Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [27]
What goes up must fall down
Not that she was very picky. Street Misses couldn't afford to be, 'not like those bawdy-house bitches on their velvet sofas,' as Doll put it. Mary lay down with prizefighters with broken faces and a sailor with one ball poxed off. (He swore the disease was long cured, but she would only give him a hand job.) It took a lot to disgust her, these days. She went with flogging-cullies who wanted to play mother and wicked son—strange, she thought the first time, for a man to want to be hurt rather than to hurt—and even a freak who offered her two shillings to let him spit in her mouth. The only kind of fellow Mary wouldn't touch was a coalman, because the smell of the dust took her back to the cellar on Charing Cross Road.
She'd never seen any of the Digots since the night she'd left home last November. Once in Lincoln's Inn Fields she stared after a woman hurrying by, her head bent over a huge bundle of cloths, but it couldn't have been Susan Digot, not so far from Charing Cross. 'Decent folk don't wander like we do,' as Doll said with a curl of her lip; 'decent folk stay in their place.'
It did occur to Mary to wonder if the woman had ever made any attempt to trace her. Asked around, kept one eye out, even? Surely where once there'd been love, something had to remain, some scraps, leftovers? Or was it possible for a mother to cut a daughter out of her life as if she'd never been born?
Not that it mattered. Mary wouldn't have gone back now, she told herself, not even if Susan Digot climbed up the groaning stairs of Rat's Castle to beg her on hands and knees. Mary could barely remember her old life: the narrowness of it, the poverty not just of goods but of spirit; the hours of weighty silence, as they'd all sat round the shivering fire. No, it was too late for return, or even forgiveness.
Ribbon brown, ribbon rose
Count your friends and your foes
With Doll life was never dull. There were no reproaches, or sermons, or tasks. The two of them slept in their paint, which left their pillows streaked and gaudy. They paid an Irishwoman in the basement of Rat's Castle to do their laundry. Every few weeks they went to a bathhouse and soaked themselves clean in scalding water. They got their dinner from a chop-house or went without, depending on their purses, but they never cooked so much as a bit of toast. They bought cups of tea and coffee whenever their hands were cold. They drank whatever liquor they could lay hands on and never thought more than a day ahead.
Lovers of liberty, Doll called the two of them. They got up when they wanted, and stayed up all night if they fancied, and at any hour of the day they could climb back up the stairs to bed. For the first time in her life, Mary had time for idleness. Few cullies ever had her for more than a quarter of an hour. She was free to choose one fellow over another, or walk away from the lot of them if her stomach turned at the thought. Sometimes she and Doll took an evening off to sit by the fire in a gin-shop and share a pipe. The drink blurred the edges of everything, turned boredom to hilarity.
One crisp February night she met a sweet-faced apprentice playing cricket in Lamb's Conduit Fields. He couldn't have been more than twelve. 'Please, Miss, how much?' he asked, like Jack the Beanstalk at his first market.
'More than you've got,' she said, not unkindly, chucking him under his chin. It was as soft as a cat's.
'I've a shilling,' he said sternly, producing it from deep down in his pocket.
Mary knew he'd probably nicked it from his master to pay for his fleshly education. She took it all the same, and led the boy by the hand behind a spreading holly bush. The ground was soft and barely damp.
She felt almost sad, afterwards, and hoped she hadn't passed on the clap. She thought she was clean, these days—she had no fever or flux, and she always washed in gin when she had it, or piss when she hadn't—but a person could never be sure.
'So now you know,' she told the apprentice, as he struggled with his buttons.
He flashed