their days glowering from their windows might spy and peeve and mumble, but they
had been doing that for too long. No one listened any more.
She raised her gaze. Smoke and steam was already rising from the laundry of the
Girls’ Working School. It hung over one end of the town like a threat, big and grey
with tall, thin windows. It was always silent. When she was small, she’d been told
that that was where the Bad Girls went. The nature of ‘badness’ was not explained,
and at the age of five Polly had received the vague idea that it consisted of not going
to bed when you were told. At the age of eight she’d learned it was where you were
lucky not to go for buying your brother a paint box. She turned her back and set off
between the trees, which were full of birdsong.
Forget you were ever Polly. Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and
with self-satisfaction at a job well done, move like a puppet that’d had a couple of
random strings cut, never hug anyone and, if you meet a friend, punch them. A few
years working in the bar had provided plenty of observational material. No problem
about not swinging her hips, at least. Nature had been pretty sparing there, too.
And then there was the young male walk to master. At least women swung only
their hips. Young men swung everything, from the shoulders down. You have to try to
occupy a lot of space, she thought. It makes you look bigger, like a tomcat fluffing his
tail. She’d seen it a lot in the inn. The boys tried to walk big in self-defence against all
those other big boys out there. I’m bad, I’m fierce, I’m cool, I’d like a pint of shandy
and me mam wants me home by nine . . .
Let’s see, now . . . arms out from the body as though holding a couple of bags of
flour . . . check. Shoulders swaying as though she was elbowing her way through a
crowd . . . check. Hands slightly bunched and making rhythmical circling motions as
though turning two independent handles attached to the waist • . . check. Legs moving
forward loosely and ape-like . . . check . . .
It worked fine for a few yards until she got something wrong and the resultant
muscular confusion somersaulted her into a holly bush. After that, she gave up.
The thunderstorm came back as she hurried along the trail; sometimes one would
hang around the mountains for days. But at least up here the path wasn’t a river of
mud, and the trees still had enough leaves to give her some protection. There was no
time to wait out the weather, anyway. She had a long way to go. The recruiting party
would cross at the ferry, but Polly was known to all the ferrymen by sight and the
guard would want to see her permit to travel, which Oliver Perks certainly didn’t
have. So that meant a long diversion all the way to the troll bridge at Tiibz. To the
trolls all humans looked alike and any piece of paper would do as a permit, since they
didn’t read. Then she could walk down through the pine forests to Plün. The cart
would have to stop there for the night, but the place was one of those nowhere
villages that existed only in order to avoid the embarrassment of having large empty
spaces on the map. No one knew her in Plün. No one ever went there. It was a dump.
It was, in fact, just the place she needed. The recruiting party would stop there, and
she could enlist. She was pretty certain the big fat sergeant and his greasy little
corporal wouldn’t notice the girl who’d served them last night. She was not, as they
said, conventionally beautiful. The corporal had tried to pinch her bottom, but
probably out of habit, like swatting a fly, and there was not enough for a big pinch, at
that.