The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

twelve

Jankin stood stock-still, regarding the Spotted Boy. Studying him. The boy looked about twelve years old. He was kept undressed to show his pigmentation; grey-white patches against dull brown. Old scars laced his body, thin black ropy scars; from cuts, from worms, from insect bites that had festered. But it was his patches that distinguished him, and Jankin remembered the black man he had seen on the quay on his first morning in England.

“See.” His grin shot over his shoulder. He almost said, Joe Vance, Joe Vance. “See, I told you. Told you it would rub off. Rub off more,” he advised the Spotted Boy. “Then you’ll be white and a free man like me.”

Down in that cellar where the freaks cluster, that’s where they’re to be found, the Giant and Jankin and Pybus who is only a boy. They were drawn there by Claffey’s ambition to become an agent, and from now on it’s among these freaks they will live, crawling back at night to Cockspur Street to their lousy beds. Nobody was doing the housekeeping these days. Bitch Mary was hatching a bastard, her frame broadening and coarsening to accommodate it. “Let me have twenty children,” she said, sneering. “Then I can sell my boys to chimney-sweeps and my girls to Drury Lane snatch-purveyors.”

It was not surprising to find that the landlord Kane was in the freak racket. It turned out he owned the garret where the pinheads clustered, and—by extension—owned the pinheads. He had not been working them because of a glut on the market, “but won’t I dust off the little devils?” he said. “By God, Con, it’s a prime plan. Let all the monster-makers of this city co-ordinate their efforts, let the trick-trainers move in concert. Meet Fernando, will you?”

Fernando was a young man of twenty-six or so, with flippers where others have arms and legs. He spoke in a high bright voice, his lips pulled savagely back in a smile that was very like a snarl. “Fernando,” he said, “will play at ninepins. Fernando will shoot a bow and arrow. Fernando will play the flute. Thread a needle.” A drop of foaming spittle whipped itself across the room. “Fernando will dress his own hair.”

“We have some savages,” Kane explained. “They’re not real ones. We have to pin their tails on before we can start the show. We did have some real ones, but they died in the cold weather.”

Claffey said, interested, “What does a savage do?”

“Basically,” Kane said, “they eat toads and flies, bite the heads off rats and chickens, and suck their blood. If you can’t find real savages from overseas you have to find Londoners that know no better. If you can find them mad enough, they will go down on four legs and bark like a dog.”

And coming and going in that cellar and others, in White Hart Lane and Bedfordbury, in Smock Alley and Bow Street, they met the fire-eaters and the posture-masters who perform contortions; with the amiable grey-faced Tibor as conductor and guide, they met Sham Sam the Conjuror, and men dressed as monkeys, and monkeys dressed as bearded ladies. “All these people are my friends,” Tibor said. “As for the savages, some of them come from extinct lines. They sing songs, lamenting how they are the last of their tribes.”

“Tribes of Whitechapel,” snorted Con Claffey. “Tribes of Seven Dials. How’s your nephew, Sam, got over the measles yet?”

“Mending, thank you,” said Sham Sam. “My nephew’s the Son of a Cannibal, you know. Well, we used to show him as the Cannibal himself, gnawing a rabbit bone and saying it was a young child. But then a woman who was in pod took a screaming fit, and threatened us with fetching the Lord Mayor. So we’ve dropped him down a generation. Now we give him a bone and he toys with it. Looks at it wistful. You know. Like he would suck it, if he dared.”

That day, they had been teaching the pinheads to bow. A flourish of the wrist, arm drawn neatly across chest, palm spread, then a low sway from the hips. It made a change for the pinheads. Usually they just sat in a corner, looking listless.

They are wonders, they are prodigies, the Giant tells them; they are nature’s curlicues and flourishes, extravagances of flesh. He moved among them, carefully, the fruit of God’s absentmindedness : the web-footed ones, the ones with sloped heads and fish mouths, the ones with great wobbling heads and loose yellow skin dropping from their frames in folds: the ones with strange growths, the bird-faces, and the bat’s faces with folded eyes.

Jankin said, whispering to him, “Charlie O’Brien, I never thought it—but there’s lower than Irish.”

The Giant looked at him, his tow-head and vacant face—a hair’s breadth from exhibition himself.

“Jankin, you wouldn’t sell me, would you?” he asked. In a low voice. For he had begun to suspect it.

