Hazel turned away angrily. She was beginning to notice that she had been bitten by bugs during the night. She climbed on to the bed and began to examine her spots one by one.
Johnnie was fascinated by her. He couldn't keep his eyes off her now. Her movements were soft. Her flesh had quivered enticingly as she had climbed on to the bed. The skin of her buttocks was smooth, like the surface of mercury.
"Ye got yer eye filt?" Razor King said to Johnnie with a sneer.
"Aw, shut yer fuckin mouth!" Johnnie said, turning on him.
For a moment it looked as though my father was about to strike him, but Razor King's anger left him almost at once. He decided to take it as a compliment. He laughed again and said he could understand Johnnie's jealousy. Then he walked over to the bed and with two fingers began to play with Hazel's cunt. She stiffened and shot a glance over Razor King's shoulder at Johnnie. Razor King was making the sound one makes to a cat, teasing her pubic hairs.
A moment later, with obvious effort, Johnnie turned on his heel and went out. As the door closed, my father bellowed with laughter, slapped Hazel playfully on the belly, and turned to me and asked for his breakfast.
"This is Gertie," he said.
— 4-
"Gertie'll stay."
Breakfast was over.
My father was sharpening one of his razors on a leather strop. Hazel, with my coat across her shoulders, was smoking a cigarette and trying to appear calm. But I knew she wasn't. I knew she couldn't be.
I asked her if she wanted another cup of tea to give her time, but she said she didn't.
"Clear the table," my father said.
I did so. At the same time I brought the iodine and the bandage. It was a ritual. I had officiated before. Seven women I had seen spread-eagled naked on this table, the operating table. And always the same smell. The female sweat. For they all sweated as they first sat and then lay back across the hard wood. Some more than others. It stood out like little needle points on their muddy white skin. Almost an execution. And the faint smell of rum. My father always gave them a swig of rum before he began. I remembered the last woman, Sadie Bell. A big-arsed woman with big breasts. She couldn't control herself. Even before the first cut she began to piss. Razor King beat her up for that. She had welts all over her when she lay down again in her own mess to be cut. I was hoping nothing like that would happen with Hazel. I wondered what I would do myself if I had been in her place. But I knew I never would be. Only Razor King marked his women. No one else would have dared.
Hazel had put on lipstick. There was a dark red smear on the end of her cigarette. Her mouth was sullen and yet relaxed. Her almond-shaped green eyes — greener because of the striking redness of her hair — expressed nothing.
Did she know? Was it possible she hadn't heard? I didn't think so. Everyone knew, everyone in the Gorbals anyway, that no woman came to Razor King's house without receiving his mark. It was an unwritten law. I had often heard women discussing it. And sometimes in a dim-lit doorway, groups of girls would get together with a lipstick and play at "marking" a little vermilion cross on the left thigh, three inches from the cunt. I had painted one on myself often although I was perhaps the only girl in the Gorbals who could never carry the authentic one.
Razor King was pouring some rum into a glass. He poured it liberally, about the size of two doubles.
He carried it across to her.
She looked up at him questioningly.
"Drink that," he said. His voice was almost gentle.
She accepted it meekly and drank.
"Take yer time, hen," he said. "We've all day."
She nodded.
"When ye're ready," he said, "just lie doon across the table. On yer back."
At that moment Johnnie came in again. He took in the situation with a glance. He knew what was going on.
"Branding day," he said sarcastically.
"Get awa oot o'here!" Razor King said.
Johnnie ignored his father.
"Yer faither's doonstairs," he said to Hazel.
Hazel's eyes flashed.
Razor King glanced at her and then back at Johnnie.
"Get awa doon an tell him to go on hame!"
"He won't listen to me," Johnnie said.
I could see Johnnie was enjoying himself. He was looking derisively at Hazel, who pulled my coat tighter around her naked body.
"Hey there, John Gault! Come on doon here tae the street like a man!"
The voice came from the street, two stories below.
Razor King swore.
