Page 33 of The Show Woman

32

The rat pit

Glasgow, they say, is a warm place. Its people are friendly and kind. A little rough around the edges, but they’d rather take a drink with you than fight you. It has large parks plump with greenery, cool, clear lakes, sputtering fountains, a grand main square and turreted city chambers that befit this second city of the Empire. There are fine sandstone mansions, long, wide streets that traverse the west end, far from the belching smoke of the grinding factories that keep the town in the style to which it has become accustomed. But Glasgow has many cities inside it. It unfolds differently for each of its occupants, offering up a plethora of refined delights for its richest, jobs and public amenities for its working man. And for its desperate, its most downtrodden and its damned, Glasgow is a dark city with a cold heart.

Lena has always understood this. She had it drummed into her as a child by her father, who knew he would never be accepted there, would never truly look, sound or behave like a true Glaswegian. For Joe Loveridge, Vinegarhill was merely a stopping point. A place to hole up for the winter, keep warm, feed up your horses and wait for the first buds of spring. But it was never home. Not for her daddy, or his daddy before that, or his daddy before that. The Loveridges’ home was on the road.

As Lena makes her way through the cramped, narrow streets of Cowcaddens, near the top of the town and away from the half-frozen river on a stinging December morning, she thinks about her father’s ambivalent relationship with this city that took them in each winter, gave her a half-formed, vague education, played host to their wagons and rides. Had he ever strayed this far into Glasgow’s underbelly? Into its darkly cavernous insides? Because the further she goes, the more it would seem that here, deep inside the gates of the city, might be what they meant in school when the minister talked about hell. The buildings have turned black from the endless smoke, panes of glass are broken, flimsy pieces of wood hammered up to keep out the cold. Urchins scurry across the cobbles, swerving to avoid broken bottles, horse shit, human shit. Most of them are barefoot. Occasionally what Lena takes for a pile of clothes moves, and she sees it is a human being, bundled into a doorway, resting its weary head.

She keeps her head down as she walks, a scarf wrapped tightly round her head. She has wheedled the address out of Mary, who knew a lassie who ended up here once, although what happened to her in the end, she could not recall. ‘Filthy place,’ she said, scribbling it down for Lena. ‘You’ll find all sorts in there, most of whom you wouldn’t give the time of day to.’

After the way she has treated her own daughter, Lena would rather not give the time of day to her, either.

On Muse Lane she stops, counts the numbers up to thirty-five. The wind is biting now, howling down the alley, lashing at filthy curtains on glassless windows. The sign above the tenement close reads MODEL LODGING HOUSE. A curious name for a place everyone else calls ‘the rat pit’.

Inside, it is chaos. In a cramped front room are at least ten women, and twice as many children, wailing and shouting and running around in the state they were born. The air is pungent. A small fire sparks in the grate and the women huddle round it, some of them in little more than rags. An older woman, stout, with no front teeth, looks up.

‘You wantin’ a bed?’

Lena shakes her head. ‘I’m looking for someone. Carmen. She’s Spanish.’

The older woman looks down again, says nothing, coughs. But a younger lassie, with a sickly, underfed-looking baby in her arms, says, ‘Carmen’s in the kitchen. You can go through, Mrs Pinnock won’t mind.’

Lena walks through a doorway into a small, dark kitchen. Carmen is standing with her back to her, frying a grizzled piece of meat on the stove.

‘Carmen,’ she says. She is painfully thin. Her eyes are deep hollows and there is a faint bruise on her left cheek. Her dress hangs off her bony frame.

‘Lena,’ she says, shocked.

She fusses at the stove, makes to turn it off but Lena says: ‘No, please. Finish cooking and eat. You look like you need it.’

Embarrassed, Carmen puts the leathery piece of meat on a plate, takes some dirty cutlery from the cracked sink and eats hungrily, stuffing forkfuls into her mouth, not stopping to swallow before shovelling in the next. Lena wonders how long it is since she last had a meal. Lena has known hunger like this, although thankfully not often. But she understands how it gnaws at you until it is painful, until you can focus on nothing but the next bite of food, when even the greyest, most pallid piece of tripe seems like a hearty dish, fit for a queen.

