Slammerkin

  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?

  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 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.

  'It's true, frig you!' bawled Doll. 'You can take his own weapon—see—and turn it in his face.' That mime was even more obscene. Mercy's laugh turned into a violent cough. They never noticed the pair of footmen hurrying down the marble steps to investigate the matter of the broken glass. Mary had to hook her arm into Doll's and Mercy's and haul them off down Soho Street before they all got their heads broken. They giggled all the way to St. Giles.

  The winter was a wet and cold one, but Mary and Doll bought fourthhand fur-edged muffs to keep them warm, when ale and wine and gin wouldn't do the trick. Most of the girls picked a beat and worked it, but Doll said that was tedious stuff. 'The whole city's our bawdy-house, my lass,' she crowed. Mary was coming to learn that men were easy, in the end; not worth being afraid of. Doll showed her where to find them, and when they were ripe for the picking. Mary took strangers against walls, in taverns, in rented rooms; clerks blind with drink on the Strand; rich Bishopsgate Jews restless after sunset on Saturday; young bucks reeling out of Alm
ack's after losing hundreds at brag.

  Mary was a free woman now, with more money in her pocket than she'd ever seen in her life before. She dressed in the brightest colours she could find on the stalls of Monmouth Street—pinks and purples and oranges—and never cared if they clashed, so long as the cullies kept looking. She knew herself to be wanted. She wore her rouged face like a carnival mask.

  One grey morning she thought of the Mighty Master for the first time in months. 'Are we going to hell?' she asked her friend, suddenly doubtful.

  Doll let out a dry chuckle. 'I'm a Roman, ain't I?'

  'A what?'

  'You know, a Papist, same as my parents before me. I take the sacraments every Easter, rain or shine,' Doll added proudly. 'When I reckon my hour's come, all I'll have to do is send for a priest and get myself absolved.'

  'What's that, then?'

  'Scrubbed clean, soul-wise.'

  Mary considered this image. 'But what about me?' she asked, troubled.

  Doll shrugged. And then, more kindly, added, 'They ever told you about the Magdalen in that school of yours? Mary the Magdalen?'

  The girl thought she remembered the name.

  'Well, she were a whore, and she did all right in the end, didn't she?'

  At Twelfth Night Doll took her to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, 'to teach you how to cheek the fellows in the grand style,' as she put it. They paid a shilling each to squeeze into the gallery—the price of a fuck, Mary thought, trying out the new word in her head. Doll gazed round critically and guessed there were no more than a thousand and a half in the house this afternoon. The hum of talk rose like bee song.

  Mary felt sick with anticipation. The play was said to be a new one, adapted from the French: The Game of Love. Her mother had always kept her away from the theatres, told her that no good would come of folk pretending to be what they weren't. The air was so hot, she felt her shoulders released as if by the touch of the sun. The curtain didn't go up till ten past six, and at first Mary was so dazzled by the set that she could see nothing else. There were great trees that slid on and off the stage, and gilt sofas, and a full moon shining without any visible means of support. The lights stank like burning hair.

  But then Mrs. Abington came on in a white flowered gown with scalloped flounces and a ladder of increasingly tiny bows on her stomacher. Mary forgot everything else. 'Does the manager let her pick out what she wants to wear?' she asked Doll.

  'Pick it? She owns it,' said Doll. 'The actresses all have to furnish their own clothes.'

  Mary watched Mrs. Abington with a sort of tender envy. Imagine owning such dresses and walking out on the stage for thousands of people to stare at you.

  'No wonder they need rich keepers!' said Doll with a dirty laugh.

  Mary looked at her hard, to see if that was a joke. Then she stared even more closely at the woman who was floating across the stage as if she'd never seen a male member in her life. It puzzled Mary, how a girl could wear such a face after entering into the trade. Maybe it was different for an actress; maybe she could reach into a pair of breeches while all the time pretending to be someone else.

  The speeches were hard to follow, above the shrill commentary of the audience, and the swish of fans, and the swell of gossip whenever some viscount or duchess showed themselves in a box. But soon Mary had got the gist of the play. Mrs. Abington was a lady who had switched clothes with her maid, as a sort of joke. It was astonishing, the difference a hat made, or an apron, or a gilt buckle. If you looked like a lady, it seemed, men bowed to you a lot, and if you dressed like a maid, they tried to kiss you behind doors. But what the maid and mistress didn't know was that the gentleman coming to court the lady had done the same swap with his manservant. So they were all liars, and none of them knew who they were flirting with, which made it very funny.

  Doll nudged Mary in the ribs whenever a riposte got a laugh. 'There's the old repartee for you, Mary!'

  'If you shut your mouth for a minute I might be able to hear it,' said Mary, elbowing her back.

  There were folk they were acquainted with—and some they were friendly with, like Mercy Toft and Nan Pullen and Alice Gibbs and the Royle brothers who ran the cider cellar round the corner from Rat's Castle—but when it came right down to it, Mary was coming to the conclusion that she and Doll had no one but each other. Even when they lost themselves in a crowd—they joined in half the peltings and 'rough music' that went on that winter, even helped to burn an effigy of a silk-master who wouldn't raise wages—Mary and Doll always kept one eye out for each other. No one else quite spoke their language, got the joke. They might be seven years apart in age, but they could finish each other's sentences.

