Aunt simply could not understand the odd proprieties, the niceties, of bourgeois city life where more was wasted than consumed, where laughter, yawns, and stomach wind shared equal status, swallowed, hidden, stifled by a hand. She did not like ‘indoors’. But she adored the bustle and the badinage of streets, the intimacy of crowds, the hats, the clothes, the trams, the liberty. She had it to herself once in a while – when she was sent by cook to purchase extra eggs or vegetables, when every second Saturday she had a half-day off, when – once, at night – she climbed the backyard wall and walked till dawn in those parts of the city where lamps – and spirits – were rarely dimmed. On that occasion Aunt was met by her employer’s dogs when she returned. They took her for a thief and, though they knew her well enough from all the times she’d favoured them with kitchen slops, they were too dumb or mischievous to let her clamber back into the kitchen yard. Their barking called the Master and the police. For cook this was the final straw. She did not find it likely that the girl had just been ‘walking’ as she claimed.
‘You country girls are all the same,’ she said. ‘“Bumpkins do not good burghers make.”’ She did not say what she had told her employers, that Aunt was mad, ‘a leaking pot’. She paid Aunt off with the exact train fare – oneway – to the village of her birth, only fifteen months after she had fled it for the prospects of the town. Aunt spent the train fare on a hat.
She skipped around the bars and restaurants quite happily. She wore her hat – a high-crowned, deep-brimmed cloche in straw with dog-rose sprigs in felt. It was the fashion for that year amongst young women of a cheerful disposition. It masked the pockmarks on her forehead and made her seem more winsome than she was. She doffed her hat at groups of men who sat on the patios of bars or on the terraces of restaurants. They seemed so bored and so keen to be amused. She only had to smile or comic-curtsy or spin her hat around upon her open hand, to earn a little cash. It was so easy to take money or a meal off men and still stay good.
There were a dozen country girls like her who worked the same neighbourhood of the city and who shared a two-room attic in a tenement near the Soap Market, in the Woodgate district. The Princesses they were called, sardonically, by the poor families and the labourers who inhabited the lower floors. They’d all lost jobs as maids or kitchen girls and had finished on the streets. Some stole. Some sold themselves to men. Some earned a little from the sale of matches or doing fetch-and-carry for the posh, frail ladies who took strong waters in the smart salons. Aunt stuck to begging. She was good at it. And soon she had enough each day to pay the pittance rent for a small corner in the Princesses’ attic rooms. There was no proper light or water there, or any stove for cooking. But there was camaraderie and candles. We know that poverty’s not fun, but if you are young and poor in company then shame, and lack of hope, and loneliness do not increase the burdens on your back. Sharing nothing or not much is easier than sharing wealth.
So Aunt was happy with her life. There was no washing up. No slops. No punctilious, grumpy cook. No silver breakfast forks. They shared – like only women will – their daily gains, their city spoils, their swag. The only privacy they had – if, say, they wished to sit unnoticed on the pot – was to hide behind the lines of washing, strung across the rooms, or to wait for darkness. But why hide away to pee, when peeing in full view of all your friends can cause such mirth and raucous joviality? ‘Hats off,’ they used to say to Aunt, whose cloche would rarely leave her head. ‘It’s impolite to pee like that in the presence of Princesses.’ They’d wait until they heard the spurt of urine in the bowl and then they’d say, ‘Hats off. Stand up … and take a bow!’ Or ‘Sing, sing! And show your ring.’ The communal laughter of these Princesses was laughter with no victim and no spite.
Aunt learnt the tricks of begging from their attic talk at night, as each described the day they’d had; how men’s brains were unfastened with their braces; how careless waiters were with tips; which restaurant chefs would give a back-step meal to any girl who’d volunteer to mop the floor. You’d eat the meal – then run; what places were the worst and best for palming cash from strangers. She learnt how just a dab of zinc and vinegar could make a girl look feverish. It didn’t work with men, but women – older ones – would pay to make you go away. She learnt a gallery of beggars’ faces, how to slide her tongue between her teeth and lips to look the simpleton, how to fake the single floating eye of the insane, how picking noses is just as good as picking pockets for getting cash if it is done on restaurant terraces and in a childish, not a vulgar way.
