Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [6]
'No but afterwards,' the girl said eagerly, 'after my father died.' She could see it like a tale in a book; herself as the little girl in her widowed mother's tender arms, the two of them costumed in black satin, jolting along in a plush-lined coach to the fabled city of Monmouth where the air smelt clean and the people smiled at each other in the street.
Her mother shook her head as if there was a bee buzzing in it. 'You make your bed,' she quoted, 'and you lie in it. This is where the Maker has put me and this is where I'll stay. There's no going back.'
And there was never any arguing with that.
One damp November evening Mary had been sent in search of a shell-cart for tuppence worth of winkles when she bumped into the ribbon peddler coming out of an alley off Short's Gardens. He opened his coat at her like a pair of wings. Mary backed away in fright. His coat was old, blackened at the edges. But there, pinned to the lining, long and snaky and curled at the end like a tongue: the very match of the harlot's ribbon.
'How much for the red one?' The words slipped out on their own.
'A shilling to you, dear heart.' The peddler cocked his grizzled head sideways at her as if she had made a joke. His eyes were shiny.
Mary ran on.
It might as well have been a guinea he'd asked. Mary had never held a shilling in her hand. And when she stood at the shell-cart tonight and dug into her smock pocket for the two pennies William Digot had entrusted to her to buy the family's dinner, one of them was gone. There was a hole in the cloth, its edges soft as Billy's eyelashes.
What was she to do? A pennyworth of winkles would never stretch to four people, she knew, so she ran round the corner to the pieman on Flitcroft Street and asked him had he anything for a penny. The ham pie he gave her had a broken crust but it looked filling, at least. All the way home she kept her eyes on the ground to catch the winking of the lost penny between two cobbles or in a gutter overflowing with peelings and turds, but she never caught a glimpse of it. As if a coin would lie long in the dirt of Charing Cross!
She hoped the Digots would be content with the pie, as it was hot and smelt wholesome. Instead, Susan Digot called her a liar. 'You spent the penny on hot lardy-cake, didn't you?' she said, rubbing her sore eyes with the heel of her hand. 'I can smell it off your breath.'
Over and over again, as the hard end of the broom landed on her legs, the girl sobbed out her defence: 'I lost it! I lost the penny, I swear!'
'Oh, Mary,' said Susan Digot, and hit her again.
She'd been thrashed before, and harder, but somehow she had never felt so injured. What good was it to be a grown girl of thirteen, if she could still be put over her mother's knee and beaten for something she hadn't done?
Afterwards she squatted in the corner and watched the Digots eat the pie, feeding the corners to little Billy. Her tears dried to salt on her jaw. Her stomach growled; she hoped they could hear it. Finally she stood up and turned her pocket inside out. 'Look,' she said, her voice shaking, 'there was a hole and I didn't know it.' She pushed her thumb through the gaping seam to show them.
William Digot looked up from his dinner. 'You could have poked that there yourself,' he accused.
His wife stared at the frayed pocket, and for a moment such a peculiar look strayed across her face that it almost seemed she might cry.
'It wasn't thievery!' said Mary, almost shouting.
Her mother's eyes flickered over her. 'Carelessness is just as bad.' Then she held out her tin plate with the crust of pastry on it, like someone feeding a dog.
'She doesn't deserve it,' remarked her husband, eyeing the plate.
'She's my daughter,' said Susan Digot, quiet and fierce.
Was the woman raging against her child, or her husband, or the Mighty Master who had burdened her with such a family, and so little pie to divide between them? Mary would have liked to knock the crust onto the floor, or even better, to