She woke up Em and then woke Victor too. He was not ready for the day. He wailed like a damp yew log in the fire. She pinched him on his arm until tears dropped heavily and he was wide awake and mutinous. Em tried to push her sister back, but Aunt was stronger. She lifted Victor by his arms and held him tightly at her side. He beat her with his wrinkled fists. She said, ‘Now watch!’ She undid the loops of her woollen top, and pushed her clothes aside. She put her index finger in the twist of honey and wiped it on her tiny nipple. The honey sagged like candle grease. Aunt pinched Victor one more time. His voice made pigeons fretful on the roof. Aunt put him firmly on her breast. The silence was as sudden and as comic as a burst balloon. He pressed his mouth and tongue onto her skin. He sucked and made the noises that children make when drinking juice through straws. ‘You see? He doesn’t need a knife and fork,’ she said. ‘Or milk.’ She outlined how they would share the child. They’d work the boy in shifts. ‘Four tits beat two,’ she said. ‘Ask a cow. And honey’s got the edge on milk. Ask bees.’
Em watched her baby nuzzling at her sister’s breast, as fickle when it came to food as adults are with love. He threw his head from side to side and tried to get a proper grip on this modest nipple, this impermeable and unswollen breast, this honeycomb. He was engrossed and sweetly satisfied and, for the moment, wanted nothing else. Em almost wished that she and Victor were still marooned beneath the parasol.
4
SO THIS WAS Victor’s life. Two lives, in fact. While other children learnt to crawl and pick up what they found as if the world was all a toy and theirs, he shared two women’s breasts. His gums grew numb on honey. His nose was flattened by their ribs.
Em still preferred to work the marketplace. She knew the faces there and all the odours were the odours of the countryside, congested and compressed. She’d lost the parasol. Its pole had ended up on someone’s fire. Its cheerful canopy was ripped and jettisoned. But she sat cross-legged for harvesting (‘We’re harvesters. We do not beg,’ her sister had said) in the usual spot, between the garden and the market, her back against the flat trunk of her tree. It was a comfort when she saw crops of the class and quality that her birth village had produced — ‘yellows’ from the potato fields, carrot clumps, onion sets, the stewing roots, sweet dumpling pumpkins, the dusty shingle of the beans — all so familiar from the days when she and all the other village kids had been dragooned to join the harvesters so that the crop could be brought in quickly and at its best.
She’d known, she would know still, all villagers apart from the shape of their arses. A bean field when the beans were splitting was a field of arses facing bluntly upwards as villagers played midwife with the soil. A potato field was much the same. The horse plough turned the soil — and then the village bums were higher than the noses for the day as harvesters with trowels sought out the timid ‘yellows’ in the crevices and punctures of the soil. These townies only dined on such fresh crops because the country folk were not too proud or idle to stick their arses in the air. Em slowly had convinced herself — with Aunt’s help — that coins given to her now were payment for the hours that they’d spent as girls, unpaid, with blackened hands and aching backs amongst the produce of their fields.
She harvested the marketplace, less passionately, less urgently, than she had done before her sister arrived. She had a place to sleep, a family, a group of friends, somewhere to wash and eat, a simple route to and from her work, free time. She felt no different from the other working women in the marketplace and garden, the waitresses and salesgirls, the prostitutes — that is to say, she felt as bored, inured, and dutiful as anyone who has to labour for their pay.
While Aunt slept late, Em took the morning and the midday shift because those were the times when people came to shop for vegetables and fruit, the times when the Soap Market and the Soap Garden were most profligate and careless with their cash. She served her time, with Victor at her breast. She had a little milk and honeyed nipples to keep her outsized baby still. And if he tried to raise his head? Or twist to see the world pass by? She only had to wrap his head inside her shawl for him to quieten or to doze. The darkness was a drug for him. His pulse was slower underneath the cloth than when his ears and eyes were naked to the clamour and the city light. If he cried, Em simply hushed him with a dab of honey on her breast, and murmured country comforts to him with her lips pressed to his cheek or ear. ‘The squeaky door gets all the oil,’ she’d say. ‘The gabby cat gets cream.’ She found rhymes and games to put him on the breast. ‘Ring the bell,’ she said, and tugged the wayward quiff of hair on Victor’s head. Then, ‘Knock the door.’ She drummed her fingers on his forehead. ‘Lift the latch’: she pinched his nose and — that’s the nature of the nose — his jaw dropped down, his mouth agape. ‘And walk right in!’ She placed her honeyed nipple on his lower lip.
In the early afternoon Victor’s skipping aunt would come with bread or cheese to share with any fruit or salad that Em had harvested that morning. There was no food for Victor then. He only fed at night. ‘The hungry mongrel does not bark,’ Aunt said. She made these nonsense phrases up, to mock her sister, to mock herself. She liked to play the country muse for those foolish men in bars who’d pay for hollow ‘wisdoms’ such as that. She was not right about the hungry mongrel — but she was wise to caution against feeding Victor while he worked. A sated child will not take honey. A sated child cannot be blackmailed by the promise of a meal. It’s hungry circus seals that sit obediently on tubs and balance beachballs on their snouts. The more they are rewarded with a fish, the more they flap and slither out of line.
When Aunt and Em had eaten, Victor was passed on. His face was pressed against the younger breasts, where the honey was not mixed with the blood-hot residues of milk, but where the torso flesh was deeper, softer, less discrete. Aunt tied him to her with a sash which passed around her neck and round her waist. His body was not long, but long enough by now to make Em’s sister stoop a little from the toppling ballast of his weight. Em was now free to walk back to their attic rooms or buy a little food or bring the family washing to the public washing square at the centre of the Soap Garden, or sleep.
Her sister carried Victor to her usual haunts, the bars, the restaurants, the tea salons, of the medieval streets to the east of the station yard. She wore Victor like she wore her hat, an accessory to her outfit and her act. She’d show her knees — at least — to anyone who’d pitch-and-toss some silver in her hat or place a coin ‘on my baby’s cheek’. If any man seemed slow to search for change, she’d wink at all his friends and ask, with the innocence of a music-hall soubrette, ‘What’s wrong with him? Has he got a snake in his pocket, or what?’ She’d lean over dining tables with Victor gummed to her breast like a bloated termite at a grape, and invite the diners — loosened by the wine or beer — ‘to place a silver coin on my baby’s eyes if you want fortune and good health’. It sounded like an age-old rite. In fact, she’d dreamed it up. If young Victor raised his head, to bare his honeyed teeth and scare off custom with his cries, then Aunt would knock his head back to the breast with the speed and firmness of a factory foreman, bent on keeping working children’s noses to the loom or press or lathe. She was not hard. She simply liked the way she was, and wished to keep it so. What sort of kindness would it be — to whom? — if she behaved towards the boy as if he were a rich man’s son whose duties only stretched from play and food to sleep? What money would she harvest on the street with Victor in her care, if Victor were the normal child, allowed to crawl and scream and play with stones exactly as he wished, if Aunt was just another ‘mother’ in the town? Where was the sentiment, the plaintiveness in that? Who’d pay for such mundanity? So trading says, The child must suck the breast. Six coins out of ten are lost unless the child is on the breast. So, Child on Breast! That was the requisition of the working day.