One gentle shove from Aunt would have sent this Dip toppling like a trussed piglet onto the bare floorboards of his room. But Aunt was in no mood to shove. Despite her bafflement, she was at least gratified to be the centre of attention, to be the focus of Dip’s ballet buffo. It kept the grief of sisterhood at bay. She let him slide onto the mattress, his sinking head pressed to her chest … her abdomen … her stomach … her crutch … her thighs … her knees. She let him put his tongue between her toes. She laughed and laughed. No wonder prostitutes were such a jolly breed.
‘Undress,’ he said. ‘But not the hat.’
8
NOW DO YOU SEE the charm of cities? None of this adventure could have happened on the village green where Aunt and Em had first played tip-and-kiss with boys. There were no flirting, pocket-picking strangers to encounter there, in patent shoes and collar studs, with private rooms. The only available men were cousins all. Or neighbours’ sons. Or daft. They were as solid and as passionate as trees, as heroic and original as farmyard hens. That is to say they were all dull and without sin; their only privacy was sleep and shit. But city air makes free – and country pullets can become street cockatoos or fighting birds or songsters once they’ve shaken hayseed from their wings. So, Aunt and Dip, two village souls gone free and wild in city streets, could no more pass each other by than cats can pass a dish of cream.
The dipping and the begging became less urgent. They lived on love and bed. These were sufficient for a while. So when they woke, curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch, Dip breathing through the filter of Aunt’s hair, Aunt folded like an infant in his arms, it was not often long before they found themselves embracing face to face or delving in the blankets for a breast, a testicle, a pinch of fat. Sex was breakfast for these two. It fuelled them for the day. Sometimes they breakfasted at leisure, no stone unturned. At other times Aunt merely turned away and let Dip wriggle into her, to puff and quiver, for a minute at the most, at her buttocks and her back. Aunt did not care for breakfast much. Her appetite for love grew with the day. But she was content to let Dip make use of her after dawn, so long as – in the afternoons, at night – he’d do what she desired.
Each day they washed with water from a jug which Aunt had filled from the public fountain the evening before. They dried themselves on air. They dressed in their best, only clothes, and walked out into town not like the cockroaches they were, but eagerly and hand-in-hand. They had to eat. Aunt dealt with that. She knew which market men would happily part with bruised fruit, which bakeries threw out collapsed or wounded loaves, where trays of eggs were stored and could be reached by someone small and agile like herself, where it was easiest to snatch the bread or chops off diners’ plates in restaurants.
They needed money, too. Youth and love are spendthrifts both. Here Dip’s expertise gave them an undulating income. One day he’d lift a wallet with enough inside to last the week; and then a week would pass and all he’d get would be ‘blind purses’ containing buttons, tokens, keys, eau de Cologne, but not one coin. Dip did not choose his victims well. He’d rather pick their pockets comically so that Aunt – his witness from across the street – would be amused. He did not concentrate. He was on show. He took it as a challenge to remove a worthless glass and metal brooch from the lapel of a stern-faced, clucking woman, and lost all taste for lucrative yet humdrum theft. Aunt satisfied the predator in him. The time would come when he’d insist that she stayed in the room when he went out to work. He’d say she soured his good luck. But in those months when they first met he did not care if business was not good. A note or two, some silver change, would be enough to reunite their hands while they, leaving Victor in the room with blankets for his toys, went off to find a bar.
Aunt had a liking for the clear, cheap, country spirit known then as glee water, but now, of course, tamed and bottled by the drink barons and marketed as Boulevard Liqueur. It did not take a lot to make her drunk. One shot, and she would lay her hat and head on Dip’s shoulder, her hand upon his knee, her foot on his. Two shots, and she would press her lips against his ear and say what they’d do to pass the time when they got home, if Victor were asleep. She’d be a ‘Princess’ and she’d let him buy her for the afternoon. She’d be as hard as nails for him. Or else they’d make imagination manifest: ‘Let’s sit apart and masturbate.’ Or else, ‘Let’s buy some honey, Dip. We’ll put it on and lick it off. I’ll put some on my breasts and you can feed off me …’ Or else, ‘Do you want to do me in my hat? I’ll do a show for you. You toss-and-pitch and watch. For every coin that you land inside the brim I’ll take something off.’
