Walking in Pimlico (7 page)

‘’Ere, Corney,’ she mumbled, ‘this gent is no gent.’

But I put my hand over her mouth, and pushed her roughly against the wall. Her head cracked the bricks and she moaned. The comedian said something more, but I didn’t hear it, and he disappeared behind the door again. Bessie was becoming difficult now, and began to struggle, complaining that she was cold and wanted to go inside. I had to hold her hard.

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I’ve paid you, and I’ll give you another five pounds. Five pounds. But you must promise to say nothing.’

Even as I am saying it, I know that five pounds will not buy her
silence. Not five pounds, not fifty pounds, not five hundred. I will be buying her silence for ever. Or until she is dead. She seems to know this too, and begins to laugh loudly, a raucous whore’s laugh which echoes around the yard, so I shake her and tell her to shut up, but it only urges her on, and she seems uncontrollable. I slap her hard with the flat of my hand and this seems to bring her to her senses, for she gasps and then pushes me away. But brandy has turned my legs to paper, so that even her feeble thrust makes me stumble backward and I fall and graze my hand. The pain is slight but my anger and irritation are not. I am enraged and cry out, and follow it with a mouthful of curses. Bessie is surprised and momentarily silenced. But not for long, for she gains her composure, and, returning the compliments, we are locked in a scrap of words, flinging filth at each other, until she makes a last, desperate claim.

‘I know you,’ she pants. ‘I know what you are and where you’re from. And don’t think five pounds or five hundred’ll keep my mouth shut. Not for all the tin you promise. I’ll settle you. You’ll be back in jump-alley with the other soft-cocks and dry-cunnys before I’ve finished and—’

When I hit her, it is with a full fist, and a long draw, and it smashes into her cheek and knocks her to the ground. She cries out in pain and shock, and my knuckles sting, so I know I have, at least, broken the cheekbone or loosened her teeth. She is on her feet and clutching her face, all the time swearing on someone’s life or soul that she knows who I am and when they find out, won’t I be for it, and if I have spoiled her face these friends will spoil mine for good. But Bessie is scared also, backing away from me across the yard, stumbling over the rough stones as her legs buckle beneath her. Watching her fall, and rise, and fall again and, knowing the moment is mine, I am suddenly calm. The searing rage burns cold now, sits in my belly like a tight fist, and I take my time to stride over to her, enjoying the flood of composure. I possess the yard, even the foul
red bricks with their greasy skin. I cover the ground, striking double time with my heels, and stand over her in moments.

In moments.

She is still cursing and babbling, but I am myself again.

She has fallen down, and is struggling to get to her knees. I make a prayer of my two fists and bring them down upon her hard, and she crumples, cracking her head upon the cobbles. I hold her down with my foot, and she groans, struggling and grasping my leg, but her other hand is under my foot, and I grind my heel into it, feeling the fingers snap. She releases her hold with an animal scream and turns her bloody face towards me, her mouth open like a child’s.

I bring my foot down upon her face.

It yields.

There is a wet sound.

She is trying to cry out. I stamp again and again, feeling flesh and bone yield as my heel shatters her face, her mouth, her nose. She is trying to breathe in gasps which are choked on blood, and crawls a little way away. I let her go, watch her for a moment. Again I cover the ground and take my heel to her head and then her face again and feel it yield as I stamp and stamp.

I stamp and stamp, and grind my heel and have no sense of time. Only industry. I enjoy the rhythm, feel the flexing of muscle and sinew, and despite the brandy my head is clear and light, my shoulders loose.

Then I am aware of a cry, a long way distant, and I wonder, as I pound the pulpy mass beneath my foot, where it comes from, only slowly realizing that someone is standing in front of me, a woman with wild eyes, shouting. I know her. It is Lucy. She is both near and far, a face that presses into mine and then appears as a tiny white speck in the distance. I stop, fascinated, and realize that my leg is sore and that the muscles burn and tear with the exertion. Time slips, for suddenly I am opening the gate into the Row and, looking
back, see a figure approaching. He shouts, and a voice shouts back and he starts towards me. I know him. The little comedian. Bessie’s mild protector. I wait in the shadow, then pass through the gate into the narrow Row. The lights of the road are welcoming and I step out briskly. I stride it out, but do not run. Breathing the thin, cold air is exhilarating, and I cover the streets with great speed, reaching my lodgings in twenty minutes and then taking the stairs three at a time.

