by Michel Faber
‘You don’t like them, do you?’ Sugar’s husky voice, at his shoulder.
‘Not much. They’re rather second-rate, I think.’
‘Oh, without a doubt, you’re right,’ she says, wrapping one arm around his waist. ‘They’ve been hanging there forever. They’re insipid. In fact, I know the right word for them: feeble.’
He gapes at her, dumbfounded. Are his thoughts as naked to her as his legs and genitals?
‘I’ll replace them with something better,’ she promises wistfully, ‘if I can ever afford it.’ Then she turns away, as though discouraged by the yawning gulf that separates her from being able to afford top-notch pornographic prints.
All of a sudden a far more vivid image springs into Rackham’s mind: a recollection of Sugar just as she was when he first woke from his sleep: Sugar sitting hunched at the escritoire, scribbling, at half past five in the morning. His heart is jabbed with the awareness of her poverty — what could she possibly have been doing? Sweated labour of some kind, but what? Is there such a thing as secretarial piece-work? He’s never read of it (it surely merits an article in one of the monthly reviews, along the lines of Outrage Uncovered in the Very Heart of Our Fair City!) but why else would a girl be toiling over a copy-book in the middle of the night? Doesn’t she earn enough as a …as a prostitute, to keep body and soul together? Perhaps she’s undervalued; perhaps most men spurn her, on account of her small breasts, her skin ailment, her masculine intellect. Well, it’s their loss, thinks Rackham. Honi soit qui mal y pense!
This stab of sympathy he feels for Sugar he could never feel for the Drury Lane ‘twins’, much less for the shabby trollops who accost him in alleyways; those creatures are indivisible from the muck that surrounds them, like rats. One’s heart does not go out to rats. But to see Sugar — this clever, beautiful young woman who shares his own low opinion of Matthew Arnold, and many things besides — slaving over an ink-stained ledger late at night, pricks his conscience. If the accounts of Rackham Perfumeries are cruel drudgery for a man of his temperament, what must this girl, barely past adolescence, brimful of life and promise, be suffering as she scribbles? How difficult Life is for those who deserve better!
‘I must be going,’ he says, brushing her cheek with his hand. ‘But before I do, have something more to give you.’
‘Oh?’ She raises her eyebrows, raises her own hand to grasp his.
‘On the bed.’ Explanation or command, her response is the same; she clambers onto the bed, boots and all, on her knees. William climbs after her, gathering up the skirts of her dress in big soft handfuls, tossing the silken greenery onto her back. The horse-hair hump of her bustle makes the pile absurdly large, so bulky it obscures her reflection in the bed-head.
‘I can’t see your face,’ he says.
Even as he pulls her pantalettes down, she lifts her head high, straining as if for a Lamarckian feat of evolution, her jaw trembling slightly, her mouth falling open with effort. Over the mound of scrumpled dress material, he sees all this and more reflected back at him in the glass.
Her cunt is tight, and surprisingly dry. This girl’s flesh needs more moisture altogether, it seems; perhaps her diet is lacking in oily foods or an essential nutrient. How strange that when she had him in her mouth, it felt as if she had no teeth, whereas now, inside her vagina, the tender nub of his prick is being nipped by unyielding tucks of flesh. However, he pushes through the discomfort, wincing once or twice, persisting until his organ and hers are accommodating each other perfectly, and he comes like a piston.
Minutes later, when he has already donned his hot, dampish trousers and is handing Sugar an additional coin, he is suddenly plagued by an anxiety that he’ll never see her again. (Not without cause, either: wasn’t there that girl in Paris, the one who liked rough treatment, who promised him ‘A de-main? and then was gone the next morning?)
‘You’ll be here tomorrow?’ he asks.
Her brow furrows, as if he has just rekindled their Fireside conversation on the subject of Death, Fate and the Soul. ‘God willing,’ she concedes, with a glimmer of a smile.
He’s standing in the threshold of her door now, lingering, knowing that if he stays any longer he’s liable to make an ass of himself.