Once, when she had watched Dip lifting purses from the smarter ladies of the town, she asked, ‘Why don’t you try to burgle me?’: ‘Just like we’re in a crowd,’ she said. ‘You come up and dip your hands inside my clothes and try to find my purse.’ For Aunt the narrative of sex, the scene, the characters, were seldom twice the same. Her passions were theatrical. She cast herself in parts in which the heroine was more slender and had better skin than her, in which she was in charge, desired, insatiable, amused, in which she could transcend herself, become any one of those grand or glamorous women on the street.
The Princesses were wrong. Hilarity was not the word, though laughter was a part of sexual pleasure. Euphoria was what she felt. When she and Dip were making, staging love, it seemed the real world could be kept at bay. She could have kept the world at bay all day! What was the hurry? What was the point in hurtling, like men, through such sustainable pleasures to the brief and unreliable moment when the bubble shudders, bursts? She could not understand how Dip, at breakfast time, was so easily, so speedily, so undramatically relieved. That was his word, ‘Relief’ – ‘Give me relief,’ he said. For Aunt not-making-love was not the absence of relief, but a muting of that part of her which found its best expression in the gift of love.
They’d put ‘the kid’ to sleep when they’d first met and kissed. Of course, tired and dispirited though he was, he did not sleep for ever. For Aunt and Dip to live the life they chose, to play such parts each afternoon, to spend those hours drinking glee, they needed privacy, the privacy of two, not three, bananas to the bunch. A child of Victor’s age was old enough to inhibit anything beyond a kiss. Both Aunt and Dip had understood, the day they met, that if their passion for each other was to boil and whistle like a kettle and not steam and simmer like the water in an open pot, they would require time to themselves.
‘We’ll put the boy to work,’ Dip said, when he had suffered inhibitions for long enough. ‘He’s missing his mum and this’ll give him something else to do.’
What kind of work? Aunt raised an eyebrow almost to her cloche’s brim.
‘The boy can hardly walk,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have him begging on his own. Besides, he’s just a baby, though he’s big. He’s hardly weaned … He isn’t bright enough. He isn’t tough …’
‘I’ll fix him up,’ said Dip. ‘The streets are full of kids like him, and doing very nicely, too.’
‘But doing what?’
Dip hadn’t thought it out, but now he had to find a scheme and find it quickly, too, before he lost his patience with the boy and showed it with his fists. He settled for the first idea that came. The boy could build a future out of eggs.
‘What eggs?’ Aunt asked.
‘The eggs you steal from out the back of that big storehouse.’
‘Then what? You think he’ll build a nest and hatch them out?’
‘We’ll boil them up, what else?’
‘What else? It’s juggling that you have in mind, I guess. Or sulphur bombs.’
‘We’ll boil them up. Get the kid a little bag or tray, some twists of salt. He’ll have a business on his hands! When I was little, that was lunch at harvest time, or if we had to travel anywhere outside the village. One boiled egg. The only salt we had was sweat. My grandma used to tell our fortunes from the broken shell. The shell could show how long you’d live. Perhap
s the kid can trade in fortunes, too.’
‘He’s hardly seven years of age.’
‘Seven’s an old man in this town.’
So it was that Victor first became a marketeer, a soapie at the age of seven. Aunt was his wholesaler. She crept into the storehouse from which she’d stolen – but more modestly – a dozen times before. It was late at night, after the fresh eggs had been brought from the railway station, sorted, placed in straw-lined trays. She lined a muslin bag with paper, lifted the one loose wallboard which provided access from the city lane at the rear of the building, and crept into the midnight room.
