The Crimson petal and the white

DON'T BANG DOOR, DRUNKARDS

SLEEPING. (the publican likes a laugh, and he likes others to laugh with him. When he first put up that sign, he recited it to Caroline so often she was almost convinced he'd taught her to read.

But soon enough she was confusing the please with the don't, and the drunkards with the sleeping.) Follow Caroline inside, and you'll notice there are no sleeping drunkards here after all. The Mother's Finest is a couple of rungs above the lowest drinking-houses and, despite its waggish motto, has a policy of ejecting sots as soon as they threaten to brawl or vomit. It's a solid, scrubbed sort of pub, all brass and poorly stained wood, with a variety of ornamental beer kegs suspended from the ceiling (despite not serving more than the one kind of beer), and a collection of coasters and bottle-tops on the wall behind the bar.

Of the forty-nine eyes in the room, only eight or ten turn to observe Caroline's entrance, for serious drinking and grumbling are the order of the day here. Those who do look at her, look just long enough to figure out who or at least what she is, then return to staring down into the gold froth on their bitter brown ale. By late tonight they may lust after her, but at this head-sore hour of morning the idea of paying for physical exertion lacks appeal.

It's a shabby crowd of men resting their elbows on The Mother's Finest's tables at this time of day; none of them exactly good-for-nothings, but certainly not good for much. Their coats and shirts have most of the buttons sewn on securely; the knitted scarves around their necks show signs of recent washing; and the boots on their feet are sturdy and, if not exactly shiny, no worse than dull.

The majority of these men are not long out of work, and most of them are married to women who've not yet despaired of them. Caroline's presence here by no means offends or surprises them; you have a very long way to go before you set foot in the kind of establishment where only men are admitted.

"'Ello, Caddie," says the publican, raising a hairy hand glistening with beer. "Cock wake you?"' "Never, Eppie," says Caroline. "The smell of your pies and ale."

The exchange is a formality, as he's already filling a mug for her, and motioning to his wife for the pie. Of all the customers, Caroline can eat and drink on credit, because she's the only one he can trust to pay him later. What man, whose presence in a public house at this time of day trumpets his unemployed state, can claim that though he's penniless now, he'll have money tonight? Caroline, since losing her virtue, has gained respect where she needs it most.

That's not to say she's wise with money. Like most prostitutes, she spends her pay as soon as she's left alone with it. Apart from meals and rent, she buys fancy cakes, drinks, chocolates, clothes sometimes, hokey-pokey in the summer, visits to warm places in the winter-taverns, music halls, freak shows, pantomimes-anything to get her out of the cold, really. Oh yes, and she buys the ingredients for her douche, and firewood and candles, and every Sunday a penny sparkler, a firework she has loved since she was a child, and which she lights in her room late at night like a Papist lighting a votive candle.

None of these vices costs very much-not compared with a man's gambling or medicines for a child-yet Caroline never saves a shilling. A reach-me-down dress, a penny sparkler, a fancy cake, a sixpenny entertainment… how can such things use up so much money? There must be other expenses, but she's damned if she can remember what they are. Never mind: her income is liquid, so she's never hard up for long.

Caroline devours her pie with an unselfconscious zest she would have found difficult to tolerate in others when she was a respectable Yorkshire wife. Fork and knife are not needed for the quivering assemblage of flour, sheep ankle, ox-tail and hot gravy she cups in her palm. She chews open-mouthed, to let the cooling air in. Within minutes she's licking her own hand.

"Thanks, Eppie, that was just what I needed." She finishes her beer, stands up and shakes pastry crumbs off her skirts. The publican's wife will sweep up after her, sour-faced, Caroline mimes a goodbye kiss and leaves.

Outside, the civilised world hasn't quite woken up yet. The shop-keepers are still laying out their wares, while thieves, bill-stickers, beggars and delivery boys look on. There are no women about except two black-shrouded flower-sellers arguing quietly over territory. The loser trundles her barrow nearer to where the dray-horses stand, her swarthy back bent almost double over her stock of dubious posies.

Caroline isn't used to being on the streets so early, and feels almost intimidated by the sheer quantity of day left to be lived through. She wonders if she should offer her body to someone, to pass the time, but she knows she probably won't bother unless the opportunity leaps into her lap.

The need isn't urgent yet. She can buy candles at her leisure. Why worry about being penniless when she can earn more in twenty minutes than she used to earn in a day?

She knows it's pig-laziness and moral weakness that prevent her from saving money as she ought to. The earnings of her trade could, if she'd been frugal over the years, have filled her old bonnet to bursting with bank notes, but she's lost the knack of frugality. With no child or immortal soul left to save, the hoarding of coins in the hope of one day exchanging them for coloured paper seems pointless. All sense of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story; they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end.

Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy. In this, she has a clear advantage over the young woman you are about to meet.

"Shush?"'