Jankin’s face was perplexed, but then his expression cleared. “Oh well,” he said. “I’m threatened to tell you nothing at all about anything of that.” He tapped the side of his nose.

“I see,” the Giant said.

At night he dreamt of the freaks, their pug-noses and protruding tongues, the characters set free from his stories; and Francis Claffey in his crib dreamt of the pennies mounting up.

The Giant has learned this lesson: anything you can imagine, can exist.

The Giant was sicker. He had grown by three or four inches (and still Paddy did not come). There was constant pain in his fingers and feet, his skin was stretched, and his head ached. His skin had a low shine on it, like pewter. At nights he coughed, with a sound that roared down Cockspur Street like cannon fire.

“You were a stubborn fool,” Claffey said to him, “not to take the Scot’s money.”

The Giant watched him. What double game is this?

“I might re-consider,” he said. “I doubt I have three months in me. I’d like to have once more a sack on my back. I could give the runt the slip, and go back and die in Ireland.”

He watched a pale rage washing to and fro through Claffey’s eyes, slap slap slap like the water in some dirty tributary of the Thames.

“Ye’ll never,” Claffey said. “You’re done for, you’re shot. Face up to it, O’Brien. You couldn’t take the voyage.”

Now he understood Claffey’s game; it was to place his intentions precisely; it was to understand them. It was to see if he knew he was dying. “And besides,” Claffey said, “the word is out that Hunter’s withdrawn the offer.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes. He’s more interested in pinheads these days.”

“Then he shouldn’t have long to wait. The way you starve the poor little brutes.”

“Ah, they get their wibble and slop. It’s what they understand. You couldn’t give them meat. Their teeth are out.”

Claffey went downstairs, whistling. It’s fact, the Giant told himself. Cold and stark. They mean to sell you.

John Hunter was in his counting house, counting out his money.

Thirty-four pounds, seven shillings, and a halfpenny.

Howison came in. “They say they are willing to guard him, till he’s dead.”

“And guard him when he’s dead.”

“Yes, that too.” Howison cleared his throat. “They want a hundred guineas.”

John hurtled forward, into space. He knocked his head hard on the corner of his dissecting bench.

He knelt on the boards, bleeding and swearing.

Meanwhile the Giant watched the Human Pincushion at work, seated on the three-legged stool, casually popping the pins in her mouth and swallowing. “Done it all me life,” she explained, between bites. “Can’t flourish at all without I have a nice pin in me mouth—or a needle’s a treat. I like a nice darning needle when I can get one.”

“Do they ever come out?” Pybus said, gaping.

“Oh yes. No show without they come out. First you see a black spot, like, on me arm or me leg, and then it festers a bit, then after a while you can see the head of the pin and so draw it out. A doctor comes and sees me, he asks to examine me, he says, Mrs. Cricklewell, you’re going to lose the use of your legs, and I says to him, Doctor, you just keep the pins coming and never mind legs, a woman has to earn a crust, and I says to him, What about my insomnia? Cure that, can you? Thing is, I have to be up in the night, scraping about for another mouthful.”

“I have an iron-eater,” Kane said, boasting. “Spectators are requested to bring items they want eaten, like a horseshoe, or a bunch of keys they don’t need anymore.”

“Ferris has a green man,” Slig said. “He’s showing him at Russell Street.”

“How the hell would Ferris know if he’s green? Ferris is blind.”

“Ferris has vowed bloody revenge on the killers of Bride Caskey.”

Claffey spat. “Let him come round here, and bring his verdant freak. He’ll be green himself when I’ve kicked him in the groin.”

“In the reign of Conaire,” said the Giant, “there was no dissension in the land. Every man thought his neighbour’s voice as sweet as a harp-string. In those summers, the sun shone unclouded from spring till October. Acorns were so abundant that men waded in them up to their knees. No wolf stole more than one bull-calf from any herd.”

“So what went wrong?” Con Claffey said, yawning hugely.

“It was a matter of Conaire’s foster brothers, apparently. Who were very fond of thieving and plundering.”

“They could not be denied,” said Pybus: not without admiration in his tone.

“At Da Dergha’s Hostel,” the Giant said, “when he and his followers were sitting down to feast, a woman came to them, a giant woman wearing a fleecy striped mantle. She had a beard that reached down to her knees, and her mouth was on one side of her head. She stood leaning on the doorpost, casting her eyes on the king and all the youths around him. ‘What do you see?’ the king asked her. She said”—and here the Giant paused, and seemed to choke on his words. “She said her name was Cailb.

