The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online Page B

child, but it’s Caroline who’s the mother here, and Sugar a girl still in her teens. If scattering seed to a flock of badly behaved old birds gives her no pleasure, what does? Ah, to know that you’d have to get deeper inside her than anyone has reached yet.
    I can tell you the answers to simpler questions. How old is Sugar? Nineteen. How long has she been a prostitute? Six years. You do the arithmetic, and the answer is a disturbing one, especially when you consider that the girls of this time commonly don’t pubesce until fifteen or sixteen. Yes, but then Sugar was always precocious – and remarkable. Even when she was newly initiated into the trade, she stood out from the squalor of St Giles, an aloof and serious child amongst a hubbub of crude laughter and drunken conviviality.
    ‘She’s a strange one, that Sugar,’ her fellow whores said. ‘She’ll go far.’ And indeed she has. All the way to Silver Street, a paradise compared to Church Lane. Yet, if they imagine her swanning up and down The Stretch under a parasol, they are wrong. She’s almost always indoors, shut in her room, alone. The other whores of Silver Street, working in adjacent houses, are scandalised by the small number of Sugar’s rendezvoux: one a day, or even none. Who does she think she is? There are rumours she’ll charge one man five shillings, another two guineas. What’s her game?
    On one thing everyone’s agreed: the girl has peculiar habits. She stays awake all night, even when there are no more men to be had; what’s she doing in there with the lights on, if she’s not sleeping? Also, she eats strange things – someone saw her eat a raw tomato once. She applies tooth powder to her teeth after each meal, and rinses it with a watery liquid that she buys in a bottle. She doesn’t wear rouge, but keeps her cheeks terrible pale; and she never takes strong drink, except when a man bullies her into it (and even then, if she can get him to turn his back for an instant, she often spits out her mouthful or empties her glass into a vase). What does she drink, then? Tea, cocoa, water – and, judging by the way her lips are always peeling, in precious small quantities.
    Peculiar? You haven’t heard the half of it, according to the other whores. Not only is Sugar able to read and write, she actually enjoys it. Her reputation as a lover may be spreading among men-about-town, but it can’t compare with the reputation she has among her fellow prostitutes as ‘the one who reads all the books’. And not tuppenny books, either – big books, with more pages than even the cleverest girl in Church Lane could hope to finish. ‘You’ll go blind, you will,’ her colleagues keep telling her, or, ‘Don’t you never think: enough’s enough, this one’s me last one?’ But Sugar never has enough. Since moving to the West End, Sugar has taken to crossing Hyde Park, over the Serpentine into Knightsbridge, and paying frequent visits to the two Georgian houses in Trevor Square, which may look like high-class brothels, but are in fact a public library. She buys newspapers and journals too, even ones with hardly any pictures in them, even ones that say they’re for gentlemen only.
    Her main expense, though, is clothes. Even by the standards of the West End, the quality of Sugar’s dresses is remarkable; in the squalor of St Giles, it was astonishing. Rather than buying a discarded old costume off a butcher’s hook in Petticoat Lane, or a serviceable imitation of the current fashion from a dingy Soho shop, her policy is to save every sixpence until she can afford something that looks as though the finest lady’s dressmaker might have made it especially for her. Such illusions, though they’re on sale in department stores, don’t come cheap. The very names of the fabrics – Levantine folicé , satin velouté and Algerine, in colours of lucine, garnet and smoked jade – are exotic enough to make other whores’ eyes glaze over when Sugar