Authors: Alison Rattle
It seemed like a dream to Marnie. A muddled dream full of hovering people, words she didn’t understand, voices she didn’t know and pains – always pains. It was a long, long dream that could have lasted for days, weeks, months or years.
Then finally there was a day when she sat up in bed and the pains had gone. The woman with the coiled hair came into the room and opened the shutters. The bright sunlight hurt Marnie’s eyes and made her cry. Then Ma came and told her to get out of bed and Smoaker Nash brought her a little walking stick he had whittled himself. Marnie had wondered what it was for. Then she’d pushed back her blanket to see two thin legs sticking out beneath her nightgown. One leg, her right one, was shrivelled away to bone and the foot was twisted at a strange angle. Had it always been like that? She had no idea. The shrivelled leg was useless anyway, and it had taken her ages to get used to Smoaker’s stick.
Marnie soon realised it was a bad thing to have a leg like that. She couldn’t run along the lanes with the other village children. She was shooed away from their doorsteps like a mangy cat. People stared at her as though she’d done something wrong and they called her bad names. Mostly, though, they ignored her altogether.
But then Ma gave her the sea and everything changed. Once Marnie had learned to swim, she didn’t care about the village children and their silly games any more. She had something much finer. She had the greatest friend of all. She had the sea, and she spent every minute she could bathing in its reassuring depths. When she was in the sea she could forget about being different. She could forget about being a freak. When she was in the sea she knew somehow that she was better than everyone else. And she’d be right there when her pa came home too, and he’d put his arms around her and she’d bury her face in his rough warmth.
7
June melted into July, each day growing hotter than the last. A fresh batch of London ladies arrived in Clevedon from Yatton Junction. Knowing nothing of the drowning, they wafted down to the beach with pink faces and glittering eyes in search of a cure for their various maladies. Once again the bathing machines were in demand. The dippers lined up ready in the sea, their skirts floating round their waists, and the horses trundled up and down the shingle with sweat foaming on their flanks. Marnie was stationed in Smoaker’s hut, collecting the sixpences and handing out clean towels, while Smoaker himself supervised the harnessing of the horses and counted the coins that clinked with pleasing regularity into his tin. Marnie could only watch the sea twinkle in the distance and smell its warm saltiness on the discarded towels left behind in the bathing machines.
Each day lasted an eternity. It was torture to wake every morning and see the sun hanging limply over the glassy sea, and to know she was forbidden to swim. Her leg throbbed and ached and seemed to grow heavier each day. She felt as dry and shrivelled as the heart of an old crone. Still Ma wouldn’t allow her to bathe.
‘They think you’re strange as it is, Marnie. They think it’s your fault Ambrose drowned right next to you. Let’s not fan the flames. You were born on land, my girl. Not in the sea.’
‘It’s not right, Pa,’ Marnie said out loud as she walked into the village to fetch a loaf for Ma. ‘Don’t let them take the sea from me. Come back now and tell them. Please come back now.’
She tried not to take any notice of the way the village women nudged each other as she hobbled past. When Marnie waited in line at the water pump, they stood with their arms folded over their bosoms and watched with eyes as sharp as fish hooks as Marnie filled her pail.
‘
Look at her
,’ they hissed. ‘
Dares to show her face after what she did
.’
‘
Might as well have killed him with her bare hands
.’
‘
It’s a wonder her mother keeps her under the same roof.
’
‘
The rat-catcher must wish he’d slit her throat instead of the poor dog’s
.’
Once, one of them spat into her pail so she’d had to empty it and start all over again. And another time, the shoemaker’s wife had nudged her so hard that she’d fallen to the ground and the water in her pail had spilled and been sucked away by the dry dust. She hadn’t refilled her pail that day and Ma hadn’t understood one bit.
‘Don’t you shame me any more, my girl,’ she’d said. ‘I won’t have them looking down their noses at us!’ She made Marnie go back to the pump. ‘This time you bring back a full pail or I’ll have the whip to you!’ Marnie knew that Ma didn’t want a cripple for a daughter. She would beat it out of her if she could.
