Beyond the Blue Read online

  for my grandmother, May Rowbottom

  1926–2005

  from her wee lassie

  To a Scot, the past clings like sand to wet feet,

  and is carried about as a burden.

  The many ghosts are always a part of them, inescapable.

  GEDDES MACGREGOR

  BOOK ONE

  After

  AGAINST A CLEAR BLUE IT FALLS, a seamless white trajectory to the water below. Cutting the sky, leaving it split into memory: before and after.

  If you were not looking closely, you might think it was a bird blinded by the morning sun; a crisp bedsheet; a child’s kite lost to the greed of the wind. It seems to be suspended in the air, cupped gently on its path to the Firth of Tay.

  A sudden disaster of white and weight. A scream across the sky.

  It falls and falls, then disappears into the Tay.

  Before the Time of Birds

  “Dundee was known as a woman’s town or she town due to the dominance of women in the labour market. In the jute mills, women outnumbered men by three to one. A unique breed of women evolved from the hardship of life in the mills and the responsibility of being the main provider for the family. Dundee women gained the freedom to act in ways which often ignored convention. They were overdressed, loud, bold-eyed girls and the sight of a woman being roarin’ fou or drunk as a man was commonplace. Despite the hardships, many former mill girls recall their working days with fondness.”

  —FROM DUNDEE HERITAGE TRUST, VERDANT WORKS

  A LIGHT SO SHIFTING, so grey and wavering, they might be figments. Their figures are dark, shadowy in the morning light. A steady stream of the dim bodies come up Caldrum Street, past Murphy’s restaurant on the corner and the tenements toward the Bowbridge Jute Works entrance; some may speak to one another, but most are quiet, still reminiscing about the warmth of their beds. Morag might see them from the window of the tenement flat if she was inclined to look in the moments before she leaves.

  It is early morning in the early spring of 1918. Imogen and Caro are still asleep. Wallis has lit the stove and makes strong tea. Women walk by the tenements, their shoes loud on cobblestones, their coats like the long tail of a kite. As if they are all one, indistinguishable and vague.

  The four women live at 96 Caldrum Street, behind the chimney stacks, the blocks of stone and brick, the huge expanses of mills. Close to the heady nature of Hilltown, close enough that they must continually pass the Hilltown clock that never keeps time. A few blocks from Clepington Church, where they have always gone to worship. The women cluster in a city populated by mills and their thick smoke, pubs where the remaining men drink away their wages, churches and boats rolling into harbour heavy with jute or whales. Dundee.

  The four women in the small tenement flat on Caldrum Street are no different than the other women in the town: women left abandoned, forgotten, freed. They keep their anger and secrets close as bone. The scent of tea and smoke fills their lungs and infiltrates their dreams. To dream of smokestacks, to wake with the scent of ash in your hair.

  Morag and Wallis walk across Caldrum Street and into the grounds of the Bowbridge Jute Works. Always, there is the camel with its hump, its downward gaze, its hard eyes: the suggestion of something exotic as they all slip into the dullness, the boiled-down necessity and daily cruelty of the Works.

  This morning, Morag walks under the high arch with the large, gloomy camel and sags just a little. Another reminder for her that there is only this town, only the plethora of mills and smoke and women learning disappointment. Morag steels herself to another long day with the incessant noise, the looms that need constant tending, the sight of children working through the complicated territory of exhaustion.

  Wallis says, “Another day.”

  Morag looks at her youngest daughter with a mix of recognition and shallow guilt. Wallis walking with her under the arch, into the fumes and danger of the Works. Morag feels she has failed; she never wished this fate on her children, but now, here Wallis is, stoic as ever, walking in her black boots into the grounds of the Bowbridge Works.

  Morag and Wallis part ways quickly once they enter the grounds; Wallis turns toward the carding room, and Morag disappears into the weaving warehouse, where she will tend her two looms for the next fourteen hours. Wallis, however, will have a more difficult day; she will be bent over a carding machine where she will pull the loose fibre until the jute is an even colour. Morag imagines Wallis watching the jute fade in her hands until it is paler, even, than dreams.