So she did well on city streets. She begged and importuned enough to count herself – by country standards – well set up. She was much plumper than the girl who’d skivvied in the kitchen. She had her hat as talisman and her Princesses for family. She did not think about the coming day – or much about the day just passed. She liked to place her hat upon her head and wander streets as if they were country lanes and she was simply searching for free fruit. She never tired of putting out her hand or challenging – this was her favourite trick – the drinking men in bars to toss and land a coin in the canyon brim of her straw hat.
Despite the drama of the hat, she was an ill-built, scruffy girl. The pits and craters on her face were blessings in disguise. They kept the men at bay. She did not have her sister’s looks. But what she had was something better, rarer in those days than mere good looks. She had a sense of unembarrassed self-esteem. She liked the way she was. So when she heard her sister calling from beneath her green and yellow parasol, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying,’ Aunt was not the least put out. She’d heard a hundred stories of the saddest kind of why and how her Princesses had fallen on hard times. Tough tales that made her wonder how animals, as frail as adolescents are, could surface with such buoyancy from depths so cold and bitter. She guessed that there was death in Em’s own tale or illness or the loss of work. She was not shockable. It seemed to fit, not flout, the patterns of the world that Em, like her, should end up in this place. Fate – the fate of being born a country woman in those days – was not Coincidence, nor was it Chance. The poor take trams. They travel on fixed lines. It’s only the rich that go at will in carriages.
Aunt stooped below the parasol and matched her sister with the voice she’d heard. They were the same, except that Em was poorer, thinner than a head of corn that had been stripped of ears. Aunt knew – from just one glance – that her sister was forlorn and ill and underfed. She heard the whimpers of the child. Her niece or nephew, she presumed. She felt content to have a sister once again, to be an aunt. She knew that she could help.
So Em became the oldest of the Princesses – and Victor was their little Prince. Most of the girls were glad to have a child at first. They passed him to and fro and petted him as if he were a cat. They teased him with their little fingers in his mouth and marvelled at the power of his gums and lips. They loved to belch him on their knees, his fingers wrapped so bonelessly round theirs, or to press their noses to his head and smell the honey-must of cradle cap. They kissed the baby dimples on his arms, his back, his chin, and called him ‘Little rogue’ and sang ‘Dimple in chin, Devil within’. They made noises like you hear in zoos from those determined that the parakeets should talk. But Victor was in no mood for games. You see, already he was malcontent, and not because of his acid rash alone. He wanted food. Warm lips and murmurs do not serve supper. He tried to push his hand between the buttons of their dresses. He wet and creased the fabric of their blouses with his mouth.
‘They’re all the same,’ a Princess said. ‘Men only want one thing.’
Aunt found some floorboard for Em and Victor below the sloping attic roof. She scrounged a little matting and some cloth for blankets. Aunt carried Victor to the street, and within twenty minutes had returned with a topless conserve jar containing tepid mashed potato, manac beans and gravy which she had begged at a restaurant’s back door.
‘This kid’s a gold mine.’ She crushed the beans and mad
e a mixture with the potatoes and gravy. ‘There’s plenty here for all of us,’ she said, though softly so that ‘all of us’ meant Victor, Aunt and Em. She made stewballs in her palms, four large ones the size and shape of eggs, and smaller pellets for her nephew, Victor. His first solid meal. He was almost nine months old. His first milk teeth were winking through the gum.
Together they poked the food into his mouth. It was too dry for him. He coughed. And when he closed his mouth the food was squeezed between his lips and fell into his mother’s hand. He did not cry, though. This was not distress. He simply did not have the knack of swallowing such lumps. Perseverance won the day. The sisters had a score of fingers to keep the food inside the baby’s mouth. Fingertips are like enough to nipples for Victor to be confused and suck. The sucking did the trick. For every scrap that slithered out across his chin a small amount went down his throat. His sucking dragged the gravy from the mixture. He liked the smell and salt. He had his fill. He slept – for once – without his mother’s breast.
Em told her story of how she’d come to town, and how the town had almost beaten her. Then Aunt replied with hers, and how the town was better than a friend. It took more care of waifs and strays than any village in the land. ‘If that weren’t so,’ she said, ‘the countryside would be the place for girls like us. The trees and fields would overflow with widows and orphans. But look around you, Em. Look on the streets. It’s cities take us in.’ And then she added, ‘City air makes free.’
They talked like artisans at lunch, about the problems of the begging trade. Their jobs were like all jobs. Why should they be abject? They had their colleagues, rivals, clientele. They had their working rituals, too – and the pride and purpose that such employment brings. The problem was that Em’s breasts were nearly dry, and still too sore for comfort. Giving solid food to Victor might give them time to heal – but would the child return to the breast when he and Em were begging once again?
