Heap House for Hotkeys

by Edward Carey

  ‘They never do, Tummis, they are frightened of him.’

  ‘He was a little cruel to a couple of the younger cousins, but, and this is most, he was especially disappointed not to search you. He made comments about it, in particular terms not exactly pleasant, that he would, you know, turn you inside out. He remembers, and retold the history, of finding you after poor Uncle Pitter’s pin. Well, dear plug, that’s the story, a penny dreadful to be sure; but don’t go home, lose yourself a bit, be quiet until evensong and then maybe he shall have forgotten.’

  ‘Thank you, Tummis,’ I said, shaking his hand and apologising as the dear fellow winced, ‘ever so.’

  ‘I shall head to my home, which will be underpopulated without you. But to my fur beetles and fireblats, to my mealworm beetles and my cockroaches, to my woodlouses and my clothes moths and my phorids, my darkling beetles and flesh flies, my thrips and sowbugs and my pill bugs and midges and grainbugs and earwigs and bot flies and of course to my gull, I shall pass your salutations.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear tap, I’ll find you later.’

  ‘Off you go then, plug,’ he said, ‘and be obscure about it.’

  Grandfather

  So into higher corridors I went, but not quite so high as the attics where the ceilings are thick with disease-carrying bats, kicking up the dust which was deep here and there, watching the progress of a snail or two in damp back rooms, stepping over the slugs, listening out for the rats, hoping to avoid Cousin Moorcus. Cousin Moorcus had broken arms and legs on five different occasions; it was not uncommon for an Iremonger cousin to end up in the Infirmary after Moorcus had been about him. Indeed it was most regular. I was particularly eager, profoundly eager, to avoid him.

  I had so often been through the great hulk house, chamber by chamber, in the regions where I was permitted, and through some that I was not, up and down, through long winding staircases, listening to its talking objects, that I knew quite well where I might hide myself. Our home, Heap House, as we called it, was not an original structure; it was built up of other former places. When Grandfather bought up new places, he should often have the buildings dismantled, brought across the heaps, reassembled once more, only this time at a different address, clamped, and bolted, braced and steel-girdled onto our home. Out here deep in the heaplands we had London roofs and turrets, ballrooms and kitchens, outhouses and stairways and many, many chimneys. Huge carts had pulled great masses across the heaps – back when the heaps were still navigable. So I felt, in my way, I was discovering London by walking into those transplanted bits. I sought out London by walking in London rooms, by reading books, by touching places Londoners had actually been. I looked for names scratched on walls and furniture, for people did like to write their names, they liked to leave a proof of themselves, they were all wonderful to me, those names, clues of a greater world. I loved to wander through all those bits of London, there must be many gaps then, over there. It must be something similar, I have often thought, to when a person loses a tooth, only London must have so very many teeth you might not be able to tell. There were small shacks and pieces of palaces in our heap home. It was an enormous building, our place, made up of many other ones. But the original structure, hard to find now, had been in our family for several centuries.

  My family lived only with its own kind, Iremongers with Iremongers, full-blooded Iremongers, all steely and grim and poker-faced. There were so many cousins and uncles and aunts, great aunts and great uncles, hordes of us, Iremongers of every age and shape, all connected by blood. And to keep those plentiful people fed and dressed a whole army of servants was needed. These servants were Iremongers too, but they were part-Iremonger, Iremongers of a lesser hue: one of their parents somewhere down the line married someone un-Iremonger and each generation afterwards kept on doing just that. I cannot say exactly how many servants there were, there were many that worked downstairs in the deep honeycomb of the cellars or out in the heaps who never came upstairs.

  I was up in a high corridor, much of it taken from a former caulking factory of Tilbury, when the house suddenly shuddered. I held onto the wall waiting for it to finish. There followed a loud and horrible scream. And that was quite usual. It was the scream of Grandfather’s steam engine.

