A Familiar Voice

Why would I hear a familiar voice?  She grabbed my arm as I pushed through the crowd of people on the platform.  The sea of faces all seemed to be staring at me or through me.  “Ada?  ADA!”  She yanked my arm a bit harder as if to wake me up. “Come, then!” The small, young woman led me through the crowd.  I followed as if I had done so a hundred times before, but the sights drew all of my attention, as they were all new.  

A man in a leather apron dragged something into the street.  I recognized it, as the top-most part of a horse, from mid-mane to snout.  The horse’s eyes were filled with terror.  Blood steamed from the neck onto the cobblestones in the cool evening air.  The man in the apron looked at me, then down at his blood-soaked hands.  He grabbed a bucket, dipped it into a rain barrel and splashed the street with water.  He ducked back into a shop.  Meats, the sign above read.  The bloody water ran into the cracks of the stones, but now seemed more voluminous, rather than diluted or washed away.  It ran along the street where another man in rags crawled along the gutter.  He was babbling incoherently, but stopped as the bloody water washed over his hands and knees.

“Rose?” I know the woman’s name for some reason.  Rose.  She was talking nervously as if we were alone in the woods at night instead of on a crowded city street.  “Prince Eddy, out here?  Imagine, the Prince so far from the palace.  If I were to choose; lost or up to no good—then, no good, that one.   What about it, Ada?”  Her cockney inflection seemed always to ask a question.  “We’re getting the eye, nigh into the eve’nin.  They’ll take us a coupla Dollymops, you and me.  Better watch it, then, keep the sharp.”

She pulled me past a man in a military uniform.  He was a barrel-chested man, powerful in his medaled jacket.   He tipped his hat; the smile on his face would indicate a gentle greeting, “Whore.” The whisper came this time from the officer.  Rose never saw it or heard it, although he clearly addressed us—or rather me.

We slipped into an alley and now Rose’s pace quickened.  She got immediately silent as she rushed along head down.  There were bills posted along the wall for the stage play of Jekyl and Hide.  The elaborate drawing of the man on the poster was half in shadow since the sun had gone behind the buildings.  Where the alley was concerned it was sunset.  The man on the poster turned to me, and again the whisper came, “Whore.”  This, I knew, Rose would not see. This was my experience alone.  All of this was some elaborate dream I was having on my train home.

We made it though the alley and passed another shop; a barber’s.  He stood behind an empty chair sliding his razor back and forth on a black leather strop; his eyes fixed on mine.  Rose tugged me hard and down another alley.  A man stood with a woman in a doorway.   He turned to me as if he were expecting to see me there, as if I were late to meet him.  The woman did not look up.  He smiled at me, pressed the woman to the wall and reached beneath her dress.  Rose pulled me.

Finally we reached a door to a run-down, two-story building.  Rose tried the door but it would not open.  She banged on the door and called out, “Mum, it’s Rose and Ada, let us in.  Come down Mum!  It’s dark.”  It had drastically changed and was getting colder and darker with each pound of the door that Rose gave.  The door swung open.

My father stood before me.  He could see I was shivering in the winter night air.  “My God, Miranda, did you walk from the station?”  I must have nodded.  “It must be two degrees outside.  Come inside!”  He gathered me up in his arms and pulled me into the house, my house.