The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  Her main expense, though, is clothes. Even by the standards of the West End, the quality of Sugar’s dresses is remarkable; in the squalor of St Giles, it was astonishing. Rather than buying a discarded old costume off a butcher’s hook in Petticoat Lane, or a serviceable imitation of the current fashion from a dingy Soho shop, her policy is to save every sixpence until she can afford something that looks as though the finest lady’s dressmaker might have made it especially for her. Such illusions, though they’re on sale in department stores, don’t come cheap. The very names of the fabrics — Levantine folicé, satin velouté and Algerine, in colours of lucine, garnet and smoked jade — are exotic enough to make other whores’ eyes glaze over when Sugar describes them. ‘What a lot of trouble you go to,’ one of them once remarked, ‘for clothes that are stripped off in five minutes, for a man to tread on!’ But Sugar’s men stay in her room for a great deal longer than five minutes. Some of them stay for hours, and when Sugar emerges, she looks as though she hasn’t even been undressed. What does she do with them in there?

  ‘Talk,’ is her answer, if anyone is bold enough to ask. It’s a teasing answer, delivered with a grave smile, but it’s not the whole truth. Once she has chosen her man, she’ll submit to anything. If it’s her cunt they want, they can have it, although mouth and rectum are her preferred orifices: less mess, and more peace of mind afterwards. Her husky voice is the result of a knife-point being pressed to her throat just a little too hard when she was fifteen, by one of the few men she ever failed to satisfy.

  But it isn’t simple submission and depravity that Sugar provides. Submission and depravity come cheap. Any number of toothless hags will do whatever a man asks if they’re given a few pennies for gin. What makes Sugar a rarity is that she’ll do anything the most desperate alley-slut will do, but do it with a smile of child-like innocence. There is no rarer treasure in Sugar’s profession than a virginal-looking girl who can surrender to a deluge of ordure and rise up smelling like roses, her eyes friendly as a spaniel’s, her smile white as absolution. The men come back again and again, asking for her by name, convinced that her lust for their particular vice must equal their own; Sugar’s fellow prostitutes, seeing the men so taken in, can only shake their heads in grudging admiration.

  Those who are inclined to dislike her, Sugar strives to charm. In this, her freakish memory is useful: she’s able, it seems, to recall everything anybody has ever said to her. ‘So, how did your sister fare in Australia?’ she will, for example, ask an old acquaintance a year after they last met. ‘Did that O’Sullivan fellow in Brisbane marry her or not?’ And her eyes will be full of concern, or something so closely resembling concern that even the most sceptical tart is touched.

  Sugar’s acute memory is equally useful when dealing with her men. Music is reputed to soothe the savage breast, but Sugar has found a more effective way to pacify a brutish man: by remembering his opinions on trade unions or the indisputable merits of black snuff over brown. ‘Of course I remember you!’ she’ll say to the loathsome ape who, two years before, twisted her nipples so hard she almost fainted in pain. ‘You are the gentleman who believes that the Tooley Street fire was started by Tsarist Jews!’ A few more such regurgitations, and he’s ready to praise her to the skies.

  A pity, really, that Sugar’s brain was not born into a man’s head, and instead squirms, constricted and crammed, in the dainty skull of a girl. What a contribution she might have made to the British Empire!

  ‘Excu-hoose me, ladies!’

  Caroline and Sugar turn on their heels, and discover a man with a tripod and camera pursuing his hobby not far behind them in Trafalgar Square. He’s a fearsome-looking creature with dark brows, Trollopean beard and a tartan overcoat, and the women jump to the conclusion that he wants them out of the way of his tripod-mounted ogre eye.

  ‘Oh no no n-o-o, ladies!’ he protests when they move aside. ‘I would be honoured! Honoured to preserve your image for all time!’

  They look at each other and share a smile: here is another amateur photographer just like all the rest, as fervent as a spiritualist and as mad as a hatter. Here is a man sufficiently charismatic to charm the pigeons down into his chosen tableau — or if he isn’t, then sufficiently generous to buy lucky passers-by a halfpenny cone of birdseed. Even better when they provide their own!

