head. Normally she liked to watch Violet on the bar before her own entrance, marvel anew at the liquid movements, the way she turned her body to oil so high up off the ground. But Tommy had been fussing, unhappy with a new bridle, and her attention had been on him, not on what was happening above.

The next three days were interminable. Violet was taken to a hospital in the town, and the staff would not let them in to see her. They were told only that it was ‘touch and go’, and would they be able to pay? Lena had panicked, feared Violet would be tossed out on to the street, but when they’d arrived back at the showground that night they had discovered there had been a whip-round among the showmen and women with whom they had spent the season. People were shocked; they wanted to see Violet done right by. Both Lena and Rosie were overwhelmed.

It was Harry who, on that third day, came to tell them that Violet would live. Lena would not look him in the eye and Harry, baffled and hurt, had slunk away, said he would head back to Glasgow, tell his mother, get somewhere ready for Violet to be settled.

And then, one week later, Violet emerged from the hospital, pushed by a crisply dressed nurse in an old wooden wheelchair. Her bill had been settled, between the takings of the circus and the showground whip-round, and the chair was hers. They did not know if she would walk again. Her spine was damaged, and they could not tell yet if it would heal.

Rosie burst with joy to see her, ran to throw her arms around her love, but Violet shrugged her off, kept her hands flat in her lap, said nothing.

She seemed to have shrunk during her time on the ward. Her eyes were sunken, her lips thin; her hair hung greasily down her back. All the vigour had been drained from her. She was like a different person.

That had been two months ago. They had returned to Vinegarhill, to a wagon Mary Weaver kept aside for emergencies, made a sort of home there. Violet had told Rosie to leave, to go home to her ma and her sister, that she didn’t want her to stay, but Rosie had been insistent. She loved Violet as much now as she always had. She wanted to care for her. Look after her. And so she had moved in.

Lena stayed in her own wagon. She came to visit regularly, brought card games, the odd nip of whisky. Violet seemed to cheer slightly when she visited, which stung Rosie a little, but she tried not to mind. She believed that one day Violet would walk again. And if she could convince Violet, then maybe, one day, she would believe it too.