  The engine travelled from Heap House into London every morning, and came back at night, with the same horrible screaming and thumping that shook the entire house. The train stopped in the cellar and Grandfather was taken up into the house by a lift pulled by unhappy mules that lived down there in the darkness and never came up. There was a tunnel that ran from the house under the dirtheaps into the distant city.

  My grandfather, Umbitt Iremonger, his birth object a silver cuspidor, a personal one, for Grandfather to aim his very own sputum into, ruled over us all. Grandfather came in and went out into the city to do his great service, and when he was out there was a sort of relief in the house, the longer the day wore on the more anxious we would become waiting for the house to scream again, waiting for the noise of his returning locomotive.

  The scream fading, I went onwards again. I wandered through the leaking corridors, turning into small cubicles, smaller rooms brought in from here and from there. I often visited these hints of a greater world, for all I had ever known was Heap House. I had never been anywhere else, just Heap House and the heaps themselves.

  I thought I should be safe up there, safe and alone, safe with the insects busy about, the rodents in the walls, and the odd maggoty seagull that had somehow found its way into the house but not back out. But up there, in a room originally belonging to a tobacconist’s from Hackney, I heard a hurried whispering that meant I was not alone.

  ‘Thomas Knapp.’

  And then there was a sudden light, a lamp came into view and was shone in my face.

  I Am Hunted

  ‘What are you doing there? Who is it? Come out into the light.’

  Ingus Briggs, the underbutler, a distant relative of some sort, his birth object a tortoiseshell shoehorn (Thomas Knapp), was suddenly beside me. Mister Briggs had a great collection of pincushions in his sitting room (a girl he once loved had a pincushion birth object). He once showed me his pincushion collection while in a sociability fit, and even begged me to push pins into them, an activity which I believe he did every evening when his duties were finished. He pushed hundreds of pins and needles into materials of varying compliance and this gave him great comfort. Briggs was a small, shiny person; I think in his youth he must have been very highly polished by his parents. I think those old Briggses must have rubbed him night and day with brass rub or silver shine until they could see their own loving reflection in him.

  ‘What are you doing, Master Clod?’ he asked.

  ‘I am wandering the house,’ I admitted.

  ‘Do not let them catch you at it. For they do not like it, they will not have it.’

  ‘Thank you, Briggs, I will try. But you do not mind, do you?’

  ‘I mind the candles and gas lamps, I mind the carpets and brooms and shoeblacks, I mind things, things I mind. Not people. People under me, surely. But never do I mind them that are above me, not for me to mind them above, not done, not done at all ever. Have you seen your Aunt Rosamud’s door handle?’

  ‘No, I am sorry, Briggs, I have not.’

  ‘It is a great distress.’

  ‘Briggs?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen Cousin Moorcus?’

  ‘Not long past he was on your landing, and since he has come into contact with Master Tummis.’

  ‘Oh, poor Tummis. Where are they now?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, but you might be wise not to enter Marble Hall, or the refectory, you might not approach the morning room, or even yet any of the downstairs parlours. I should, in a general way, keep yourself more silent. I heard someone walking up here, footsteps above me, that was why I came up. Master Moorcus is very certainly looking out for you, Master Clod. Whilst others seek your aunt’s door handle, he looks for you in the larger cupboards, under sta
irs. I should, in a general way, move more quietly.’

  ‘Thank you, Briggs, thanks awfully.’

  ‘I never said a word,’ said Briggs as he left.

  The View From Our Windows

  I moved along, I kept in unpopular places, listing rooms with bubbled or peeling wallpaper. In a former barber’s shop, bolted to the third floor, originally from Peckham Rye, a room that I had not been in for several months, and where I thought I should be quite safe from Moorcus, I stood before a window thick with grime, but with a small crack in it, through which the outside whistled in, and, when I put my eye to the slight hole, there was a small view to be had of the outside of what lay beyond our home, of the heaplands in all their majesty. The heaps were calm that day and peaceful, it should have been a perfect day for sorting had not the loss of Aunt’s door handle kept everyone inside.

