Babylon (2 page)

‘Yes, Madeleine?’

‘Please, Madam, I, I, I—’ I sweltered under the collective gaze of my classmates. ‘I’d like to volunteer, too’ I said. I heard a few stifled giggles. ‘If it comes to that, th-that is,’ I continued, unable to rein in my stutter or force the blood out of my cheeks. ‘If
—
if it’s not too late.’
Oh God
, I thought,
what am I babbling on about
? I lowered my hand, exposed, at last, for what I was, and feeling very, very foolish.

Miss Nelson, our teacher, smiled. And then her mouth set, paralysed, I think, by the effort of concealing her own embarrassment. An expectant silence followed. But I had nothing more to say. I had made my confession. It was too late to retract, and too early to offer excuses.

‘Good. That’s one more, then,’ she said. Her smile had gone, to be replaced by an expression that, though more severe, seemed thankfully natural. Standing up, she looked over my head towards the girls at the back of the class who had likewise volunteered. ‘Scarlett, Cliticia, Faye, Vanity, Narcissa,
Séverine, Omphale, Fellatia.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘And Madeleine,’ she added, gazing down at me, who sat at a desk abutting her own. ‘Nine of you.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Fifty years ago, that would have been a poor showing. But in these perilous times the selection committee will be
more
than pleased.’ She rubbed her hands
together, as if striving to warm herself. ‘Now, girls, listen: you must consolidate matters by submitting a formal letter of consent from your mothers.’ She shot me a glance. ‘Or fathers, of course.’ Again, I heard the snorts and little choking fits that indicated desperately suppressed laughter. There was a saying. A saying I’d heard too many times as I’d passed the men gathered outside The Roebuck on my way home from school: Shulamites are good for two things, and the other is the begetting of bastards. ‘Only after consent has been given,’ she continued, ‘will you be eligible for interview. Do you understand? It’s very important. Without that letter, there can be no interview, and thus no chance of entering the novitiate.’

My own ‘Yes, Madam’ was too loud, too polite, especially against the background noise of perfunctory grunts emanating from the back row. I looked over my shoulder. Ignoring the girls who sat directly behind me, I focused on Cliticia, her chair tipped at forty-five degrees so that her shoulders leant against the classroom wall. She returned my gaze with sulky indifference. Snubbed, I turned around and stared at the desktop, still hot with self-consciousness, but determined not to recant. Lizzie, my best friend, who sat by my side, would, I knew, offer me a shoulder to cry on. But she wasn’t the ally I had hoped for.

‘I expect you to get those letters to me first thing tomorrow,’ said Miss Nelson. She continued to wring her hands, like Lady Macbeth fretting over a last, indelible spot of blood. ‘Now, before we finish for the day we shall, of course, recite the
Lord's Prayer.
But before we do, I think it appropriate that I read a few verses to bid our brave volunteers Godspeed.’

She opened the Bible that lay on her desk.

‘I am black, but comely
, O
ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look well upon me, because I am black, because the moon hath looked upon me. Return, return
, O
Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee. Oh Babylon, set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave
... ’

Therefore do the virgins love thee,
I thought.

She closed the Bible. ‘Girls, we live in an age of polluted ideals. An age of racial and cultural degeneration. We can only hope that  the days of terror will soon be at an end and that Babylon will be restored to her former glory. Now let us pray.’

We bowed our heads. I didn’t believe in her God—the simpering One, the wet lettuce leaf of Nazareth. I was a whore of Babylon. Or at least, I soon would be. And that meant I believed only in the Goddess. But I knew it was the genius of my adopted home, and race, to trim and dissemble. For thousands of years, we had pretended to be Christians, Muslims, Hindoos, and Buddhists. We had parasitized their rituals, doctrines, and texts. And even now, when no other religion, government, or civilization, really mattered, except that of Babylon the Great and her representatives on Earth, habits still died hard. And so I prayed.

‘Class dismissed,’ said Miss Nelson, when we had finished.

I rose, curtsied, opened the lid of my desk, put away my slate and reader, and then retrieved my canvas reticule. ‘Are you going home the usual way?’ I asked Lizzie. The best thing to do, I decided, was to try and pretend that nothing had happened.

‘You’re bonkers,’ she whispered as she collected her own things.

I shrugged and got up. ‘What if I am?’

She opened her mouth, but her reply was drowned out by the hubbub of fifty girls scraping chairs and banging desktops.

‘Quiet!’ snapped Miss Nelson. She picked up her signal. Its sharp, insistent clicking brought an immediate silence.

I held my reticule to my chest and walked towards the door, easing my way through the crush of bodies. My bravado did little to conceal my distress.

‘Such zeal,’ said a girl to my right. ‘How very commendable.’

‘Trollop,’ said another, somewhat more forthrightly.

‘Trollop? Naw. Madeleine Fell wants to be a
pet.’

‘Yeh. Teacher’s pet wants to be
another
kind of pet. Meow!’

‘Shut up, Aimee Porter,’ said Lizzie, who had caught me up. She looped her arm around mine and hurried me into the corridor. ‘You really
are
bonkers,’ she continued once we were out of earshot. ‘And I reckon you know it too. But it’s nothing on what your Mum and Dad’re gonna be. They’re going to give you a
right
barrikin.’

I don’t think I could have replied even if I had wanted to. My cheeks still hadn’t cooled; I felt that I might at any moment burst into tears. But guilt was rapidly giving way to a sense of pure excitement. And it was that excitement, I think, more than anything else, which sealed my lips.

I didn’t need a shoulder to cry on, and I didn’t need Lizzie. Filled with self-delight I wanted only to hug my reticule and commune with the secret dreams I would no longer have to hide.

