11

The landlord Kane called on them, in response to complaints. ‘Heavy treading,’ Kane said, ‘that’s what I hear.’

‘God damn,’ said Claffey, ‘he’s a giant, what do you expect, fairy footsteps?’

Kane glared at Claffey. ‘Wrap it, Skin-pate, or you’re out on your ear.’

‘Claffey does have a point,’ said Joe.

The Giant lay on his back on the floor and pretended to be asleep. He gave false snores.

‘Them people below pay good money,’ Kane said. ‘Clients of mine. They say the freak is walking all day and night.’

‘It is called pacing,’ Joe explained. ‘He is restless and ill-at-ease. He is homesick, I think.’

‘You ought to sell him,’ Kane said. ‘What’s the good now? All novelty’s worn off. You could hire him out as a whole gang of labourers.’

‘He’ll not do manual work,’ Joe said. ‘Not that he is too proud, but he says his muscles are tearing off the bone.’

‘Have you ever considered you could swap him?’

‘I’d certainly swap him for a sapient pig, if one could be got.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s a good act,’ said Kane. ‘Tibor the Terrible Tartar.’

‘Tibor,’ said Slig. ‘I know the lad. His father’s from Cork.’

‘Nothing between the ears,’ said Kane, ‘but will bestride two horses at once, standing up, and catch an orange on a fork.’

‘And is he for sale?’

‘Only that one of the steeds is coughing and ready for the knackers, so he’s looking for finance, cut somebody in on a percentage. Think about it.’ Kane looked down at the Giant. ‘What’s that his head’s resting on?’

‘His money bag.’

‘By the lights!’ said Kane.

‘There is one that still likes Charlie,’ said Jankin, piping up from the corner.

‘And who’s that?’

‘The crocus,’ said Jankin. ‘Anatomy.’

‘Which anatomy?’

‘Hunter,’ Joe Vance said.

‘Hunter, is it?’ Kane rubbed his chin. On his way out he carefully inspected the chair with the dint. He frowned over it, wobbled it from side to side. He left, increasing their rent as he did so.

‘So how was the Crown?’ the Giant asked, a week later. ‘It’s your only haunting-ground, now.’

Pybus slapped his chest. ‘Brave and bloody,’ he said. ‘We’re singing a song called Sandman Joe, we don’t understand the words but it’s very vulgar, an ill-used horse is in it so Jankin went out of the room.’

‘And who taught you this song?’

‘Mester Howison, the surgeon’s man. He will drink with Irish, there’s no harm in him. Bully Kane was there, our landlord, and Con Claffey, and Bully Slig.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Mester Howison asked after you,’ said Claffey. ‘How is Charles Byrne these days, was how he put it.’

Nights sharp as a scalpel. Spring frozen, sap locked into the trees. Wullie Hunter has gout, an ailment he despises. Day and night he is in pain. The Giant thinks, If I die, how will they bury me? The ground is harder than a bailiff’s heart.

Wullie feels, within himself, an unaccustomed heaviness. He would mention it to his brother, if they were on terms.

The Giant says, ‘Joe, whenever I pass a stairhead, I feel an attraction to fall down it.’

Bitch Mary comes home with her face beaten in.

Joe says, These are not the days we have known.

John Hunter keeps to his routine. He rises in the dark, and rinses his mouth in water that has stood since the night before. He pisses—an activity less painful than formerly—and rubs grit out of his eyes. He strokes his bristling chin, he scrubs his white freckled body and dabs it with his linen towel. He begins dissecting before six, and the frigid dawn peeps in at his indecencies, at his scoured-raw hands hauling bowel, at his excised bladders and hearts thrown in a dish.

At nine, he breaks off for breakfast. Gooseberries in a mutton tart remind him of eyes rolling on the slab. Eyes reminds him of optics, optics reminds him of that Swiss devil Marat with his increasingly twisted-up and mad set of theories about the nature of light. Where is Marat this morning? Hunter stops eating, and starts imagining. His pulse shoots up. He pushes his pie aside. Remembers brother James, jiggling like a half-disjointed idiot on the stool in the kitchen at Long Calderwood; and how sister Dolly tenderly placed an extra log on the fire, at the sight of him. James with his cheeks blazing, his cold sweat, his bones fighting out through the skin. Marat reckoned he could cure tisick and bone-rot, cure the pox too, and if he could do either or any it was from gab gab gab, his continental blawflum and the gradual, creeping, magnetising power of his gold-striped eyes—gentle as sin, God rot him.

Put off his breakfast by thoughts of Marat and other malpractitioners, he would receive his patients. He would go on his rounds, and dine at four. He put little on his plate, he drank no wine. (Wine and, even more, spirits disposes to springing skullsplitters, headaches so vast, so penetrating, so mobile, that he feels some vast satanic fisherman has gaffed him through the hard palate and is working him to land.) He would leave the table as soon as good manners allowed, and go to lie down for an hour; but this time for recuperation, if he had dined too heavy, was filled with the heaving spectres of democrats, and the dead. When he rose, he would dictate case-notes, or write them up himself. He would prepare a lecture, or deliver one. By twelve midnight, the household was in bed; and he alone, walking till one or two, listening to the clocks as they struck across the city.

