Chapter 32: How Not to Get Thrown Out
Bloody, stolen money. A moment ago, the thought of it made my skin crawl. But now? Now, looking at the steaming, welcoming facade of the bathhouse, I thought, thank God for it. As they say, even a hero can be felled by the lack of a single coin. Jared, however, was still hesitant, his brow furrowed with a deep-seated suspicion of all good things. To him, spending money on a bath was an unthinkable luxury, a decadence so profound it bordered on sin. In all his years of dreaming of a better life, that life had never included the simple, forgotten pleasure of being clean.
“You have to think of it this way,” I began, my voice taking on a persuasive, almost hypnotic tone. I would use any means necessary to get into that bathhouse, to feel hot water on my skin. “Money isn't for burying in the dirt, Jared. It's for buying things. You can't eat it, you can't wear it, so we might as well spend it.” I was feeding him the kind of slick, manipulative philosophy he had never been exposed to, a poison from my world.
“Is that right?” he asked, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “But a place like this… it must be terribly expensive.” He squinted at the painted sign near the entrance, trying to make out the words. “Eh? Wait… that’s not so bad. Five coppers a person?” I knew it couldn't be too expensive. This bathhouse catered to the working class of the tenements, a necessary service for people living in flats without their own plumbing. If the price was too high, no one would come. I couldn’t read the swirling script on the sign, but I recognized the Arabic numeral '5', followed by a strange little symbol I didn't recognize. Jared confirmed it meant copper coins. It certainly couldn’t be silver; who in their right mind would pay five silver pieces for a bath?
My impression from my old world was that a public bath wasn’t a place of high society, unless it was one of those opulent, marble-lined establishments that offered massages, pedicures, and other, more… specialized services. “We have three silver coins,” I said. “How many coppers is one silver?” It was strange seeing Arabic numerals here; I was sure I’d seen cruder, Roman-style numbers etched elsewhere. “About a hundred coppers,” Jared replied. “But it depends on the coin, the purity and such. The money-changers are sharks; they'll cheat you if they can.”
“That’s not expensive at all,” I said, genuinely surprised. In fact, it was cheaper than I’d imagined. Considering the cost of the water tower, the great steam-pump, and the massive boilers, the price was remarkably fair. Everything I had seen of this world so far had suggested that poverty was the dominant theme, that comfort and leisure were luxuries unknown to the common person. The affordability of this bathhouse was a welcome, if puzzling, anomaly. Later, I would learn that while it wasn’t expensive, it wasn't cheap either. For people living on the razor's edge, with rent to pay and food to buy, even five coppers was a significant expense, a luxury they might afford once a week, if they were lucky.
“Alright then,” Jared finally conceded, though he still looked deeply uncomfortable with the idea of such frivolous spending. “We’ll go. But there’s another problem. We’re… we’re too dirty, Parula. Our clothes are rags. They won’t let the likes of us in.” So, he was aware of it too—the invisible wall of grime and poverty that separated the desperate from the merely poor. I was so used to my own filth I had almost forgotten how we must look to others. He was right. We’d be turned away at the door, likely with a cuff to the ear and a curse. He’d had it happen to him before, he told me, a familiar bitterness in his voice. In this city, a child of the slums was welcome nowhere respectable.
“Alright,” I said, a plan already forming in my mind, a desperate, brilliant little scheme. “Here's what we're going to do. First, we use the well water to wash our hands and faces, to get the worst of the muck off. Then, Brother Jared, you’re going to find a clothes shop. We're going to solve this problem for good.”
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