In the evenings, Jessa finds solace in the ghosts that linger by the waterfront, with the breeze creaking ropes and clinking chains and the gentle plash of the waves against the revetment. The seawall sweeps a slow Maleconesque curve from the north down to the southeast where it abuts the short stonework promontory where the ruins of a small fort once stood sentinel over the river mouth. In those days a bustling harbour sheltered in the estuary, but the slow accretion of silt has long since blocked the access channels, and mudlarks and whelk pickers practice their trades where the trade ships once found haven. Knee-deep in the stinking ooze, wicker baskets on their crooked backs. The fort now little more than a heap of sandstone blocks, worn by the sea spray and the wind. During the daytime it provides a perch for the men with their fishing poles, and the young girls and boys who hunt for crabs in the crevices at the water’s edge.

 

There was once a mighty trading port. Now only few small pleasure crafts and fishing dinghies find mooring at the makeshift jetties chained to the old seawall, accessible from rickety ladders, or in places, down stone steps that used to serve access to the private moorings of some of the wealthier Families. When storms threaten the boatmen would beach their crafts on the mud flats in the more sheltered estuary, but the weather is generally calmer these days, the storms less frequent and less angry, and the boatmen more complacent. They joke that one day a mighty tsunami will wash them all away, but few really believe this. The Big One - it will be the end us all. But life goes on.

 

The ghosts are there most evenings, small clusters in the gathering dusk, or solitary, separate from their peers in a bid to accentuate their allure. The groups may laugh and gossip and call out to passers-by.  The solitary ones pretend a quiet aloof dignity but favour those who heed them with ornately shy glances. Intoxicating vulnerability…

 

Three ghosts on the rampart, wearing their finest, passing the rum call out:

 

- come join us, Sister Jessa…

 

- not today…  Jessa keeps her distance.

 

- come chile, come share in the spirit…

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- not today… thank you… maybe some other time…

 

- you know you belong with us…

 

- although I do truly appreciate your offer, and the spirit of generosity in which it is made, on this occasion I must regretfully decline

 

-> oh, see how you are, with your fancy manners!

 

Jessa laughs and bobs a small but precise curtsy, then skips away with a smile.

She exchanges a few small coins for a bag of hot chestnuts, the ancient vendor muttering pleasantries and gratitude as he rakes his charcoal embers. She takes a pinch of salt and wanders a short distance to find a suitable spot atop the sea wall. Far enough from the ghosts to be a target of their imprecations and banter, but close enough to hear their laughter and catch snippets of their conversation.

- … and all the long day I was beset by Mehrkanoons, and through no fault or consequence of my own doings… and me with my troubles in all immanence…

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- Oh, you poor lamb! Here, take a draught to settle your nerves…

 

…

 

- …and just then the draft from the window slammed shut the door, and in the very face of the bailiff as he came calling for the rent money!

 

…

 

- … all the livelong day! And so auspicious was it…

 

…

 

- … oh, hark at thou in all thy silliness…

 

…

 

- … you tired of this… uh… is… the… sound… that a Mother makes…

 

…

 

- …but not then, but not long thereafter it was to his misfortune to die beneath a bridge, and misfortune too for all his kin… for his wife went early to her confinement the very next day, and the child was lame born with withered legs and eyes that bugged!

 

- aye, and it was no less or more than his comeuppance, if you ask me… and herself too, haughty cow with her graces and airs…

 

- have a care! Did you not bear a lame bairn for yourself, and suffer no such harshness of judgement?

 

- Neither provenance nor circumstance compare!

 

- Hush now…  Settle… Here’s company…

 

Jessa scoffs her chestnuts, savouring the warm salt earthiness, and constructs histories, sometimes just to flesh out minor details of a few half-heard phrases, other times to imagine epic tales that tie together a whole meandering narrative from a series of overheard fragments. These seldom make much sense in their first telling, and so she sometimes takes them to her home with her and reworks them at her leisure as she lies in her cot waiting for sleep to come. Most often, the results are no better when she reviews them the next day, but the ones that pass the daylight test to are scribbled into the tattered journal that she keeps beneath her threadbare mattress. This is rare. Jessa cannot decide for certain whether this reflects a failure of imagination, or that the source of her muse is tarnished. Who could weave a tale from the chatter of waterfront ghosts? What meaning, if any, might lie behind their banal gossip and non-sequiturs? Still, she keeps her book of stories.

