Already There

The black night is where I belong and where I can come alive. If you can call the pitiful existence I breathe through being alive. I work in a field that hardly puts me in a good light. The streets of London make for an interesting setting for somebody trying to believe they are alive. There are only a few ways I know the fact is true and I am not just some wondering corpse. There is the pounding of my heart I can feel in my ears every time there is news of another death in Whitechapel and also the breath I can see on the bitter air in the brutal winters where all I have are my talents and wits to survive. And as I grow older they are both deteriorating dramatically. The air is always coarse and nearly impossible to breathe in the wintertime – but it is still vile even when cold. The combined stench of smoke, alcohol and lewd excrements are what make up the air we breathe in the East-end, but the air is far from the bulk of our worries.

Every night all the women in the district sell the only possession they can call their own over and over again purely for the purpose of earning enough pennies to put a piece of bread on the table. That’s usually all the most of them can afford to buy – one piece of bread and a room to sleep in if you is lucky; but only very lucky. The most of them just try not to get bit by one of the thousands of rats and vermin, in the doorway of a house someone more fortunate than the rest of us has the money to live in. Not many of us avoid the rats – one bite and you have no real chance of living much longer. The diseases don’t touch any of us though; maybe we’re so sick in the head that no one can tell the difference. No matter, whatever it is we catch the only ones who really suffer are the stupid bastards who pay us so they can feel like they own one of us – if only for a few moments. Maybe its God’s way of punishing them for playing away from their wives and children with one of the whores in Whitechapel. I don’t know – don’t really care. All I know is how to survive the next day.

We all survive together; Liz, Cathy, Mary and me. A couple of days ago I could have said Polly too, but she’s dead now. I didn’t see the body and I’m damned glad for it – I heard enough from people who did see to know it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened here. And that’s saying something with the reputation of this place. Mary says she used to live in Ireland – next to the sea, I’ve never seen the ocean; I lived in London all my life. So did the other four, except Mary I mean. There are only three of us now…

Maybe less if they don’t catch the bastard who did this. We banded together tonight and stayed in the same place; I hope my fiends make it through. This desperation to survive has reached its absolute peak and I can feel in my bones that the worst is yet to come. Food and not keeling over in the middle of the street used to be the biggest problems – now we gotta make sure we don’t end up with our blood splattered all over the cobbles. They say the grass is always greened on the other side; I don’t know who said it, I never was very bright, but there’s no way he ever came here. I hope. The only place in the world that this squalor could be worse than is hell itself – unless we’re not already there.