The Giant, O'Brien

by Hilary Mantel

  By this time, John Hunter is a great man, with his house at Jermyn Street and another out in the country at Earl’s Court. It is there he keeps his collection of specimens, now growing huge, and his caged animals, who roar and paw and bellow through the night. He has first refusal of all the beasts who die in the menagerie at the Tower of London, and amongst animal sellers deals with Mr. Gough, with Mr. Bailey of Piccadilly, whose trade is chiefly in birds, who will get you anything from a linnet to an eagle, and who is so obliging as to extend credit: with Mr. Brookes, who had crossed a dog with a wolf, and who gave him one of the puppies. (She was a nervous bitch, who habitually ran out into the road and would not come back when she was called. She was given to trembling and starts of terror, which caused some citizens to mistake her for a mad dog and murder her.)

  As for Earl’s Court, who knows what comes in and what goes out—everything from leopards to gnats in a jar. There are the bees, silently industrious in their many hives, the seagull to be fed for a year on barley, the vat of live eels sent every month from the fishmonger, and the single swallow tamed by Mr. Granger, condemned forever to get its food dead instead of live and on the wing, and never again to see the African coast. As for the opossums, he must have had a dozen over the years, but breed? They cannot or they will not. Perhaps they propagate by a method as yet unknown?

  On their second day in their new home Pybus brought an orange and a lemon, and they all examined them. They cut up the orange and sucked its juice, smacking their lips, and then they cut up the lemon and attempted the same. Bitch Mary exploded in laughter at them, holding it back until she saw their puckered faces and stinging lips.

  “Laughing like a country girl,” Claffey said fondly.

  Mary ate everything they ate, and was already fuller in the face. Her hair was paler than the lemon’s flesh.

  Oxford Street was the problem: Claffey and Pybus and Jankin gawping its length, wanting things. Even by night, when the whale-oil lamps shone, they would promenade, their toes turned out, imagining themselves with a two-shilling tart on one arm, and in the other hand a cane with an ivory knob. The Giant was kept close until his prepared debut, but Joe was out and about, making his excuses for an hour off here and there and coming back with a smirk and his pocket lighter.

  “Course, we’ll have to borrow a little bit,” he said. “It’s the usual thing. I’m an agent and I know about it.”

  So it came to the day when they were making a wish-list:

  A tea-caddy and a spoon.

  A tilting tea-table, mahogany: very convenient for restricted space: space being usually restricted, when giant on premises.

  A teapot and the correct bowls for tea.

  A toothbrush and some toothpowder in a jar.

  A salt cellar.

  Some glass candlesticks, which are all the go.

  A clock.

  A trumpet.

  Two siskins in a gilt cage.

  A warming pan.

  A mousetrap.

  A writing set.

  Some sheets of wallpaper with views on them: with an Indian prince riding on a pony, and a slave holding a parasol over his head. And hunting dogs. And cranes. And flowers.

  “Gentlemen of the press,” said Joe. He held his arms up, as if he were brandishing flaming torches. The gentlemen sat on chairs that Joe had hired, ferreting in their wigs and picking their noses. The Giant was behind a green curtain, crouching. “But lately from our continental triumphs,” Joe said. He looked about the room, smiling, side to side; trying to stimulate a round of applause.

  “Yerg-h-h,” said one of the pressmen, yawning in his face.

  That set them off all over the room, “Yerg-h-h,” in a broken chorus.

  Behind the curtain, the Giant cleared his throat. His intention was only to warn Joe to cut it short; there was a crushing pain in his thighs and calves, and his kneecaps were fighting out through the skin. But the sound produced a sudden sharpening, a sobering, in the room. “By God’s balls!” one man exclaimed; all sat up straighter.

  Joe was taken aback. He looked down, and saw the Giant’s toe peeping from under the screening. “Without further delay,” he announced, in the voice of a hero, while simultaneously scooping at the curtain. It stuck-the rail being Claffey’s carpentry—and Joe found himself dragging on it, wrapped in it, fighting a bout with it, until the Giant simply unhooked it from its moorings and stepped forth into plain view.

