Chapter Sixteen
MOLLY
I didn’t know what to expect for Christmas. I half thought Madame Camille would give the girls some time off, or at least a break on the day itself. But she didn’t and we were busy and after we had our lunch, which was a chicken and some boiled potatoes with gravy, the working house was opened up and a trail of men started to come through. They sickened me, those men. Especially the ones with the families.
I couldn’t help but think of my own family. I thought of Mam and Mr McKenna and the two boys, sat at the table, my chair empty. Would they say a prayer for me? Would they be thinking of me too?
I longed to write a letter, addressed to Mam, to tell her where I was, to let her know that I was living. All she knew was that I’d left the regatta and never been seen again.
But how could I tell them where I was, of the awful immoral place I was living, the things I was seeing, and the baby growing inside me, bringing shame to every moment I sucked in my breath? I thought of the Virgin Mary giving birth to the baby, Jesus, in the stable on Christmas Day and how she hadn’t been married. Maybe I could be forgiven after all if I just prayed hard enough?
I was getting very tired with the late nights and hauling the laundry and all the cleaning. There was always work to be done in our board house too, dinners to be made, groceries to be bought, the children to be washed and the water boiled to wash them. I felt like my stomach was yanking the life out of me, pulling the blood from my bones, the muscles from my skin. When it was time to get up in the mornings, I thought I might die of the tiredness.
The new kip-house near the Gentleman Clubs was working well for Madame Camille. She added her usual touches to the place, making it welcoming and setting it apart as more exclusive than some of the more down-standard houses around us.
Every evening I was afraid Henry Brabazon would walk back in the door and catch me. I never knew if he would and it meant I spent my whole shift watching the door, waiting for him and his moustache and his lovely black hair.
He hadn’t so far and I could only hope he would not. Because next time, I knew, he would walk in and have me arrested there and then. And where would that leave me? With a judge waiting to send me to jail and have me hung by my neck on a rope? I thought if I could just get through the next few months without being seen then I could leave here; run away or do something to free myself. Anything at all, to save me.
* * *
I was still watching the girls and learning the tricks of the trade. They told me bits and pieces, how to finish the men quickly, to try and get a nice regular - maybe one who would be kind and sometimes just want the company and to talk.
I didn’t see much because the doors were mostly closed, but I could hear and if I asked a question the girls would tell me. I was educating myself. I knew when it was my turn I would just have to bear it. There was no other way.
London was freezing. The cold had swept in before Christmas, bringing icy winds and biting air. I arrived at the kip-house every day with my nose glowing red. I had been given a new coat after my flu, a green wool coat, a hand-me-down from one of the girls but it was warm and I was glad of it.
One day we heard that Maggie, a northern girl who had been at the kip-house for a few months had gone missing. She had been out on the street near the end of her shift and she hadn’t come back. The house madam that night had let it pass, thinking she might have just gone home, broken her shift with tiredness or with drink. But Maggie never came back to the house and there was no sign of her the next day either.
Madame Camille was called and she arrived with a face like thunder, annoyed at being drafted in for another problem that couldn’t be handled. But when she saw the fear on the girls’ faces, she softened a bit. Maggie had been seen talking to a man, a gentlemanly looking sort and had walked down the street with him and hadn’t been seen since.
‘I’ll speak to my sources,’ she said, meaning the police and we all got back to what we were doing. That evening a meeting was called and for a few minutes, the doors were locked and all the girls, Madame Camille and I sat around the little coffee table in the hosting room. It was the first meeting we’d ever had, all of us, alone, no customers there at all.
‘Girls you know I look after you,’ says Madame Camille. She’s standing in front of the fireplace and she seems so tall among us girls sat down on the sofas. She reminds me of my teacher in school, only she’s glamorous and made-up, her cheeks growing rosy under all that white make-up from the light of the fire.
‘I have some bad news and I want you to prepare yourselves.’
