Babylon (9 page)

'Oh, you must think me terrible, coming here, telling you such things. And I know it’s really none of my business, but—’

‘We’re grateful to you,’ said Dad, in a subdued voice I barely recognized.

They were seated around the dining table with their backs to me. Confident that I wouldn’t be noticed, I held my breath and listened, fearing the worst.

‘Very grateful,’ repeated Dad. He turned to look at Mum. ‘I swear, Maudie, when I get hold of that girl—’

‘Calm down, Josh,’ said Mum. ‘I can’t believe it’s her own doing. There’s this Shulamite who she’s struck up some kind of friendship with. I think the blame’s likely to lie with
her.’

‘A daughter of ours should know better,’ said Dad.

‘I’m sure there must be
some
kind of rational explanation, Mr Fell,’ said Mrs O’Brien.

Seemingly unable to meet her eyes, Dad looked askance at the newspapers and books that littered the Welsh dresser: copies of
Reynold’s News,
the
East London Observer,
and cheap editions of Spencer and Huxley.

‘It defies rationality,’ he said. ‘She’s a girl with real prospects. Why did she have to go and do something like this?’

‘And so dangerous!’ said my mother, putting a hand to her mouth.

‘She’s my only child,’ said Dad. ‘My little girl. How could anybody think I’d consent to have her sold... into nameless infamy!’

‘Procured!’ said mother. She stifled a sob.

‘Quiet yourself, woman,’ said Dad as he struggled to bring himself and what remained of his family under control. ‘We have matters in hand now. Let’s not get ourselves excited.’

‘All the tales you hear,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘The tales of the Black Order! They’re enough to scare anyone. After what Lizzie told me, I couldn’t keep things to myself, I really couldn’t.’ She stared at Dad with such intensity that he was at last obliged to turn his head and meet her eye. ‘Heaven save us, Mr Fell, the Minotaurs! They’re, they’re—’

‘There’s no name for what they are,’ said Dad. ‘Not yet there ain’t.’ He passed his fingers through his long, tawny hair. ‘The Minotaurs say they want revolution,’ he continued. ‘But don’t be fooled by their cant. They’re hungry for power—power pure and simple. Just like those who did for us on Bloody Sunday.’

He was wrong. Bloody Sunday was nothing. The Illuminati tolerated dissent. They had never deigned seriously to persecute Radicals and Freethinkers. Why? Because democracy bred docility. Democracy, like liberty, freedom of movement and speech, had made somnambulists of us all. Only the Minotaurs understood that change, real change, comes through convulsive acts of negation and the remorseless pursuit of the Will.

‘Oh, and all these horrible murders,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘How could I keep quiet?’

Mum nodded. ‘Quite, quite
terrible
murders. Whoever’s responsible must be as crazed as the Mahdi!’

Dad got to his feet. Not as he often did, with the air of one about to address a public meeting, but like a man inclined to skulk off into the shadows to bury his shame. ‘You try and do your best,’ he said. ‘And look where it gets you.’ He frowned, and then turned this way and that, as if lost at a crossroads on a stormy night. ‘We took Madeleine along with us to the Hyde Park rally,’ he concluded, uncertainly.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘We were all inspired by Mr Stead’s articles in the
Pall Mall Gazette
.’

‘It was a fine rally, too. We did well that day,’ Dad continued, as if in a dream. ‘That same year the Criminal Law Amendment Act passed. I like to think we saved
some
lives.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘At least these silly young things can no longer volunteer at thirteen, like they used to. Who knows what state we’d all be in if it were still so!’ She took a hurried sip of her tea, like one seeking a balm for her mauled spirit. ‘You mustn’t blame her too much, Mr Fell. A great many young ladies are volunteering these days, and not all are born Shulamites, either. Many come from families as respectable as your own.’ Mrs O’Brien drained her cup, placed it on its saucer and leant back, her corpulent frame ill at ease in the confines of the modest chair. ‘I put the blame on unhealthy reading habits. The evil influence of pernicious literature! The
Pall Mall Gazette
—now, that’s a truehearted English journal. But penny fiction? The dreadful moral poison that may be found in Holywell Street? No, no, no! Such nonsense should never be allowed to fall into a young girl’s hands!’ She dug into her bag, brought out a book and set it on the table. ‘I hope you don’t mind. It’s something I had my Lizzie read. A fine example of
improving
literature! Perhaps you might want Madeleine to take a look at it, too.’ The title was in large type:
The 'Woman Question: On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, and
Hysteria in Females
.

