The Difference Engine

by William Gibson

  "And you like that, eh?"

  "What?"

  "I don't know what that means that you just said; but I can tell you like it. You like to think about it." With a gentle, quite natural movement, she put her hand against the front of his trousers. "Isn't it stiff!" She snatched her hand back and grinned triumphantly.

  Mallory looked hastily about the deck. There were other people out, a dozen or so. It seemed none of them were watching, but it was hard to tell in the foggy darkness. "You tease," he said.

  "Pull it out, and you'll see how I tease."

  "I'd rather wait for the proper time and place."

  "Fancy a man saying that," she said, and laughed.

  The steady slapping paddle-wheels suddenly changed their tenor. The black Thames gave up a vile rush of stench and the crisping sound of bubbles.

  "Oh, it's horrid," cried Hetty, clapping a hand to her mouth. "Let's go in the saloon, Ned, please!"

  A strange curiosity pinned Mallory in place. "Does it get worse than this? Down-river?"

  "Much worse," Hetty said through her fingers. "I've seen folk swoon away."

  "Why do the ferries still run, then?"

  "They always run," Hetty said, half-turning away. "They're mail-boats."

  "Oh," Mallory said. "Could I buy a stamp here?"

  "Inside," said Hetty, "and you can buy me something, too."

  Hetty lit an oil-lamp in the cramped little hallway of her upstairs lodging in Flower-and-Dean Street. Mallory, powerfully glad to be free of the fog-choked eeriness of back-street Whitechapel, edged past her into the parlor. A square, plank-topped table held a messy stack of illustrated tabloids, somehow still delivered despite the Stink. In the dimness he could make out fat Engine-printed headlines bemoaning the poor state of the Prime Minister's health. Old Byron was always feigning sickness, some gammy foot or rheumy lung or raddled liver.

  Hetty entered the parlor with her glowing lamp, and faded roses bloomed in the dusty wallpaper. Mallory dropped a gold sovereign on the table-top. He hated trouble in these matters, and always paid in advance. She noted the ring of the coin, smiling. Then she kicked off her street-muddied dolly-boots, and walked, swaying, to a doorway, which she flung open. A grey cat ran out, mewing, and she fussed at it, petting it and calling it Toby. She let it out to the stairs. Mallory watched her do this, and stood flat-footed in unhappy patience.

  "Well, then, come on with you," she said, tossing her plaited brown head.

  The bedroom was small enough, and shabby, with a pressed-oak two-poster and a tall, tarnished cheval-glass that looked as if it had once cost some money. Hetty set the lamp on the badly delaminated veneer of a bedside commode and began to pick at the buttons of her blouse, pulling her arms from the sleeves and tossing the garment aside as if clothing were more trouble to her than she cared for. Stepping deftly out of her skirt, she began to remove her corset and a stiff crinkled petticoat.

  "You wear no crinoline," Mallory noted hoarsely.

  "Don't like 'em." She popped the waistband of the petticoat and laid it aside. She deftly picked the wire hooks of the corset and eased its laces open, then wriggled it over her hips and stood there, breathing in relief, in her lace chemise.

  Mallory got out of his jacket and shoes. His member strained at his fly-buttons. He was anxious to get it out of his trousers, but didn't care to parade his erect prick by lamplight.

  Hetty jumped into the bed in her chemise, the worn springs complaining loudly. Mallory sat on the edge of the bed, which smelled powerfully of cheap orange-water and Hetty's sweat, and got his trousers and unmentionables off, leaving himself in his shirt.

  Leaning off the bed, he unbuttoned one compartment of his money-belt and removed a French-letter. "I'll do it in armor, dear," he muttered. "Is that all right?"

  Hetty sat up brightly on her elbow. "Let me see it, then." Mallory showed her the rolled membrane of sheep-gut. "It isn't one of those queer ones," she noted, with apparent relief. "Do as you like, dearie."

  Mallory carefully peeled the device over the taut skin of his prick. This was better. Mallory thought, happier for this act of foresight. It felt more as if he knew what he was doing here, and that he would be safe after all, and get his money's worth as well. He climbed under the dingy sheet.

