But should it be local, J. Leper-Klamm, for a quick kill? Try £8,000. Or should they call in one of the Californian fat cats, and go for top dollar, £15,000? Brain candy. Holes in the shoe.
9
The rector filled his hat with stones. Not caring whether he bruised the straw, he dug the brim in among the flints, pebbles and broken bricks. William watched him: his eyes on the Rector’s eyes, a hawk-like disinterest. The Rector, satisfied, held out the hat at arm’s length, an offering.
‘Seventy-three!’
The boy had done it once more: replied before the question could be put.
Mr Harrison was not sanguine, could not stand against this certainty, the unencumbered act of will. How could he speak? The boy gave answers to questions he had not yet adequately framed; the necessity of asking anything at all faded; Mr Harrison twitched into silence, his goitre bobbing. But his rational, restless, measuring mind needed always to check: even on what no longer was; not understanding that the answer cancelled the question.
Rings smoothed the bland waters, running back into the dropped pebble. A hole, invisibly sealed.
Mr Harrison could not simply shake out the stones to count them, they would be lost among their innumerable brothers. He started to count, stuffing his jacket pockets, then his waistcoat, his trousers: he bulged, misshapen, a lumpy shining gentleman holding out an empty hat, a beggar.
The count had gone.
His collar rubbed against his neck, which seemed to have swollen, horribly, puffed with blood. His underclothes clung to him. Discomfort was the condition with which he was most comfortable. He understood the question the boy was now forcing him to answer: how many stones are left upon the small beach?
He could fetch ropes, perhaps summon the gardener’s son, divide the area into squares, bring buckets, perhaps some sort of weighing machine could be rigged – but the ground was uneven, the tide would bring in more stones, children from the cottages could throw them into the water: he choked, he clutched at his throat, convulsive panic.
William rested his back on one of the stout black timbers of the quay, face to the mere, right hand upon the heart-bird, slowing it, holding back its reckless expenditure of time.
The jagged base of a porter bottle lay in the mud of the foreshore, catching the light. He would fire it by the force of his will, he would melt it. He saw a pattern of flame in the depths of the green, a fret; broke away, consciously. If it could be done then he did not need to do it.
‘I have found a s-sign…’ declaimed the Rector, his meat breath upon the boy’s neck, wildly quoting, already knowing that the rest of the quotation was slipping away from him. ‘A s-s-s-sign…’
It was his theory that a programme of education could only work if it be rooted in observation, mensuration, practical tests: and if the responses were kept alive, stimulated, by rapidly moving through all the disciplines, stitching them together, the whole man, healthy body; so that he would abruptly, violently, quote from the Bard, the Good Book, while William watched the birds turn, a great hand, out over the estuary, the unravelling of a dark hat.
William spoke to his fist. ‘… And now I have lost it. Let us leave the boat on the bank and go.’
They went; Mr Harrison striding, stick in hand, white jacket, shoulder bag, listing everything, seeing nothing. The solid dark-jacketed youth always a few yards behind, heavy lids, snail eyes; his answers dragging out more fractured questions, until the Rector was done with, bodily exhaustion, breathless, ready only for the window seat, sherry wine.
They would walk for many hours, lapwing and swift, endlessly following the ragged disorder of the shoreline; stamp through the stiff grass, sometimes with a ditch beside them, hare and coypu, sometimes with a clear sight of water, the light-sucking mud; seeming to go back as often as forward, if there was a distinction, if there was anywhere to go forward to.
Beyond the quay at Kirby they met with a party of inbred and dwarfish sportsmen, guns at their feet, cattle-faced, drooling: powerful in shoulder and wrist. Unhurried, going nowhere, hands in pockets, looking out over the Twizzle; the far-off hammering of wings, the diving wheeling bird-cloud. The guns drawing in the prey; a clatter of iron filings from hollow chalky teeth.
And now as they approached the Wade, Harrison saw that somehow William had got ahead of him and was waiting at the crossing place.
The boy stands beside the long pole, sea-cross, that marks the track over to Horsey Island: the tide is coming in, the mud barely covered, but the walk is treacherous, the bubbling black ooze soon reaching over the boots, slowing, stopping the walker, who hesitates, both shores retreating, the tide now racing, deep pools on either side.