  But with Aunt’s great loss the heaps went unpicked. I should have liked to go out into them. I should like to have got myself all togged up and set forth with Tummis beside me. We were all of us Iremonger children to be very well dressed when we went out. We wore new boiled collars and starched shirts, and perfectly tied black bows, our suits were cleaned and pressed, our top hats were dusted, and white twill gloves were placed upon our hands by a servant. We must always be properly dressed to go out into the heaps, it was a house rule, it was important to show respect to the heaps, for the heaps, as we were endlessly reminded, had made us what we were. And what we found out there we must hand over to our seniors who accepted these objects and put them in piles to be taken back to the city and resold, or to be crushed or boiled down or stripped bare and made into something else. So many things were to be used again. For as long as the weather allowed it we were to sort in the heaps, but not to go too far, for if we waded out too far for safety then we might not get back in time if the wind got up, or some terrible gas escaped from down below. Many cousins had been lost deep in the heaps, my senior Cousin Rippit among them. He was Grandfather’s favourite, Rippit was, he went out one day into the heaps with his body servant and he never came back. And many more servants besides had been lost out there, taken by surprise by some wave of objects crushing down upon them, or having climbed too high and plunging down deep, deep, deep. It was a wonderful danger. How I should have loved to wade further, to be out of my depth, to feel the heap deep beneath me, cold and enormous. Out in the heaps, there were such things, things from far beyond our home, things from other lives. So we sifted and found for the family and brought things back, lugged the bits and pieces over to the Iremonger walls, and took them inside for salvage. Woe betide the Iremonger child that came back clean from a morning or afternoon spent out in the heaps. Our clothes were most carefully inspected at the end of a sifting day, our gloves must be black, our shirts thick with grime, our top hats dented or ripped, but not missing, our knees bruised and bloody, and our snot full of dirt. If we were in the least clean or unscuffed we were beaten.

  Only on the very stillest days was I allowed out to exercise in the heaps, with wadding stuffed up my ears and with a scarf wrapped around my head like a big bandage even if it was hot summer outside and the heap haze was impenetrable. So I stood there that day of the lost door handle, my face at the cracked window, wondering in my fancy about all those other people a huge dustheap away, wondering if I could somehow get word to the city beyond, to Forlichingham, to London, and imagining that there was someone beyond of all those people, someone who might like the look of me.

  ‘Is there,’ I whispered, ‘anyone there? Who are you? What do you look like?’

  And then reflected in the glass came a face, and with it was a smile and with it were the words, ‘Got you, scab-rat!’

  My Cousin Moorcus.

  4

  A Sealed Box of Safety Matches

  Lucy Pennant’s narrative continued

  The stench of the place. It stank so much way out in the dirtheaps it was as if you were always crowded over, the smell of it was so big and so shocking it felt like something solid, something you could touch and hold, was creeping about you, sweating on you, breathing hard on you. Back in Filching I had seen new people arriving, foreigners and such, coughing and weeping at the smell, a smell that I being a native didn’t take much notice of, and I should laugh at those complaining greenhorns, thinking them very delicate and weedy. But now, here was I far out, coughing and wincing, and the woman looking at me how I looked at Filching foreigners.

  ‘What a pong, however do you live with it?’

  ‘No talking, hurry yourself.’

  I followed her out from the rail line inside some other sort of station which at first felt darker yet than the tunnel, but then there was someone waving a lamp and I began to make out six sweating donkeys heaving on a treadmill, a man in livery whipping the beasts so that they might pull harder. From there we moved upstairs into a vast chamber as big as a church and I supposed that now we must be inside the mansion itself at the bottom of it, full of clanging and shouting, and everyone there wore white, or something approaching white, and steam rose up from many different places. This was one of the kitchens, the evening meal was being prepared and all was great action. I was marshalled beyond, still reverberating from the strange bumpy journey and the shrieking whistle, so that though my aching head might have realised the journey was over and we had arrived, my body was still trundling along. I followed the thin figure out of the steaming chamber up more stairs and into a study of some sort with a desk and a pleasant armchair with a flowery pattern. Seated in the chair was a lady, quite handsome, who smiled at me as I came in.