Five years ago—he consults his notebooks, and sees it was five years ago now—he took a turn for the stranger—his routine broken, his patients deserted and referred elsewhere, while for ten days he lay suspended it seemed on air, his body spinning, faster and faster spinning. This was stage one: waking in the night, to this gyroscopy.

Stage the second: he was two feet long.

Stage third: John Hunter’s feet lost. He can move them, but they are someone else’s. He can’t claim ownership, despite the motive power.

In this stage, he can’t stand the light. They close the shutters but he begs to be blindfolded; not that anyone can understand his speech. A noise makes him scream: any noise, the hoofs of horses clip-clop in Jermyn Street, the buzz of a fly blunting its head in the corner, or Anne’s voice calling out, Oh, the post’s come. The harpsichord-clavichord-any-bloody-chord, hammer or quill on string, they hurt his viscera, pluck liver and lights, pluck and plick, conducing to shriek, and a sort of terrible silent sobbing inside himself, which occasionally lurches up into his throat and batters at the back of his clenched teeth: in which he’s saying, Bring me Mesmer, bring me Marat, bring me any bleeding bollocking quack you care to name—pay him to stop it, stop it happening, stop it happening now.

Stage fourth. After ten days, he’s out of bed, leaning on an arm. He claims kinship with his feet—he knows, intellectually, that they belong to him—and he accepts that he has returned to his true size. Colour is unreliable; the fire burns purple in the hearth, and no one will explain why this is so. There is no centre in him, so he can’t balance. His hands swim in dislocating space. They feel their way towards nothing. If he wants to put his hand on an object, he has swiftly to calculate the distance, and watch his hand as it moves. If he wants to plant his feet, he has to predetermine where they’ll rest, heel and toe. It’s as if something’s gone inside, as if his spring were broken.

And now, in times of violence and cold weather, he sometimes feels the wash of nausea, sees through slitted eyes the city jaundiced, which he takes to be a warning, for this yellow pigmentation stained his world for ten days before the strangeness and the pain arrived inside him.

After this, Anne persuaded him to Bath. He drank the waters. He still believed he would die. He slept lightly and had dreams in which blood ran down the walls, and it was his. Returning to London, he went to the meeting of a committee, at St George’s. The agenda swam before his eyes. The faces around him adopted singular arrangements, eyes on top of nose, nose floating off to the left, teeth detaching themselves and falling with a soundless clatter to the table top. The chairman rapped on this table top with his pencil, Come on, John Hunter. Keep up.

John Hunter is nervous of speaking in public. Standing before his awed, gaping students, his thoughts disorder, slip sideways and snag themselves. He needs thirty drops of laudanum before he can stand up to it like a man. Otherwise, what happens? His scribbled-over papers fumble and flit to the floor. Did I drop them? He must apologise, recapitulate: ‘I’ll start all over again.’

Long after midnight, Pybus went into the yard for air. Fumes of spirits went before him, gusting on the night. There was frost in the air, and the frost killed the fumes; he stood breathing quite sweetly. He shifted his feet on the stones; since he came to England his feet were more callused than ever, but the hard skin did not keep out the chill. Vance, at the Giant’s behest, had provided them all with leather shoes, but Jankin had thrown his overboard, when they were at sea. He believed they were a torment or some kind of shackle; and yet he, Pybus, was resolved to persevere—except when he was in private—because both the Giant and Joe Vance insisted that the constant wearing of shoes was a mark of the high life, and after all, Pybus, they would say to him, your daddy wore them, your grandaddy wore them, it is only in your own poor generation that you are forced to be so closely acquainted with mother earth. The Giant himself wore great boots, which he said were made from the skin of forty calves, and it was the work of Pybus to polish them with a rag; but by and by, he thought, this task will pass to Jankin, and I will go on to greater things.

So, standing as he was, the smoke of evening fires drifting around him, he heard a sound, a grunting, rutting sound. He thought, it is the pig! His ears were attuned that way; all of them, constantly, were expecting Toby Goss, the slick black genius from Dublin. His head swivelled in the direction of the noise, and then he began to walk.

Beside the house was a little passage. It led him to a back court, very cramped. Very stinking, and dark shapes moving in it, confused animals, two heads and a heaving back. His heart came into his mouth, for he remembered that creature they had seen in Ireland, running in the ruins: half-hound, half-babby. He stepped back into the passage, and crossed himself. At that moment the moon—so soiled, so grounded in puddles—came sailing high above the buildings.

By its gentle light, he was able to separate the animal shapes into human form. He saw that on the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and lay beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of the man Slig, and Pybus watched it flapping, fighting to be free. Slig was unbuttoned, and he held his member in his hand, rubbing the tip and watching and listening as the woman’s skull tapped the cobbles, tip, tap, tip, tap, with every lunge of Claffey.

