Slammerkin Read Free Page B

the red one?' The words slipped out on their own.
    'A shilling to you, dear heart.' The peddler cocked his grizzled head sideways at her as if she had made a joke. His eyes were shiny.
    Mary ran on.
    It might as well have been a guinea he'd asked. Mary had never held a shilling in her hand. And when she stood at the shell-cart tonight and dug into her smock pocket for the two pennies William Digot had entrusted to her to buy the family's dinner, one of them was gone. There was a hole in the cloth, its edges soft as Billy's eyelashes.
    What was she to do? A pennyworth of winkles would never stretch to four people, she knew, so she ran round the corner to the pieman on Flitcroft Street and asked him had he anything for a penny. The ham pie he gave her had a broken crust but it looked filling, at least. All the way home she kept her eyes on the ground to catch the winking of the lost penny between two cobbles or in a gutter overflowing with peelings and turds, but she never caught a glimpse of it. As if a coin would lie long in the dirt of Charing Cross!
    She hoped the Digots would be content with the pie, as it was hot and smelt wholesome. Instead, Susan Digot called her a liar. 'You spent the penny on hot lardy-cake, didn't you?' she said, rubbing her sore eyes with the heel of her hand. 'I can smell it off your breath.'
    Over and over again, as the hard end of the broom landed on her legs, the girl sobbed out her defence: 'I lost it! I lost the penny, I swear!'
    'Oh, Mary,' said Susan Digot, and hit her again.
    She'd been thrashed before, and harder, but somehow she had never felt so injured. What good was it to be a grown girl of thirteen, if she could still be put over her mother's knee and beaten for something she hadn't done?
    Afterwards she squatted in the corner and watched the Digots eat the pie, feeding the corners to little Billy. Her tears dried to salt on her jaw. Her stomach growled; she hoped they could hear it. Finally she stood up and turned her pocket inside out. 'Look,' she said, her voice shaking, 'there was a hole and I didn't know it.' She pushed her thumb through the gaping seam to show them.
    William Digot looked up from his dinner. 'You could have poked that there yourself,' he accused.
    His wife stared at the frayed pocket, and for a moment such a peculiar look strayed across her face that it almost seemed she might cry.
    'It wasn't thievery!' said Mary, almost shouting.
    Her mother's eyes flickered over her. 'Carelessness is just as bad.' Then she held out her tin plate with the crust of pastry on it, like someone feeding a dog.
    'She doesn't deserve it,' remarked her husband, eyeing the plate.
    'She's my daughter,' said Susan Digot, quiet and fierce.
    Was the woman raging against her child, or her husband, or the Mighty Master who had burdened her with such a family, and so little pie to divide between them? Mary would have liked to knock the crust onto the floor, or even better, to look away, quite indifferent—but she was too hungry for dignity tonight. She took the crust between finger and thumb and choked it down.
    The lesson she learned that night was not the one intended. The next time she was sent to buy dinner, she knew enough to lie about the price of the half-dozen oysters; she kept that penny, to pay herself back for the beating.

    Mary had bled two months in a row now. Susan Digot had wet eyes, the first time, and muttered about this being greatly early for it all to begin, even if Mary was taller than many a grown woman. 'I was a child till I was past sixteen, back in Monmouth,' she added aggrievedly. 'Everything moves too fast in the big city.'
    The pointed bones of Mary's elbows were wearing through her grey uniform, and she'd lost a button off the front where her chest was swelling. These days she wasn't paying attention at school. She forgot to join in with the chanted rhymes, even though she knew them all by heart. Her mind stretched and yawned like a tiger. She could read and