Caroline has paused in front of a poky, gloomy stationer's on here way back down Greek Street, because inside the shop she's caught sight of-is it really?-yes, it's Shush, or Sugar as she's known to the world at large. Even in the gloom-especially in the gloom-that long body is unmistakable: stick-thin, flat-chested and bony like a consumptive young man, with hands almost too big for women's gloves. Always this same first impression of Sugar: the queasy surprise of seeing what appears to be a tall, gaunt boy wreathed from neck to ankle in women's clothes; then, with the first glimpse of this odd creature's face, the realisation that this boy is female.

At the sound of her nickname, the woman turns, clutching to her dark green bodice a ream of white writing paper. There's a bosom in that bodice after all. Not enough to nourish a child perhaps, but enough to please a certain kind of man. And no one has hair quite as golden-orange as Sugar's, or skin quite as luminously pale. Her eyes alone, even if she were wrapped up like an Arabian odalisque with nothing else showing, would be enough to declare her sex. They are naked eyes, fringed with soft hair, glistening like peeled fruits. They are eyes that promise everything.

"Caddie?"'

The shadowy woman raises a green glove to her brow and squints at the sunlight beaming in from the street; Caroline waves, slow to realise that her friend is blinded. Her waving arm causes shafts of light to seep back and forth over the cluttered rows of shelving, and Sugar squints all the more. Her head sways from side to side on its long neck, straining to find who has called out to her through the thorny confusion of quills, pencils and fountain pens. Shyly-for she has no business here-Caroline steps into the shop.

"Caddie!"

The younger woman's expression, in recognising her old friend, glows with what so many men have found irresistible: an apparent ecstasy of gratitude to have lived to experience such an encounter. She rushes up to Caroline, embraces and kisses her, while behind the counter the stationer grimaces. He's embarrassed not so much by the display of affection but by the blow to his pride: serving Sugar, he had taken her for a lady and been rather obsequious to her, and now it appears, from the commonness of her companion, that he was wrong.

"Will that be all, madam?"' he harrumphs, affectedly sweeping a small feather duster over a rack of ink bottles.

"Oh yes, thank you," says Sugar in her sweet fancy vowels and scrupulous consonants. "Only, please… if you'd be so kind… I wonder if it could be made a little easier for me to carry?"' And she transfers the ream of paper-slightly rumpled from the bosom-to-bosom embrace-into his hands.

Scowling, he wraps the purchase in pin-striped paper and improvises a carry-handle of twine around it. With an ingratiating coo of thanks Sugar accepts the parcel from him, admiring his handiwork, demonstrating with a sensuous stroke of her gloved fingers what a good job he has done.

Then she turns her back on him and takes her friend by the arm.

Out in the sun, up close, Caroline and Sugar appraise each other while pretending not to. It's months since they last met. A woman's looks can crumble irreparably in that time, her skin eaten away by smallpox, her hair fallen out with rheumatic fever, her eyes blood-red, her lips healing crookedly from a knife wound. But neither Caroline nor Sugar is much the worse for wear. Life has been kind, or at least has been sparing with its cruelty.

Shush's lips, the older woman notes, are pale and dry and flaking, but weren't they always? In Sugar's poorer days, before the move to smarter premises, she and Caroline lived three doors apart in St Giles, and even then customers would occasionally knock on the wrong door and ask for "the girl with the dry lips".

Caroline knows, too, that underneath Sugar's gloves there's something wrong with her hands: nothing serious, but an unsightly skin ailment which, again, men have always seemed happy to forgive. Why men should tolerate such defects in Sugar was, and still is, mysterious to Caroline; indeed there's not a single physical attribute of which she could honestly say that Sugar's is better than hers.

There must be more to her than meets the eye.

"You're lookin' awful well," Caroline says.

"I feel wretched," says Sugar quietly. "God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation." Her face and voice are calm; she might be commenting on the weather. Her hazel eyes radiate-or appear to radiate-gentle good humour. "Bring on Armageddon, what do you think?"'

Caroline wonders if she's missing a joke, the kind which Sugar shares with educated men now that she's relocated to Silver Street. Sugar used to be good for a laugh, back in the Church Lane days. Her parlour piece-a great favourite with all the whores-still makes Caroline smile, remembering it. Not that she remembers it very well, mind; it involved not just play-acting but words, hundreds of 'em, and the words were the best part. Sugar pretending to seduce an invisible man, begging him in a voice almost hysterical with lust. "Oh, you must let me stroke your balls, they are so beautiful-like … like a dog turd. A dog turd nestling under your…" Your what? Shush had such a good word for it. A word to make you wet yourself. But Caroline has forgotten the word, and now's not the time to ask.

The fact that Sugar should be so much more desired and sought-after a whore than herself has always puzzled her, but that's the way it is and, judging by gossip in the trade, it's more true lately than ever.