‘Goodbye then, Mr Hunt.’ She kisses him on the cheek, her lips dry as paper, her breath sweet as scented soap.
‘Yes …I …but … but I must tell you … the name George Hunt. It’s — I’m ashamed to tell you — a fiction. A white lie. To keep those nosy girls at The Fireside from becoming bothersome.’
‘A man must be careful with his name,’ Sugar agrees.
‘Discretion is a much abused virtue,’ says Rackham.
‘You needn’t tell me anything.’
‘William,’ he volunteers immediately. ‘William is my name.’
She nods, accepts the intimacy with mute good grace.
‘However,’ he goes on, ‘I would be most grateful if you could, at all times when you’re in mixed company, refer to me as Mr Hunt.’
She opens her mouth to speak, stifles a yawn with the back of her hand. Forgive me please, I’m so terribly sleepy, her eyes plead, as she nods again. ‘Anything you please.’
‘But do call me William — here.’
‘William,’ she repeats. ‘William.’
Rackham smiles, a beam of satisfaction that is still on his face when, a mere sixty seconds later, he’s standing out in the street, alone, two guineas the poorer, horses snorting to his left, flakes ofsnow stinging his face. A stiff wind alerts him to the fact that his trousers needed more time in front of the fire; the odour of faeces at his feet reminds him that the sweet scent of a woman can be expunged all too soon.
Of course this is not the first time William Rackham has been smoothly and swiftly swept out into the street as soon as his tryst with a prostitute has been concluded. But it’s certainly the first time he arrives at that juncture feeling perfectly content, begrudging not a penny of the expense, wishing not an instant of the experience undone. God, what a night! Nothing transpired as he imagined it might, and yet everything surpassed his dreams! Who would believe it! He feels like telling someone the whole exciting story, feels like rushing home and … well, perhaps not.
The snowfall thins and dwindles, and is abruptly gone, but this narrow street is a draughty place and William begins to shiver. Still he’s reluctant to leave the scene of his remarkable adventure: it can’t be over yet! Craning his head back, he stares up the rear of Mrs Castaway’s, wondering which of those windows is Sugar’s. Half-way up the building, a brightly lit window shows some movement: a silhouette passing. But it isn’t Sugar, it’s a child, moving slowly and haltingly, humping a large burden up a flight of unseen stairs.
‘Excuse me, master,’ says a voice behind him.
William almost jumps out of his skin, whirls round to face whoever dares intrude on his reverie.
It’s a filthy old crone clutching a rusted bucket, her dark face like driftwood eaten away by the Thames, her lifeless hair indistinguishable from the threadbare shawl that covers it, her back bent like a rusted sickle wrapped in oily black rags. Her free hand is dangling low, an inch or two from the ground, her gnarled fingers clutching near his trouser-bottoms as if hoping to stroke them.
‘Excuse me, master,’ she says again, in an ancient, sexless voice that seems to issue from an abscess inside her scum-encrusted clothing. She smells repulsive. William steps aside.
Immediately she waddles forward and reaches down to the exact spot where he was standing, or damn near. With her blackened claws she picks up a large dog turd, fingering it carefully so that it doesn’t crumble, and transfers it into her bucket, which is a quarter-full with ordure of the same kind, destined for the Bermondsey tannery where it will be used to dress morocco and kid leather. Rackham stares down at her, and the old woman mistakes his disbelief for pity; she looks up to him, wondering if the eight pence she hopes to get for her pail of ‘pure’ can be supplemented with
an early-morning godsend.
‘Ha’penny for a crust, master?’
Galvanised by disgust, Rackham fumbles in his purse and tosses her a coin. She knows better than to grasp his gloved hand and kiss it. Instead, bowing to his wish, she melts away into the first rays of the sun.
At the door of Sugar’s bedroom, a knock. She opens it, her face arranged into her best ‘serene’ expression in case it’s Mr Hunt — William — Prince Glorious, whatever his name is, coming back for a lost garter or a grope at her bosom. ‘It suddenly occurs to me I haven’t seen your breasts yet.’
But no, it’s not Mr Hunt.
‘Up already, Christopher?’
