Free Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue Page B

Parliamentary Member. He kept talking about a Monsieur Merlin who'd performed for the Assembly in shoes that went on wheels. 'Wheels, I tell you!'
    'Never!' murmured Mary, as she rubbed the swelling in his breeches, noting the flawless pile of the velvet.
    'Dashed along like some bird—until he came a cropper and smashed through Mrs. Cornelys's mirror. Blood and glass all over, I declare, the poor Frog.'
    'Poor Frog,' Mary repeated, addressing the lopsided prick she was lifting out of the velvet. 'Poor, poor little Froggie.'
    'Not so very little, surely?' he asked, half-forlorn.
    Mary thought the lord must have been drunk, or dreaming, to make up a story like that one. But the image stayed in her head as she straddled him: a little Frenchman, flying along the ground like a swallow, towards disaster.
    Another day Mary met a chair-man with a worn-out spine, who carried sedan chairs for a living and suffered with every step. He paid for a room in a bagnio so they could do it lying down. She climbed on top and promised not to shake him. What a luxury that was, to fall asleep afterwards and dream that she was riding through town in the King's State Carriage with its carbuncles of gold.
Ribbon gold, ribbon brown

What goes up must fall down
    Not that she was very picky. Street Misses couldn't afford to be, 'not like those bawdy-house bitches on their velvet sofas,' as Doll put it. Mary lay down with prizefighters with broken faces and a sailor with one ball poxed off. (He swore the disease was long cured, but she would only give him a hand job.) It took a lot to disgust her, these days. She went with flogging-cullies who wanted to play mother and wicked son—strange, she thought the first time, for a man to want to be hurt rather than to hurt—and even a freak who offered her two shillings to let him spit in her mouth. The only kind of fellow Mary wouldn't touch was a coalman, because the smell of the dust took her back to the cellar on Charing Cross Road.
    She'd never seen any of the Digots since the night she'd left home last November. Once in Lincoln's Inn Fields she stared after a woman hurrying by, her head bent over a huge bundle of cloths, but it couldn't have been Susan Digot, not so far from Charing Cross. 'Decent folk don't wander like we do,' as Doll said with a curl of her lip; 'decent folk stay in their place.'
    It did occur to Mary to wonder if the woman had ever made any attempt to trace her. Asked around, kept one eye out, even? Surely where once there'd been love, something had to remain, some scraps, leftovers? Or was it possible for a mother to cut a daughter out of her life as if she'd never been born?
    Not that it mattered. Mary wouldn't have gone back now, she told herself, not even if Susan Digot climbed up the groaning stairs of Rat's Castle to beg her on hands and knees. Mary could barely remember her old life: the narrowness of it, the poverty not just of goods but of spirit; the hours of weighty silence, as they'd all sat round the shivering fire. No, it was too late for return, or even forgiveness.
Ribbon brown, ribbon rose

Count your friends and your foes
    With Doll life was never dull. There were no reproaches, or sermons, or tasks. The two of them slept in their paint, which left their pillows streaked and gaudy. They paid an Irishwoman in the basement of Rat's Castle to do their laundry. Every few weeks they went to a bathhouse and soaked themselves clean in scalding water. They got their dinner from a chop-house or went without, depending on their purses, but they never cooked so much as a bit of toast. They bought cups of tea and coffee whenever their hands were cold. They drank whatever liquor they could lay hands on and never thought more than a day ahead.
    Lovers of liberty, Doll called the two of them. They got up when they wanted, and stayed up all night if they fancied, and at any hour of the day they could climb back up the stairs to bed. For the first time in her life, Mary had