Free Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue Page A

joke. They might be seven years apart in age, but they could finish each other's sentences.
    There was an old song Doll used to sing, late at night:
Ribbon red, ribbon grey,

Men will do what they may.
    By now there was hardly a corner of the city where Mary hadn't turned a trick, from the pristine pavements of the West End to the knotted Cockney streets where Spanish Jews, Lascar seamen from the Indies, blacks and Chinamen all mingled like dyes in a basin. She'd had coopers and cordwainers, knife-grinders and window-polishers, watchmen and excisemen and a butcher with chapped hands. In the crowd that gathered to watch the famous Mr. Wesley preach at the old foundry in Moorfields, Mary had done three hand jobs and earned two shillings. She'd taken on an Irish brickie in Marylebone, a one-legged sailor back from the French wars, a Huguenot silkweaver in Spitalfields, a planter gentleman back from Jamaica, and an Ethiopian student of medicine. She'd charged that fellow double, expecting him to hurt her with his monstrous yard—such were the rumours—but it turned out he was no bigger than an Englishman after all. So now she knew. She was acquainted with the whole city, from a coach trundling along Pall Mall, to the back wall of St. Clement Danes, to a room upstairs at the Lamb and Flag on Rose Street. It was a drover down from Wales who hired that room. 'Lie still,' he'd said afterwards, with his soft lisp; 'lie still a while, Miss, and I'll pay another tuppence.'
    She'd had a few bad nights, but she didn't let herself dwell on them afterwards. When she came home once with the marks of a cully's nails on her neck, Doll called her a ninny, and taught her how to knee a man so hard his bag would ache for weeks.
    Mary knew she'd never starve, now; she could be sure of that much.
Cunny draws cully like a dog to a bone.
What she had between her legs was like the purse in the old story that was never quite emptied.
Ribbon grey, ribbon gold

You must dance till you be old
    Mostly the men blurred together in Mary's mind, after the first two months in the trade, but there were a few who stood out. A greasy-haired jack on Queen Street, for instance, who'd taken her against the side of a cart and—she found afterwards—reached under her skirts with his knife and snipped her pocket in the act. She should have known he was a thief from his crooked eyes.
    One regular was a young Scot the Misses all called Mr. Armour—laughing behind his back—because he insisted on wearing a thin sheath of sheepsgut. 'What's that, then?' asked Mary in alarm as he drew it on, the first time.
    'A cundum,' he said, digging her breasts out of her stays. 'Reasons of health.'
    She held him at bay with one hand. 'Which reasons would those be?'
    The Scot shrugged. 'It armours me against venereal itches and fluxes.'
    'What, you wear this cundum thing every time you do the business?'
    He tore at her laces in his haste to loosen them. 'Well, not with ladies, that goes without saying. Only with women of the town.'
    Mary let out a screeching laugh. She sounded like Doll, it occurred to her. 'And what about us?' she asked as Mr. Armour buried his face in her breasts and tugged up her skirts. 'Are we not as likely to get clapped or poxed by you cullies as you by us whores?'
    He looked up, wild-eyed, as if he hadn't been expecting argument. He gripped the sheath at the root to hold it on. 'Such,' he panted, 'would seem a necessary risk of your trade.'
    He was nudging her knees open, but she had one last question. 'Couldn't I buy one of these cundums myself?'
    'Why yes,' he said, straight-faced, and then, with a smirk, 'but I can't imagine where you'd wear it!' And with that he was up to the hilt in her, and the time for talk was over.
    Soho Square at five in the morning was a good hunting ground; that was when the lords were finally turfed out of Mrs. Cornelys's Select Assemblies. Once Mary went into the bushes with a nob who turned out to be a