Arcadia (12 page)

‘They’re all the same,’ a Princess said. ‘Men only want one thing.’

Aunt found some floorboard for Em and Victor below the sloping attic roof. She scrounged a little matting and some cloth for blankets. Aunt carried Victor to the street, and within twenty
minutes had returned with a topless conserve jar containing tepid mashed potato, manac beans and gravy which she had begged at a restaurant’s back door.

‘This kid’s a gold mine.’ She crushed the beans and made a mixture with the potatoes and gravy. ‘There’s plenty here for all of us,’ she said, though softly
so that ‘all of us’ meant Victor, Aunt and Em. She made stewballs in her palms, four large ones the size and shape of eggs, and smaller pellets for her nephew, Victor. His first solid
meal. He was almost nine months old. His first milk teeth were winking through the gum.

Together they poked the food into his mouth. It was too dry for him. He coughed. And when he closed his mouth the food was squeezed between his lips and fell into his mother’s hand. He did
not cry, though. This was not distress. He simply did not have the knack of swallowing such lumps. Perseverance won the day. The sisters had a score of fingers to keep the food inside the
baby’s mouth. Fingertips are like enough to nipples for Victor to be confused and suck. The sucking did the trick. For every scrap that slithered out across his chin a small amount went down
his throat. His sucking dragged the gravy from the mixture. He liked the smell and salt. He had his fill. He slept – for once – without his mother’s breast.

Em told her story of how she’d come to town, and how the town had almost beaten her. Then Aunt replied with hers, and how the town was better than a friend. It took more care of waifs and
strays than any village in the land. ‘If that weren’t so,’ she said, ‘the countryside would be the place for girls like us. The trees and fields would overflow with widows
and orphans. But look around you, Em. Look on the streets. It’s cities take us in.’ And then she added, ‘City air makes free.’

They talked like artisans at lunch, about the problems of the begging trade. Their jobs were like all jobs. Why should they be abject? They had their colleagues, rivals, clientele. They had
their working rituals, too – and the pride and purpose that such employment brings. The problem was that Em’s breasts were nearly dry, and still too sore for comfort. Giving solid food
to Victor might give them time to heal – but would the child return to the breast when he and Em were begging once again?

‘When Victor isn’t feeding,’ Em explained, ‘I don’t make money on the streets.’

‘If that’s the only problem you’ve got, then you’re the lucky one!’ said Aunt. She took her sister by the hand. ‘Just sleep,’ she said. ‘I told
you, Victor’s gold to us. A baby at the breast earns cash. You don’t need milk for that. You don’t need spit to stick your tongue inside your boyfriend’s ear.’

At dawn, while Em and Victor were still asleep, Aunt put on her hat and went down to the bars where the traders, warehousemen, and porters had coffee-and-a-shot before they started work. She
found the comic angle for her hat. She wore her sweetest, daftest smile. She stood against the walls of bars and called for pitch-and-toss. She’d show the men her plump and mottled knees if
anyone could throw a coin in her hat. The man who stepped up to her and softly dropped a coin in, imagined he had got the best of Aunt. She showed her knees. He departed poorer than he’d
come, but she, quite soon, had earned enough for food. She bought a bruised banana, cheap. A fresh, warm turban of bread. A bottle of root-water. A twist of honey. Cheese. She was a cheerful sight
upon the street. She skipped like someone half her age. She took the stairs two at a time. She found a dancing path between the sleeping Princesses, and spread the breakfast on the boards. She
broke the bread and cheese. She snapped the banana into three, and mashed one third with rootwater in a spangled cup until it ran like gruel and was thin enough for Victor to swallow.

She woke up Em and then woke Victor too. He was not ready for the day. He wailed like a damp yew log in the fire. She pinched him on his arm until tears dropped heavily and he was wide awake and
mutinous. Em tried to push her sister back, but Aunt was stronger. She lifted Victor by his arms and held him tightly at her side. He beat her with his wrinkled fists. She said, ‘Now
watch!’ She undid the loops of her woollen top, and pushed her clothes aside. She put her index finger in the twist of honey and wiped it on her tiny nipple. The honey sagged like candle
grease. Aunt pinched Victor one more time. His voice made pigeons fretful on the roof. Aunt put him firmly on her breast. The silence was as sudden and as comic as a burst balloon. He pressed his
mouth and tongue onto her skin. He sucked and made the noises that children make when drinking juice through straws. ‘You see? He doesn’t need a knife and fork,’ she said.
‘Or milk.’ She outlined how they would share the child. They’d work the boy in shifts. ‘Four tits beat two,’ she said. ‘Ask a cow. And honey’s got the edge
on milk. Ask bees.’

