Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

hauling on the feet to hurry death—but no one was let near the Metyard mother—and the carrion crows wheeling overhead. Mary fixed her gaze on the jerking limbs of Mrs. Metyard for as long as it took, till her eyes watered.
    As the bodies had to stay up for an hour, now was the time for the bringing out of picnics. Doll produced a sweetbread pie, and Mary ate her half with a good enough appetite, though she kept glancing over her shoulder at where the Metyards hung, over the stained sawdust.
    When Turlis's men cut the corpses down smoothly—one man to support each around the hips, another to saw through the rope—there was the usual squabble. Bodies sprawled on the dusty ground, with ruby necklace-prints around their throats. The surgeons' boys, being entitled by law to all Tyburn cadavers, ran in while Turlis and his men beat the families off with sticks. Those in the crowd afflicted by warts snatched at the still-warm hands to rub them on their faces.
    Mary didn't want Collar Day to be over. She pushed through to where the Metyards had been cut down, and on a joyful impulse paid sixpence for an inch of the mother's rope.
    'Half a fuck, that cost,' said Doll with mild reproach.
    'As if you don't drink twice that every day of your life, and piss it out the next!' But Mary did stare at the coarse fibres in her hand. Which half had paid for the rope, she wondered—the pushing in or the pulling out?
    On the way home she realised she'd no money left for supper, and Doll was skint again. So Mary looked out till she found a country fellow with hay in his seams. She brushed against him in the crowd. 'Looking for a sweetheart?' she said, smiling like an angel.
    His eyes bulged; he was too embarrassed to say yes or no. So Mary led him behind some railings on Oxford Street, and convinced the poor blockhead afterwards that the going rate in London was three shillings. She got rust marks all down her pink sack gown, but Doll assured her they'd brush out.

    That long steaming summer she and Doll saw all the sights. They took a party of Dorsetmen to a club Mercy Toft knew where the dancing girls were all Africans or Indians—just to see the fellows' faces, really. The girls moved as fluidly as water. They were called things like Cleopatra, Cocoa Betty, Dusky Sal. Mary wondered what their real names were.
    Other times, Mary and Doll strolled past all the print shops on the Strand to look at the new pictures, laughing at the filthy ones. 'That'll come to naught,' Doll might say, tapping the glass; 'he'll never get it in from that angle.' They went to drink chocolate at Bedlam, and put their faces to the grates to see the lunatics dance. Another night, they watched a house burn in Cheapside, till a maid jumped out of a window on the third story and died of the fall.
    Some nights, some cullies left a foul taste in the mouth, but the answer to that was simple: drink another bottle. Gin blurred all the edges, perfumed all the foulness. 'This life's the only life, ain't it, Mary?' Doll would slur.
    'Yes, my dear,' Mary always replied, 'there's none other so merry.'
    One of the few men Mary ever felt hatred for was the barber who lived downstairs in Rat's Castle. When she begged him to draw out a tooth that was hurting her, that July, he insisted she lie down and pay him before he'd so much as take out his tools. She shut her eyes and squeezed tight to hurry him on. When he tried to kiss her she thought she would gag from the pain.
    By August, London was one great stinking armpit. At St. James's Palace a son was born to Queen Charlotte, 'a bare eleven months after Young Georgie set to work on her!' as Doll put it crudely.
    One sticky afternoon, Mary saw Mr. Armour on the Strand, arm in arm with a fat old fellow, and thought she might as well have a go. 'Three shillings for the pair, gen'men,' she murmured as they passed.
    The young Scot stared straight ahead as if he'd never seen her before in his life, never bent her