moral principles and low filthy longings. This one was no gentleman, and of course he was just a boy, sixteen maybe, although he was tall for his age. A lot taller than me.
“You’re gay, ent you?” he asked.
“Never you mind what I am.”
“You’re gay, you’re a whore, you’re here to flaunt yourself and have carnal connection.”
“I’m here to watch the play. So fuck off.”
He was right, though—the part about me being a whore. Why deny it? There was lots of us gay girls here—dozens of us, just like every night—and most of ’em had come for the business. At the big music halls, the ones where four thousand punters could crowd in, there might be two hundred girls at work, and private rooms behind the boxes, where a gentleman could retire for half an hour with a girl and a bottle of wine. There were no little rooms at theatres like the Kemp—it wasn’t grand enough for that. But there was the night houses across the way, and alleyways behind, where the world could go round as the world has gone round since Adam met Eve, and will continue doing till Judgement Day comes. But me personally, I was here to watch the play. Besides, there was something just a little bit wrong with this one, the Printer’s Devil with his gabbling worried voice. You get so you can sense it straight off, the ones you’d better steer clear of. So I edged forward, through the crowd.
We were way up top, of course, cos that’s where you’d go for a sixpence. The theatre was packed, like usual, and I’d come in too late to get a seat on the benches, which left me standing at the back. The pit was a shilling, and them who could afford three shillings were in the boxes—merchants and such and the real titled gents and ladies—though they steered pretty much clear of theatres like this. Up here it was tradesmen and shop-girls and apprentices and dollymops, and all manner of riff-raff like myself, crammed in cheek-to-giblets and craning to see round someone’s hat. The smell was what you’d imagine, all mixed in with gunpowder from the explosions and oranges being eaten by the crowd, and the heat was terrible, from all the bodies and the gaslights. But the play was prime.
It had just got to the part where the ghost of the one brother appears to the other, all quavery and beyond-the-grave with his hair standing straight up on end, and blood and gore on his breast from the sword that foully struck him down. There were gasps at the sight of him, and shouts to his brother of, “hear him, hear him!” and “it was the Frenchman done this!”—you know, in case he wasn’t clear on who he should be killing for revenge. For they were enjoying this, and not jeering as they do when the play’s no good, although they weren’t impressed with the actor who was playing the Frenchman’s friend, and there’d been a few orange peels flung at him already.
“They incite the passions, that’s what they do, they stir up our animal spirits, such low and lewd entertainments.”
Fucksake. He’d come up behind me again, talking low and faster than ever.
“The door is open, just a crack but that’s all he needs, the door is open and the Devil slips in. That’s why it’s wrong, I shouldn’t be here, I should leave.”
“Then go.”
“I want you to come with me. I want you to come right now.”
“What for?”
But of course I knew what for. He was pushed up against me in the press of bodies and I could feel it, sticking into my back.
“Christ, would you take that bloody thing—?”
“No, not for that!”
The look on his phiz was pure distress—enough to make you laugh out loud. Cos of course I had him pegged from the first second he started gabbling. One of them bible-thumpers so horrified by the goings-on in his breeches that he torments himself barmy. Suddenly—Gawd help us—he was Bearing Witness. Something about being a norrible sinner and in the Devil’s clutches till he was Saved by the Light and it was someone called the Captain who rescued him.
“The Cap’n loves me, he said ‘I love you Young Joe like a son.’ He said so this very morning and I could of wept with happiness. And I dreamt one time of how the Devil come for me, but the Cap’n was there to stop him. He seized the Devil by the nose, the Cap’n did, and thrashed him with a stick, Cap’n Daniel O’Thunder!”
The name meant fuck all to me, and besides I’d had enough of this. Now he was clutching my arm to keep me from getting away.
“I swear, he thrashed the Devil till he howled, and—argh!”
What you do is, you stamp down hard with the sharp heel of your boot on his instep. It works a treat if you do it right, and I’d had plenty of practice, trust me. With a shriek he lurched back into the punters behind him, who didn’t like this one bit, and let him know it. I slipped through the bodies, quick and nimble, for I can flit like a swallow when needs be. When I looked back I seen his face for just an instant, twisted and clenched, and then he was swallowed up in the crowd.
So I forgot about him, and watched the rest of the play. It was very satisfactory. The French villain who killed the first Corsican brother tried to flee in his carriage, but crashed in a forest. He was with his friend—the friend being another Frenchman, tricked out in a great black wig and the worst stage whiskers I ever seen. He couldn’t act a lick to save his soul, this friend, but it was a small part so it didn’t matter so much. Anyroad, the second Corsican brother stepped through the trees and challenged the villain to a duel. There was a great sword-fight and the villain fell dying in agony and at the very end the ghost appeared again to talk to his brother. Both brothers were played by the same actor, a wonderful trick that must have been done with mirrors, and you should have heard the shouts and applause. After the play there was an acrobat, and then the burlesque, and it was nearly midnight when it was finished. You tell me where else you’d find yourself an evening like that for a sixpence, because you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t find it for a pound.
And if I’d seen my mother on that stage, it would have been perfect. I was watching for her, of course, like I always did. But, just like always, it turned out she was somewhere else.
THE NIGHT AIR was cold, coming out of the theatre, and Christ the noise and jostle. The street out front was clattering with coaches, looming at you out of the fog—cos what else would there be except fog, on a London night? Yellow fog in the gas-lamps, waiting to swallow us, and rivers of Londoners flowing in all directions. That was London, all hours. Just slip into the current and let it carry you away, like a tiny lump of something—don’t ask what—bobbing along on the Thames.
Just before it carried me round the corner, I seen the Printer’s Devil again. He was standing under a gas-lamp clutching his tracts. Someone had stopped to take one—a tall old gentleman in a queer old-fashioned black coat and boots and a slouchy low-brimmed hat. The gentleman was standing very close, looming over him like a hawk on a tree branch. I only seen them for a second, and it was hard to be sure with the fog, but it seemed to me like the gentleman was saying something. The Printer’s Devil was shrinking back with his eyes wide and white, like a horse’s when a fist is raised to strike.
That’s when the gentleman looked across and seen me. Just an instant. His face beneath the low-brimmed hat, staring at me from out of the fog, like something coiled up in a cave.
I WAS A NGLING SOUTH and west towards the Haymarket, so the route took me along the edges of the old rookery of St Giles. The Holy Land itself—the biggest and worst of all the London slums.
It wasn’t like it was in