Only when I dropped on to my bed did I consider what had happened that evening. Tired as I was, sleep would not come, for as soon as I closed my eyes the room began to spin and lurch. Even worse, all the incidents of the evening started to repeat themselves to me, in particular the press of Bessie’s soft body and the rough sweetness of her mouth, and I guiltily wondered what Helen would say if she knew that I had been unfaithful with a whore! I reached for the little portrait of her which I kept under my pillow and carried with me constantly. It is the dearest thing I own, my only reminder of Helen and our precious few weeks together. She had been unwilling to part with it, declaring that it was not hers to give, that it belonged to her brother, John, a gift from her to him on his birthday. She had even had it inscribed on the reverse. Encased in a thin gold frame, like a locket, on the back was the legend:

For my dearest Brother on his birthday.
John Shovelton
From his affectionate Sister Helen

But he was careless of it, and when I discovered it upon his dressing stand among his pins and links, I had no scruples about taking it for myself and keeping it without Helen’s knowledge. Now I have held it so many times in my loneliness that I can conjure every contour, every scratch, even my poor attempt at defacing the inscription in a jealous rage. Like a primitive talisman, its familiarity
was a comfort, and so as the waves of nausea coursed over me, I sought it out in the familiar depression under my pillow.

It was not there.

I searched again. And again.

And then I remembered that I had put it in my waistcoat pocket when I dressed. But even as I tried to sit up, I was struck with a terrible giddiness, and within moments saliva filled my mouth and the room lurched and spun. I found the bowl just in time and into it emptied the wretched contents of my stomach. However, the torment did not end there. Gasping for air between each convulsion and even as I tried to settle in my bed, images of the night’s events paraded in front of me, and I watched over and over, and with maddening repulsion, the dissolution of Bessie’s features as they merged with the black of the cobbles and murk of the yard. It seemed that as desperately as I needed to close my eyes, so that panorama of pictures was relit and rerun until I thought I should lose my mind. Only Helen and the image of her – dear, sweet, angelic Helen! – kept me from crying out.

As the nausea subsided and my stomach gnawed itself into a raw tightness, I searched in the watch pocket of my waistcoat (I was still dressed) for the picture of my dear girl. But it was empty, and though I searched repeatedly, I could not find it. I knelt on the floor and ran my hands over the bed and mattress, turning the sheets on to the floor, expecting every moment to hear a familiar clatter as it fell. Nothing. I lit a candle and tore the sheets, mattress, everything from the bed, hurling them across the room where they struck the table and tipped over the foul contents of the bowl. Inhaling again that acrid stink, I felt the familiar convulsion in my stomach, but the anxiety of the moment kept the nausea at bay, for I realized, searching the mattress and the sheets, my clothes, the floor around my bed, once, twice, three times in a mad frenzy, that Helen’s picture was not there.

I have read that in the midst of chaos there often comes a moment of clarity, an instant when time is shrunk to an image. And so it was for me. On my hands and knees in my own vomit, I had a sudden and minutely clear presentiment of Helen’s image.
She
did not stand before me, but instead the little whore, Bessie, and I realized then – and in truth I very nearly laughed aloud – that I had been nibbled! How ironic that the light-fingered trollop had prigged the portrait from my pocket while she pretended to caress me! Hadn’t Tiverton accused her of the same crime? Had charged her with stealing from him as well as giving him the clap? So I did not even pause to consider the best course of action, but stumbled back to Whitechapel in my befouled clothes, along quiet streets which were not empty but easy to negotiate, and arrived back in the Row within the hour. All was still dark in the yard as I opened the gate and, steadying myself by the wall, I held my breath and listened. There was not a sound.

