The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  Instead, I unlocked the door into the workshop and drifted in noiselessly, towards the chair next to Din’s, where we used to sit and sew side by side on his earliest days with us.

  ‘I’m sorry Mr Diprose is always so rude to you, Din,’ I said.

  He shrugged, and turned the sewing-frame that was in front of my chair towards him, so he would not have to reach too far across me, and started to dismantle the set-up.

  ‘He applies unnatural scrutiny to me. It was why I followed you to Whitechapel. He pressured me to find out more about you, and to find some way of binding you to me.’

  ‘You had no need, ma’am,’ he replied, before adding softly, ‘for I am bound to you already.’

  ‘I do not mean by dint of the Ladies’ Society.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  We fell into each other’s silence, only Din tried to clamber out again by passing me an old manuscript that was on the sewing-frame. I took it, and placed it on the table next to me. Then I started to wind the cord onto the sewing-frame. I did not know why I was doing his job, only that I was not tired any more, and I needed something to distract me. His hand went up to meet mine, but still I wound the cord, so he wrapped his entire hand over mine, and kept winding with it for a few turns. Eventually I could bear it no more, and pulled my hand back, and all the way up the length of his arm, and spun round to face him. We kissed – he pulled me towards him with his empty hand, while the hand still holding the thread went to the back of my neck – and I smelt him up close at last.

  Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears, which stream down my face, and he kisses them, each one, before returning to my mouth, my neck, my chest. I forget about Peter in his grave, about Lucinda and Pansy and Nathaniel on the streets, about Sylvia and Jocelyn, and about myself. Then suddenly I remember.

  ‘Stop!’ I stand up so fast that my chair falls backwards. I do not pause to see his face. I push the sewing-frame out of the way and run to the door, find the key hanging round my waist, put it in the lock and turn it. Then I run back to him, and he stands up to greet me, and we kiss all over again.

  He kisses my lips, then across my face, and my ear, and he walks slowly round to my back, his lips keeping contact with my skin all the way, and he carefully and unhurriedly unbuttons my dress, and slips it down over my shoulders, which he kisses, each one, before I turn back to him, and do the same to his shirt. It is stained brown here and there, and smells of beer, and sweat, and hedgerows. He takes my chemise off next.

  My fingers trace the contours of the skin on his chest. I kiss his neck wound, which has almost gone, although I can see fresh scars on his arms and on one shoulder. I press my body towards him, and slip my hands round to his back. They feel something, and feel it again. A groove. It has me caught; I cannot move my fingers from it. Silky and smooth, a long groove, along which my fingers cannot help but trace. And then I lift my head, and I stare at him. I turn him round, but he twists his head back to look at me. On his back are deep, old welt-marks, like carriage wheels on mud, the entire length and breadth of his back, and the backs of his legs.

  ‘Dare not pity me,’ he said sternly. ‘Have a look, have a good look. But come back to me, or we both stop now.’

  I came back, but I kept seeing them in my head, and struggled to know whether to touch them, or not to touch them, and how to show I didn’t care. He kissed me, and he pressed urgently against my hip bone, then towards my centre. The heat from my body seemed to drain towards that one point; my head struggled to reclaim control, and in the conflict, my body lost. I was feeling too much. I feared he would be more than I could bear. My breath was being overwhelmed by a sinister inflation, which threatened to obliterate my ability to inhale entirely. Before it could engulf me, I had to close it off. Instead of feeling too much, I made the choice to feel nothing.

  ‘Forsooth,’ I suddenly remembered, relieved that the last year’s toil had not been in vain. Then, ‘Verily sir, a mighty one.’ I lifted my head and strained to latch my mouth on to his ear, like I had read about. I bit hard.

  ‘Ouch,’ Din said.

  I thrust myself forward and tilted the crown of my head towards the floor, and arched my back dramatically, but it was all wrong. ‘Oh, oh, oh, sirrah.’ I struggled to remember a sentence from The Lustful Turk. Something about ‘a delicious delirium’. I stopped arching my back, and started to writhe around beneath him, then lifted my head in search of his ear again. Our skulls clunked together, and our temples throbbed.

