The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Page A

farther apart…!’
    They giggle and fidget as the pigeons flutter all around, alighting on their bonnets, clawing at their outstretched arms, settling on their shoulders – anywhere the seed has spilled. Despite the flurry of movement so near their eyes, they do their best not to blink, hoping the decisive moment will catch them in a good light.
    The photographer’s head moves to and fro beneath his hood, he tenses his entire body, and then there’s a shudder of release. Inside his camera, a chemical image of Sugar and Caroline is born.
    ‘A thousand thanks, ladies,’ he says at last, and they know that this means goodbye: not au revoir , but farewell. He has taken all he wants from them.
    ‘Did you ’ear what ’e said?’ says Caroline as they watch him carry his trophies towards Charing Cross. ‘For all time. All time . It couldn’t be true, could it?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Sugar, pensively. ‘I’ve been to a photographer’s studio once, and I’ve stood next to him in the dark room while he made the pictures appear.’ Indeed she remembers holding her breath in the red light, watching the images materialising in their shallow font of chemicals, like stigmata, like spirit apparitions. She considers telling Caroline all this, but knows the older woman would require each word explained. ‘They come out of a bath,’ she says, ‘and I’ll tell you what: they stink . Anything that stinks so much can’t last forever; I’m sure.’ Her frown is hidden under her thick fringe: she isn’t sure, at all.
    She’s wondering if the photographs taken of her at that photographer’s salon will last forever, and hoping they don’t. At the time, while the business was being done, she felt no qualms, and posed naked beside potted plants, in stockings by a curtained bed, and up to her waist in a tub of tepid bathwater. She didn’t even have to touch anyone! Lately, however, she’s come to regret it – ever since one of her customers produced a thumb-worn photograph of an awkward-looking naked girl and demanded that Sugar strike exactly the same pose with exactly the same kind of hand-brush, of which he’d thoughtfully brought his own. It was then that Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of her bedroom, they vanish the moment they’re over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.
    You would probably think, if I showed you photographs of Sugar, that she needn’t have worried. Oh, but they’re charming, you’d say – innocuous, quaint, even strangely dignified! A mere century and a bit – or say, eleven dozen years later – and they’re suitable for reproduction anywhere, without anyone thinking they might deprave and corrupt the impressionable. They may even be granted an artistic halo by that great leveller of past outrages, the coffee-table book. Unidentified prostitute, circa 1875 , the book might say, and what could be more anonymous than that? But you would be missing the point of Sugar’s shame.
    ‘Imagine, though,’ says Caroline. ‘A picture of you still bein’ there, ’undreds of years after you’ve died. An’ if I pulled a face, that’s the face I’d ’ave for ever … It makes me shiver, it does.’
    Sugar strokes the edge of her parcel absently as she thinks up a way to steer the conversation into less tainted waters. She stares across the square at the National Gallery, and her painful memory of the hand-brush man fades.
    ‘What about painted portraits?’ she says, recalling Caroline’s exaggerated admiration for an art student who once fobbed her off, in lieu of payment, with a sketch he claimed was of the Yorkshire dales. ‘Don’t they make you shiver?’
    ‘That’s different,’