Certainly there's no doubt that the relocation of Mrs Castaway's from St Giles to Silver Street-a hop, skip and jump from the widest, richest, grandest thoroughfare in London-was as much due to the demand for Sugar as to the madam's ambition.

Which raises the question: what's Sugar doing here in a dingy Greek Street stationer's, when she now lives so close to the splendid shops of the West End? Why risk dirtying the hems of that beautiful green dress on carriage-ways where no one's in a hurry to sweep up the horse-shit? Indeed, why even bother to get out of bed (a bed Caroline imagines to be royally luxurious) before midday?

But when Caroline asks, "What are you doin' all the way down 'ere?"' Sugar just smiles, her whitish lips dry as moth's wings.

"I was… visiting a friend," she says.

"All of last night."

"Oh yes," smirks Caroline.

"No, really," says Sugar earnestly.

"An old friend. A woman."

"So how is she, then?"' says Caroline, angling for a name.

Sugar closes her eyes for a second. Her lashes, unusually for a red-haired person, are thick and lush.

"She's… gone away now. I was saying goodbye."

They make an odd pair, Caroline and Sugar, as they walk up the street together: the older woman small-boned, round-faced, swell-bosomed, so neat and shapely in comparison to her companion, a long, lithe creature wreathed in a peau-de-soie dress the colour of moss. Although she has no bosom to speak of, this Sugar, and bones that poke alarmingly through the fabric of her bodice, she nevertheless moves with more poise, more feminine pride than Caroline.

Her head is held high, and she appears to be wholly at one with her clothing, as if it were her own fur and feathers.

Caroline wonders if it's this animal serenity that men find so attractive. That, and the expensive clothes. But she is wrong: it's all to do with Sugar's ability to make conversation with men like the one you will meet very shortly. That, and never saying "No."

Now Sugar asks Caroline, "How far out from home do you mean to start today?"' "Not 'ere," the older woman replies, frowning, and gesturing back towards St Giles.

"Crown Street, maybe."

"Really?"' says Sugar, concerned. "You were doing all right a few months ago, weren't you, around Soho Square?"' (here you see another reason why Sugar has done so well in her profession: her ability to recall the less than fascinating minutiae of other people's lives.) "I lost me nerve," says Caroline with a sigh. "It was a good day, that day I ran into you and was all excited about Soho Square; I'd landed meself two champion customers in a row, and I was finkin': this is the patch for me from now on!

But it was beginner's luck, Shush. I just don't belong this far into the good parts. I should know me place."

"Nonsense," says Sugar. "They can't tell the difference, half these men. Put a black dress on, take a deep breath, puff your cheeks out and they'll mistake you for the Queen."

Caroline grins dubiously. In her experience, the great jaded world is not so easy to impress.

"They see through me, Shush. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's arse."

"Oh, I think you can," says Sugar, suddenly serious. "It all depends who's buying it."

Caroline sighs. "Well, if I keep to my part of town, I find there's more buyin' and less refusin'. Every time I try me luck any further west than Crown Street, it's a struggle." She squints up Greek Street in the direction of Soho Square, as if everything that lies beyond the Jews' School and the house of charity is too steep to climb. "Oh, I get foreigners, right enough, and boys from the country, I get a few of those, that don't know no better than to follow on and on. You keep 'em talkin' all the way there, "Oh yes, and what brings a man like you to London, sir?" and 'fore they know it they're in Church Lane and there's no backin' out. So they 'as their pound o' flesh, pays you well for it and just puts it down to experience. But then you also get the ones that keeps on at you:

"Is it far, is it far, are we there yet?-you'd better not be one of those Old City sluts."

When they're like that, sometimes you can still steer 'em into an alley, make 'em settle for a soot-arse, but sometimes they just shakes you off 'alf-way, really wild, and says, "Why don't you solicit from your own kind?" I tell you, Shush, it really takes it out of you when they do that. You feel so low, you want to go 'ome and weep…"

"No, no," protests Sugar, shaking her head. "You mustn't look at it that way. You've brought them low, that's what you've done. They thought they were Prince Glorious, and you've made them see they don't cut the figure they thought they did. If their rank was obvious for all to see, why would a woman like you approach them in the first place? I tell you, it's they who go home and weep-pompous trembling little worms. Ha!"

The women laugh together, but Caroline only for a moment.

"Well, 'owever they see it," she says,

"it can get me snivelling. And in public too."

Sugar takes Caroline's hand, grey and green gloves locking together, and says, "Come with me to Trafalgar Square, Caddie. We'll buy some cakes, feed the pigeons-and watch the undertakers' ball!"

They laugh again. The "undertakers' ball" is a private joke between them, jokes being the main thing to have survived the three years since they were neighbours and daily confidantes.

Soon they're walking together through a maze of streets neither of them has any use for-streets they know only as the locales of other women's brothels and introducing-houses, streets already marked for destruction by town planners dreaming of a wide avenue named after the Earl of Shaftesbury. Crossing the invisible boundary between St Anne and St Martin-in-the-Fields, they see no evidence of saints, and no fields unless one counts the tree-lined lawn of Leicester Square. Instead, they keep their eyes open for the same pastry-shop they visited last time they met.