  Morag turns before she enters the warehouse and looks for Wallis, her dark coat in a sea of dark coats and long skirts. She sees her, finally, as she hesitates next to the lacklustre beige stone of the Works; she watches her daughter cross the threshold into the carding room, taking one sure step into the building.

  Wallis pulls at the thick, dull jute, lets it fall into the large barrels. The rollers revolve at various speeds, fleecing the jute with metal pins before it is condensed into the fibre they call silver. Silver, as if there might be something beautiful, something breathtaking about it all. Instead, there is this: women crammed into small, close rooms; heat, dust and fumes of grease and oil; noisy machinery that makes ears ache and heads throb with the constant whir and din.

  Wallis looks down the row of girls at their carding machines, each surrounded by barrels quickly filling with the silver; she has learned enough about them in her years at the Works to feel that she knows each of them as she might know a friend, a sister. Lottie Duncan with her three small children and absent husband; Elsie McRae with her hard, difficult mother and her ailing grandmother; Jean Grant, another young Union member; Mae Abernathy with her lost fiancée, her unending, unflinching hope. Wallis does not need to be clairvoyant to know how all their lives will end. They will stay, work, and find themselves slowly, painfully dying from bronchitis, pneumonia or some other respiratory disease. She holds a hand to her chest, as if she might be able to feel the rumblings of disease there. Mill fever.

  God help me.

  Wallis tugs at the jute and lets it fall through her fingers. The jute might be something else, something kind and lovely, if she were only able to shut herself off to the carding room, the gossip between the women around her, the whine of the machines.

  “Been to any dances, Wallis?” Mae asks over the din. She is a few years older than Wallis and pretty with dark hair and light eyes. She smiles.

  “No.”

  “Caro hasn’t dragged you out?”

  “Not lately. But I’m sure she will.” Caro is always begging Wallis, always suggesting that Morag trusts them more when they go out together. Usually, though, it is Caro who dances and Wallis who stands at the side, watching her sister spin in the arms of another man left behind by the War. She has watched these men, their broken, ruined limbs—an arm that will no longer bend, a leg that is permanently stiff, stilted, or, worse, a man who has been bombed and blasted into silence—and felt a slow, sad sinking. Wallis says, “Any word from Peter?”

  Mae’s eyes well up, and Wallis immediately regrets the question. Mae says, “No,” in a voice barely audible.

  Wallis closes her eyes to the broken-apart look of Mae’s face; she knows that look, knows the pained feeling behind her pale eyes. She is about to say, “I’m so sorry, Mae,” when there is a crack, a loud, hard sound in the air around them. The chatter of the women stops just as suddenly. Wallis is absolutely still and silent for a moment, before she hears the cry. The long, anguished cry of someone in unbearable pain.

  Mae breathes, “Good God.”

  Wallis does not look down the row of women in the direction of the cry. She does not see Elsie caught in the carding machine. She will not know how to explain it later, but she does no
t want to see her tangled body—a body that she will later be told had been bent, broken, trapped by the rollers—and the possibility of her own future. Such accidents are possible, probable, and Wallis does not want to commit the scene to memory.

  Wallis takes a step backward, away from the other women who are rushing forward, burdened with their unfortunate curiosity. She is paralyzed with fear at the possibility of the sight of Elsie; Elsie’s eyes, her body wrenched into the machine, and the sheen of her dark, polished boots. Wallis counts the buttons on her own boots—one, two, three—and gets to six before the men rush in, mumbling and cursing as they try to pull Elsie free.

  “Stand back, stand back.” The biggest man, Joe McGivern, warns all the women away. His stomach will be straining against his shirt, pushing into the air between them. A button pulling, and Wallis becomes transfixed by the prospect of it: the pucker, the pull, the possibility of a tear.