We look at each other, then lean in closer, waiting for her to go on.
‘Is it Maggie?’ asks one of the girls, her voice high-pitched, her tears already starting.
‘Yes,’ says Madame Camille, looking very sombre indeed. ‘They found her this afternoon. I’m sorry girls. About a mile from here.’
The wailing starts. The type of wailing I used to hear when the cats were in heat and they’d be clawing and climbing all over each other, a horrible caterwauling.
Found where? I wonder. What are they crying over? Then I realise without it needing to be said. The girl is dead. Murdered. By a john, too.
I was told to go and make tea, I could hear banging on the door, fellas trying to get in. Madame Camille went to the door herself and told them in a firm voice to come back in an hour.
‘They’ll be ready for you, then,’ she said.
A whole hour to grieve for Maggie.
I made the tea as quick as I could serving it up to the sniffling girls who were talking about the last time they spoke to Maggie and what she was like. But it wasn’t just Maggie they were crying for. It was for themselves. Any one of them could have been Maggie.
Madame Camille tells us she’s going to introduce some changes and that she won’t be sending girls out on to the streets anymore. Everything would work from the kip-house, for the time being.
A few days later I got hold of the Evening Standard. I pick it up out of a bin, its edges sticking out, all dog-eared and damp. There were never any papers in the kip-house and I missed reading them, picking up the news, looking to hear of home.
I was scanning the pages for articles on Ireland when I saw a headline that drew me in.
MURDERED PROSTITUTE HAD EYES GOUGED OUT.
Maggie. She’d been found stabbed, her neck slashed, and her lovely green eyes gouged out. Her blood had pooled into a puddle where she’d been thrown under a bush in Hyde Park.
I think of her, of what was going through her mind as the knife was drawn and brought down upon her.
And then I think of Montgomery, of the knife that tore through his windpipe, pulling it open so that the blood and the flickering muscle could flow out.
Did Maggie cry out as her attacker ripped her open? Like Montgomery did? Like a baby, crying for his mother, a man like a bairn, like the coward that he was?
* * *
When the pains came in March I didn’t know what they were. They felt a bit like my monthlies, an ache and pull, down low, like something was trying to drag me by my pelvis into the ground. They started out like that, but then they changed. And I knew.
I was at the kip-house and I told the house madam that I thought it was my time so she shooshed me out the door in case one of the customers saw me.
‘Nothing like a labouring woman to put them off,’ she said, handing me my coat and telling me she’d let the midwife know and have her come around.
I walk home, on my own, slowly, stopping to grip the wall. I was scared. And I felt tired already.
When I got home, the house was quiet but I found Elizabeth and told her I thought it was my time. She helped me up the stairs, got me changed and put me in the bed. She felt my stomach and the big, hard lock that was going across it when the pains came.
‘How often are you getting them?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Every few minutes, I think.’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh, you’ve a way to go yet,’ she says. And the words make me sad. Like I’ve just turned for the finish line in a race, but somebody has moved it and I see it getting further away, where the eye couldn’t even see.
Elizabeth says she’ll make me a cup of tea, put some water on to boil and get out the towels and strips of cloth the midwife would need. She tells me not to be counting on the midwife calling soon, that it was a busy neighbourhood with babies delivering, and we were nothing special in this house.
When she brought up the tea I didn’t want to drink it. I felt sick. And when the wave would come, I was gripping the bed with the pain of it, till it passed.
I got up to pace around the room but nothing helped. I felt like I wanted to sit and when I sat I wanted to stand. There was no way to get comfortable and the waves just kept coming, sucking the energy from me and sweating my brow.
I was beginning to wail when the midwife came, hours later. The pains were coming fast now and I could hear a voice in the room crying out. It was only after the sound was gone that I realised it was mine.
She took a look with her big hand all the way up there and she said things were progressing but I still had a way to go.