"Wasn't it here?"' (shops appear and disappear so quickly in these modern times.) "No, farther."

London's pastry-shops (or "patisseries", as they tend to style themselves lately)-poky little establishments that look like prettified ironmongers, displaying a variety of squat objects named after gateaux-may appal the French on their visits to England, but France is far away across a distant channel, and the patisserie in Green Street is quite exotic enough for such as Caroline. When Sugar leads her through the door, her eyes light up in simple pleasure.

"Two of those please," says Sugar, pointing to the stickiest, sweetest, creamiest cakes on show. "And that one too. Another two -yes, two of each." The two women giggle, emboldened by that old girls-together chemistry. For so much of their lives, they have to be careful to avoid any word or gesture that might hinder the fickle swell of men's pride; what a relief it is to throw away inhibition!

"In the same scoop, maydames?"' The shop-keeper, aware that they're as much ladies as he's a Frenchman, leers smarmily.

"Oh yes, thank you."

Caroline gently cradles both of the thick paper scoops by their coned undersides and compares the four creamy lumps within, trying to decide which she'll eat first. Paid in full, the shop-keeper sees them off with a cheery "Bon jewer."

If two cakes each is what prostitutes buy, then bring on more prostitutes! Pastry will not stay fresh waiting for the virtuous, and already the icing is beginning to sweat. "Come again, maydames!"

Onwards now to the next amusement. As they approach Trafalgar Square-what excellent timing-the fun has just begun. The unseen colossus of Charing Cross Station has discharged its most copious load of passengers for the day, and that flood of humanity is advancing through the streets. Hundreds of clerks dressed in sombre black are spilling into view, a tumult of monochrome uniformity swimming towards the offices that will swallow them in. Their profusion and their haste make them ridiculous, and yet they all wear grave and impassive expressions, as though their minds are fixed on a higher purpose-which makes them funnier still.

"The un'-dertakers' ball, the un'-dertakers' ball," sings Caroline, like a child. The wit of the joke has long gone stale, but she cherishes it for its familiarity.

Sugar is not so easy to please; to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment.

Sharing an old joke, singing an old song-these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her. Well, Sugar is determined to be different. The Fates can look down any time they please, and find her always set apart from the common herd, ready for the wand of change to christen her head.

So, these clerks swarming before her cannot be undertakers anymore; what can they be? (of course the banal truth is that they're clerks-but that won't do: no one ever escaped into a better life without the aid of imagination.) So… they're an enormous party of dinner guests evacuating a palatial hotel, that's what they are! An alarm has been raised: Fire!

Flood! Every man for himself! Sugar glances down at Caroline, wondering whether to communicate this new perception to her. But the older woman's grin strikes her as simple-minded, and Sugar decides against it. Let Caroline keep her precious undertakers.

The clerks are everywhere now, piling out of omnibuses, marching off in a dozen directions, clutching packed lunches in parcels tied with string. And all the while still more omnibuses rattle into view, their knife-boards covered with more clerks shivering in the wind.

"I wish it'd rain," smirks Caroline, recalling the last occasion when she and Sugar stood under cover, squealing with delight as the omnibuses ferried the clerks through a merciless downpour. The ones on the inside were all right, but the unfortunates riding on the knife-boards were hunched miserably under a jostling canopy of umbrellas. "Oh, what a sight!" she'd crowed. Now she clasps her gloved hands as if in prayer, wishing the skies would open so she could see that sight again. But today, the heavens stay closed.

Under benign sunshine, the streets grow busier still, a chaos of pedestrians and vehicles making little distinction between street and footpath. Riding slowly through the hordes of clerks, like farmers trying to drive hay-carts through a flock of sheep, are the Jewish commission agents in their flashy broughams. Displayed at their sides are the ladies of mercantile nobility, lapdogs shivering in their laps. Wholesale merchants, holding their heads visibly higher than retail merchants, alight from cabs and clear a path with a sweep of their walking sticks.

It is from inside Trafalgar Square, however, that the scale of the parade can best be appreciated, as the crowds of clerks stream around and about like a great army surrounding Nelson. All Sugar and Caroline have to do is push through into the Square proper, holding their cakes and parcel aloft. With every step, despite the press of bodies, men make way for them, some falling back in ignorant deference, others in knowing disgust.

Suddenly Caroline and Sugar seem to have all the space in the world. They lean against the pedestal of one of the stone lions, eating cake with their heads thrown back and licking flecks of cream off their gloves. By the standards of respectability, they might as well be licking at gobs of ejaculate. A decent woman would eat cake only on a plate in a hotel, or at least in a department store-although there's no telling who, or what, one might risk meeting in such a universally hospitable place.