‘When Victor isn’t feeding,’ Em explained, ‘I don’t make money on the streets.’
‘If that’s the only problem you’ve got, then you’re the lucky one!’ said Aunt. She took her sister by the hand. ‘Just sleep,’ she said. ‘I told you, Victor’s gold to us. A baby at the breast earns cash. You don’t need milk for that. You don’t need spit to stick your tongue inside your boyfriend’s ear.’
At dawn, while Em and Victor were still asleep, Aunt put on her hat and went down to the bars where the traders, warehousemen, and porters had coffee-and-a-shot before they started work. She found the comic angle for her hat. She wore her sweetest, daftest smile. She stood against the walls of bars and called for pitch-and-toss. She’d show the men her plump and mottled knees if anyone could throw a coin in her hat. The man who stepped up to her and softly dropped a coin in, imagined he had got the best of Aunt. She showed her knees. He departed poorer than he’d come, but she, quite soon, had earned enough for food. She bought a bruised banana, cheap. A fresh, warm turban of bread. A bottle of root-water. A twist of honey. Cheese. She was a cheerful sight upon the street. She skipped like someone half her age. She took the stairs two at a time. She found a dancing path between the sleeping Princesses, and spread the breakfast on the boards. She broke the bread and cheese. She snapped the banana into three, and mashed one third with rootwater in a spangled cup until it ran like gruel and was thin enough for Victor to swallow.
She woke up Em and then woke Victor too. He was not ready for the day. He wailed like a damp yew log in the fire. She pinched him on his arm until tears dropped heavily and he was wide awake and mutinous. Em tried to push her sister back, but Aunt was stronger. She lifted Victor by his arms and held him tightly at her side. He beat her with his wrinkled fists. She said, ‘Now watch!’ She undid the loops of her woollen top, and pushed her clothes aside. She put her index finger in the twist of honey and wiped it on her tiny nipple. The honey sagged like candle grease. Aunt pinched Victor one more time. His voice made pigeons fretful on the roof. Aunt put him firmly on her breast. The silence was as sudden and as comic as a burst balloon. He pressed his mouth and tongue onto her skin. He sucked and made the noises that children make when drinking juice through straws. ‘You see? He doesn’t need a knife and fork,’ she said. ‘Or milk.’ She outlined how they would share the child. They’d work the boy in shifts. ‘Four tits beat two,’ she said. ‘Ask a cow. And honey’s got the edge on milk. Ask bees.’
Em watched her baby nuzzling at her sister’s breast, as fickle when it came to food as adults are with love. He threw his head from side to side and tried to get a proper grip on this modest nipple, this impermeable and unswollen breast, this honeycomb. He was engrossed and sweetly satisfied and, for the moment, wanted nothing else. Em almost wished that she and Victor were still marooned beneath the parasol.
4
SO THIS WAS Victor’s life. Two lives, in fact. While other children learnt to crawl and pick up what they found as if the world was all a toy and theirs, he shared two women’s breasts. His gums grew numb on honey. His nose was flattened by their ribs.
Em still preferred to work the marketplace. She knew the faces there and all the odours were the odours of the countryside, congested and compressed. She’d lost the parasol. Its pole had ended up on someone’s fire. Its cheerful canopy was ripped and jettisoned. But she sat cross-legged for harvesting (‘We’re harvesters. We do not beg,’ her sister had said) in the usual spot, between the garden and the market, her back against the flat trunk of her tree. It was a comfort when she saw crops of the class and quality that her birth village had produced – ‘yellows’ from the potato fields, carrot clumps, onion sets, the stewing roots, sweet dumpling pumpkins, the dusty shingle of the beans – all so familiar from the days when she and all the other village kids had been dragooned to join the harvesters so that the crop could be brought in quickly and at its best.
She’d known, she would know still, all villagers apart from the shape of their arses. A bean field when the beans were splitting was a field of arses facing bluntly upwards as villagers played midwife with the soil. A potato field was much the same. The horse plough turned the soil – and then the village bums were higher than the noses for the day as harvesters with trowels sought out the timid ‘yellows’ in the crevices and punctures of the soil. These townies only dined on such fresh crops because the country folk were not too proud or idle to stick their arses in the air. Em slowly had convinced herself – with Aunt’s help – that coins given to her now were payment for the hours that they’d spent as girls, unpaid, with blackened hands and aching backs amongst the produce of their fields.