Em watched her baby nuzzling at her sister’s breast, as fickle when it came to food as adults are with love. He threw his head from side to side and tried to get a proper grip on this
modest nipple, this impermeable and unswollen breast, this honeycomb. He was engrossed and sweetly satisfied and, for the moment, wanted nothing else. Em almost wished that she and Victor were
still marooned beneath the parasol.

S
O THIS WAS
Victor’s life. Two lives, in fact. While other children learnt to crawl and pick up what they found as if the world was all a toy and
theirs, he shared two women’s breasts. His gums grew numb on honey. His nose was flattened by their ribs.

Em still preferred to work the marketplace. She knew the faces there and all the odours were the odours of the countryside, congested and compressed. She’d lost the parasol. Its pole had
ended up on someone’s fire. Its cheerful canopy was ripped and jettisoned. But she sat cross-legged for harvesting (‘We’re harvesters. We do not beg,’ her sister had said)
in the usual spot, between the garden and the market, her back against the flat trunk of her tree. It was a comfort when she saw crops of the class and quality that her birth village had produced
– ‘yellows’ from the potato fields, carrot clumps, onion sets, the stewing roots, sweet dumpling pumpkins, the dusty shingle of the beans – all so familiar from the days
when she and all the other village kids had been dragooned to join the harvesters so that the crop could be brought in quickly and at its best.

She’d known, she would know still, all villagers apart from the shape of their arses. A bean field when the beans were splitting was a field of arses facing bluntly upwards as villagers
played midwife with the soil. A potato field was much the same. The horse plough turned the soil – and then the village bums were higher than the noses for the day as harvesters with trowels
sought out the timid ‘yellows’ in the crevices and punctures of the soil. These townies only dined on such fresh crops because the country folk were not too proud or idle to stick their
arses in the air. Em slowly had convinced herself – with Aunt’s help – that coins given to her now were payment for the hours that they’d spent as girls, unpaid, with
blackened hands and aching backs amongst the produce of their fields.

She harvested the marketplace, less passionately, less urgently, than she had done before her sister arrived. She had a place to sleep, a family, a group of friends, somewhere to wash and eat, a
simple route to and from her work, free time. She felt no different from the other working women in the marketplace and garden, the waitresses and salesgirls, the prostitutes – that is to
say, she felt as bored, inured, and dutiful as anyone who has to labour for their pay.

While Aunt slept late, Em took the morning and the midday shift because those were the times when people came to shop for vegetables and fruit, the times when the Soap Market and the Soap Garden
were most profligate and careless with their cash. She served her time, with Victor at her breast. She had a little milk and honeyed nipples to keep her outsized baby still. And if he tried to
raise his head? Or twist to see the world pass by? She only had to wrap his head inside her shawl for him to quieten or to doze. The darkness was a drug for him. His pulse was slower underneath the
cloth than when his ears and eyes were naked to the clamour and the city light. If he cried, Em simply hushed him with a dab of honey on her breast, and murmured country comforts to him with her
lips pressed to his cheek or ear. ‘The squeaky door gets all the oil,’ she’d say. ‘The gabby cat gets cream.’ She found rhymes and games to put him on the breast.
‘Ring the bell,’ she said, and tugged the wayward quiff of hair on Victor’s head. Then, ‘Knock the door.’ She drummed her fingers on his forehead. ‘Lift the
latch’: she pinched his nose and – that’s the nature of the nose – his jaw dropped down, his mouth agape. ‘And walk right in!’ She placed her honeyed nipple on
his lower lip.