Something touched Pybus. He almost screamed. A human shape fell back into the darkness of the passage; it was Bitch Mary. ‘Pybus?’ When she raised her skirts, her white thighs shone like two slivers of moon. ‘Be quick,’ she said. ‘Here, against this wall. I must get my own baby, wizened or yellow or dwarf, to replace the babies hanged.’

Pybus opened his breeches. He looked back over his shoulder. Surely by now they were forcing a dead woman? There was a sort of blot on the cobbles by Caskey’s head, but he did not want to think about its nature. Mary put her hand out and yanked at his cock. He gave a little yelp, so small—saw her eyes blaze up, and then her fist came out of nowhere, and his nose spewed blood, and it was dark.

The Giant lay, bug-bitten. His blanket covered him no more than a handkerchief would cover an ordinary man, but something seemed to have got into the weave, into the knitting of it, so that it fratched against his flesh, and he thought by morning he would be rubbed raw in patches. The city’s bells tolled: two o’clock. He realised he was alone, except for Jankin—who had never made a success of sleeping in a bed—curled whimpering in the corner.

He rose. He stretched himself, not upwards but outwards; he did it cautiously; but still the walls skinned his knuckles. He pulled on his breeches and shirt, and threw the blanket around his shoulders. ‘Hic,’ said Jankin in his sleep. ‘Hic’ And, ‘My eyes are blinded.’

Down and out into the street. Down the back alley, towards the noise that had cracked the eggshell of his rest.

Pybus lay like a landed fish on the cobbles. The girl stood over him. She was angry, broad-shouldered and set, her hands on her hips. ‘I have a disease,’ she said. ‘I have taken a dislike to this ape here, and I meant to pass it on to him before I die. But then, I could not. And there was nothing for it but knock him down.’

‘You should not defame apes,’ the Giant said. ‘And Pybus is only a boy.’

‘I am only a girl.’ Mary sucked at her knuckles; they had met the teeth of Pybus, on the way to his nose. ‘They have slaughtered Bride,’ she said. ‘Claffey and the man Slig.’

The Giant took a step, and stood over Bride. Her face was a vacancy; everything had gone out of it. He put his hand under her head, and felt his palm sticky, blood and brain. ‘Murder is their nature,’ he said. ‘Just as my nature is giant, and Joe’s nature is agency.’

‘And mine is street molly and tib, it is Covent’s Garden nun. Nature cannot be helped, I suppose. It cannot be prayed against. I ply my trade on my back; I am a star-gazer.’

‘Where can we take her?’ the Giant said. ‘I am not familiar with the burial customs in these parts.’

‘Some midden or tip,’ Mary said. ‘It’s the fate of our nation.’

There was a soft A-hem from the shadows. It was Joe Vance, coming home late. ‘Mr Hunter would like her, I think. She’s very fresh. She’ll go to waste, otherwise. What’s the point of that, I ask myself.’

‘They say,’ said Mary, ‘that the road from Ireland to heaven is a beaten track, worn smooth with the feet of all who tread it; but the road there from England is grassed and flowery, for it is walked but once in a decade. I understand this now, as formerly I did not.’

The Giant looked down at Joe Vance. ‘I cannot alter your mind, Joe. You are the agent and prince of us all. But I will not be accomplice to the cutting up of Bride Caskey. Murder has been done; it is enough. If you wish to sell her to the man Hunter, you must hire a handcart, for I will not be the one to carry her to that filthy fate.’

‘Very well,’ Joe said shortly. ‘You’ll have the grace to place her under cover. It’s coming on to rain.’

The thin night drizzle fell on his blanket as the Giant stooped over Bride. Her body seemed half the size of the living woman, as if Claffey and Slig had systematically reduced her in some type of bone-crusher. ‘Heavy as a bird,’ he said. ‘Heavy as a bag of feathers. It only amazes me that Constantine Claffey was not engaged in this piece of desperation, for there’s another raider of the high hills of hell.’

He laid Bride under the jutting eaves, and threw his blanket over her face. It can’t itch her now, he thought. He picked up Pybus and carried him up to their room, where he washed his face and so roused him: to face the broken day, to feel his tender gums, to take his split—by eleven that morning—for watching the murder of Caskey and saying naught. Joe came in brisk and cheery, the guineas from Howison in his hand, and moved about the room quite liberal: ‘A shilling for you, Pybus lad. A shilling for Mary, and a shilling for Charlie O’Brien.’

The Giant threw his shilling on the boards. Joe picked it up again. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.

‘A shilling for Claffey…’ but then he thought better of it. ‘After all, Claffey had the gratification,’ he said.

Claffey was hacking at a lump of cheese. His appetite was excellent. ‘Bloody buggering scheme of yours,’ he said, ‘to take the bitch to the anatomy—a stroke of brilliance, Joe. At least we got some cash out of her carcass. Plus, when cut up into little bits, she won’t be rising again, on the last day or any other bloody day, to torment a good man with her witticisms and sell young girls into sin.’

