Authors: Jim Crace
Later, he came back. She woke to find him watching her. He had some cold fish and some bread.
‘You’re quite a pretty girl,’ he said, looking more at Victor and Em’s breasts than at her face. ‘You’d better find some man to take you in. You’d
better find a proper father for the child.’
Em shook her head and said she didn’t want the bread or fish. She had no appetite. She feared the yardman wanted something in exchange for food. His eyes were flared and restless like a
pig in heat. He looked – to use her mother’s phrase – as if his heart had slipped below his belt. She closed her eyes and pulled her shawl across her chest. At last she heard the
yardman walk away. He had not left the bread or fish behind.
Now, her third day on the streets, she did her best to keep her problems to herself. She did not try to match the gazes of the men and women in her path. She did not seek – or trust
– their kindness any more. She sat with Victor in the sun on the steps of the Postal Hall. She’d tried the clerks in poste restante. This time a man behind the grille had asked for
proof of who she was before he’d check the number that she gave. He had looked at her and Victor as if they both were pigeons of disease. She could not stop the tears. She could not stop them
running down her cheeks onto her shawl even when she’d fled the Postal Hall and rested in the sun. What should she do? Seek out the yardman? Sell Victor for the highest sum? Head out of town
and find her husband’s village once again, beyond the sea-blue fields? Perhaps she ought to step beneath a tram. Or try her luck beneath the hooves and wheels of some fast cart. She was too
tough to take these easy routes. In those days life was hard. All life was hard. They raised you then on work, debt, hunger, cold. Three days and nights without a bed in town was better than the
seven they had spent walking through the fields and woods. So things were looking up and would improve each day.
She nursed the dream of meeting with her sister once again, but set her daily target low. The first task was to find a place of safety. Then to find a place where they might sleep without fear
of men or thieves. And, then, a little food perhaps. A good crisp apple, sweet with sun, was what she most desired. This was the country treat for little girls with tears or for children
who’d been good. ‘Cheer up, dear Em,’ her mother used to say. ‘Go on. Go to the shed and get yourself a nice ripe apple from the tub.’ Em smiled at this – the
memories of her mother and of treats. It must have been the smile and the charm and snugness of Victor at her breast that caused the two women passing by to pause and match her smile with theirs.
They threw a few small coins into Em’s spread lap, and smiled again, and walked away. They looked like sisters, plump, modest girls, with shallow caps pinned to their hair and shoes with
little heels. The baskets that they carried – the country market kind, woven out of teased bark – were empty. They looked like rich men’s maids, like country girls who’d
made their lives in town. Em followed them. It seemed the wisest thing to do. They led her through narrowing streets, past mews, and squints and alleyways, beneath the medieval wooden gates, into
the merriment of the Soap Market where they – and Em herself – were soon lost in the crowd. If her sister was a maid to some rich man, then surely she would buy her victuals there,
thought Em. Besides, she felt at ease and safe amongst the country products and the smells. What could be more innocent than shopping in the marketplace for food? Ten, twenty times, she thought she
saw the plump sisters once again. But all the women looked alike. They seemed to dress the same, and walk in pairs. These were the type of women, as Em had discovered, who would give coins freely
for a widow with a child on milk. She knew that this was where her fortune would be made.
That night she joined the others without homes, scavenging for fruit and coins amongst the mats and panniers of the market. She sucked the laxative and discarded fangs of rhubarb stems. She
dined on dates and green tomatoes, while Victor made supper out of milk. She knew what she would have to do. At dawn she woke, wet with Victor’s urine, and disturbed by cold and the noise of
porters, barrows, market girls. She turned her palm up for sympathy and cash. A market trader, fond of children, placed a perfect apple in her palm.
So Victor lived beneath a market parasol for eight, nine months. His mother found it thrown out. Some flower-trader, at a guess, had given up on it and bought another. Its wooden pole had
snapped in two. Its green and yellow canvas canopy was torn. She made repairs as best she could without materials or tools. She made the most of nothing. Women had to then. A bit of canvas and a
broken pole were better quarters than the trenches that their men would occupy when war broke out. Em set up her umbrella at the centre of the marketplace, between two bars and near the scrubbing
stones. There was the flat, damp trunk of a snag tree for back support. There was market waste and mulch to soften cobblestones. Her begging pitch was chosen well. The drunks, the madwomen, the
wretched ones, the innocents with visions, the dregs and cynics, assembled at the steps of churches, and begged for coins, alms, for holy charity, from worshippers, and penitents, and wedding
guests. The ones with whistles, tricks with fire or balls stayed on the busy streets and entertained the hangers-out, the tramline queues, the cafe clientele for cash. Em’s kind of beggar,
the kind that is the model of what could happen to us all, must be clean – and in the Soap Garden there was running water all day long. Crowds of people, too, with time to spare. The traffic
there was mixed: market traders, bar girls, their customers, the women and their washing, the men who came to drink and talk. No one came there without a little cash. The bars, the girls, the
market stalls weren’t charities. Gratitude was not the bargain that they sought.
