Mariel stared up at a sky that swirled with cold, grey clouds.
It was getting dark and she couldn’t feel much anymore.
She wondered if she should be thankful for the ending of her life or should she be fearful of the wrathful coming of God’s punishment.
For that is what Father George said, “Be Warned! All whores are damned by God to spend some time in hell satisfying the devils lust for fornication!”
Mariel thought it was unfair that God would make her a whore and then damn her for being what he had wanted her to be.
She was born of a prostitute mother and opium addicted stranger for a father who abandoned her without a second thought on the night she was conceived.
It had been a foregone conclusion that Mariel would follow in her mother’s footsteps becoming a prostitute at the age of ten.
For two years she and her mother had lived a quite well with the extra money men would pay to have their way with a young girl.
As they told their friends, Mariel’s mother raised the price, for Mariel was a novelty in the unwholesome, squalid world of lust avarice and desire.
The things the men did hurt and made Mariel feel wrong but her mother would scold her if she complained and call her ungrateful. She should feel flattered for the gentlemen’s generosity to want to spend time with her.
So something, somewhere inside Mariel learnt to switch off to the place where she felt the outside world coming into her and she found a place where she didn’t feel the pain or the wrong anymore, a place where she could be safe.
Because its beauty lies in the intensity of its impermanence, it is the nature of desire to be transient, therefore all things novel have a short life span.
As Mariel grew older and looked less like a little girl, the clients disappeared and the money stopped. Men with their tastes weren’t interested in a thirteen year old whose body was starting to turn into a woman.
Her mother blamed her for their ill fortune as though Mariel had changed her body on purpose.
She had offered the unique service of selling her daughter sexually to the elite of the powerful upper class, enjoying their favour while becoming wealthy and though while not being accepted, she was mildly tolerated.
This had put her above a lot of others in the pecking order of the neighbourhood and she had lived the highlife, reveling in “wiping their nose on my arse” as she often liked to say of her rivals, knowing that her powerful friends with the bizarre tastes would be most upset if anything happened to her or her daughter.
Even though now the pain of loss of money and being out of favour with those who held the power was soul destroying, she was also without their protection and was now fair game, it was payback time.
So she began spending whatever money she could trying to drink herself to death before her sins caught up with her.
She became the whore of a thug called Mad Mike.
He had a bit of money and could protect her from the other predators always on the lookout for a woman to own who would satisfy their needs whenever they wanted.
Mariel’s mother paid a big price for this protection because she was not only his whore but also his punching bag.
The name Mad Mike was not for nothing,
When he became violent he would lose all sense of reason and everyone became someone who wanted to hurt him.
Mad mike was not from the slums and garbage bins of early 19th century London, he had been born into a respectable, god fearing, middle class family that had whipped him with chains of guilty sins and vengeful oppression, shaping him into a man who was adept at manipulation, violent intimidation, vengeful thievery and obscene abuse against whoever reminded him of the overwhelming fear that gnawed constantly at his guts and the few remaining scraps of decency that were left inside there.
When the world became a place he could not control, he would lose himself in the fear of those whipping chains once more and he would lash out to hurt, as he had been hurt, usually killing people who did not deserve to die for their perceived transgressions.
After one of these killings, Mad Mike would celebrate his brave and violent nature until he fell into unconsciousness and when he woke from the drunken stupor, he would spend the next few weeks brooding in a dark place deep inside where no one could hear him, not even God, and he would ask himself the question he feared most - what would be his punishment.
All sorts of tortures lit the fires of his imagination, sparks from the hell fire and damnation sermons his preacher father would shout and abuse him with before they could eat their evening meal.
Mariel’s mother had died one afternoon after Mad Mike had come home in a drunken rage at losing some money while gambling.
He was sure the other man, who was higher up the pecking order than Mad Mike and therefore had more powerful friends, had been cheating but Mad Mike couldn’t do anything about it without coming off the worse for his troubles.
So it was time for Mariel’s mother to be a punching bag again as Mad Mike took his anger and rage at the card cheater, out on her.
Her weak and already bruised body could take no more and as each hit thumped the life out of her, she died thinking that because she had lived out Gods plan for her life as best she could, he would show her kindness and mercy and make her stay in hell as short as possible.
Mariel who had been hiding under the bed during the murder, knew she had to gather what little she owned and leave before
Mad Mike, who had collapsed into an unconscious slumber after killing her mother, came to.
She had no desire to be his new whore and punching bag.
She was now thirteen and no longer the fresh and inviting novelty she had once been to men.
There were now plenty of girls younger than her that caught their eye and favour. She knew her only chance at paying for some food and shelter from the approaching cold of the night, was to go to the public gardens where men came to find young girls up who were still young girls.
It was a place where there were no questions asked and anything goes.
She walked into the public gardens, avoiding the policemen who wandered through the park turning a blind eye to the goings on as long as they received payment in the form of sex or a part of the nights takings, most weren’t fussy.
Mariel stood back from the path a little in the shadow of some trees hoping to hide her developing body and attract a wealthy gentleman.
It wasn’t long before a large fat man dressed in an evening suit approached her.
He looked like a wealthy gentleman on his way to the opera and would be able to pay her well for the things he asked her to do.
As he lent over and whispered his needs into her ear, she tried hard not to gag at the smell of his foul breath. Most of them had foul breath as though they were just as rotten on the inside as they were on the outside.
She nodded her head and followed him as he led her into the privacy of some surrounding trees.
Finding somewhere they would not be disturbed, she closed her eyes as his roaming hands began to feel her body and escaped into that safe place where no one could really touch her or ever hurt her.
It didn’t take long before Mariel knew something was wrong.
The gentleman had been caressing her neck but his hands didn’t move on, they began to squeeze, harder and harder and when Mariel raced out of her safe place and opened her eyes, she saw her choking self, reflected in the madness of his bulging, angry eyes.
She fought kicking and scratching at his face, digging her fingers into one of his eyes.
He screamed, letting go of her as he tried to push his ruined eye back into its socket.
She fell to the ground fighting to breathe through her bruised larynx and tried to gather her wits.
A voice inside of her yelled to run and she did.
She ran in the first direction she looked at and kept running, out of the park and into the street, straight in front of a passing carriage.
The horses bowled her over and she fell beneath them, her head being first hit by their iron shod hooves and then run over by one of the carriage wheels.
Not wanting to become involved, the wealthy passenger in the cab ordered the carriage driver to drive on, leaving Mariel lying in an empty street staring up at the darkening sky.
As she lay dying, she wondered if she had locked the door to that safe place when she’d left, because she wouldn’t be needing to go back there any more.
It began to snow and through her fading eyes she watched a snowflake gently floating down to softly rest on the side of her face.
She smiled, because its tender touch was one of the most beautiful things Mariel had ever felt in all of her short, tragic life.