by Ned Beauman
‘I know you’re there, Sinner!’ shouted Kölmel. ‘Come out! I know you’re fucking there! Or, er, otherwise, if you’re not, I’d like to offer you my sincerest apologies, Mr Pearl.’
‘Fuck!’ said Sinner. He got up, picked up his original bottle of bourbon, kicked the still-kneeling Pearl in the face and climbed out of the window on to the fire escape, which was now littered with the yellow forms. It was a warm night, and as he looked out over New York he felt like an ant crawling over a cinema screen. Running down the clanging iron steps, he nearly toppled off the edge – a week of abstinence and constant exercise had let him get drunk tonight even quicker than he’d intended. He jumped down to the pavement beside the dustbins and looked around. The street was empty but for a stray cat. He wanted to be submerged in glow again, but Times Square was a long way away, and on the corner opposite he saw a delicatessen, closed, and a little bar, still open. He ran across the street into the bar. And there, sitting on a stool with a beer, was Frink.
‘Come on, Sinner,’ said Frink, not looking surprised to see him. ‘Don’t know what you wanted with that wanker, but you’ve had your fun now.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Sinner.
‘Come on, Sinner,’ repeated Frink. He got up from the stool and made as if to put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. So Sinner smashed the bottle of bourbon on the edge of the bar and lunged with a grunt at Frink, who raised his hands to defend himself and got a two-inch gash in his palm. Sinner was about to lunge again when the barman smacked him over the head with a wooden drinks tray and he lost consciousness. The last thing he saw was his trainer looking sadly down at him, blood streaming from his dirty fingertips. He hadn’t even eaten his sweets.
6
NOVEMBER 1935
By the side of the road there was a heap of burnt wood like a badger’s funeral pyre. ‘What’s that?’ said Erskine as the cart rattled past.
‘A sort of shrine, I think,’ replied Gittins, and said something to the driver in Polish. The driver’s reply was so long that Erskine wished he had never raised the subject, but finally the driver did finish and Gittins translated.
‘A hundred years ago it seems there was a monk called Jakub, who lived in the monastery up in the mountains. One day he went into his abbot’s study to find him … well, doing something unspeakable with the daughter of the blacksmith from down here in Fluek, whose great-grandchildren still live nearby. Jakub, outraged, killed the abbot with a dagger, and then, stricken with guilt and panic, fled the monastery. Coming to this road, he dropped the dagger where that shrine is now, stole a horse and rode north towards Gdansk. Along the way, after witnessing evil and misery of all kinds and helping where he could, he met God in a tavern.’
‘I see.’
‘Jakub asked God why He allowed human brutality to go unchecked in all its awfulness. God replied that He merely gave human beings free will, which he could never take back. But Jakub argued that free will is a frail thing, always a slave to our animal instincts – if God wanted us to have real free will, why did he make men so hot-headed at the same time? God told Jakub that he had already heard these arguments from his angels, and he had ignored them then too. But at last, in frustration, God suggested to Jakub a pact, whereby any man who wanted to murder another man would now get the chance to think it over without passion. Jakub would become the saint of repentant murderers: whenever one man killed another, Jakub would appear to that man, give him as long as he needed to consider properly what he’d just done, and ask if he regretted it. If he did, the man could take back the murder and it would be as if nothing had ever happened. If he didn’t, then at least he would have acted with true free will. And if the scheme were successful, it would be extended to all sin. Jakub would become the second-greatest redeemer that ever lived.’ In the distance Erskine spotted a thin plume of smoke above the darksome fir trees – they were nearing the village. ‘Jakub agreed, of course, but as soon as he did he realised that God had tricked him. He would go years at a time, coming upon thousands of scenes of carnage, before finding a single person who would not do just the same thing if given a second chance. People kill, Jakub realised, because it suits us to, and our baser urges are just an excuse. In the end, he saw that he had been lying even to himself: he was glad he’d killed the abbot, and wouldn’t change a thing about what had happened. He went to God and asked if he could give up the task, now that he had been shown how wrong he was about human nature and about his own. And God denied him his freedom, as a punishment for the abbot’s murder. Rather a striking fable, isn’t it? Now it seems that everyone who passes by throws a log or a stick on the pile, and every so often somebody sets light to it. The fire calls to Jakub, asking him to help the people of his village choose wisely in troublous times.’