Marnie hid herself in the sweaty shadows of Smoaker’s hut and counted away the days. There didn’t seem to be a reason to get up in the mornings any more. She wished more than ever she had a pa to look out for her; someone to protect her and love her. When the bathing machines weren’t crowding her view of the horizon, Marnie would stare out to sea for hours at a time, hoping to conjure up a small wooden fishing boat with torn sails and a hoary fisherman with a yellow beard grown to his knees who could be no one but her pa. But as hard as she tried, she could never make anything appear.
‘WHERE LADY DE CLEVEDON HERSELF TAKES THE CURE!’ Smoaker Nash announced proudly as he stood outside the hut greeting every new customer. Marnie grew sick of hearing it. Lady de Clevedon had only been the once, but to hear Smoaker, you’d think she was bathing from morn till dusk. But the words seemed to have an effect on the ladies. The nervy ones calmed down and handed over their sixpences without trembling, and the excited ones chattered even more, their cheeks aflame with colour and self-importance.
Marnie’s throat was tight with envy as she took their money and handed out fresh towels. If she was a rich lady from London she would hire a machine for the whole day and only come out of the water when her skin was as wrinkled as an old apple. She remembered Ma telling her once that the Queen Victoria had her very own beach on the Isle of Wight and her very own bathing machine that was like no other. It didn’t need a horse to pull it down to the water, but was sat on rails that ran right down into the ocean. It was a palace on wheels, Ma said. What a thing! To have your very own beach, thought Marnie. She sighed and looked out of the window at the machines lined up at the water’s edge. But what was she thinking? She did have her own beach.
This
was her beach, whatever Ma or anybody else thought. Although she wasn’t big and brawny like Ma, she was as tall and her arms and shoulders were hard and strong from years of ploughing through the waves. Soon, when the gossips had grown bored, she would be allowed to go in with Ma and help her do the dipping. No one could tell her to keep out of the sea then. Marnie couldn’t wait. She would be the best dipper ever. Better than all the other dippers in Clevedon. Better even than Ma.
Queen Victoria herself would come to know the name of Marnie Gunn.
‘Marnie!
’ Smoaker came panting through the door. His face was as red and sticky as jam beneath his battered straw hat. ‘Quick, girl! The Lady de Clevedon is on her way! Find the newest towels. The whitest ones. Make sure they’re spotless!’
Marnie blinked hard. Her daydream disappeared; a fragile cobweb swiped away. ‘What?’ she asked dully.
‘Towels!’ growled Smoaker.
At the back of the hut was an old wardrobe that Smoaker had carted down to the beach years ago. Inside it smelled of mothballs and damp and was filled to bulging with towels. Most of them were frayed and had seen better days. The Mistress Miles, who took them in to wash, was frayed around the edges herself and had definitely seen better days. The towels often came back more grubby than they went. Ma had given up on complaining since there was no one else willing to take in such a daily load. Marnie hunted through the wardrobe and pulled out the thickest, whitest towels she could find. She shook out the sand – no amount of washing seemed to get rid of it – and folded the towels neatly. Smoaker was hovering by the door, hurrying her with his hands.
There was a clamour of voices on the slipway outside. The gold-liveried footmen, the huddle of maids and the Bath chair containing Lady de Clevedon had arrived. Marnie smoothed her frock and straightened her shoulders. She’d never spoken to proper gentry before. What should she say? Should she curtsey? Would she have to speak at all? But Smoaker was there already, nodding his head, handing a footman the towels and showing him the way to the last available bathing machine. Marnie’s shoulders slumped. She wasn’t needed after all. She’d been daft to think Smoaker would let
these
customers see the cripple in the hut. She looked out of the window and saw him running down the beach. Off to tell Ma the Lady de Clevedon had come again.
It was stifling in the hut. Marnie’s skin was sticky and the back of her throat bone dry. Outside on the slipway, the maids had settled to gossiping and the footmen were lurching on to the beach with the Bath chair.