“‘That is a short name,’ said the king.

“She said, ‘I have others. They are Samuin. Sinand. Seschend. Saiglend. Samlocht.’”

“Less names,” said Claffey. “And get on with it.”

The Giant glared. “Very well, Francis Claffey—if you don’t know what to call your fate when she comes for you, don’t come crying to me. There are at least twenty-six names I have not told you, so consider them all listed, and bear in mind that all these names she recited in one breath, and while standing on one leg.”

“Why did she do that?” Pybus asked.

“Why does anybody do anything? So Conaire asked her, ‘What do you want,’ and she said, ‘To come in.’ Conaire said, ‘There is a solemn prohibition placed on me against admitting any single woman after sunset.’”

“You mean no one had wed her?” Kane said. “And with a beard like that?”

“Solemn prohibition?” Con Claffey said. “The lad was making an excuse.”

“He was not,” said Jankin. “There was a solemn prohibition, and you would know about it if you had ever listened to this tale with attention. He can’t catch birds either, bad luck to him if he does.”

“So the woman said to him, ‘I claim hospitality from this house.’”

The Giant thought, I let Hunter in. I wined the man.

“So Conaire said, ‘If I send you an ox or a salted pig, would you not go elsewhere?’

“Then the woman got angry, and she said, ‘A pretty pass for this nation, if the High King can’t offer a bed and a dinner to one lone woman.’”

“I quite agree,” said Mrs. Cricklewell.

“So Conaire said, ‘Let her in.’ And all the company was stricken with a great terror, though none of them knew why.”

“I know why,” said Jankin. “Wouldn’t anybody be terrified if there came in this great woman with a beard and her mouth on one side?”

Pybus said, “I wouldn’t be frightened of a woman. Though I’d be frightened of that man who came in the ship, yesterday. The man with one great eye, and seven pupils in it, and all as black as beetles.”

“Yes,” said the Giant, “you were not here for that part of the tale, Con Claffey.”

Con Claffey curled his lip.

“And I worry about those men with three heads,” Pybus said. “And each head, three rows of teeth from ear to ear. And bones without joints.”

“Are they for purchase?” said Slig.

Kane gnawed his lip. “There were fearful prodigies, in those days.”

“Right, Kane. And in these days too.” The Giant stood up. “I will not finish this tale.”

“Temper, temper,” said Mrs. Cricklewell.

“Right,” the Giant bellowed, from the doorway. “Will I tell you what the woman said, as she stood on one leg? Will I tell you what she said? She said, ‘I see your destruction, your utter destruction: you will not leave this house, none of you, neither hide nor hair, except for the fragments that are carried out in the claws of birds.’”

He turned away. His bitter shoulder. He heard Con Claffey say, in a low tone, “The fella’s on to us. He comprehends our scheme.”

He heard Slig say, “No matter. What can he do?”

And Kane: “They say the crocus is panting like a bride. Howison will drive the price up. We’ve got him on a percentage. It’s in his interest.”

At Jermyn Street, Howison attended his master’s gashed scalp, all the time talking to him soothingly. “Try the eminences. Apply to the worthies. Money will forthcome. You must have that giant.”

And by the fireside, Slig: “I have known men and women who were exceptionally hairy.”

Says Kane, “I have known a salamander, lives up Tooley Street. He has a sister would eat live coals as some eat sugar plums.”

The Giant thinks, I have known people with claws instead of hands. They terrorise people. Their mother loves them but they murder her, so what then? They go out in the world murdering.

Mrs. Cricklewell bites on a bodkin. Crack, crack, crack. A splinter falls from her lip.

Protect me, thinks the Giant. Breastplate and shield. King Conaire and all his men.

Slig says, “At Petticoat Lane we have a thing called What Is It.”

“And what is it?” Claffey asks.

“That is what you cannot know, nor I divulge. It is a thing beyond decribing. We keep it behind a curtain, and charge extra.”

“Can we see it?” Claffey looks eager.

“That you cannot.”

In the stories, a giant has a cap which makes him disappear. He has slippers that take him around the world in minutes.

What had Bride Caskey said? In England they hunt them down with large dogs.

