Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea Page B

whole damn place and boat it back to Ireland, make a big family there. Sully has no regular situation. He spends his days collecting bits of smoked cigars from the gutter, which he then dries out and sells back to the tobacconists for a price. And when there’s no cigar butts to be had, he looks over the streets for sticks and handkerchiefs and shawls that have been dropped in the night. Or he digs out the cracks between the paving stones with rusty nails to find a penny. Or he collects dried-out dog-dirt for the tanning yards, and bones for the glue makers. And he never sticks to anything. Spends most of his time wandering about, looking for a bit of amusement. And when I’ve finished my day at the mill and have no desire to go home to Mary and her wailing, I join him, for I like his way of living outside.
    Push to shove, we fall in with the mudlarks, and we fare grand with them. We sit by the Medlock, Sully and his gang and me, waiting for the tide’s retiring, throwing stones and shouting oaths at the old women who make a headstart by wading straight into the water and fishing down to their elbows, not minding what they stand on, for their feet have long gone to leather. We wrap scraps around our own to keep them safe, but we’re young and still have imaginations about what we can’t see, so we decide it better to bide for the mud. What we find in it, we sell. Bits of coal, we knock off to the neighbors at a penny a pot. A pound of bones gets you a farthing at the rag shop. Dry rope is worth more than wet. But copper nails are the real treasure: fourpence, you get, a pound. You get naught for the bloodworms, their having no use or value, but we collect them anyhows, fill our pockets with them and then take them out in fistfuls to show the fine ladies on Deansgate.
    The worms are all the wildlife there is in Manchester, apart from the pigs in the courts. But oddtimes—it’s true—a wind comes down the Medlock and brings a seagull with it. You don’t remark on it hanging there till one of the others points it out to you. Then you’re not able to stop remarking on it, the way it stays up without moving a limb, and you go all envious, like a fool.
    Mary’s livid about my larking. “When you sink so low,” she says, “it isn’t easy to pick yourself up again. What if the mill people find out what you’re doing? What if one of the foremen sees you running about like Miss Jim Crow, all torn and covered in muck? What would Frederick think? You’re going to ruin everything!”
    And eventual things do go Mary’s way. I get a nail in the foot and, in the same unlucky week, a bit of glass in the other, which leaves me lame. I can’t get up from crawling and have to go about the place like a dog. I’m still suffering for it in the knees.
    â€œServes you right,” Mary says. “That’ll learn you.”
    All the same, she makes sure to put a word in for me at the mill, and she gets a promise—it’s no secret how—that I’ll get my job back once I’m healed.
    I spend most of the days pent up in our room. But if the weather’s nice, I sit on the step outside and watch the course of the passing day. Sully from Spinning Field doesn’t find his way to me—he must be a dullard or just a laggard, for I told him precise how to get here—but as chance has it, the Jew Beloff passes by regular to visit the boghole, his own court having none. And one day, when he gives me a farthing for no more than a salute, I get to speaking with him.
    â€œSee you about the place, sir,” I says, for he’s hard to miss, as tall as he is, all long and black, and with very little whisker on him; not a bit like Karl. “I see you about, but I’m not familiar with your people. Is it Irish you are?”
    He enjoys that, he does. He stops and gives me his gums and leans on the wall beside me and tells me his kin isn’t a