The Giant, O'Brien

by Hilary Mantel

  “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 laboring, 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 amongst 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.” Charlie 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 walks back to Jermyn Street, his brain working. In the hall, he turns out his pockets. One shilling and sixpence. Hm. He calls 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’d 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 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 landpirate 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 croacked 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.

  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 tr
eat. 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.