Negotiations are in progress. The Giant’s price is driving up and up. Heads are whispering together at the Crown on Wych Street. Two hundred, three. John-o near-apoplectic. Howison’s part in this should not be inspected too closely. Slig is planning on extending his cellar empire to the east. Tibor the Terrible hopes to get a new horse out of it. “I’ll call her Jenny,” he says, sentimentally. “Set men closely about him,” Hunter begs.

Says Howison, “They are close.”

Hunter makes an itching motion with his fingers. “I should like to examine him. To see how near the end. But he would not admit me.” He sucks his lip. “Not even for half a crown.”

The Giant: “If only I could get a good poet. Somebody to recite at him. A good poet can recite a man to death. A poet takes a person’s earlobe between his finger and thumb and grinds it, and straight away that person dies. With a wisp of hay and a cross word they drive a man demented. They chew flesh and set it on the threshold and when a man steps over it he drops to his knees and expires.”

The Spotted Boy comes in, bearing a message. It’s late May and he’s shivering. There’s a smoky ring around the pupils of his eyes. Slig looks knowing. “Another for the knacker’s,” he says, when the Spotted Boy goes out.

“God curse him!” cries the Giant. “If he cuts me up, I cannot rise again.”

“But your throne in heaven!” Jankin says. “The cushions of scarlet silk! Stuffed with the down of a thousand swans! Tassels is in it. And jewels the size of soup-plates.”

“Yes,” says the Giant shortly. “It is prepared for me, Jankin, for I never hurt any creature. But if my bones are dispersed, I cannot have it.”

Jankin’s mind is moving slowly, theologically. “And cannot you go to hell either?”

The Giant shakes his head. “I can go nowhere. Nothing is to go. Dead is dead, for me.”

Jankin says, shaken, “I had not thought of this. Does Mr. Hunter know?”

The Giant stared hard at him. “Hunter has no god. What is faith? He cannot anatomise it. What is hope? He cannot boil its bones. What is charity—aye, what is charity, to a bold experimentalist such as he?”

Jankin’s face was white. “I did not realise it, Charlie. That you could not rise.”

“Jankin, would you bury me at sea? Would you place me in a casket of lead?”

Jankin began to weep.

“I did not realise it,” he said. “God forgive me, Charles O’Brien. It is a thing I did not know.”

The Giant rocks himself a little.

He thinks: no person rocked me, I was a giant child. The cradle would have burst.

Here I am: a man grown.

What could his life have been, if he had not been a giant? He might have been a poor scholar, wandering the roads; his cloth satchel on his back, the shape of his books evident through them, so every traveller he met, and every householder whose door he visited would recognise his calling, and any stranger would offer him a place at the hearth. He might have made his life on the roads, a useful man and a hired dreamer, offering his services in each settlement for the writing of letters and the drawing of leases; stopping in some place he liked the look of, to hold school in the hedge and conference under the tree, to dance at the tavern and sharpen his wits on the priest, to court the girls and beat into the boys the principles of geometry and the alphabet in Greek. He might have been a poet and diviner; lying in the dark, his hands crossed over his face to shut out any beam of light: until the light dawns inwards, and the poem is cracked open. He might have bathed in the five streams of the fountain of wisdom, and kept company with the night-visiting gods.

But instead it is fetch the water from the pump, the flat slimy water; it is the hit of cheap gin in the gullet, and Claffey’s fumbling feet on the stair. It is the Scotchman waiting, idly jingling the coins in his pocket; it is the animal-trainer, flicking his whip. The harpers play three strains: smile, wail, and sleep. But these nights as he lies awake, the deep ache springing from his bones, he hears the rattle of the nightwatchman, like the chattering of God’s teeth. He hears the wheels of the coach of death, rumbling over the cobbles, and he knows that if he were to stir and open the shutter, he would see the headless horses, and death’s coachman with his basin of blood.

The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar’s hand lies always on his book, and the thinker’s eyes on canvas travel the room to rest on each human face; the rebel has his ballad and his cross, his bigot’s garland, his wreath of rope. But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrubbed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day or a week, so he is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory runs out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rocks away; and the cell-line runs to its limit, where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature. Unless we plead on our knees with history, we are done for, we are lost. We must step sideways, into that country where space plaits and knots, where time folds and twists: where the years pass in a day.