"It's auld Cooper. Her faither," Johnnie said with a grin.
Razor King reached for his cap.
"Wait, Razor King!"
Hazel ran over to the window and opened it.
"Away hame, faither! A came here o ma own free will! Away on hame!"
"Ye bliddy wee whore!" the voice come back. "If ye're no doon here in two meenutes ah'm comin up fur ye!"
"Ah'll kill the auld bastard!" Razor King snarled, but before he reached the door, Hazel had thrown herself naked on to his arm.
"It's no him ye'll mark, Razor King!"
She was trembling; the slick white slats of her flesh pressed against his raggedly clothed body.
Johnnie had stepped into the room and was standing beside the fire warming his hands.
Razor King put one arm round the panting woman and lifted her bodily into his arms. He carried her across to the table.
"Lock the door, Gertie," he said to me. "An' you see that no one comes in here!" he said to Johnnie who nodded, pretending to be uninterested.
Hazel was breathing heavily. She was spread-eagled like a starfish on top of the wooden table, the lower part of her legs, which were bent at the knees, hanging down over its edge. With each hand she grasped one edge of the table as though to brace herself against shock. The back of her neck fitted at the fourth edge. In that position the middle part of her young and ripe torso, radiating in every muscle and hair a living shudder, was bared to her executioner. I returned from the door and stood over her, looking down. Gently I placed my hand on her lean belly just above the strong and hairy torque of her mound. She smelled of sweat like the others. It was at the armpits, at the navel, under my hand, and at the warm pit between her trembling thighs. I wondered what she was feeling. She had closed her eyes. In my other hand I held a piece of cotton soaked in iodine, ready to swab the wound. With his left hand my father gripped her just above the left knee. Like a strong clamp. And then, his eyes narrowed, and still wearing his cap, which he hadn't bothered to remove, he leaned down, his face over her thigh, and with his right hand he touched the blade of the gleaming razor to the taut skin. It broke apart almost magically in a thin red line. Hazel's torso shuddered under my hand. I laid my left forearm across her chest just above her coral-tipped breasts to prevent her from rising. She appeared to derive comfort from this movement. She exhaled her breath, her nostrils quivering, and seemed, in spite of the pain she must have felt, to give herself over entirely to the cutting razor.
My father worked swiftly, cutting two minute triangles of flesh from the thigh. The blood was flowing like a small tide when he finally wiped his razor on his sleeve.
Hazel uttered a sharp gasp of pain as I applied the iodine-soaked cotton to the wound. The tears were running down her face. As I bandaged her thigh I heard Johnnie laughing. Razor King was looking at him. Dumb. Like a wolf. But Johnnie laughed. He went on laughing.
— 5-
Night fell early in the Glasgow slum. At half past four in the afternoon I lit the oil lamp and sat down with the News of the World in front of the fire.
The rest of the day had passed uneventfully. Old Cooper, still hurling threats at our window, had finally been led away by some of the men. But he was not to get off so lightly. Razor King never forgot an insult. One night a few weeks later, old Cooper was badly slashed by an unknown razor slasher on his way to work. Everyone knew it was my father's work, but as usual, there were no witnesses and the victim kept silent. Cooper lost his job and, half-blind and emaciated, he took to selling bootlaces in the street. I speak of this simply to emphasize the fact that it never paid to cross Razor King. The latter's position depended entirely on his reputation for the most savage brutalities. Thus, sooner or later, a man who had crossed him would find himself confronted in a quiet place by a man half-mad, more wolf than man, razors flashing and hob-nailed boots kicking. Cooper was just one of a long series of broken victims. His fate excited pity in no one, not even, I believe, in Hazel who, having been brought up in the slums with a knowledge of all their brutal conventions, looked upon her father as an old fool, just as she would have considered it foolish for a man to try to stop an avalanche with his fists. Anyway, since she had come to bear Razor King's mark, she had become his woman, and as her fate was intimately bound up with the fate of her man, her first loyalty was naturally to him.