 

She tosses the charcoal blackened chestnut skins into the sea below, but it is too noisy to hear them land on the water, and too dingy to watch them float on the gently lapping tide. She lives in genteel poverty now since her mother passed away some three months prior. The chestnuts a luxury she can ill afford. Still, if she is careful, and lucky, she could eke out her small inheritance for perhaps another year. The landlord who owns her small garret room has not been by to collect the rent for many weeks even prior to her mother’s death. Maybe he too has passed away. Maybe he has become too obese to climb the stairs… Or maybe one day soon he will arrive, sweating and puffing at her door demanding payment with his leering insinuations that money is not the only coin... Perhaps she will just move to the room across the hall that has stood empty and unlocked these past two years and take her chances there.

 

She knows that eventually she will have to look for money. But not yet. Not yet... Not ready yet. For the moment she is content to spend her days wandering the city. Taking pleasure in the small transactions that fuel its ebb and flow; watching the turbulent stream of peoples and actions; following the threads of news and gossip. She rests to avoid the midday sun in pleasant parks and gardens, taking a simple meal of bread and cheese and fruit, or thin slices of hard sausage. In the afternoon she bathes naked with the others in the water gardens or step wells, or fountains, taking in the chatter but rarely engaging directly. Then she heads back to her room, where she eats a small bowl of plain rice, and writes or draws pictures in her journal, or perhaps takes a nap, before heading out to the waterfront to watch the sunset. Suchwise, she passes her days.

 

A while back, she made a friend at the Grand Fountain in the main square, a small furtive girl called Leila, with mousey urchin hair whose tiny breasts were mottled with vitiligo patches of white skin and tipped with large pert nipples dark as blueberries. Jesse found her breasts both astonishing and strangely beautiful, although she never said as much. Perhaps Leila understood Jessa’s interest, but she too left it unspoken. For a few weeks they bathed everyday together mostly in companionable silence, always making arrangement to meet the following day at a different location. Then, one day Jessa, on the way home to her lodgings, realised that no arrangement had been offered for the following day. The next day, and for some days after, she made the rounds of all the usual haunts, but has not seen Leila since then. She misses the companionship, and sometimes the image of Leila’s face or breasts come unbidden to her mind, and she feels a brief twinge of longing and regret.

 

She misses her mother also, but the illness was long, and the burden of care grew greater with every passing day. She misses her mother greatly, but also with a guilty sense of relief. Wasting away. Smaller with each passing day. In need of more and more care. Needing feeding. Needing cleaning. Rubbing her arms to sooth the pain. The illness taking and taking and taking… Bastard of a disease.

 

Eventually she will have to look for money. She will find a plan. She thinks that she might like to work at one of the stalls at the Flower Market, or perhaps squeezing oranges at one of the refreshment stands in the in Grand Market. She will not go to the arrack bars, or the tea shops or the smoke lounges, where the old men are coarse and insinuating in their language and free with their hands; the hours as long as the coin is poor. There is always work to be had making and mending rope, or in the tanneries or the fish markets, but it is brutal hard on the hands and the back. One day she will have to look for money, but not yet. When that time comes maybe she will just decide to join the ghosts on the waterfront…

 

It is fully dark when she stirs herself, apart from the lights of the stalls and the hostelries, but the moon is almost full. She climbs down from her perch and begins the short journey back towards her lodgings. Some men are shouting that war is declared. The Deutsche and the English have gone to war. There is a band playing in the street, and the Ghosts down by the striptease show go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda, you’ll go a-waltzing Mathilda with me…

 

And all plans are nought but stories of what might come to be.