Joe—his expression wondering—handed Claffey the shilling. God help him, the Giant said; all my stories have not prepared Joe for this extremity, and nor has his book about the prince. He said, ‘Gentlemen, I shall treat you one and all. Tonight I open my purse, and we will carouse at the Black Horse.’

‘We’d sooner the Crown,’ said Jankin, but Joe swatted him and said, Don’t put the man off his pleasures.

All of them were grinning. ‘I’m thinking,’ the Giant said, ‘you’ve been too much at the Crown, lately.’

Diversion, was his idea.

Wullie had shrunk, was John’s first impression; the deathbed wiseacres reminded him that this was quite a usual misperception. He thought of the diminutive Irishwoman brought only yesterday, raped and half-throttled and bashed to death—her skull beaten in, against a wall, he supposed, or on the ground. The Giant’s band of mad Irish had fetched her, and Howison knew better than to ask questions: only take in fresh supplies, welcome while they are supple, and get them on the table.

William had begun to complain of his symptoms on fifteenth day, third month, Year of Grace 1783. He, John, had made an annotation in his book. Thursday, twentieth day, William had got out of his bed to give a lecture. He was brought back to his house in a state of collapse. Twenty-second day of this month, an incident occurred in the night; let us say the rupture of a small vessel, let us say some bleeding into a small space, let us say some leakage, let us say he’s a goner.

After this, they send for John, and he comes, of course. Whoever lives longest, will win the contest. If he is honest with himself—and he is always that—he will say their quarrel did not so much touch on the structure of the placenta, as it touched on who should take credit for the work of discovering about it. For he thought Wullie had beaten him out of glory, as Wullie often did; he humble, meek and useful, and Wullie your high society dandy. But what does it matter now, your man collapsed among his pillows, white as thin paper, crying.

March 29th: the spring long in coming: buds sealed on the trees still, and Wullie ebbing visibly. He speaking, he’s saying, ‘John, when you come to it, as I have, as I know I have—when you come to it, it’s not hard to die.’

He leans forward, and with a handkerchief dabs a spool of dribble from his brother’s lower lip.

Some lawyer of William’s is sitting beside the bed. He leaps up and flitters by John’s elbow, as he crosses the room to stare down into the street. ‘He’s left you naught,’ he says. ‘Dear Mr Hunter. Don’t think it.’

‘I wanted naught,’ John says. His voice rasps in his throat.

William is still calling out to him: Believe it John believe it, dying’s not so hard.

Tears are blurring his eyesight. He stands with his back to the bed, so as not to show them. He says, ‘It’s poor work, brother, if it comes to that.’

At the Black Horse that night, there was a scene the Giant had not prepared for. Joe Vance, his face white, his little hands moving up and down. ‘For I cannot abide,’ he said. ‘I cannot bide more.’

‘But Vance, my agent,’ the Giant said. ‘For grief’s sake, don’t abandon me.’

‘Not at this juncture,’ said Constantine Claffey; who had become—the Giant did not know how—part of his treat.

‘I can no longer stay in this town,’ said Vance.

‘Ah, come, come,’ said Claffey. ‘Dear Joe, you are drink taken. Tomorrow you will think again.’

‘Tomorrow I will not,’ said the wrecked and weeping agent. ‘I must remove or die. I cannot be here in this city. The streets are thronging with opportunity, the stones running with gore. I have read the bible of the strangling necks, their handbooks and their lore, and I feel the pull of England’s fatal cord: Jack Ketch is coming for me. For Ketch is what they call the hangman, he has but one name, and that one is not his own.’

‘Jack Ketch, to my knowledge,’ drawled Constantine, ‘has been dead these many hundred years.’

Said Pybus, ‘It is what he saw at the puppet show. At Bartholomew. He is unhinged by it.’

‘Unhinged?’ said Claffey. ‘He is a gate flapping in the gale.’

John Hunter is sitting in the dark, among his skulls. He’s knuckling his own head. He’s saying, Not hard to die. He’s saying, Poor work if it comes to that. He’s saying, Oh, God blast. And Wullie with more work in him, years’ more work yet. And he’s saying, I’m sure I’ll never die: except in a fit where the world looks yellow, in a fit where upright objects slope, when the pain in his chest so starves his brain that nothing filters through but narrow and yellow and slanted: where he begins violently to daydream, and the world in those dreams is close and full of texture and the snuff of death and its very colour, which colour he now knows, and different God damn me from the blue of Wullie’s face, as different God damn me as the lark from a starling.

When they woke up next morning, Joe Vance was gone.

‘You had to expect it,’ Claffey said. ‘It was a case of blind panic. My brother says he’s seen it before, in men who’ve been in London six months or a year. A sort of addling begins in their heads, a scrambling, he calls it, in the senses—they cannot help it, but the next thing is they are cut and run.’

Pybus shook his head. Poor old Joe. They did all, truly, commiserate with him. One snag. This was not discovered till the Giant rose, muzzy-headed and nauseous, some time after eleven. Along with Joe had gone the Giant’s bag of money, seven hundred in pounds sterling.