June comes. The stinking streets. O’Brien tosses through the night, wringing the sheet, twisting it and soiling it with his death-sweat. He prays for mayhem to break out, for the rebels to take the field; he prays for the Whiteboys to come, swooping in, smashing with billhook and pike: Slasher, Cropper, Night Errant: Thumper, Madcap Setfire, and Captain Right. To the rescue.

Slig says, to the Spotted Boy, “Tell Kane. Not long now.”

Jankin is crying in the corner.

The Spotted Boy says to him, “If I were white like you and a free man, how would I earn my living?”

Says Slig, “Tell Hunter he refuses food. Tell him he persistently curses and swears. Tell him our guard is strong and our hearts are true. Tell him the price is five hundred pounds.”

Hunter says, “Do they want my blood?”

The Giant, raving on the floor, wishes him skulls and entrails strewn, wishes him cold winds and scalping blades: the fall of a house, the loss of heirs, an abundance of spectres, a rejoicing of crows. A high gallows and a windy day.

He says, “Did you ever hear of the army of men with cats’ heads?”

Jankin says, “Would you give us Ebinichebel, King of the Dog-Heads?”

The Giant says, “I am too weak for that vile Saracen.”

An hour passes. Slig and Con Claffey, they are bristling and alert. Says Kane, “Soon we shall swagger.”

As the evening cools, he rallies a little. He says, “There was once a race of people called the Astomi. They had no mouths. They lived on the smell of apples.”

Standing in the shadows, waiting for him, are Katherine Lineham and Ruggetty Madge, Teddy Brian and Redman Keogh: Cooley and Ryan and Thomas Dwyer, that came from Tipperary and had no coat to his back.

But he dies to the sound of What Is It, dragging its chain in the next room.

One day, about a week later—when the Giant’s bones, boiled brown, were already hanging in the workshop of the impoverished John Hunter—Pybus and Jankin were crossing Drury Lane, on their way to become drunk at the Fox Tavern. Ducking round a cart, Jankin was nearly bowled over by a spry black pig that shot from an alley. The pig checked its pace, darted a glance over its shoulder, and with its trotter performed a quick calculation on the cobbles.

A vast excitement swelled inside Pybus. “Toby!” he yelled. “It’s Mester Goss’s pig!” He made a lunge for it. The pig side-stepped him; but then it halted, and once more glanced back. It seemed to be smirking.

Jankin skidded to a halt on the cobbles. “Toby,” he yelled. “Toby, here, lad.” From under his coat he fished the halter that Joe had bade him prepare, for the day when the pig should arrive. Still Toby lurked, and shifted his feet, as if he knew something.

“By God,” said Jankin. “It has a look in its eye.”

Puzzled, Pybus replied, “Yes. So it does.”

The two men stood watching each other. “We could easy catch it,” Jankin said. “For look at it; it’s standing there, waiting for what will we do.”

“Yes,” Pybus said. “We could easy catch it.”

Thoughtfully, he rubbed his grazed knees.

“On for the Fox, is it?” Jankin said.

Pybus nodded. “On for the Fox.”

Toby, performing another rapid addition, wheeled smartly and trotted off towards Long Acre. Jankin and Pybus raised their hands in salute.

King Conaire had a singing sword. Do you know this? He was the son of a bird-god.

His head spoke after it was severed. Thank you, it said. Thank you for listening.

Put away the dark lantern and the hooks. Coil the rope ladder, and roll up the sacks. Clean your shovel before you stow it; you’ll be wanting it again.

The Lancet, 1937: “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of John Hunter … is gradually disappearing … . Fading has advanced unchecked. The change is greatest below. The surroundings of the figure are so dim as to be indecipherable; the legs are almost indistinguishable, the pendent right hand resembles a shapeless pudding, the pen that it held is gone. The face, the least affected part, has lost its once sharp outline—a change that enhances its absorbed, far-away expression … . The whole picture is progessing towards extinction.”

I want a crow’s nest, and a magpie’s nest, and the branches of the tree they are set in. I cannot get a large porpoise for love or money. I want some eels and they must not come from a fishmonger, but straight from the river.

I had three hedgehogs, and all have died.

I want some ostrich eggs. And a bittern, to hear it boom, and learn how it makes that noise.

I want knowledge. I want time.

And time wants you, John. You will become a grain of wheat. You will be changed to a pool of water. To a worm, a fly. And a wind will blow the fly away.