Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [11]
She stood and watched the peddler walk away. She had a wet face, and one sleek satin ribbon in her fist.
When Mary got home at last that night, there was a moment when she might have spoken. Her thighs were slick; they shook under her smock. She thought the first word she spoke might make her burst into tears. She was almost ready to say, 'Mother, something terrible—'
But Susan Digot was raging. A girl of fourteen out past ten o'clock, when decent folk were long in their beds? Hanging round the Dials, no doubt, in defiance of orders, along with every bit of trash the city could throw up? 'If you mix with muck, you'll end up just as brown,' she quoted contemptuously.
So all Mary said was that she was sorry. She turned her grazed face away from her mother's candle and went to bed in the next room, where Billy was fast asleep, his foot dangling out of the end of the bed.
When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.
The girl stayed away from the peddler after that, but it made no difference. She'd outgrown ignorance like a skin that had split, and been shed, and crumbled away to nothing. Now she'd never be that child again.
Still, she played her part for all she was worth. Later, she thought it must have been herself she was trying to fool.
As that summer panted to a close, Mary gave no trouble to her mother. When William Digot occasionally stirred out of his weary doze to give his wife's daughter an order or a warning, she never answered back. In September there were raucous celebrations for the young King's wedding, and even more for his coronation a fortnight later, but Mary didn't even ask if she could go and watch the fireworks. She never complained about the meagre food anymore, not even during a bad week in October when a bundle of quilting fell on the hearth and got singed, and Susan Digot shrieked loud enough for the neighbours to hear, and had to make it up out of her pay. Some days Mary said she had no appetite, and gave half her bread to the small boy, chewed up soft. She hurried to school along the slippery streets, where the creaking alehouse signs hung low and blocked out the light. She kept her head down over her desk and joined in the chants as if they were gospel.
It is a crime
To waste time.
Her voice, deeper than all the others now, rose above them.
The wage of vice
Is fire and ice.
Once, after a sermon by the visiting chaplain, Mary Saunders was found weeping under the row of coat pegs. When the Superintendent asked what the matter was, all the girl could say was that she'd lost another button off her smock.
For the first time in her life Mary tried praying. Mighty Master, she whispered into her pillow, Mighty Master. She listened hard, but there was no answer.
She came home one October evening and her stepfather struck her across the eye.
She stared up from the floor, blinking. Black dust moved beneath her knees. The strangest thing was that Susan Digot was not sewing; her linen lay in untidy folds on her chair. Her face was scrunched up like a bag. In her hand, vibrating as if in a draught, was a scrap of paper. The boy whined in the corner, unfed. Susan Digot brought the note up to her eyes, and began to read aloud. 'Your daughter—' Then her voice drained away. She dropped the note at Mary's feet.
Mary didn't want to touch the letter. She tilted her head and deciphered the words upside down.
Yore dawters a hor. You ony have to look at her bely.
That was all. Mary said it over and over to herself, till the words fitted together. Till she knew for sure what she'd spent five months half suspecting, half denying.
Her mother bent and dragged her to her feet. The two of them were as tall as each other. Susan Digot took the grey school smock in two hands and pulled it to lie smooth against her daughter's body. Such a strange gentle curve, arching above the girl's skinny thighs, nothing anybody would have noticed through her loose smock if they weren't looking. The mother sucked in her breath.
'It's