On that first night she was afraid. She’d stolen eggs before, but only one or two. A watchman, catching her, would not call on the police or his employer for what it took a hen a day to make. He’d settle for the lecture he could give or, at worst, demand some other recompense.
But on that night she wanted fifty eggs at least, more hen’s work than could be shrugged off as ‘breakages’. If she was caught and put away then Victor would be orphaned once again. She did not trust her Dip – left as a sentry in the street with Victor sleeping on his shoulder and her hat in hand – to give the boy a home or love. She’d never seen them touch affectionately. Dip was the sort who having never been a cared-for child himself thought touch and tenderness were simply trinkets with which men could flatter, soften, win their women. But Aunt – persuaded now against all reason that Victor would be happier left on his own, the boiled-egg salesman of the marketplace – had made herself the promise that he would ‘always have a beam above his head at night’. If she could guarantee that he was safe and warm at night, then she could put him out of mind by day.
She was the cheerful type. What was the point in brewing guilt? Who’d benefit if she and Victor caressed and hugged all day, and let their empty stomachs shrink and pucker in the cold? It seemed to her, as she gained entry to the storeroom, that stealing eggs for Victor was the greatest gift that she could give because these eggs would free Em’s son from her, and leave her free of him.
That night the storeroom was not entirely dark. A late winter moon turned the skylight windowpanes a liquid silver and made the room look colder than it was, as if the ceiling had been tiled in translucent squares of ice. What light there was picked out the thousand brittle, bony skulls of eggs. The shells absorbed the light, reflecting none onto their bedding straw, like button mushrooms butting into oxygen from earth.
Aunt walked as gently as fear allows between the egg trays and the light. The odour was strong, and reminiscent too. The chicken dung, the straw, the timber of the room, the salt-and-semen smell of white and yolk, the moonlight dressing, was farmyard simplified, was field. Aunt took just five eggs from each tray and – counting in a whisper as she worked – filled her bag with sixty eggs. They were the size and weight of perfect plums. The only sounds she heard were Dip whistling in the lane outside – his warning that there were passers-by – and, far away, the midnight alarums of the drunks and revellers amongst the final trams and scuffles of the night. There were no rats to alarm her. The watchman slept on undisturbed. But still she was afraid. The eggs were ghosts. They looked like souls or sins encased in sculpted skin. To steal these icy eggs at night made Aunt feel like a grave-robber. Each one was someone dead and someone loved. Which were her parents? Which were the villagers who’d been alive when Aunt was born? Which one was Em?
She could not move. Dip whistled without cease, suspiciously and tunelessly. Perhaps there were policemen on the street – then whistling would only bring ill-luck to Dip. But if he stopped?
Aunt crouched beside her bag of eggs. A moth flew up from God-knows-where. A bat-moth, black, grey, and red. It landed on the back of Aunt’s right hand. It closed its wings and rested on her warmth. No great weight, no manacle, could have rendered Aunt more still or breathless than that one moth. Then Victor woke. She heard Dip curse, then whistle once again – a slower, sleepy version of the dance he’d been attempting before. But Victor would not settle to this bogus lullaby. His thin crow voice was raised in protest at the pressure of Dip’s hold, the darkness of the lane, his orphanage. ‘Shut up,’ Dip said. But Victor knew the power of his lungs and screamed. Nothing would make him happy now. He was alone, at midnight, in the city. Tomorrow he would earn his living – a marketeer at last. But for the moment, but for ever, Em was dead, the eggs were stolen, packed, and Aunt was crouching in that brittle-mushroom field, transfixed. She was not certain what had pinned her there – the screaming or the whistling or the moth. She only knew what everybody knew who’d come from village into town, that midnight is a lonely and ungenerous time when streetlamps blanket out the stars.