‘You can only do so much,’ Mrs O’Brien concluded. ‘These are such difficult times. Such difficult, perilous times.’

I closed the door as softly as I could and tiptoed down the stairs. As I opened the front door and stepped out into the gathering night, I looked back one last time. Not like Lot’s wife, with regret. My own city of the plain lay not behind me, but ahead. Better, however, to advance into flaming ruin than return to unbearable disgrace.

I passed under the dripping arches of the Great Eastern Railway. Eyes looked up at me, glinting from bundles of rags: men, women, and children who belonged to the Empire of Hunger. I hurried on towards Whitechapel Road, conscious that other, less pathetic examples of nocturnal life would soon be emerging, and that I stood in danger of being made an honorary subject, not of the Empire of Hunger, but the Empire of Fear.

The night deepened and a fog began to coalesce about my ankles. The comparative safety of Wilmot Street was far behind—as lost and irrevocable as my innocence—and I said a mental goodbye to its complement of shop assistants, clerks, sub-officials, and petty entrepreneurs.

A policeman was walking towards me. As he came nearer, I recognized him. It was PC Thrain, who sometimes gave talks at my school.

‘Be careful, Miss,’ he said, as he walked past. ‘We can’t protect women after midnight.’

It was still only six o’clock. But ‘Thank you, Constable,’ I said, and lengthened my gait. ‘I’ll be back indoors soon.’

The top of Brady Street was a snarl of naphtha-lit stalls. Beside them kerbside acrobats and a fire-eater performed tricks, and barefoot children pulled at skirts and trouser legs soliciting farthings and ha’pennies. I pulled my ulster tightly across my chest, turned into Whitechapel Road, and continued on my way.

I passed Whitechapel station. The pub next to it had been used as a temporary resting place for poor Polly Nichols, and I crossed myself without thinking, oblivious to the fact that I now worshipped Ishtar. Then I passed the crowd outside the Pavilion Theatre-—where, according to Mum, they put on melodramas ‘of a rough type’—and, a little way down the road, a similar crowd milling about outside the waxworks. The shop that housed the waxworks had once been home to a freak show where Mr Merrick, the human mutation, was kept in a cage before being taken to live inside the London Hospital. I looked straight ahead, avoiding the leering eyes of sailors, bullies, roughs, and cads.

Those whom Mum and Dad called the ‘predatory classes’ always welcomed a fog, and I inspected each passing, gas-lit face for evidence of criminality.

There were faces belonging to Fancy Dans and Ally Slopers. And there were plenty of faces belonging to round-the-corner-Sallys, several of whom, I discovered to my distress, were Shulamites who had come upon hard times. And there were the dirty, cherubic faces of newspaper boys and little flower girls. But nowhere, I told myself, in an attempt to bolster my weakening resolve, were there the faces of Mr Stevenson’s Hyde, a Bill Sykes, a Sweeney Todd, or a Varney the Vampyre.

My legs quickened, transporting me deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

A bobtail shepherded a client out of a noisy penny gaff and into an alley for a thrupenny upright. Another streetwalker, who looked as if she lived on a diet of mother’s ruin and broken teeth, disputed the reckoning with a Lascar, and then disappeared into a similar well of darkness.

I turned into Osborn Street. Immediately, the spectral landscape of squalor and neglect became more sinister. Here, I was breaching the heart of the vortex: the evil quarter mile of Spitalfields where light and air were but a rumour.

As I entered Brick Lane, I began to feel giddy.