  ‘I am truly grateful, ladies! If you could but dispose yourselves a little farther apart …!’

  They giggle and fidget as the pigeons flutter all around, alighting on their bonnets, clawing at their outstretched arms, settling on their shoulders — anywhere the seed has spilled. Despite the flurry of movement so near their eyes, they do their best not to blink, hoping the decisive moment will catch them in a good light.

  The photographer’s head moves to and fro beneath his hood, he tenses his entire body, and then there’s a shudder of release. Inside his camera, a chemical image of Sugar and Caroline is born.

  ‘A thousand thanks, ladies,’ he says at last, and they know that this means goodbye: not au revoir, but farewell. He has taken all he wants from them.

  ‘Did you ‘ear what ‘e said?’ says Caroline as they watch him carry his trophies towards Charing Cross. ‘For all time. All time. It couldn’t be true, could it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Sugar, pensively. ‘I’ve been to a photographer’s studio once, and I’ve stood next to him in the dark room while he made the pictures appear.’ Indeed she remembers holding her breath in the red light, watching the images materialising in their shallow font of chemicals, like stigmata, like spirit apparitions. She considers telling Caroline all this, but knows the older woman would require each word explained. ‘They come out of a bath,’ she says, ‘and I’ll tell you what: they stink. Anything that stinks so much can’t last forever; I’m sure.’ Her frown is hidden under her thick fringe: she isn’t sure, at all.

  She’s wondering if the photographs taken of her at that photographer’s salon will last forever, and hoping they don’t. At the time, while the business was being done, she felt no qualms, and posed naked beside potted plants, in stockings by a curtained bed, and up to her waist in a tub of tepid bathwater. She didn’t even have to touch anyone! Lately, however, she’s come to regret it — ever since one of her customers produced a thumb-worn photograph of an awkward-looking naked girl and demanded that Sugar strike exactly the same pose with exactly the same kind of hand-brush, of which he’d thoughtfully brought his own. It was then that Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of her bedroom, they vanish the moment they’re over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.

  You would probably think, if I showed you photographs of Sugar, that she needn’t have worried. Oh, but they’re charming, you’d say — innocuous, quaint, even strangely dignified! A mere century and a bit — or say, eleven dozen years later — and they’re suitable for reproduction anywhere, without anyone thinking they might deprave and corrupt the impressionable. They may even be granted an artistic halo by that great leveller of past outrages, the coffee-table book. Unidentified prostitute, circa 1875, the book might say, and what could be more anonymous than that? But you would be missing the point of Sugar’s shame.

  ‘Imagine, though,’ says Caroline. ‘A picture of you still bein’ there, ‘undreds of years after you’ve died. An’ if I pulled a face, that’s the face I’d ‘ave for ever … It makes me shiver, it does.’

  Sugar strokes the edge of her parcel absently as she thinks up a way to steer the conversation into less tainted waters. She stares across the square at the National Gallery, and her painful memory of the hand-brush man fades.

  ‘What about painted portraits?’ she says, recalling Caroline’s exaggerated admiration for an art student who once fo
bbed her off, in lieu of payment, with a sketch he claimed was of the Yorkshire dales. ‘Don’t they make you shiver?’

  ‘That’s different,’ says Caroline. ‘They’re … you know … of kings and people like that.’

  Sugar performs a chuckle of catty mischief from her encyclopaedic repertoire of laughs. ‘Kitty Bell had her portrait done, don’t you remember, by that old goat from the Royal Academy who fell for her? It was even hung at an exhibition; Kitty and I went to see it. “Flower Seller”, they called it.’

  ‘Ooo, you’re right too — the slut.’

  Sugar pouts. ‘Jealous. Just think, Caddie, if you had a painter begging you to let him do your portrait. You sit still, he works, and then at the end of it, he gives you a painting in oils, like … like a reflection of how you’d see yourself in a looking-glass on the one day of your life when you were prettiest.’