I felt like I was dying. I wondered how they knew I wasn’t. But when I told them that they just laughed at me and said, ‘Poor pet.’
I wanted my mother. I wanted her there, to tell me it would be all right.
I don’t know how long the pains came for, over and over, rendering me unable to talk or even breathe. They kept telling me to breathe, but I couldn’t.
There was a big, soggy mess below and after that the pains got worse. I didn’t think they could but they did. I was roaring, like the cows I used to hear when they were calving. Low and loud. It came from deep within my throat, noises I’d never heard come out of my body before.
Just before the baby moved down and I could feel him making me want to push, I got to take a little rest. It was as though he was saying sorry, for doing all this, to give me a little reprieve before I had to get him out.
I lay there, passing in and out of a sleep, a whiteness above my head. There were whispers in the distance. I thought I heard my mother’s voice, an accent like hers.
I was lying by the banks of the Boyne, the butterflies lighting on the grass, the river babbling and rushing by. I was there, just for a moment, with my brothers and the sun, but then I was back, in the musty room in the terrace house and now another pain ripping through me - it was time to push.
I flipped over, like a big heavy animal, grunting and roaring and all the while I could feel him moving down, coming out, making his way past me now, the burning tearing through me, a searing hot pain, stretching me inside out.
The midwife was shouting and I thought if they don’t get this out of me, I’m going to truly die right here on this bed, in front of them, an agonising death.
I gave a big push, and he was out; I turned around and heard my voice, all high-pitched and yelping and I was taking him in my arms and looking at him, his face and flat nose all scrunched up, his cheeks fat and swollen.
‘Congratulations,’ says the midwife and Elizabeth was almost crying and telling me I did ever so well.
But I didn’t hear either of them. I heard nothing but the mucousy cries of my baby. The midwife turned him upside down and clapped him on the back and stuck a little pipe in his nose and put her lips to him and sucked a bit and when she gave him back to me, his cries came, all piercing - the loveliest sound I’d ever heard.
I took my finger and held it in front of him and I watched as he stopped crying and looked at it, his two eyes almost cross-eyed in his head. I wiped it down his nose, around his chin and back around his head, feeling his wet skin and the soft bones beneath it.
This is who had been squirming inside me. It was these arms and legs that were kicking, these fingers and toes that were under my ribs. I couldn’t believe that he had come from me, that I had grown him and here he was, like a real, live doll cradled in my arms. Had he really come out of me?
The midwife gave him a quick rub with the hot water and showed me how to put him on the breast and when everything was finished with, I lay back with him suckling, feeling a soaring in my blood like I’d never felt before.
I wanted to show my mam and my brothers and say, ‘‘Look what I made, isn’t he beautiful?’ And the worry that I had, that I’d be thinking of Mr McKenna when I looked at the baby, that I’d remember what he did and see him as a representation of something bad, was gone. I wasn’t worried at all. I had my whole life ahead of me now with this little boy. And I felt very blessed indeed.
* * *
I called him Oliver. When I was expecting him, I thought about it and it crossed my mind that Daddy might not like to have a bastard called after him. But when I saw his little face, all squished and red and wet and crying, I knew he wouldn’t mind. That he was part of me and that was good enough.
The first night passed on a high. I was shocked that something so perfect, so beautiful had been inside me all this time. That I had pushed him out. That he was mine. I held him, not sleeping at all, just nursing and holding, smelling him and feeling the warmth of his skin.
The midwife had looked round after he was delivered, washed, and on the breast and asked me where his things were.
I told her I had no things.
She looked annoyed.
She said she’d come back the next day with a few essentials but that somebody had to help me and find the things he needed.
‘He’s not a doll,’ she said, all condescending. ‘It’s a baby, a shitting baby.’
I didn’t like her using those words around my baby. He was an angel. I would get him the things he needed, whatever it took.
The girls in the house came in after their shift and congratulated me; said he was a stunner. And he was.
