Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [16]
It was a wizened Irishwoman who owned the whole lodging-house and twenty like it; half the parish of St. Giles drained into Mrs. Farrel's red hands. The rooms were always dim. When Mary asked why the windows were filled with balled-up brown paper, Doll explained it was because the old bitch Farrel was too cheap to glass them, 'and I'd rather the dark than the howling winds. Besides, night air is well known to be noxious.'
'So does Mrs. Farrel ... is it to her you answer, then?' asked Mary confusedly.
'What, does she pimp for me, you mean?' Doll's smile was scornful. 'Not at all. All I owe her is the rent. I'm a free agent, I am; I answer to no one.'
The Indian girl, Mercy Toft—who put her head in the door once in a while to say good day to the newcomer—thought Doll Higgins was mad. 'It's a hard life without a madam or bully-man to drum up trade and keep you out of trouble!'
Mary nodded weakly, as if she understood, and watched the inky tendrils that kept slipping out of Mercy's hair-knot. 'Have you lodged here long?' she asked hoarsely.
'Half a year in Rat's Castle, and another six years hereabouts. But mind, the worst rogues in London are to be found in the Rookery,' Mercy warned her with a grin that showed her white teeth; 'they'll rob your legs if you stand still long enough!'
How perverse, then, that Mary was coming to feel almost at home here, surrounded by the people her mother used to call riffraff, or simply, scum. She spent her days dozing on Doll's stained mattress, her fever rising and falling like a flame in her spine. She sensed herself to be strangely safe, as if she were floating far above the ordinary world.
She could hear Doll's thumping feet on the stairs long before the door opened. Doll might stalk in at any time of night or day and let herself fall onto the thin mattress. She smelt like a fishmonger's and her pockets clinked, fat with shillings. 'Devil ride me,' she'd declare, 'if I ain't giving up this nasty trade.' But when Mary pressed her, she seemed unable to remember a time before strolling—that was her word for it—or any possibilities beyond its reach. It was like a country she lived in. To hear her describe life on the streets, everyone—man, woman, or child—prostituted themselves one way or another. When drunk on her favourite gin—blue ruin, she called it fondly—she'd breathe perfume in Mary's face and swear that there was no trade like a Miss's. It required no training, capital, nor premises, and the supply of customers would never run out till the end of the world. 'I defy you,' she would slur, 'I defy you to name me any other trade so merry.'
Mary sometimes had to remind herself: she wasn't a harlot. Only the friend of one. Only a girl fouled and in trouble.
After a fortnight, Mary's fever had died down, and the pains with it. Doll, who'd been most impressed to hear that Mary was a scholar, as she called it, sometimes got her to read pamphlets aloud in the long winter afternoons. Mostly they were bawdy political doggerel that bewildered Mary, about what Countess P___m got up to at B___h with the Honourable Member for W___r, but they made Doll cackle and roar. Sometimes she'd take the trouble to fill Mary in, telling her lurid and improbable tales, like the one about the King's old tutor carrying on with the King's own mother.
One morning Mary felt strong enough to get up, and asked for her smock, but Doll let out an alarming laugh and said, 'That filthy thing? Gave it