  Caroline licks the inside of the paper scoop, thoughtful, half-seduced by the mental picture Sugar has painted for her, half-suspecting she’s being gulled. But, teasing aside, Sugar sincerely believes Caroline would make a fine subject for a painting: the small, pretty face and compact body of the older woman are so much more classically picturesque than her own bony physique. She imagines Caddie’s shoulders swelling up out of an evening gown, smooth and flawless and peachy, and compares this rose-tinted vision with her own pallid torso, whose collar-bones jut out from her freckled chest like the handles of a grid-iron. To be sure, the fashions of the Seventies are growing ever more sylph-like, but what’s in fashion and what a woman believes in her heart to be womanly may not be the same thing. Any print-shop is stocked to the rafters with ‘Carolines’, and her face is everywhere, from soap-wrappers to the stone carvings on public buildings — isn’t that proof that Caroline is close to the ideal? Sugar thinks so. Oh, she’s read about the Pre-Raphaelites in journals, but that’s as far as it goes; she wouldn’t know Burne-Jones or Rossetti if they fell on top of her. (Nor is such a collision likely, given the statistical improbability: two painters, two hundred thousand prostitutes.)

  There’s a fleck of cream on Caroline’s chin when her face emerges from the paper scoop. Having savoured the fantasy of being an artist’s muse and scorning mere money for the greater glory of her very own painted portrait, she’s decided not to swallow it.

  ‘No fanks,’ she says in a nobody’s-fool voice. ‘If there’s one fing I’ve learnt, it’s that if you join in games you don’t understand, you finish up fleeced, wivout even knowin’ ‘ow you got that way.’

  Sugar tosses her crumpled paper scoop to the ground and shakes her skirts free of cake-crumbs and birdseed. ‘Shall we go?’ she suggests and, reaching over to Caroline’s face, she gently wipes the fleck of cream off her chin. The older woman recoils slightly, startled at this unexpected physical intimacy outside working hours.

  It’s half past eight. The undertakers’ ball is over and the streets are once again sparsely peopled. First the garret-shop slaves, casual labourers and factory workers, now the clerks: the city swallows armies of toilers and is still not satisfied. All day there will be fresh deliveries from all over England, from all over the world. And tonight, the Thames will swallow what wasn’t wanted.

  Caroline yawns, exposing the one blackened tooth among the white ones, and Sugar yawns in response, covering her mouth demurely with her gloved hand.

  ‘Lord, I could drop into bed now and snore me ‘ead off,’ declares the older woman.

  ‘Me too,’ says Sugar.

  ‘I got woken early. A cab got smashed up, in Church Lane, as close to my window as …’ (she points to King George) ‘as that there statue.’ ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘I fink a woman died. The police carried a body away, wiv skirts on.’

  Sugar considers tickling Caddie with a description of her faulty grammar made flesh: a procession of earnest moustachioed policemen, pretty skirts frou-frouing under their sombre overcoats. Instead she asks, ‘Anyone you knew?’

  Caroline blinks stupidly. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her.

  ‘Gaw, I don’t know! Fancy it bein’ …’ She screws her face up, trying to imagine any one of her prostitute friends being on the street at that time of morning. ‘I’d best go ‘ome.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Sugar. ‘Or Mrs Castaway’s may lose its reputation.’ And she smiles a smile that isn’t for the likes of Caroline to understand.

  Briefly they embrace and, as always when they do, Caroline is surprised by how awkward and tentative Sugar is; how the girl’s body, so notorious for its pliability in the hands of men, feels gawky and stiff in the arms of a friend. The heavy parcel of paper, dangling from Sugar’s fist, bumps against Caroline’s thigh, hard as a block of wood.

  ‘Come and visit me,’ says Caroline, releasing Sugar from the clasp.

  ‘I will,’ promises Sugar, a blush of colour coming to her face at last.

  Who to follow? Not Caroline — she’ll only take you where you’ve come from, and what a shabby place that was. Stay with Sugar now. You won’t regret it.