But in Trafalgar Square shocking manners are less conspicuous; it is, after all, a popular haunt for foreigners and an even more popular haunt for pigeons, and who can observe perfect propriety in amongst so much filth and feather-flutter? The class of people who worry about such things (lady Constance Bridgelow is one of them, but you are far from ready to meet her yet) will tell you that in recent years these miserable creatures (by which she would mean the pigeons, but possibly also the foreigners) have only been encouraged by the official sanctioning of a stall selling paper cones of birdseed at a halfpenny each. Sugar and Caroline, having finished their cakes, buy themselves a seed cone at this stall, for the fun of seeing each other flocked all about with birds.

It was Caroline's idea; the stream of clerks is thinning now, swallowed up by the embassies, banks and offices; in any case, she's already bored with them. (before she fell from virtue, Caroline could be entranced by embroidery or the slow blinking of a baby for hours at a time: these days she can barely keep her attention on an orgasm-admittedly not hers-happening in one of her own orifices.) As for Sugar, what amuses her? She's regarding Caroline with a benign smile, like a mother who can't quite believe what simple things delight her 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 folic`e, satin volout`e and Algerine, in colours of lucine, garnet and smoked jade-are exotic enough to make other whores' eyes glaze over when Sugar describes them. "What a lot of trouble you go to," one of them once remarked, "for clothes that are stripped off in five minutes, for a man to tread on!" But Sugar's men stay in her room for a great deal longer than five minutes. Some of them stay for hours, and when Sugar emerges, she looks as though she hasn't even been undressed. What does she do with them in there?

"Talk," is her answer, if anyone is bold enough to ask. It's a teasing answer, delivered with a grave smile, but it's not the whole truth. Once she has chosen her man, she'll submit to anything. If it's her cunt they want, they can have it, although mouth and rectum are her preferred orifices: less mess, and more peace of mind afterwards. Her husky voice is the result of a knife-point being pressed to her throat just a little too hard when she was fifteen, by one of the few men she ever failed to satisfy.

But it isn't simple submission and depravity that Sugar provides. Submission and depravity come cheap. Any number of toothless hags will do whatever a man asks if they're given a few pennies for gin. What makes Sugar a rarity is that she'll do anything the most desperate alley-slut will do, but do it with a smile of child-like innocence. There is no rarer treasure in Sugar's profession than a virginal-looking girl who can surrender to a deluge of ordure and rise up smelling like roses, her eyes friendly as a spaniel's, her smile white as absolution. The men come back again and again, asking for her by name, convinced that her lust for their particular vice must equal their own;

Sugar's fellow prostitutes, seeing the men so taken in, can only shake their heads in grudging admiration.

Those who are inclined to dislike her, Sugar strives to charm. In this, her freakish memory is useful: she's able, it seems, to recall everything anybody has ever said to her. "So, how did your sister fare in Australia?"' she will, for example, ask an old acquaintance a year after they last met. "Did that O'Sullivan fellow in Brisbane marry her or not?"' And her eyes will be full of concern, or something so closely resembling concern that even the most sceptical tart is touched.

Sugar's acute memory is equally useful when dealing with her men. Music is reputed to soothe the savage breast, but Sugar has found a more effective way to pacify a brutish man: by remembering his opinions on trade unions or the indisputable merits of black snuff over brown. "Of course I remember you!" she'll say to the loathsome ape who, two years before, twisted her nipples so hard she almost fainted in pain. "You are the gentleman who believes that the Tooley Street fire was started by Tsarist Jews!" A few more such regurgitations, and he's ready to praise her to the skies.

A pity, really, that Sugar's brain was not born into a man's head, and instead squirms, constricted and crammed, in the dainty skull of a girl. What a contribution she might have made to the British Empire!

"Excu-hoose me, ladies!"

Caroline and Sugar turn on their heels, and discover a man with a tripod and camera pursuing his hobby not far behind them in Trafalgar Square.

He's a fearsome-looking creature with dark brows, Trollopean beard and a tartan overcoat, and the women jump to the conclusion that he wants them out of the way of his tripod-mounted ogre eye.

"Oh no no not-o-o, ladies!" he protests when they move aside. "I would be honoured! Honoured to preserve your image for all time!"

They look at each other and share a smile: here is another amateur photographer just like all the rest, as fervent as a spiritualist and as mad as a hatter. Here is a man sufficiently charismatic to charm the pigeons down into his chosen tableau-or if he isn't, then sufficiently generous to buy lucky passers-by a halfpenny cone of birdseed. Even better when they provide their own!

"I am truly grateful, ladies! If you could but dispose yourselves a little farther apart…!"

They giggle and fidget as the pigeons flutter all around, alighting on their bonnets, clawing at their outstretched arms, settling on their shoulders-anywhere the seed has spilled.

Despite the flurry of movement so near their eyes, they do their best not to blink, hoping the decisive moment will catch them in a good light.

