91Èȱ¬

Oh, but he was the handsomest man as I ever saw. Black curly hair and olive skin, and eyes like treacle: clear and golden brown and sweet as sweet. Lips as was made for kissing.

‘Will you let me kiss you, Annie?’ says he.

‘I will not,’ says I. ‘What kind of girl do you think I am?’

‘The very best, Annie. The very best kind of girl as a fellow could hope to meet.’

He had a way with him, no doubt about that. Made you feel special, he did. Made you feel all warm inside. And when he kissed me, I felt as I was the luckiest girl alive.
But now the only thing making me feel warm inside is this here gin. At a penny a pint it comes cheap. But there’s other things come cheaper. That’s what they’ll say.

It was a Sunday, the day I met him. A Sunday in the park. I’d been thinking of me old mum and how she took me there once when I was a kiddie. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as the lake, shimmering like silver in the sunlight. I wanted to feed the ducks; but me mum says, ‘Don’t be so daft! Do you think we’ve bread to spare for ducks, when we haven’t enough for ourselves?’

I was thinking about the lake and the ducks on that Sunday, and about me poor mum, who don’t need no bread no more, not where she is. There weren’t no ducks that day, and the lake weren’t so much silver as a muddy brown colour. So I turned for home, only I had to stop to adjust the bit of cardboard that was plugging the hole in me boot. And when I stood up, there he was, large as life and twice as handsome. He smiled at me – and what a smile he had! Made me blush to the roots of me hair. Made me heart beat nineteen to the dozen.

You could have knocked me down with a feather when he asked if he could walk with me. Me: the plainest Jane as ever there was! And then, when the heavens opened and the rain came down all sudden, he took off his jacket and held it over me head and I kept as dry as dry, except for the water as leaked into me boot. He was like a drowned rat, bless him; but he said he didn’t mind as long as I was dry.

No one never did a thing like that for me before. I’m not a person what nice things happen to. It’s been that way ever since I lost me old mum. I was thirteen. I had a job, making matchboxes, tuppence farthing a gross. But that weren’t enough to keep our old rooms, not without mum’s wages. So I had to move, and move again. And I had to get a new job, working in a sweatshop, fourteen hours a day. This room I got now, I shares with another girl. I also shares it with the rats and cockroaches and fleas and silverfish. They’re luckier than me: they get their board and lodgings for free.

More gin, another mug full. Drink to forget, me old mum used to say. But that’s no good for me. Forgetting won’t make it go away. But drinking might cure it, all the same.
The girl as I shares the room with works nights. She has the mattress during the day, and I have it at night. We see each other sometimes: pass on the stairs, or share a quick crust. It was her what told me about the drownings. When I think of that lake now – the one with the ducks, the one what shone like silver – I can’t help but imagine that the bottom of it, under the water, is covered by lots of little skeletons. Lots of little corpses, all sunk in the ooze. Maybe the ducks eat the flesh off them. Maybe the ducks don’t need no bread after all.

(Gin is leaking out of my mouth, dribbling down my chin. I hate the smell of it. I hate the taste of it. But I go on drinking it, gulping it down, quick as quick.)

Anywhere there’s water, my roommate said; anywhere there’s water, women will go at dead of night: to the River or the Regent’s Canal, maybe even to that lake of silver. They go at dead of night and throw in their babies to drown, because they’ve children enough and can’t mange with another mouth to feed.

It’s no good telling me, I says to her. Those women have husbands to keep them. There’s no one to keep me. How will I manage when I get big and fat and clumsy? I’d get the sack from the sweatshop and starve.

You should make him keep you, says she. But I haven’t seen him for ever so long: not since I told him about the baby and begged him to help. He’s gone away and won’t come back, and I don’t blame him, neither. Who’d want to marry me?

Take hot baths, she says. Baths, I says; I ain’t never seen a bath, let alone a hot one. So she says: a tumble down the stairs will do it. No thanks, I says; I don’t want to break me leg or crack me skull open.

That’s when she told me to drink gin.

I’ve these pains now – oh, terrible they are, like being stabbed by knitting needles. But that’s a good sign, ain’t it?

Please god it works.