Thongs

— 2-

The next morning, Sunday, I was awakened by the sound of church bells. People were already moving about in the rooms and passages of the tenement. Night changed to day gradually, for the tenements were never silent. The inhabitants were born, they made love, and they died, in the same rooms, and often at night. Just before dawn, and before the sounds of the milk carts in the street outside, there was probably more silence than at other times, an hour's silence before the paraffin lamps went on in the fetid rooms. And all night long doors slammed and people shuffled about, moving for whatever purpose to the common latrine on the stairs.

My father was snoring heavily in a drunken sleep. His new mistress lay with the upper part of her body exposed and with one slim white foot sticking out of the covers at the bottom of the bed. I had the impression that she was not sleeping. I knew why.

When Hazel allowed my father to bring her home, she made what many regarded as the most important decision of her life. And there was no going back. From the moment that he took her on the bed, she was a marked woman. She belonged to him, like his bloody razors.

Razor King, the werewolf of the Gorbals.

More like an animal than a man, he emerged from our one-room flat in the tenement, and before he had reached the street, the word of his approach had traveled a block. Men retreated behind doors or crossed to the opposite pavement; women appeared at the doorways smiling, showing off their ragged figures.

John Gault seldom looked at them. If he did, he looked at them with a pure male look, his gaze traveling from their haunches to their bunched breasts and then up to the flushed face on which fearful consent was already written. Sometimes he would pause and shamelessly run his hand up between a woman's thighs under her skirt. If the woman pleased him, he would go with her to her room. If not, he would burst into loud laughter, thrust his finger into her cruelly and hurl her whimpering aside.

No woman was ashamed to go with Razor King. It was a mark of caste. A girl took on an air from being a victim of his lust.

But he had brought Hazel home. And that was different. My father would mark her, a small cross cut with a razor on the soft inner surface of her left thigh, his cattle.

Hazel told me afterwards that she was slightly drunk when he picked her up. She was on her way back from a dance hall with another girl when Razor King barged out of a pub onto the pavement in front of them. The other girl screamed, not loudly, and he stood staring at them with his red-rimmed eyes. His glance soon left the other girl and fixed itself on Hazel. She said that when he smiled it was as though she already felt his hands on her naked flesh. She was weak at the knees. He beckoned her to him. She hesitated. A little crowd had formed nearby. Men stood in the pub door. The organ grinder had stopped playing. She flashed a look at the men and then back at Razor King. A young man stepped between her and him. He didn't have time to say whatever it was he was going to say. A moment later he was stumbling backwards into the gutter, his ruined mouth hanging on his throat and a small gusher of blood squirting high above his shocked face. Razor King beckoned to her again, this time with the bloody razor. She said it was as though she had lost all power of will. She went up to him like a lamb. Without a word he took her arm and walked her past the crowd along the street, leaving his victim bleeding, perhaps to death, in the gutter.

When she realized where he was taking her, she had been afraid. Everyone knew about the mark. Fourteen women in the Gorbals had been cut already. Normally my father kept the woman for about two months afterwards. Then they were free to go. The men of the Gorbals fought each other to marry a marked woman. It showed deference to the King. It was sure protection.

Hazel said she hadn't slept. After he had fucked her, she had lain awake for the rest of the night thinking about the mark. She couldn't sleep. And her head ached from too much drinking. She couldn't believe she was in bed with him, she said. And she was thinking that tomorrow her father would know and she was wondering what he would do. Time had never passed more slowly. When dawn came, the gray light filtering across the room, across the basin of stagnant washing water on the table, she was in a cold sweat and her shoulder ached with the weight of my father's head.

Johnnie hadn't come in. Hazel didn't know that and Razor King hadn't noticed, but I had, because Johnnie had mentioned her name a week before. He said he had big eyes for her. A real hot piece of stuff. He might even marry her. And I was wondering how he would take it when he came in and saw her in bed with our father. She couldn't have been more than a year older than Johnnie, who was nearing twenty. Johnnie would be mad. I knew that.

I got up and walked quietly over to the bed. I was right. Hazel was awake. She looked at me without saying anything. She didn't know me then. I was his daughter, that was all she knew.

My father was snoring heavily. Hazel was trying to cover her breasts. It was as though she was ashamed to let me see them. I noticed that she had been bitten in a number of places by the bugs. Here and there on the smooth alabaster skin of her upper torso was an ugly red spot. It was almost impossible to keep the bedbugs at bay in the old Gorbals' tenements. We used paraffin for everything, for light, and the men used it for hair oil, and we used it to fight the bugs with. We smeared it on the walls.

I smiled at her, trying to tell her not to be afraid. She didn't smile back. She was too scared. Her lovely round breasts rose and fell next to the rough gray blanket. I would have liked to touch them but instead I turned away and began the day's work.

I raked out the fire and lit a new one, took the basin out to the stair head lavatory and emptied it, and then I sat down on the pan to pee. There was a used condom, its neck tied with a knot near my right foot. I slipped my foot out of my shoe and touched the little rubber sack with my bare toes. I was cold but it made me feel sexy being as I was with my naked bottom on the wooden seat. I wondered who'd been in the lavatory the night before. It was used often for that. Greta Smith told me she'd let a boy do it to her there. Against the wall where the dirty drawings were. They made me feel sexy too. Sometimes I masturbated there, looking at them. When I lifted up the condom I found it was quite heavy. It was a bit sticky and the dust had collected on it. I wrapped it up in a bit of newspaper and put it in the pocket of my skirt. The thought of its being there, the real stuff, so close to my cunt, made me feel really good. I was going to begin rubbing myself when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I knew at once it was Johnnie. I called out to him.

"That you, Sis?"

"Aye, just a minute, Johnnie. Ah'm comin' out."

He was waiting for me. He had a smirk on his face and looked pleased with himself.

"Where were you all night?" I said.

"That'd be tellin'!" he said with a wink.

I knew all right where he'd been. He'd stayed the night in a brothel with a whore. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so pleased with himself. He was earning money now with a coal lorry.

"Is faither angry?"

I told him then about Hazel.

"Faither didn't notice ye wisnie there."

Johnnie had gone white.

"So he's taken Hazel Cooper has he? Ah'll get the auld bastard fer that yet!" he said between his teeth.