The Apple Read Free Page B

likeable or charming or even especially polite. She offered her body with bad grace, stated her prices matter-of-factly, didn’t pretend to experience transports of joy when some red-faced fool was squirming against her. She scorned compliments; when one of her first customers told her she had the prettiest breasts he’d ever seen, she would probably have slapped him, had she not been attached to him at an awkward angle just then. The honeyed compliments of men always led to a slick of viscous liquid that would soil her clothing and need to be wiped away.
    Mr Heaton, however, had not yet laid a hand on her. His shilling was by far the easiest earnings of her week; she got it in thirty seconds flat. Clara wondered if he was a eunuch. His limping gait, the scars on his face … perhaps these were signs of a more serious injury. Clara disliked sick animals and her instincts told her to keep well away from such things. But Jesus Christ almighty: a shilling in thirty seconds, without a hand laid on her! She couldn’t justify rejecting such an offer, especially when other customers wasted hours of her time, haggled over prices, inflicted bruises on her flesh, made her itch. Each time she felt annoyed with Mr Heaton, she reminded herself that she’d had one, two, three, four, five, six shillings from him, for doing nothing. If she kept this lark up for twelve weeks, her accrued capital (ignoring for a moment that she spent each shilling as soon as she got it) would be a pound. A pound just for resisting the impulse to chew a fingernail! That couldn’t be a bad thing, could it?
    But then she discovered the catch. Last week, she’d found out something about her crippled benefactor that transformed him from ‘Mr Heaton’ into ‘the Rat Man’.
    They met in the street as usual. Passersby squinted in bemusement and distaste as she ungloved her right hand and allowed him to inspect her middle finger. Her nail was ever-so-slightly chipped, where she’d caught it on a brick wall while servicing a customer in a hurry, but it was long, and Mr Heaton nodded in satisfaction.
    ‘Would you like to earn five shillings at a stroke?’ he asked her, as she was tugging her glove back on.
    She regarded him suspiciously. Was he going to ask her to allow four more of her nails to grow? This seemed the most obvious next proposal.
    Instead, he said:
    ‘I want you to accompany me to a sporting event.’
    ‘I don’t understand much about sport, sir,’ she’d replied.
    ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he assured her. ‘Nobody would expect anything of you. All eyes will be on the action.’
    ‘Yours too?’
    ‘Mine too.’
    ‘Then what use would I be to you, sir?’
    He leaned in closer to her, closer than he’d ever ventured before. A respectable, fashionable mother, passing at that moment with her infant daughter toddling along beside, shielded the child’s face and hurried her along the footpath, so shocking was this public display of intimacy. The sparse beard on Mr Heaton’s chin almost brushed the shoulder of Clara’s dress as he spoke low into her ear.
    ‘The sporting event I have in mind is pit ratting. A publican of my acquaintance hosts a rat pit in Southwark on the last Thursday of every month. The next one is next week.’
    ‘I don’t like rats, sir.’
    ‘You don’t have to like rats. They come to a bad end, anyway, and swiftly. Dogs dispatch them with lightning speed.’
    ‘I don’t like dogs neither, sir.’
    He winced, and his expression became somewhat supplicatory.
    ‘Oh, don’t say that. There will be two dogs there on Thursday. One of them is my own. Robbie is his name. He’s the most beautiful dog; a handsomer dog never walked the earth. His coat is smoother than sable.’
    ‘I won’t have to do nothing with the dog, I hope, sir?’
    ‘You can admire his skill. Or not, as you please. Your business will be with me.’
    ‘And what business will that be, sir?’
    ‘Nothing you won’t have done