Just as dawn broke, I drifted off, falling into a greyish sleep, feeling his little heart beat against mine. When I woke up I felt sore and he was crying.
I stayed in bed all that day, sniffing and smelling him, swaddling him like the midwife told me to. She came back and washed me and said everything looked ok, but there was a lot of blood. I felt a bit weak.
She brought with her some worn looking smocks and binders and a couple of towels. ‘I’ll add these to the bill, but you need more,’ she said. ‘Usually a mother would sew these herself.’
I knew she was looking down her nose at me. That she thought I was too busy whoring to be sewing for my baby. But I had nothing. No money to buy anything. Nothing to trade. Only what Madame Camille gave to us in the house.
Just like she surprised me on my sick bed, Madame Camille made an appearance that evening, coming in all smiles and carrying a brown paper bag. She took out an orange, something I’d never had before.
‘Now you eat this all up and get your strength back,’ she said. ‘And I’ve brought you a few things for the baby too.’
I was delighted when she pulled out two new snow-white smocks. She had towellings too and pins for the baby’s nappy. She had ointment for his belly button and eyes and eyebrows. She knew exactly the things I needed.
She didn’t offer to hold him. I knew she wouldn’t want to, up against her beads and lace and her bony wrists. It would look wrong her taking him in her arms and swaddling him, nothing soft about her at all.
Then she came out with it. Something she needed to offer to me. Because we always had choices, she said.
‘I know of a couple. A lovely couple. Catholic actually. He’s a school teacher, grand tall man, very athletic. Anyway, they haven’t been blessed with any children.’
I look at her, over the top of Oliver’s head, his scalp alive with a smell I found intoxicating.
‘Oh,’ I say, as if she was just telling me a story, nothing to do with me.
‘They’re looking for a baby, Molly. A newborn. A good healthy baby. A boy actually.’
She looks down at Oliver’s head.
; ‘My baby is not for sale,’ I say, as calm as I could. Was there nothing this woman wouldn’t sell. Women. Babies?
‘Oh, it’s not a sale,’ she says. ‘Far from it. I was thinking of his future, Molly. The baby. They have a beautiful home, up near Streatham. He would have everything he needs; everything. An education. Food. They have a housemaid, Molly. He’d go to a Catholic school.’
Sounded like she had everything thought out.
‘I’m keeping my baby,’ I say and I feel my teeth gritted against each other.
‘You don’t need to make any decisions now,’ she says. ‘You’ve not even spent a day with him yet. He’s beautiful. But in a few weeks’ time Molly, when you’ve to go to work and you’ve your bills to pay and you’re wondering what sort of life, what future you can offer him, I just want you to know, there are other options. For him.’
So, this was her game. Take in poor wretched souls like me, sell us into the business and take our babies away for more profit. Well I could see through her as though she were a pane of glass. She was not taking my baby off me.
I turned my head and stared at the brown wall. I watched a mouse scatter along the skirting board, a black thing, barely visible against the wood only for his quick darting movements. I thought how the mouse had more freedom than I had, running around wherever he wanted to go.
‘Molly just think about it. It would do a lot for your slate too. Almost wipe it clean it would,’ she said.
The slate. This magic slate I’d heard all the girls talking about.
‘How much is on my slate?’ I ask her, turning back from the wall.
‘I record everything carefully,’ she says, her forehead creasing a bit. ‘Don’t forget that I took you in. When you had nowhere to go. When you had that growing in your stomach and not a pot to piss in.’ She stabs the air at Oliver, the corners of her mouth going up in disgust.
‘It’s not cheap to feed and clothe you and put a roof over your head,’ she says. ‘And you had a hospital stay and now a midwife to pay for. Let’s say you’ve one of the heaviest slates I have.’
‘How long will I have to work for you?’ I ask. Straight out. It had been on my mind. I wanted to know what I owed her and how long it would take me to pay it off. I needed something to look forward to, something better for my baby.
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