‘I think I’d like to be alone,’ I said, a goose girl resolved to try her hand at playing the prima donna. Lizzie’s eyes grew big with surprise. Sensing that surprise would at any moment give way to peevishness, I disengaged my arm from hers and walked away, drifting through the open doorway that led into the playground.

I was a boat that had slipped its moorings. Soon, I would be carried out on a blood-dimmed tide, far out into the world’s voluptuous seas and oceans.

But escape wasn’t to be so easy.

‘So how was school today?’ said Mum.

‘All right,’ I said, looking dispiritedly at my dinner. I sometimes entertained this strange fantasy: Mum and Dad weren’t my real Mum and Dad at all. They were foster parents. My real parents were—well, I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t from this world, I told myself. I was from China, or the Moon.

How was I to find my way home? A little more than an hour after I’d put out to sea I was adrift and in danger of being carried back to shore.

I
s anything the matter?’ said Dad, pricking my thought bubble so viciously that I almost heard it pop.

I wondered how I should ever explain matters. Dad still had his job at Poplar shipyards. It was a good job, too. He was a foreman. And Mum was teaching at Toynbee Hall. Unlike most people, They didn’t hate, or fear, Shulamites. But the continuing burden of newcomers from Russia and Eastern Europe meant that they were not as free from prejudice as they liked to believe.

‘I don’t think I heard you, my girl.’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ I said, my voice breaking. ‘It’s just that—’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Mum. ‘She’s in a tizzy about something or other. You know how it is.’

I continued to stare at my food. Dad fell silent. But a bashful acknowledgement of ‘the curse’ was writ large across his face. And I was tempted to tell the truth, the whole truth right there and then: that I was indeed accursed, but not in the way that he suspected.

‘The nights are drawing in,’ said Dad. ‘You make sure you come home as soon as you finish school. Understand?’ He looked at my mother and sighed. ‘The funeral’s Monday week.’

‘The funeral?’ said Mum.

Dad’s eyes became darkly meaningful.

‘Of the last one. The one found in Miller’s Court
—
’

‘Hush!’ said Mum.

‘Or so I heard from Freddie Lee,’ said Dad. He let his hands fall to either side of his plate. ‘Poor girl,’ he said. ‘Poor girl.’

Mum shook her head. ‘God help us all. Such times we live in.’

‘It’ll be the talk of the town, I expect,’ said Dad. ‘Just like it was the last time around. To think that it takes such matters to bring the public’s conscience to bear on the life of the London poor.’

‘Very true,’ said Mum. ‘As Mr Shaw has pointed out, it’s little under a year since the West End was clamouring to muzzle such as them who dared complain they were starving.’

Dad raised his knife and fork. ‘It’s taken some independent genius to focus their minds, it seems.’ He carved himself a thick slice of red-veined beef and brought it to his mouth. ‘A murderous genius,’ he added, chewing thoughtfully.

‘Don’t joke about such things,’ said Mum.

‘I’m just saying what needs to be said.’

Silence descended on the table.

‘Oh, eat up do, Maddy,’ said Mum, as she nervously tried to change the subject. ‘You need your strength. You’re beginning to look as if you have the green sickness.’

‘Do as your mother says,’ said Dad.

‘That’s it, go on,’ said Mum, as I lifted a forkful of potato. ‘We don’t want you wasting away. You’ll be a pupil teacher soon.’

‘That’ll bring in a few bob,’ said Dad.

‘Oh, give over, Josh,’ said Mum. ‘It’s not the money. It’s just lovely to know she’s doing well.’

‘She’d make a fine governess,’ said Dad. ‘I believe Canon Barnett
—
’

‘You remember the rally,’ I said, interrupting and turning to Dad, as eager to change the topic of conversation as Mum had been. ‘The rally in Hyde Park?’

Three years ago Mum and Dad had taken me along to a big Hyde Park rally to demonstrate against the Maiden Tribute. Dad had carried a banner that read ‘Protection Of Young Girls’ and I had had my own little banner emblazoned with the legend ‘Sir, Pity Us.’ I’d been better off than the wagonloads of ‘maidens’ dressed in white that brought up the rear of the procession. They had held aloft a banner proclaiming ‘Innocents Will They Be Slaughtered?’ I detested ungainly syntax.

‘The Maiden Tribute? Of course,’ said Dad. ‘And the year after it, too,’ he laughed, ‘when King Mob came to the West End. Put a stone through the window of a Pall Mall gentleman’s club on
that
occasion, if I remember aright.’

‘But you feel sorry for Shulamites,’ I said. ‘You’ve always felt sorry for them, haven’t you?’

‘The sisterhood should be disbanded, that’s what
I
think, and Babylon shut down. Perhaps for good. The whole system is rotten. It’s merely something the establishment uses to preserve its power. But as for the young ladies themselves?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘They’re innocents. Dupes. Sacrificial lambs. They’re lured off-world by all these promises of money and romance—
romance
, mind!—and then, after ten years, they’re thrown onto the scrap heap with just a pension to keep the wolf from the door. Or else they become temple-maidens simply because that’s what their mothers did, and their mothers before them, and they don’t know any better.’ He paused a moment to stare at me, a note of gentleness entering his voice. ‘Yes, of
course
I feel sorry for them.’

‘We all feel sorry,’ said Mum, frowning. ‘But stay away from those girls, Maddy.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘They’re trouble.’ But they weren’t sorry. Not really. Nobody was. The only person sorry was me. For myself. Because I wanted Mum, Dad, and everybody to know that my middle name was Trouble, too.