William breathes out from his mouth, slowly, a lance of hot breath; his hand on the wooden post. Breathes, blows. Across the rush of the tide, undisturbed. Out. Out of him. So slowly. The tongue of breath. Blows darkness into the lowest leaves of a solitary tree standing above the shoreline of Horsey. The tree fills, the breath rushing, unforced. The darkness of the space between the leaves closes, joins, seals the immaterial detail. Sustained: Gull’s breath describes the face in the tree, takes darkness from it. There is a tunnel from the boy’s mouth to the outer limits of the shore; everything else is gone.
A figure is standing on Horsey. There is an unshaped black figure at the side of the tree.
William Gull sees: he is looking from Horsey back across the tidal reach, across the water, at the effigies of Mr Harrison and the boy, William Gull, himself, his hand upon the post of the sea-cross. He rubs the flame in his hand, feeling a splinter drive under his nail, a memory of pain.
BOOK TWO
Manac Es Cem
10
To: Sarah Hinton
123 Whitechapel High Street
October, 1838
My dear Sarah,
You chastise me for my incontinence of expression, you call me ‘whirlwind’, you say that I tell you all things but those with which you most urgently charge me. You say that my manner is, at once, vague, abstracted, preoccupied – and ‘startling’, that I am too sudden, too harsh in manner. My dear Sister, I think you must choose your stick with greater care before you beat me.
You compliment me on looking like a scarecrow, a fairground dummy, its clothes flung upon its back. Nothing fits, I grow in such starts. I wake and my arms are hanging from the bed. I sit; my legs crawl out from beneath the bench. My shoulders spread in the afternoon, my head swells at night. How should I equip a wardrobe to suit such a changeling?
And yet, and yet, all that you say has justice, guilty as charged; but I am not wholly sorry for it. This is to describe a river by the rubbish found along the foreshore, to anathematise the moon because a few benighted souls run mad from its tides, baying in the streets for red blood. I go too far: as always, you reply!
What then of my duties? Yes, I have come to them at last! I sit at the Temple gate and have the working of a fine brazen monster that swallows up coin, devours paper, most heartlessly, returning little for much. I am, in short, a cashier! I have a place in the world, not yet a significant one, but I am truly resolute, urgent – where no urgency is required. I sit at the door and the daylight runs from me.
We are a Christian oasis, half-forgotten, by the caravans of the big bright world. Mr Dyer, woollen-draper, is a sober, upright and respectable man of business. To say that is to say all. He has, I swear it, no secret life, no life of the soul. His only levity before us, his dependants, is habitual, and thus – meaningless. As he enters the premises he looks around and finding us all, always, in our accustomed places, and at the appointed hour, he removes his gloves, opens a drawer and declaims: ‘Observe the dyer’s hand!’ A quotation, I suppose. Of course, we are bound to observe anything and everything – but that smooth white horror. He then steps into an inner sanctum; we see him no more.
One day follows another, time passes but does not flow, as we know it can; time is unconsummated. I rise at seven, and dust till eight. Then do no
thing, or anything there is to be done in the morning, and ditto in the afternoon till nine. I hand spirits across the counter to the best customers, or those who claim to be our best customers, without parting with a solitary ha’penny: those sharp-faced men whose only claim on the hospitality of the establishment would seem to be some special relation with Mr Dyer; a relation that involves significant looks, the vigorous shaking of hands and nodding of heads. Often we part with more strong spirits than we do cloth. We had far better call ourselves The Black Eagle, become a tap room, and give away a suit of best Scotch Tweed, from under the counter, to such as announce themselves, with a wink and a leer, as ‘our best customers’.
My dinner is taken at one, and my tea at five, after which I have my supper, and then have till 10.30 to take my exercise, read, write to you, &c., with little variation.
I have no news, except that my clothes are getting too small – I can’t make up my mind to stop growing.