Bessie was lying on her side where she had fallen. I tipped her over with my foot, and was startled by the wet sigh that escaped from her mouth, so I pushed her head around with the tip of my boot and for a moment wondered if she might still be alive. But it was soon clear that she was not, and so I set about searching her skirts and jacket. There was blood a-plenty, and my hands were sticky with it after a moment’s work, but though I was thorough (indeed I was), I could not find the locket. Then I scuffed around the cobbles, thinking that she might have dropped it, but there was not enough light to see, and it could have rolled into any crack or pothole in the ground. A knot of panic began to form in my stomach, hardly distinguishable from the foul nausea that threatened to overwhelm me with every movement. If the picture was not on Bessie’s body, not lying between the bricks of the yard, the only other place it could be was in the concert room.

The Constellation was in darkness, but I tried the door anyway
and to my surprise found it opened easily. I took a few steps into the room, feeling my breath coming hard, stinging through my teeth and burning the back of my throat. My chances of negotiating a path between the tables and chairs without upsetting them and causing a noise were negligible in my unsteady state. And after all, how would I find the locket in the dark? It occurred to me that Bessie might not have stolen it. That I might have dropped it anywhere, at any time during the evening. One of the other women might have found it. Or the publican. Or the comedian. Anyone.

I closed the door quietly, stumbled across the yard and then into the Row. Once there, the gentle glow of the streetlamp was reassuring, and I walked towards it, keeping close to the wall. A clear head is what I desperately needed and in full measure now, but I was sick and dull and could not contemplate any further than that moment. The locket bearing Helen’s portrait was not to be found. The darkness was too impenetrable, and the danger of alerting the publican and his family too great. But, though I regretted the loss of that reminder of my dear girl’s face, it concerned me more that it might fall into the wrong hands. Better a drain or sewer than in the greasy hands of some slaughterman, or on the watch-chain of a clerk to be handed around and gawped at!

The Row was still and silent, and the noise from the road so faint that it might be a mile away rather than yards, and this is soothing, for my head is alternately light and heavy, and my tongue feels too big for my mouth. If I do not keep moving, I know I will sink irresistibly down against the wall on to the ground and be discovered by some light-fingered wanderer who will relieve me of everything I own and leave me naked. So I stumble away from the road, keeping close to the wall, towards the intersecting streets beyond, and the glow of another streetlamp, and am brought up by a noise beyond the wall. The opening of a door, a muffled call, a muttered curse. It comes as something of a shock, for I am so completely not myself
that I have forgotten the horror that lies beyond this very wall which had seemed so comforting. It has not occurred to me to put distance between myself and the events of last evening. My hands are still sticky with the evidence and my fine new boots will not bear close inspection.

I realized, without panic, that soon the body must be discovered, and I cast my mind back (with some difficulty, it must be admitted) to recall the little comedian, who pissed against the wall close by. And another face. And a voice, which burst out of the darkness. I stop and try very hard to recall, but my head is too big, too heavy. Movement too is difficult. I close my eyes and lick my lips which are dry and flecked with vomit, and that sourness makes my gut lurch again. So I breathe deeply and try to keep the bile down and then, opening my eyes, it seems a face looms before me, so close that I am startled and slither a little on the greasy stones. It is shouting, but I cannot hear what it says, and its eyes are wide with horror. It recedes and then comes rushing out of the blackness again, and I believe I cry out.

I cannot tell whether it is real or a terrible dream.

I am standing with my back against the wall, feeling with the tips of my fingers the rough bricks, and thinking how fine it would be to sit, just for a moment, with my back against it. My head is pounding, and the bile is again rising, and though I try to swallow it back, my stomach will not tolerate it and I cough and gag as I jettison the foul effluvia at my feet. I long for cool water and the cold sheets of my bed, and as my knees begin to shake, I realize I am going to fall to the ground and with little prospect of being able to raise myself. So I struggle against the urgent desire to give way and as I do it seems that there is once again a figure before me, standing still in the Row. This time I am glad and stumble in his direction. I do not care who he is or what he knows. I will pay him, I decide, to guide me home. But my legs will hardly support me, and I know that if I lose
momentum, I will fall, so I train my eyes upon him and begin to run. I run, and slip and trip, my boots cracking on the cobbles, and the figure that had seemed so substantial begins to melt away, and the more urgently I pursue it, the more certainly it retreats, until it has disappeared completely. When I reach the Whitechapel-road and stop, expecting to see it, the figure is nowhere, though I imagine I hear running footsteps in the far distance.