The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

him. “I want you to go now.”
    â€œI’ll be back,” he whispered through the gap.
    â€œI’ll be here,” she replied bitterly.
    In the morning, he thought in the dark alley, she’d wash him off, and he was glad he wouldn’t be there to watch.
    Â 
    6.
    Â 
    The Crocker household consisted of Crocker himself, Mrs. Crocker—a pale, grave presence—and their three children, but on that first day Ling was greeted at the back door by the maid-of-all-work, a florid Irish girl called Bridey. She had been waiting for him on the back porch, arms crossed stoutly over her bosom like a barred gate. Ling had mistaken her for the lady of the house at first, bowed and called her Madame Crocker, and she’d snorted, though a hand had loosened from the knot across her chest, floating up to pat her hair coquettishly. She wasn’t flirting with him so much as admiring herself in the mirror of his error, as if he were no more than a puddle or a window she’d caught sight of herself in.
    â€œWell,” she offered waspishly, “I see they won’t be needing me no more. Nor the puss to catch the mice, so!”
    Bridey was the girl he was replacing, a trade, she gave him to understand, that was greatly, pitiably, to the Crockers’ disadvantage (her contempt for Ling was merely the long shadow of her starchy resentment against her employers). Bridey shared the bristling umbrage of many Irish girls toward the Chinese who were displacing them from work, but in her case the general animus was tempered by her own good fortune. She was to be married and had given her notice, hence a place had opened. So fluffed up was she with her nuptial prospects that Ling at first took “Bridey” to be her title and not her name. She looked down on him from this lofty matrimonial height but also took a kind of glee in lumbering the Crockers with him, though—as Ling would come to know—they were just as delighted to see the back of her, such were the liberties she’d taken: refusing to do laundry “as scullion work” and entertaining her “cousin”-cum-beau, Sean, a beanpole of a boy seemingly always on the verge of toppling, in the kitchen and at the Crockers’ expense. “I’m not no nagur, nor no Chink neither, to take orders,” the girl had declared roundly to Sean on one of his visits while she was teaching Ling to cook (he took to it swiftly, since most everything in Bridey’s economy, from eggs to cabbage to potatoes to meat, was to be boiled like so much laundry, and anything else fried with fatback). She huffed on a silver spoon she was polishing, rubbed it on her sleeve, and studied her reflection in it. “I’m as white as ’em, ain’t I?”
    Bridey had shown Ling where to find the buckets and brushes and brooms. Shown him where to dispose of the chamberpots and how to make the beds so tight that a coin would bounce on them (she caught the coin), and even how to do the laundry, despite his assurances that he knew. She’d begun to show him how to iron—pummeling rather than smoothing the linen as if into submission—until he’d taken over impatiently and she’d nodded. “Well, I never. They do say your sort pick up a thing right quick.” Though to his surprise, she’d later set a newspaper on the ironing board and given it a brisk pressing. It was to become one of his preferred tasks (once he remembered not to spit on it), poring over the headlines as he ironed in an effort to parse out new English words before carrying the paper in to breakfast. He got a second chance to practice his reading later, while ripping the old pages into strips to serve in the privy.
    Bridey had sailed out of the house a week after Ling arrived, Sean meeting her at the garden gate, doffing his hat so low that Ling feared he might snap in two like a reed.
    â€œShe might have been a papist, that one, but her