It was not fair that Victor did not seem a willing volunteer in this. ‘This kid’s a gold mine,’ Aunt had said. He kept the sisters fed and clothed. He kept them decent, free from sin. They did not have to steal or prostitute themselves or find thin comforts and escape in drink, while Victor was still small. They did not have to learn the trade of dipping — picking pockets, that’s to say — while Victor’s tiny grazing head was eloquent enough to make hard men and stony women pick their own pockets of small change.
They used the child as bait, it’s true. Put crudely and unadorned like that, it makes the sisters less than kind. But Less than Kind is not the same as Without Love. He was their ‘little blessing’; their meal ticket, too. They loved him for the gift he gave them: he saved them from the grinding molars of the city which seized on women very much like Aunt and Em and made them old and sick and spiteful within days. Imagine Em and Aunt without a child. No need. Just think of all the country girls who lived and begged and starved alone in cities such as ours, across the world, in those dead days before the rich bred consciences, before the telephone, the car, the welfare cheque, the safety net, the thawing of the civic heart. The lucky ones kept jobs. They laboured over stoves. They scuffed their knees in cooling clinkers as they raked out grates at dawn. Perhaps they flirted with a stable hand or — more ambitiously — exchanged embraces with madam’s chauffeur. Perhaps they fell in love and, if their half-days coincided with their sweetheart’s — rare chance, indeed — they walked unfettered for an hour, embraced by city crowds and understanding all too well that this was the best that life in towns would offer them, that there was worse awaiting them, if they should lose their looks or tempers or good luck. They could be roofless, empty-gutted, and with no embraces to exchange except those given to their own rough knees, at night.
So why should Aunt and Em not count themselves as blessed in having Victor? Why should they not take care to put him to good use, and love him still, and love him all the more? They liked the independence that he gave. They did not know — he did not know — that they had robbed him of his liberty, that their ribcages were for him two sets of prison bars, their arms his warders, their breasts his sedatives.
They went about their business, dawn till dusk, and ploughed a life. Quite soon — within a year and a half, when Victor was three, with teeth — they had harvested enough to move downstairs, below the attic rooms where the changing cast of Princesses had made the sisters ill at ease. They rented one small room in a crowded family apartment. It was their own. There was a tap and a small coal stove that they could use in the raised courtyard at the back. There was a communal but a proper toilet too, in an outhouse. The sisters took their turn in emptying the ‘honey can’ when it was full. Was this the ‘citizenry ’ that they sought? There was no time to ask. There was no time to sit like sisters, face to face, and knit a conversation from the warming wool of gossip, hope, and love. Em had to be at work before the traders took their breakfasts in the bars. Aunt had to be at work until the restaurants had closed and all the rich and drunk had gone back home. So Victor grew weaker, older, a city child whose landscape was all ribs and cloth and honeyed, female flesh. The stones and mayhem of the street were ever at his back, a hidden world imagined only from its hums and dins and choruses.
What does a small boy know, a child that — by this time — is barely four? A toddler who has yet to crawl? A little smothered lad? A boy who is trained to do nothing but drape and nuzzle like a bean-sized joey in its mother’s pouch? How could young Victor tell that this routine of facing flesh all day was not normality? He was no revolutionary in bud, no mystic with a notion of a patterned world. He was just worm — a mouth, an arse, a readiness to bend. He sought the softest earth, the warmest way, the stone that had no jags, the twilight safety of the breast. He had no choice. They’d got him trained, just like a dog. He knew that if his head went up and turned towards the lights, a hand much stronger than his head would push him back. He knew that if he spat the nipple from his mouth and raised his chin to cry he would not get what he was crying for, unless he wanted pinches on his legs or Aunt to hold his nose.
He had no general sense of smell. The cloying odours of the honey and the herby alkalescence of the breast blanked out the city smells, the horses and the fruit, the men with pipes, the scent, the woodsmoke, the urine, and the puddled rain. His eyes were clinkered with the grit of too much sleep. The underlids were sore from lack of air and exercise. They did not focus well in light — and streamed at night when he was fed with solids in the oval, orange thrall of candlelight. His legs and arms had not grown strong. They’d had no chance to punch and kick the air. His hands were good for nothing needing pull or grip. He lived for sound alone. His mouth was sealed — but his ears were free and open to the world. He knew the market cries, the trundle of a porter’s cart, the curses of the men weighed down by baskets of crops, the whistles of a happy man. He knew the tucks and folds of Em’s sweet murmurs from the challenge and the bounciness of Aunt’s street voice. He knew them, but could not clothe them with a shape or form. They were just sounds to him. Sound is air made tangible. No one flourishes on air alone.
As he got older, heavier, so Em and Aunt got tired of harvesting the streets. It was less fun, living in their shrunken home, away from all the toughness and the jollity of the Princesses above. The sisters got on well enough because they hardly met, because they hardly talked. And just as well. If they had met and talked more frequently they would have found what many siblings find when they have fled the nest, that sharing parents is no guarantee that temperaments are also shared. The only thing they did as family was sleep together, sharing mats, with Victor in between. Their bodies were the rails of Victor’s cot.
Aunt took the boy onto the streets with less enthusiasm as he grew older, as he passed four. He weighed too much. His body was too long; when he was ‘feeding’ his feet found footholds on her knees. It made no sense to carry him, but Aunt was not prepared to sit with Victor on her lap all day, a fixture on some restaurant steps or at the entrance to a bar, waiting for the harvest to make its way to her. She was the sort who liked to move about, to have a stage, to work (she said) ‘my mouth and not my bum’. She tried to keep him entertained, yet keep him also blind and nuzzling at her chest. She had not learnt the sentimental skills of entertaining kids. They liked crude noises, little nonsense rhymes, and songs with simple choruses. What kind of child would understand or like Aunt’s running commentary on the world, the adult jokes, the cynicism of her words as she earned money on the streets?