Ain’t you ever tried outrunning the clouds? Not those ones right at the top of the sky, the ones all stretched out and wispy like attic webs, they don’t do much harm. I’ve never heard so much as a peep from them. Even when I’ve pulled the rags out of my ears and listened hard enough to count a spider’s footsteps. It’s the others, the lumps that troop over the chimneys, hoards of ‘em and all full of screams. I’d slip my hand from my ma’s and before she could screech, I was gone. I was only Elwinna when I ran away, the rest of the time I was plain Winn. Winn take your fingers out your ears. Winn get out from under there. But most of all, Winn stop your wailing. And she took her hankie out all smeared and smelling of lard gone dusty and she stuffed it in my gob. You’d best learn to be quiet, she’d said, and she’d turned her back on me. I’d watched her reflection in the window, her face like a painting on a chocolate tin in the shop she always rushed me past, my feet slipping in the muck, the one of a girl leaning on a rose. And the rain had seemed it was running tears down her cheeks. And then I knew she didn’t hear the clouds at all. It was only me. 

Not long after that Ma stopped taking me to my father. Not that we ever found him. No matter how many times we traipsed those streets where the fine folk lived. No matter how often Ma crushed lavender with her fingers and rubbed it on her wrists. ‘It’s time your Pa started paying for you,’ she’d say. I’d thought the windows would open and spit out gold and I’d ducked my head under her arm. My feet felt like bruised tongues. ‘There were another street and all the houses there, they was thrice as tall and they bended in the winds. A door swung wide and he called me, like a song sucks the darkness out of the night.’ And she’d wiped her tears and flung them into the gutter. 

Ma grew lines on her forehead and her eyes tucked into creases. She only looked at me to yank the rags from my ears, her hands fast as starlings and sharper than the Sundays when I’d press against the dry window and see other Mas with their arms round their daughters. ‘Couldn’t take a wretch like you to church,’ she said. And she held my sleeve not my hand. And the fellas eyed her like the peddler’s mut eyed the bags o’ mystery in the butcher’s window, though her laugh was cruel as a sky of blacking cloud. That was when I made myself useful. Small hands you wouldn’t even notice until you wanted the time. Then you’d find your pocket watch was missing and you’d remember a lady finer than her clothes and a straggle of a girl. But only when the sky was clear. Only when the blueness went all the way down to the dirt. Only when the clouds were too far to hear.   

But the blueness was rare as one of Ma’s smiles that bloomed into her eyes. London had more rain than folk, more cloud than air, more screams than noise. And they shook through me making my hands leaden and fumbling. ‘Here what’s your girl doing?’ And the man who stenched of mutton crackling gripped my wrist, held it up. Ma didn’t tuck me into her smell of lavender. She didn’t hurry me out of the rain that tumbled down the back of my dress. She didn’t stroke my hair until the screams passed. She took to silence for days, left me home scrubbing the burnt bottom of the pan while she went somewhere. 

A man came to our door, his face like handsomeness made too pale, his voice like parsnips baked sweet. ‘I live in a place where you wouldn’t hear the clouds, Elwinna,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have need of rags to plug your ears.’ He gave me a cone of chestnuts, all cracked and black and I gobbled each one and emptied the burnt bits into my palm. ‘Go with the nice gentlemen,’ Ma said, and she smoothed my hair with a shuddery hand. I didn’t know how many coins he gave her. I only heard them clinking in the bag she clutched. And then I was in the carriage. And he was nattering and the horses clip clopping and I pushed my face into the bundle of my dresses and smelt Ma – her lavender and grimace. 

I bet you thought this was a happy ever after, a tale to make you all cosy – the urchin, the changeling lifted high, and higher than the clouds, too. For where could he take me that I wouldn’t hear them? And as the horses clip clopped, I lost myself in make beliefs of towers on the moon and a lady’s face dark at a narrow window. Of course, he lied. She’d sold me to a man of science. But he was right I wouldn’t have the rags, for he forbid me to plug my ears. Even when the clouds screeched loud enough to clatter my teeth. Even when I couldn’t keep myself from screeching back at them. I sleep in a room that’s a startle of white. I shake my door till my arms hurt. And I call for my Ma, even though I know she won’t come. Experiments, that what he calls what he does to me. He ties me up to machines and opens the windows in the storms and the wailings and my own screams go as loud as the clouds. Those footsteps coming, they’re his.