The Journal of Dora Damage(124)

He tried to continue with the sewing-frame, but I could see it was hard for him.

‘Come, Din. Help me here. It might be easier for you. Hold the leather for me, won’t you? Would that Jack were here.’

‘You miss him, ma’am,’ he said as he stood up and came over to the bench.

‘I do, Din. He was very dear to me.’

Din held two opposite corners of the olive-green leather for me, as he had done once before. I was close to his neck; I could see the depth of last night’s injury. I should have offered to dress it, but I feared the intimacy. I searched for something else I could say to express my sadness about Jack, but the words did not come out now we were in range of each other’s breathing.

As I pasted, Din finally proferred something like an answer to my questions. ‘Sometimes, ma’am, I need to feel less than human. But also, it can make me feel more human. It reminds me of what I’ve got to lose.’

‘Do you need reminding, Din?’ I said quietly, not looking up.

‘Maybe we all do.’

‘Indeed.’ And his statements got me thinking of the pictures in the crates, and I escaped into a new train of thought as if to prove to him that I was not distracted by his presence. ‘Do they – they – by which I mean, the Noble Savages,’ for there was no escaping it now, ‘possibly they need reminding – possibly they – they – need these,’ I waved the brush at the crates, ‘these pictures, these words, this violence – in order to feel more human.’

‘Or less.’

‘Or less, indeed. I think I am starting to understand you now, Din.’

‘We have young aristocrats at the fights too,’ he added.

‘They come to watch? To wager?’

‘To fight. A young Smith-Pemberton, fresh from Eton. A young Gallinforth, trainin’ to be an officer,’ he said knowingly. ‘These names mean somethin’ to you, ma’am?’

‘I don’t believe you!’ I said. And yet I did. I could not look up from the leather.

‘We’ve all got our demons. Money don’t mean nothin’ when you’re beatin’ the brains out of someone in the East End. They can’t do it up West, can they? You’d be surprised who you find there. I don’t know many men who don’t feel the need to beat somebody else up once in a while.’

‘But the tanners: surely they face enough blood in their daily toil?’

He shrugged, then grimaced.

‘And they don’t do it for money?’

‘No.’

‘Do you do it because – because the others are white?’

‘They’re not, not all o’ them. Colour doesn’t come in to it when you’re head to foot in blood. Although bein’ black, it don’t show too bad much when I’m bleedin’.’

‘I would call that a disadvantage.’

‘Blood shows them how strong they are. If they can’t see it, they feel weak. As long as you can stand the pain, you never let them see how much you’re bleedin’.’

I was feeling weak by now; I thought at first that I was feeling queasy at all this talk of blood, but he was leaning slightly further in to me now, and in my head our cheeks brush, and I pull away, and lean in to him once more, only this time slowly, so the hairs on our bodies have to reach for sensation before our skin presses more tightly, and then we move our heads a little, to enhance the tingling feeling, and then my lips find his nose and I kiss it, and my eyelashes flutter like a butterfly’s wings across his brow, and I catch close his round brown eyes, and the old scars like fossils in the solid rock of his face, but warm, so warm, and alive, and the fresh wound open and gaping like his mouth into which I am now falling, falling, but I hold on to his teeth, his jagged teeth which are eating my lips, and I hang on, but still I am sinking and drowning and dying for breath, and my chest heaves in the quest for air, heaves and thrusts into him, swelling and shrinking, reaching and fading, and his hands hold me up and he is the pillar which supports me, my column of strength, but then he falls too, down, down, and I look down and see him climbing up my legs, my skirts bunching upwards towards me, he rises and his hands encircle my calves, my knees, my thighs, and still he is rising, and I can’t see his face for he is tasting his way blind, up and up, and then I want to come crashing down over on around him, but I don’t because it is so sweet here, with his tongue pulsing a nether heartbeat inside me, then his fingers renew the thrust while his mouth sucks, and I well and swell and clutch at the bench to keep me here, on the brink, as long as I can, and my hand seizes something, and I don’t know what it is.