Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Five: In Which Jessie Starts a Brawl

The landlady bobbed her head at the Captain's request to "help me along a little", a few coins had changed hands whose denominations and significance I didn't understand, and then I whisked away to a small upstairs bedroom. It was presumably a younger woman's, perhaps the landlady's daughter, because the bed was too narrow for a married couple, the adornments on the vanity and wash-stand were girlish. I was steered into a seat and the jacket pulled off my shoulders almost before I could rescue my cell phone. I tucked that into the pocket of my jeans and watched anxiously to what was done with the jacket – I wanted to return it to its rightful owner if I could.

The landlady just plunked it down on the foot of the bed, then turned to me. She put her hands on her wide hips, and blew a breath out of the corner of her mouth that made the sweat-dampened curls on her forehead bounce. She was appraising me like a particularly obstinate stain that needed immediate care. I suppose I was.

Hands on my shoulders, she turned me around to face the vanity, fingers already pulling at the matted tangles at the back of my neck.

The person I found staring back at me from the mirror was almost shocking.

I knew who she was, but she looked more shell shocked and weary than I'd ever seen her before, red-brown hair straggly and light gaze red-rimmed. She was white and tight around the eyes, lips pale and thin, cheeks still stained with what was left of my supposedly water-proof mascara.

Ha, take that Maybellene.

If this is what mermaids were supposed to look like, it was after they had been hauled out of the sea foam thrashing and screaming.

My hair hadn't seen a comb since I'd boarded the plane four... five days ago? I'd finger picked it a few times, but it wasn't the same as the landlady running a proper comb through it. Once my hair was manageable again, it was given a scrub in a shallow washbasin with tepid water and a rough bar of straight-up-soap, and combed again. The landlady put some sort of liquid on the tines, and it smelled watery but nice, like a weak sort of floral perfume. It made the comb slide through the knots and I wondered if this was the precursor to cream rinse and leave-in conditioner.

The whole time, the landlady clucked about it's absurdly short length – only to the bottom of my ears – and did her best to twist it up with pins and a broad white sash of fabric that acted partially as a headband to hold back all the layers that weren't long enough for the pins, and partially for decoration. I used more water from an ewer to scrub at the salt and makeup residue, and swipe under my arms and the back of my neck. It was room temperature and fresh, and felt amazing. Once my skin was clean again, the landlady added just a hint of some sort of red cream from a pot on the top of the vanity to my lips and cheeks that made them rosier.

I refused to trade in my salt-crusted sneakers for a pair of ballet flats that looked like they possessed absolutely no arch support, but was persuaded to change my wrinkled tee-shirt and jeans for a simple cream coloured high-waisted dress with dark beige vertical stripes. I couldn't help fingering the hem of the sleeves, the small ribbon details around the scooped neckline. The stitches had to be hand done; they were just irregular enough to have not come from a machine, but so precise that I almost couldn't tell. What incredible workmanship.

My bra seemed a puzzle to the woman, as were the panties that I had been washing and re-wearing every morning. They were switched for a shift and a corset that did an awful lot more, uh, lifting and separating than Wonderbra could ever achieve. And apparently for underwear women wore... nothing. I tried not to think too hard about what might happen in the event of a good gust of wind or a set of stairs with cut outs, or in the event someone got their period unexpectedly.

The landlady bundled up my twenty-first century clothing in a swatch of unfinished fabric and handed it to me. Trusting that my ID cards and phone were safe inside the cloth pack, I thanked her. She had been staring at my earrings the whole time. They a weren't particularly good pair, bought at an accessories kiosk in the mall for five dollars, but to her the glint of the faux stones and the intricately swirled pattern stamped into the nickel must have been impressive.