Babylon (6 page)

But my thoughts were all upon her sisters. ‘Is it true then?’ I asked. I immediately cursed myself.

‘Is what true?’

‘Nothing, I mean—’ I could hardly retract. ‘Shulamites only ever seem to have sisters. And people say that—’

‘Infanticide?’ said Cliticia, incredulously. ‘Wot, killing off the boy babies ’cause they don’t bring in any dosh? That’s a wicked fing to say, Maddy, it really is, and I don’t care if you ’ave ’eard it from others.’ She simmered a little, and then quickly cooled down, to finally give a brief, nervous laugh. ‘I told you before: don’t believe all what you read in the papers. Shulamites
never
’ave boys. Or ’ardly ever. Don’t know why, but that’s the way it is. The way it’s been for thousands of years.’ She shook out her curls. ‘You might say it’s in our blood,’ she concluded, rather self- importantly. ‘Our black... poisonous... blood.’

She pulled another key from her pocket, unlocked the door to her rooms, and stepped inside. I followed her. ‘Anyway, that’s ’ow we got to afford
this
place.’ And how nice it was, how different from the tawdry lodgings of so many families in Spitalfields. ‘It’s true, I never knew who me Dad was. That’s a problem most of us Shulamites ’ave.’ She threw up her hands. ‘But that’s life. When a temple-maiden retires she gets paid to ’ave baby girls, not to get soddin’ well
married,.'

I followed her into a room the Lipskis evidently used as a parlour, and then into Cliticia’s bedroom.

‘I ’ave to share it with the three youngest, of course—Bibi, Blaise, and Babiche. Gabrielle—’er off-world—is the only one who’s ever ’ad a room to ’erself. But it’s all right.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘We’ll all ’ave our own rooms when we get to Babylon, won’t we? Big, posh rooms, too.’

‘I know,’ I said, smiling back. ‘We’ll live like a couple of swells.’ A huge oak wardrobe stood against one wall.

‘I bet you have lots of nice things,’ I said. I inspected myself, running a hand down my linsey bodice. ‘You’re a bit of a swell already. But me?’ My bodice was dowdy, but my hair was even worse. Cliticia, on the other hand, sported one of the latest Piccadilly bangs; her chignon was adorned with lace and tiny artificial flowers; and the puffs, ringlets, and coils that fell over her ears must have taken hours of application with curling tong and comb. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took off my bonnet. ‘I’ve always wanted a French twist,’ I said.

She placed her hands on her hips and gave me a long, appraising look. ‘Why don’t you tight-lace?’ she said, frowning a little. She walked to the wardrobe and, after throwing open the doors, took a corset from its hanger. ‘Try it on.’ She saw me hesitate. ‘Go on, don’t be shy.’

‘I couldn’t. Really.’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘You’re a Shulamite, ain’t you? A
born
one?’

‘Yes,’ I said, a little confused. ‘I told you I was. I mean—’

‘Then act like one,’ she said, not unkindly. She placed the corset next to me on the bed, and then fell to unhooking her dress.
'Look, I’ll go first.’ The dress slipped off her shoulders, and she stood revealed in corset, chemise, stockings, and drawers. ‘What kind of stays are you wearing at the moment?’

Reluctantly, I rose, took off my ulster, laid it on the bed, and then unhooked my own dress. Soon, I was as near naked as Cliticia.

‘You’re wearing jumps,’ said Cliticia, her jaw visibly dropping. 'You don’t want to wear jumps, darling.’ Her incredulity disappeared in an explosion of laughter. ‘A Shulamite wearing jumps! Gawd bless us!’

‘Mum made it for me,’ I said, flushing. The loathsome thing was khaki. It had good whalebone in it, but it was otherwise constructed of buckram with stay-silk from the local haberdashers. I’d begged Mum to let me have decent stays. There were some really nice pieces of juvenile corsetry available after all and I’d had my eye on something by Symington called ‘The Pretty Housemaid’. But people didn’t like to see girls my age tight-laced. Sometimes they didn’t like to see any girl tight-laced. They called it ‘vicious dressing’.

