Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [23]
'Youngsters these days,' remarked a fat older woman; 'don't know where they get the strength.'
Mary was the only girl at the Dials now. When she'd finished with one man she turned away from the wall and there was another waiting, watching her. Somehow that was the worst thing, being seen. The man waiting had his breeches half-unlaced already, so as not to waste any time.
He was the biggest so far, and the roughest. Mary didn't protest. She kept her eyes shut as much as possible. Inside she said a word she wasn't meant to say anymore: Mother. She thought she was bleeding a little, after that man, but it was hard to tell because of everything else that was running down her thighs.
Between each cully now her feet started taking her home to the Rookery, but she turned back to the pillar at the centre of the Dials, and folded her arms and pressed down on the treacherous curve below her ribs, to remind herself what this was about. The killing she had to pay for. This was the only way.
Please. Mighty Master. Somebody. Let it be over soon.
A few hours before morning, Mary dragged herself up the stairs of Rat's Castle. She felt divided from herself. The ache sounded in her stomach like a drum. The milk of eleven or twelve strangers—she'd lost count—brewed to a poison inside her. She could smell it through the petticoats, through the limp orange slammerkin: dark and yeasty. Of course, she realised; that was what Doll smelt of.
But Mary had survived, and the men's faces were blurred already. And locked in her fist were the many small and greasy coins that amounted to a crown.
'One of us, ain't you now?' said Doll, half-asleep, giving her a one-armed hug.
Doll saw to it all, the next day; it was she who bought the big bottle of gin, and only took a mouthful for herself. Doll knew which cellar on Carrier Street was the right one. It was she who held Mary's head against her own perfume-drenched bodice, so the girl only caught glimpses of Ma Slattery. When the old woman took out a rusty knife to sharpen the stick, a wail seemed to start up from Mary without her knowledge, but Doll covered her mouth and whispered nonsense in her ear. She stood at the end of the stained mattress where Mary lay; she pulled the girl's wrists over her head and gripped them hard enough to break. She chattered on, describing a fine lavender trollopee she'd seen going cheap on Monmouth Street—a trollopee was like a slammerkin, and how vastly it would suit Mary—and the new tigers on show at the Tower, and a riot over the price of mackerel all down Billingsgate, and how soon it would be Christmastide. She kept talking all the way through, while the speechless old woman did things to Mary that the girl had no words for, things that made her twitch and buck like the mad dog she'd seen on Holborn last summer. It seemed ten years since last summer, when she'd been a child in uniform, trailing home from school. Now the cramps took this new Mary Saunders and shook her like a blood-spattered flag.
It was Doll who wiped the vomit from Mary's mouth with the back of her hand. In the end it was Doll who took the pot away to empty it into the gutter, but not before Mary had glimpsed what was in it. Just a pale shape swimming in the red; a worm, a parasite, a demon expelled from her body. Nothing, really; nothing that made any difference.
Mary bled for a week. But as soon as the rent came due she went back on the town, bracelets of blue marks round her wrists. What d'ye lack, gentlemen, what d'ye lack?
CHAPTER TWO
Magdalen
BECAUSE OF course this was the only trade. Her eyes had been forced open. The fact was, there was nothing else a fourteen-year-old girl could do that would earn a fraction of what Mary was making, now she was hardened