That night she joined the others without homes, scavenging for fruit and coins amongst the mats and panniers of the market. She sucked the laxative and discarded fangs of rhubarb stems. She dined on dates and green tomatoes, while Victor made supper out of milk. She knew what she would have to do. At dawn she woke, wet with Victor’s urine, and disturbed by cold and the noise of porters, barrows, market girls. She turned her palm up for sympathy and cash. A market trader, fond of children, placed a perfect apple in her palm.
So Victor lived beneath a market parasol for eight, nine months. His mother found it thrown out. Some flower-trader, at a guess, had given up on it and bought another. Its wooden pole had snapped in two. Its green and yellow canvas canopy was torn. She made repairs as best she could without materials or tools. She made the most of nothing. Women had to then. A bit of canvas and a broken pole were better quarters than the trenches that their men would occupy when war broke out. Em set up her umbrella at the centre of the marketplace, between two bars and near the scrubbing stones. There was the flat, damp trunk of a snag tree for back support. There was market waste and mulch to soften cobblestones. Her begging pitch was chosen well. The drunks, the madwomen, the wretched ones, the innocents with visions, the dregs and cynics, assembled at the steps of churches, and begged for coins, alms, for holy charity, from worshippers, and penitents, and wedding guests. The ones with whistles, tricks with fire or balls stayed on the busy streets and entertained the hangers-out, the tramline queues, the cafe clientele for cash. Em’s kind of beggar, the kind that is the model of what could happen to us all, must be clean – and in the Soap Garden there was running water all day long. Crowds of people, too, with time to spare. The traffic there was mixed: market traders, bar girls, their customers, the women and their washing, the men who came to drink and talk. No one came there without a little cash. The bars, the girls, the market stalls weren’t charities. Gratitude was not the bargain that they sought.
So Victor’s mother did more than beg. She traded smiles and peace of mind. She did it well. She had a baby to support. The coloured, broken umbrella was the perfect touch. It was what country women used to shield themselves from the rain and sun when they came in to town to sell their flowers or their garlic cloves. Passers-by would look down to see what this woman had for sale. Em’s face was hidden by the parasol. Her breasts were on display – with Victor hard at work. The child in need. One hand – the one with a single wedding ring – was resting on her knee palm up. The other pressed the baby to her chest. She marketed herself. She felt no shame. Shame is a family, village thing. It doesn’t count for much amongst strangers. Her only fear – and hope – was that her sister would chance by and look beneath the parasol. She did her best to beg with pride. It was not sin, like drink or bed, that had brought her there. She pinned a browning photograph of her husband to the canvas of the parasol with a black silk funeral rosette. It signified, Here is a widow and her child. Look at their man. His death has made them homeless, poor.
What of Victor at this time? Are kids of less than five weeks old so self-engrossed and innocent that nothing in the outside world makes any impact on their lives so long as they are fed and warm and free from wind? The truth is, yes. The only bonding that there is takes place between the nipples and the lips. Victor was the kind of child who bonded to his mother’s breast with the tenacity and deliberation of a limpet on a stone. If he was sucking, he was well. Detach his gums, prise him loose with the gentlest finger, and he would imitate a seagull bickering for shrimps, his tiny call – not yet a voice – as querulous and fretful as a dirge.
Em thought this threnody would earn her cash, that Victor singing thinly for the breast would move the hardest passer-by to find a few spare coins. If her child could cry like that so readily she only had to pop her nipples free when people passed and she would earn a fortune in small change. No one was mean enough, she thought, to close their ears to babies in distress. But she was wrong. We in this city are the sentimental sort. We don’t like tragedy. That’s why the drunkard at the railway station gates, singing bits of opera in fake Italian and French, and bothering the women with his arias, earned more from begging than the trolley man who’d lost a wife, his mind, and both his legs in some forgotten war. To toss some coins in the drunk’s old opera hat was to show one’s liberality, one’s worldliness, one’s sense that all was well. To give cash to the trolley man – taken without a word or smile – was to price a life, a leg, a personality. At what? At less than one could spare. The coins clattered on the trolley floor. Enough small change to buy a rind of pork, a two-stop tramway ride, a piece of ribbon for your hair. The coins paid for guilt-free entry to the forecourt and the trains. Except, of course, the gateway where the trolley man lay in wait was the one least used. His naked stumps, his naked hopelessness, made people change their routes. The operatic drunkard got the crowd.