‘I’ll scour the bugger,’ Claffey said. ‘I’ll scour him out. I scoured for Caskey and I found her and I beat her sodden skull in. I’ll do the same for Vance. There’s not a ditch in this ville where he can hide from me. There’s not a hole so low that my eye won’t be in it.’

‘Why break sweat?’ said his brother Constantine. He dusted some debris from his waistcoat. Think about it, bro’—what does it matter to you that the Giant’s money’s gone? Tisn’t as if you were seeing the colour of it.’

‘That’s true, I suppose,’ Claffey said.

The Giant lies on his back on the floor. Their legs weave about him, so do their verbals. He puts his hands over his ears to stop the sound, but to do that he has to take them away from his eyes, and then light filters in. He closes his lids hard, he screws them down. But all the same the red winter’s day nips under his skin, and steals his blackness.

Let me be blindfolded, he thinks. He remembers Jankin’s dream, out of which the idiot spoke a line of verse: My eyes are blinded.

He thinks, My speech is silent. The verse is the mother’s lament, as Herod’s hangmen come for the babies, to gibbet them by their doors. My heart’s a blood-clot.

Let us say we reverse time. Suppose the Holy Innocents grow up. Suppose they grow up and one becomes a horse-thief and another a bigamist, one tells lies in the journals and another fires his neighbour’s barn, say one becomes a soldier, say one becomes a whore: say they trample through Palestine, conflagrating, confabulating, mad and dirty as Uxbridge brick-makers, say one becomes an idiot, and one becomes a king.

Where’s your Herod then?

The Giant’s ribs heave, up and down, up and down.

Men staring down at him. Strangers, in all but name. And estimating. Sizing him up. Selling by the inch.

‘So, now,’ said Con Claffey smoothly, ‘you can work the freak as he should be worked. Never mind the beau-monde and their half-crowns. Half-crowns are all very well, but there is a limited quantity in circulation. All the society people in this town have already viewed your Giant. Open him up now to the plaudits of the multitude. Ask them but one penny. Those pennies will soon add up.’

‘It will be a great while before they add up to the size of the pile Joe Vance ran away with.’

‘And so? You can diversify. For now that Vance has gone, you’re cock of the walk, I’d say. The boy and the addle-wit will do what you say, and as for the brute, dope him, Fran, if you must—though it strikes me he’s tractable enough.’

‘Yes. He’s docile these days. And what can he do without his money? Used to threaten to flounce off to Mulroney’s, but where can he flounce now?’

‘Where at all?’

‘He’s to be my creature,’ Claffey gloated. He stared down. ‘You’re my creature, Charlie O’Brien, and I’m your only agent now.’

‘So what you do, you go to Slig, say, Convenient cellar wanted. Only condition, it must be deep enough to let the brute stand up and show off his attributes, get him crouching low and it misses the whole point. A cellar then, deep and dirty. One penny to come down the steps and view. They’ll flock, brother. Every punk in England.’

‘Could we not exhibit him here?’

‘Here? Why no. These premises, which all persons of refinement like myself find mean enough, would be a terror to the kind of menial dross I’m talking of. You see, there is an art in pleasing the masses—’

‘An art, is it?’ Claffey said.

‘—yes, because by comparison with the masses, philosophers and dukes are easy prey. The problem with the populace is that people are always passing off on them, I mean you get some five-foot fly-by-night standing on a tree-stump, “Oh, I’m a giant,” you get some goitered cretin passing himself off as the Freak That God Forgot—well, it won’t do. Just because a man’s lousy it doesn’t mean he’s a fuck-wit too, it doesn’t mean he’s a moon-calf just because he’s poor. No, what the wider public requires is an honest product, bring them a freak and let it be a sound and genuine freak like Charlie here.’ Constantine nudged the Giant with his toe. ‘Is he asleep, or pretending? Then the other thing is, with the public, you must suit them, you must coddle them, you must slowly considerate about them; when you take their money you must make them feel they’re in their own lice-shot parlours.’

‘Hence the cellar.’

‘Hence and hence. So get over to Slig.’

‘I still say it will be slow work, building up a sack. Maybe we ought to scour as well, see can we find Joe.’

‘You know he will have spent it,’ Con said patiently. ‘For you know Joe Vance. The man is a dilettante. He is a snapper-up. A man shows him a cravat at three times its worth and, Oh, snap it up, says Joe, cravats like that are worth a king’s ransom. How he ever got on in agenting is something I couldn’t account for.’

‘You’re right, bro,’ Claffey said. ‘Charlie’s money will be gone on Canary wine, Chinese cabinets and unstrung lutes. Moth collections behind glass, rambling roses and tickets to the opera. That’s what grieves me. I could have spent it on something sensible.’

Yes,’ Con nodded. ‘It could well be remarked of Joe Vance, that he had a sensibility above his income.’

The Giant opened his eyes. He stared up at them, from the floor, his clear eyes turned backwards in his head. And spoke to this effect: ‘The Devil cannot genuflect, for backwards are his knees.’