  There was a moment’s silence; then a low whistle of admiration ran around the room. As it subsided, a ragged clapping began, and was taken up by one pressman after another; each uttered his own obscenity as he clapped, and each stared, and one said, “Dammit, he has snapped the curtain rail,” and the Giant looked down at his own hand and saw that oh yes, so he had.

  He smiled. It was an uncalculated, accidental effect, but they had taken it like bait. Joe Vance was pink with pleasure; error had turned to triumph. “Please, Mr. Byrne!” He gestured towards the capacious wooden chair, a throne in type, that Pybus and Claffey had been working on for three days. Its construction was rough, naturally, but they had been out shopping and got a length of red plush, which Bitch Mary had draped in a most artistic fashion across the seat and arms—careless, but classical.

  The Giant leaned down and tested the chair seat with his hand. Testing was his necessary habit with all chairs, stools, benches, and stone walls. He lowered himself, crossed his legs suavely, and saw and heard the pressmen gasp in amazement. “What a tableau he makes,” Joe whispered to Claffey. “What a tableau indeed!”

  For what had they expected, the press corps? They’d looked for some rumblethump, some tattery freak with his head on backwards and a cyclops eye. Instead they’ve an aristocrat of height. Said Joe Vance loudly, for the benefit of the scribes, “There’s enough lace on his cuff to deck every altar in the Vatican.”

  There was a pause, a hiatus. The Giant looked around the room, half-smiling. After a moment passed, he raised one eyebrow. Ah, St. Silan, he thought. St. Silan could cause death just by raising an eyebrow; suicides used to wait up, hoping to catch him at dawn in a quizzical mood.

  One pressman, nodding nervously, quivered to his feet: “Sir Giant, how do you account for your parentage?”

  By a piece of business pre-arranged with Joe, the Giant drew out a length of muslin, three feet or so, from his sleeve, and dabbed the corners of his mouth genteelly. Only then did he begin to speak.

  “I was conceived on the slopes of a green hill, known as a sacred place by the men and women of my nation. My mother was a green girl entirely, and my father came out of Scotland, possessed of a raw and tartan heart.”

  It was not the answer he had practiced with Joe. Joe’s was tedious, tortuous, something to do with Noah and his Ark: who went in and came out, and a large number of stowaways, undetected by the great man and his tribe of relatives.

  “Sir Giant,” said a second man, “are there any more at home like you?”

  “Alas, my upbringing was solitary. There were some few paltry fellows—two in particular, the brothers Knife, conceived on top of a haystack in our parish—who had a conceit they were tall, and who used to extort money from the credulous; but I know nothing of their lineage, and look upon them rather as sports of nature than as what I am myself, a descendent of the ancient native lords. And there is a lad named Patrick, Patrick O’Brien, who has sometimes claimed kinship with me—who has indeed, I hear, sometimes claimed to be me—but he is no more high, sir, than you are a Chinaman.”

  “So accept no substitutes,” Joe said brightly. “Charles Byrne, Tallest Man in the World.”

  Claffey said to Pybus, under his breath, “I wondered when they’d mention Pat O’Brien.”

  A languid fellow rose, at the back of the room. He ah-hemmed before he spoke, and fluttered his hand to draw attention to himself. “You have lately been at Cologne, your publicist states. Tell me, what wonders did you see there?”

  “Oh, Smartarse,” Joe breathed. “There
’s always one.”

  “Why, they have a little church,” the Giant said equably. “They call it a Dom. I’d take up residence in that fair stadt, only to avoid a boff on the head every time I want to say a prayer. The place wants finishing, mind, but the three kings have a golden house there.” He leaned back on his throne. “Among the French églises there are some pretty little chapels, one they call Notre Dame in Paris I remember. Amsterdam is most picturesque, with rivulets running between the houses.”

  “All right?” Joe called out to the gentleman. “Happy, are you?”

  The Giant reached over to calm him, but with the tip of his middle finger he accidentally caught Joe under the chin. There was laughter, scattered applause.

  “Picture his snuff box,” one fellow said. “It would be like a soup-plate.”

  “Picture his linen bill! It will be like the national debt.”

