"I know you do," scowled Mrs Slurry. "everyone round here knows."
"I'm not ashamed of what I do."
"You should be. Sneaking round at night, breaking up marriages, upsetting the kiddies, doing things with men ..."
"I don't just do things with men," I added, toying with her.
Mrs Slurry raised her hand, finger-sausages splayed. "Aw, shutup, will you, I think I'm gonna lose me dinner."
"I'll pay you well," I said.
"I'll take her," said Mrs Slurry. She was fortunately not one to let personal disapproval stand in the way of a financial transaction.
Deborah had fallen asleep in the crook of her huge arm, a rosy pink creeping into her pale cheeks. "Take her now," said Mrs Slurry, "she's had enough. Don't want her to have too much and get a sore tummy. Hold her tight, thassaway, make her feel safe. S'all anyone really needs, innit? To feel safe. Can I get you a cuppa tea or do you need to go out and break up a few more families?"
She was nothing if not hospitable. I didn't want to go back out into the cold rain and holding little warm, dry, Deborah and stroking the birdlike contours of her thin back was surprisingly pleasurable. I indicated that I could stay and was given a mug of hot tea.
I refused the offer of milk, fearing that the dairy cow might squeeze some of herself into my mug. We sat at the big wooden Slurry table, near the fire, babies and children strewn around the room, some awake, some asleep, some grizzling, some smiling, all chubby-cheeked.
"This won't be a problem with Mr Slurry, will it?" I asked. "You already have so many."
"He won't notice another baby," said Mrs Slurry. "He can't count beyond five, not since the accident."
I remembered the accident well. I had just purchased some mutton from the butcher when a dreadful screaming erupted from the back room. Mr Slurry galloped into the shop, clutching his five severed fingers in his right hand, making a double hand, a finger bouquet. Blood poured down his left arm, which he was holding by the elbow, a raw lump of meat closely resembling the mutton package I was carrying. A crowd gathered and someone who appeared to know about these things bound his arm to slow the bleeding. I wasn't needed so I moved off with my mutton.
Deborah slept in my arms, soft puffs of breath fluting her perfectly shaped lips. Mrs Slurry slurped her tea.
"We won't get in trouble for doing this, will we?" she asked, worried. "We should probably take her to the police, that'd be the right thing to do."
"There aren't any police," I said. "Not anymore. You didn't hear?"
Mrs Slurry frowned. She had not heard. Unusual, I thought, for the greatest gossip in Grimble's End to be unaware of such high drama.
"There was a prisoner in the cells," I explained. "With a disease which stole his mind and made him strong. He killed the officers with his bare hands. "
"All four of them?"
"All four."
"God help us."
"I doubt it."
I finished my tea and chinked a handful of coins onto the table. Mrs Slurry reached out for Deborah and for a moment her warty face was transformed into something almost beautiful as she looked upon the tiny, sleeping baby. Deborah was in good hands. I arranged to return the following week with more money and three turnips.
When I knocked on the Slurry door four nights later, Mrs Slurry was angry.
"Can't you count?" she grumbled, "s'not a week yet, and I'm dreadful busy."
"This isn't about Deborah," I said. "Something else entirely. Remember the prisoner I told you about?"
Mrs Slurry nodded, her chins continuing to wobble although her head had finished moving.
"He's in your washhouse right now, dying," I continued, "I must go to him."
Mrs Slurry's mouth sagged into a ragged hole of disbelief. "I would've thought you'd have some taste," she hissed. "You can't pleasure a killer right here in me washhouse! He must have money in his pockets, has he? I s'pose that's good enough for the likes of you. You probably like them better if they're dying. Less work."
I snapped. I was so, so tired and she was so, so stupid. "Mrs Slurry, you are a lumpen idiot with less than half a brain. You assume I'm a prostitute because I work nights. Who else works nights, Mrs Slurry? Who else?"
"Uh ... night soil collectors ... grave robbers ..."