  Sugar wastes no time watching Caroline go, but hastens out of the Square. As hurriedly as if she’s being pursued by ruffians intent on garrotting her, she makes her way to the Haymarket.

  ‘I’ll get you there faster, missie!’ shouts a cabman from one of the hotel stands, his raucous tone making clear he’s seen through her fancy clothes.

  ‘You can ‘ave a ride on me ‘orse, too!’ he whoops after her as she ignores him, and other cabmen on the rank guffaw with mirth, and even their horses snort.

  Sugar advances along the footpath, face impassive, back straight. The other people on the streets do not exist for her. The men loitering around the coffee-stall step back from her advance, lest her swinging parcel clip their knees. A bill-poster moves his bucket closer to the pillar on which he’s pasting his placard, lest she kick his gluey liquid all over the paving-stones. A bleary-eyed gent — a new arrival from America, by the look of his hat and trousers — appraises her from head to hurrying feet; his innocence will wear off by this evening, when a flock of harlots will flutter into the Haymarket and proposition him every dozen steps.

  ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ he mutters as Sugar pushes past him.

  Up Great Windmill Street Sugar goes, past Saint Peter’s where the best of the child prostitutes will later congregate, past the Argyll Rooms where even now the cream of male aristocracy lies drunk and snoring, interleaved with snoozing whores damp with champagne. Unerringly she turns corners, ducks through alleyways, crosses busy streets with barely a glance, like a cat with an idea glowing in its catty brain.

  She doesn’t stop until she’s in Golden Square, with the rooftop and smoking chimneypots of Mrs Castaway’s, and the desultory traffic of Silver Street, already in view. Then, with only a few yards to go, she cannot bring herself to walk those last steps and knock at the door of her own house. Under her green silks, she’s sweating, not just from her haste, but in fresh distress. She turns about, hugs her parcel to her bosom, and dawdles towards Regent Street.

  On the stone steps of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Warwick Street, a small child of uncertain sex lies huddled in a pale-yellow blanket that twinkles with melted frost. In the pale sunlight, the drizzle of snot on the child’s lips and mouth shines like raw egg-yolk, and Sugar, disgusted, looks away. Alive or dead, this child is doomed: it’s not possible to save anyone in this world, except oneself; God gets His amusement from doling out enough food, warmth and love to nourish a hundred human beings, into the midst of a jostling, slithering multitude of millions. One loaf and one fish to be shared among five thousand wretches — that’s His jolliest jape.

  Sugar has already crossed the street, when she’s stopped by a voice — a feeble, wheezy bleat, making a sound that could be wordless nonsense, could be ‘Money’, could be ‘Mama’. She turns, and finds the child alive and awake, gesturing from its swaddle of dirty wool. The grim façade of the chapel, new red brick with no windows dow
n below, and spy-holes in dark locked door, flaunts its imperviousness to anti-Catholic rioters and children seeking charity.

  Sugar hesitates, rocking on the balls of her feet, feeling the sweat inside her boots prickle and simmer between her toes. She cannot bear going backwards when she’s made up her mind to go forwards; she’s crossed this street now, and there’s no crossing back. Besides, it’s hopeless; she could fuck a hundred men a day and give all the proceeds to destitute children, and still make no lasting difference.

  Finally, when her heart begins to labour in her breast, she fetches a coin from her reticule and throws it across the street. Her aim is true, and the shilling lands on the pale-yellow blanket. She turns away again, still unsure of the child’s sex; it doesn’t matter; in a day or a week or a month from now, the child will be dragged down into oblivion, like a lump of refuse flushed into London’s sewers. God damn God and all His horrible filthy creation.

  Sugar walks on, her eyes fixed on the grand thoroughfare of Regent Street shimmering through her stinging eyes. She needs sleep. And, yes, if truth be told, if you really must know, she is suffering, suffering so much that she’d be relieved to die, or else kill. Either would do. As long as a decisive blow is struck for disengagement.