The Apple Read Free

for you, and you’ve been among prostitutes and strange children for too long. Come away now. Sugar is tired, even though it’s the middle of the day. Tonight her work will begin anew, so where’s the harm in taking a snooze while things are quiet? Half-asleep already, she leans in front of the looking-glass, wipes her face clean with a damp cloth, and sticks her tongue out.
    Fancy that: her tongue is pink and healthy-looking. How quickly the human body recovers from its abuses! It’s a miracle, hallelujah. Merry Christmas now, and sweet dreams.

Clara and the Rat Man
     
    C lara had found the Rat Man repulsive from the outset, but, because she found all of her customers repulsive, this had seemed insufficient reason to spurn his advances. Looking back on it, she regretted her lack of discrimination, and blamed it on her inexperience as a prostitute. In the menagerie of maleness, two kinds of repulsive existed: repulsive-ugly and repulsive-peculiar. The Rat Man was repulsive-peculiar.
    Not that he wasn’t ugly, too. His teeth were brown, his eyes were bloodshot, his beard was wispy and his nose was pock-marked. He walked with a limp, and the pinkish-grey skin of his forehead was strangely scarred, as if someone had poured a kettle of scalding water onto his brow when he was a baby. Altogether he would have been a pitiable case, if Clara had been the pitying kind. The world was too undeserving, however, for Clara to give pity away for nothing. Ugly, scarred men were none the less men, and thus despicable.
    ‘Call me Mr Heaton,’ he’d said, with a formal bow. It was almost comical, him standing there in Great White Lion Street, leaning on his cane, treating her as though she were a prospective pupil of the pianoforte, rather than a whore.
    That was six weeks ago. Six weeks was a long time in her new life. Once-cherished illusions and inhibitions were dying almost daily, and, just when she imagined that they must surely all have perished, a few more would fall. Each month, she was unrecognisable as the person she’d been the month before, and the month before that. Even her way of speaking sounded less well-educated, more common now than when she was a servant in a cosy middle-class house, as though the grime of street life had soiled her tongue, coarsening her vowels, nibbling the consonants away. The effort of refraining from saying ‘ain’t’, or of avoiding double negatives, seemed too wearisome now that there was no-one to impress. Only twelve months backwards in time, dressed in stiff calico and clutching an impressive set of silvery keys, she had dealt with tradesmen and bakers’ boys at the back door of her mistress’s house, and had felt herself superior to them as soon as they opened their mouths. The smallest difference in intonation served to define her place above them on the ladder. But she had descended that ladder with dizzying speed.
    Yet in another way, she was the stronger for her fall. Every day, she became more skilled and confident at taking the measure of a man in a single glance, and brushing him off if she suspected he was more trouble than he was worth. If the peculiar Mr Heaton had first accosted her yesterday instead of six weeks ago, she would have cold-shouldered him without hesitation. Yes, she was almost sure of that.
    But a month and a half ago, she’d still been finding her feet in the profession, and fearful that her fastidious tastes might render her destitute. After all, she wasn’t a fancy woman, kept in a smart house in St John’s Wood. She was a common streetwalker, seeking to earn enough for lodgings and food. What would become of her if she said no to every ugly man who propositioned her?
    Mr Heaton had not exactly propositioned her, in any case. He had merely asked her if, for a shilling, she would promise to let one of her fingernails grow.
    ‘Fingernails grow awful slow, sir,’ she’d said, once she’d got him to repeat the bizarre request. ‘Do you want to stand