  ‘A tremulous shudder, an “Ah, me, where am I?” and two or three long sighs, followed by the critical, dying, “Oh, oh!” ’ That was it. I tried all those, in turn.

  Din pulled back, and for the first time I could see nature’s grand master-piece, only his seemed to be wilting. I had not read of that, only of pillars, and engines, and skewers. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, perplexed.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Dora. Look at me.’

  But I could not meet his eye. Oh, but the sham was more shameful than the real thing.

  ‘What is it? Have I misread you?’

  ‘No,’ I said quietly, then I sat up quickly, and hugged my knees into my chest, and sat there like a small curled thing, waiting for the fear to pass. For I’d read of too many fantasies to feel anything other than fictitious myself right now.

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘But not like I am.’ I couldn’t tell him of the waves of feeling inside me I had felt with my husband, after which Peter expressed such revulsion of me that he never came near me again, except after vigorous scrubbing with carbolic and bicarbonate. I feared that what I had experienced all those years ago was a cousin of the great explosions, those throbbing, Vesuvial orgasms that I had encountered in close on a thousand erotic books since, which had told me more extraordinary stuff besides on how one should expect to appear to one’s man in the throes of firkytoodling, or what you will.

  But I think Din understood anyway. ‘You do not need to do this to yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered back.

  ‘And don’t say sorry.’

  But I was sorry; I deeply repented my behaviour.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Let me help you,’ he said. He lay me back down. ‘Don’t move. You are not to move. You may only move when you can’t help but move, but not before. If it takes for ever, so be it. If it happens now, so be it. But you are not to move until you want to.’

  ‘I’m scared, Din. I’m not Sylvia.’

  ‘I am glad about that. Because I know where my heart is.’

  And I did wait until the movement came over me, and then it was as involuntary as fainting, and infinitely more pleasurable. I do not have a name for what we did; it was not the chaste embraces of popular novels, nor was it the tuneless organ-grinding of Diprose’s catalogue of work. It was ferocious, and it was lyrical, and we did it, wordlessly and without name, without ‘verily’s or ‘sirrah’s or ‘forsooth’s, long into the afternoon, amongst the paper shavings and leather parings on the floor, and I knew that I would never again be able to separate the smell of the bindery from the smell of him and what we did that day.

  ‘Would that we could bottle this, and keep it for ever,’ I sighed, in his arms.

  ‘You would make a captive of love?’

  ‘No. Just that I am more used to safety than you, and prize it more greatly. If all we had in the world was a square of cloth, you would stick a post up the middle, hoist sail, and ride the wide oceans a-whooping. What would I do? I would grab the edges, tuck them in at the sides, and huddle down beneath it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, kissing me and stirring me inside again. I wanted to tell him to stop, to never stop, to go away, to stay for ever. ‘Why you, Mrs Dora Damage, you’re nothin’ but an outlaw, just like me.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, but I have seen you battlin’ bravely in that world out there.’

&nbs
p; ‘Only because I want to be safe. Safety is an unknown quantity to you.’

  ‘To me, yes, but I want it for my children, and my children’s children.’

  ‘And yet I believe you are all the better for disregarding it. I admire you, Din.’

  ‘No you don’t. You pity me.’

  ‘I do not. Well, not entirely, at least. And I’m learning not to, besides.’

  ‘Then I admire you your application to your lessons. You are an outlaw, but a highly educated one.’

  I laughed. ‘You are talking about yourself.’

  ‘Face it, an’ embrace it, Dora. You’re a fighter. Only you just don’t know it. You even earn a livin’ from outside the law.’

  ‘No. I have only swapped one set of rules for another. And curiously enough, they’re set by the same people. I hope you never meet Sir Jocelyn Knightley. I fear he considers himself an outlaw.’

  ‘I should relish the challenge. Becoming an outlaw is the best response to tyranny I know of. I shall consider him my brother. I have heard you call him a libertine. What is that, other than someone who has been freed from slavery?’

