Haunted Legends (8 page)

“Do you kiss, love?”
he
says.

“No,” says Ruth. “Never.”

He
buries his mouth into her neck. At least Ruth knows
he
won’t be long now. She stares out into the park dusk over
his
back. It’s dark under the trees; nothing moves but the whores and the rats. No lights shine behind the windows of the big Victorian houses that line the park driveway. No one lives here anymore and most of the houses are in ruin.

As
he
grunts, Ruth stares up at the slate roofs, stained yellow by the glow of the city lights on the clouds, darkest only where the slates have fallen through. And there’s a figure up there. Even from down here Ruth sees its face is twisted, grinning or scowling, she’s not sure, and it twirls arms and legs as if dancing on the rooftops. Its limbs are spindly, gangly, too long.

Ruth rubs her eyes and stares again. The figure is gone.

He
slips out, spent and panting. “You sure you don’t kiss, love? I like a bit of a kiss when I’m done.”

But Ruth is already pulling up her pants to leave.

•  •  •

It’s Tuesday morning and the mission hall is full. The fat women behind the tea urn dole out tea and toast and scornful looks. They shake their jowls as
Ruth passes. They know what Ruth is. Ruth hates the Mission, but in the day, if she’s moved on from her restless sleep behind the bins to the rear of the Easy Rider bicycle shop on the High Street, there’s nowhere else to go. She’s long since learned the church opens its doors only partially to girls like her.

Ruth takes tea and pushes through the rut of unwashed bodies toward the alcove under the stairs. She can hide here, in the dim light. Ruth is more at home in the dark. The priest is less likely to spot her and try to save her. She shivers; how Father Thomas might save her by soaping her breasts in the bath she doesn’t care to know.

The Runt’s here, as is Basil and Lass. Basil surreptitiously tips alcohol into Ruth’s tea.

“It’s a bit early for tea without gin, what,” he says. Lass grips his arm as if she’s feared to let go. “I always say PG Tips alone is no way to start the day.”

“You’ll get us thrown out,” says Lass.

The Runt grins and glances around. “Fuckin’ hope so,” he says. “This place is ripe today, even by my stench. I hear they’re going to knock it down. They’ve found asbestos, and even shit like us are protected from asbestos. I hear there’re holes in the roof.”

Ruth splutters on her tea. For an instant, she’s back in the park, and the devil is dancing on the rooftops, leaping between the broken chimney stacks and grinning down at her. Too long, those legs; too sticklike; too hot, that stare.

“There was someone on the roof last night,” Ruth says, distantly.

“Of the mission?” says The Runt.

“No, on the houses in the park, a strange gangly bloke leaping about. He stared down at me, and his stare burned my face. It made me piss myself.”

“How the devil did he get up there?” says Basil.

“Don’t know, but when I looked back he’d gone.”

“That’s the Spring Heel,” says Lass. “Everybody’s talking about him. You’ve seen Spring Heel Jack.”

“Doesn’t that mean you’re going to die or something?” says The Runt. “Doesn’t he go round slitting prostitutes’ throats?”

Basil kicks The Runt’s shin. “It means too much bloody gin in the tea, old boy. Besides, that’s the Ripper you’re thinking of.”

“Well, they’re all the same, aren’t they?”

Lass grips Basil tighter. “You should look for a beau like mine to look after you,” she says. “Or find another patch to work, somewhere away from the park.”

Somewhere away from the park
. Ruth bows her head. She stares downward at the carpet and the top of The Runt’s head, both balding and tattered. What is there for her away from the park? She has nothing but the tuft of intrigue between her legs. What can she do but dodge the pimps and the sadists?

She glances at Basil—a penniless tramp who believes himself aristocracy—and at Lass—simple and trusting but utterly devoid of self-esteem, who’d quite literally die were she cast adrift from the lifeboat that is Basil’s arm. And The Runt, well, hunched and dwarfed and painfully ugly, what hope is there for him? What hope for any of them?

“I have to work the park,” says Ruth. “It’s all I know.”

•  •  •

That night business is slow. The path lamps are out, and there’s a damp curtain over the park, a blanket that’s more than the early September mists alone. The night is cool, and men aren’t so keen to drop their pants on cool nights. She’ll need to find somewhere inside soon, and that usually means paying a pimp. Pimps mean hidden bruises. Pimps mean the drug culture that’s always scared Ruth. Better to remember what she did the night before, even if it was to fuck balding old men who know they’ll never pull skirt any other way again. And better to have full use of the legs when one of the mad bastards holds a knife on her.

