One gentle shove from Aunt would have sent this Dip toppling like a trussed piglet onto the bare floorboards of his room. But Aunt was in no mood to shove. Despite her bafflement, she was at least gratified to be the centre of attention, to be the focus of Dip’s ballet buffo. It kept the grief of sisterhood at bay. She let him slide onto the mattress, his sinking head pressed to her chest … her abdomen … her stomach … her crutch … her thighs … her knees. She let him put his tongue between her toes. She laughed and laughed. No wonder prostitutes were such a jolly breed.
‘Undress,’ he said. ‘But not the hat.’
8
NOW DO YOU SEE the charm of cities? None of this adventure could have happened on the village green where Aunt and Em had first played tip-and-kiss with boys. There were no flirting, pocket-picking strangers to encounter there, in patent shoes and collar studs, with private rooms. The only available men were cousins all. Or neighbours’ sons. Or daft. They were as solid and as passionate as trees, as heroic and original as farmyard hens. That is to say they were all dull and without sin; their only privacy was sleep and shit. But city air makes free — and country pullets can become street cockatoos or fighting birds or songsters once they’ve shaken hayseed from their wings. So, Aunt and Dip, two village souls gone free and wild in city streets, could no more pass each other by than cats can pass a dish of cream.
The dipping and the begging became less urgent. They lived on love and bed. These were sufficient for a while. So when they woke, curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch, Dip breathing through the filter of Aunt’s hair, Aunt folded like an infant in his arms, it was not often long before they found themselves embracing face to face or delving in the blankets for a breast, a testicle, a pinch of fat. Sex was breakfast for these two. It fuelled them for the day. Sometimes they breakfasted at leisure, no stone unturned. At other times Aunt merely turned away and let Dip wriggle into her, to puff and quiver, for a minute at the most, at her buttocks and her back. Aunt did not care for breakfast much. Her appetite for love grew with the day. But she was content to let Dip make use of her after dawn, so long as — in the afternoons, at night — he’d do what she desired.
Each day they washed with water from a jug which Aunt had filled from the public fountain the evening before. They dried themselves on air. They dressed in their best, only clothes, and walked out into town not like the cockroaches they were, but eagerly and hand-in-hand. They had to eat. Aunt dealt with that. She knew which market men would happily part with bruised fruit, which bakeries threw out collapsed or wounded loaves, where trays of eggs were stored and could be reached by someone small and agile like herself, where it was easiest to snatch the bread or chops off diners’ plates in restaurants.
They needed money, too. Youth and love are spendthrifts both. Here Dip’s expertise gave them an undulating income. One day he’d lift a wallet with enough inside to last the week; and then a week would pass and all he’d get would be ‘blind purses’ containing buttons, tokens, keys, eau de Cologne, but not one coin. Dip did not choose his victims well. He’d rather pick their pockets comically so that Aunt — his witness from across the street — would be amused. He did not concentrate. He was on show. He took it as a challenge to remove a worthless glass and metal brooch from the lapel of a stern-faced, clucking woman, and lost all taste for lucrative yet humdrum theft. Aunt satisfied the predator in him. The time would come when he’d insist that she stayed in the room when he went out to work. He’d say she soured his good luck. But in those months when they first met he did not care if business was not good. A note or two, some silver change, would be enough to reunite their hands while they, leaving Victor in the room with blankets for his toys, went off to find a bar.
Aunt had a liking for the clear, cheap, country spirit known then as glee water, but now, of course, tamed and bottled by the drink barons and marketed as Boulevard Liqueur. It did not take a lot to make her drunk. One shot, and she would lay her hat and head on Dip’s shoulder, her hand upon his knee, her foot on his. Two shots, and she would press her lips against his ear and say what they’d do to pass the time when they got home, if Victor were asleep. She’d be a ‘Princess’ and she’d let him buy her for the afternoon. She’d be as hard as nails for him. Or else they’d make imagination manifest: ‘Let’s sit apart and masturbate.’ Or else, ‘Let’s buy some honey, Dip. We’ll put it on and lick it off. I’ll put some on my breasts and you can feed off me …’ Or else, ‘Do you want to do me in my hat? I’ll do a show for you. You toss-and-pitch and watch. For every coin that you land inside the brim I’ll take something off.’
Once, when she had watched Dip lifting purses from the smarter ladies of the town, she asked, ‘Why don’t you try to burgle me?’: ‘Just like we’re in a crowd,’ she said. ‘You come up and dip your hands inside my clothes and try to find my purse.’ For Aunt the narrative of sex, the scene, the characters, were seldom twice the same. Her passions were theatrical. She cast herself in parts in which the heroine was more slender and had better skin than her, in which she was in charge, desired, insatiable, amused, in which she could transcend herself, become any one of those grand or glamorous women on the street.
The Princesses were wrong. Hilarity was not the word, though laughter was a part of sexual pleasure. Euphoria was what she felt. When she and Dip were making, staging love, it seemed the real world could be kept at bay. She could have kept the world at bay all day! What was the hurry? What was the point in hurtling, like men, through such sustainable pleasures to the brief and unreliable moment when the bubble shudders, bursts? She could not understand how Dip, at breakfast time, was so easily, so speedily, so undramatically relieved. That was his word, ‘Relief’ — ‘Give me relief,’ he said. For Aunt not-making-love was not the absence of relief, but a muting of that part of her which found its best expression in the gift of love.
They’d put ‘the kid’ to sleep when they’d first met and kissed. Of course, tired and dispirited though he was, he did not sleep for ever. For Aunt and Dip to live the life they chose, to play such parts each afternoon, to spend those hours drinking glee, they needed privacy, the privacy of two, not three, bananas to the bunch. A child of Victor’s age was old enough to inhibit anything beyond a kiss. Both Aunt and Dip had understood, the day they met, that if their passion for each other was to boil and whistle like a kettle and not steam and simmer like the water in an open pot, they would require time to themselves.