Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald

Author:Ann-Marie Macdonald [Macdonald, Ann-Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780394281780
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-08-26T05:00:00+00:00

Well-off people purchase liquor discreetly and consume it in a civilized manner at home. Ordinary people pass the jar in a convivial kitchen. Loose pegs and young trouble-seekers come to Jameel’s blind pig in the Pier to fight, play cards and pass out. Miners, merchant seamen and steelworkers, some as sweet and others as sour as soldiers. A few genuine formaldehyde drunks, the odd alienated contemplative just passing through, a vet with no visible injuries. No music — no one even cranks the old player-piano. This place is not sufficiently jovial to inspire more than a caterwauling chorus at closing time. The clientele are white with the exception of one or two of the American sailors. Certainly no one is here from The Coke Ovens itself. There are no women. There are no tourists — this isn’t Harlem. No slumming scions. Frances is the only fallen princess to have crossed the threshold. Her aunt Camille doesn’t count because she is not here voluntarily. She stays upstairs until it’s time to come down and empty the spittoons and swab the piss from the doorstep.

Frances arrives outside the steel door, takes a last breath of coke-oven air and enters the dim roar of the speak, passing under Boutros’s arm as if it were a bridge. The air is palpable, not just with smoke but with the dark mass of male voices and limbs, work-soiled clothes, the smell of axle grease, sulphur and sweat. A shifting, pitching anchorage of hard dirty hulls in the night, and Frances swims among them without so much as a paddle or a spar. What would be more frightening? To be noticed and netted? Or accidentally crushed? She finds Jameel and gets up the nerve to order a drink in what she hopes is the voice of experience, impatient for her first real taste of sin. Jameel tells her to forget it and get to work.

She looks about. Work…. No stage. No footlights. Certainly no hushed turning of heads at her approach to the piano. Where to begin? Frances wishes for a fairy godmother to swathe her in ostrich feathers; in breasts, hips, lips and lipstick — a husky contralto which she imagines to be Louise Brooks’s voice. No such luck. Five foot nothing, flat as two bumps on an ironing board, hips like chopsticks — at sixteen Frances is as grown as she’ll ever be. She stands before the piano since there’s no stool. It’s missing a few teeth, the rest are edged in decay, still others are intact but silent. Its pocked and yellowed music-rolls date from a long-dead turn-of-the-century parlour.

Frances turns to the indifferent bass throng and feels her knees turning to water. To stop herself running away, she kicks up her heels in the fake tap dance that earned her so many pennies on the docks. No response. Not even a “boo” — she is invisible. A tobacco-streaked wad of mucus lands next to her shoe by chance. She gags briefly, closes her eyes,

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