Free The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling

sunk.
    I shook my head. ‘No need, Peter. I’ve taken care of her. The rent’s been paid for two months, love. Don’t you worry there.’
    ‘How?’ He looked up at me in shock.
    ‘I’ll tell you another time.’
    In bed that night I could not rest, despite my wearying day. I was hungry and faint, and sick for more food; my limbs were
     restless, and my sleep enervated. My dreams were haunted with spectres of my daughter, my husband and my father hovering around
     my mother’s death-bed, but who was dead and who alive I could not tell, for all were grey with terror and privation, and all
     cried at me to save them.
    My mother, Georgina Brice, died on 14 September 1854, twelve days after she went down with the cholera. She weakened quickly;
     her liveliness poured out of her with every filling of the chamber-pot. Everything about her was dry: her skin flaked under
     my touch, her mouth cracked not only at the corners but inside, at the roof, under the tongue. No matter how much clean water
     she drank, nothing would quench her. Soon she stopped passing water: she could not even cry tears, although she knew she was
     dying, and her face sometimes creased and heaved up and down, as if she were weeping dry. The doctors said to give her salt,
     and more salt, to keep the water in her tissues, but it was too late, and I might as well have been embalming her for all
     the salt I shovelled into her. The fishy smell of cholera pervaded the house and the streets around the contaminated water
     pump in Broad-street. Even now, when I walk past the fishmongers’ stalls, I am reminded of those dreadful days of death in
     our little tenement north of the river. Would that we had never left Hastings in search of the heart of the book trade.
    She would ask me to sponge her face with water, then leave the sponge on her lips so she could suck it. But she was too weak,
     and the water just pooled in her mouth and dribbled down her chin. I was nineteen, and about to become a mother myself, but
     I was not ready to lose her, even though there are millions of wretches out there who lose their mothers as they draw their
     very first breaths, or in their tenderest years. I wiped her chin and neck, and I could see from her pallor that she was leaving,
     and that she did not know me any more. She opened her eyes wide one last time and stared at me, and she did not cry. She could
     not, the doctor told me, even if she had wanted to. She died like that, with her eyes open; her eyeballs had so dried out
     that it took me twenty minutes to close the lids, using my own tears as lubrication. Her body was not cold as marble, as the
     saying goes; rather, it was like petrified wood, so ravaged was her desiccated skin. As I washed her all over before dressing
     her, my tears dripped onto her and mingled with the water, and so great were the out -pourings of my grief it was as if I
     needed not have brought the pail up. But tears are futile, and could do nothing for her dry old body, and so ashamed was I
     of my excess that I have not cried a single tear since.
    Early the next morning, stiff-limbed, I picked the fire over for cinders to stoke up the range, and drew water into the kettle.
     As I set the breakfast things I ran my hands over the table, the chair backs, the piano. The knock at the door would surely
     come soon, and we would stand by stoically, relinquishing everything to the bailiffs, or the brokers, and be left standing
     in a bare little house. Where would Lucinda sleep, and how would Peter eat breakfast?
    Yet it was a rare moment, for I felt a peculiar sense of freedom at the thought, as if furniture was merely tiresome and its
     removal a blessing, and I knew then what I had to do. Perhaps the answer had been inside me all along, but it took the prospect
     of release from my trappings for me to notice it.
    So in and out my toes went again that morning, only this time the hem under which they went was edged with a slightly worn
     but