‘Mester Howison, will you stand us a round?’ Pybus shouted. ‘Our Giant is robbed and our agent gone, and our pockets are empty.’

So, Pybus: neatly telling the man Howison everything he wished to know. Ordering up the ale, Howison asked, ‘How’s your Giant taking it?’

‘He lies on the floor,’ said Con Claffey, ‘with his eyes and ears shut mostly.’

‘The poor man,’ said Howison thoughtfully.

‘We will pay you back,’ said Claffey, ‘when we drive the Giant to work. My brother Con here, he has a scheme, about putting him in a cellar.’

‘And you have not heard the pretty part of it,’ said Con, settling with his pot in front of him. He smiled, and looked mysterious, as well as greasy.

Presently, Tibor the Terrible Tartar came in.

‘The man himself,’ Con greeted him. ‘How’s your prancer, Tibbsie?’

Tibor shook his head. He looked downcast. He was a little bow-legged man, grey in the face.

‘Her ghost walks the amphitheatres,’ he said. ‘God bless her, Jenny. She was a horse and a half.’ An oily tear shone in his eye. ‘Nobody regards a Tartar with just one horse. Stand on the back at full gallop, swivel under belly and shoot arrows, they think it’s a mere nothing. I’ve had complaints and demanding their money back. I’ve had dung thrown.’

‘Lack of capital just now prevents our investment,’ Con Claffey said. ‘But it may not prevent it for ever. Meanwhile, you were telling me about a human pincushion?’

‘Yes.’ Tibor sat down, sighing, and rubbed his nose. ‘Whether it’s a plague of agents absconding, or what it is, but there’s a number of acts and shows floundering for want of investment—’

‘And want of management,’ Con Claffey said. ‘Here, Mester Howison, won’t you sit with us? You might be interested in this.’

Howison, amiably commanding their pots filled, translated himself among them. ‘So what have you got?’

‘Pinheads,’ the Tartar replied. ‘Pinheads there for the harvesting. Three I know of alone, in a garret in Conduit Street, existing by the charity of their neighbours, too frail to venture out to get bread, and afraid of being stoned.’

‘Hm. These neighbours,’ said Con Claffey. ‘How much would they want?’

‘Hardly a question at all,’ Tibor said. ‘They’re not in the freak game, it seems they supply the pinheads just out of Christian charity.’

Francis Claffey sniggered. ‘We’ll send them a bouquet.’

‘And what else?’

Tibor wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘There’s a stone-eater wants managing.’

‘I’ve a scepticism,’ Con Claffey said, ‘about stone-eaters.’

‘No, it’s right,’ said Tibor. ‘He eats up to a peck a day. If you dunt his belly you can hear them rattle. Paid a halfpenny, he will jump up and down for you and they rattle better.’

Said Pybus—who had grown noticeably intelligent since Mary attacked him, as if all he needed was a blow to the head—‘Do they not stop him up, the stones?’

‘Ah,’ said Tibor. ‘Once in three weeks he takes some opening medicine, and voids a great quantity of sand.’

‘How does he do that?’ said Howison.

‘His stomach is equipped with a grinding mechanism.’

Howison smiled.

‘Just think.’ Beaming, Con Claffey rubbed his hands. ‘All the cellars of London. A thousand cellars, and each fitted with a freak, and each freak bringing in a pound a day! Do you begin to see, Mester Howison? The potential?’

‘I see it clearly,’ said Howison. ‘But what has it to do with me?’

‘The life of a freak is not long,’ said Con. ‘Not once it has been brought to London and been worked. Now, Tibbsie, bear me out here.’

‘The life of a freak is not long,’ said Tibor the Terrible.

‘You are thinking my master would be interested,’ Howison said. He took a long and pensive pull of his ale. ‘He might, at that.’

‘So we were thinking,’ said Francis Claffey.

‘So we were thinking,’ his brother Con said, swooping fatly over his brother’s words, ‘we were thinking that if Mr Hunter would lay out on the initial capitalising of our cellars—for which we would cut a favourable deal with our countrymen—we could give him first refusal on the corpses.’

‘Mr Hunter has no money to throw about, you understand? Besides, I don’t know that…I’m not sure that he…’ Howison lapsed into silent thought. Respectful of it, all the companions took a long drink.

In the end, Howison said, ‘But I’d be interested. I myself.’

For, he thinks, any corpse I come by, I can always sell on to John-o at a rate which will make me a small but interesting profit. He always has no money, but there are sources he can draw on, if I remind him early enough. Borrow from his admirers, why not? He has many. And he will always raise cash to buy the things he really wants to cut up.

John-o is interested in cutting up whatever he finds at the limits of life. He is interested in what distinguishes plants from animals, and animals from man. The latter distinction, Howison thinks, may need more than a scalpel to make it. But he keeps such thoughts to himself. He turns back to the Irish, wreathed in smiles.

‘By God, man,’ said Hunter, pulling down the Giant’s eyelid.

‘What is it? What do you see?’

‘What do you see?’ asked John.