Finally, Carmen finishes. She wipes at her mouth, runs her tongue over her teeth, and there is something carnal about her sated appetite, as though she were an animal who has finally feasted on a kill it has stalked for days. She pushes the plate away.

‘You have come to see me,’ Carmen says eventually.

‘Yes,’ says Lena. Now she is here, she is unsure what to say to Carmen in this dank, sorrow-ridden place. She just knows she wants to take her away from here immediately, never to return.

‘You want to know what it was like? With him? You want me to tell you everything?’

Lena shakes her head. ‘No. No. God. Nothing like that. Harry and I are done. It’s over. But I came because I wanted to see you. To see if you were alright. And ask if you wanted to come back.’

It is Carmen’s turn to shake her head. ‘I cannot face it. The shame. I cannot.’ And she bursts into tears.

Lena does not know whether to comfort her, put an arm round her thin shoulder, just like she did that day back in Stirling. Something stops her. Instead she places her hands in her lap, waits for Carmen’s sobs to subside.

‘I ran away,’ says Carmen. ‘I am sorry for that. I should have explained. But Violet made it sound so bad. Worse than it was. As though I had met Harry on the streets.’

‘You didn’t?’ says Lena. ‘But I thought . . .’

‘Harry was the acrobat. I lied to you, all the way back at the beginning. I told you I met an acrobat and then I was pregnant. But it was not an acrobat. It was Harry. He did a show near where our circus was, in Edinburgh, and I met him. He was very nice. A gentleman. He came to visit a few times. But then the circus moved on, and I did not see him again. And then when I was pregnant I ended up here, and I lost the baby. And Harry never knew.’

‘Oh, Carmen,’ says Lena. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘For you. For the baby. For Harry too. It could all have been so different.’

Carmen stands up, puts her dirty plate in the sink, shrugs. ‘Could it? I did not love Harry. Not like you do.’

Lena flushes.

‘He did not love me either. It was just an arrangement, and we were young and stupid. It is gone now. All in the past. This is my present.’ She looks around the room.

‘What can I do to help?’ asks Lena.

‘Nothing,’ says Carmen. ‘You do not understand. You cannot know, how it feels to do what I do.’

Lena shivers at her use of the present tense, wonders how she paid for that awful strip of meat she has just gorged herself on.

‘This is just how it must be,’ says Carmen.

‘But surely not. You left once. You can do it again. Please, Carmen. Come back. Come back to Vinegarhill with me. Did you not hear about Violet?’

She tells Carmen about Violet’s fall, that she has lost the use of her legs, may never walk again, but holds back on telling her the full, awful truth.

‘I am sorry for her. I did not always like her but she does not deserve that. But with no Violet, and no me, it sounds as if your ladies’ circus is over.’

Lena bridles at this. Nothing is over until she decides that it is. And even though she knows her dream, her show, lies scattered amid the burning embers of these past few, terrible weeks, she will not give in.

‘Come back to Vinegarhill. At least for a couple of weeks. Get yourself settled and then we can talk about what happens next.’

But Carmen shakes her head. ‘I need money. I am trying to save. To go home to Spain. If I come to Vinegarhill it will just slow me down. This...’ she gestures round the miserable room ‘...is the right place for me now.’

Lena fumbles in her pockets, brings out a sixpence, offers it to Carmen. ‘Please, take it,’ she says.

But Carmen simply shakes her head. ‘I have my pride, and you have yours,’ she says.

‘Are you still going to church?’ Lena asks.

‘I am. I go often.’

‘Can I come and see you there some time, then? Come and pray with you like we did that time in Stirling?’

She sees Carmen soften, and Lena’s heart leaps when she nods.

‘Yes. Come and see me there some time, if you like. Then, at least, we can say goodbye before I return to Spain.’

Lena walks over to her, bends down and kisses Carmen’s cheek. She smells of spoilt cooking oil, but her skin is soft as butter.

‘You will always have a home with me,’ she says to her.

She feels in her pocket, produces the rainbow ribbon Carmen dropped that awful night in the wagon, and hands it to her. The colours shimmer in the dank little kitchen, as though someone has let in the sun.

‘Never forget that,’ she says.

She leaves Carmen twirling the ribbon in her hands, letting the silk run through her fingers.