The boy stands, veiled in steam, behind the great pail of fresh hot water he has carried up to her. He’s only partly dressed, his mop of blond hair is disordered, and he has crystals in the corners of his eyes.
‘I saw yer light,’ he says.
Such a sweet boy, anticipating her needs like this. Unless he’s just trying to get a chore out of the way. ‘But weren’t you asleep?’
‘Amy wakes me,’ he sniffs, flexing his tiny pink fingers to get the blood back into them. The dull iron rim of the pail reaches his knees and its circumference, Sugar estimates, equals his height.
‘So early? What does she wake you for?’
‘Nuffink. She yells in ‘er sleep.’
‘Really?’ As a rule, Amy dispatches her last customer much earlier than Sugar, and doesn’t rise again until the following noon. ‘I never hear it.’
‘She yells soft,’ says Christopher, brow knitting. ‘But I’m right up close. Next to ‘er mouth, like.’
‘Really?’ From the way Amy talks when awake, it’s difficult to believe she would tolerate her son in the same bed with her. ‘I thought you had your own little closet to sleep in.’
‘I do. But I come out when Amy’s finished, an’ get in next to ‘er. She don’t mind me when she’s asleep. She don’t mind nuffink.’
‘She doesn’t mind anything, Christopher.’
‘What I said.’
Sugar sighs, lifts the pail and carries it inside her room, careful to acknowledge in her posture how heavy it is. What a little champion! She’d been resigned, at this irregular hour, to going down to the boiler room herself, no sign of life being evident by the time William — Mr Hunt — Emperor Pisspants — finally departed. She’d already dragged the hip-bath, and sundry other necessities, from their hiding-place inside the wardrobe, and was just trying to persuade herself to fetch the water when Christopher came knocking.
‘I really am grateful,’ she says, tipping the contents of the bucket into the tub.
‘It’s what I should be about,’ he shrugs. ‘I earn me keep.’
Looking back at him standing on the landing, Sugar notices the tell-tale marks of his struggle with the pail, lugged over-full up far too many stairs in his efiort to save an extra trip. There are livid red crescents on his forearms, and his bare feet and trouser-cuffs are wet and steaming with hot spillage.
‘Man of the house, you are,’ she praises him, but she’s forgetting that flattery rubs him up the wrong way. With a peevish twitch he turns from her, and runs back downstairs.
Shame, she thinks, but then again there are only so many hours on end that a woman can keep in mind all the needs and preferences of males. In the bleary light of dawn, Sugar is ready to be excused.
For the first time in thirty-three hours, she removes all her clothes. Her green dress smells of cigar smoke, beer and sweat. Her corset is stained with dye from the bodice, which is evidently not meant to be worn in the rain. Her camisole stinks, her pantalettes have the snot of male ecstasy all over them. She tosses everything into a pile, and steps naked into the tub. First her long legs, then her bruised buttocks, then finally that bosom whose immaturity those drooling swine who compile muck-rags like More Sprees in London never fail to remark upon — all sink beneath the bubbles.
Guffaws, chatter and the clanking din of goods deliveries grow louder outside her window; sleeping may prove difficult, though she’ll probably drop off during the lull that always comes between the shops preparing themselves and the customers arriving. Her consciousness is already dissolving at the edges; she must take care not to fall asleep where she sits. She’s so tired now that she can’t even remember whether she has performed her prophylactic ritual or not.
Heavy locks of hair disentwine from her loosening chignon, unravelling onto her wet back, dropping hairpins into the water, as she turns to look for evidence of remembering or forgetting. The tureen of contraceptive is where she left it, and yes, she remembers now, she has used it. Thank God for that. Not that she can actually recall inserting the plunger, but there it lies (tipped not with cloth, like Caroline’s, but with a real sea sponge), sopping wet beside the tureen.
How many hundred times has she performed this ceremony? How many sponges and swabs has she worn away? How many times has she prepared this witches’ brew, measuring the ingredients with mindless precision? Granted, in her Church Lane days the recipe was slightly different; nowadays, as well as the alum and the sulphate of zinc, she adds a dash of sal eratus, or bicarbonate of soda. But in essence it’s the same potion she’s squatted over almost nightly since she began to bleed at sixteen.