  Hetty wrapped her strong arms around his neck and kissed him fiercely with her great crooked mouth, as if she meant to glue it to him. Mallory, startled, felt her tongue writhing about on his teeth like a slick warm eel. The strange sensation powerfully stimulated his virility. He struggled atop her, her solid flesh feeling marvelous through the obscenely thin veil of the chemise, and fought with the garment till he had it up about her waist. Hetty made enthusiastic groaning noises as Mallory groped about in the damp fleece between her legs. Finally, seeming impatient, Hetty reached down without ceremony and jammed his prick into her cunt.

  She stopped sucking his mouth as they began to rut. Soon they were breathing like steam-gurneys, the bed creaking and jouncing beneath them like a badly tuned panmelodium. "Oh, Ned, darling!" she yelped suddenly, setting eight sharp fingernails into his back. "What a fine big one it is! I'm going to spend!" And she writhed under him in near-convulsion. Jolted by the strangeness of a woman speaking English in the midst of sexual congress, he spent abruptly, as if the seed were wrenched unwilling from his flesh by the hard lewd plunging of her loins.

  After a quiet, panting moment, Hetty kissed his bearded cheek with the half-shy lash-fluttering look of a woman conquered by desire. "That was fine indeed, Ned. You really do know how to do it. Now let's have something to eat, shall we? I'm bloody starving."

  "Good," Mallory said, rolling off the sweaty cradle of her hips. He felt grateful to her, as he always did to any woman who had favored him, and a bit ashamed of himself, and of her as well. But very hungry, too. He had not eaten in many hours.

  "We can get a nice petit-souper downstairs from the Hart. Mrs. Cairns can fetch it up for us. She's my landlady what lives next door."

  "Fine," Mallory said.

  "You'll have to pay for it and tip her, though." Hetty rolled from bed, her chemise rucked up. She tugged it loose, but the glimpse of her magnificent backside sent a wash of gratified amazement through him. She knuckle-thumped the bedroom wall in quick staccato. After a slow moment there was an answering knock.

  "Your friend's up late?" Mallory said.

  "She's used to this business," Hetty told him, sliding back in bed with a chorus of squeaks. "Never you mind Mrs. Cairns. She mills her poor husband about every Wednesday and keeps the whole building awake."

  Mallory carefully removed his French-letter, which had stretched out of shape but not torn, and dropped it into the pot-de-chambre. "Should we open a window? It's damned hot… "

  "No, don't let in the Stink, dearie!" Hetty grinned in the lamplight, and scratched herself beneath the sheet. "Anyway, the windows don't open."

  "Why not?"

  "The casements are all nailed tight. The girl who used to live here, last winter… Queer little thing, with a po-face and fine gentry airs, but awful frightened of her enemies. She nailed all the windows shut, I think. They finally got her even so, poor creature."

  "How is that, then?" Mallory asked.

  "Oh, she never brought her men here, that I ever saw, but finally the coppers came here looking for her. Specials, if you know the kind I mean. And they gave me a sharp time of it too, the bastards, as if I knew what she did, or who her friends were. I didn't even know her real name. Sybil something. Sybil Jones."

  Mallory tugged at his beard. "What did she do, this Sybil Jones?"

  "She had a child by an M.P. when she was young," Hetty said. "Fellow name of, well, I doubt you want to know. She was a politician's tart, who used to sing a bit. Me, I'm a tart who poses. Connaissez-vous poses plastiques?"

  "No." Mallory noted without surprise that a flea had landed on his bare knee-cap. He caught it, then cracked it bloodily between his thumbnails.

  "We dress in t
ight leotards colored just like skin, and swan about and let gentlemen gawk at us. Mrs. Winterhalter—you saw her tonight in Cremorne, bossing us about—she's my manageress, as they say. The crowd was dreadful thin tonight, and those Swede diplomats we was with are as tight as a chicken's arse. So it was a bit of luck for me that you showed."

  A rapping came at the door of the hall. Hetty rose. "Donnez-moi four shillings," she said. Mallory gave her some coins, which swiftly vanished as she left. Hetty returned with a dented and chipped japanned tray and displayed a misshapen loaf of bread, a lump of ham, mustard, four fried sausages, and a dusty split of warm champagne.

  Filling two stained champagne-flutes, she began to eat her supper, quite composedly, without speaking. Mallory gazed fixedly at her dimpled arms and shoulders and the swell of her heavy, dark-nippled breasts in the thin chemise, and wondered a bit about the plainness of her face. He drank a glass of the acrid, bad champagne, and ate the greenish ham in famished mouthfuls.

