Slammerkin (7 page)

Mary stared at herself in the bit of mirror she held and blushed scarlet. Her small breasts poked out on top of her stays, as white and hard as elbows. The gaudy silk ruffled at her neck and shoulders; grubby blue lace dangled at her forearms. She looked half dressed. She looked like the whore she was tonight.

'See,' said Doll, giving her bodice a lewd tug, 'these lines lead the fellows' eyes directly down to the spot. And your big curved flounces,' she added, snatching at Mary's skirt, 'they're meant to make them think of tits and arses. We loop one bit of the train up to your waist, see, and that's a sign that you're in the trade—in case they haven't guessed!'

'My face is still wrong,' said Mary gruffly, looking in the mirror. 'I look like a bony child.'

'But the gentlemen like 'em young, don't you know? And you have your assets,' said Doll professionally. 'Good dark eyes, and you can wear your own hair, if we comb it high; black's very
à la mode
these days. That bump in your nose is no worse than the one I was born with. And the cullies like a wide mouth; it reminds them of the other one!' She let out an obscene laugh.

Mary tried to join in.

'Now all you need is a dab of powder'—Doll pulled out a box and puff, and set to work on Mary's face—'and a lick of ribbon red.'

'Ribbon red?'

Doll let out that little sigh that meant exasperation, but also a delight in her own knowledge. 'Quicker than carmine,' she said, 'and cheaper too.' She pulled down the end of her own scarlet hair ribbon and spat on the limp strip of satin, then sucked it. She rubbed it hard against Mary's lips as if polishing the tarnish off a teapot. She moved on to Mary's cheekbones and the warm pink spread, like a flush of health: magic.

In the mirror Mary watched the mask take shape. This wasn't her anymore; this was some vivid, fearless puppet. She tried a smile.

Doll stuck out her tongue at Mary: it was as red as a devil's from the ribbon.

The girl laughed aloud. She was a quick learner, like Doll kept saying. Already she was picking up the language: words of spite and laughter, words she'd never heard at school or in the cramped rooms on Charing Cross Road.

That night Mary stood at the Dials with one hip pushed out the way Doll had shown her, and tried to mimic her friend's crooked smile. Grease and powder lay like armour on her face, but her knees trembled under the petticoats revealed by the gauzy orange slammerkin. The bell shape of her skirt was full of icy air. She kept the fur muff over her stomach so her bump wouldn't show. Doll would have been with her, except that she'd passed out cold on the mattress after half a bottle of gin.

Mary had only had a few gulps. The drink washed around in her stomach, warm and queasy. She remembered her instructions:
coyness gets you nowhere.
She would have to learn to think of every passer-by in breeches as a cully. How bold the other Misses were, accosting a stranger or laying a hand on his thigh. 'What d'ye lack, gentlemen?' called one woman in a felt bonnet.

'Need of company?' asked another, linking arms with a soldier as he passed, but he shook her off.

'A shilling for a glimpse of Eden!' cried a girl in a brown wig. Alice Gibbs, that was her name, Mary remembered; she was rumoured to let cullies go in her mouth. Mary was revolted by the thought, and looked away.

She cleared her throat as a man in fine plush breeches hurried by. 'Fourteen and clean, sir,' she whispered.

He gave her a brief stare, but kept walking. The corner swallowed him.

That's what Doll had told her to say as her come-on.
Fourteen and clean.
Only half of it was a lie. It could have been a child's skipping rhyme. What was the one Mary had learned at school?

Spick and span without, within,
Soul and body cleansed of sin.

'Trade's ever so slow tonight, ain't it?' said a fair-skinned girl in a silver-edged sack gown, and Mary nodded back. 'Have I seen you before?'

'No,' said Mary nervously, and gave her name, before it occurred to her that now might have been a good time to change it.

The Miss was called Nan Pullen. By day she was a maidservant on Puddle Dock Hill, she told Mary rather proudly, but as soon as she was sure her mistress was asleep, she borrowed a handsome dress from the oak wardrobe and walked the streets half the night. The fine clothes worked a treat; she was rarely short of trade. 'Quilting keeps the worst of the cold out,' she said professionally, slapping her heavy underskirt. And she always got home by four in the morning, to snatch a little shut-eye. 'Saving my shillings, don't you know.'

Are you?' said Mary.

'Someday I'm going to have my own lodging-house,' boasted Nan, 'and be beholden to nobody.' She left soon after that, saying she had an instinct the cullies were all hanging round the Piazza at Covent Garden tonight. 'I follow my nose,' she said, tapping it. She waved at the other Misses as she swept off, her fine gown scattering the dust.

