The Journal of Dora Damage (20 page)

I took them off quickly, and returned them to the hamper. I closed the lid hastily; such distractions would turn my head today.
I would leave them for Lucinda to discover. I returned to work, ashamed at my excitement and angry at the profligacy of a
gift I could never use.

I situated myself in the draught-proof booth to plan my designs. Din could see me from here, but if I angled my work correctly
he would not see what I was doing, and besides, once the gold-tooling had begun, the curtains would be closed.

And so to the frontispiece of the first book: a phallus complete in itself, not appendaged to a body. I copied it, and experimented
with suspending it in a fine-tooled oval of ivy-leaves. It felt curiously normal for me now to be doing this, despite the
fact that I was a wife, and had only occasionally seen my own dear husband’s ‘emblem’, and that woefully long ago. I entertained
myself by wondering what his reaction would be were I to announce to him that I needed to disrobe him for the purpose of research.
His seemed to belong to an entirely different species from Fanny Hill’s maypole or the Dey’s masterpiece; neither did I remember
his throbbing with ammunition like a flesh-coloured trebuchet, or ‘at full cock’ like a loaded gun, or erupting like Vesuvius.
But then again, at least, that meant that I had never been the silent victim of bullets, shrapnel or lava either. Perhaps
that was how men preferred their women; what a disappointment I must have been to my husband, for not being a docile and willing
conduit, a physiological sewer, to the pourings-forth of his mighty Jupiter Pluvius.

Perhaps the simple answer was that Diprose was right, and it was not I who should have been reading these things at all.

Chapter Twelve

As I went by a dyer’s door,

I met a lusty tawnymoor;

Tawny hands, and tawny face,

Tawny petticoats,

Silver lace.

'T
he devil has come upon us!’ Peter shrieked.
I was just coming up from the cellar with some fresh paste, so I rushed to him, anticipating the discovery of my child on
the floor: it had been so long since she had fallen fitting, but still I feared it daily. But Lucinda was nowhere to be seen.
Peter was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the workshop, clutching the hem of his nightshirt around his crotch
like a boy who has had a bad dream, and wobbling a purple finger in the direction of the benches.

‘Take him away!’

‘Peter, my love, may I introduce . . .’

‘Take him away!’ The bloodshot folds of skin hung from his face like an ornate gold and red brocade curtain, which quivered
as he shouted, as if someone was hiding behind them shaking their swags and festoons.

‘He is working for . . .’

‘Give me my draught,’ he pleaded, suddenly.

‘Peter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. This is Mr Din Nelson and he’s going to be . . .’

‘Give me my draught now!’

I uncorked the bottle and handed it to him, and he swigged it gladly, and sat quivering in his armchair by the fire once more.
So I never did introduce him properly to Din, and he never mentioned the man again either. I instructed Din to stay in the
workshop at all times, and never to come through into the house even to make paste, and the curtain was kept closed from hereon
in.

The same group of children escorted Din to work each morning; it was the mothers pulling them inside who varied, according
to the daily rumours of his good nature or malevolence. It was a struggle between respectability and convenience, for there
was no doubt the man was entertaining their children, which was always a blessing when it kept them out from under one’s feet.
Besides, there was something jaunty about Din’s striding limp, and every morning he would raise his hat to the women, and
each day he met them – and they him – with an increasing firmness of eye.

In the evenings he would stay until six, when he folded his work, swept up the threads below his seat, gathered his coat,
and bade us good evening. He never enquired, as a more diligent employee seeking promotion might, as to whether I might require
him to stay longer; he never waited for my dismissal every evening. But I was hardly bothered by this; what concerned me more
was his fourth day, a Friday, when I darted into the house at five o’clock to serve Lucinda up some pancakes, and when I returned,
Din was nowhere to be seen. He had cleaned up his mess, put away his work, and taken his coat an hour before time, and all
without Jack’s noticing. I thought no more of it, aside from a minor indignance at his insolence.

It rather suited us, because we needed to get on with the Priapic Trilogy, and due to Din’s absence, we could start on it
an hour early. We were planning to experiment with
répous-sage
, whereby the design is modelled into relief from the underside of the skin. Jack dampened the leather and, while he held
it taut, I cut halfway down along every line of the design, with a knife sharper than paper, and with scarcely a breath between
us. Then we coaxed the three proud
peni
into tumescence: with the point of the bone folder and the agate we made the incision bulge and rise, before filling the hollows
with a mixture of
papier-mâché
, sawdust and glue. Jack and I were so absorbed in the vulnerability of the procedure that we soon forgot the subject matter
at such close quarters; we could just have easily been performing
répoussage
on a nose, or a chin. And at around ten o’clock, when Jack and I beheld the first of the three finished books, we could see
that we had created a veritable masterpiece of the nether regions.