  “Dammit, get them out of here.” It is one of the managers—perhaps Fergus or Paisley in the quick flash of the moment, the confusion of bodies, Wallis can never be sure—holding his hand up against his mouth. There is a rush of movement, the crush of women’s bodies to one another, and the dull, washed-out sound of Elsie’s cries. Wallis and the other women in the carding room are herded out, pulled away from the pulse of the machines and into the courtyard.

  Jean breathes, “Lord help us all.”

  Lottie asks, “Will she be all right?”

  “Sure she will,” Mae says. “They’ll get her out.”

  Wallis does not speak but, instead, looks up to the blue sky and the camel that hangs between the warehouses. She does not want to answer Lottie, to tell her that she knows—without having looked at Elsie, without seeing her eyes, the taut fear that must have been there—that Elsie would not be all right. That Elsie was damaged, had been torn apart and forgotten by the machines, as so many of the women had been before.

  How many is that now? Does anyone remember them all?

  Wallis looks around to the women standing in the courtyard with her, hoping that the sky will remain the clear stretch of blue while they wait—coatless—close to one another. She wonders how many of them will give themselves over to the same fate. In ten years, how many of them will still be here, perhaps even standing in the air of a crisp day, while another woman is pulled free from angry machinery.

  Later, Wallis steps into the courtyard again, but the sky has darkened, relinquishing the faint light of day for the navy of evening. It’s cold for a spring night; Wallis pulls the collar of her coat tighter. She moves from one foot to the other—her foot aching from the tight edge of her boot—as she waits for Morag. She knows Morag will ask her about Elsie, will wonder what she saw, what the carding room sounded like in the moments just after the accident. Death is not unusual in the mills. A girl loses her hand while spinning. A man is caught by a belt and revolved around the shafts three times. Women go deaf. Children are hit, boxed in the ears, dangled out windows three storeys up when they fall asleep at their machines. But, still, there is that thick stab for Wallis each time an accident occurs; another reminder of their own slim trajectories in the mill.

  Wallis is stamping her aching foot when Morag appears, rushing across the courtyard in her long dark skirt.

  “What happened to Elsie McRae?”

  “You must have heard.”

  “She was caught. Did they get her out?” Morag seems desperate for information. Her eyes are bright, wide.

  “Yes,” Wallis says.

  Morag sighs. “Thank God the girl is all right.”

  Wallis and Morag start across the courtyard, toward the arch with the camel and out into Caldrum Street. Just a few steps across the street and they will enter their tenement building, climb the three storeys to their flat. Look out the window and see the Works, always.

  Wallis says, “She died.”

  Morag stops in the middle of Caldrum. She grasps Wallis’s arm. “She died?”

  “Yes. The injuries were too severe. She died after they pulled her out.”

  Morag looks up to the darkening sky and then back to Wallis. New shadows come across her face, cutting her features in two. One eye. Another. The curve of lip. “The poor thing.” Morag takes Wallis’s arm to cross the street and they walk up the stairs to their floor. The hallway is deserted, quiet, as they push their door open.

  “Another girl was killed at the Works.” Imogen stands in the centre of the room, as if she has been waiting for them. Desperate for the gossip, the macabre details of death.

  “Imo,” Morag says harshly. The room becomes still. Quiet for horror.

  Caro sits by the window, her thin legs curled up under her. She says, “Was another girl killed?”

  Wallis nods. “Elsie McRae. She got caught in a carding machine. She died when they pulled her out.” Wallis looks away from her sister and back to Imogen. She is still in her school uniform—Wallis remembers the obligatory itch of wool against bare legs—and Imogen tugs at her skirt anxiously. Next year she will be finished with school, expected to work, perhaps at the same machine that cradled Elsie McRae. Wallis desperately wants to keep her from this fate; she would like her to continue with her schooling, to have something more than the ragged hands of a mill worker.

  “Were you there?” Imogen asks. She wants all the messy details, Wallis can see it in the light on her face. For Imogen, there is always a story, always a discovery; lies and truth mingle and sway.

