Read Online The Apple by Michel Faber - Free Book Online

only slightly muffled by the cotton and the feathers.
    Oh happy house! supremely blest!
    Where Christ is entertained
    as its most dear-beloved guest
    with selfless love unfeigned .
    Sugar tosses the pillow aside, blinking in the golden glare. An evangelist! A female evangelist! Here in Silver Street, Soho! Is this woman stupider than most, or cleverer? To sing about Christ being entertained with selfless love, right outside a bawdy-house – that must be an act of purest sarcasm, surely? Nobody could be so innocent.
    Unsteady on her feet (for she had wine last night), Sugar shambles to the window and looks down into the alley from her top-floor vantage-point. Her tormentor is a fat matron in a black bonnet, accompanied by a miserable-looking child toting a basketful of pamphlets: two dark blots on the brightly-lit cobbles.
    Set thy sights on Heaven’s gleaming ,
    Look about thee for employ;
    Linger not in idle dreaming;
    Labour is the sweetest joy!
    Sugar shivers where she stands. It’s spring, but not exactly warm. In fact, despite the brilliant sunshine, there’s a wintry nip in the air. She’s slept in her clothes all night, and her sweat is now cooling, making her feel as though she’s stepped out of a bath and wrapped herself in an unpleasantly damp towel. She hugs herself and rubs her thin arms vigorously with her palms.
    The missionary in the street below, sensing movement above her head, glances upwards, but Sugar steps back at once. She’ll display every detail of her naked body to her customers, but she won’t allow passersby to ogle her outside of working hours. Let them pay if they want a look.
    The do-gooder sings louder, sniffing an audience; her voice almost cracks with the force of her delivery, as she flings a new song at Mrs Castaway’s top storey.
    Have I long in sin been sleeping ,
    O, forgive and rescue me!
    Lord! I crave Your showers of blessing
    Let Your mercy fall on me!
    Fall on me? Sugar momentarily considers pulling on a glove, fishing a turd out of her chamber-pot and throwing it down onto the head of this caterwauling ninny – there’s God’s mercy for you! But she’d probably miss, and ruin a glove for nothing. And there’s no guarantee the singing would stop, anyway; these Christian crusaders can be as tenacious as a dog in heat. Better to lose herself in an activity of her own.
    She gets back into bed, still fully dressed, and wraps the bedsheet around her bony shoulders like a shawl. Yawns like a cat. For the duration of the yawn, the sound of the evangelist is suppressed, lost in the bloodstream commotion inside her ears. If she could only yawn for half an hour on end, the woman outside her window would surely hoarsen and go home.
    Next to Sugar’s bed is a stack of books and periodicals. Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right , collected in book form, is topmost, but she won’t read any more of that: she can see where it’s heading. It wasn’t so bad at the start, but now he’s put a strong-minded woman into it, whom he clearly detests, so he’ll probably humiliate or kill her before the story’s finished. And she’s fed up with Trollope’s latest serial, The Way We Live Now – she won’t buy any more instalments, it’s threatening to go on forever, and she’s wasted enough money on it already. Really, she doesn’t know why she persists with Trollope; he may be refreshingly unsentimental, but he always pretends he’s on the woman’s side, then lets the men win. They all do, these novelists, whether they’re male or female: the game is rigged. And the latest Mrs Riddell is worse than usual, and there hasn’t been a tolerable serial in The London Journal for months, only garbage about ghosts and forged wills. In every story she reads, the women are limp and spineless and insufferably virtuous. They harbour no hatred, they think only of marriage, they don’t exist below the neck, they eat but never shit. Where are the authentic, flesh-and-blood women in modern English