I was getting prettier. The boys were already beginning to look at me. And the old man who repaired boots in Cumberland Street had waggled his penis just as my father was doing now. He went through the glass door that led to his back shop and if a girl was alone, he would take it out and tap the glass with it. You would be standing waiting and suddenly notice it, like a big finger beckoning you. The last time I had been there I nearly went. I wanted it and I didn't. I think he knew that. But I didn't want to have a baby. I left the shop without the boots.
The way my father moved his cock reminded me of the boot maker. There was something sly abut it. Ingratiating and threatening at the same time. A big smelly finger. You wanted to put your nose to it. At that moment I felt jealous of Hazel. She was excited. And she was going to get it. Like a fist. My own body already felt it.
"Rub yersel'!"
My father's lips were drawn back over the yellow stumps of his teeth in a kind of snarl.
Slowly, hesitantly, Hazel lowered her right hand to her mound. Her fingers slipped into her delicate cleft. Her body shuddered. In her high heels she seemed a little unsteady, like a fine racehorse on icy cobbles. Her body quivered under the motion of her fingers and her long red hair splashed down over her firm breasts. Through her hair, her green eyes stared at him almost defiantly.
He let his hands fall to his sides and tossed his belly so that his cock swung up and down as though on a spring. He grunted each time he did so. He was trying to make her hate him. To make her hotter.
Her nostrils were quivering. She looked beautiful. I envied her.
He shuffled towards her, his knees close together, until he was almost touching her bare flesh and then his right hand shot out viciously and pushed her backwards towards the bed. For my father, fucking was rape. He was a wolf and he liked nice fat fear-ridden bitches for his lust. White thighs.
It was a high bed built in an alcove. It was broad and shadowy. It must have stood nearly three feet from the floor. As she fell backwards her naked buttocks slapped against the wooden side. He held her there in a firm grip. She was wilting. He was muttering obscenities at her while his hard calloused hand worked roughly between her soft legs until her head drooped like a bell of burnished copper on his shoulder. His prick was hard and flat against her naked belly now, and his hands slipped 'round behind her to support her smooth buttocks. He lifted her quivering torso high so that she toppled backwards, all legs, the thighs apart like broken calipers. I could hear her panting. From where I lay I could see only her legs now, all the power gone out of them, dangling like white creepers over the side of the bed. The rest of her, her soft front, arms and head, was out of sight on the bed.
Razor King walked over and switched off the light. At the same time he locked the door.
He seemed to be unaware of me. In the darkness I thought frantically of the old shoemaker behind the glass, trying to see him. If it had been then, I would have gone like a sleepwalker.
Behind closed eyelids I heard Hazel groan as though she had been wounded for a long time. The bed shook. I shuddered.
Somewhere above there was the sound of a clothes pulley going up on its iron wheels and a woman's laughter, like the sound of a night animal beyond the damp walls. The atmosphere of the room seemed suddenly to be impregnated with the smell of young woman and male. The grunting grew furious. And the slap of wild bellies. I pulled the blanket over my head and passed the flat of my hand downwards slowly over my own throbbing front. Someday soon, I felt, it would happen.
— 2-
The next morning, Sunday, I was awakened by the sound of church bells. People were already moving about in the rooms and passages of the tenement. Night changed to day gradually, for the tenements were never silent. The inhabitants were born, they made love, and they died, in the same rooms, and often at night. Just before dawn, and before the sounds of the milk carts in the street outside, there was probably more silence than at other times, an hour's silence before the paraffin lamps went on in the fetid rooms. And all night long doors slammed and people shuffled about, moving for whatever purpose to the common latrine on the stairs.
My father was snoring heavily in a drunken sleep. His new mistress lay with the upper part of her body exposed and with one slim white foot sticking out of the covers at the bottom of the bed. I had the impression that she was not sleeping. I knew why.
When Hazel allowed my father to bring her home, she made what many regarded as the most important decision of her life. And there was no going back. From the moment that he took her on the bed, she was a marked woman. She belonged to him, like his bloody razors.
Razor King, the werewolf of the Gorbals.
More like an animal than a man, he emerged from our one-room flat in the tenement, and before he had reached the street, the word of his approach had traveled a block. Men retreated behind doors or crossed to the opposite pavement; women appeared at the doorways smiling, showing off their ragged figures.
John Gault seldom looked at them. If he did, he looked at them with a pure male look, his gaze traveling from their haunches to their bunched breasts and then up to the flushed face on which fearful consent was already written. Sometimes he would pause and shamelessly run his hand up between a woman's thighs under her skirt. If the woman pleased him, he would go with her to her room. If not, he would burst into loud laughter, thrust his finger into her cruelly and hurl her whimpering aside.
No woman was ashamed to go with Razor King. It was a mark of caste. A girl took on an air from being a victim of his lust.
But he had brought Hazel home. And that was different. My father would mark her, a small cross cut with a razor on the soft inner surface of her left thigh, his cattle.
Hazel told me afterwards that she was slightly drunk when he picked her up. She was on her way back from a dance hall with another girl when Razor King barged out of a pub onto the pavement in front of them. The other girl screamed, not loudly, and he stood staring at them with his red-rimmed eyes. His glance soon left the other girl and fixed itself on Hazel. She said that when he smiled it was as though she already felt his hands on her naked flesh. She was weak at the knees. He beckoned her to him. She hesitated. A little crowd had formed nearby. Men stood in the pub door. The organ grinder had stopped playing. She flashed a look at the men and then back at Razor King. A young man stepped between her and him. He didn't have time to say whatever it was he was going to say. A moment later he was stumbling backwards into the gutter, his ruined mouth hanging on his throat and a small gusher of blood squirting high above his shocked face. Razor King beckoned to her again, this time with the bloody razor. She said it was as though she had lost all power of will. She went up to him like a lamb. Without a word he took her arm and walked her past the crowd along the street, leaving his victim bleeding, perhaps to death, in the gutter.
When she realized where he was taking her, she had been afraid. Everyone knew about the mark. Fourteen women in the Gorbals had been cut already. Normally my father kept the woman for about two months afterwards. Then they were free to go. The men of the Gorbals fought each other to marry a marked woman. It showed deference to the King. It was sure protection.
Hazel said she hadn't slept. After he had fucked her, she had lain awake for the rest of the night thinking about the mark. She couldn't sleep. And her head ached from too much drinking. She couldn't believe she was in bed with him, she said. And she was thinking that tomorrow her father would know and she was wondering what he would do. Time had never passed more slowly. When dawn came, the gray light filtering across the room, across the basin of stagnant washing water on the table, she was in a cold sweat and her shoulder ached with the weight of my father's head.