  ‘I am Mrs Piggott,’ said the woman, ‘the housekeeper here.’

  Mrs Piggott’s hair was done up at the back in a very neat tight little bun, everything about her was tidy, but her teeth, when she opened her mouth I saw her teeth were worn almost to nothing.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ she asked.

  ‘The man who came for me said Forlichingham Park.’

  ‘It is, child, though here we call it Heap House. There’s nowhere else for miles around, should you travel out beyond the gates you’d get very lost and it would be devil hard to find you. We are in the dumps, dear, far out in the waste dumps. There’s no map that has this place on it. We’re quite sealed off.’

  ‘Can I sit? I’m a bit wobbly,’ I said, ‘that train, the smell out there . . .’

  ‘Sick it up then, poor dear, whatever it is. Get out of you all that’s not from here, best if you do. For now, young lady, you are from here. Keep standing though. You may not sit.’

  ‘Is there a window?’ I said. ‘I want to look out of a window.’

  ‘No windows down here, only upstairs. Though it is true candles and gas must be lit day and night, even there. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.’

  She tenderly laid a hand on my cheek. She smelt of lavender. Some other servants came into the room then, women all of them and in plain dark uniform.

  ‘Thank you, Iremongers,’ said Mrs Piggott.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Piggott,’ they all said.

  ‘In this house,’ Mrs Piggott said, smiling at me, but with a certain sadness in her eyes, ‘you shall be called Iremonger, you mustn’t think anything of it, it’s just our way, it is the custom here, you understand, and I am not the maker of customs. You shall be called Iremonger like everyone else, only I and Mr Sturridge the butler and Mr Briggs the underbutler and Mr Smith the lock and Mr and Mrs Groom the cooks have their names, for we have high positions and they have need, those upstairs, to summon us by our names, but everyone else is just and only Iremonger. There now, do you understand, Iremonger?’

  ‘My name is Lucy Pennant,’ I said.

  ‘No. You are not being quick, my dear. It hurts, I know it hurts, but we are a family here, and not without our kindnesses. It will seem strange for a little while, but then, soon enough, it shan’t any more, dear Iremonger.’

  ‘Lucy Pennant,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ she said now with
a little more force though trying to keep her smile. ‘That person is not to be mentioned . . . we’ll call you Iremonger. Iremonger is what you are now. You should not want me to be unhappy, Iremonger, should you? I am quite a personage, when unhappy I am a spirit, a force, a character. You should not want that, should you?’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t, but . . .’

  ‘No, Mrs Piggott,’ she said.

  ‘No, Mrs Piggott,’ I repeated.

  ‘Very good then. Your duties shall be explained to you. What sort of an Iremonger are you, I wonder? What do you have to recommend you? Whatever you have shall not surprise me. I have seen everything. We have Iremongers here who try to claim attention in all the most foolish of ways; there are Iremongers of mine who don’t walk, and Iremongers who don’t see, and Iremongers who can’t hear, we have Iremongers that say they talk to ghosts, and Iremongers who predict things, Iremongers who climb up chimney flues, we have Iremongers who never stop sleeping, and Iremongers who do not go to sleep. We have short Iremongers and long Iremongers, we have Iremongers that laugh and Iremongers that don’t, we have Iremongers, we certainly do, all sorts. All here. And now we have you. And that’s very nice, isn’t it? And we’ll soon get to know you, and you to know us. Well then, and there you are near the bottom, and higher up am I, and what sort of Iremonger am I? I’m Claar Piggott, full Iremonger several generations back, but still holding liquid of that inextinguishable spirit. Claar, but you must refer to me as Mrs Piggott.’

  She put her own dry finger to my lips.

  ‘Now then,’ she said, ‘empty your pockets. There are to be no things here, none whatsoever, it is an uncluttered haven down here.’

  I stood still, dumbfounded, as the various servants came at me as if all of one mind and delved in and out of my pockets in a matter of seconds. I tried to push them away but there were so many of them.