LITMIR.BIZ

       Christmas in Silver Street

      Close your eyes. Lose track of time for a moment – just long enough to be overtaken by a hundred and thirty years. It’s December 1872. Feathery snow is falling on that dubious part of London between Regent Street and Soho, a hodgepodge of shops and houses crammed between the opulent avenues of the well-to-do and the festering warrens of the poor. Welcome to Silver Street. Here umbrella-makers, scriveners, piano tuners, unsuccessful playwrights, dressmakers and prostitutes live side by side, each pursuing their trade under worsening weather. Snow makes everyone and everything look equal, as if God has lovingly applied a thin layer of white icing to rooftops, street-stalls, carriages, and the heads of beggars. Suffering and decrepitude are scarcely recognisable under such a pretty disguise.

      On this frigid December morning, you have entered a brothel known as Mrs Castaway’s, and are peeking into an upstairs bedroom. What have you found? A girl called Sugar. She’s seventeen, and you are watching her inspect her tongue in a hand-mirror.

      Do you know Sugar? If you are a man, there is a good chance you have known her in the Biblical sense. She’s a prostitute, and at this point in Queen Victoria’s reign the ratio of prostitutes to the overall population is 1:36, or one per twelve adult males.

      If you are a respectable woman, you ought to pretend you never heard such statistics, and ought to hurry past Sugar in the street, fearful of suffering a stain on your reputation. But perhaps you are not as respectable as all that, for you have not passed by. You are here, watching Sugar inspect her tongue in a brothel.

      Do not be scandalised by Sugar’s age. The age of consent for girls is twelve. In two years from now, it will be raised to thirteen. Sugar is an old hand at this game.

      She sits in her rumpled bed, holding the mirror to her face. Her tongue, she notes, is grey in the middle, not bright pink the way it ought to be. She drank too much last night, and here is the evidence.

      Last night was Christmas Eve, now it’s the morning after. December 25th, a day like any other. Sugar has the lamps lit, because her bedroom window is small and the sun is lost behind the grey swirl of snow. The fireplace spits and hisses; the floorboards creak by themselves. The old-fashioned erotic prints on the walls are, as ever, the only decorations; Mrs Castaway does not encourage her girls to deck their halls with boughs of holly.

      To be frank, none of the shabby Georgian houses jumbled behind Silver Street is the best place to see evidence of Yuletide festivities; for that, you would need to go to the West End, or the suburbs. Only in the splendour of the Burlington Arcade can there be a wholesale celebration of gift-giving; only in the villas of the respectable can fairytales of Virgin Birth survive.

      Sugar takes one last look at the inside of her mouth. How odd, she thinks, that red wine can turn a pink tongue grey. The miracle of the body’s perversity.

      A knock at her door makes her jump. At this time of the morning, she knows it can’t be a customer. It must be little Christopher, come to collect the bed-linen.

      ‘I’m ’ere for the sheets,’ says the boy, when she opens the door to him. He’s blond, blue-eyed and as innocent-looking as a shepherd’s lad from a Nativity scene. Not exactly dressed in rags, although his shirt and trousers would benefit from some mending here and there. Amy, his mother, is not the mending type. Her speciality is thrashing grown-up men until they whimper for mercy.

      How old is little Christopher? Sugar can’t tell. Far too young to be a drudge in a brothel, but Amy has put him to work this way, and he seems grateful to have a purpose. Perhaps if he washes and dries a million bed-sheets, he will finally make amends for his original sin – of being born.

      ‘Thank you, Christopher,’ says Sugar.

      He doesn’t reply, merely begins folding the dirty sheets into a stack he can carry away. Outside in the street, a fruity voice begins to sing:

      On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me A partridge in a pear tree …

      ‘It’s Christmas, then,’ says the boy, lifting the pile of linen to his chest.

      ‘Yes, Christopher.’

      He nods, as if confirming something he knows inside out, something he mentioned only for conversation’s sake. Chin resting on a wad of soiled linen, he walks to the door and is about to leave, then turns and asks,

      ‘What’s Christmas?’

      Sugar blinks, momentarily stumped. ‘It’s the day Jesus Christ was born,’ she replies.

      ‘I knowed that,’ says the boy.

      From outside: ‘Four collie birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree …’

      ‘He was born in a manger,’ adds Sugar, to make the story more interesting for him. ‘A big wooden tub for animals to eat from.’

      Christopher nods. Making-do and poverty is the way of the world, he knows.

      ‘… my true love gave to me, five gold rings …’

      ‘Some folk,’ observes the boy, ‘gives presents at Christmas. To each uvver, like.’

      ‘So they do, Christopher.’

      The child shakes his head, like a little old man bemused by the pointlessness of giving someone sixpence in exchange for sixpence. He hugs the bedsheets tight to his chest and walks out of the room, craning his head sideways to make sure he doesn’t break his neck on the stairs.

      ‘Six geese a-laying,’ carols the voice from the streets outside, ‘five gold rings, four collie birds, three French hens …’

      Sugar shuts her bedroom door; there’s a draught getting in. She throws herself back onto the half-stripped bed, irritable, wishing the day was over instead of scarcely begun. The pillow-cases smell of men’s hair-oil and spirits; she ought to have sent them downstairs with the rest of the washing.

      The carol-singer loitering in the street outside Mrs Castaway’s seems indefatigable. Snow continues to whirl through the sky, the windowpanes rattle and creak, but still those damned partridges and turtledoves

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