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ROSEMARY (alone) She was a good mother. If she hadn't taken up with whoring she could never have given me bread. Nor would I have learnt the art of how to make sex pay without paying the price of gonorrhoea and later the ravages of neuro-syphilis. Poor Mum! But … How happy, how cheerful she was! I wonder why? Does it tickle to feel the spirochaetes as they spire and burrow in the convolutions of one's brain? She certainly used to laugh immoderately as she heard the bombs crash amongst the palaces and the filthy, crowded streets of London; till at last … I wonder who it was who released the atom bomb that brought peace, the blessed meek-eyed Peace whose reign had been so long delayed by these filthy men? I wonder what blackguard sired me? I sometimes think my profound morality and sense of duty must have derived from him. How else could I have had such strong ideas of what was pure and godly and of good report? I could never have become such a smooth hypocrite without it. How she would have enjoyed it! How it would have warmed her heart if she could have seen how her little girl would turn out when she apprenticed me to service – so as to save me from ever depending for my bread on the dangers of whoredom. She used to tell me tales of things she knew about men – very frightening some of them were too.
One day the police came and took away the corpse of her friend who had been battered to death. It was exciting; they caught the murderer. Some of my friends showed me bits out of the paper. ‘What is a sexual partner?’ I asked Mum one day. ‘Wherever did you hear words like that?’ she said. ‘Oh, it was in a piece of newspaper I bought my fish and chips in’, I lied. She didn't believe me and I'm sure she could never have understood what that clever arse of a psychoanalyst said
‘sexual partner’ was. But she could have told him that was what happened to your girlfriend when a respectable public school aristocrat bit off your nipples and thrashed the last spark of life out o