The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel Read online

  “Will you have a story?” the Giant soothed them. For the time must be passed, must be passed.

  “Go on,” Vance said.

  The Giant did not stop to ask what kind of story they would like, for they were contentious, like fretful children, and were in no position to know what was good for them. “One day,” he began, “the son of the king of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride.”

  “Where East?” Vance asked. “East London?”

  “Albania,” the Giant said. “Or far Cathay.”

  “The Land of Nod,” said Claffey, sneering. “The Kingdom of Cockaigne.”

  “Wipe yourself, stench-foot,” O’Brien said, “then pin back your ears. Do you think I tell tales for the good of my soul?”

  “Sorry,” Claffey said.

  “One day the son of the king of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride, and he hadn’t gone far on his road when he met a short green man. The strange gentleman hailed him, saying—”

  “I don’t like a tale with a short green man in it,” Jankin said.

  The Giant turned to him, patient. “If you will wait a bit, Jankin, the short green man will grow as big as the side of a hill.”

  “Oh,” Jankin said.

  The wind moaned, the boards creaked and shifted beneath them. From the deck the world appeared no longer solid but a concatenated jumble of grey dots, sometimes defined and sometimes fusing at the margins, the waves white and rearing, the clouds blackening en masse, the horizon crowded with their blocky forms and their outlines unnatural, like the sides of unimaginable buildings, set storey on storey like the tower of Babel.

  Conversing with the sailors—who cowered away from his bulk—the Giant found he had regained his command of the English language. One day, he thought, we will be making tales out of this. Our odyssey to the pith of London’s heart, to undying fame and a heavy purse. Rancour will be forgotten, and the reek of our fear in this ship’s dark hole. In those days Jankin will say, Do you remember, Claffey, when I was sick on your feet? And Claffey will clap him on the back, and say, Oh I do indeed.

  And so at that time, after his father’s death and he being fourteen, fifteen years of age, John Hunter was still in the fields largely, the business of sending him to school having met with scant success. Having come home from the field to drink a bowl of broth, he heard one day a beating at the door, the main door of the house at Long Calderwood, and himself going to open it and propping out the door frame, short for his age but sturdy, his sleeves rolled and his red hands hanging, and there’s the carrier with some distressed bundle wrapped in a blanket. It’s human.

  His first thought was that the man had been asked to transport some sick pauper, who being now about to take his leave of this mortal world was not required, I’ll thank you very much, to piss and shit his last in the cart, and so the fastidious tradesman was attempting to pass on his responsibilities and let some unsuspecting farmer’s floor be soiled. “Get off with you, and go to the Devil!” he’d cried, his temper even then being very hot if he thought anyone had made a scheme to take advantage of him.

  But then from within the bundle came a long, strangulated coughing, and after that the words “John, is that you, my brother John?”

  His brow furrowing, John approached the cart, and pulled back the blanket where it obscured the man’s face. And who should it be, but his own dear brother James. James, who had taken a degree in theology. James, that was a gentleman. James, that had gone to London to join brother Wullie, and become a medical man, and a man of means. See how far education gets you.

  “Y’d best come in. Can ye step down?”

  “I’ll have your arm,” James quavered. “Dear brother John.”

  Stout brother John. He half-lifted his relative from the cart. “Is there a good fire?” James begged to know. Through the cloth of his coat John felt the quake of his body, his jumping pulses. There was a nasty smell on his breath: rot. Dumped on a three-legged stool, James seemed hardly able to support himself upright. “What means this?” John enquired. “What brings you home in this condition, mon?”

  “I am done for,” James said. “I am worn out from the dissection room, the noxious emanations from the corpses, their poisoned fluids and exhalations, and the long hours your brother Wullie keeps. So jealous is he of his subjects, that he bade me sleep at night under the post-mortem table, lest one of his rivals should crack in at the windows and carry off the corpse.”

