The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  ‘It was the perfect answer,’ I heard her protest, as I threw my veil over my head. ‘It was my way of claiming cruelty – admittedly, not to me, but to the poor trollop he saved from the pyre, which is an indirect form of cruelty, isn’t it? Adultery would be self-evident to any judge, in the face of that, don’t you think?’

  ‘You told him?’ But my wrath was slowing me down. ‘No, don’t answer me!’ I seized my shawl and gloves. ‘Tell me, was he in a carriage?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Oh, Dora, did I do wrong?’

  Your speculations are dangerous and serve you ill.

  I was running up Ivy-street in the direction of the river by the time I got to wrapping my shawl about my shoulders. The cold wind slapped my cheeks awake, and soon I was pushing my way through the Saturday-morning market goers, tradesmen and stallholders, until I was free to break into a run once more. The carriages, however, were moving apace, and I held out little hope of finding the one I was after. I knew I would have to cross Waterloo Bridge, but then I did not know whether I should head for Berkeley-square, or Holywell-street.

  Luck would have it that the traffic had slowed to a halt at the approach to the turnstile by the bridge, and I was able to peer into each one as I passed, all the while scanning up ahead of me for one that I might recognise. And then I saw a dirty brown hansom that I had seen before, and there was her pale face pressed up against the glass. The cab was parked at a slight angle to the line of cabs waiting to cross the bridge, as if it were not quite in the queue. It seemed to be waiting for me. Her mouth opened when she saw me, and I waved to her, and she lifted her hand. I was nearly there, nearly with her.

  It was nature that led to me to throw myself into the carriage and seize her in my arms; reason might have persuaded me to stay outside, and negotiate her return to me. But I was inside before I knew it, and holding her, and she me, and she cried into me. And before I had a chance to look around me, we lurched off our feet and had to sit down, next to the other occupant of the cab, for the driver was not paying his fare to cross the turnstile, but had turned the cab round and we were now heading eastwards at quite a lick, towards the Borough, and we were prisoners, I realised at last, of Mr Diprose.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ I demanded of him.

  He simply held up his hand to silence me. ‘Chaque chose en son temps. ’

  ‘No. you will tell me now! You have kidnapped my child; you must tell me what you mean by it. Lucinda, tell me what the man said to you.’

  ‘He said we were going on an adventure,’ she whispered from around my waist.

  ‘And we are, Lucinda, we are,’ Mr Diprose said. ‘Now, conserve your spirits, for we have a long journey ahead of us.’ And with that, he folded his arms, leant his head against the wall, and closed his eyes.

  I tried the doors, but they had been locked from the outside. I banged on the roof.

  ‘Let us out, boy!’ I shouted. ‘Let us out! Stop and let us out!’ But I received no reply. ‘We do not wish to be here! Stop!’ I yelled again. Then I shook Mr Diprose awake, and shouted at him, ‘Stop the carriage, you blackguard! Tell me where you are taking us.’

  He picked my hands off him with disdain and turned his head further away from me. I peeked out of the curtains, but I did not recognise any of the streets or landmarks. We were certainly in the poorer districts of London still, south of the river, and, I presumed, still heading east. I did not remember crossing the river. I patted Lucinda’s hands, and told her silly stories, and she even laughed once, but I was sorely vexed inside.

  At some point, as we were nearing out destination, Diprose awoke.

  ‘Now if you would be so kind as to enlighten us, Mr Diprose . . .’ I ventured.

  But still he remained silent, and soon the cab pulled to a halt, and we stumbled out onto the pavement. The scene that greeted us was beyond anything I had seen before, even up by the river, or beside the tanneries. I knew not where we were, but I could tell straight away it was a neglected place of tears and no pity. Every building was broken; wood and bricks clung forlornly on to crumbling beams; rags and planks patched every window which had never known glass. Strange scents hung in the air – fried fish, mixed with a spicy sweetness, and rotting waste – and faces yellow as the gas-lamps shuffled dejectedly along the uneven streets.

  The door upon which Mr Diprose was knocking was distinctive from the surrounding drabness, in that it was streaked with a vivid blue paint, and a square of cloth depicting a red, scaled dragon entwined with an orange fish was nailed to the centre.