So it was with Em. When she took Victor off the breast, his protests cleared a space around their parasol. The shoppers did not look to see what was for sale. They knew. They heard the baby’s screams and kept their eyes away from this private tableau of distress. It would not do to stare. Or smile. Or break the moment with some coins in Em’s palm. Besides, what could a coin do for one so young? A coin would not change its life. What should they do then? Search their pockets for a little solid love? Hold out their hands and offer to this pair that spare room, rent-free? That job? That meal? That ticket home? No, Victor’s tears – and, here, who will not pause to note the leaden candour of the words? – were of no worth. But what could be more appealing than a baby on its mother’s nipple, the two most loved of natural shapes, the infant cheek, the breast? No need to look away from nakedness like that. You could study scenes more intimate in churches or in galleries. Madonna and her Child. The Infancy of Christ. First Born. Indeed, there was a sculpture reproduced on the lower-value silver coins of that time. A woman, Concord, held an infant to her breast, her tunic open to her waist, her thighs becoming tree trunk, tree bole, the tree becoming undergrowth, becoming Motherland. Here, then, was the sentimental counterpart of comic, operatic drunks. Em and Victor made a wholesome sight when Victor was asleep and on her breast. Coins dropped into the mother’s palm or on her shawl were tribute tithes for family life. Em understood. To earn the pity and the cash of citizens she had to seem respectable and, more than that, serene – a living sculpture labelled Motherhood.
2
FOR THOSE MEN who were not moved by Motherhood, Em acted Eve. She wore a mask of gormless innocence which was as challenging to them as the pouting and the paint upon the faces of the bar girls who sold real sex for cash. The market traders who passed her frequently and saw the way her expression seemed to fluctuate haphazardly between Eve and Motherhood thought – preferred to think, in fact – that Em was none too bright. They said she hadn’t got the sense that God gave lettuce. They labelled her ‘the Radish’. That was the nickname that they used for girls red-faced and odorous and from-the-soil like her. These traders had good cause to doubt the sharpness of her intellect, besides the permutations of her face. She muttered to her baby all day long, and in those slow and well-baked country tones which stretched the vowels and squashed the consonants and made the language sound like morse. Yet there was cunning just below the widow’s skin. Alms-givers welcome gormless gratitude. They do not give to people who seem wiser than themselves, no matter whether it be Eve or not. No, Victor’s mother was no fool, despite appearances. A fool would have an empty palm, but Em’s was always slightly curled and buttoned heavily with the copper brown of coinage.
Her looks, of course, were helpful there. She was a radish with a round and childish face. Her breasts were high and firm with milk. Her throat and shoulders were vulnerable and bare. Her knees were spread to make her lap a cradle for the child. Her feet and lower legs protruded from her apron skirts with the unselfconsciousness of a small girl sitting in shadow at the harvest edge. Any man who paused to drop some coins in her palm had pa
id for time to stare at her – though if he stepped too close the parasol would block his view. She did not lift her face to look these men directly in the eye. A look from her would make them hesitate, or return the coins they had found for her in the pockets of their coats. For women, though, the radish turned its chin and caught their eyes and smiled. Most shopping women are too timid and too sociable to fail to match a freely given smile. And having smiled themselves at Em, what could they do? What else but mutter phrases about the weather or the child, and buy escape from smiles and platitudes with coins in Em’s palm?
Sometimes the crowds which walked between the market and the garden were too dense for smiles to work. The shoppers simply dropped their eyes and let the beggar woman’s beams slip by. But Em soon learnt the trick of targeting her smiles with words. ‘God Bless the Cheerful Giver,’ she would say. Or, ‘Lady, Lady!’ spoken urgently, as if she’d spotted danger on the street or recognized a family friend. If Em could only stop the first one in a crowd and embarrass her to pause and give, then she could count on gifts in streams. The first fish leads the shoal.