The Giant had come out to the knock: to the peremptory rap of a man who expected the door answered. He’d thought it might be the law. I am large enough, he’d thought, to knock down the law of England.

Thought it without self-promotion. Only sad fact.

Hunter had been stamping there, scrappy and mere and bluff. ‘I come to see how you do, Charles Byrne.’

‘Go before me,’ said the Giant, courteous. There will be no charge. My minders aren’t here, and by now, I should say, I regard you almost as a personal friend.’

Hunter stepped in, and looked around. ‘I am afraid they have sold the tea-caddy,’ said the Giant, ‘and all its contents. Or I could offer you…’

‘No matter,’ said the Scot.

He took a seat. ‘That one has a dint in the back,’ the Giant said.

‘No matter.’

‘I once wept, sitting in that chair.’

‘For what reason?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘Your memory fails?’

‘Everything fails, sir. Reason, and harvests, and the human heart.’

For a moment Hunter stared at him, oddly. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘That is a fine set of satirical prints you have got on your wall there. Might they be for sale?’

‘Possibly,’ said the Giant. ‘Quite probably, in fact. What the late Joe Vance thought of as a satire, is not precisely my idea of the term.’

Hunter shifted uneasily in the dinted chair. ‘And what would your idea be?’

‘Properly understood, a satire can blister the face of the man it’s made against. It can fish out his soul and spit it on the tip of a knife.’

Well, if one could,’ the Scotchman said, regretting. ‘If such a manoeuvre were possible.’

‘It may be,’ the Giant said, ‘that you don’t have the right kind of knife.’

Hunter conceded. He sat nodding his head, balding, with the frippery bits of cheek-ginger bristling, like scragged lace, against the failing light of a fine spring evening.

‘Drink, sir?’ said the Giant. ‘From our decanter? Or is it too early for you?’

‘Oh, why not, why not?’ said Hunter. No danger, tonight, that he would go whoopsy-hic. He was concentrated now; you could pour in a distillery and it wouldn’t dizzy him.

The Giant bestowed a glass of decent crystal, and within it what tasted like a decent claret—but what would he know? Probably Wullie would have damned it. But Wullie was dead.

‘Are you quite well, Mr Hunter?’

He was aware that the Giant was gazing down at him.

‘My brother Wullie has passed away.’

‘That’s a sad circumstance, Mr Hunter. I’m sorry to hear it.’

The little man took a sip from his glass. Then he put it down. ‘Let’s not get sentimental.’ He looked up. His eyes were slicing; the Giant thought, He has some kind of blade, at least. ‘I’ll put it to you straight,’ he said. ‘You’re a dead man. Is that clear?’

‘I feel yet,’ said the Giant, ‘the bronzed, the bloody ocean swim within me, its waters crazed with wrecks; the slapping seas, that are mad with the merman’s murmur.’ He thought, that’s a foul line, merman’s murmur: heroic foul. ‘My eyes see—sometimes. My tongue—from time to time—continues to speak.’

‘Yes, man, but you are doomed. Your heart is labouring, your liver swollen, your limbs—as you know—extending.’

‘Dear Sir Hunter,’ said the Giant. ‘For a long time now, I have deceived my followers…and may God forgive me. I held out the hope that my growth might make me a more valuable exhibit. Patrick O’ Brien—’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of him,’ the Scot rapped out. ‘He is embarked and embarked, but where is he?’

‘It’s a mystery,’ said the Giant. ‘Like Toby, the Sapient Pig. Both, believe me, will appear among us; but not yet.’

‘Like signs,’ Hunter said. ‘Do you feel it so?’

‘I feel every bloody thing,’ said the Giant. ‘I am notorious for what I feel. Come on, Mr Hunter, I am inviting you in civil, I am giving you such refreshment as lies within my situation, and you are not such a fool but that you do not know that in this last month my fortune has taken a turn for the worse.’ The Giant rubbed his head. ‘As yours, of course, with the death of your brother.’

‘I’ll talk no more of Wullie.’ Hunter swayed his head, side to side like a dog. ‘I’ve a proposition.’

The Giant closed his eyes. ‘Make it,’ he said. He drew back his lips, in a kind of friendliness; he breathed deep, and a pulse jumped, deep within the flesh of his cheek, and controlled his smile.

Hunter began to speak. Within a second—for desire must be held back—he choked on his wine. O’Brien would have leaned forward and slapped him on the back; but Hunter was a frail strange creature, and the Giant feared to dismember him like a butterfly, dust him apart like a dried moth.

Then the man Hunter made his proposition.

The Giant listened, and placed his wine glass with great care on the side-table. A jewelled inch was left, in which lees hung like crushed roaches in amber.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. He then lay down on his back. He closed his eyes and he closed his ears.

‘Ah well,’ said the man Hunter.

Was I not kind to him, thought the Giant.

Did I not usher him, warning him against the dint chair?

Did I not give what hospitality was in me?

Hunter was uncertain what to do. Stared down. Measured the Giant, coveted him, and yet felt himself in a situation of some social unease. Try again another day?

