The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  On his first morning in Hounslow William was slow to wake. The chloral had left a residue of grit inside his eyelids and upon the underside of his skull, and his arms in their restraints were heavy and numb. He breathed in and, despite the chill, the air tasted greasy and old. There were voices and the heavy sound of footsteps. Before he could open his eyes his head was lifted and a spoon thrust roughly between his glued lips, tearing at the skin. The metal spoon rattled against his teeth and was gone and he choked as he fell back upon the pillow, the tears starting from his eyes. Through the blur of tears he saw a man, half turned away. The man's shoulders drooped and his hair was powdered with grey. Then once again William slept.

  Much later he woke again. The sleep had not refreshed him. The headache persisted at his temples and he felt at the same time fretful and drained. But his wrists were free. Very carefully, summoning his energy, he lifted his head. He was in a small room perhaps twelve feet square into which eight narrow cribs had been crammed. The walls were of sketchily whitewashed brick, set with a single small window striped with bars. There was no fireplace. Besides a comfortable-looking chair that took up a disproportionate amount of the small space the cribs were the room's only furniture. The chair was empty but most of the other cribs were occupied by men who lay quietly, their eyes closed or set upon the ceiling. Another man squatted in the narrow space between the beds, his hands clasping the iron bars of William's crib. Like the other men he wore a white tunic although his was grimy and hitched up around his waist. Beneath it he was naked. He was painfully thin. His nose jabbed out of his face like a hooked finger and his sallow skin was pitted with the knuckle-print scars of smallpox. But his eyes were a clear and brilliant blue and as he threw his head back the watery light from the window lit up his face. It was flooded with a kind of angelic ecstasy. Casting away the bars of the crib, he held his joyful arms aloft and rapturously gave himself up to the glory of Almighty God. As the words streamed from him in exultant adoration William felt a stab of loss so sharp he could barely keep from crying out and the darkness swirled giddily around him. He clenched his eyes closed, unable to bear the sight of this prophet who squatted before him. For shining from the man's face, lighting him up from within and flooding him with bliss, was all that William had lost, all that had died within him. The grief pierced William's heart and, pressing his fingers into his head as if he would crush his skull, he buried his face in his pillow.

  The door slammed. The prophet's prayers became louder, more frantic.

  'Oh for Christ's sake! You dirty little bastard, didn't I tell you —? Jesus Christ. Peake, bucket. Now.'

  There were footsteps, followed by the sharp crack of a slap and a more muffled crunch. There was a ragged groan. Then the prayers started up again but fainter this time, more breathless.

  'You disgusting piece of scum, you'll pick up every filthy little scrap of what you done or I'll have you lick it off the floor, do you hear me?'

  There was another crunch, another gasp and the prayers ceased. William loosened the grip on his skull and lifted his face an inch from the pillow. Instantly he was assailed by the unmistakable stench of human excrement. Again something twisted in his heart. He thought he might vomit. Instead he bit down hard upon the raw skin of his lip. In the cot next to his a man with wiry white hair stared impassively at the ceiling, his hands folded across his chest. In the far corner of the room someone hummed tunelessly.

  'I said, pick it up!' There was a sharp stamp and something cracked. Water sloshed across the floor.

  'Oh my — Jesus, Mr Vickery!' A different voice, higher-pitched, squeaky with outrage. 'The sodding bastard has gone and bit me!'

  There was another strangled gasp and then a thud.

  'Get him out of here,' Vickery ordered. He no longer sounded so much angry as tired. 'Douche first, then solitary. Two weeks. He bites you again, make it four.'

  The humming grew louder as something bumped across the splintered floor. No one else in the dormitory moved. Then a key turned in a lock and the door opened.

  'My God, My God,' whispered the prophet and his voice echoed in the empty corridor. 'Why hast thou forsaken me?'

  'You stupid bloody sod,' Vickery said wearily. 'When will you learn to keep your fat mouth shut?'

  The door slammed. Someone began to mutter a string of curses very softly to themselves, the same three words over and over. Another's feet thumped rhythmically against the iron bars of their cot. The feeling of oppression, of impending disaster, was so strong in William's chest that he wanted to scream out loud. He gripped the wrist restraints in his fists and pulled at them to calm himself. Then he felt a rap upon his shoulder. He turned his head. The man from the next bed leaned over towards him, beckoning him close with a finger. William started and his sense of dread strengthened. He had taken the man for an old one but, although his hair was quite white, his face was younger than William's own. His eyes darted about and his tongue flickered over his lips, again and again, like the tongue of a lizard.

  'I pray for all the men in this house. Now you have come I will pray for you.' He lowered his voice to a whisper. 'That's why I've been lodged here, amongst you. My father's friend Harrington requested I come here before I take up my parish duties. I'm to pray for the lunatics so that their suffering might be eased a little.' He smiled in William's direction but his tongue still flickered over his curved lips and his eyes never ceased in their restless darting about the room. 'I will pray for you.'