Marnie couldn’t bear it any longer. It wasn’t fair. No one will notice, she thought. No one will notice if I’m gone for five minutes. I’ll just dip me toes in and splash me legs. I’ll be back before anyone knows I’m gone.
Marnie stepped outside the hut. Lady de Clevedon’s arrival had brought the whole of the beach and the esplanade to a halt. Everyone’s eyes were on the progress of the Bath chair and the milky skirts that spilled over the sides. Everyone’s eyes but those of a boy in a blue suit. Marnie flushed. He was looking straight at her. It was the same boy she remembered from the last time the Lady had bathed. He was standing apart from the rest of Lady de Clevedon’s household party with his hands in the pockets of his blue striped britches. A large slate-grey wolfhound sat at his heel. Marnie paused, unsure whether to continue. Sod it, she decided. Who was he anyway? He wasn’t anything to do with her. What she did was none of his business.
It was hard to move quickly along the beach with her stick sinking into the shingle with every step. Marnie felt the boy’s eyes following her as she made her way along the rear of the bathing machines. She knew what he would see: a spit of a girl with a withered and twisted leg, hobbling along like an old woman.
‘Never seen a cripple before?’ she wanted to shout.
Marnie walked past the bathing machines and along the shore for a while. If she kept right to the water’s edge, the bathers wouldn’t see her. She knew to keep away from the machines. She knew the laws well enough. They were pasted on the wall of Smoaker’s hut. Anyone coming within fifty yards of a person bathing from a machine should be made to pay a penalty of forty shillings. Ma had drummed it into her.
‘They pay for their privacy, Marnie. And it would be a scandal to be sure, if anyone but a dipper were to see a lady in her bathing gown!’
Even the fishing vessels had to keep their distance.
Marnie tugged off her boots. Already her toes tingled in anticipation of the cold froth of seawater. There was a sound behind her. The crunching of shingle and shells. She turned quickly, afraid that Ma or Smoaker had seen her and had come to thrash the back of her legs and drag her back to the hut. She stumbled in surprise. It wasn’t Ma or Smoaker at all, but the boy in the blue suit, walking right towards her with a shy smile on his face.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you here before, haven’t I?’
Marnie nodded slowly, readying herself for a sneer and a nasty taunt. Close up, she saw he was older than her. Sixteen, maybe? Or seventeen? His pale complexion was shaded by a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with a band of blue ribbon to match his jacket and waistcoat. There was something strange about his eyes, though.
‘You’re the dipper’s daughter, aren’t you?’ he asked.
Again, Marnie nodded slowly. She saw then what it was with his eyes. The left one was blue, while the right one was grey, like a rain cloud had passed over an early-morning sky.
‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Marnie said quietly. She bit her lip and peered over her shoulder. She felt cornered. She wanted to wade into the sea right now and swim away from this stranger. But she knew she couldn’t. What was he going to do next? Usually the taunts came straight away, but this boy seemed to be looking at her kindly. It was a cruel trick, she was sure. Any minute now he would spit on her and push her to the ground.
‘Where should you be, then?’ he asked.
Marnie looked down at her bare feet. She tried to move her twisted foot behind the other to hide it. The boy didn’t seem to notice. There was no sign of mockery on his face.
‘Where should you be?’ he asked again.
‘In the hut.’ Marnie pointed across the beach. ‘I take the charge. For the bathing machines.’
The boy kicked one foot gently at the shingle. ‘My mother is taking the sea-cure now.’ He nodded towards the bathing machines. ‘Lady de Clevedon,’ he added.
Marnie didn’t answer. What was there to say? She thought she’d better hurry back before Smoaker missed her. But how could she go without appearing rude?
The boy bent down to ruffle the head of his dog. ‘My name is Noah,’ he said, ‘and this is Prince.’
Marnie looked at the dog then back at the boy, unsure of what she should say or do.
‘Does it work?’ asked the boy.
‘Beg your pardon?’ said Marnie.