So Victor and his mother lived beneath the parasol by day, and slept at night wherever they could find a place amongst the dozing market baskets or at the back of bars. They were not rich. Of course they were not rich. How could they be on gleanings? But they survived, sustained by charity, by the prospect of Em’s sister chancing by, by the certainty that the city would provide abundantly, by the sense of awe they felt at being at the centre of such a boisterous web, by the dislocated optimism of those whose lives are trembling at the gate.
Was Victor happy? So far, yes. He fed contentedly. He slept. His domain was his mother’s lap. Her nipples were his toys. But then the muscles strengthened in his neck and arms. He grew bored with suckling. He wanted to lift his head to look around at all the movement and the colours in the streets. He fell back startled from the breast when he heard Em calling out, ‘Lady, Lady!’ or when the hubbub of the crowd seemed more eloquent and urgent than the beating of his mother’s heart. He found he liked those moments best when he was upright on his mother’s knee and she was belching him, separating the suckling oxygen from the milk that he had swallowed and which was causing jousting mayhem in his gut. She had one hand flat on his chest, supporting him. The other tapped and played a gentle bongo on his back between his fragile shoulderblades. Or else she beat her tune, not with her fingers on his back, but with the cracked and greying candle stub which she would only light again when she had somewhere to call home. Her son’s short neck was creased in tidal ripples of baby fat. His mouth was hanging open, waiting for the upward storm of warm and milky wind. Some passing men made clicking noises with their tongues for him, or comic, pouting kisses with their lips. Sometimes a dog ran by. Or older children. Always the market offered entertainment to the child – a porter with teetering crates of onions on his wooden cart, an argument, a snatch of song, some shoving between friends, and, almost constantly by day, the casual, tangled flow and counter-flow of citizens in search of romance, fortune, pleasure, food. At times the street around the parasol was quiet and empty, but then Victor found a butterfly to watch or sharp-edged sunlight winking on a broken neck of glass or the flexing toes of his own feet, or spilt water – parting, joining in its halting, bulbous progress through the cobblestones.
Once he’d belched he would have stayed most happily, his head laid back upon Em’s chest, his hands encased in hers, a dozing spectator. But there was money to be earned. His mother’s breasts were Victor’s lathe, his workbench, the family spinning wheel. Em put her small son to her breasts. She put his mouth onto her nipple and she held him there, whispering and pigeoning into his ear to make him calm. It was a hopeless task. A growing child will not stay calm and supine all day long. A child is put upon this earth to raise its head and stretch its legs and grab. Em sang him lullabies. She told him country tales. She reminisced about her husband, Victor’s dad. But Victor did not care. The docile, suckling infant grew less tractable. His stomach became distended and would not clear with belches. His testicles and inner thighs became encrusted with a bitter rash, its scaling plaques and lesions made angrier by the baby’s water and his stools. He cried when he was wrapped inside his swaddle clothes. He thrashed his legs and pushed his fists into himself.
Em knew what should be done. A nappy rash is not the plague. It only takes a little air, some white of egg, and patience for the rash to clear. She begged an egg and broke it into the half-skin of a discarded orange. She put tiny poultices of orange pith, glistening with albumen, onto her son’s sore thighs and testicles. She stretched his legs and let him lie, naked from the waist down, across her lap. The sun and breeze were free to sink and curl between his legs. Young Victor – his flaming gonads patched in orange pith – looked as if the madders and the ochres of a peeling fresco had settled in his lap. So much for Eve and Motherhood. This sculpture was not good for trade. Em’s outstretched hand was hardly troubled by the weight of coins now. Nobody caught her eye. The squeamish men no longer paid to stare at Victor on Em’s breast.