In the early afternoon Victor’s skipping aunt would come with bread or cheese to share with any fruit or salad that Em had harvested that morning. There was no food for Victor then. He
only fed at night. ‘The hungry mongrel does not bark,’ Aunt said. She made these nonsense phrases up, to mock her sister, to mock herself. She liked to play the country muse for those
foolish men in bars who’d pay for hollow ‘wisdoms’ such as that. She was not right about the hungry mongrel – but she was wise to caution against feeding Victor while he
worked. A sated child will not take honey. A sated child cannot be blackmailed by the promise of a meal. It’s hungry circus seals that sit obediently on tubs and balance beachballs on their
snouts. The more they are rewarded with a fish, the more they flap and slither out of line.

When Aunt and Em had eaten, Victor was passed on. His face was pressed against the younger breasts, where the honey was not mixed with the blood-hot residues of milk, but where the torso flesh
was deeper, softer, less discrete. Aunt tied him to her with a sash which passed around her neck and round her waist. His body was not long, but long enough by now to make Em’s sister stoop a
little from the toppling ballast of his weight. Em was now free to walk back to their attic rooms or buy a little food or bring the family washing to the public washing square at the centre of the
Soap Garden, or sleep.

Her sister carried Victor to her usual haunts, the bars, the restaurants, the tea salons, of the medieval streets to the east of the station yard. She wore Victor like she wore her hat, an
accessory to her outfit and her act. She’d show her knees – at least – to anyone who’d pitch-and-toss some silver in her hat or place a coin ‘on my baby’s
cheek’. If any man seemed slow to search for change, she’d wink at all his friends and ask, with the innocence of a music-hall soubrette, ‘What’s wrong with him? Has he got
a snake in his pocket, or what?’ She’d lean over dining tables with Victor gummed to her breast like a bloated termite at a grape, and invite the diners – loosened by the wine or
beer – ‘to place a silver coin on my baby’s eyes if you want fortune and good health’. It sounded like an age-old rite. In fact, she’d dreamed it up. If young Victor
raised his head, to bare his honeyed teeth and scare off custom with his cries, then Aunt would knock his head back to the breast with the speed and firmness of a factory foreman, bent on keeping
working children’s noses to the loom or press or lathe. She was not hard. She simply liked the way she was, and wished to keep it so. What sort of kindness would it be – to whom?
– if she behaved towards the boy as if he were a rich man’s son whose duties only stretched from play and food to sleep? What money would she harvest on the street with Victor in her
care, if Victor were the normal child, allowed to crawl and scream and play with stones exactly as he wished, if Aunt was just another ‘mother’ in the town? Where was the sentiment, the
plaintiveness in that? Who’d pay for such mundanity? So trading says, The child must suck the breast. Six coins out of ten are lost unless the child is on the breast. So, Child on Breast!
That was the requisition of the working day.

It was not fair that Victor did not seem a willing volunteer in this. ‘This kid’s a gold mine,’ Aunt had said. He kept the sisters fed and clothed. He kept them decent, free
from sin. They did not have to steal or prostitute themselves or find thin comforts and escape in drink, while Victor was still small. They did not have to learn the trade of
dipping
–
picking pockets, that’s to say – while Victor’s tiny grazing head was eloquent enough to make hard men and stony women pick their own pockets of small change.

They used the child as bait, it’s true. Put crudely and unadorned like that, it makes the sisters less than kind. But
Less than Kind
is not the same as
Without Love
. He was
their ‘little blessing’; their meal ticket, too. They loved him for the gift he gave them: he saved them from the grinding molars of the city which seized on women very much like Aunt
and Em and made them old and sick and spiteful within days. Imagine Em and Aunt without a child. No need. Just think of all the country girls who lived and begged and starved alone in cities such
as ours, across the world, in those dead days before the rich bred consciences, before the telephone, the car, the welfare cheque, the safety net, the thawing of the civic heart. The lucky ones
kept jobs. They laboured over stoves. They scuffed their knees in cooling clinkers as they raked out grates at dawn. Perhaps they flirted with a stable hand or – more ambitiously –
exchanged embraces with madam’s chauffeur. Perhaps they fell in love and, if their half-days coincided with their sweetheart’s – rare chance, indeed – they walked unfettered
for an hour, embraced by city crowds and understanding all too well that this was the best that life in towns would offer them, that there was worse awaiting them, if they should lose their looks
or tempers or good luck. They could be roofless, empty-gutted, and with no embraces to exchange except those given to their own rough knees, at night.