The dizziness was back, but I kept on staggering forward.
My hunger, presented with the scent of so much food, was now actually a kind of pain. I walked over towards one of the goose stalls. I stood there, inhaling the roast meat.
‘How much is the goose?’
‘Three shillings, lad.’
I didn’t have three shillings. The truth was: I didn’t have any money at all.
I staggered backwards. Stood on a man’s foot.
‘Mind yourself, boy!’
Boy, boy, boy.
‘Yes, I am a boy,’ I mumbled, even though eighteen was positively middle-aged at that time.
And that is when things began to spin.
I was generally quite strong. One of the many quirks of my biology was that I was never really ill. I’d never had a cold, or the flu. I’d never vomited in my entire life. I’d never even had a bout of diarrhoea, which, in 1599, was an incredibly, suspiciously rare thing to be able to say. Yet right then I was feeling dreadful. There had been rain earlier, but now the sun was out and the sky was a hard blue. The same oblivious blue it had been above the River Lark. The heat added to the intensity of everything, which was intense enough to begin with.
‘Maman,’ I muttered, delirious. ‘Maman.’
I felt like I could die. And, in that moment, I was perfectly fine with that.
But then I saw her.
She was standing holding a basket of fruit, frowning at me. She was about my age, but looked it. She had long dark hair and eyes that shone like pebbles in a stream.
I walked towards her, staring in wonder at the plums and damsons in the basket.
I felt a strange sensation, like I wasn’t in my own body.
‘Can I have a plum?’ I asked her.
She held open her palm. I thought of Manning’s hand and the outstretched fingers that kept my mother under the water.
‘I don’t . . . I . . . I . . . the . . . I . . .’
I saw the stray cow I had seen earlier, walking through the crowd. I closed my eyes and my mother fell through the sky with the weight of timber. I opened them and the fruit seller was frowning at me, cross or confused or a little of both.
I wobbled a little, as the street sped in circles.
‘Steady thyself,’ said the fruit seller.
Those were her first words to me.
Steady thyself.
But I couldn’t steady myself.
I could see why my mother needed walls to lean onto after Father died. Grief tilts you.
Things went very light and then very dark.
The next thing I knew – a moment, or five minutes later – was that I was lying flat on my front, half my face in a muddy puddle, surrounded by plums and damsons. Most of them were in the mud too. Some were getting crushed underfoot by passers-by. One was being eaten by a dog.
I slowly got to my feet.