Bits of clay pipe and shards of ginger-ale bottles crunched beneath my heels. I negotiated a gutter, slipped a little on a patch of rotten vegetables, and then recovered. I looked around. My nape tingled. I sensed the presence of some indefinable threat. The last time I had been here, Little Babylon hadn’t seemed so bad. At night, however, it was forbidding. There were voices. Many voices. The voices of a population who lived here only because the prospect of the workhouse was even more unbearable than life in the slums.
What am I doing
? I thought.
Is any of this real
?
Shouldn’t I just turn around and go home
? In reply, shadows formed, disappeared, and then reformed, before finally dissolving behind a bank of fog. Corseted as I was, my traumatized waist affected a womanly panic in my bosom. I soon began to struggle for breath. In a ballroom, at a party, or even walking the Lime-house Mile, such a feminine display might have charmed a gentleman’s eye; but here it only made me the target of footpads. I bowed my head and walked on, past heaps of rubbish and pools of sullage. The smell of drying matchboxes, stale fish, and rotten cabbage was as all-pervasive as the sulphurous fog.

I stopped. The fog had thickened—the damp air blowing in from the Essex and Kentish marshes clogged with the carbon spewed out from hundreds of thousands of chimneys and flues. Panic flowed from my bosom and filled me entire. I spun through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. The air was streaked with odd shades of green. My mouth filled with a strange compound of flavours. And my skin grew clammy, as if covered with the slime trails of countless snails and worms. I put a hand against the nearest wall—my fingers running over a torn, wet poster—and edged tentatively forward.

A hundred pairs of eyes lit up the mouth of a nearby alleyway, each rat-like pupil like the tip of a red-hot poker. The troglodytes who inhabited the foulest rookeries in Flower and Dean were, perhaps, studying me with that mixture of wonder, fear, and hatred invariably evoked by the sight of an outsider. I walked faster, ever faster, staring down at the cobbles, willing the natives to return to their cottages and fever-haunted courts deep within London’s black heart.

I was beginning to lose my nerve. I felt like crying. I was at the heart of a naphtha-lit Dis, a monstrous City of the Plain. Here, the world of day, where men went to work, women kept house, and all was circumscribed by propriety, had capitulated to the forces of eternal night, where men and women fed upon each other, and life hurtled towards an apocalypse of madness, copulation, and death.

A small party of Sally Army girls suddenly appeared out of the fog and walked towards me, the eldest of their number holding a bull’s-eye lamp before her to light the way. I pulled myself together and waved to them. They stopped and, on hearing my breathless request, directed me to Church Street, bestowing advice and hallelujahs. The night was insalubrious. And there was murder about, they said.

I hurried across the road. Ahead of me, shrouded behind a swirling curtain of greens, yellows, and sickly oranges, were the brewery, the railway tunnels of the Great Eastern, and, at the very end of the Lane, the bleak netherworld of The Nichol. I made my turning and gratefully entered into happier territory, where the shuttered old silk-weavers’ houses hinted at some small degree of safety and comfort.

‘But it’s
true,’
said Cliticia, her eyes flashing as she grew impatient with the obstinacy of my disbelief. ‘It’s
bloody
true I tell you. I’m out. Dropped. Expelled.’ She slapped her thigh. ‘Royally
buggered.’

Tonight, at about the same time as Mum and Dad would have been allowing Lizzie’s mother into their parlour, the Duenna had paid a house call to inform Madam Lipski that the Temple of Ishtar would not be needing her daughter’s services. Not this year, nor any other.

‘Then that’s two of us,’ I said.

She kicked one of her dolls across the room. ‘I suppose so.’

Lying down on her bed, she stared disconsolately at the ceiling.

‘Expelled,’ she murmured. ‘Mum can’t believe it. She’s down the rub-a-dub-dub, drowning ’er sorrows.’

The gas lamp was turned down, and in the sombre light her face resembled a piece of carved ebony that some African witch doctor might have employed as a fetish or juju. But the truly remarkable thing about Cliticia’s appearance this evening was her hair. I sat down on the edge of the counterpane, mesmerized by the sight of it.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ I said, running my fingers through her locks, and eager, if only for a minute or so, to change the dreary tenor of our conversation. ‘What on earth did you
use
?’