  “Picture his …” And the speaker choked; the whole room fell back as one, and opened its eyes wide, and fanned itself with a hand.

  Just this morning Joe had said, “Play it up a bit, about the ladies, Charlie. Will you do that? Will you do that for me?” He had been every inch the impresario, purring and preening, but his guts turning over with nerves inside; now he stood grinning, caressing his bruised chin, neverminding about it, his gratified lips open and his greedy pink tongue just peeping out between.

  The Giant leaned forward, causing the front row to sway back. “As you suspect, gents,” he said, “my organ is proportionate.”

  A new sound filled the room: wistful, sibilant, yearning. The Giant sat back while it played itself out, melted sighing into the corners of the room. A young fellow spoke up, gathering his courage: “Yet women say, the women I know … they say size don’t count.”

  “Do they?” The Giant held up his hand, scrutinised his fingernails. “And they say that to you, do they? Ah well. One can imagine why they would.”

  A little laughter, edgy. “I see, gentlemen,” the Giant said, “that you wish me to enlarge. On the theme. On the subject. It is proportionate, as I say. Will I stand up again, so you can appraise my proportions? No; there is no need, I perceive; you can view my assets while I recline. A Tower of Ivory,” he explained, “at the base of which they fall, stunned. Not but what they do not recover themselves; the fainting, I think, is out of politeness largely. And then, gentlemen, their rhapsodical sighs and moans—but I see by your faces that you already know those sounds, albeit only in your imaginations. First they try to scale this tower—the ambition is natural to them—with their slick little tongues like the tongues of kittens. When I am satisfied in that way, I put out my little finger and flip two or three of them on their backs. When I say ‘two or three,’ when I say ‘them,’ I speak advisedly—for I have about me every night an eager set of the female sex. They fear … they fear indeed—but oh, it is their fear that delights them! And gentlemen, when dawn comes, I am the complete gallant. Which of you can say as much? I have a fellow in Covent’s Garden who brings each morning a selection of fresh bouquets, wound up with ribbon such as ladies like. Each morning he fetches half-a-dozen, at five o’clock—and when, three or four times in the week, more are needed, I have a smart lad who goes to run and tell him. And when you, at some stale hour, are rolling from your mattresses, and roaring for your piss-pots, and grinding the yellow pills from your eyes—and when, I say, your foetid molls are trolling forth, booted from your couches, unwashed, fishy, chafed between the thighs, slowly dripping your lukewarm seed—my douce delights are receiving their bouquets, with pearls of pretty laughter. Each one carries within her a giant baby. How can she not conceive? My seed is propelled within her like a whirlwind. I do not spill forth, like little men—I come like the wrath of God. When the years have flown, and my dear delights are grandmas, they will need only to think of the business we transacted, and their dried parts will spin like windmills in a gale.”

  Clarke has got a preparation of an extra-uterine pregnancy. The foetus lodged in the tube and began to grow there, the mother dying of it. It is a very fine preparation, and I mean to have it. I have said to Clarke, will you give it to me? No, I will not. Surely you will. Positively, I will not. You will sell it me then. No no and no. Then if I see you in a dark alley I will murder you, I said. Clarke half-believes me, for he sees the flush rise up in my cheeks. I half-believe myself. I must have it.

  “That’s my boy,” Joe said, when the pressmen had surged out, chattering, into the street. “It’s the very way to treat them, a touch of the flattery and a touch of the imperial contempt.”

  Yet there was something nervous about Joe: he was glad and sorry, he was thinking it had gone well and yet it had gone too well, it was out of his grasp a bit. As the gentlemen had exited, he had called out in his brightest voice, “Eleven till three, five till eight, six days a week, only half-a-crown a person!”

  One of the gentlemen had stopped. “Look here, sniveller, don’t be crying your wares as if your giant were a hot pie—get a handbill printed.”

  “A handbill?” Vance gawped. His hand closed on the man’s arm. “Where would I get that?”

  Claffey dug Pybus in the ribs, and turned down his mouth.

  “Why, go to a jobbin’ printer,” the pressman drawled. “And will y’ quit molesting my cuff?”

  Joe took his hand away as if the sleeve were heated iron. He was desperate not to offend.

