I, Ripper

There was a last bit of business. Since my pseudonym, Horn, was affiliated with music, it occurred to Henry Bright that I should write crime under my own name. Gad, I didn’t want that, as I had aspirations of mingling with the quality and wanted no whiff of blood floating about my presence. So he said, “All right, then, lad, come up with something else. Dickens called himself Boz; certainly you can do better than that.”

“I can,” I said, and reached into my past to something only my sister, Lucy, had called me, as her child’s tongue could not manage my initials and they had eroded into a single syllable. “Call me Jeb.”

Sept. 5, 1888

Dear Mum,

I know how you worry, so I thought I’d write and tell you that all is fine here, even if you never answer me, even if I never send it. I know how disappointed you are in me, at the low way I turned out, and I wish it had been different, but it ain’t, and there you have it.

Anyhow, I didn’t know the girl that got cut. There’s a lot of us down here and our friends are usually in the same area, a block or so, and poor Polly was out east, near a mile. Never laid an eye on the poor thing. We’re all talking about it, and we all feel pretty safe down here. We’re always together, and as I gets it from the newspapers, poor Polly was all alone on a dark road and the fellow that done her just did it for her purse and the thrill it gave him, and now he’s gone and won’t be back again. They’ve increased the coppers everywhere because the newspapers have made such a big skunk about it, so all of us believe he’s long gone and won’t be coming back, and if he does, it won’t be this year or even the next.

Other than the fright it give me at first, I am fine. I have so many things to say to you, I wish I talked and wrote better to get them all out. I know what upsets you and Da the most is the s-x. Really, that’s the smallest thing in my life. You get used to it early, and it comes to not mean nothing. It just happens, it’s over in a second, and you go on, it’s all forgotten.

As for the blokes, you’d think I’d be down on them, but I’m not. Most seem like gentlemen. I’ve never been cuffed about, nor coshed, nor robbed. Nobody has ever forced himself onto me against my will. Even the coppers, at least the ones in uniform, are nice enough to us gals. They have no interest in hurting us or “punishing” us, we’re just something they get used to fast down here, and they don’t want no bother from us, only to get through the day like we do, and go on home to the missus.

My problem ain’t never been the blokes, or the s-x they wants. Don’t all men want that? They’re going to get it one way or the other, is how I sees it. No, what my problem has been, ever since I were a little girl, is the demon gin. I do like my gin. I like my gin so much. All the girls down here drink it for the way it makes them feel and the happiness it brings. You and Da and Johnto never had no idea how young I was when I started it and how it explained all the trouble that I got into and why no matter how the nuns and priests talked to me and Da smacked me and you squashed me with that look you get when you’re disappointed – do I know that look! – it was always the gin that was behind it, and here I am all these years later, sometimes down and out, having lost everything, even a bed to sleep in, and all I think about is the gin.

I call it my disease. I can’t do nothing without thinking about it, and when I have it, I am happy. My happiness comes out in my singing, which I love, which is my way of telling the world that don’t otherwise notice I exist. Sometimes, too, I know, I can get pretty uppity on gin. I won’t let nobody tell me what to do when I am fortified up, because it don’t seem nobody knows any better than me, that’s how strong and good I feel.

I will tell you, Mum, they’ll never take the gin away. If reformers close the shops and burn down the gin factories, someone’ll figure out how to do it under the tracks or in a cellar nobody don’t know about, and it’ll be back on the streets in a day and I’ll be first in line.

Mum, I know you don’t want to hear that, but I have to tell it anyway, because it’s the truth. Mum, I miss you so much and remember such good times and how tender you always was with me before the sickness. I remember Johnto and Paul and the others and how happy we all was. I wished it had never changed, but it did and we went where we did and done what we done.

I love you, Mum.

Your daughter

Mairsian

CHAPTER FIVE The Diary

September 5, 1888