A while later, a man hurried by with his hands in his pockets. 'Take me under your cloak, my dear,' bawled the red-haired woman who was leaning against the shutters in the shadows that hid her age. According to Doll, Mary remembered, she was the wife of an Indian footman who'd crushed his fingers and couldn't work anymore. A scrivener's clerk with his sleeves full of papers came up the street now. The redhead pulled her skirts up as far as her garter. 'How does Mr. Cock stand tonight, sir?'

Mary blushed at the words, but the clerk passed the woman as if he hadn't heard. He walked by Mary too, then paused, and looked back at her.

She stood a little straighter, pushing out her small chest but trying to suck in her stomach. She began to shake. Just this once, she promised herself, just this once. When all this was over, she'd find another way to earn her bread: there had to be something to make, or mend, or sell.

Now the clerk had taken hold of her sleeve and was pulling her into the light. She wanted to turn her hot face to the wall. She wondered whether he'd start with a compliment, or a request that she might not understand. She wondered when to mention that her rate was two shillings.

'Ninepence.' The man said it calmly, as if he were standing at a gingerbread stall.

And though she could feel tears pricking her eyes, what could Mary say but yes? If she refused this cully, who was to say when she'd get another?

They stood in the shadows. It was all very peculiar, Mary thought. It wasn't like the other times. This was no rape; she was letting it happen, making it happen, in fact. She helped the clerk unbutton his thin breeches; she wanted it over fast. His long sleeves full of papers creaked awkwardly. He looked down at his yard, and so did she. It was the first time she'd actually seen one close-up; the thought started a giggle in her throat. Such a pale, peeled thing it was. The clerk put her hand on it so she started to rub it, as if cleaning a plate, and all of a sudden she felt it growing like a marrow in her hand. Such power she tasted, then!

But he hauled up her skirts as if he was running out of time, and kneed her legs apart, and pressed himself into her, and all at once Mary was a helpless child again. It didn't hurt, exactly; it was just dry and heavy, like a weight she had to carry inside her. The worn papery smell of the man surrounded her. She held onto the shoulders of his plain coat; she bore his thrusts, staggering a little on the cobbles. When panic rose up in her throat she kept her mind on the goal: the crown for Ma Slattery—five shillings, ten sixpences, sixty pennies.

Then with a scalding gush inside it seemed to be over. The clerk leaned his head on her shoulder for a moment, and his legs buckled and swayed. Mary despised him, and almost pitied him too, until he pulled away, straightened up, and reached for his purse.

Nine pennies; she dropped them into the pocket that hung inside her waist seam. There; she'd done it. It wasn't the end of the world. She'd got paid for the thing instead of having it snatched. Her head suddenly ached with tears.

After the clerk came a carpenter, very sawdusty, and then a soldier in an old uniform, and then an old fellow who smelled as if he'd never had a bath, and thanked her afterwards. What they all had in common was a terrible, rutting need. Like that saying of Doll's when she was drunk:
Cunny draws cully like a dog to a bone.

Between customers there were long stretches of waiting. Mary's thighs were sticky. Her stomach ached. By midnight she'd earned three shillings and she was beginning to acquire a stroller's arrogance. She could do it; she had something any man would pay for.

But then the girl in the brown wig stalked over. 'Treating time, my dear,' she announced.

Mary stared at her. Inside her muff, her hands knotted round each other.

'Didn't Doll Higgins tell you our custom?' said the girl pleasantly. Behind her, the others were lining up, arms crossed. 'First-timers always treat.'

They took every penny she had in her purse; she didn't dare hide any, because she had a feeling they would know. She didn't cry either, in case it left lines in her painted face. She managed a sort of grin. It was their beat, after all, and she couldn't afford to make enemies. Not that they were spiteful; the brown-wigged girl invited her along to the Bull's Head for a sup of negus to warm her up, but Mary said she thought she'd stay on for a bit.

'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?

B
ECAUSE 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 enough to stand up to the cullies and set her price. The world was vastly unjust, she recognised that now—with the rich born to idleness, and the poor like the mud under their carriage wheels. But here was a way for a girl who had already lost everything to seize her chance. Why scrape an uncertain living by wearing out her hands, her feet, her back, or her eyes, when, as Doll quoted with a coarse chuckle,
Cunny beats
all?

It was the way the world was. It was the bargain most women made, whether wife or whore, one side of the sheets or another. 'Don't you see?' slurred Doll one night on Oxford Street, seizing the bottle from Mercy Toft and draining it. She chucked it at the fresh-painted door of a four-story house, and clapped her hands with glee to hear it smash. Then she remembered her point, and turned on Mary. 'You've got a thing, ain't you, that any man, from a beggar to a baronet, will pay to lay his hands on.'

She started hoisting up her skirts for illustration, petticoat by petticoat. Mercy Toft was laughing so hard she couldn't stand upright. Only Mary saw the door of the great house open; she grabbed Doll's skirts before she could show her snatch to the whole neighbourhood, and shoved her into the road.