  “Jobbin’ printers,” Claffey said to him afterwards. “That’s what I heard mentioned by a few. I suppose you know what they are?”

  “Them?” Joe guffawed. “Isn’t my uncle the chief jobbin’ of the parish? Leave it up to me.” He turned on the Giant, rubbing his buttocks, complaining. “I came down with a rueful crash there. There was no need to turn me arse-over-pate to make a comedy.”

  “I was trying to calm you,” the Giant explained. “My finger went astray.”

  Later, Jankin stole up and said, “Giant, have you ever, you know … with a lady?”

  The Giant was impressed to know that Jankin had not believed a word he had said to the newspaper men. He confessed, “I am a perfect stranger to the rites of Venus.”

  “Ah, then it’s only me,” Jankin said, melancholy. “The virgin of the world. If Joe would put a twopence in my pocket, I could make my addresses to a lady.”

  “Has he given you naught?” The Giant fished a coin out. “Buy a sweetmeat. Offer it to a lady, do you understand? Don’t take out your diddler and ask her to suck it.”

  “Can I not have a bite of the sweetmeat myself?”

  “If she offers. But give it her nice, wrapped up. Not with your fingers stamped in it.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to address an Englishwoman. Could I address Bitch Mary?”

  “Mary? Leave that alone. Claffey would yoick your entrails out.”

  The Giant stooped, and passed his hand over the seat of his throne. “Here.” He pulled out a great iron nail and held it up. “Is this your work, Jankin? All the time I’m boasting about Paris and Amsterdam, and this little device boring into my buttocks.”

  “Sorry,” Jankin said.

  “Ah well,” said the Giant, and snapped the nail in two between his fingers.

  “It’s an experiment,” Hunter said. “You have heard of an experiment, have you?”

  “Is it a disease?” the pauper said.

  “Y’re way off, man,” said John Hunter. “An experiment isn’t a disease! It’s the thing that imparts the knowledge that makes a man of science like me able to cure the disease.”

  “Is that an experiment?” the pauper said. “That blade you’ve got out your drawer?”

  “We call this a lancet, not a blade. Brace up, can’t you! My man Howison gave you full information that you were to be in an experiment, you came here to my house on that understanding, and if you don’t like it you can walk out that door.”

  “And if I do, will I get a penny for my trouble?”

  “No, not a farthing, but my boot up your backside
. Trouble? You? What trouble did it give you, to step along to a gentleman’s house and be treated civil? What were you doing else? Watching a cockroach race, were you? Oh, I’d be very sorry to drag you from a cockroach race, I’m sure.”

  Calm down, John Hunter. Get a grip. Those arteries of yours are hardening, that blood pressure is shooting up the scale on the instruments not yet within your ken. You feel the blood in your ears, ker-clunk—and if you were to glance into the plain pineframed oval of mirror that lights the north wall of your consulting room, you would see your cheeks, with their outgrowth of ginger bristle, dappled with a flush as rosy as a girl’s. What is modesty in her, is choler in you: not healthy, John.

  When I look out of the window and see the cats after my pheasants and digging up my flowers, I scramble for my gun, but by the time I get to it the cats have run away. This makes a spasm in my chest.

  The pauper cowered against the wall, his hands covering his privy parts. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Give you a wee prick,” Hunter said.

  “Will it hurt me?”

  “Naw, man.” He plucked at the pauper’s shielding arms.

  “Will it make my parts drop off?”

  “Naw. It’ll do you good. In fact, it’s a dose of medicine for you, with my compliments.”

  The man stared. He had never heard of getting something for nothing.

  “Look, now,” Hunter said. “Let me show you how it will be.” Patiently, he unbuttoned himself, and took out his tackle, easing his balls through the placket. Scarlet against its bush of orange hair, his cock was as vivid as the part of some obscene tropical monkey. It lay glowing in the palm of his hand, looking as if it might break out into some violence.

  “Come on now,” Hunter said to the pauper. “Fair’s fair. Now show me yours.” The pauper’s eyes were riveted. “I never saw one on a Scotchman before,” he said. “Are they all that colour?”