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A Novel
by Anna Lawrence Pietroni
Book Reviewed by:
“Is if weem cleaner than a queen.”
This was not the whole truth, Ruby knew: brushed fingernails, ungritty counters—they would keep your reputation clean enough. The test was, Captin taught her, in the stomaching, in the buying of the fish up at the wet market in Muckeleye; cheap fish, but not rotten. There was a woman, Ruby read in Captin’s Muckeleye Gazette, been jailed for selling poison fish; a man, for trying to fry his chips in motor oil.
“S’ all right, Captin. It woe be your countertops as see yo banged up in Winson Green,” said Ruby. “It ull be for flogging fish that’s green under the batter.”
“Ay I taught yo nothing, Ruby?” He reached over for the broom and swept at her feet while she jumped and giggled. “Who will I leave me fishy empire to if Ruby plays so light and careless wi it? If her goes bringing me good name to disrepute?”
Ruby wouldn’t play this way in front of other people, and there was no queue yet, but when a bent-up woman came in and tried to stand up tall against the counter, Captin shooed Ruby out. Ruby knew the bent-up woman wouldn’t ask for anything, not while she was there—the woman never did. With care, eyes fixed on Captin, she would place whatever coin she had to spare flat on the counter, and Captin Len would smile and then be gruff and say that he was sure he’d fetch her something, like a bag of cods’ heads to stretch out with mash into a fishcake. But he would pack it up with extras, like some chips in with her bits. Been doing this for years. It was Captin Len’s Fried Fish Shop kept the Cradles fed, since the hungry winters of the War and women driven to cobbling War-loaves fit for only pigs (more potato in than wheat) to keep their children from being starved into coffins small enough to carry on their laps.
So, when Captin started wrapping up jellied roe and a whole scoop of batter-bits, Ruby went when she was told, no hesitation, through to the back. This, Ruby loved in Captin: how he was so careful with the dignities of strangers and the dignities of friends, how he cradled them so lightly, yet weighted down his pockets with responsibilities that were not his to bear.
“I doe mind a cup of tea either, Ruby,” Captin called to her. “Bring it back wi yo when yoom finished out the back.”
Ruby left the door between the fish shop and the back room slightly open. She stopped by the shallow sink in Captin’s scullery to rinse scourings from her fingers and fill the kettle; she started at the spit and fizz of fresh chips dropping in the fat. (A lesson Captin taught her early: never leave your range too long without some chips to cool the fat. “Yo doe want the chip fat catching else we’ll all go up.” All that grease sunk deep into the wall, and bowls of rendered fat about the place.) She took the top sheet from the pile of old Gazettes that Captin kept for wrapping up bad fish, and pulled on Captin’s sweater—big on her, but something between her and the low wind that brought the sulphur in off the canal. It was treacherously dark down by the Cut, but light swung out through the doorway and flung Ruby’s shadow long across the water. Eyes flicking up to keep the Cut in check, she steadied herself (a hand on each side of the doorframe, the paper pinched between a finger and thumb) and lowered herself down onto the top step.
She reached into the pocket of her pinny and pulled out a small book bound in soft, scratched leather. It was tied shut with a shoelace, and when she undid the knot, the book eased open, pages splayed. The book had been her mother’s, and Captin’s before that, passed down to Ruby when she had turned seven. Inside the cover, a tidy, careful “Leonard Salt, Cradle Cross,” and underneath, in a looser hand, “given over by Captin to Bethy for her Birthday.” Despite the binding, Captin’s book was cheap and not meant to be kept beyond the year—the print bled on damp fingers, the pages tore, and on the title page, The Coastal Companion, Severnsea, Almanac for 1899 was set askew. Within, the times of tides; a chart of all the stars; the lunar calendar. Some pages—registered importers and their agents, best bait for sea trout, the breeding patterns of the slob trout in the estuary—were obscured with pasted lists of Places I will Go when I have got a Boat, or maps, “From Cradle Cross to Ludleye Port, by water,” drawn on scraps of sugar packet, flattened out, or advertisements: “Clamp a Johnson’s Sea-Horse to your boat”; “Our spring-knit slims even the most amorphous mermaid.”
Excerpted from Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni Copyright © 2010 by Anna Lawrence Pietroni. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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