"I'll leave you to think about who else might work at night, Slurry. At night, in the day, right around the clock. Stretch that brain, Slurry. I have work to do. Sit down and think, if that's possible."
She sat down.
I emerged from the washhouse several hours later, with blood on my hands.
"... maids ... them that have lodging houses ... " continued Mrs Slurry, eyes glazed, "how come you know so much about what's going on all over the place?"
With some pleasure, I showed her my real face. She clutched her heart, paled and fell to the floor.
"Oh, get up, Slurry," I said impatiently. "Do you think I'd leave Deborah with you if your time was up?"
She slowly dragged herself from the floor and slumped onto a chair. I placed three earthy turnips on the table and walked out into the cold, cold night.
About the Author
Jude Bridge has been published in Dotdotdash, Indigo, LiNQ, The Fish Anthology 2011 and Sand(Berlin). A former stand-up comedian, she has thus far managed to avoid rehabilitation.
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Ridicule
Adam Hennessy
The loose gravel beneath my shoes crunches and I focus on the sound. It is almost comforting, hypnotic. I drift away. Then it cuts through – their cackling laughter, their gaggling chortle coming from all sides, louder and louder, incessant and unrelenting. I try to concentrate on the over under and around pattern of my shoe laces but it does not work. Slowly, frightened, heavy of head, I lift my eyes and they are there, to the left, the right and ahead. I don't need to see them behind to know they are there too. They laugh, trying to hide the fact it is at me, concealing, pretending to chat or tend to their out of control screaming children. But I know, I am sure it is me. I'm positive. I see them glance, they look away cackling like witches brewing a pot. "Bubble, bubble toil and trouble. Look at him his chin is double."
I close my eyes and rub the lids, hoping it will all go away when I open them. I have just arrived, come late again to avoid their laughter. I know they point when I'm not looking. The laughter builds and I can't take it any more. I have to act. I will.
I see myself running at the nearest woman, my reaching hands close around her throat. I squeeze harder, her face goes red, purple, eyes bulging. There is screaming, crying. "Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!" A child wails. Then a shrill bell rings out, I remove my fingers from my face, open my eyes, vision blurry at first.
Then it comes into perfect focus. My life, my joy, my son wraps his arms around my leg and I breathe a sigh of relief. I have survived another school pick-up, and now back to the comfort of the house, away from their murmurs, their laughter.
About the Author
Adam Hennessy is a writer, husband and father. He lives in Sydney. Adam also writes for the pop culture website, Vivid Scribe.
######
A Romance in Paris
Lisa Dowdall
Every night she's at the dance halls or beer barns that line the downtown strips like spectators at an expensive motorcade derby. Gleaming chrome beasts from out of town race past on their way to the champagne flutes and crystal lights of Devaux's or Le Benardin or Vintage, the famous party houses Uptown. But her lot is not so glamorous, and forced laughter drips from her lips as she clutches the arms of men in muggy brown suits and un-shined shoes as they step from their plain taxi cab, pretending their eyes are not tracking those other headlights wending through the neon night and disappearing somewhere better.
Her partner for the evening pulls her inside Dizzy's Dance Hall and towards a gaggle of his friends, and she is plunged into a shadow carnival, all ruby lips and kohl-rimmed eyes, with the flash of fake diamonds and pearls, the double image of patent leath
er heels on mirror floors. This whirligig leaves the spectre of dancing flesh dolls with rotting costumes in her mind's eye, everyone melting together in an absurdist Dali landscape where the desert is the dance floor.
There is no pleasure for her in these encounters, despite her title, Pleasure Companion, as if pleasure were some close acquaintance to whom she could introduce others, rather than a sour, ageing crone who no longer receives visitors. After these sweaty séances, she catches the train home alone, and in the morning her mouth will taste of bitter grit. She'll have cellophane eyelids and a road rash throat. Her joints will ache and it will be cold, even if a summer sun is shining through the factory window, marking out a circle dance on the arthritic wooden floorboards. If there is any pleasure in life, it comes with a long and lonely hangover.