The corset on the bed was a Shulamite corset. It was satin and shimmered pale blue in the oblique rays of light that shone through the casement window.

‘It’s French,’ said Cliticia. ‘Look at the label.’ I looked. It said
‘La Petite Salope.’

Cliticia walked over to me. She ran a finger down my stay laces. ‘Come on. Take it off.’ She bent over, retrieved the corset that lay on the bed, and held it up, encouragingly. ‘And try
this
on. You won’t be sorry.’

I removed the jumps and wrapped the silky, Shulamite corset around my waist. ‘Lace me,’ I said, turning my back to her and feeling her take the strain. She tugged and I gasped as the steel busk dug into my abdomen. And then the whalebone pinched, squeezed,
compressed
and finally began to crush my viscera. The blood rushed to my face in a flood of tingly excitement.

‘It’s an S-line corset,’ said Cliticia, as she continued her task of cincturing my waist into a skinny little isthmus that joined the great landmasses of my bosom and hips. ‘It gives you an S-shaped spine.’

When she had finished,
I
was encased in a gin of whalebone and steel, a farrago of ribs and metal catches.

‘What an ’andsome
tournure
it
gives you,’ said
Cliticia.
She
gave
my bottom a little
pat. ‘That’s
the real fing. The real
cul de Paris.’

I stood
before the mirrors set in
the
wardrobe doors. The corset had changed my posture
quite
dramatically. With my spine
distorted
into
the
radical ‘S’ shape that Cliticia had spoken of, I was a glorious perversion of female form, all thrusting bosom and wildly projecting hindquarters. And yet the corset made me seem childlike,
too.
My twenty-two inch waist had been reduced to
eighteen
inches. Any smaller,
and
it would have resembled Dulcie’s, whose diminutive body was confined
in
lead-lined and altogether more morbid corsetry deep beneath the
earth.
Unlike her,
of course, I
could breathe,
if only using the
upper
portion of my chest.
I looked
at
myself
the
more. And the
more
I looked the more my breathing became laboured. It was as if I were sickening of my
own
beauty, a beauty that, perhaps, would only be complete when, like Dulcie, I breathed no more.

‘You’re a proper little pouter pigeon,’ said Cliticia, admiring my reflection. Then she turned around, presenting me with her back
and
the crisscross of stay laces that ran down her spine. ‘Now it’s my turn,’ she added. ‘Lace me up some more.’

I complied. To my amazement, I found I was able to reduce her minuscule waist still further.

‘That’s seventeen inches!’ she moaned. ‘Ooooo! That’s sixteen!’ She gasped, and then gave a little scream. ‘That’s fifteen! No, no, don’t stop, don’t stop!’

‘For God’s sake, I’ll cut you in half if I pull any tighter!’

She broke free and surveyed herself, turning this way and that before the full-length mirrors.

Cliticia was no sylph. In fact, she was unusually buxom. But with a fifteen-inch waist the top and bottom halves of her hourglass figure were accentuated to a quite extraordinary degree. Whitechapel matrons would, no doubt, have mocked and deplored such a silhouette. (There was indeed something faintly ridiculous about it.) Modern gentlemen, however, would surely have been glad to account themselves nympholepts, and damned to suffer insanity, sickness, and death, if only for the privilege of bestowing a single caress upon its radical contours. Her bosom heaved, thrust up like a big dollop of black pudding. And her fundament had assumed dimensions that would have supported a wineglass—if, that is, anyone should have wished to use the cruel distension
of her
coccyx as an impromptu piece of furniture.
She
was
beautiful. And the
more beautiful, perhaps, precisely because of that
understated
quality of absurdity that marked her out as something not
of this
world.

‘You
’ave to
do
it gradual, like. One inch
per
month,’
she said,
breathlessly. ‘It takes’
—she gasped as if
she were
in extremis
—
‘practice.’ If her flesh had been white instead of
that
gorgeous shade of deep purple she would have seemed as chlorotic as me; for already, after only a few minutes of having my waist crushed in an embrace of whalebone and steel, the blood
had
completely left my face, the pulse in my temporal arteries had become visible, and my breasts palpitated, shivering within their cruel restraints.

