I notice him first one morning by the fishmonger’s stall. It is raining again—always raining in that place; and cold—the sky aslant with coruscation of sleet. I have just settled a damp sleeve of plump, deeply pink langoustines into my—my mother’s—my housewife’s—basket when I see him, though without seeing, hunched at the corner of the stall. It is the son, I think, if I think anything, of the man who pulled my hair; but really I think nothing. I am moving on, moving on, barely noticing. Then, though, I see him again, in the afternoon, as I emerge from the bakery with three small lemon cakes wrapped in a towel for tea. Then and most disconcertingly in Sandgate Street as I lean in close to the window of Cariole’s toy shop to get a better look, forehead touching glass, angel of breath appearing under nostrils, I am so intent upon what is there—a mechanical duck that, when fully wound, quacks, preens, then shits a pellet of dark green wood—there he is, reflected in the glass beside me, this boy, his reflection alongside, on top of, practically merging with, my own—
It is only then, I think, it strikes me that I have seen him before.
He is ubiquitous enough to be invisible, almost. Like other Whitby boys, he has sandy, indistinct hair, pale blue, nearly colorless eyes, translucent white skin, sharply raised cheekbones across which meander a few noncommittal pinkish-beige freckles; and a malicious ferret’s grin, absent one or two teeth. He wears a grimy, formerly white, untucked shirt, trailing in the back, open at the neck to reveal a painfully concave hint of breastbone, and nubbly, hand-me-down knickerbockers a size too large. There is, in other words, nothing to distinguish him from many others, all approximately of my age, none achieving my height or anything near to it, whom I encounter in the course of my daily errands, or in the street wanderings, eclectic as they are, that follow.
I turn around, and he’s gone.
Just like that.
He always did have the knack of disappearing like smoke. Hip, that is. Hippolyte.
What kind of name is that? say I, on hearing.
What kind of name is Carlotta, says he. Ferret’s sneer so quick it does not occur to me to ask how he knows my name, since certainly I have never told him it.
But we have advanced by then, Hip and me. I am ahead of myself now.
• • •
It is, I suppose, not quite credible that I should have an admirer: I, a child, a ginger, a giantess. Unsubtle of foot. Nonetheless, it is true.
Though not immediately. I must chase him first, through all the passages and tunnels, vast and various, that constitute the underneath of Whitby. There is great pleasure in the play of giantess’s legs, hot in pursuit of that-which-must-be-pursued; and the boy is always ahead of me, a grey figure in a grey ground of Whitby winter: up, over a wall, into somebody’s yard, scattering buckets and nets and tarps and ladders, startling chickens, setting the dogs to barking; up over another wall, up an alley, past a shut-up, still-stinking latrine, a smallboat wintering in a mummy’s wrap of canvas, a garbage tip heaped with bones, it’s death here, all death. We are mocked all the while by the icy, tinkling chatter of frozen laundry hung out on a line, a man’s voice shouting Stop that din or I’ll whang ye, I will!—the angry gestures (shaken fists, upraised elbows, pointed fingers, others) of housewives surprised in the act of smoking bedbugs out of mattresses—we create our messes, he and I—wheelbarrows thumped, pots tipped, spilled milk mingling with spilled bitter, night soils unceremoniously scattered; and all the time, just ahead of me, the tantalizing tail of the boy’s grimy shirt as he rockets over another wall, around another corner, over another cesspit—and then finally, inevitably, one day, at the corner of Grope Street and Lantern Lane, down, into the passages.
I’ve heard about those. Pirates are said to have inhabited the passages once. Now there is just the cold, strangely stilled air, smelling deeply of brine; the echoing drip, coming from somewhere, of water; and endless, deep sighings of the sea. Then, too, growing farther away with every moment’s hesitation, the galling patter of footsteps in the dark, the single laugh, high, clear, contemptuous, carried up from below. It’s because of this that I finally make the leap.