The remedy was simpler than eggs. The problem was that Em was eating too much fruit. Her diet was the oranges, the grapes, the grapefruit, the tomatoes, and the apples that the more familiar shoppers and traders tossed to her as they passed by. She dined on that. Then for supper she fed herself on what she gleaned amongst the cobbles, the fruit discarded, bruised, mislaid in the Soap Market. She fed herself on citrus, pectins, fructose. Her waters were as tart and acid as peat dew. Her milk was too. It passed through Victor acrimoniously. It turned his gut. It chafed and scalded his most tender skin. Feeding made him restless on his mother’s breast. He tugged her nipples in his gums. He tried to bite. And then Em had a problem of her own. Her son had made one nipple sore. The nipple cracked, and was not helped to heal by all the acid in her milk. She would not let her child feed on that side. She only let him suck milk from the right. But he was bigger now and wanted more. One breast was not enough. He’d passed six months. His mouth and stomach were prepared for solid food – some mashed banana mixed with milk, some peas, potatoes, stewed apple, grain. But Em was frightened of the day when Victor would renounce the breast. She liked the way he clung to her to feed. She simply pushed her child onto her one good breast and hoped his rash, her crack, would heal before the cash dried up.
Em’s fruity undernourishment and her fatigue at coping with the child alone reduced her flow of milk still more. Again the baby lost all interest in the outside world. He sucked all day, but still he was not satisfied. He was tired and fretful now, at night. He would not sleep for long. He whimpered and he dozed. His mother’s breasts were irritants to him. She would not let him suck the one; the other one was nearly dry. Em was in pain. Her cracked nipple had become infected through neglect. She was feverish. A nut-sized abscess had formed amongst the milk ducts of her breast. It blushed and throbbed. The pain was memorable.
‘I’m out of oil,’ she told herself, picking at the peeling fossil slates which were her nails.
Together Em and Victor rocked away the nights and days. Em’s careful presentation of her baby and herself was neglected. The radish face turned yellow-white. The good health of the countryside did not survive the hardness of the town. She had no plan to make a fresh escape. She sank into the shade beneath the parasol and called out above the fretful cries of Victor, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying.’ She wept. She tried to seize the trouser legs, the skirts of passers-by. She mimed an empty stomach. She put her hand onto her heart. She tried abuse. She called out words she had not known before she came to town.
It did not work. The rich were blind to noisy poverty. The people hurried by. The crazy woman with the parasol would win no hearts like that. She had trembled at the gate. Now the gate was closing on them both. The city was about to lock them in a cell of hunger, sickness and despair. And then their fortunes changed. Em’s sister, Victor’s aunt, was sent by chance to rescue them.
/> 3
SHE WAS NO rich man’s maid. She was a beggar, just like Em. And worse. The aunt had lost the kitchen job for which she’d come to town three years before. She’d not excelled at the skivvying which – when her widowed father died – the Village Bench had hoped would ‘quieten’ her. High hopes indeed for such a squally girl. Her face, and tongue, had not found favour with her employer’s cook, who had taken her teenage dreaminess, her wilful tawny hair, her lack of tact, her pockmarked forehead and cheeks, as insolence.
The hope had been that Aunt could – quickly, cheaply – be transformed from hayseed into scullion. But she was not the curtsy-kowtow kind and had no kitchen skills. ‘She couldn’t boil up water for a barber,’ cook had said. ‘That girl’s as much use in this kitchen as a cat.’ Instead, she was the sort who saw the city as a place for play not work. Unlike the country working day the city day was ruled by clocks. It had its shifts for work and meals and sleep. And there were shifts when Aunt was free to play. What did she care if cook found single, errant, tawny hairs entwined in dough or curling like a filamentary eel in ‘madam’s’ soup? Why all the fuss? Nobody had died from swallowing one hair. And what if there were egg bogeys between the tines of breakfast forks? Or if the skillet smelled of pork? So much the better if the skillet smelled of pork! Anyone with sense or appetite would take a fold of bread and ‘wipe the pig’s behind’. She and her older, married sister, Em, fought for such a treat when they were young.