In this manner a new year begins.
• • •
It is my first outside, in the street.
Tonight it is the New Year’s night,
tomorrow is the day,
And we are come here for our right,
O sing Hagmena-heigh!
O sing Hagmena-heigh!
• • •
Snatches of song are borne back to us on the wind, along with sharp, stinging flakes of snow that have begun to fall in the dismal twilight, borne inland off the metallic convexity of the sea. They touch coldly, cling to hair and brows.
If you go to the black-ark
bring me an X mark
Ten mark, ten pound
Throw it down upon the ground,
So me and my friends may have some,
Hagmena-heigh!
• • •
From up the river comes the dull thwuck-thwuck of hammers in the shipyard; and up above and behind us the lamps are being lit, street by street, the ghostly blue flames of gas illuminating doorways and windows, alleys and passages, the curving stairs and sea-stinking grottoes of Whitby—as well as the haphazard, glittering, guttering, peripatations of the snow.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, dark already, on the eve of the brand-new year.
Despite the weather and the darkness, the streets are busy, the housewives hustling home with their bundles, the cook-maids straight from the bake house with fragrant, warm loaves of bread wrapped and cosseted beneath their arms. Just outside the tantalizing, gaslit window of the milliner’s shop a puppet show is enacted, accompanied by hectic strains of hurdy-gurdy: a skeleton, stark white, dances, bones departing one by one across the tiny stage until only the skull remains, gyrating wildly, upon a background of worn black felt. Snatches of song rise up—
Tonight it is the New Year’s night, tomorrow is the day—
And just as quickly fade.
Groups of children, roiling together like schools of fish, tight packed, jostling, in threadbare coats and trailing scarves, emerge from the ill-lit alleys, disappear shrieking down damp and ancient passages descending toward the sea.
We are abroad, Hip and I. The foam that trails the wave. From shop to shop they go, begging money; we do not beg. It is something else that we are after.
If you go to the bacon-flick, cut me a good bit
Cut, cut and low, beware of your maw
Cut, cut and round, beware of your thumb,
So me and my friends may have some!
Sing Hagmena-heigh!
• • •
The detritus is what we are. Unstable stuff. Left in the wake.
We don’t want what they want.
Come on, says Hip, you mus’ see this!
• • •
His eyes of any color or no color at all glint eagerly in the gaslight, transparent yet simultaneously opaque as coins, as flat. Shifting. Coins on black felt. His fingers graze my elbow. I feel a sensation, as of bubbles rising rapidly through dark water, silver spheres rushing upward around me, and myself sinking, sinking through the cold and black; this is a premonition, though I do not know of what.