  “They kept it quiet in case it frightened the others. They took her out as quickly as they could.”

  “Did you see it?” Imogen asks.

  “Don’t be morbid.” Morag’s voice is hard, sharp. She prefers death to be distanced, clean, quiet. Wallis thinks that, perhaps, Morag does not want to remember her own mother’s death. Nor Brigid’s.

  There’s always Brigid.

  “Elsie McRae was only a wee bit older than Imo. Just sixteen,” Caro says from her spot by the window. Wallis removes her coat and crosses the room to her chair, the faded tapestry chair that used to be their father, James’s, before he went to the War and disappeared. There are marks from bodies, buttocks and thighs, the long expanse of forearms from elbow to wrist, in that chair. Ghostly imprints. Wallis settles into them.

  “And not much of a face on her,” Caro says.

  “Caro.” Morag’s voice is spiked like fences.

  Caro turns away and looks out the window. Small windows in the parlour open to the closes, the alleyways and courtyards between the tenements. Long lines of clothes flap in the wind, tethered to pulleys from kitchen windows, turning damp in the incessant rain. Women hang out their windows, hoping for someone to talk to. The flats are all the same, interchangeable: greys and browns and faded reds that might once have been shocking, the scents of meat boiling, potatoes cooking, women giving up. Before the War, it had been different; men had marred the tenements with their harsh voices and their bulk. There had been loud fights, dishes smashed, women shoved halfway out the windows after their husbands returned, empty-pocketed, from pubs. Sometimes there had even been joy: the bright orange explosion of it, engagements, new babies, marriages mended. Then, everything hadn’t been so desperate, so intimate in the flats. Wallis knows they all miss the presence of men, their strange smells and slanted smiles.

  Of course, some men are still in Dundee; those too old, too young, unfit for war. Men who have been returned from the fighting, broken and still breaking. They wander the city like ghosts, or something more forgotten than that.

  When the flat is dark and the girls are all asleep in the small bedroom, Morag lies in her slim cot in the kitchen alcove and looks at her hands. They are rough and hardened, scarred from the uncompromising jute; she touches the calluses and thinks she has been given more than her share of disappointment. She holds it tight like unused breath: a place where memories of her mother and sister and all her wasted years are stored.

  Morag is not sure when she first learned disappointment, but knows i
t had something to do with Brigid’s terrible, beautiful face, when Morag looked in the mirror and saw her own plainness. There is something stark and unforgiving about Morag. She has always understood the fickle nature of beauty.

  She has lived across the street from the Bowbridge Works for twenty years, since her daughters were born, walking across Caldrum Street and under the sloped eyes of the carved camel of the Works gate into the expanse of the mill grounds. The damned camel to give the impression of something fresh, something other than another day of weaving. The sound of the bell, the bummer, in the morning is like a hand on Morag’s cheek, reminding her of the day ahead. Morag looks at her own hands again and imagines what they might look like had they belonged to someone else, someone who knew a different kind of life, someone who had managed to keep it all whole.

  If her mother had not died. If Brigid had not worn that gauzy nightgown, had not been so desperate, so torn in two.

  Brigid.

  Every day, Morag moves quickly between the two looms she tends, with her sister’s name still loose in her mind, as if she might use it tomorrow to call out to her across the tenement courtyards, just when Morag might see her walking up Caldrum. Brigid something like the sight of an eclipse, just as startling and bright. Morag cannot remember a day when Brigid was not in her thoughts, appearing over the quivering sounds of the mill, the endless din of the rooms, the impossibility of escaping it.

  Morag stretches her fingers to relieve their ache. They are gnarled, marked with evidence of years of hard use: first in her father’s house, then in her own tenement flat, then in the Works. Her hands carry the memory of bleach and new peas and baby skin and stiff laundry. What these hands have known. The old grey folds of a dying man’s body. Thick salt and the shock of the waters of the Tay. Rope unravelling between her fingers. Morag puts her hands under the blankets and, in doing so, imagines she puts all her secrets away.