So Victor’s mother did more than beg. She traded smiles and peace of mind. She did it well. She had a baby to support. The coloured, broken umbrella was the perfect touch. It was what
country women used to shield themselves from the rain and sun when they came in to town to sell their flowers or their garlic cloves. Passers-by would look down to see what this woman had for sale.
Em’s face was hidden by the parasol. Her breasts were on display – with Victor hard at work. The child in need. One hand – the one with a single wedding ring – was resting
on her knee palm up. The other pressed the baby to her chest. She marketed herself. She felt no shame. Shame is a family, village thing. It doesn’t count for much amongst strangers. Her only
fear – and hope – was that her sister would chance by and look beneath the parasol. She did her best to beg with pride. It was not sin, like drink or bed, that had brought her there.
She pinned a browning photograph of her husband to the canvas of the parasol with a black silk funeral rosette. It signified, Here is a widow and her child. Look at their man. His death has made
them homeless, poor.
What of Victor at this time? Are kids of less than five weeks old so self-engrossed and innocent that nothing in the outside world makes any impact on their lives so long as they are fed and
warm and free from wind? The truth is, yes. The only bonding that there is takes place between the nipples and the lips. Victor was the kind of child who bonded to his mother’s breast with
the tenacity and deliberation of a limpet on a stone. If he was sucking, he was well. Detach his gums, prise him loose with the gentlest finger, and he would imitate a seagull bickering for
shrimps, his tiny call – not yet a voice – as querulous and fretful as a dirge.
Em thought this threnody would earn her cash, that Victor singing thinly for the breast would move the hardest passer-by to find a few spare coins. If her child could cry like that so readily
she only had to pop her nipples free when people passed and she would earn a fortune in small change. No one was mean enough, she thought, to close their ears to babies in distress. But she was
wrong. We in this city are the sentimental sort. We don’t like tragedy. That’s why the drunkard at the railway station gates, singing bits of opera in fake Italian and French, and
bothering the women with his arias, earned more from begging than the trolley man who’d lost a wife, his mind, and both his legs in some forgotten war. To toss some coins in the drunk’s
old opera hat was to show one’s liberality, one’s worldliness, one’s sense that all was well. To give cash to the trolley man – taken without a word or smile – was to
price a life, a leg, a personality. At what? At less than one could spare. The coins clattered on the trolley floor. Enough small change to buy a rind of pork, a two-stop tramway ride, a piece of
ribbon for your hair. The coins paid for guilt-free entry to the forecourt and the trains. Except, of course, the gateway where the trolley man lay in wait was the one least used. His naked stumps,
his naked hopelessness, made people change their routes. The operatic drunkard got the crowd.
So it was with Em. When she took Victor off the breast, his protests cleared a space around their parasol. The shoppers did not look to see what was for sale. They knew. They heard the
baby’s screams and kept their eyes away from this private tableau of distress. It would not do to stare. Or smile. Or break the moment with some coins in Em’s palm. Besides, what could
a coin do for one so young? A coin would not change its life. What should they do then? Search their pockets for a little solid love? Hold out their hands and offer to this pair that spare room,
rent-free? That job? That meal? That ticket home? No, Victor’s tears – and, here, who will not pause to note the leaden candour of the words? – were of no worth. But what could be
more appealing than a baby on its mother’s nipple, the two most loved of natural shapes, the infant cheek, the breast? No need to look away from nakedness like that. You could study scenes
more intimate in churches or in galleries. Madonna and her Child. The Infancy of Christ. First Born. Indeed, there was a sculpture reproduced on the lower-value silver coins of that time. A woman,
Concord, held an infant to her breast, her tunic open to her waist, her thighs becoming tree trunk, tree bole, the tree becoming undergrowth, becoming Motherland. Here, then, was the sentimental
counterpart of comic, operatic drunks. Em and Victor made a wholesome sight when Victor was asleep and on her breast. Coins dropped into the mother’s palm or on her shawl were tribute tithes
for family life. Em understood. To earn the pity and the cash of citizens she had to seem respectable and, more than that, serene – a living sculpture labelled Motherhood.