Ruth walks slowly along the park paths. With the mist and the smothering silence, she thinks she could be back in Victorian days. Simpler times when even whores were treated as people. The gentlemen would tip their hat and thank you, Basil had told her, and throw a coin or two’s gratuity as they clambered aboard their hansom cabs. A world away, thinks Ruth. Now they just wipe their dicks on her skirt and run.

Ruth pauses, convinced she hears footsteps behind. It’s not unusual for a punter to follow her for a while; to build up courage if it’s a first time, or to convince himself she’s not working with thugs, or the police, or both.

“Looking for business?” Ruth stares into the gloom.

There is someone there, lurking, ill-defined in the dusk. He’s wheezing, but that’s not unusual. They may be old men, lung-rattling ancients after a
final fling at death’s door. They may be young boys, panting as they ejaculate in their pants and run off with a story for their mates. It takes all sorts and Ruth’s seen them all.

“Twenty quid for full; ten for hand; I don’t do oral and I don’t kiss. Anything else, well, it depends.”

He looms from the darkness. He’s little more than a blur as he passes. Ruth staggers as she’s knocked backwards. The grass is muddy and she slips. The air smells sulphurous and rotten. Ruth’s dress clings cold and wet to her thighs.

“Leave me alone,” she yells.

The man returns, leaping gazellelike in front of her. As he jumps he turns his head toward her. His skin glows putrid green. His teeth are yellowed in an angular jaw. His eyes are bulging in his head. The sulphurous stench is a wind behind him. He laughs, cruel and guttural.

“Go away. I have a pimp. He’ll cut you.”

Thirty feet? Forty? Even in the pitch darkness Ruth sees him leaping lit from within like a will o’ the wisp for her. He turns and heads directly for Ruth. She cowers, covering her head with her hands instinctively, but he leaps again at the last and soars away into the night sky. The dreadful wind washes over her. She can taste its smell and hear its colour.

Ruth sits panting upon the ground.

•  •  •

There’s always confession in the church on Wednesdays. Basil says absolving sins midweek gives Father Thomas Sunday afternoons off. Lass clings to his arm, gazes up at him and nods.

“You’re so clever, Basil,” she says. “You know everything.”

Ruth hesitates by the confessional booth. She’s never seen anything to believe in with the supernatural, on either side for good or evil. It’s always seemed to her to be Ruth and
the world,
and in such a titanic struggle between both there seemed little room for higher powers and greater wonders. But when the devil displays on the darkest of nights, when he dances just for her and her alone, when his stench grips her throat and burns her nose, then to where does she turn?

“I’ve got nothing to confess,” says The Runt. “Fuckin’ pure, me, pure as the driven slush.”

Basil grips Ruth’s arm. “Are you sure you want to do this, old thing?
I mean, Mad Maud went to confession and it lasted a week. She came out all drained and disjointed, like it was only her sins holding her together.”

Basil offers Ruth brandy and she takes a swig. She doesn’t do neat alcohol and it sears her throat. Homeless, barely destitute, it’s hard enough to stay clean to attract punters as it is without stinking of spirits. Without that barest of self-control Ruth knows she’ll be dead in a gutter by Thursday.

“I have to talk to someone,” says Ruth. “Someone in the church. Someone who knows about these things.”

“Father Thomas will want to soap your tits,” says Lass.

The Runt grins. “Aye, and I could do that for you without all the Christian mumbo-jumbo.”

“I have to find out if it’s the devil,” says Ruth. “I have to learn what it wants from me.”

•  •  •

Ruth steps through, into the confessional booth. It’s calm inside, serene such that it takes her breath away. It’s an alien landscape and she’s disorientated, as if she’s stepped through onto the moon. A single candle flickers briefly and settles. At first Ruth thinks she’s alone, but in the stillness she hears Father Thomas shuffle behind the thick, velvet curtain.

“Well, child?” he says at last.

Ruth is shaking. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“You’ve never confessed your sins before?”

“I don’t know what my sins are.”

“We all know what our sins are, child, if we’re really true to ourselves in looking.”

Ruth sighs. “I’ve seen the devil, Father. It came leaping at me from the darkness. I breathed its fetid breath.”