  ‘If this is an opium den, Mr Diprose, we shall not enter!’ I said as resolutely as I could muster. I had heard of these places.

  ‘Hush, woman,’ he said, for the door was opening, and a very small Oriental woman, little taller than Lucinda, was smiling at us from behind spectacles. She pressed her palms together and bowed deeply, then led us up a precarious flight of stairs to the upper tenement.

  The room was filled with a sweet smoke, but I could see through the haze that it was surprisingly clean and neat, like the woman herself. She gestured to a low bed, piled with cushions. I wondered where the aroma was coming from. It was not unpleasant. Despite myself, I sat down on the bed. That smell. So strange. I tried to pull Lucinda towards me, but Diprose sat hastily in her place next to me, and I watched as the woman held out her arms to Lucinda, and the child went to her.

  ‘Lucinda, come to me,’ I said wearily. Why was I so tired? She did not seem to hear me. As long as I could see her, I thought, she will be safe. ‘Why are we here?’ I asked Diprose.

  ‘We are going to see Sir Jocelyn,’ he casually replied.

  ‘Not, not, to operate!’ If I had had the strength, I would have gasped and clapped my hand over my mouth, but my arm would not move.

  ‘Why, yes, you are right. To operate.’

  ‘You – are – evil!’ My speech was slurred. I tried to stand. ‘Let us out! Lucinda!’ Still, the smell. It was taking something from me. My reason wafted on the syrupiness of the aroma. I was losing something to it.

  ‘Be calm,’ I heard him say. ‘Sir Jocelyn is not going to operate on your daughter.’

  ‘But you said . . .’ The smell was pungent, like fresh honey, or that confection, that contentment-of-the-throat confection that Sir Jocelyn gave me, only more concentrated. I was finding something about the situation strangely amusing.

  ‘He is going to operate on you.’

  I tried to tell him that I did not understand. I think I started to laugh. It was absurd. How extraordinarily funny it seemed.

  ‘Sir Jocelyn,’ Diprose continued, ‘has finally conceded that I have been right all along. Exposure to exciting material has rendered you dangerous and troublesome.’ This, of course, only added to my mirth. ‘It is time to calm your uterine fury with the surgical amputation of your clitoris.’

  I don’t think I stopped laughing. Like a eunuch in a harem, I thought. Mutilate me, so I can serve without threat. My hilarity grew. Was this what they called hysteria? In which case, Sir Jocelyn’s diagnosis was correct. So, what are you waiting for, Charlie? Operate on me!

  That saccharine gas must have been piped from the noxious exhalations above the river of Lethe, for as I drank in the ether, I was transported to the depths of a valley that ran the length of the border between sentience and death. I rose upwards every once in a while, and was able to peer over the valley sides in both directions, either towards death, or towards the world I was leaving behind, but I was quickly dragged down again to the valley floor, where I languished for I knew not how long.

  But I saw visions when I rose, on which side of the valley I could not tell.

  An ochre-hued man with a conical silk hat and a long robe.

  A room, suffused with an almost spiritual concentration, empty except for a bed on which a woman was lying, face down, her legs bare and spread apart.

  A long stick of bamboo, with a fan of thin needles stuck into the end like a fantastical bookbinding tool.<
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  A small, bespectacled woman carrying a tray of bowls.

  An ivory hammer.

  Lucinda, calling for me. ‘Mama, Mama.’

  Silence.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  A long-tailed pig,

  Or a short-tailed pig,

  Or a pig without any tail;

  A sow pig,

  Or a boar pig,

  Or a pig with a curly tail.

  Take hold of the tail

  And eat off his head,

  And then you’ll be sure

  The pig-hog is dead.

  I found my cheek pressed against crisp white sheets, in a wet patch where my mouth had been drooling. I was lying on my front with my legs apart, just like the woman in my vision, and staring at a wash-stand. The room was dark, but the moonlight was shining through the window, directly onto the mirror that backed the wash-stand. The mirror was surrounded with tiles, which were patterned intricately with cobalt and white designs. The moonlight brought the faces in them to life: the ovals were eyes, the swirls between them noses. I used to play this game with the old wallpaper in my bedroom as a child, which was enhanced by water stains and peelings.