  Hetty finished the sausages. "Then, with a crooked smile, she slid out of bed, and squatted by its side, hoisting the chemise to her waist. "That champagne runs right through you, don't it? I need the pot. Don't look unless you want to." Mallory looked aside politely and listened to the rattle of piss.

  "Let's wash," she said. "I'll fetch a basin." She came back with an enameled pan of reeking London water, and sponged at herself with a loofah.

  "Your form is splendid," Mallory said. Her hands and feet were small, but the columnar roundness of her calves and thighs were marvels of mammalian anatomy. Her great solid buttocks were faultless. They seemed weirdly familiar to him, like the white female buttocks he had seen in a dozen historical canvases. It occurred to him that likely they were the very same. Her neat-lipped cunt was furred with auburn hair.

  She smiled at his stare. "Would you like to see me naked?"

  "Very much."

  "For a shilling?"

  "All right."

  She threw off her chemise with apparent relief, sweat standing out all over her. She sponged tenderly at her dripping armpits. "I can stand in pose, not moving at all, for full five minutes at a time," she said, slurring a bit. She had drunk nearly all of the champagne. "Have you a watch? Ten shilling an' I'll do it! Do you bet I can?"

  "I'm sure you can do it," Mallory said.

  Hetty bent gracefully, grasped her left ankle, and lifted it straight above her head, her leg stiff at the knee. She began spinning about, slowly, shuffling on heel and toe. "You like it?"

  "Wonderful," Mallory said, stunned.

  "Look, I can put both my hands quite flat on the floor," she said, bending at the waist. "Most London girls are so tight-laced they'd break in bloody half if they tried this." Then she went into a split on the floor, and gazed up at him, drunken and triumphant.

  "I never lived till I came to London," Mallory said.

  "Take off your shirt, then, and let's fuck starkers." Her long-jawed face was flushed, her grey eyes bulging. Mallory took his shirt off. She advanced on him with the enamel basin. "Fucking naked's fine in beastly hot weather like this. I always like to fuck naked. My, you have fine firm flesh on you, an' I do like a man with some hairiness. Let's have a look at your prick." She grabbed it forthrightly, skinned it back and examined it, then dabbled it in the basin. "You're not sick, dear—there's nothing wrong with you, it's quite a fine one. Why not fuck me without that nasty sausage-skin and save yourself nine pence?"

  "Nine pence isn't much," Mallory said. He put on another French-letter, then mounted her. He rutted nakedly, sweating like a blacksmith. The sweat was pouring off the both of them, with a reek of bad champagne, yet the sticky skin of her great teats felt quite cool against his naked chest. She galloped along under him, her eyes shut and her tongue showing at the corner of her crooked mouth, and put the backs of her heels sharply into his buttocks. At last he spent, groaning between clenched teeth at the burning rush through his prick. There was a roaring in his ears.

  "You're a bawdy devil, my Ned, and sure." Her neck and shoulders were red with prickly heat.

  "So are you," Mallory gasped.

  "I am, dear, and I like to do it with a man who knows how to treat a girl. Let's have some nice bottled ale, then. More cooling than that champagne."

  "All right. Fine."

  "And some papirosi. Do you like papirosi?"

  "What are those, exactly?"

  "Turkish cigarettoes, from the Crimea. They're all the rage since the war."

  "You smoke tobacco?" Mallory asked, surprised.

  "I learnt it from Gabrielle," she said, climbing from bed. "Gabrielle, she lived here after Sybil left. She was a Frenchie from Marseilles. But she sailed to French Mexico last month, with one of her embassy soldiers. She married him, lucky thing." Hetty wrapped herself in a robe-de-nuit of yellow silk. In the lantern-light it looked a fine garment, despite its frayed hems. "Sweet she was, Gabrielle. Donnez-moi four shillings, dear. No, five."

  "Can you change a pound-note?" Mallory said. Hetty gave him fifteen shillings, with a sour look, and vanished into the parlor.

  She was absent a long time—chatting with Mrs. Landlord, it seemed. Mallory lay at ease in her bed, listening to strange distant echoes of the great metropolis: bells ringing, distant high-pitched cries, bangs that might be gunshots. He was as drunk as a Lordship, it seemed, and Lordship felt mortal fine. The weight would be back on his heart soon enough, and no doubt redoubled for the sin, but for the moment fleshly pleasure had lifted him, and he felt quite free and feather-light.