She harvested the marketplace, less passionately, less urgently, than she had done before her sister arrived. She had a place to sleep, a family, a group of friends, somewhere to wash and eat, a simple route to and from her work, free time. She felt no different from the other working women in the marketplace and garden, the waitresses and salesgirls, the prostitutes – that is to say, she felt as bored, inured, and dutiful as anyone who has to labour for their pay.
While Aunt slept late, Em took the morning and the midday shift because those were the times when people came to shop for vegetables and fruit, the times when the Soap Market and the Soap Garden were most profligate and careless with their cash. She served her time, with Victor at her breast. She had a little milk and honeyed nipples to keep her outsized baby still. And if he tried to raise his head? Or twist to see the world pass by? She only had to wrap his head inside her shawl for him to quieten or to doze. The darkness was a drug for him. His pulse was slower underneath the cloth than when his ears and eyes were naked to the clamour and the city light. If he cried, Em simply hushed him with a dab of honey on her breast, and murmured country comforts to him with her lips pressed to his cheek or ear. ‘The squeaky door gets all the oil,’ she’d say. ‘The gabby cat gets cream.’ She found rhymes and games to put him on the breast. ‘Ring the bell,’ she said, and tugged the wayward quiff of hair on Victor’s head. Then, ‘Knock
the door.’ She drummed her fingers on his forehead. ‘Lift the latch’: she pinched his nose and – that’s the nature of the nose – his jaw dropped down, his mouth agape. ‘And walk right in!’ She placed her honeyed nipple on his lower lip.
In the early afternoon Victor’s skipping aunt would come with bread or cheese to share with any fruit or salad that Em had harvested that morning. There was no food for Victor then. He only fed at night. ‘The hungry mongrel does not bark,’ Aunt said. She made these nonsense phrases up, to mock her sister, to mock herself. She liked to play the country muse for those foolish men in bars who’d pay for hollow ‘wisdoms’ such as that. She was not right about the hungry mongrel – but she was wise to caution against feeding Victor while he worked. A sated child will not take honey. A sated child cannot be blackmailed by the promise of a meal. It’s hungry circus seals that sit obediently on tubs and balance beachballs on their snouts. The more they are rewarded with a fish, the more they flap and slither out of line.
When Aunt and Em had eaten, Victor was passed on. His face was pressed against the younger breasts, where the honey was not mixed with the blood-hot residues of milk, but where the torso flesh was deeper, softer, less discrete. Aunt tied him to her with a sash which passed around her neck and round her waist. His body was not long, but long enough by now to make Em’s sister stoop a little from the toppling ballast of his weight. Em was now free to walk back to their attic rooms or buy a little food or bring the family washing to the public washing square at the centre of the Soap Garden, or sleep.
Her sister carried Victor to her usual haunts, the bars, the restaurants, the tea salons, of the medieval streets to the east of the station yard. She wore Victor like she wore her hat, an accessory to her outfit and her act. She’d show her knees – at least – to anyone who’d pitch-and-toss some silver in her hat or place a coin ‘on my baby’s cheek’. If any man seemed slow to search for change, she’d wink at all his friends and ask, with the innocence of a music-hall soubrette, ‘What’s wrong with him? Has he got a snake in his pocket, or what?’ She’d lean over dining tables with Victor gummed to her breast like a bloated termite at a grape, and invite the diners – loosened by the wine or beer – ‘to place a silver coin on my baby’s eyes if you want fortune and good health’. It sounded like an age-old rite. In fact, she’d dreamed it up. If young Victor raised his head, to bare his honeyed teeth and scare off custom with his cries, then Aunt would knock his head back to the breast with the speed and firmness of a factory foreman, bent on keeping working children’s noses to the loom or press or lathe. She was not hard. She simply liked the way she was, and wished to keep it so. What sort of kindness would it be – to whom? – if she behaved towards the boy as if he were a rich man’s son whose duties only stretched from play and food to sleep? What money would she harvest on the street with Victor in her care, if Victor were the normal child, allowed to crawl and scream and play with stones exactly as he wished, if Aunt was just another ‘mother’ in the town? Where was the sentiment, the plaintiveness in that? Who’d pay for such mundanity? So trading says, The child must suck the breast. Six coins out of ten are lost unless the child is on the breast. So, Child on Breast! That was the requisition of the working day.