  ‘You do him too well, Din,’ I snorted. ‘I am afraid he shall consider you a scientific curiosity.’

  ‘And what does he consider you?’

  ‘Please don’t ask, I beseech you,’ I said, knowing that the answer was quite simply, and quite probably more accurately than I had realised, little more than a whore. ‘Spank me,’ I said instead, surprising myself as I heard the words come from my mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Spank me,’ I repeated. ‘Here.’ I stood up, without wondering for a moment whether I was presenting to him my best angle, and seized the strop from the wall. ‘The leather side, not the emery cloth,’ I added, as I lay myself across his lap, although this was no time to fear for my tender behind.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Dora.’

  ‘Just give it to me. I want to know what it feels like.’

  He patted the strop against my bottom, and I giggled.

  ‘Go on, harder,’ I said. He raised the strop higher in the air, then landed it against my skin.

  ‘Ouch,’ I shrieked, and thrust my pelvis into his lap.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He rubbed the palm of his hand over my bottom, and kissed it gently.

  ‘Don’t be. I asked for it.’

  ‘You have a perfect bottom,’ he said tenderly. ‘Do you want me to hit it again?’

  ‘No,’ I said, wriggling myself around to kiss his face. I think my face must have been redder than my rear. It felt naughty, but appropriate; it was in many ways what I needed, combining both sensation and punishment in the one act, answering my desire and my guilt at once. I was a woman in mourning; I was betraying my husband, and deserved to suffer. I took the strop from him, laid it on the floor next to us, and locked my limbs in his. ‘It’s just – it was in the books. I was curious.’

  ‘You have to pity the men,’ Din said gravely. ‘Why is it they think they’re bein’ dangerous lookin’ at a black man with a white woman? Why is that more horrorsome than a fifty-year-old man with a ten-year-old child, or a woman with a goat? Cos it’s seen to be the wrong way round; the wrong balance of power. White over black, man over woman, that’s the right way, ain’t it? Black man, white woman, though, stirs it all up, causes bother.’

  ‘Are you saying they seek out sensation? They want the thrill of possibility?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Just like me with the strop.’

  ‘Just like. Cos they never lost their dignity, they know they’d want revenge if they’d been treated like us. They know what they’ve done to us, and they’re scared that if we get a little power we’re gonna get some guns and come runnin’ after them.’

  ‘Which is precisely what you’ve said you want to do!’

  ‘Have to, not want to. I want to live in peace. Ain’t no such thing as a free revolution, Dora.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ I agreed. I was starting to realise our loving would have a heavy price, although it felt worth every penny. What did Adam and Eve think of their punishment, having tasted the tree of knowledge? I could only remember the wrath and indignation of the Almighty; we were not told whether His first minions felt it was worth it. Was I a white Eve with my black Adam; or was he the black serpent hiding in the tree? I looked around at the bindery and became aware of a crawling feeling across my skin, which sat uneasily with the warmth of his embrace. We had perpetrated a terrible sin; we had violated every moral, social and religious taboo, yet my shame mixed curiously with a wondrous, golden sensation of glory, and I wondered to myself how something so wrong could feel so good. Or was that, how could something that felt so good be so wrong?

  ‘You don’t want revenge?’ I was starting to shiver with cold.

  Din fell silent for the first time.

  ‘A little bit of revenge, maybe?’ I goaded. His lips moved up and down together, his chin twitched. And then I froze. ‘No. Is that what – this – is all about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘Oh, Dora, Dora no.’

  I sat up and disentangled myself from him. ‘Yes! Yes! You horrible man! Go! Get away from me!’ I seized my chemise and held it over my nakedness.

  ‘Dora, listen! Way back, back in the homestead, the men used to talk ’bout white women in a way that made my ears burn. And I’m ashamed to say, I joined in, more than most at times.’ He took my hands in his, the chemise still bundled between us.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it! You, you violator! How could you? I want to spit on you!’ Actually, I wanted to vomit, and gouge his eyes out at the same time. ‘Was it good, your triumph, your revenge, hmm? Oh!’ I shook out my chemise and climbed into it, then searched for my dress.