A crucial hairpin gives way; the remainder of her waist-length hair threatens to unfurl into the tepid water. Shivering, she rises, standing above the froth, hands on her thighs. And, at long last, she is able to release the residue of urine, trifling but painful, that wouldn’t come out earlier, before her bath. The yellow droplets patter down on the suds, writing dark nonsense into the white of the soap-scum. Is it only piddle draining out of her now? Could there really be anything else left in there? Sometimes she has walked along the street, a full half-hour after a wash, and suddenly felt a gush of semen soiling her underclothes. What could God, or the Force of Nature, or whatever is supposed to be holding the Universe together, possibly have in mind, by making it so difficult to be clean inside? What, in the grand scheme of things, is so uniquely precious about piss, shit or the makings of another pompous little man, that it should be permitted to cling to her innards so tenaciously?
‘God damn God,’ she whispers, tensing and untensing her pelvic muscles, ‘and all His horrible filthy creation.’
As if in response to the trickle into her bathwater, there is a pattering against the frosty window, and then the gentle rush of rain, drowning out the noise of humans and horses. Sugar steps out of the tub, drying herself with a fresh white towel while, on the window, the frost crackles, turns milky and washes off, revealing rooftops silhouetted against a brightening sky. The fire in her hearth has gone out and she’s shivering with cold as she pulls her night-gown over her head, half dead with exhaustion. But her patience with what’s-his-name — with Do-Call-Me-William — has been plentifully rewarded: as much money as she would have had from three individual men. Mind you, she isn’t greedy: she’d happily have done without getting fucked in the end.
Then she shuffles — yes, yes, yes — to her bed.
Grunting, she slaps aside the sagging drapes. Her reflection shows an angry young woman ready to murder anyone or anything that stands in her way. With a grunt of determination she seizes hold of the soiled sheets and tries to drag them off the mattress, but all strength is gone. So, slumping in defeat, she extinguishes the lights, crawls up to a dry corner of the bed right near the mirror, pulls a blanket over her body, and utters a cry of relief.
For a few seconds more she lies awake, listening to the downpour. Then she shuts her eyes and, as usual, her spirit flies out of her body, into the dark unknown, unaware that this time she is flying in a different direction. Down on earth, her dirty tub and her wet bed remain, shut inside a decaying building among other decaying buildings in this vast and intricate city; in the morning, it will all be waiting to swallow her back inside. But there is a greater reality: the reality of dreams. And, in those dreams of flying, Sugar’s old life has
already ended, like a chapter in a book.
PART 2
The House of Ill Repute
SEVEN
The heir to Rackham Perfumeries, in a fresh suit of clothes and light-headed from lack of sleep, stands in his parlour staring out at the rain, wondering if what he’s feeling is love. He has been rudely drenched, he has been overcharged by the cabman who brought him home, no one received him until the fourth pull of the bell, his bathwater was an age in coming, and now he is being kept waiting for his breakfast — but none of it matters. Out there, he thinks, is the girl of a lifetime.
He pulls harder on the sash, and the curtains part wider — as wide as they can go. But the torrential downpour that has followed him from the city all the way to Notting Hill is letting precious little sunlight show; rather, a quantum of paleness filters through the French windows, settling on the lamp-lit parlour like a layer of dust. Half past nine, and the lamps still on! Ah, but it doesn’t matter. The rain is beautiful: how beautiful rain can be! And think of all the muck it’s washing off the streets! And think also: only a few miles south-east of here, housed under this self-same sky, in all probability still tucked up in bed, lies a naughty angel called Sugar. And inside her, glowing like silver on the lining of her womb, is his seed.
He inserts a cigarette between his lips and sucks a naked flame against it, reconfirming the decision he made almost immediately after leaving Mrs Castaway’s: that he must have Sugar entirely to himself. An idle dream? Not at all. He need only be rich, and wealth, great wealth, is his for the claiming.