  “I see. So theft of corpses is an ever-present worry, is it?” John asked. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at his shivering brother. Well he remembered the day James left for London, sovereigns in his purse, felicitations ringing in his ears, and a new hat in a leather box completing his general air as a man of present prosperity and greater ambition. And now—the ribs were stoved in, the stomach collapsed. There were two red blotches on his cheeks—a sick parade of well-being. “It seems to me you have come back to die,” John said. “All our family have a charnel disposition. Have you heard of a great man, called Sir William Harvey? He dissected his own relatives.”

  James raised his head. Hope shone in his face. “Have you formed an interest, brother John, in matters anatomical?”

  “But only after they were dead.” He turned aside, calling out to his sister Dorothea to come and view James. “You need not fear me,” he said, under his breath.

  Dorothea came, and made a great fuss and to-do, and boiled something nourishing for the invalid. Dolly never criticised or carped, and when he became a great man himself he would have her for his housekeeper, since all his other sisters were now residing in the churchyard under sod.

  When they docked, and stood on dry land, Pybus fell about, and affected to be unable to walk except in the manner of a sailor, rolling and slowly riding upon the element he has made his own. Claffey grew impatient with the joke, and kicked him, saying, “That’ll give you something to straggle for.”

  The Giant looked up, scanned the English sky. A few scudding clouds, the promise of sun breaking through. “God’s same sky over us all,” he said. But the voices were foreign, the shoving, shouting men, the tangles of rope and rigging, the salt and fish odours, and the buildings piled on buildings, one house atop another. They had boarded after dark, so now Pybus gaped, and pointed. “How do they—”

  “They fly,” Vance said shortly.

  “Jesus,” said Pybus. “Englishmen can fly? And the women also?”

  “No,” Vance said. “The women cannot fly. They remain on what is called the lower storey, or ground floor, where the men are able to join them as they please, or, when they sicken of their nagging chatter and wish to smoke a pipe of tobacco, they unfold the wings they keep under their greatcoats, and flutter up to what are called the upper storeys.”

  “That’s a lie,” Claffey said. “They must have a ladder.”

  The Giant gave Claffey a glance that expressed pleasure at his ingenuity. He was familiar himself with the principle of staircases, but in the lifetime of these young fellows there had been no great house within a day’s march, where they might see the principle applied.

  “Oh yes,” Vance said, sarcastically. “Surely, they have a ladder. Take a look, Claffey—don’t you see them swarming over the surface of the buildings?”

  They looked, and did not. Glass windows caught the light, but the Giant’s followers saw glinting, empty air, air a fist could pass through, that flesh could pass through and not be cut.

  On the quayside, Jankin leapt in the air, pointing. He was swelling with excitement, bubbling at the mouth. The black man he had seen strolled calmly towards them. He wore a good broadcloth coat and a clean cravat, being, as he was, employed at the docks as a respectable and senior kind of clerk. He was young, his plum-bloom cheeks faintly scarred, his eyes mild.

  Jankin danced in front of him. He gave a shriek, like one of the parakeets the Giant had heard of. His grubby hand shot up, massaging the man’s face, rubbing in a circle to see woul
d the colour come off. Jankin stared at his grey-white, seamed palm, and clawed out his fingers, then rubbed and rubbed again at the fleshy, flattened nose.

  “Get down, dog,” Joe Vance said. “The gentleman is as respectable as yourself.”

  The black man reached out, and took Jankin’s forearm in his hand. Gently he removed it from himself, pressing it inexorably into Jankin’s chest, as if he would fuse it with the ribs. His mild eyes were quite dead. His mouth twitched, but it did not speak. He passed on, his tread firm, over the cobbles and towards the city he now called home.

  The Giant said, “People are staring at me.”

  Vance said, “Yes, they would. I should hope so. That is the general idea.” He rubbed his hands together. “Sooner we get you indoors and housed, the better for us all. We don’t want them gaping for free.”

  The Giant saw the parakeets, green and gold, flit and swoop in a hot tangle of deeper green, and heard the alarm shrieks from their beating throats, and felt rope cut into skin and smelled the sweet, burned, branded flesh.

  He called out after the black man, “Poor soul, you have a brand on your body.”

