Losing It by Melvin Burgess

Author:Melvin Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

Mary Hooper

When Charlotte’s mother died there was no money to bury her, so her body was left where she finally breathed her last, in a corner of the small room where they lived in St Giles Lane. There she lay for three days, covered with a ragged blue curtain, until the neighbours had collected enough money from the others in the house to have the body taken to a paupers’ burial ground. No one went to the funeral, no friends or neighbours—and certainly not Charlotte or her little brothers—for no one had the black clothes, the fare to the cemetery, or could spare a working day. Besides, it was hardly worth it, for a pauper’s interment did not include any ceremonials or even a drink to speed the dead person on their last journey but just two drunken gravediggers opening up a well-used trench in the ground and a few mumbled words from a parson.

Charlotte was fifteen, and George and Albert were seven and eight, respectively. Two other children—a boy and a girl—had been born in the years between Charlotte’s birth and those of the boys, but neither had survived beyond the age of two. In the days following her mother’s death, Charlotte often thought about the dead children, wondering how she would have managed if there had been five mouths to feed instead of three. But then, she thought on other occasions, what if the two missing children had had some special talent: amazing tumbling skills to draw the ha’pennies of those waiting outside the theatres, for instance, or fingers that were deft and skilled at lace-making or could sew on buttons as fast as a flea could run across a bedsheet. If that had been the case, the one talented child might have earned enough to keep them all.

But no, for better or worse it was just the three of them, and Charlotte intended to earn money the way her mother had done before her, by sewing shirts at home. She envisaged no problems with this, for she’d been helping to oversew buttonholes since she was a child of six and had become quick and deft at it.

For a week after their mother died, however, Charlotte did not—could not—sew buttonholes or anything else but simply lay on the mattress she’d shared with her ma and wept. The boys cried pitifully too and between times slept and occasionally woke up to eat whatever their neighbours had left on the landing outside their room: hot potatoes, boiled puddings, an onion pasty and, once, a small meat pie. The neighbours, poor as mice, had hungry children of their own so could only manage to give away a little food, but luckily for George and Albert (who were always hungry, despite their grief), Charlotte had lost her appetite and invariably gave them her portion.

A week or so went by, and then one day, George and Albert looked outside the door mid-morning as usual to see what had been left for them.

“There’s nothing!” Albert said, surveying the bare floorboards up and down the corridor.

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