In any case, her mam did sometimes choose to appear more than once in the same location, which made her not completely impossible to track down. Delly went to a few choice bars on Six-Bend Island first. It took a bit of self-restraint to keep from bellying up and buying herself a drink. Her Elgarite refutation of fleshly wants was rewarded at the third bar, where the girl wiping the glasses said that ol’ Marvie had been in a few times that week. Delly’s dear old mam had been in the company of a fellow named Squint Jok, who had his bolt-for a few blocks away on Maiden Street. Delly could only think that it could be worse: Squint Jok could just as easily be Drunk Jok, or Fleabite Jok, or Worryingly Murderous in His Aspect Jok, any one of which wouldn’t be the type of Jok you’d like to see in close association with your dear old mother.
She went to the house in question and gave it a good squint of her own. The door and windows at the front were all boarded over, which was a good sign in terms of the chance that her mam might be holed up inside. There was a side alley: she went down it and found a fence around what she supposed to be the back garden. At the bottom of the fence there was a hole large enough to admit a medium-sized dog. Delly gave a low groan, got down into the dirt, and endeavored to force her larger-than-medium-dog-sized carcass through the gap. She made it into the yard thoroughly besmeared with dirt and grass stains, with her dress ripped and her arms scratched and her good cheer considerably rumpled.
The house wasn’t any more beguiling from the rear. Though she wouldn’t hold that against it: the same could be said for Delly. Almost all of the windows back here were boarded over, too, except one that had had its boards pried off and the glass smashed out. There was also a trampled-down path in the weeds straight to the door. Delly followed it and tried the door handle. It worked, in that the handle didn’t turn but the door swung open after she gave it a good shove.
Then she was in what had probably been a kitchen once. Delly tried not to look around herself too closely. Her mam had never been much for the domestic arts, but as the years had gone by she seemed to have made strides past simply ignoring the filth and toward actively cultivating it. If Delly’s mam had been born with any gift of magic she would have made a fine necromancer of crumb-eating insects and pernicious creeping molds.
After the kitchen there was a hall, and then what she supposed must be a sitting room, as it had a number of people sitting in it. One of them gathered himself up and said, “Hey,” by way of expressing either surprise or annoyance at discovering an intruder in their midst. Then, exhausted by his efforts, he slumped back against the wall again.
“Mam?” Delly said, giving the murky air about her a good slicing squint. “You in here? It’s me, your daughter. Dellaria Wells,” she added, thinking that her mam might need a bit of brain dusting when it came to clarifying the name and identity of the young fruit o’ the maternal bough.
“Delly?” came a voice from the corner. Her mam rose up in a tide of shawls—she was always a devoted wearer of shawls, Delly’s mother—and then came toddling toward her on the uncertain hooves of the recently indisposed. “That’s you, then?”
“Might it so,” Delly said. “Won’t you come out into the air, Mam?”
Her mother followed her out into the backyard, where they gazed at each other for a moment through a thick fog of familial irritation. “Whaddya want, then, Dellaria?”
Mam’s eyes looked strange. Like scuffed buttons. Delly’s own eyes went grape-shaped. “You ain’t just had a gargle then, Mam.” She didn’t look just drunk.
Her mam scowled. “What’s it to you, Dellaria?”
“Well, I passed through you on my journey into this reliving, for what it’s fucking well worth, Mam,” Dellaria said. “What’re you taking? I thought you hated drip.” Drip was what most people were taking hereabouts to make themselves go button-eyed. Dellaria herself steered clear. Drip was like love, she figured: all good enough fun, but you’d better not let yourself get too used to it or it’d take you apart as sure as knives.
Dellaria’s mam went all dreamy, like her new fella had a job with a steady wage. “But before I hadn’t dripped the red, so.”
Delly made a sound that expressed her feelings a mite. A squawk of sorts. Then she said, “The red’s the killing kind, Mam.”
“Might be you could call it that,” Delly’s mam said.
“It ain’t about what I call it,” Delly said. “It’s what it is, so.”
Delly’s mam looked back at her with her button eyes. “You want something from me, Dellaria?”
It was a fool’s game to want anything from Marvie Wells, but it was a game Delly had been playing since the day she was born. “Nah, Mam,” she said, slipping further into the West Leiscourt alleychat they’d both grown up swimming in. “Only to get mirrors on thee, see if th’art still chewing air, so. If I manage to find the clink to pay for it, will you take a bolt-for I rent for thee, Mam?” Delly thought she’d get her into a boardinghouse for women this time, if she could scrape together the cash. It probably wouldn’t keep whatever miserable drip-dealing Jok Mam was going around with these days away from her, but it might be some kind of start, at least.
“Might it so,” Mam said, with a sly smile that made Delly want to slap her lips off.
She didn’t do that, though. She just said, “Will I be able to find thee here, then, Mam?”
“Might it so,” Mam said again. “Until the cops catch us or the place burns down.” Delly expected that was the best she would get, so she took her leave of the mean old trout and let her inward currents pull her back toward her room, and the gin that lay below it.
* * *
—
Delly lived in a bare little room in a boardinghouse above a bar called the Hangman’s Rest. She’d always figured that the name was meant to be a nod to the culmination of the career paths of some of the regulars, so in that way it suited her fine. It was a good little room. The floor didn’t slant too badly, the ceiling only leaked a little bit in the one corner during heavy rain, and it was right above the bar’s back room. She liked that. It gave her a comforted feeling to sleep above so much gin. If the floors gave out, at least she’d have a softish landing.
After a few drinks downstairs, she laid out all her money and trinkets on the bed—she’d never bothered to buy a table—and her gut straightaway started to lurch. As treasure troves went, a beetle might turn up its nose at it. She licked her lips and tried to do the math. She owed Mrs. Medlow six tocats on rent for this month, plus the interest she’d promised her, and the bartender downstairs two more. She had two tocats six sen tied up in the toe of an old stocking she had hidden under a loose floorboard, and about another tocat in scrap metal she’d stripped out of an abandoned house a few days earlier, assuming she’d be able to sell it for half what it was worth. That left her four tocats four sen short with no real time to make up the difference before she’d have to sleep under a bridge with seeping pustules all over her ass. To say nothing of her mam, who’d be dead of either exposure or the red drip at any moment, at this rate.