Strong hands helped me down. Brandy was forced between my lips. Then I was carried into a pleasant room where for two hours I slept.
When I woke, Hazel was bending over me.
"Are you all right, Gertie?"
I smiled in reply.
"Let me help you get dressed," she said gently.
Half an hour later, the long black Daimler left us at the edge of the Gorbals. We walked quickly back to the flat.
— 9-
Six months passed. Each time when I asked Hazel when she would take me again, she was evasive.
"You mustn't be impatient, hen. You're young. You have plenty of time…"
Plenty of time! Oh yes, plenty of time! But what of the present? What of the agonies of starvation my body suffered during those months? Had I failed somehow? Had they decided against me?
I fell back into the old life of the slums. My body was maturing quickly. The young men of the district were beginning to be very interested in me. One had even suggested that he would like to marry me. How sorely tempted I was! Would a young and virile husband not bring relief to my starved body? But then I thought of the children and the squalor. To move from this single end to another identical, what was the point? Hazel said I had fifty pounds. She had shown me a bank book in my name but she said that I couldn't touch it, that she was keeping it for me. Surely if they had given me all that money they must have liked me! I didn't know what to do.
Only one thing provided me with distraction at that time. Johnnie was approaching his twenty-first birthday, and as the weeks passed, his muscles grew harder. Razor King still fucked Hazel and made no move to change her for a new mistress, but he spent more time getting drunk and in the brothels. I knew even then that it was only a question of time. One day Johnnie would challenge our father's authority.
More and more, Johnnie stayed in the house when Razor King was out. As the days passed, he troubled less and less to conceal his desire, and at times, especially when Hazel was scantily clad and washing herself in the tin basin, he would sit astride one of the chairs a few feet away from her, his elbows resting on the back, and an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He seldom said anything. He just sat and watched.
Johnnie was probably the only man in the Gorbals who would have dared lay a hand on Razor King's woman. He dared when finally he did so because he was the same man his father was, only younger, and with the absolute knowledge of the young, he sensed his own growing manhood and compared it to the man who was dying in his father. He had little love for Razor King. Our mother had been one of Razor King's women and both Johnnie and I had seen her on more than one occasion before her death, struck bleeding on the floor, our father, the black belt in his hand, swaying drunkenly above her.
On the other hand, Johnnie didn't blame Razor King for this. The poison of hatred was to a great extent neutralized by an intuitive sympathy of one rogue male for another. Such incidents between husbands and wives went on all the time in the Gorbals. Men like Johnnie and Razor King were untroubled by conventional notions of justice. Things happened. Blood was spilled. A man reacted to the immediate situation. And if he had the reputation of being a wolf, he had to live up to that reputation. If you have terrorized all men over a period of time, you become the slave of your own brutalities. Any deviation, any mercy shown, is interpreted as a weakening. And a weak wolf doesn't become a dog. A weak wolf is destroyed.
In a way Johnnie admired our father. Simultaneously, he despised him as a dying man. There had been many Coopers, men not quite brave enough to deal with the wolfish John Gault, and who had been marked for life because of a wrong word, but Gault was growing old, drinking too much, spending too much time in orgies with whores, and Johnnie knew that there would be other men, younger, unwasted, braver, more cunning men, and one day Razor King would be battered down on a stone pavement.
Johnnie was waiting. He had nothing to lose.
On the street he was recognized as the son of Razor King, a young man who was fast growing to be his father. Few men would have dared to cross him for fear of his father's reprisals. It was as though he had decided to wait until his father suffered the defeat that was bound to come. His position depended on courage and strength. He didn't lack courage and never would, but the strength was going. One day he would die or be beaten, as some boxers are, into idiocy.
Johnnie knew this, and Hazel knew it, and so did I. Johnnie waited, enjoying in a detached way, a spectator. I watched with excitement. It was all I had during those long months I wasn't called to the big house. I had no love for our father. Only his brutality fascinated me. And if that brutality could be smashed by another's, I would be fascinated no longer. I watched Hazel. She didn't resent Johnnie's ironic attentions. Sometimes I felt she encouraged them. I knew that one day she would give herself to him and that then it would be a matter of days.
But all this was not enough.
I was starved. My father had not laid a finger on me since the night he thrashed me naked on the table. And my body cried out for brutal treatment. Once tasted, the sweet poison of punishment is irreplaceable. What could an ordinary man offer? Caresses? A sentimental love?
It might have been eight months after my visit to Mr. Oakes' house that I realized I could stand it no longer. It would have been easy to give myself to one of the boys in the communal privy on the stairs, but he would want sex, the ordinary lustful sex with his naked belly on mine and his seed eventually in my womb. Any one of a hundred would have been glad to serve me, even to marry me, especially perhaps to marry me, for I was every bit as beautiful as Hazel and I was the daughter of Razor King. Intuitively I knew that whoever I gave myself to would try hard to get me pregnant. And that did not fit in at all with my plans. I suspected that Mr. Oakes required me to be a virgin. I might allow myself any sexual extravagance short of the ordinary act of copulation.
I left the house one day about two in the afternoon and it was not until I was nearly there that I realized where I was going. Cumberland Street! To the shop of the lascivious old shoemaker!
Of course! Why hadn't I thought of it? He would be glad to give me what my body demanded. My cunt began to itch as I walked quickly towards his shop.
As I turned into Cumberland Street, he was opening the door for the afternoon's business. I stopped abruptly and stared at him. He looked up and saw me. Something in my expression must have told him I had come to see him. He was between fifty and sixty with a bald head and a gray bristle on his face. He had a slight stoop. When I made no move to walk on, a small smile played on his thin lips. His hand fell down to his crotch and he gripped the meat there beneath his dirty brown corduroys. He held it speculatively, looking at me, his lips apart, his tongue licking the upper one. And then, when I still didn't move, he darted into his shop out of sight.
I followed him like a zombie.
The interior of the shop smelled musty, of leather. He was nowhere to be seen. But I knew where to look for him. He was in his usual place, in the back shop, and he had his bare cock out and was tapping it like a soft fat pencil against the glass. When I walked straight to the connecting door, he jumped aside in glee and, stuffing his penis back into his trousers, opened the door for me.