  William turned his head away, the screams dying in his chest. The dread flattened a little, leaving a black scum of misery. He curled himself up, wrapping his arms around his knees, and called out for chloral to be brought. Over and over he called, in a voice as dull and rhythmic as the thump of his neighbour's fist upon the frame of his crib. At last, Vickery came. Matter-of-factly, as though he was following the conventions of medical practice to the letter, he slapped William hard across the cheek before thrusting the spoon between his lips. William swallowed and closed his eyes, pressing his hands into the churning chill of his belly. Then he waited for the darkness to pull him down.

  XXI

  It took close on an hour to ease the body out from the place where it was wedged. It'd made itself at home in its narrow cleft, its shoulders and hips swelling and softening into the brick, the skin a dark purple like it'd sucked itself full of the underground darkness. The rats had had a go at it, of course, and there was bits missing from the legs and fingers and anywhere else they'd found the room to squeeze around it but the salt and the cold had stopped the rotting going too fast ahead and the body smelled more of mud and seaweed than anything else.

  Once they'd got it free, the tide favoured them, and for a deal of the way to the sluice they were able to let the river carry it, nudging it along by one of its stiffened feet when it caught in a gap in the brick. At the Temple steps, Tom had Joe go out first to scout things while he unbundled the necessaries from the tarpaulin on his back. It was a little before five o'clock in the morning and, though dawn was a good way off, the river was starting to get busy. It was still too early for the steamers but the hay barges were out and the gardeners from upriver were taking their produce to the morning markets. Still, the early folks weren't much in the way of looking about them, not in Tom's experience. Besides, the moon was a young one, which was a piece of luck, and the clouds hung low over the city. Sticking as best he could to the darkest shadows along the river wall Tom let the body swing out into the river.

  It bobbed face down, its gnawed fingers paddling at the water. Tom caught it by the ankle. With his head bent low over the dark water, he began to drag the body slowly downstream towards a stretch where there was a clutch of disused wooden barges moored several deep. Folks used them for sleeping sometimes but they was little more than hulks, their rotting hulls collapsing on to the mud at low tide. Tom wasn't much of a swimmer but he made his way out, half-walking, half-hauling himself along with the ancient tarred fenders that bulged along the barges
' dark flanks, until he came to a place where the mooring chains met in a rough iron knot and a flimsy pier with tottering legs chopped up the flow of the river. The waterlogged corpse was heavy and hard to manage. Tom hooked his arms around its thick thighs so as to pull it along. It dragged reluctantly behind him, leaving a gentle V-shaped trail in the river. The water was icy cold. Tom shivered. It'd do for him the same as his companion, if he stayed here too long. Pushing the body ahead of him he ducked into the narrow space between the barges. He would not be seen here, not from the banks or from the river. The slice of sky between the two high flanks of the boats was grey now, the darkness dusty with dawn. Tom wedged the body in best he could and waited.

  As the sky lightened the river became busier, noisier. The penny steamers honked and sloshed. On the banks, wagons and carriages rattled over granite slabs. Tom pressed himself against the rotten flank of the barge and willed the river towards the sea. And slowly, so slow Tom fancied it was doing all it could to defy the very fundamentals of its nature, it went. When it was only around Tom's knees he took an old coat from the tarpaulin bundle on his back and huddled into it, rubbing hard at his frozen arms. Still he waited. The tide drained away, so that the slice of sky shifted and the barges slumped into the slime, leaning down over Tom. He crouched lower, waiting for the water to puddle on the mud. At last it was low enough. Quickly as his frozen fingers would permit him, Tom pulled the old coat off his own back. Again he reached into his bundle. Into the top pocket he poked the man's handkerchief, firm enough so as it would stay but careful to let the ends with the man's initials bloom out with a dandy's flourish. Then he bundled the dead man's arms into the sleeves of the coat, wrenching impatiently at them when they wouldn't bend. A bone cracked. The coat would do, although it was no gent's garb. Tom could've used the man's suit, of course, he still had it, but it was a good one. It'd only be a waste to return it to a dead man who had no use for its quality and who'd be like to muddy it when he lay down. When the corpse was good as dressed Tom dragged it carefully to the top end of the barges. This was the riskiest part. The head had to be far enough out, after all, so as it would definitely be spotted before the tide came up again, but at the same time he didn't want it attracting attention afore he'd got himself a good distance away. Taking a deep breath he shoved the body out beneath the tangle of chains and up against the ramshackle pier. Then, fast as he could, using the cover of the barges and the river wall, holding himself in so thin he might almost have passed for invisible, he slipped away.

  He came up the river stairs a few hundred yards downriver. Straight off, fearful in his wet clothes of freezing himself to death, he took himself into a coffee-house and there, in front of a sputtering fire and with his fists closed round a mug of hot tea and brandy, he steamed himself dry, filling the narrow room with the rotting stink of river. A little later he came out and made his way east along the river. A knot of people were standing on the bank, pointing. Tom looked out. A couple of dredgermen had pulled their splintery boat alongside the pier and were in the process of hauling something from amongst the chains of the barges.

  'Oh my sweet Lord!' squealed one woman in horror and she stretched her neck for a better look. 'A dead 'un, for sure.'

