‘I’m keeping these,’ he mutters defiantly.
George grins. ‘Up to you, mate, but I’d not walk one inch in this man’s shoes. He’s not got the decency to die when he should.’
The lad chews the inside of his mouth awhile, and then hurls my boots into the muck.
‘Fuck you, George.’
‘And your sister. Your mother and all. And when I did, they didn’t charge me, neither. Which is not like them in the least.’
George places his mouth close to my ear.
‘Now. You tell George here your little secret. I can spot a queer one when I see it. How come you’re not dead?’
‘I do not know.’
Again, it is the truth. I cough up another mouthful of the river and it dribbles down my chin.
‘Could be worth your while. And mine.’ His eyes gleam like sovereigns. ‘I think you’ll be coming with me, Lazarus.’
He grasps my hand, winches me into a sitting position. I heave, spill more oily slops down my chest. It seems I cannot stop leaking.
‘Ooh,’ squeals a girl from her safe distance. ‘George is touching him.’
The words do not make George let go. I look at the way his fingers clasp mine, the ruddy glow of them against the bleached grey of my sodden flesh.
‘I should be dead,’ I whisper. ‘Why am I not so?’
‘That’s what I’m going to find out, Mr Lazarus,’ says George, showing me two rows of even teeth.
‘What’s he saying?’ calls out one of the mudlarks.
‘Nothing you lot need to know. This is man’s business.’
‘Talking up horrors, that’s what they’re doing,’ wails a female voice.
The clacking of a rattle winds its way into the space between my ears.
‘Fuck me, it’s the Peelers.’
‘Stay where you are,’ yells George. ‘We’re breaking no bloody laws.’
‘When did they ever care about the law?’
‘Stay if you want. I’m legging it,’ says the boy who gave up my boots.
I hear the suck and slather of mud as they hurry off. George looks from me to their retreating backs to me again. The rattling grows louder. He chews his lips.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck the Queen and her fucking consort too.’
He lets go of my hand and I fall back. I stare at the sky. My thumbs dig into the soft quilt of the filthy ooze, and I let myself slide into the comfort of its tight wet mouth. I am lullabied into a drowse by the slurp of their footsteps retreating, the moist tread of other men approaching.
EVE
London, November 1845
They say when I was born I didn’t cry; I meowed and licked my paws. They say that the midwife dropped dead of fright. They told a lot of tall stories but none of them were as tall as the ones I told myself when I looked in the mirror. Mama said I shouldn’t look in mirrors: it would upset me. What she meant was, it upset her.
Other girls look in the mirror and see the fairest of them all. I saw a friend. Her name was Donkey-Skin. I can’t remember when she came to me, only that she was always there. My only companion, born of imagination and loneliness, which is a hectic brew for a child. What did it signify if no one else could see her? I liked it so. She was mine and mine alone.
I did not want to share her with another soul, so I kept our conversations whispered, our games quiet. When Mama asked me whom I was talking to, I said, ‘No one!’ in my most innocent voice. She took it for another sign of my strangeness and it was not long before she ignored my chattering. Donkey-Skin wove herself from all the things I hid from my mother, knitting herself from the truths Mama would not tell me but I found out anyway.
Donkey-Skin was ugly: even uglier than me, which was quite something. If I was hairy, then she was as furry as a cave full of bears. If I was a freak, she was a cursed abomination in the sight of God. If I was lonely, she was abandoned on a hillside for wolves to devour. She was different because she did not care. Her life’s work was to teach me not to care either.
When we were alone she murmured, Kitten, kitten, my very own pet. Her lullabies rang over the terrifying stretches of the night as I rested my cheek on her breast, safe under the press of her arm. She loved me because of my thick pelt of fur rather than despite it. Only she could sort my tangles. I purred beneath her gentle comb as she groomed my baby hair.
Of course, Mama was having none of that. Every day she reminded me that God made me foul-featured for a reason: punishment for a sin I could not remember and she never revealed. It could have been so much worse, she said. I was lucky, she said. Was I beaten? No. Was I fed? Yes. I had a roof over my head; I had a mother who was respectable. I should bow my head, keep my eyes down, keep the peace, be sweet, be grateful that someone cared enough to put bread in my mouth. I could have been sold to trim fur collars or made into a muff. I could have been tied in a bag and dropped in the Fleet.
My earliest memory is of Mama shaving me. She sat me upon the table and I kicked out my heels. She caught my foot and kissed the only part of me that was smooth and counted out my toes: ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy got shaved.’ Or was it ‘saved’? I do not remember. Her songs were hopeful spells to make the fairies take pity and return the pretty pink and white babe they’d stolen from her womb. There was no escaping the truth of it. I was a changeling and as furry as a cat.
She doesn’t want a baby, Donkey-Skin whispered in my ear. She wants a piglet.
I giggled.
A naked pink wobble of a thing, with that sore scalded look of them, tiptoeing as though the ground hurts and makes them screw up their eyes.
You are not a piglet, said Donkey-Skin. Don’t be one, not for anyone.
Donkey-Skin was right; I did not want to be a piglet. Piglets grew into pigs, fat overblown pillows slathering in their own muck. Pigs were dinner. I had no wish to be sliced, smoked, fried, salted, stewed or pickled.
Mama grasped the kettle and heaved it from the mouth of the range, poured a bowlful and soaked the dishcloth. A cowlick of steam curled off the face of the liquid. She folded the rag in half and hung its hot wet curtain across my face.
‘Mama?’ I whimpered. ‘Mama?’
‘Is it too hot, little one?’ she said.
She pulled the flannel away and I tingled with the sudden cold. I grabbed at it, but my reach was far too short. She picked up a jug, took the brush, dipped in the bristles and swiped foam across my cheek. I giggled and wiped it away, slapping the white mess on to the floor.
‘No,’ she said and sopped my other cheek.
I wiped that away also, squeaking with delight.
‘Stop it,’ she said, louder, and I squealed louder, to match her.
She aimed quick blobs at my chin, my cheek, my forehead. I could not get enough of this new game. Even when she held my wrists with one hand and soaped my face with the other, I wriggled free.
‘I am making you beautiful,’ she snapped, and started to cry. ‘I’m doing this because I love you.’
Then she smacked me. I had been stung far harder in the past, and deserved it too. This small slap spelled me into stone.
‘Stay