She held the bat-moth by the wings and put it on the eggs. She had to take the chance of climbing back into the town. Victor’s screaming, Dip’s slow dance, were loud and strange enough to bring the army out. She lifted the loose wallboard and looked outside. It seemed safe enough. She clambered through the gap and reached back into the storeroom for the bag of eggs, and then replaced the board to disguise her entry. Dip had seen her now, and stopped whistling. Victor screamed. Despite the hour the lane was busy. Men, mostly alone, were making for a brothel-bar where drinks and women could be bought until dawn. They passed between the distraught child and the woman thief without a comment or a glance. Crime and distress were the common starlings of the street. They could not give a damn.
9
A COUNTRY CHILD of six or seven might work all day at harvest time. Hard work, too; helping with the stacks, or pulling roots, or climbing to the furthest branches for the remotest plums. At dawn it very often was the child who was sent out to slop the pigs or strip the maize for chicken feed. The youngest daughter had the milking stool. The smallest son was sent at dusk to gate the herd or flock, and if he came home empty-handed – that’s to say, he’d found no firewood, mushrooms, nuts – then very often supper was withheld. ‘Empty hands, empty stomach,’ was the village phrase. At lambing or when the fruit was in its fullest blush, some girl or boy would have to keep the foxes or the applejays at bay. All it took would be a fire, a scare-drum, or a horn. A single child in every orchard or each field throughout the day or night would do the job at no expense, so long as they were vigilant and did not sleep. Nobody said, That kid’s misused. How could you leave a child so young, alone, for such a time, with so much danger all around? Rather, their childhood seemed ennobled by the tasks they had. Work made them independent, healthy, spirited. Why, then, the fuss when city children worked? Compared to country kids the poorest city children – homeless, reckless on the streets – had an easy time of it. At least they pleased themselves. If they were bored with holding carriage horses for small change, or selling matches, papers, sex, then they could take the time to share a cigarette with friends or join the shoal of sprat-sized thieves and beggars in the Soap Garden. They could vie with pigeons for rinds of bread, or glean the market for discarded fruit, or splash around in the motherly and greying laundry water of the public washing fountain.
Philanthropists, of course, would do their best to net the shoal, to place the best and brightest of the girls in houses where they’d be taught to iron and make the beds. They’d do their best to separate the boys from their bad ways, their friends, their cigarettes, their threadbare clothes, by indenturing them to coachbuilders, factory men, or anybody wanting hard work for no pay. They thought a hostel was a better place for orphans than the street, yet could not answer why it was that once their orphans had a bed, a schedule for their prayers, once they had work and food, a change of clothes, they still broke loose to join the starlings again.
The answer’s tough and simple. It is this: that routes to misery and hell are often much more fun, more challenging than routes to virtue and well-being. Why else, how else, would children such as those who thronged the Soap Garden and the Market, then and now, embrace the destitution of the city streets with such audacity and such appetite? We should not grieve too much for little Victor
, then. Not yet, at least. The market was a warm and busy place, more cheerful than a four-walled room, more sociable, more nourishing than the four dry, sweet breasts that had sustained him till the fire. He was bereaved, twice over. He was not strong. Or wise. But he was young enough to mistake mischance for the natural order of his life.
He sat, contented, resigned, before his tray of eggs, exactly in the place – where else? – where he had sat and suckled for so long with Em. His back was set against his mother’s tree. It was a home of sorts. And though his face was not well known (how could it be, pressed up against his mother’s flesh and shrouded, swaddled from the light?), he knew enough about the tricks of trade to turn his thin mouth up and advertise his wares with what appeared as undesigning smiles. Indeed he was amused. What boy, a few weeks short of seven years of age, would not delight in sixty eggs of which he had sole charge?
Aunt and Dip were his first customers, pretending to be casual passers-by. They dropped their coins in his hand and made the most of choosing a well-boiled egg. They smelled the shells. They tapped the shells and held the oval echo to their ears. They ate their eggs exactly where they stood, stooping down theatrically to help themselves to salt.