  'Fancy that,' Tom said and shook his head in surprise. 'Fancy that.'

  He did not wait to see in which direction the dredgermen pushed off. They'd get a few bob for the corpse at most of the stops along the south side. His money, rightly, Tom thought as he walked slowly away, but he smiled all the same.

  XXII

  Other men in the dormitory resisted the doses Vickery forced upon them twice daily, pretending to swallow so that they might later spit it out or simply clamping their teeth against the spoon, but not William. The drugs nauseated and confused him. They dried his mouth and cramped his temples and smeared him with a film of greasy dread that shortened his breath and twitched at his eyelids. But they also deposited a sticky drift of dust across his consciousness, disguising him from himself. The madness felt closer, more real, as the chloral took hold. Twice a day the sedative drew him down into the darkness, separating him from time and place and flattening him out inside so that the lunacy might insinuate a little further and with a little more assurance into his most private crevices. When, in the cold grey of another exhausted dawn, the preoccupations and purposes of the outer world threatened to creep into his skull and cast their faint light upon the outer cortices of his brain, the chloral locked the shutters against them, barring their entry. He paid no heed to the other men with whom he shared the ward. He spoke to no one. He rose from his bed only when taken to the privy or to the dining hall for his sparse meals. He ate little, crumbling the coarse bread mechanically between his fingers. When he fumbled at his thoughts they crumbled too. He let them drop away. There was a hopeless satisfaction in it, in no longer having to struggle against it. With nothing to think of and no facility for thinking he preoccupied himself with a compulsive monitoring of his minor ailments: sores on his thighs and buttocks when, as a punishment, he had been left by Vickery to lie for a day in his own urine; the cramps in his legs; an earache; a persistent cough. He called often for tinctures and tonics and, when occasionally they were brought, he fretted upon their efficacy. He rarely slept but he drifted in and out of troubled dozes, waking from them cold and clammy and calling for chloral. Held tight in the uneasy embrace of the drugs, blurred and dreary and bound by regulations and routine, there was, during the days at least, something approximating to peace. One morning, as the dishwater of another dawn leaked through the high window, the prophet was returned to the ward. The light extinguished from his face, he looked ordinary, exhausted. And so a week passed and then another.

  While other inmates from time to time received correspondence, Polly sent nothing. William expected nothing. The madness separated them as absolutely and as irrevocably as death. Occasionally he had a sense of her, a shivery feeling of her breath upon the back of his neck as though he was the one still living and she the lingering spirit of the departed, but he knew it to be no more than that. They were no longer of the same world. The unborn child, however, haunted his ragged dreams. Night after night he stared in frozen horror as through the sprigged lawn of Polly's gown burst a terrible black demon infant, shrieking wildly and flailing not with tiny arms and legs but with one hundred lunatic tentacles, the perfect quintessence of derangement. Night after night he saw the terror in Polly's eyes as it leaped from her arms to scream and rage, clawing and throttling, stabbing and ripping, growing all the while to a terrible size and set upon devastation. Night after night it raged until at last, when all about it was destroyed, it turned its maddened red eyes upon William. All at once its hideous face softened and it reached out with its tentacle arms, yielding now and quiet, murmuring only one word, over and over. 'Father,' it said and its voice trembled with love. 'Father.'

  The first time William woke the dormitory with his screams, Vickery shook him violently and had him spend the rest of the night with a rag bound over his mouth as punishment. In the morning Vickery made no mention of the incident but when he loosened the gag he had Peake bring William ointment for his sores. At breakfast, for the first time since arriving at the asylum, William tasted sugar in his tea.

  As for Di, William would not permit himself to think upon him. It churned his belly into turbulent eddies and inflamed the ashy deadness in his chest. The briefest fragments of memory, the sweep of his eyelashes against his pale cheek, the dimples of his knuckles in his plump hands, the soft pink buds of his toes, each was enough to set the fretted skin on William's forearms prickling with longing, so that even beneath the sluggish weight of the sedative he could feel the cravings begin to stretch and flex in the pit of his stomach. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands and forced them down, waiting for confusion to blur their edges. It never took long. The sedative was strong, much stronger than was recommended for long-term usage, but then the asylum was understaffed. Chloral did the work of
a dozen men and never complained of the work or arrived on the ward the worse for drink. There were very few attendants at Hounslow of whom one could confidently make the same claim.

  William had been in the asylum for more than two weeks when Vickery gave him the newspaper. It was against the rules but William had passed a wretched night, wracked with dreams. When at last the monster called out to him with all its ghastly love and recognition William vomited in his sleep. Choking, barely able to breathe, William forced himself on to one elbow and vomited again. He could not stop. Again and again he retched, until all that was left was a thin bitter bile that dripped like drool down his chin. The vomit matted his hair and whiskers, and soaked his sheets. There was a pool of it on the floor. William called for water, quietly at first and then more insistently. In the bed next to William's the white-haired man woke and began to whimper, banging his head repeatedly against the iron bars of his crib. By the time Vickery stormed into the dormitory, his hair askew, three or four of the men were awake and agitated, cursing or weeping or thundering their fists against the wall.