Free Theodora by Stella Duffy Page A

after four days of labour, her own mother had begged her to allow them to kill the baby, the one that was ripping apart her daughter’s too-small frame. Anastasia died and the baby boy did too. Theodora cursed the baby as she’d heardthe old street whores do, damning him to Hades and to hell and the netherworld, all three in one furious ecumenical breath. When damning the dead baby made no difference to her tears, she turned, as she always did, back to work. To the succour of applause, the balm of the crowd, the drunken embraces of her friends backstage.
    Late in the evening, two days after the funeral, their hysterical audience that afternoon none the wiser, no sign of grief on either sister’s face or in her performance, Theodora sat with Comito and their friends, Anastasia was remembered and remembered until the dead young woman in the ground had her own monument of words. Each of the dancers and actresses knew it could so easily have been any one of them. Sophia knew for certain it would have been her, but for every abortion, every procured miscarriage, every single termination of all her own pregnancies. No small number in a woman sold into the theatre and its concomitant whoring by her disappointed parents at the age of four. That Sophia had proved good at theatre work was pure luck. That she had learned early what dangers there were for her in sex and procreation was down to watching another dwarf performer racked in vain by the full-size child she’d birthed backstage. Dead with the cord round its neck and the mother never able to work again either. Experiences that made Sophia keener always to pimp than to whore. That night she gave in to Theodora’s demands for a job, gave in even though she had said half a dozen times it would have been better for the actress to go home and sleep away the last two days of abandon and pain. Theodora was having none of it and finally Sophia relented.
    ‘But only one tonight, yes?’
    ‘One, two, half a dozen, I don’t care. Just give me their money.’ Theodora was more drunk than Sophia had seen herbefore, and yet not a single word was slurred. ‘I want to work this pain out of my body. I don’t care how I do it and I don’t care how many. But I can’t sleep, and I can’t lie alone.’
    ‘Lie with me.’
    Theodora smiled. ‘Little One, I’d take you any day …’
    ‘I wasn’t offering sex.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I only make love to women who are awake,’ Sophia replied.
    ‘I’m not sleeping.’
    ‘Yes you are. Grief is like sleep.’
    ‘Not enough like sleep.’
    ‘You’ll wake from it, but it takes time.’
    ‘I haven’t got time,’ Theodora answered, shaking her head. ‘I need to feel better now. So if you won’t fuck me into oblivion, bring me some men who will. And make sure they have full purses.’
    She’d spoken louder then, louder than she’d intended, too many years of theatrical training making their presence felt, and two soldiers leaning against a bench on the far wall looked up.
    One nudged the other and they stood up together, the first saying, ‘We’ll take her.’
    The second added, ‘If you can take two men of the Greens?’
    Theodora turned from Sophia, very slowly, and carefully looked them both up and down. Neither older than twenty-five, they had country accents. One was short and round, his hairline receding already, the other a reedy half-man, half-boy, still trying to encourage whiskers with a daily face-scraping shave. She sighed, and then, as elegantly as she had ever performed a gesture on stage, she reached out a hand to each man’s groin, weighing them up for a moment, before she spoke in her most elegant classical Greek accent: ‘How about I pierce both my nipples? You could fuck one each and then I might feelsomething.’ Then, both hands still holding tight to the terrified soldiers, she walked backwards pulling them out of the bar to Sophia’s rented room two houses away, calling over their shoulders as she went,