I heard a shouting from upstairs, and raced up to find Peter kneeling by his bed, grimacing, in a puddle of urine. He had
knocked his chamber-pot over, and his nightshirt was soaked.

‘Give me some draught,’ he begged. ‘Give me some Drop.’

‘I will, love. Let me clean you up first.’ I rolled the wet portion of his nightshirt up into the dry bit above, then lifted
it over his head. I found a clean one from his cupboard; it hadn’t been aired, but there was urgency in his nakedness, so
I dressed him quickly and got him back into bed. He dosed himself straightways, and sank back into the bed and into himself,
as I soaked up the rest of the puddle with the old nightshirt, tucked it inside the chamber-pot, and took the whole lot downstairs.

Back at work, I fretted about Peter, and wondered if I really were doing the right thing in my new trade, with my leather
penises and the like. They certainly made a change from the books a woman like me was meant to be reading, which seemed to
demonstrate over and over again, with a million minor variations, that women are untroubled by desire, and that on their purity
and domesticity depends the moral state of the entire nation. I thought of the books I had loved, rather than those that set
out to belittle me. I tried to imagine Jane
firkytoodling
with Rochester, which was not hard, given that they only made love once he was a cripple, and I had bound plenty of literature
which dealt with that topic. Or Cathy and Heathcliff, with Edgar watching, or, better still, a
ménage à trois
powered by the passion of hatred. It surprised me how easy it was for me to imagine this, but then again, I had always found
more genuine passion between the pages of
Jane Eyre
than between the sheets of
The Lustful Turk
. I empathised with Jane: her lack of hope for her life, her minimisation of her desires, her ability to knuckle down and
do whatever it was that needed to be done. After all, I was the daughter of a governess who had never hoped to marry either;
and, like Jane, I never felt that I was included among the fair sex.

But then again, the women of Lambeth on a Saturday night could not be described as the fair sex, either. Women who shrieked
and fell, and showed their thighs from the gutter, all the while laughing from the drink. Women who sold their babies to the
baby-farmers, who were all women too, to do away with them because they couldn’t bring themselves to do it with their own
hands. Women who gave over their own daughters to the men who refused to pay for the old crone any longer, women who could
do this to their own girls, to avoid hunger, rather than throw themselves off a bridge first. What on earth was fair about
that? Fair sex, what poppycock, I thought, before remembering that I couldn’t use the word ‘poppycock’ any more, not now I
knew what else it could mean. No, we were the
un
fair sex, and yet what was really unfair was that if we went to public hangings, or public libraries, or public anythings,
we received a scolding for not protecting our purity.

When the church clock chimed midnight, I laid down my tools, took off my apron, and didn’t even bother to check the kitchen
fire. I left the kitchen dirty, and I looked in on my sweet Lucinda, only I didn’t kiss her cheek, as I was dirty too, and
I took off my dirty smock and put on my dirty chemise. But I could not take off my shame and lay it on the chair by the bed.
That would never go away, and I lay down next to Peter in an uneasy sweat of tiredness and dirt, in a stew of dirt and shame
and anger, and I knew it would still cling to me in the morning when I woke, like a clammy shawl, like the London fog.

The following day was Saturday, and I was ready to speak to Din, not about his reasons for leaving us an hour early, but in
an effort to find some way of binding him to the workshop. I had not planned my questions wholly on behalf of Mr Diprose;
I confess to a certain curiosity about the life he had lived, before circumstance and rich ladies conspired to throw him up
on my shore.

‘Where do you lodge, Mr Din?’

‘In the Borough, ma’am.’

‘Your exact address, please, for my records.’

‘The Lodging House for Transient Male Workers, ma’am, on the High-street.’

‘And your landlord?

‘Mrs Catamole.’

‘You have been there how long?’

‘Eight months, ma’am.’

‘And before that, you were where?’

‘At a flop-house.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A beer-stop.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Them places is only temporary, ma’am. The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery wanted to find me
better straight off, and cheaper too, so they sent me to Mrs Catamole.’ His accent was enchanting: thick, and syrupy, with
an evident American twang, but with something else, too. Like his step, his speech was jaunty.

‘Is it to your satisfaction?’