‘Peroxide, household bleach, soap flakes, and ammonia,’ she replied, absently.

Her blonde coiffure lent her the aspect of a fallen angel, or a Black Madonna crowned with gold. She looked divine and, at the same time, ineffably vulgar.

‘But why?’ I got up and inspected myself in the wardrobe mirrors, wondering if I could ever look so fallen or angelic, and was pleased to discover that there was a touch of carnation in my cheeks, offset by a pallor that the fog had aggravated, as it might a consumptive. Tonight, I seemed to possess the elements of that contaminated beauty I had always longed for, but had never really dared hope might be mine. ‘Why now?’ I said.

‘Because we’re getting out, that’s why,’ said Cliticia, sitting up and swinging her legs off the bed. ‘The little ones are staying next door with Mrs Szurma. They’ll be all right.’ She stood up. ‘Now ’urry up and choose a dress for yourself,’ she continued. ‘You can’t go over looking like that. And ’elp yourself to some paint.’  She took a pot of rouge off her vanity table and held it out. I took it, a little abashed. ‘We’ll show ’em,’ she concluded, clenching her teeth. ‘We’ll show ’em we’re bloody Shulamites.’

We were assailed by abuse almost as soon as we had stepped onto the pavement.

‘Necrosluts,’ slurred an adolescent boy who leant against the north wall of Christ Church. A gin bottle hung from his limp hand.

‘Fuck off, Bertie Simpkins,’ said Cliticia, hoarsely. ‘Fuck off back to Fuckland where all the little Fuck people live. Go on, before I give you a kick up the bottle an’ glass. You fucking slubberdegullion, you.’

The boy turned as pale as the bone-white masonry.

Despite the inclement weather we had both, in a fit of insanity that had taken its cue from the greater insanity overwhelming our lives, dressed as if for a summer’s day. Cliticia wore white silk trimmed with Bedfordshire lace. And I had decked myself in black satin with chenille and beads. Our dresses were the sort that displayed a well-turned ankle to good effect, and which only Shulamites, and other openly disreputable young women, might wear.

Carrying a gigantic carpetbag between us, we turned right and headed for The Ten Bells.

As we approached the pub a crowd that had defied the weather and spilled out onto the cobbles parted to allow us through. Like a couple of
grande
horizontales
taking a Sunday stroll along the Ladies’ Mile of Rotten Row, we glided through their midst, impervious to whistles, sniggers, and ribaldry.

We entered the bar.

Inside, the air was thick with smoke, laughter, screams, and cussing.

Cliticia took hold of my hand. We squeezed through the close- packed huddle of bodies until we stood behind a woman notable for the French elegance of her clothes and a complexion as inhumanly beautiful as it was dark. Cliticia tapped her on the shoulder. The woman turned around.

‘Oh, God in heaven,’ she said, her voice inflected with thick, Slavic vowels, ‘what are
you
doing here!
Doch,
have you not made enough trouble for one day?’

‘Where’s Mr Kirchner?’ said Cliticia, unperturbed.

‘Ha! Her precious Mr Kirchner!’ Madam Lipski stamped her foot on the floor. ‘Why am I so cursed? This one: always, always sh
e popustu tratit vremya!’

‘I am
not
playing around,’ said Cliticia.

‘Never mind that,’ said a burly man who, it seemed, was Madam Lipski’s companion for the evening. ‘You’ve caused your mother a lot of ’eartache today. Get along with you back ’ome, go on.’

If Madam Lipski was beautiful, her beauty was past its zenith, and waning towards a point where it would no longer respond to the alchemy of cosmetics. I wondered if her daughter provoked in her a measure of jealousy.

‘Mr Kirchner!’ said Madam Lipski, turning to her companion. ‘Oh, for all the saints, tell me I have a daughter who is just a fool and not a villain!’ She took a sip of her half of bitter. ‘He’s over there,’ she added, abjuring the defamation of her offspring to cock her head towards a corner of the bar. ‘This Kirchner-—’ She narrowed her eyes and became suddenly meditative. ‘There are some very odd stories going around about him.’