Your affectionate brother,
James
It was the shrieks at night, the horror. The gut of a cat stretched out and torn, horribly, horribly, stretched until it would stretch no more. Instead of divine music: shrieks in the night, cat-gut, the tails of horses set on fire. The voices of women, of children in pain. My shoes are off. I have walked barefoot in penitence around the body of the church, sweet grass in this foul warren – but the walls are not there. I can see the houses beyond the church; the stones will melt, the glass tempts fire. I have looked heavenward for a breeze to turn the dry pages of the trees. I wait for a fountain of stars. But the ground is parched, the soil is bitter, shards of coloured glass lacerate the skin of my feet. I tear my clothes in the brambles; I bruise my foot upon the stones; dust I rub into my hair. It cannot be borne.
Hell’s hinges; Whitechapel’s henges.
Hinton walked, a dialogue with fever; so cold, shaking, the blood in his face, the veins of his eyes, broken. His shirt was soaked; so many, so many pains to be borne. The blows, women reeling from the arms of their men; blood. The children, verminous; they cannot live. The streets are filled, a river of laughter, lamplight, varnished faces, oaths, the crowd has no thought, where are they going? It doesn’t matter. Young girls sauntering on the arms of their men – who strain to catch the eyes of other girls. The doors of public houses open to the street. Song. Carriages. Even men of education, of substance, position, yes, they come here. Their wives allow it, are accomplice to these brutalities. They are serviced; it is done with. This red, this silken, rim of hell.
Hinton walks the circumference.
Shrieks in the night, he runs from them, towards them. So many windows; as if blind sea-birds had flown into the blank white walls of buildings. Birds buried in walls. He runs from them, on the leash of this circumference, within this invisible boundary, chews his heart. He is bound to a heat that he cannot classify.
A mad voice screaming: ‘BURY THE BELL!’
Angel Alley; the cold brick walls rub his shoulders, forcing himself, he is borne in, borne on, beyond control, led out of himself, dragged out, naked, shivering. Two women in a dark doorway. Women or girls. Their hats. Faces gone into shadow, eaten. He is made dizzy by the scent, so foreign, sickly. He cannot draw breath. He wants.
As I came up to them they spoke, ‘Which of us will you have?’ One spoke, or both. And it was a test; a judgment I could make only with a sword. ‘Which of us?’
He ran to the end of the alley; there was no way out, the walls of the buildings above him, blind windows, the sky so far away, a black wound.
Hinton, upon his knees, but will make no prayer. ‘Christ was the Saviour of men, but I am the Saviour of women, and I don’t envy him a bit.’
Dead windows, red lights, oven-glow, the melting of metals; the mixing of blood with liquid fires, lead and dung. Two women in the doorway.
‘Come up and be dead!’
11
Nicholas Lane was one of those unique individuals who invent for themselves a new category. He was a great bookman: not a great bookseller, he could never be contacted, his stock was impossible to view – not, certainly, a great bookbuyer, his cheques were notoriously Amazonian. A great bookman, simply that. A legend. For want of others, in a small world, at a dead time.
If he could find a Hessel Street squat connection, who also supplied a runner called Nolan, he might be able to get the phonenumber of an Indian accountant in Enfield, who sometimes drove to country auctions with an Islington dealer, who was rumoured to exchange sexual favours with a Clerkenwell silversmith, who shared a stall in Covent Garden with an Italian ex-football player, who had unsubstantiated Sicilian connections, and who sold books as furniture, leatherware by the yard, to a Corsican whose former girlfriend worked in the same tax office as J. Leper-Klamm. If.
Dryfeld detonated: had to be dropped at the bottom of Brick Lane, dal soup, fresh orange juice, 3 papadoms, onion bhaji, vegetable curry, black coffee – and the same again, please. Times Literary Supplement, all the locals, Croydon to Ongar, checking the jumbles, skin like a blood orange, hemp-veined: the man who asked for the radio to be dropped in a bucket of water. He continues his lifelong, and ever unsatisfied, quest for the perfect Bengali virgin, diaphanous sari riding on full hips, bare brown belly: who would oblige an itinerant bookdealing manicdepressive of no fixed abode, no family, and no stock exchange quotation. That was his obsession: if he could quench it he would have to find another. The Lane was the last place on earth to pursue it. He’d have more chance in Limerick Junction on a wet Thursday.
The chain broke on Nolan, not squatting, not scoring, not sleeping. The fox of memory: small ring curved in the soft flesh of his earlobe, making a bright nose in that tiny shrunken face, blooding the skin-tone. A brushed redness, redgold hair, cut short, washed into wire; tall grinning man in a flawless shirt, bleached jeans, some memory splinter of the retail rag trade, late 60s, driver, coated, raw eyed, stimulated pupil, not seeing, unecstatic, broken, mild in manner. Nolan: spoken of, not recovered.