The photographer's head moves to and fro beneath his hood, he tenses his entire body, and then there's a shudder of release. Inside his camera, a chemical image of Sugar and Caroline is born.

"A thousand thanks, ladies," he says at last, and they know that this means goodbye: not au revoir, but farewell. He has taken all he wants from them.

"Did you 'ear what 'e said?"' says Caroline as they watch him carry his trophies towards Charing Cross. "For all time. All time. It couldn't be true, could it?"' "I don't know," says Sugar, pensively. "I've been to a photographer's studio once, and I've stood next to him in the dark room while he made the pictures appear." Indeed she remembers holding her breath in the red light, watching the images materialising in their shallow font of chemicals, like stigmata, like spirit apparitions.

She considers telling Caroline all this, but knows the older woman would require each word explained. "They come out of a bath," she says,

"and I'll tell you what: they stink. Anything that stinks so much can't last forever; I'm sure."

Her frown is hidden under her thick fringe: she isn't sure, at all.

She's wondering if the photographs taken of her at that photographer's salon will last forever, and hoping they don't. At the time, while the business was being done, she felt no qualms, and posed naked beside potted plants, in stockings by a curtained bed, and up to her waist in a tub of tepid bathwater. She didn't even have to touch anyone! Lately, however, she's come to regret it-ever since one of her customers produced a thumb-worn photograph of an awkward-looking naked girl and demanded that Sugar strike exactly the same pose with exactly the same kind of hand-brush, of which he'd thoughtfully brought his own. It was then that Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of her bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.

You would probably think, if I showed you photographs of Sugar, that she needn't have worried. Oh, but they're charming, you'd say-innocuous, quaint, even strangely dignified!

A mere century and a bit-or say, eleven dozen years later-and they're suitable for reproduction anywhere, without anyone thinking they might deprave and corrupt the impressionable.

They may even be granted an artistic halo by that great leveller of past outrages, the coffee-table book. Unidentified prostitute, circa 1875, the book might say, and what could be more anonymous than that? But you would be missing the point of Sugar's shame.

"Imagine, though," says Caroline. "A picture of you still bein' there, 'undreds of years after you've died. An' if I pulled a face, that's the face I'd 'ave for ever… It makes me shiver, it does."

Sugar strokes the edge of her parcel absently as she thinks up a way to steer the conversation into less tainted waters. She stares across the square at the National Gallery, and her painful memory of the hand-brush man fades.

"What about painted portraits?"' she says, recalling Caroline's exaggerated admiration for an art student who once fobbed her off, in lieu of payment, with a sketch he claimed was of the Yorkshire dales. "Don't they make you shiver?"' "That's different," says Caroline.

"They're… you know… of kings and people like that."

Sugar performs a chuckle of catty mischief from her encyclopaedic repertoire of laughs.

"Kitty Bell had her portrait done, don't you remember, by that old goat from the Royal Academy who fell for her? It was even hung at an exhibition; Kitty and I went to see it. "Flower Seller", they called it."

"Ooo, you're right too-the slut."

Sugar pouts. "Jealous. Just think,

Caddie, if you had a painter begging you to let him do your portrait. You sit still, he works, and then at the end of it, he gives you a painting in oils, like… like a reflection of how you'd see yourself in a looking-glass on the one day of your life when you were prettiest."

Caroline licks the inside of the paper scoop, thoughtful, half-seduced by the mental picture Sugar has painted for her, half-suspecting she's being gulled. But, teasing aside, Sugar sincerely believes Caroline would make a fine subject for a painting: the small, pretty face and compact body of the older woman are so much more classically picturesque than her own bony physique. She imagines Caddie's shoulders swelling up out of an evening gown, smooth and flawless and peachy, and compares this rose-tinted vision with her own pallid torso, whose collar-bones jut out from her freckled chest like the handles of a grid-iron. To be sure, the fashions of the Seventies are growing ever more sylph-like, but what's in fashion and what a woman believes in her heart to be womanly may not be the same thing. Any printshop is stocked to the rafters with "Carolines", and her face is everywhere, from soap-wrappers to the stone carvings on public buildings-isn't that proof that Caroline is close to the ideal? Sugar thinks so. Oh, she's read about the Pre-Raphaelites in journals, but that's as far as it goes; she wouldn't know Burne-Jones or Rossetti if they fell on top of her. (nor is such a collision likely, given the statistical improbability: two painters, two hundred thousand prostitutes.) There's a fleck of cream on Caroline's chin when her face emerges from the paper scoop.

Having savoured the fantasy of being an artist's muse and scorning mere money for the greater glory of her very own painted portrait, she's decided not to swallow it.

"No fanks," she says in a nobody's-fool voice. "If there's one fing I've learnt, it's that if you join in games you don't understand, you finish up fleeced, wivout even knowin' 'ow you got that way."