*
She had dreams once. She was going to be a trapeze artist in a travelling circus. She and her father lived together in a basement apartment on the outskirts of the city while she attended the performing arts high school and he taught at the community college. Her father loved books, music and history, but for her there was nothing better than the sweet press of speed as she swung out in a parabolic ballet, flirting with inertia on high. During those years, happiness was free and love didn't require a security deposit or reference checks. During the day, she and her father were busy and lived separate lives, but they passed their evenings together listening to jazz on the radio while he marked term papers and she darned tights.
It all came to an end one cold winter morning on their way to the train station. He had a stroke and fell down dead in the snow, next to the swing-set in the little park. She called for help but no one came while she knelt next to his body, whispering at him to wake up. It was her thirteenth birthday, and she was wearing her mother's topaz earrings – a gift from her father, who had slept with them under his pillow for years.
Kneeling there in the park, a fire began to bubble all over her skin, so real to her she could feel it liquefying the snow around her blue-jean knees. It began to shrivel her up, working from the outside in, like a piece of paper caught alight. It turned her to black ash and red-hot embers, left to drift away on a chance breeze.
Later, she marvelled at the fact that she hadn't cried or screamed, gone mad, bolted for a policeman, run to the nearest house to beg use of their phone to summon an ambulance. She knew the stroke wasn't her fault, and that the invisible fire had robbed her of reason, smothering her, imprisoning her, but still, the grief fuelled the guilt into an impenetrable wall of flame that threatened to raze her to the ground until, at last, she found a way to lock all feeling away within a deep vault inside herself, where it could not scorch her anymore. From then on, she existed in a constant state of detached numbness, where sentiment of any kind was an unwelcome trespasser.
She has the earrings still, in a blue velvet pouch at the bottom of her bag, but she doesn't look at them anymore. After the funeral she gave up the trapeze, and whenever she sees term papers or topaz she thinks of death.
*
In the afternoons she explores the factory. Her newest home once produced machines and their skeletons are scattered over five floors under a layer of dust and grime. They are of all different sizes and shapes. Some are tall and wide with knobs and dials behind plastic casing. Some are short and squat with LCD monitors and keypads. Others have conveyor belts or metal racks or light bulbs or emergency stop buttons.
She could live in a dormitory with other Pleasure Companions, but she prefers to live alone. Her last home was in a hospital basement, but she was evicted after maintenance staff came down to convert it into storage space for ageing, terminal patients. The factory was one block down from the hospital and had once belonged to Coombe and Sons, according to the tumbledown sign out front. There was running water and no sign of other squatters, so she moved in with her trolley suitcase and sleeping bag. She thinks maybe the machines scare other people away, like terracotta warriors of the digital age protecting a secret king who exists in the spiritual realm of ones and zeroes.
She doesn't know how the machines work or what they were designed and manufactured for. Some have instructions but they are in German or Swedish. When the factory becomes too silent for her to bear, she walks down row after row of machines, turning them all on until she is insulated in a cocoon of droning, beeping and whirring. She takes comfort in their foreign language.
Her favourite machine is D14-R. The day she moved in, she found him sitting all by himself on the fourth floor of the factory. He seemed a pleasant enough roommate, so she bedded down with him.
After she comes home from the dance halls, sometimes she will flip his red switch to "on" and clean his chrome plating by torchlight. He sighs before settling down to sleep as she runs her hands over his flesh. She doesn't mind that he never speaks, and she prattles away to him about her clients, about her debts, about the price of new silk stockings and cigarettes. He is a patient listener and not in the least argumentative, unless she presses him for an opinion, which he is loath to give.
*
She comes home to discover a letter lying on the floor after a ten-hour evening in stiletto heels and red lipstick for a series of All Saints' Day parties with a new client. His name is Michel and he lives on Rue Descartes in the fifth arrondissement with a wife and two daughters. He is a financial consultant, a terrible kisser and a pigheaded louse who threw up on her shoes and didn't even buy her a drink.