Just as Gittins finished, Erskine was nearly thrown from the cart as one of its front wheels was sucked into a hole in the road. They both got out to help the driver and found themselves up to their ankles in mud. Because of the cold everything hurt a bit more than it should have. The smell of the horses reminded Erskine of his uncle’s disastrous attempts to teach him to ride back in Claramore when he was twelve. He already wished he had never come on this trip.
And, indeed, he could hardly remember why he had ever thought it might be a worthwhile way to spend a fortnight. In November, Benjamin Percy, who’d just come back from the Ukraine, had made a rousing speech to the Royal Entomological Society in which he argued that, while people were only too happy to go all the way to Africa or Asia, there was a lamentable neglect of unexotic old eastern Europe, ‘where every time you shake out your boot in the morning some unknown subgenus will fall on the floor’. Percy himself had come back with a few very intriguing new grubs. So several new expeditions had been organised, including this one to a region south of Bialystok, part-funded by Erskine’s own father. There were supposed to be five men coming, but three had dropped out for one reason or another, leaving Erskine alone with John Gittins.
Gittins was a fat otter-faced bureaucrat in his fifties who for nearly twenty years had carried around a glass vial containing a small colony of cimicids – bedbugs – which every night he tipped out on to his hairy thigh so that they could feed on his blood as part of some obscure long-running experiment into mandible size versus nutritional preferences. Reportedly, when he checked out of hotels he would often forget the vial and then dash back to his room almost in tears in case the maids had smashed it underfoot. When he wasn’t talking about his cimicid colony, Gittins was almost invariably talking about his feud with Francis Hemming CMG CBE, the formidable lepidopterist secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The full details of the dispute were far too complex for anyone but Gittins himself to understand, but Erskine did know that, on the final day of a recent series of consultations in Lisbon, Gittins had been intending to table a revolutionary motion about mail ballots which would have shaken Hemming’s tyranny, and, anticipating this, Hemming had got up first and spoken uninterrupted for nearly five hours about malarial parasite classification, so that the meeting had to be adjourned for the sake of the tired old men on the committee before Gittins could begin his revolt. Gittins was now determined to destroy Hemming by any means possible, and would be willing, Erskine suspected, to sacrifice not only his own life but probably also his wife’s, his daughter’s and even his cimicids’ to prevent Hemming getting the knighthood to which he aspired. Gittins’ only non-entomological hobby was languages, of which he could speak nearly a dozen, including Polish. He had a mole on his neck with six long wiry hairs sticking out of it, as if a spider had been shot from a catapult and embedded itself in his flesh.
Closer to the village, they passed grey fields of barley and beetroot. Fluek itself, chosen for the diversity of the nearby terrain, was nothing but some cottages, some barns, some stables, an inn and a church – whose roof had been cracked ever since the Bolsheviks came through in 1920 – all huddled together. Several of the timber buildings were p
atched up with incongruous sheets of rusting corrugated iron which must have been plundered from a nearby battlefield. There was something so submissive and exhausted about the place, thought Erskine, like a thin farmer munching on grass because his own fat cattle have bullied him out of his hot dinner again.
They all got out of the cart, and after the driver had hitched the horses to a post he led the two Englishmen to the inn. On the way, Erskine noticed several old women in shawls glaring at them from doorways.
‘They don’t seem very pleased to see us,’ he murmured to Gittins. Was this the ‘evil eye’ he had read about?
‘No, they certainly don’t,’ replied Gittins, and said something to the driver. Erskine cringed – he hadn’t intended Gittins to relay his comment, and now the idiot was certain to cause offence. But the driver replied in a casual tone, and Gittins said, ‘He said we shouldn’t have arrived today. Today is the birthday of – well, I don’t know the word – the “angel child”, I think. The grandmothers think that’s bad luck, he says. He doesn’t believe it himself.’