  I became aware of a burning sensation somewhere around the lower regions of my body, and struggled to recall where I had been. Lucinda, I thought. Where was she? I lifted my head to see if she was in the room with me, and my pelvis groaned with the effort. I laid my head back down on the bed. At least, I rued to myself, it was not Lucinda who had had to undergo this, and I felt my body flood with a curious sense of relief, and gratitude even. I wanted to laugh again. Peace, at last. Where was my shame? It had been removed, excised from my body. I had been suitably punished. Ah, the relief. Relief at last.

  Slowly and with tremendous fear I worked my hand down between my body and the bed. I tugged at my skirts, and pulled enough of them up by my waist to be able to get my hand between my legs. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find. Bandages stiff with blood, presumably. But there were none. My thighs were smooth, and not sticky with drying fluids. My hair was still as it should have been.

  With trepidation, I placed the very tip of my middle finger where my clitoris used to be, and waited for it to descend into an excruciating mess of tissues, a raw savage wound, and recoil in agony and disgust. Oh, but I was angry now. This was the seat of my new-found sexuality. This was where Din had been. This was where I found myself. And now it had been taken from me.

  But it hadn’t. I touched it gently, and then more firmly, and it answered me willingly with its usual golden rush. I pulled my finger away, not comprehending. This wasn’t right either.

  The pain, I started to realise, was coming from my behind. I pushed upwards on my hands until my arms were straight and my trunk almost upright, and twisted my head to see. My skirts were still covering my bottom, so I reached round and yanked them upwards. But it was too dark; no light fell on the bed. In the darkness I passed my hand over the skin of my bottom. It was a series of raised dots and small welts. It stung, like a scrape.

  I stood up slowly; my head felt surprisingly clear despite my recent stupor. I twisted again to get a look at myself in the mirror, but I could only see myself from the waist upwards. I stood on the bed; I was the right height now, but out of the light. I got off the bed, and pulled it laboriously a couple of feet towards the mirror, and stood on it again, directly in the shaft of moonlight. I pulled up my skirts once more, twisted round, and over my shoulder could see that the moonlight was illuminating my bottom perfectly.

  On the left cheek it seemed as if someone had painted an ivy wreath, in the centre of which was a portrait of a young woman with a snub nose and an indoor cap and ribbons. She looked not unlike me. On the right cheek, someone had painted the insignia of the Noble Savages, and the word Nocturnus underneath.

  I rubbed at the artwork with my finger. It was too sore for me to press firmly, and when I examined my finger in the moonlight I could see that not even a smudge of paint had transferred on to it. Comprehension only dawned very slowly. I knelt on the bed, with my bottom in the air, for I could not sit down on it.

  I had, I finally realised, been tattooed.

  What had he, ‘Nocturnus’, said, in my bindery? ‘Strange to think we find such beauty in the posthumous scarification and gilding of an animal’s hide. He had said that tooling was like a tattoo, on dead skin.’ What else? Of course. ‘I have left instructions in my will to bind my complete works with the skin from my torso, with the scar left by the spear wound resplendent across the front panel, and the tattoo round my navel on the back cover. Is it not a fine way to achieve immortality?’

  One cannot tattoo leather, I thought to myself, only living skin.

  My magnum opus, he had called me, in Glidewell’s study. I had not thought to take him literally.

  My skin was being prepared to become the leather for a future book.

  I would be Volume Two.

  * * *

  This, surely, was a knowledge I was never meant to possess. Does a tree know of its life beyond the papermill? Had the buffalos, crocodiles, goats, calves I had so casually used known of their destination? Or was only I to go to the slaughter with this horrific awareness of my future reduction? I, who was once woman, was to become a book covering? Sartor Resartus. The binder re-bound. Was I nothing more than the beasts of the field, air, swamps, prairies, which I now would join in death?

  And when would that be? Would I be permitted to live to a ripe old age, and die of natural causes, after which Sir Jocelyn would come and claim my hide? Not likely. It was reasonable to surmise that, pretty much as soon as my skin had healed from the tattooing, I would die. I would, more precisely, be killed.