F
OR THOSE MEN
who were not moved by Motherhood, Em acted Eve. She wore a mask of gormless innocence which was as challenging to them as the pouting and
the paint upon the faces of the bar girls who sold real sex for cash. The market traders who passed her frequently and saw the way her expression seemed to fluctuate haphazardly between Eve and
Motherhood thought – preferred to think, in fact – that Em was none too bright. They said she hadn’t got the sense that God gave lettuce. They labelled her ‘the
Radish’. That was the nickname that they used for girls red-faced and odorous and from-the-soil like her. These traders had good cause to doubt the sharpness of her intellect, besides the
permutations of her face. She muttered to her baby all day long, and in those slow and well-baked country tones which stretched the vowels and squashed the consonants and made the language sound
like morse. Yet there was cunning just below the widow’s skin. Alms-givers welcome gormless gratitude. They do not give to people who seem wiser than themselves, no matter whether it be Eve
or not. No, Victor’s mother was no fool, despite appearances. A fool would have an empty palm, but Em’s was always slightly curled and buttoned heavily with the copper brown of
coinage.
Her looks, of course, were helpful there. She was a radish with a round and childish face. Her breasts were high and firm with milk. Her throat and shoulders were vulnerable and bare. Her knees
were spread to make her lap a cradle for the child. Her feet and lower legs protruded from her apron skirts with the unselfconsciousness of a small girl sitting in shadow at the harvest edge. Any
man who paused to drop some coins in her palm had paid for time to stare at her – though if he stepped too close the parasol would block his view. She did not lift her face to look these men
directly in the eye. A look from her would make them hesitate, or return the coins they had found for her in the pockets of their coats. For women, though, the radish turned its chin and caught
their eyes and smiled. Most shopping women are too timid and too sociable to fail to match a freely given smile. And having smiled themselves at Em, what could they do? What else but mutter phrases
about the weather or the child, and buy escape from smiles and platitudes with coins in Em’s palm?
Sometimes the crowds which walked between the market and the garden were too dense for smiles to work. The shoppers simply dropped their eyes and let the beggar woman’s beams slip by. But
Em soon learnt the trick of targeting her smiles with words. ‘God Bless the Cheerful Giver,’ she would say. Or, ‘Lady, Lady!’ spoken urgently, as if she’d spotted
danger on the street or recognized a family friend. If Em could only stop the first one in a crowd and embarrass her to pause and give, then she could count on gifts in streams. The first fish
leads the shoal.
So Victor and his mother lived beneath the parasol by day, and slept at night wherever they could find a place amongst the dozing market baskets or at the back of bars. They were not rich. Of
course they were not rich. How could they be on gleanings? But they survived, sustained by charity, by the prospect of Em’s sister chancing by, by the certainty that the city would provide
abundantly, by the sense of awe they felt at being at the centre of such a boisterous web, by the dislocated optimism of those whose lives are trembling at the gate.
Was Victor happy? So far, yes. He fed contentedly. He slept. His domain was his mother’s lap. Her nipples were his toys. But then the muscles strengthened in his neck and arms. He grew
bored with suckling. He wanted to lift his head to look around at all the movement and the colours in the streets. He fell back startled from the breast when he heard Em calling out, ‘Lady,
Lady!’ or when the hubbub of the crowd seemed more eloquent and urgent than the beating of his mother’s heart. He found he liked those moments best when he was upright on his
mother’s knee and she was belching him, separating the suckling oxygen from the milk that he had swallowed and which was causing jousting mayhem in his gut. She had one hand flat on his
chest, supporting him. The other tapped and played a gentle bongo on his back between his fragile shoulderblades. Or else she beat her tune, not with her fingers on his back, but with the cracked
and greying candle stub which she would only light again when she had somewhere to call home. Her son’s short neck was creased in tidal ripples of baby fat. His mouth was hanging open,
waiting for the upward storm of warm and milky wind. Some passing men made clicking noises with their tongues for him, or comic, pouting kisses with their lips. Sometimes a dog ran by. Or older
children. Always the market offered entertainment to the child – a porter with teetering crates of onions on his wooden cart, an argument, a snatch of song, some shoving between friends, and,
almost constantly by day, the casual, tangled flow and counter-flow of citizens in search of romance, fortune, pleasure, food. At times the street around the parasol was quiet and empty, but then
Victor found a butterfly to watch or sharp-edged sunlight winking on a broken neck of glass or the flexing toes of his own feet, or spilt water – parting, joining in its halting, bulbous
progress through the cobblestones.