‘Who or what is the “angel child”?’ The phrase made him shiver for some reason.
‘He says we shouldn’t concern ourselves with that.’
The inn was not quite as bad as Erskine had feared. A smudged woman in a red skirt was pouring tea from a samovar as they entered. At her feet lay a grey one-eyed mongrel, scratching at fleas and suckling a litter of tiny pups. The woman spoke a few sincere-sounding words of welcome and the driver helped them carry their baggage upstairs.
Their room contained only a double bed, a table and a chair. They didn’t unpack because there was nowhere to put anything. On the wall opposite the bed was an odd hand-drawn poster.
‘What’s that?’ Erskine said.
‘I think that’s supposed to be a louse, and it says, “This may you kill.” And I think the other thing is supposed to be a bath, and it says, “This may you save.” Meaning the bathwater? I may have misunderstood.’ It was nearly five o’clock. Gittins went to the window. ‘Dark soon. No point going out today.’ He took a volume of Finnish grammar from his pretentious red leather book-satchel and sat down at the table.
‘Don’t you want to see the rest of the village?’ said Erskine.
‘Not much to see.’
Erskine, determined to prove Gittins wrong, went out for a walk. But, in fact, apart from some hens, he couldn’t find anything to look at. Everyone seemed to be indoors. And the rain stung the back of his neck. So he went back to the room, sat on the bed, and read some of Sloane’s commentaries on Darwin. At seven o’clock the proprietress came upstairs with two bowls of tolerable stew. At eight o’clock Gittins took off his trousers and, humming happily under his breath, fed his cimicids, a ritual that even Erskine could recognise as weirdly erotic in nature. He was almost sure, at one point, that he heard Gittins murmur something to the insects about Francis Hemming. At nine o’clock they got into bed together and Gittins blew out the candle.
‘Goodnight,’ he said.
‘Goodnight,’ said Erskine. Gittins smelt even worse than the horses, but Erskine still fell asleep immediately.
The next day they got up before dawn and went out to a stream near the village. They both wore oil-silk capes. Erskine kicked up some rocks at a bend in the stream and Gittins held a very fine net in the water a few feet further down. Every few hours they would leave the net on a tree stump to dry and then pick through its contents for specimens. Whenever Gittins tried to talk about Hemming, Erskine pretended not to hear. So in the afternoon Gittins began to initiate conversations which were not at first about Hemming but which were designed to be steered casually towards the subject of Hemming within ten or fifteen minutes. And by the evening Gittins, like a master chess player, was diligently engineering conversational junctures at which, although he had not yet himself mentioned Hemming, it would have been perverse for Erskine to respond with anything other than the allusion to Hemming that was so logically invited – leaving Erskine no choice but to go back to ignoring Gittins as he had in the morning. What seemed to captivate Gittins was Erskine’s deliberate refusal to make clear whether he approved or disapproved of Hemming’s regime. Meanwhile, Gittins didn’t seem to want to discuss his cimicids too much with Erskine, much as a man will only talk about his mistress with his closest friends.
When, with night falling, they returned to the inn, there was a small crowd of boys waiting outside. Gittins greeted them in Polish. None replied, but the oldest, a crooked-toothed but handsome lad of about sixteen, held out a dented tobacco tin. Erskine smiled and shook his head.
‘Come on,’ said Gittins.
‘I don’t smoke a pipe.’
‘I don’t expect it’s tobacco.’
So Erskine took it and opened it. It was empty but for five or six crawling black specks. Gittins got out his magnifying glass and bent over the tin. ‘Anoplura.’
‘Lice? Is this a joke?’
‘They must have heard from someone that we’ve come here to look for insects.’
Erskine shut the tin and held it out to the boy, but he wouldn’t take it back.
‘He probably wants money,’ said Gittins.