Sugar tosses her crumpled paper scoop to the ground and shakes her skirts free of cake-crumbs and birdseed. "Shall we go?"' she suggests and, reaching over to Caroline's face, she gently wipes the fleck of cream off her chin.

The older woman recoils slightly, startled at this unexpected physical intimacy outside working hours.

It's half past eight. The undertakers' ball is over and the streets are once again sparsely peopled. First the garret-shop slaves, casual labourers and factory workers, now the clerks: the city swallows armies of toilers and is still not satisfied. All day there will be fresh deliveries from all over England, from all over the world. And tonight, the Thames will swallow what wasn't wanted.

Caroline yawns, exposing the one blackened tooth among the white ones, and Sugar yawns in response, covering her mouth demurely with her gloved hand.

"Lord, I could drop into bed now and snore me 'ead off," declares the older woman.

"Me too," says Sugar.

"I got woken early. A cab got smashed up, in Church Lane, as close to my window as …" (she points to King George) "as that there statue."

"Was anyone hurt?"'

"I fink a woman died. The police carried a body away, wiv skirts on."

Sugar considers tickling Caddie with a description of her faulty grammar made flesh: a procession of earnest moustachioed policemen, pretty skirts frou-frouing under their sombre overcoats. Instead she asks,

"Anyone you knew?"'

Caroline blinks stupidly. The thought hadn't even occurred to her.

"Gaw, I don't know! Fancy it bein' …" She screws her face up, trying to imagine any one of her prostitute friends being on the street at that time of morning. "I'd best go 'ome."

"Me too," says Sugar. "Or Mrs Castaway's may lose its reputation." And she smiles a smile that isn't for the likes of Caroline to understand.

Briefly they embrace and, as always when they do, Caroline is surprised by how awkward and tentative Sugar is; how the girl's body, so notorious for its pliability in the hands of men, feels gawky and stiff in the arms of a friend. The heavy parcel of paper, dangling from Sugar's fist, bumps against Caroline's thigh, hard as a block of wood.

"Come and visit me," says Caroline, releasing Sugar from the clasp.

"I will," promises Sugar, a blush of colour coming to her face at last.

Who to follow? Not Caroline-she'll only take you where you've come from, and what a shabby place that was. Stay with Sugar now. You won't regret it.

Sugar wastes no time watching Caroline go, but hastens out of the Square. As hurriedly as if she's being pursued by ruffians intent on garrotting her, she makes her way to the Haymarket.

"I'll get you there faster, missie!" shouts a cabman from one of the hotel stands, his raucous tone making clear he's seen through her fancy clothes.

"You can 'ave a ride on me 'orse, too!" he whoops after her as she ignores him, and other cabmen on the rank guffaw with mirth, and even their horses snort.

Sugar advances along the footpath, face impassive, back straight. The other people on the streets do not exist for her. The men loitering around the coffee-stall step back from her advance, lest her swinging parcel clip their knees. A bill-poster moves his bucket closer to the pillar on which he's pasting his placard, lest she kick his gluey liquid all over the paving-stones. A bleary-eyed gent-a new arrival from America, by the look of his hat and trousers-appraises her from head to hurrying feet; his innocence will wear off by this evening, when a flock of harlots will flutter into the Haymarket and proposition him every dozen steps.

"Begging your pardon, ma'am," he mutters as Sugar pushes past him.

Up Great Windmill Street Sugar goes, past Saint Peter's where the best of the child prostitutes will later congregate, past the Argyll Rooms where even now the cream of male aristocracy lies drunk and snoring, interleaved with snoozing whores damp with champagne.

Unerringly she turns corners, ducks through alleyways, crosses busy streets with barely a glance, like a cat with an idea glowing in its catty brain.

She doesn't stop until she's in Golden Square, with the rooftop and smoking chimneypots of Mrs Castaway's, and the desultory traffic of Silver Street, already in view. Then, with only a few yards to go, she cannot bring herself to walk those last steps and knock at the door of her own house. Under her green silks, she's sweating, not just from her haste, but in fresh distress. She turns about, hugs her parcel to her bosom, and dawdles towards Regent Street.

On the stone steps of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Warwick Street, a small child of uncertain sex lies huddled in a pale-yellow blanket that twinkles with melted frost. In the pale sunlight, the drizzle of snot on the child's lips and mouth shines like raw egg-yolk, and Sugar, disgusted, looks away.

Alive or dead, this child is doomed: it's not possible to save anyone in this world, except oneself;

God gets His amusement from doling out enough food, warmth and love to nourish a hundred human beings, into the midst of a jostling, slithering multitude of millions. One loaf and one fish to be shared among five thousand wretches-that's His jolliest jape.

Sugar has already crossed the street, when she's stopped by a voice-a feeble, wheezy bleat, making a sound that could be wordless nonsense, could be "Money", could be "Mama". She turns, and finds the child alive and awake, gesturing from its swaddle of dirty wool. The grim fa@cade of the chapel, new red brick with no windows down below, and spy-holes in dark locked door, flaunts its imperviousness to anti-Catholic rioters and children seeking charity.