Remember. He would nod in greeting, stick out a hand to be slapped, to test for rain, always nodding, customers, employers, friends, family. Peddled books under the flyover, Berlin Wall end of Portobello, Friday mornings in early winter, sweatshirt, no jacket, clean white plimsolls, the sunlight hasn’t lifted the fog blanket, he is standing there with damaged, torn, marked-up art books, much too active for anyone to touch, the cloth actually hot to handle, smell of college libraries, paint stripper, cow gum, defective literature trawled out of terminal cottages, ‘got to be for you, man’, David Gascoyne’s Short Survey of Surrealism with the spine gone and the Max Ernst dust-wrapper cut-up and pasted onto the endpapers.
‘Swift is surrealist in malice Sade in sadism… Poe in adventure Baudelaire in morals Rimbaud is surrealist in life & elsewhere… Albertus Magnus is surrealist in the automaton Lulle in definition Flamel in the night of gold… Monk Lewis in the beauty of evil…’
Nolan is a delivery man. Always on the run, between meets, cases to load, schlepping, no time, man; that crazed love of books as totems, unread, absorbed through the skin, has to have them around, cheques bounce, vehicle repossessed, divorce, rip-off, harm. Fly out, away, over the swamp lands; sell up in the New York rooms.
Miami; nightclerk in a Colombian massage parlor, it’s very clean, whistling, scrubbing out the shower stall in his jockey-shorts. Heavy citizens. Silk suits. Hairy shoulders.
All front. Mindless. Mov-ing, baby. Julio. Angel. Chris Craft hijack, owners to the sharks. Cuban lift. Blowpipe technicians iced: too hot for the alligators. Bermuda Triangle scare-story video. Halter burns, shaved privates. Rectal meat-hook. The coke shoe. Gets out light, with the loss of one finger. One ring.
So it is that Nicholas Lane brings it to mind, driving alongside the London Hospital, rush hour, jerking forward on our nerves, the lit entrance, pillars, an opera, steps like a Hawksmoor church, diseased supplicants crawl in off the streets, remembers: that Nolan has been picked up in a raid, crashing, n
ot his bust, too bad. Three years in Dorchester. Time to catch up on his Proust. View of the brewery, not Maiden Castle.
The ghost of the fox runs into a furnace of his own devising. Cover blown. Car shakes itself clear, a left, towards the river. The quadrivium that it cannot pass.
J. Leper-Klamm’s days slipped away from him under a sick pulse of strip-lighting, bisto coloured walls; overheated, underfed, detached, secretive, head down, left handed, scribbled his tight birdfoot markings behind a sheltering curve of arm. A long bandage of dirty cuff, unbuttoned, flapped at his wrist, giving him a convalescent look; unravelled pharaoh.
Mr Klamm was not entrusted with interviews, inquisitions, investigations, not expected to break the nerve of cocky self-employed decorators, or see through intricate webs of deceit. He was not a sweater; he psyched nobody out. Within the great block of the Moorgate Tax Offices Mr Klamm was a negligible presence; he filed letters, they were never seen again. He sent triplicate replies to defaulting company directors who had long since claimed their last expense account luncheon. His tongue tasted, permanently, of cheap glue. He was a redundancy waiting to be found out.
J. Leper-Klamm also had Europe’s largest holding, in private hands, of editions of A Study in Scarlet. He collected no other title. His collection had cost him many, many thousands and was worth, even bled at auction, many, many thousands more. His work was a disguise. Or was it? It gave him a number on the computer, a place in the Reich. Without it he would have been so invisible that he could not have functioned. A ghost cannot own books, a ghost cannot lock them into rooms that only he will ever enter.
A schoolmaster at one of the educational establishments on the Indian sub-continent, founded after the model of our high-Victorian Public Schools, had given the schoolboy Klamm, cuffs flapping, dank haired, propped on his elbow, inattentive, waiting, a copy of the Sherlock Holmes Long Stories, four volumes in one, John Murray, reprint, 1952.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 7