  The man called back, “Shog off, freak.”

  The first night of their walk to London, they begged lodgings in a barn. Joe Vance parlayed with the farmer, and purchased from him some milk, some beer, and some nasty dried-up bread with green mould on it. Claffey became militant, and raised a doubt about Joe Vance’s abilities. The Giant was forced to detain their attention with a long tale. He settled them among the straw, and turned his cheek to the alien breeze. They had come so far in thin rain, their heads down, purposefully observing as little as they could. London would be all wonder, Vance had said. They were disposed to believe it, and not notice anything immediate: just walk. They had expected lush valleys, mounts snow-topped, fountains, a crystal house or mansion at each turn in the road: but no, it was tramp, tramp, just tramp.

  “Look now,” the Giant said. “Shouldn’t we have a conveyance, Vance? I’d have thought a coach would have been sent for me, or some sort of elegant chariot?”

  Hm. Or possibly not. Vance seemed likely to break out into a rage, which he did too readily when things went wrong. “What kind of coach?” he yelled. “One with the roof cut off? Who’s going to wreck a perfectly good coach for the onetime transport of a giant? It isn’t as if England is teeming with giants, it isn’t as if having made a ruin of a perfectly sound vehicle they can hire it out again on a weekly basis, is it? No Englishman does business that way!”

  “What about a chariot?” the Giant asked mildly. “The same objection cannot be raised to a chariot.”

  “Oh yes, a chariot, but then it would have to be reinforced! You couldn’t have your customer stepping in and putting his giant foot through it, so it would have to be strengthened—which costs money—and then drawn by heavy horses.”

  “Did you not think of this before?” Pybus asked. (And Pybus was only a boy.)

  “Just what are you insinuating?” Joe Vance bellowed. “Are you insinuating that I have in some way exaggerated my experience as a giant’s agent? Because if you are, Pybus, I’ll slit your nostrils and pull your brains out through the opening, and then I’ll pound them to a paste and put them down for rat poison.”

  The Giant asked, “Do you know the tale of the man that was drunk in the company of the priest, and the priest changed him to a mouse, and he got eat by his own cat?”

  “No,” Jankin said. “By God, let’s have that tale!”

  … As for what we can say of Buchanan—whoopsy-go Buchanan! Why John am I glad tae see ye—hup, whop, ye’ll take a drop, take another, take a flask, woeful tangle wi ma feet, here’s a go, here’s to you, here’s to lads, hup! Hic! Take a sip! Never mind, sit ye down, mind the chair, chink the cup, Saturday night, wife’s a-bed, hic! Whop! Saints Alive!

  Slithery-go, oh, hey, clattery-hic—oh, phlat, hold yer cup out, no harm done—what a daft bloody place to put a staircase!

  Well, Buchanan was an episode, nothing more. The man was not untalented as a cabinet-maker, but he could not keep his books straight, nor would a coin lodge in his pocket for more than an hour before it would be clamouring to be out and into the pocket of some purveyor of wine and spirits. In those first days in Glasgow, in the house of the said Buchanan, he would grieve—on windy days, the notion of fields would possess him, the sigh of the plane under his hand would turn to the breeze’s sough, and he would long to lie full length upon the earth, listening to the rocks making and arranging themselves, and deep in the soil the eternal machinations of the worms. But he said to himself, conquer this weak fancy, John Hunter, because fortunes are made in cities, and you must make yours. At night he opened the shutter, letting in the cold, watching the moon over the ridge tiles, and the stars through smoke.

  Buchanan was a hopeless case. His slide to bankruptcy could not be checked. He had taught a skill, at least; now he, John Hunter, could say, “I am a man who can earn a living with my hands.” But he was glad when he was able to pack his bundle and foot it back to Long Calderwood.

  Buchanan died. Brother James died.

  One day a letter came. “Wullie’s sent for me,” he said to Dorothea. “I’ve to go south. He’s wanting a strong youth.”

  “Then I suppose you’ll do,” his sister said.