I gazed down at myself. Despite being
a
heavily boned garment the corset had really lovely, delicate fanning, with lots
of
floss and decorative stitchwork around the contrasting light- and dark-blue panels of the stays.

With half-a-dozen tugs of its laces I’d gone from angel
in
the house to wasp-waisted demoness, a metamorphosed nymph who owed her new life as an object of desire to the merciful Zeus of contemporary fashion.

Cliticia put a finger to my cheek. ‘So pale,’ she said. Her finger ran across my throat, my bosom, and then down the inward- curving steel busk that lined the corset’s front panel. ‘Almost like you ’ad the green sickness.’ I trembled. It seemed in anticipation of a question I longed to put, but which I could at that moment only frame in terms of my heaving, somewhat over-expressive bosom. ‘White girls eat arsenic to achieve a complexion like that. So romantic,
so...
deathly pale.’

‘The divine Edgar Allan says female death is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.’”

‘The divine Edgar? Never bleedin’ ’eard of ’im. But I’m telling you, if you want to
keep
that lily-white look, then my money’d be on arsenic to do the trick.’ She shrugged. ‘You might content yourself with a daily glass of vinegar, o’ course. But I doubt it. I think
you'd
be the kind of girl to go all the way.’

She went to the wardrobe, knelt down, and pulled out a doll from under piles of petticoats, silk drawers, and old-fashioned pantalettes. It was a fashion-plate doll, a scaled-down replica of a particularly curvaceous Shulamite. ‘This is Nixie,’ she continued. ‘Nixie is a creature of extremes, ain’t you, darling? She
always
goes
all
the way.’ Cliticia pecked the little bisque-headed doll on the cheek. ‘Someday, I ’ope
I'll
be like Nixie.’ She looked up at me. ‘Tell me, Maddy. And be honest, will you? Why do you
really
want to go to Babylon?’ She sat back on her haunches, her thighs pressed jealously together. ‘Is it because of the Men?’

I felt my throat constrict. ‘You mean the Minotaurs?’ I said.

‘Course,’ said Cliticia.

‘But why do you ask?’ I said, almost snapping at her.

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she said, arching an eyebrow. ‘I
see.
So sorry.’

I gazed over her head. Light continued to stream through the window even though the sky seemed to have grown impenetrably sullen. Feeling sullen myself, I focused on Christ Church and the
oeil-de-boeuf
windows that lined its upper gallery.

‘Be careful when the Duenna talks to you about Minotaurs,’ said Cliticia. She put her index finger to her temple and rotated it, clockwise, then anti-clockwise, as if she were attempting to bore a hole into her head with the long, red drill bit of her fingernail. ‘They weed out the ones who’re, like, a bit
wonky.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not like that.’

‘Oh, yes you a-re,’ she chanted, ‘oh, yes you a-re.’

‘I’m not!’

‘Madeleine Fell’s crazy. That’s why they call her
Madeleine.’
She exploded into laughter, infinitely pleased at having discovered in herself a hitherto neglected talent for word play.

‘I’m not crazy like some girls are,’ I said, as her laughter abated. We both grew quiet. Cliticia fiddled with her doll, and I continued to stare out at those circular windows that dotted the upper portion of Christ Church, so like the portholes of some ocean liner bound for the shores of oblivion, they seemed, and I a would-be passenger somewhat too eager, perhaps, to play the role of a stowaway. ‘Aren’t you frightened
of...
what might happen?’ I said at last.

‘I think about it a lot,’ she said, softly. ‘You can’t ’elp but think about it, can you?’

The silence closed in. Christ Church loomed above us, as it did over all Spitalfields, a great temple consecrated to some dark mystery of the blood. Its weight seemed ready to press me through the floor and basement, deep, deep into the earth. It seemed ready to cover me, as a great bull might a heifer.

‘I think about it a lot, too,’ I said, running a hand over the silky,
moiré surface of my corset. I sat down next to Cliticia, took the doll from her hands and looked deep into its lifeless eyes. ‘I think about it all the time.’