Sugar hesitates, rocking on the balls of her feet, feeling the sweat inside her boots prickle and simmer between her toes. She cannot bear going backwards when she's made up her mind to go forwards; she's crossed this street now, and there's no crossing back. Besides, it's hopeless; she could fuck a hundred men a day and give all the proceeds to destitute children, and still make no lasting difference.

Finally, when her heart begins to labour in her breast, she fetches a coin from her reticule and throws it across the street. Her aim is true, and the shilling lands on the pale-yellow blanket.

She turns away again, still unsure of the child's sex; it doesn't matter; in a day or a week or a month from now, the child will be dragged down into oblivion, like a lump of refuse flushed into London's sewers. God damn God and all His horrible filthy creation.

Sugar walks on, her eyes fixed on the grand thoroughfare of Regent Street shimmering through her stinging eyes. She needs sleep. And, yes, if truth be told, if you really must know, she is suffering, suffering so much that she'd be relieved to die, or else kill. Either would do. As long as a decisive blow is struck for disengagement.

It's not Caroline's company that's brought this on. Caroline, as you already know, is inconsequential; she asks nothing.

No, what has tested Sugar so unbearably is this: having to be patient and kind all yesterday and last night, sitting up with a dying friend called Elizabeth in a fetid slum in Seven Dials. How long Elizabeth took to die, clutching Sugar's hand all the while! Such a clammy, cool, claw-like hand it was too, for all those hours! At the thought of it, Sugar's own hands sweat even more inside her gloves, itching and stinging against the powdered lining.

But being a fallen woman has its small advantages, and she claims one of them now. The rules governing outdoor dress are clear, for those who can understand them: men may wear gloves or not wear gloves, as they please; poor shabby women must not wear them (the thought alone is ridiculous!) or the police are likely to demand where they got them; respectable women of the lower orders, especially those with babes in arms, can be forgiven for not wearing them; but ladies must wear them at all times, until safely indoors.

Sugar is dressed like a lady, therefore she must on no account bare her extremities in public.

Nevertheless, glove-tip by glove-tip, finger by finger, Sugar strips, even as she walks, the soft green leather off her hands. Unsheathed, her sweating white skin glistens in the sunshine. With a deep sigh of relief, indistinguishable from the one she uses when a man has done to her all he can do, she flexes in the cool air her intricately cracked and flaking fingers.

Follow Sugar now into the great open space, the grandiose vacancy of Regent Street-admire those towering honeycombs of palatial buildings stretching into the fog of architectural infinity, those thousands of identically shaped windows tier upon tier; the glassy expanse of roadway swept clear of snow; all of it is a statement of intent: a declaration that in the bright future to come, places like St Giles and Soho, with their narrow labyrinths and tilting hovels and clammy, crumbling nooks infested with human flotsam, will be swept away, to be replaced by a new London that's entirely like Regent Street, airy, regular and clean.

The Stretch at this hour of morning is already alive with activity-not the insane profusion it will bear in the summer Season, but enough to impress you.

Cabs are trotting backwards and forwards, thickly bearded gentlemen in dark clothing dash across their path, sandwich-board men patrol the gutters and, over there, a trio of street-sweepers are standing over a drain, cramming the accumulated porridge of snow-slush, dirt and horse-dung down through the grille with jabs of their brooms. Even as they toil, an equipage bristling with provincial businessmen jingles by, leaving a steamy festoon of turd in its wake.

An omnibus is reined to a halt, and half a dozen passengers alight. One of them, a soberly dressed man of average height and build, is in an indecent hurry, and almost runs into the shit-spill: just in time he reels backwards, like a street clown performing for whinnying onlookers in Seven Dials. Mortified, he whips off his hat, and advances with a cringing gait.

His hair, thus released into the atmosphere, is remarkable in how it sits, or more accurately jumps around, on his head. From the forehead down, he looks terribly serious, even anxious, as if he's late for work and may expect a reprimand, but from the forehead up he is a comic delight: a flip-flopping crest of curly golden hair, like a small furry animal fallen out of the sky onto the head of a man, and determined to keep its purchase there no matter what.

Sugar smiles, relieved to see something amusing in the world at last; then she hugs her parcel once more, and starts to idle along the Stretch. Just a few more minutes, here on the cobbled shore of London's tomorrow, and she'll be ready to go home.

Leave Sugar to herself now; she longs to walk alone, anonymous. She's already forgotten about the man with the ridiculous hair, whom you took to be just another passer-by, a flash of local colour distracting you from your quest to find the people you came here to meet. Stop daydreaming now; cross the shiny Rubicon of Regent Street, avoiding the traffic and the mounds of muck; and seek out that clownish man.

Whatever you do, don't let him melt into the crowd, for he's really a very important man, and he'll take you further than you can possibly imagine.