  Seventeen forty-eight saw John Hunter, a set-jawed red-head astride a sway-backed plodder, heading south towards the stench of tanneries and soap-boilers. He came to London across Finchley Common, with the gibbetted corpses of villains groaning into the wind. A hard road and a stony one, with constant vigilance needed against the purse-takers, but he was counselled against the sea voyage by brother Wullie, who had once been in a storm so horrible that the ship’s masts were almost smashed down, seasoned sailors turned white from terror, and a woman passenger lost her reason, and has not recovered it till this day.

  At the top of Highgate Hill he came to the Gatehouse Tavern, and observed London laid out below him. The evening was fine and the air mild.

  It was an undrained marsh, the air above it a soup of gloom. The clouds hung low, a strange white light behind them. The Giant and his companions picked their way among the stinking culverts, and hairless pigs, foraging, looked up to glare at them, a metropolitan ill-will shining red and plain in their tiny eyes. As they tramped, their feet sank in mud and shite, and the sky seemed to lower itself onto their shoulders. As night fell, they saw the dull glow of fire. Men and women, ragged and cold as hermits, huddled round the brick kilns, cooking their scraps of food. They squatted on their haunches, looking up bemused as O’Brien passed them. Their eyes were animal eyes, glinting. He thought they were measuring the meat on his bones. For the first time in his life he felt fear: not the holy fear a mystery brings, but a simple contraction in his gut. All of them—even Vance, even Claffey—stepped closer to his side.

  “Keep walking,” the Giant said. “An hour or two. Then lavish baths await us, and the attentions of houris and nymphs.”

  “And feather beds,” said Jankin, “with quilts of swansdown. And silk cushions with tassels on.”

  London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitchsoaked ropes in the streets, and branched globes of light sprout from the houses. Pybus thinks they have come to a country where they do not have a moon, but Vance is sure they will see it presently, and so they do, drowned in a muddy puddle in Chandos Street.

  John’s arrival was well-timed, for it was two weeks before the opening of brother Wullie’s winter lecture programme. “I hear you’re good with your hands,” Wullie said.

  He grunted: “Who says so?”

  “Sister Dorothea.”

  Wullie put his own hands together. He had narrow white gentleman’s hands. You would never know, to look at them, where they ventured: the hot velvet passages of London ladies who are enceinte, and the rigid bowels of dishonourable corpses.

  Wullie had also a narrow white gentleman’s face, chronically disappointed. It
was some four years since his fiancée Martha died, and he had not found either inclination or opportunity to court any other woman; pale-eyed chastity had him in her grasp, and he thought only of sacrifice, late hours, chill stone rooms that keep the bodies fresh. The rooms of his mind were cold like this, and it was difficult to imagine him sighing and groaning, all night on a feather mattress beside the living Martha with her juices and her pulses, her dimples and her sighs and her “yes Wullie, yes Wullie, oh yes just there Wullie, oh my little sweetheart, can you do it over again?” Easier to imagine him a-bed with the dead woman, four years buried and dried to bone.

  Easy to see, Wullie creeping up from the foot of the bed, his tongue out, daintily raising the rotted shroud: fingering her phalanges with a murmur of appreciation, creeping each pointed finger over the metatarsals and tarsals while his nightshirt, white as a corpse, rolls up about his ribs. It’s with a gourmet’s desire he sighs; then tibia and fibula, patella, and—ah, how he smacks his dainty lips, as he glides up the smooth femur, towards his goal! He pants a little, crouching over her, scarred Scottish knees splayed—and now he probes, with expert digit, the frigid cavity of her pelvis.

  “Are you quite well, brother John?” Wullie asked.

  “Aye. Oh, aye.”

  “You are not fevered?”

  “Only deep in thought.”

  “Then fall to work on these arms. I am told you are observant and deft. Let us try your vaunted capacities.”

  The arms came wrapped in cloths, bloodless like wax arms, but they were not wax. Severed at the shoulder; and his job to dissect, to make preparations, to serve the students with a feast for their eyes. His voice quivered. “Whose are they?”

  “Whose?” The little query dripped with ice.