‘If we give him any now we’ll have to fork out to all of them, every day, for as long as we’re here,’ said Erskine. But then he caught the oldest boy’s eye again. There was something about his expression, cocky and nervous at the same time, and about the coal-dust stubble on his upper lip, which made Erskine reconsider. The boy reminded him of someone, someone for whom he felt a certain ardour, someone whose face he’d last seen when he was back in London, but he couldn’t think who. ‘Ask him how much he wants,’ he said.
Gittins spoke to the boy. ‘He wants ten groszy.’
‘How much is that?’
‘About tuppence, I think.’
‘Oh. Well, let’s give them all ten groszy.’
‘I don’t have any change that small.’
‘What do they need it for? There are no shops here.’
‘I think pedlars come through sometimes.’
Erskine gave all the boys a zloty note from his wallet. None of them moved.
‘What more do they want?’
Gittins enquired. ‘They want to give us the specimens, but they want their tins back afterwards.’
‘Bloody hell. Ask the oldest if he will sell us his tin for ten zloty.’
Gittins translated, but then all the boys started to babble at once. ‘Now they all want to sell their tins. This one’ – a grimy child of about six years old with a strangely adult face, like a homunculus – ‘is insisting very vehemently that he has the best tin.’
‘If we give the money to anyone but the biggest, it will get stolen.’
So Erskine pressed a ten zloty note into the warm hand of the oldest boy. With a little bit of what sounded like swearing the argument ended, and one by one the smaller boys emptied the contents of their own tins into the tin that was now Erskine’s. Then they dispersed. The oldest boy did not even look back at Erskine as he hurried off. When they were all out of sight, Erskine shook all the lice on to the ground and stamped on them.
‘“These may you kill”,’ he recalled.
‘You know, Erskine, I rather think we may have been swindled,’ replied Gittins. For the first and last time on that trip they laughed together. Erskine wondered if any of those boys might be the ‘angel child’. Perhaps the handsome one. But then what could he have to do with bad luck?
They’d been up in the room for about an hour when Erskine, hoping to start a friendly, non-Hemming-related conversation, made the error of saying, ‘Did you know that Captain Robert Fitzroy nearly rejected Charles Darwin as a naturalist for the HMS Beagle in 1831 because he didn’t trust the shape of Darwin’s nose?’
‘Really?’
‘Says so here. What a turning point in scientific history.’
‘What are you reading?’
‘Sansom’s The Candle Flame.’
‘Wha
t’s it about?’
‘Oh, the theory and practice of eugenics. It’s excellent.’
‘You don’t believe in any of that rot, do you?’
Erskine was speechless for a moment. ‘I intend to devote my life to “that rot”, actually.’
‘The betterment of the Anglo-Saxon race. The triumph of the germ-plasm.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on. There are forty-five million people in Britain, Erskine. And you plan to start breeding for pedigree. How do you suppose that will happen?’
‘It’s simply a matter of systematic encouragement and discouragement.’
‘And by discouragement you mean the lethal chamber?’
Erskine hated that phrase. It stood for every irrational, feminine objection that the average imbecile had to the project of eugenics, saving him from having to think for even a moment about the substance of his prejudice.
‘The lethal chamber is just one of a thousand methods,’ said Erskine. ‘There may be no need for it ever to come into use. You know perfectly well that it’s just sensationalism to identify the whole project with one extreme measure. Imagine if all anyone knew of entomology was you and your cimicids.’
‘Would I be entitled to procreate, then, according to your scheme?’
Erskine had of course already considered this, and the fact was that Gittins was fat, smelly, petty and tedious; not quite a superman. But he’d probably already gone much too far with his comment about the cimicids – it was only their second day, after all – so he just said, ‘I’m sure you’d pass the relevant tests.’
‘Oh, thank you, Erskine, that’s very comforting.’ Erskine had not realised that Gittins was intellectually capable of sarcasm. ‘What frightens me is that perhaps one day I really will have to sit one of those tests, and it will be you who sets the questions and marks the answers, or if not you then perhaps Mr Hitler. I very much hope you grow out of all this.’