There’s a pause before Father Thomas draws back the curtain. He looks flushed of face. “In a metaphorical sense, of course?”

“It knocked me to the ground, and flew off laughing, and the smell, well, I can still taste it now.”

Father Thomas shakes his head. He stares down at Ruth’s lap, and she covers herself with a palm. Slowly, nervously, she raises and lowers the hem of her skirt.

“I need help, Father, quickly.”

“Come through and I’ll run a bath.” Father Thomas stands briskly. His
ears are pink warm. “Cleanliness is next to godliness. You’ll need your sins washing away. We’ll get you from those dirty clothes and the devil will soon seem far, far away.”

•  •  •

Ruth doesn’t work that night. She lingers at the edge of the park, closer to the main road traffic and the late-night revellers that she can leap toward should the demon return.

“When will we see the devil?” says The Runt.

“I told you he’d want to get you undressed,” says Lass. As usual she’s lodged on Basil’s arm, but he’s well fried on vodka and gin, and it’s no longer certain who is holding whom. “Though it’s what he’s doing fumbling about in his gowns with his other hand that makes me shudder.”

Ruth speaks quietly. She’s more alone in her head than she’s ever been. “Father Thomas only wanted what
he
wanted. He said I was delusional. He had no idea what I was talking about. How can the church not know about the devil? How can the church not care about me if I reach out to it?”

Lass breaks free from Basil’s arm. It’s the first time Ruth has ever seen them not conjoined. Lass lifts Ruth’s chin with a finger and looks into her eyes. Lass’s pupils are flecked green and brown and gold; it adds a depth to her stare Ruth has never seen before.

“The church is self-serving,” says Lass. “I know, because I’ve been abused by Father Thomas and his kind, too. He washed away my sins, once.” Lass grins. “And limped for a week for his trouble. But this isn’t the devil, this is the Spring Heel. There’s a difference, I know. Be true to yourself, Ruth, and perhaps the Spring Heel can help you if you call to him.”

“I say, summon the devil?” says Basil. “What fun.”

“But why would I want to call so hideous a creature?”

“And where do we find him?” says The Runt.

“We must look to the rooftops.” Basil points upward and stumbles through the effort. “I’ve heard tell the Spring Heel can leap the moon.”

•  •  •

If the Spring Heel came that night, he was little more than a shadow that shrieked once across the high clouds. It’s four in the morning and Ruth is no nearer to discovering herself. Lass, when back connected to Basil at the arm, loses all the lucent insight she’d displayed earlier. It’s as if Basil is leaching her personality, and Ruth has long since grown impatient questioning her
about the Spring Heel. Basil is so drunk he can barely breathe. The Runt stands twitching in his sleep in a nearby doorway.

Ruth pauses at the park gates. To the east, a hint of dawn lingers behind the black treetops. It could be dawn, or an onrushing fire to consume the world, thinks Ruth. She shivers, though she’s not cold. There was a time when she’d see only the beauty of the dawn, not fear what the new day might bring. There was a time when demons and monsters were just the stuff of nightmares and fairy tales, of fears that flew before the light of day.

But now
he’s
out there, somewhere, this ghostly devil dancing on the trees or the rooftops or the clouds or the moon. Perhaps he’s close by, watching her from some high eyrie. Perhaps he’s ready to swoop down and carry her off to some unspeakable Hell. Ruth reaches beneath her skirt and scratches at a rash developing on her labia. She sighs. Every man that’s ever used her has taken her partway there anyway.

•  •  •

It’s signing-on day, and the DSS on Lord Street is full. Ruth sits silently waiting while Basil and Lass queue for handouts. Ruth’s chair bleeds rubber foam to the piss-stained carpet from an ugly gash in its plastic. It can barely support her weight, but then neither can Ruth. Her vision is spinning and her neck is warm. She’s been sick down her dress, and there’s likely more to come.

Above a sign that says
Benefit Fraud Is Everyone’s Problem,
an old television set hangs from the ceiling on dulled chains. Ruth peers up at it, squinting to focus. The colours are washy and
wrong,
and the picture fights roll and black static.

On the screen, some wanker in a sharp suit spreads news of a world bent on Ruth’s exclusion. Her world is the park, the bins behind Easy Rider, the mission’s soup kitchen, and little else. Hers is a rock pool that’s barely heard of the ocean.