  Hetty returned with a wire crate of bottles in one hand, puffing a lit cigarette with the other.

  "You took a long time," he said.

  She shrugged. "A bit of trouble downstairs. Some ruffians." She set the crate down, pulled a bottle out, and flung it to him. "Feel how cool—they keep these in the cellar. Nice, ain't it?"

  Mallory unloosed the complex stopper of porcelain, cork, and levered wire, and thirstily drank. NEWCASTLE ALE, the bottle said, in molded letters of raised glass. A modern brewery where they made the liquor in great steel vats near the size of a ship-of-the-line. Fine machine-made brew, free of any cheater's taint of jalap or indian-berry.

  Hetty got into the bed in her robe, drained the last of a bottle, and opened another. "Take the robe off," Mallory said.

  "You didn't give me my shilling."

  "Here, then."

  She slipped the coin under the mattress, and smiled. "You're a rum'un, Neddie. I like you." She took the robe off, flung it at the iron coat-hook on the back of the door, missed. "I'm in a rare mood tonight. Let's have another go."

  "In a bit," Mallory said, and yawned. His lids felt heavy suddenly, grainy. The back of his head throbbed, where Velasco had smacked him, it seemed an age ago. It seemed an age since he had done anything but drink and rut.

  Hetty gripped his limp prick and began to fondle it. "When did you last have a woman, Ned?"

  "Ah… two months, I think. Three."

  "And who was she?"

  "She was…" She had been a whore in Canada, but Mallory suddenly stopped. "Why do you ask?"

  "Tell me. I like to hear about it. I like to know what the fancy do."

  "I don't know anything about that. Nor do you, I imagine."

  Hetty released his prick and folded her arms. She leaned back against the headboard, then lit another papirosi, scraping her lucifer against a rough patch of plaster. She blew smoke through her oddly shaped nose—a disconcerting sight, for Mallory. "You don't think I know anything," she said. "I've heard such things as you don't imagine, I'll wager." "No doubt," Mallory said politely. He finished his ale.

  "Did you know that old Lady Byron flogs her husband naked? His prick won't stand till she beats him on the arse with a German riding-crop, and I'd that straight from a copper, who was sweet on me, who had it from an upstairs servant in the household!"

  "Oh?"

  "That Byron family is dead bawdy and wicked to the core. He's too old now, but in his youn
ger days he'd fuck a sheep, Lord Byron would. He'd fuck a bush if he thought a sheep was in it! His wife's no better. She doesn't fuck other men, but she's of the flogging sisterhood."

  "Remarkable, " Mallory said. "What about their daughter, then?"

  Hetty said nothing for a moment. He was surprised at the sudden gravity of her expression. "She's dead flash, Ada is. She's the greatest whore in all of London."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because she fucks whoever she pleases, and none dare make a peep about what she does. She's had half the House of Lords, and they all tag at her skirts like little boys. And call themselves her favorites and her paladins, and if any man breaks troth and dares breathe a word against her, then the others see to it that he comes to a very bad end. They all ring round her, and protect her, and worship her like Romish priests do their Madonna."

  Mallory grunted. It was whore's talk, not a proper thing to say. He knew that Lady Ada had her gallants, but the thought that she let men have her, that there was shoving and spending, prick and cunt in the mathematical bed of the Queen of Engines… Best not to think about it. His head had a whiskey-spin, somehow.

  "Your expertise is impressive, Hetty," Mallory muttered. "You certainly command the data of your trade… "

  Hetty, who had been guzzling at another bottle of ale, laughed explosively. Foam splattered her chest. "Oh, Christ," she said, coughing, and smearing at her breasts. "Lor', Neddie, how you do talk. Look what you made me do."

  "Sorry," Mallory said.

  She gave him a fleering grin and picked her smoldering cigarette from the edge of the bureau. "Get the rag and give 'em a good wash," she suggested. "I'll bet you'd like that, eh?"

  Without a word, Mallory stooped to his work. He fetched the basin, and sopped the hand-towel, scrubbing the wet terry carefully over her breasts and the fat, navel-dimpled white rise of her belly. Hetty watched with hooded eyes, puffing at her cigarette and flicking ashes on the floor, as if her flesh belonged to someone else. After a while, she silently gripped his prick, working it back and forth encouragingly as he wiped at her legs.