The Giant, O'Brien

  From their first visit to the Crown in Wych Street, the boys came home slewed and rolling. Constantine Claffey was sick on his waistcoat, but he wore it next day just the same. “When they go to the tavern these days,” Joe Vance explained, “they call the first bevvy their quencher. Then it’s their rouser, then it’s their cheerer. After that they don’t bother giving it names.”

  Joe was a leaner man these days, and his eyes were mild as he sat by the fire with his book on his knees, and gazed into the middle distance. One day, when the Giant came home, he found that Joe had sold the siskins. Seated on the chair with the dint in its back, the Giant wept.

  eleven

  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 is 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 hooves 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. I
f 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. Georges’. 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 calloused 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 stargazer.”

  “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 bro
ken 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 carcase. 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 thought; 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 has shrunk, was John’s first impression; the deathbed wiseacres remind him that this was quite a usual misperception. He thinks 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.