the black sheep underground

“PENELOPE

i
Once, in the tide of Dunbar past – long before kitchens and boys, and murderers and mules – there was a many-named woman. And what a woman she was.
First, of course, the name she was born with: Penelope Lesciuszko.
Then the one christened at her piano: the Mistake Maker.
Her factory name was Penny Lessing.
Her unfortunate, self-proclaimed nickname was the Broken-Nosed Bride.
And last, the name she died with: Penny Dunbar.
Quite fittingly, she had travelled from a place that was best described by a certain phrase in the books she was raised on.
She came from a watery wilderness.

ii
Many years ago, and like so many before her, she arrived in the city with a suitcase and a scrunched-up stare. She was immediately astounded by the mauling light of the place.
This city. It was so hot and wide, and white.
The sun was some sort of barbarian, a Viking in the sky. It plundered, it pillaged. It got its hands on everything, from the tallest stick of concrete to the smallest cap in the water. Typically, too, it was just Penelope’s luck; she’d shown up on a scorcher.
In her former country, in the Eastern Bloc, the sun had mostly been a toy, a gizmo. There, in that far-off land, it was cloud and rain, and ice and snow that wore the pants – not that funny little yellow thing that showed its face every now and again to remind you it was around. In that place, the warm days were rationed. Even on the boniest, barren afternoons, there was a chance of moisture. Drizzle. Wet feet. It was communist Europe at its slow-descending peak.
In a lot of ways it defined her. Escaping. Alone.
Or more to the point, lonely.
She would never forget landing here in sheer terror. From the air, in a circling plane, the city looked at the mercy of its own brand of water (the salty kind), but on the ground, it didn’t take long to feel the full force of its true oppressor. Her face was dappled immediately with sweat. Outside, she stood with a flock, a herd, no – a rabble – of equally shocked and sticky people.
After a short wait, the lot of them were rounded up. They were corralled into a sort of indoor tarmac. The light globes were all fluorescent. The air was floor to ceiling heat.
“Name?”
Nothing.
“Passport?”
“Przepraszam?”
“Oh, Jesus.” The man in uniform stood on his toes and looked above the heads and hordes of new immigrants. What a mob of hot and sorry faces! He found the man he wanted. “Hey, George! Bilski! I got one here for you!”
But now the woman who was nearly twenty-one but appeared sixteen gripped him firmly in the face. She held her charcoal-coloured booklet as if to strangle its edges of air. “Parshporrt.”
A smile, of resignation. “Okay, love.”
She knew no-one here.
The people who’d been in camp with her for nine months in the Austrian mountains had broken away. While they were sent, family after family, west across the Atlantic, Penelope Lesciuszko was to make a longer journey, and now she was here.
She was here and she had to execute her plan:
Get to camp. Learn English better. Find a job, and a place to live. Then, most importantly, buy a bookshelf. And a piano.
At that moment, those things were all she wanted from this new world laid searingly out in front of her. As time went by, she got them. She got them all right, and a whole lot more… “