  ‘Dora, Dora, hush. Do me some justice. Let me finish. What we have just done is nothing to do with triumph, or revenge. I am not those men, I am not the man I was back in the homestead, and I am not the men in your books, either. I have seen – I have seen countless livin’ bodies, bodies of my friends, semi-strangled, their backs laid open, every limb mutilated, with veins drainin’ and arteries pumpin’ out into the soil, and thrashed to within an inch of their life, beyond the point at which every onlooker is beggin’ for their spirit to give up the fight and take their freedom. Yet their soul chooses to stay, and their body comes back with it. Life is tenacious, and it is a wonder. The soul loves the body; and if you love one, you cannot help but love the other. I will kill a man who has killed those I love, black or white; but I will not harm any one of any colour just because they are of his colour! Do you hear me, Dora?’

  I stepped into his arms, my dress still unbuttoned behind.

  ‘Do you hear me Dora?’

  ‘Yes.’ I believed him, and he was right. There was nothing of transgression or power in our afternoon of bliss. On the contrary, it was a time of healing and forgiveness. In the gloom, we glowed; our union had only made us more beautiful.

  ‘Odi et amo.’ He turned me round and started to do up my buttons.

  ‘I hate and I love?’ I asked.

  ‘ I hate and I love: why I do so you may well ask. I do not know, but I feel it happen and am in agony. ’

  ‘Ovid?’

  ‘Catullus. Why make love, Dora, if it is not in the spirit of love?’ He sat me down again next to him on the floor. He was still naked. ‘Our congress is the most precious thing we have; I will never, ever, confuse it with hatred. You’re tremblin’, Dora. I am sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t know what we’ve done here today, but it scares me. I feel I know you so well, and yet I don’t understand you at all. Two human beings met here today, not just a white woman and a black man. You happen to be black and I happen to be white.’

  ‘An’ you happen to be in mourning for your husband,’ Din said, and kissed me on the tip of my nose. ‘An’ I
am a black man, Dora, and it defines me more than your skin will ever define you. I am black, an’ I must fight for its recognition an’ acceptance, an’ for the freedom of my country.’

  ‘But this is what I do not understand. It is not your country. You were taken there, or at least your forefathers were.’

  ‘It’s the land o’ my birth.’ He rolled onto his back, and stretched his arms above his head. I wanted to kiss his armpits, to stretch myself like a cat along the length of him. I loved his nakedness. I was no longer afraid of his body, only of the rules that surrounded me.

  ‘So?’ I answered. ‘It does not have to be the land of your life! You are free here. Would you stay with a mother who tortured you? You would leave, and find someone else to love you. Why stay with your motherland, when all she can do is abuse you?’

  ‘I am bound by my past, an’ the past of my race.’

  ‘You have a responsibility to your future, and the future of your race.’

  ‘Who are still in captivity in the land of my birth. Tell me, Dora, the opposite of slavery?’

  ‘Freedom.’

  ‘Is it? Could be. Or is it mastery? Self-mastery, I mean. Or are they one and the same?’

  Self-mastery. I thought about the books of our lives, the choice presented to our souls at birth by St Bartholomew. Freedom has its responsibilities; we are bound to write our books well.

  And then we heard the noises in the sitting room, and it was more of a commotion than Pansy and the children would ever have made simply by returning from a puppet-show. I laid a finger on Din’s lips, and he clasped it and kissed it, before seizing his clothes and dressing quickly. I watched as he went over to the bindery door, raised his hand, and fled into the night with the silence of snow, on which we had to leave not a trace.

  I turned the key quietly behind him, then I unlocked the door into the house, and slipped back inside my life. I rubbed my eyes, rearranged my hair and dress, and apologised for falling asleep in the workshop.

  Sylvia was slumped over to one side in the armchair; Nathaniel lay loosely in her arms, busily sucking at her breast. Her dress was undone at the back, and was crushed and creased below her arms, and the top of her corset jutted up and under her breasts, pinching the skin, her flesh rubbed raw around it.