  There was an old song Doll used to sing, late at night:

  Ribbon red, ribbon grey,

  Men will do what they may.

  By now there was hardly a corner of the city where Mary hadn't turned a trick, from the pristine pavements of the West End to the knotted Cockney streets where Spanish Jews, Lascar seamen from the Indies, blacks and Chinamen all mingled like dyes in a basin. She'd had coopers and cordwainers, knife-grinders and window-polishers, watchmen and excisemen and a butcher with chapped hands. In the crowd that gathered to watch the famous Mr. Wesley preach at the old foundry in Moorfields, Mary had done three hand jobs and earned two shillings. She'd taken on an Irish brickie in Marylebone, a one-legged sailor back from the French wars, a Huguenot silkweaver in Spitalfields, a planter gentleman back from Jamaica, and an Ethiopian student of medicine. She'd charged that fellow double, expecting him to hurt her with his monstrous yard—such were the rumours—but it turned out he was no bigger than an Englishman after all. So now she knew. She was acquainted with the whole city, from a coach trundling along Pall Mall, to the back wall of St. Clement Danes, to a room upstairs at the Lamb and Flag on Rose Street. It was a drover down from Wales who hired that room. 'Lie still,' he'd said afterwards, with his soft lisp; 'lie still a while, Miss, and I'll pay another tuppence.'

  She'd had a few bad nights, but she didn't let herself dwell on them afterwards. When she came home once with the marks of a cully's nails on her neck, Doll called her a ninny, and taught her how to knee a man so hard his bag would ache for weeks.

  Mary knew she'd never starve, now; she could be sure of that much. Cunny draws cully like a dog to a bone. What she had between her legs was like the purse in the old story that was never quite emptied.

  Ribbon grey, ribbon gold

  You must dance till you be old

  Mostly the men blurred together in Mary's mind, after the first two months in the trade, but there were a few who stood out. A greasy-haired jack on Queen Street, for instance, who'd taken her against the side of a cart and—she found afterwards—reached under her skirts with his knife and snipped her pocket in the act. She should have known he was a thief from his crooked eyes.

  One regular was a young Scot the Misses all called Mr. Armour—laughing behind his back—because he insisted on wearing a thin sheath of sheepsgut. 'What's that, then?' asked Mary in alarm as he drew it on, the first time.

  'A cundum,' he said, digging her breasts out of her stays. 'Reasons of health.'

  She held him at bay with one hand. 'Which reasons would those be?'

  The Scot shrugged. 'It armours me against venereal itches and fluxes.'

  'What, you wear this cundum thing every time you do the business?'

  He tore at her laces in his haste to loosen them. 'Well, not with ladies, that goes without saying. Only with women of the town.'

  Mary let out a screeching laugh. She sounded like Doll, it occurred to her. 'And what about us?' she asked as Mr. Armour buried his face in her breasts and tugged up her skirts. 'Are we not as likely to get clapped or poxed by you cullies as you by us whores?'

  He looked up, wild-eyed, as if he hadn't been expecting argument. He gripped the sheath at the root to hold it on. 'Such,' he panted, 'would seem a necessary risk of your trade.'

  He was nudging her k
nees open, but she had one last question. 'Couldn't I buy one of these cundums myself?'

  'Why yes,' he said, straight-faced, and then, with a smirk, 'but I can't imagine where you'd wear it!' And with that he was up to the hilt in her, and the time for talk was over.

  Soho Square at five in the morning was a good hunting ground; that was when the lords were finally turfed out of Mrs. Cornelys's Select Assemblies. Once Mary went into the bushes with a nob who turned out to be a Parliamentary Member. He kept talking about a Monsieur Merlin who'd performed for the Assembly in shoes that went on wheels. 'Wheels, I tell you!'

  'Never!' murmured Mary, as she rubbed the swelling in his breeches, noting the flawless pile of the velvet.

  'Dashed along like some bird—until he came a cropper and smashed through Mrs. Cornelys's mirror. Blood and glass all over, I declare, the poor Frog.'

  'Poor Frog,' Mary repeated, addressing the lopsided prick she was lifting out of the velvet. 'Poor, poor little Froggie.'

  'Not so very little, surely?' he asked, half-forlorn.

  Mary thought the lord must have been drunk, or dreaming, to make up a story like that one. But the image stayed in her head as she straddled him: a little Frenchman, flying along the ground like a swallow, towards disaster.

  Another day Mary met a chair-man with a worn-out spine, who carried sedan chairs for a living and suffered with every step. He paid for a room in a bagnio so they could do it lying down. She climbed on top and promised not to shake him. What a luxury that was, to fall asleep afterwards and dream that she was riding through town in the King's State Carriage with its carbuncles of gold.

  Ribbon gold, ribbon brown

  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.