‘Yes, ma’am. The bed is comfortable, and the board wholesome and pleasant. I never expected so much, nor hoped for it neither.’

‘How long have you been in England?’

‘Eleven months, ma’am. Nine months in London.’

‘Where were you in the interim?’

‘In Portsmouth. The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery got me safe passage with a Dutch ocean-liner.
They dropped me in Portsmouth.’

‘And where did you lodge in Portsmouth?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘I walked, and took lifts where I could.’

‘And where did you sleep?’

‘Rough, ma’am.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘On the streets. Or in boat-yards, or fields. I got to London soon enough, ma’am. I took myself to my benefactress, but she
had been unwell, she died.’

‘Ah, yes, Lady Grenville. You must have thought your luck had died with her.’

‘No ma’am. I make my own luck. I was expectin’ nothin’ more from the Ladies’ Society for the—’

‘Yes, yes, I know who you mean.’ How quick he was to subdue, from my rude interruption! I bit my impatient tongue, then said
softly, ‘You may continue. Pray, tell me, how did you get to be here?’

‘I knew of another American fellow like me, who had run the railroad for a while before the price on his head got too high,
and he ran to England. I heard he was in Limehouse. So I took myself there.’

‘Did you find him?’

‘No. But I found those who knew him. Americans, lots of them, all of them Negroes. Another runaway, too.’

‘So how did Lady Knightley find you?’

‘Lady Grenville’s girl asked me to leave an address. The only one I knew of was this one I was headin’ to in Limehouse. I
had carried that address with me for years.’

‘And Lady Knightley found you there,’ I said.

‘Yes. The folks there told her they might find me on the floor of a Chinaman’s rooms some streets away. And there she did
find me.’

The vision this presented was remarkable. Lady Knightley, driving around from place to insalubrious place, in search of a
man she had never met, from a country she had never been to. I bowed my head; if she had been present I would have dropped
to my knees in humility and respect.

‘And she took you to the flop-house? And thence to Mrs Catamole’s?’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘And how have you found the English to be, Din?’

‘Mighty helpful, ma’am. Civil as they could be. They do not trouble me while I walk the streets. When I hail an omnibus it
stops. At table Mrs Catamole asks me how I find the fare. That never happened at home, even before I was caught.’

‘You were caught?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Did they send you back?’

‘No, ma’am. I was caught in the beginnin’.’

‘Forgive me, Din. I am not understanding you.’

‘I was caught by the tradin’ men, when I was a boy. I was free before that.’

‘You –
became
– a . . .?’ He had not used the word to me; I did not know if I could say it to him. ‘You were how old?’

‘Fourteen, ma’am.’

I wanted to clarify what I was hearing, and to find out more, but I was straying into dangerous territory, and the man wasn’t
revealing without my questioning. I picked up my pen and resumed what I thought was an official line of enquiry.

‘Next of kin, Din? For my records, again.’

If I had thought this was a safer way of interrogating I could see from his face that I had got it wrong. I did not know then
that a man of his colour could turn pale; it was a fearsome sight, and was as unfamiliar to me as the paleness of desert sands
to those smeared with city grime.

‘None,’ he finally said. ‘My mamma and pop are dead, ma’am.’ His voice was resuming its previous courtesy, despite my lack
of it. ‘I had two brothers and two sisters, but I won’t be seein’ them again. And no, ma’am, I leave no wife or children behind
me.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Din’ I replied. ‘Thank you for answering my questions.’

‘Pleasure, ma’am.’

I closed my notebook with a snap and turned sharply on my heel in the desperate hope that something lay on the bench behind
me that could occupy my industry for a few moments. Eventually I moved into the gold-leaf booth and the day’s tasks. I watched
him from here, and weighed his polite answers in my head. Throughout the morning I found my gaze falling on him when I no
longer wished to gold-tool another innuendo-laden title, or
répoussé
another penis.

And instead of the lists of body parts and sexual practices my brain used to litanise, I turned to the planning of my argument
to Diprose about how Din could not possibly be a threat to anyone, for he was polite and gentle, and that after a man had
been through what he had, and suffered the loss of his family, what cared he a few smutty stories?

He left again an hour early on the following Friday, and the next.

‘We must watch him next week, Jack,’ I said, ‘and see if he still gives us the slip.’

‘Aye aye, Mrs D.’

But each week, we would forget to stand guard, and when I remembered, something would distract me. Peter would summon me in
to cut his nails, or Lucinda would ask for food, or the pot-man would arrive and fill our empty jugs, which always seemed
more important than Din stealing a mere hour from us.