The Giant said only, ‘Get out. Cromwellian.’

Hunter walked back to Jermyn Street, his brain working. In the hall, he turned out his pockets. One shilling and sixpence. Hm. He called out, ‘Anne, are you up there? Got any money?’

Fifty pounds ought to do it, he thinks. He cogitates the sum, revolves it. He would, of course, have offered less, but they had not got to the stage of mentioning figures before Byrne had lain down and ceased to participate. As if it were unreasonable!

He hears his own voice—’Why beat about the bush? You’re dying and you’re on your uppers. You want money, I want your bones. It’s a simple enough transaction to comprehend. I send my man around with an agreed sum in cash. And in return, you put your thumb-print to a compact we’ll draw up, saying I’m to have your corpse. So you see the advantage I’m offering you?’ He paused. ‘Have the money while you’re alive and can enjoy it. Man, ye may as well.’ He thought he’d explained it clearly enough. But before he’d finished talking, something had fallen out of the man’s features. Some kind of understanding. Leaving a great blank. Wiped.

‘Look at it this way,’ he said encouragingly. ‘It’s your chance to contribute to the sum of human knowledge, after you’re gone. If you don’t want the money yourself you could distribute it among your followers. Or send it back to your relatives.’

The man had said—and in his voice there was no expression at all—‘I could apply it to charitable purposes. The relief of indigent freaks.’

‘Ye could, at that,’ said John.

Then the man asked him, oddly, ‘This contract, will it be written in English?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

The Giant said, ‘I thought it might.’ Then he lay down on the floor.

Hunter hugs himself. He knows he can get this giant, somehow. If the price is right. He’ll have to borrow, of course.

No answer from his wife. Mr Bach—or one of his offspring—is tripping down the stairs.

What’s the Giant doing, when he lies on the floor? There is a point—and you may know it yourself—a point in fatigue or pain when logic slowly crumbles from the world, where reason’s bricks sieve to crumb. Where content flits from language, goes its ways and departs, its pack on its back: you take the high road and I’ll take the low. Where meaning evaporates into the air like ether. The Giant has reached this point. When he seals his senses, he’s sealing out the meaningless, because inside he’s trying to preserve some sense of what meaning means. He examines the words. He interrogates them. Bones. Compact. Corpse.

But finally, here’s why he’s lying on the floor. No fancy reasons. Forget philosophy. He’s lying on the floor because he’s realised this, that there’s nothing to be done. There’s simply nothing.

There’s

simply

nothing

to be done.

But the Giant rises: and to vituperate. To say, Curse him, John Hunter, he thinks I can’t read. To smash the satires out of their frames, to splinter the rattling sash, to hurl against the stained wall the three-legged stool that of its very nature don’t wobble: for God help us, in this quaking, sin-sodden world, why should tripods be privileged?

The Giant’s voice is shaking the beams. He is smashing the glass from here to Fleet Street. He is setting up quivers in the foundations that will crack down Cockspur Street, one fine day; vibrations that will blow London apart. ‘Will I take him on in a contest?’ he howls. ‘Trigonometry? Or singing? Will the dog match me, God rot him, in Socratic dialogue? I tell you what it is.’ He turns, his face blazing, his feet pounding the boards; we can expect soon a billet-doux from the tenants below. ‘It’s a new and original wickedness. To come to a man, to say, I’ll buy you, to say, I’ll buy you while you’re still breathing, I’ll buy you now against the hour of your death.’

‘Not so,’ said narrow Slig.

‘How not so?’

‘Not so because it ain’t,’ drawled Con Claffey. ‘Not new, not original. Not wicked, even.’

‘Enlarge,’ the Giant demanded.

‘It is a familiar pretext,’ said Con, ‘for anatomies to approach those felons about to be hanged—among which company we may enumerate ourselves one day—’

He paused, and waited for a comradely titter: which proceeded, in the end, from Tibor the Terrible Tartar. ‘They approach those felons, I say—and offer to purchase their corpses in advance, so that they may have a good suit to hang in.’

‘Jesus,’ said Slig. ‘You remember Sixteen-String Joe?’

‘Jesus, do I,’ said Con. ‘What a figure he cut, when he was bound in the cart. Joe was a redoubtable highwayman, a land-pirate of the first water. He departed this life with his hair curled, and his waistcoat embroidered with the flowers of the forest, the pearls of the sea. By God, and with an ode in his mouth. He croaked well, did Joe.’

‘So it’s regular?’ said the Giant. He wanted to think the approach of the little Scotsman was some stealthy, snuffling seduction, peculiar to him. Their faces showed him the truth: it’s regular.

He thought, where’s Joe Vance?

Where’s he lying tonight?

I wish he were by me now.

Good old Joe.

Money or not.

Would agent, but never sell me.

Sack of lucre.

Never do it now. Mulroney’s. Never the lyre-backed chairs. And horribly enough, that’s what Joe understood. He knew what was beautiful. He knew what would last. And he thefted his own vision. Go explain that.