"It's too long and hard a trip for anybody, Alice," Saskia said.
"I suppose so," was all Alice said. Her speech was uncharacteristically slurred, and her expression--from the moment Jack had awakened to the women's whispers on the Bloedstraat--was unfamiliarly dreamy and carefree. Jack would later assume that this had to do with how many joints she'd smoked, because--until Amsterdam--his mother and marijuana were not on close terms. But they were on close terms that Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Saskia and Els walked them back to their hotel--not because the two prostitutes thought the red-light district was unsafe, even at that hour, but because they didn't want Alice to run into Jacob Bril. They knew Bril was also staying at the Krasnapolsky.
After the women hugged and kissed Jack and Alice good night, Jack and his mom got ready for bed. It was the first time Jack remembered her using the bathroom ahead of him. Something amused her in there, because she started laughing.
"What's so funny?"
"I think I left my underwear in Els's room!"
The advice-giving business had clearly distracted her--and by the time Jack finished brushing his teeth, Alice had fallen asleep. Jack turned out the lights in the bedroom and left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar--their version of a night-light. He thought it was the first time his mother had fallen asleep before him. He got into bed beside her, but even asleep, his mom was still singing. Jack was thankful it wasn't a hymn. And maybe the marijuana had resurrected Alice's Scottish accent, which, in the future, Jack could detect only when she was drunk or stoned.
As for the song, Jack had no way of knowing if it was an authentic folk ballad--something his mother had remembered from her girlhood--or, more likely, a ditty of her own imagination that, in her sleep, she'd put to music. (Why not? She'd been singing for half a day and night.)
Here is the song Alice sang in her sleep.
Oh, I'll never be a kittie
or a cookie
or a tail.
The one place worse than
Dock Place
is the Port o' Leith jail.
No, I'll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I'm sure--
I won't end up on Dock Place
and I'll never be a hure.
Hure rhymed with sure, of course. Jack thought it might be a nursery song, which--even in her sleep--his mother meant to sing for him.
Jack said their nightly prayer--as he always did, with his eyes closed. He spoke a little louder than usual, because his mother was asleep and he had to pray for both of them. "The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it."
They slept until noon Sunday, when he asked her: "What's a hure?"
"Was it something I said in my sleep?" she said.
"Yes. You were singing."
"A hure is like a prostitute--an advice-giver, Jackie."
"How can a person be a kittie or a cookie or a tail?" Jack asked.
"They're all words for an advice-giver, Jack."
"Oh."
They were walking hand-in-hand through the red-light district to Tattoo Peter's when the boy asked: "Where's Dock Place?"
"Dock Place is nowhere I'll ever be," was all she would tell him.