She notices it right away, next to D14-R's left foot, just visible in the pre-dawn light. A plain sheet of white paper, folded twice like a letter ready to be stuffed into an envelope, exuding secrecy. It is perfectly smooth, as if straight from a printing press, and cool between her fingers. She unfolds it and reads the words, typed neatly across the top of the page:
You talkin' to me?
She glances at D14-R and frowns.
*
They buried her father in a small cemetery on top of a hill next to a chapel. It had an iron fence and sycamore trees that reminded her of broccoli. The college paid for his interment but they could not afford a service, so she went alone with two council workers and the plain wooden box to the grave site and watched them lower him into the ground while she played his favourite song, 'I Can't Get Started' by Ella Fitzgerald, on a little pocket low-fi. When she scattered the first fistful of dirt over his coffin inside the grave, that inner fire roared to life, and though she did her best to put down new containment lines, it jumped them again and again, until she was left sobbing into her coat sleeve.
When she returned to the basement apartment, the landlady asked her when she was planning to settle the outstanding rent bill. She was evicted the next morning with her duffle bag and pillow. She didn't even have the chance to salvage her father's books.
On the fifth anniversary of his death, she takes a night off work, shares a bottle of cheap red wine with D14-R and goes to bed early, although she knows she will have to sweat through horrible dreams.
*
She finds the second letter after a trip to the library, where she likes to scavenge old periodicals that no one will miss. It is keeping D14-R company again, two folds, sleek and new, with no sign of entry. Paper does not have legs, she tells herself sternly as she picks up the single white sheet.
Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
She glances around suspiciously, half expecting to see someone lurking in a doorway, but not a speck of dust is out of place. Although the intent of the letters is not clear, she knows it would be safer to move. But she hates the thought of leaving just when she has started to feel comfortable in this toy box of machinery. D14-R says nothing, constantly.
*
She had a friend for a few weeks in May when she was 18. They lived together in a Montmartre bedsit that cooked them during the day and froze them at night. His name was Tom and he was a flame-haired 35-year-old Irishman who didn't wear shoes and rode around on a fixie bike retrofitted with a bubble m
achine. Everywhere he went he trailed an exhaust of soapy sunshine in all the colours of the rainbow, delighting children and frightening adults. He was a poet who would stroll the banks of the Seine, writing about the people he observed, and part-owner of a racehorse that he doted on, even though it never won. She went with him to see the horse run once. It finished dead last, but Tom was proud as could be in his pinstripe waistcoat with balloons billowing from his fob chain. After the race, they fed the horse pieces of carrot while leaning on its stall door, talking about Breton, Cocteau, Queneau and all the other poets her father had been so fond of. They had sex in the hayloft afterwards, and all the way home on the handlebars of his bike she shed pieces of straw like a lovelorn scarecrow.
She came home on the first day of June and Tom was gone. His bed was made, the floor swept and his drawers empty. His bike was not in its usual place against the shed, and all his fine costumes had fled the closet. She called the race track, but they said the horse had been sold.
She tells D14-R that having friends and lovers is a lonely preoccupation, and living on your own is by far the best solution.
*
The third letter appears after her annual medical check-up with the Pleasure Companion Association's doctors, who all have clammy hands that glisten inside their clear latex gloves. She unwraps it like a present.
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
She exchanges a sidelong glance with D14-R. His silence is surly and superior.
The fourth letter waits for her after her Sunday morning shower in the glacial, green-tiled bathroom that the factory workers must have rinsed in after their shifts were over, before going home. She shudders at the thought of all the overweight, middle-aged men stripping off their overalls and jostling for prime position under the showerhead's pathetic jets.
She hurries over to it, her bare feet leaving ghostly imprints on the floorboards, and squats next to D14-R as she reads:
Mrs Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?
She hugs her bathrobe tight around her, glances up at D14-R's impassive façade and fiercely represses a smile. This is no laughing matter, and machines do not have a sense of humour.