  A key turned in the lock, and the door opened. ‘Ah, she is awake,’ Diprose said, as he entered, with Sir Jocelyn close behind him. I glimpsed the corridor beyond them, and realised that we were back in Berkeley-square.

  ‘Good evening, my dear Dora,’ Sir Jocelyn said.

  ‘Lucinda,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’ They did not answer me. ‘Take me to my daughter.’ They took an arm each, and led me like this out of the room, and down the stairs. I wanted to spit in their eyes. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Tell me where Lucinda is.’ I was really scared now. We passed maids, dusting cornices with long feather dusters, and Goodchild, carrying a tray. None of them flinched at the sight of me. We went into Sir Jocelyn’s office.

  A large leather trunk and two smaller wooden crates stood in the middle of the room. Many of the shelves were empty; the floor was strewn with papers, books, and the paraphernalia of scientific exploration waiting to be packed: sextants, telescopes, microscopes, compasses, even a portable bath. Was it here that they would kill me?

  ‘Be seated, Sir Jocelyn,’ Diprose said eagerly, and rubbed his hands together. ‘You, over here,’ he said to me, and pulled me to the corner of the room behind the anatomy model. Vesalius’s De humanis corporis fabrica libri septum was still on the shelf; I spotted its large black and gold binding immediately. ‘Now, lift your skirts.’

  ‘I will not, Mr Diprose!’ I said, in a rage. ‘I will not!’ I clutched his hands with my own, and dug my flaky nails into his flesh. He only smiled, and grabbed at my skirts. I pushed his hands down again, and kicked his shins with my boots, then seized his greasy beard and yanked it firmly downwards, such that his chins bumped onto my collarbone.

  ‘Come, come, my little sauce-box,’ he chuckled. ‘You shall do me some damage, tiger.’

  How dare he laugh? I scratched upwards into his eyes, but he jerked his head out of the way, caught both my hands in his, then forced them down behind my back.

  ‘Possibly you enjoy antagonising me. I suggest you learn a little obéissance.’ His chest pressed against mine, his black whiskers scratched my cheeks, and his breath was hot and smelt of whisky. I could see the fur on his tongue, the gold of his molars.

  All the while Sir Jocelyn sat and watched us from the other side of the room, as if observing one
of his fellow travellers subduing some gibbering native in order to carry out an anatomical study.

  ‘Well, Charles. I see you are struggling to unveil your Galatea to me.’

  Still holding my hands tightly, Diprose was able to turn me round, but as he tried to lift my skirts again I kicked him sharply in the shins, and he howled with pain. He was not deft, or agile, and he was too old to have any real strength. If I continued to struggle, I thought I could hold out.

  But as I kicked backwards again, he intercepted my ankle with his foot, and I fell forwards. He would not relinquish his grip on my hands, so he stumbled on top of me, and we collided with the anatomy model, which crashed to the floor too, and we were a mess of limbs and organs, chipped paint and bruised bones, and Diprose was sitting on my back. He had my skirt up, and started to investigate my bare buttocks.

  ‘Good, good,’ I heard him say, and felt his finger following the inky wounds. ‘Sir Jocelyn, I shall trouble you to attend to us here, for I cannot persuade the termagant to come over to you willingly.’ I heard Sir Jocelyn rise, and slowly pace over to us. He picked his feet carefully over the scattered pieces of his precious anatomy model.

  ‘You are evil,’ I hissed, at them both.

  ‘I prefer “exceptional”,’ retorted Diprose, still squatting ignominiously on me. ‘Sir Jocelyn, regard.’ Sir Jocelyn’s feet were by my head; I could bite his ankle, I thought, if he takes half a step towards me. ‘May I present to you the cover of your next oeuvre.’ I beat my fists on the floor, and tried to buck him off me. He was a dead weight. Sir Jocelyn was silent for a moment. ‘Quite exquisite, Mrs Damage,’ Diprose continued, ‘if I may say so,’ he said, as if congratulating a lady on her flower arranging. ‘And they are healing so quickly. Only minor scabbing. It won’t be long.’