The Giant, O’Brien

Her hand reached up for his arm. She drew him down the street. ‘This is my cabin.’

Beside it, Connor’s was a palace. The roof was in holes and mucky water ran freely through it. The child was in the least wet part, wrapped in a tatter or two. In his fever, he kept tearing the rags from him; with practised fingers, his mother wrapped them back. His forehead bulged, over sunken, fluttering eyelids. ‘He is dreaming,’ the Giant said.

Squatting on her haunches, she gazed into his face. ‘What is he dreaming?’

‘He is dreaming the dreams that are fit for a youth who will become a hero. Others babies dream of milk; his dreams are of fire. He is dreaming of a castle wall and an armoured host of men, himself at the age of eight as strong as any man grown, a gem set on his brow, and a sword of justice in his hand.’

She dropped her head, smiling. The corners of her mouth were cracked and bleeding, and her gums were white. ‘You are an old-fashioned sort, are you not? An antique man. If there were a gem on his brow I would have sold it. If there were a sword of justice, I would have sold that too. What hope for the future, you’ll say, if the sword of justice itself is sold? But it is well known, almost a proverb, that a hungry woman will exchange justice for an ounce of bread. You see, we have no heroes in this town, not any more. No heroes and no virtues.’

‘Come away with us,’ he said. ‘We are going to England. I am going to the great city of London—it seems that there a man can show himself for being tall, and they’ll pay him money.’

‘Come away?’ she repeated. ‘But you go tomorrow, do you not? Shall I leave my son unburied? I know he will die tonight.’

‘You have no husband?’

‘Gone away.’

‘No mother or father?’

‘Dead.’

‘No brother or sister?’

‘Not one alive.’

‘Must you measure the ground where they dropped? Will you pace it every day?’ He indicated the child. ‘Will you scour these rags to swaddle the child you are carrying? Come away, lady. There’s nothing left for you here. And we need a woman of Ireland, to sit beside me on my throne.’

‘Who’s getting you a throne?’

‘Joe Vance. He’s shown giants before. He’s got experience in it.’

‘Ah, you poor man,’ she said. She closed her eyes. ‘I never thought I should say that, to a giant.’

‘Don’t fear. There is a sea voyage, but Vance has made the passage before.’

The child’s head jerked, once; his eyes flashed open. He reared up his skull. A thin green liquid ran from the side of his mouth. His mother put her hand under his head, raising it. He coughed feebly, snorted as he swallowed the vomit, then began to expel the green in little spurts like a kitten’s sneeze.

‘What did he eat?’ O’Brien asked.

‘God alone knows. Here we live on green plants, just as in my grandfather’s rime men ate grass and dock. The children have found something that poisons them, and it is always the ones who are too young to explain it—you could ask them to lead you to where they have plucked it, but by the time you know they are poisoned they are too weak to lead you anywhere. Or maybe—I have thought—it’s something we give them—some innocent herb—that we can eat, but which murders them.’

‘That’s a hard thought.’

‘It is very hard,’ she said.

The Giant and his train enjoyed nettle soup, and before the craving became acute Vance appeared with his flasks of the good stuff. Squatting in the cabin of the woman, the Giant told these stories: the Earl of Desmond’s wedding night, and how St Declan swallowed a pirate. All the town had come in, some bringing a light and others a turf for the fire, listening to the tales and praying in between them. When the death agony arrived, O’Brien took the child on to his knee, so that the rattle in his throat was interlaced and sometimes overlaid by his light, mellifluous tones, that tenor which surprised the hearers, coming as it did from a man so grossly huge. He tried to fit the cadence of his tale to the child’s suffering, but because he was a fallible person there were moments when it was necessary for him to pause for thought; at these times, the mud walls enclosed the horror of labouring silence, the scraping suspension of breath before the rasping cry which brought the babby back to life for another minute, and another. His body sleek with hair, his bones thick as wire, he looked like a mouse under O’Brien’s hand.

When the crux came, he cried out once, with that distant, stifled cry that hero babies make when they are still in their mothers’ wombs. It was cry of vision and longing, of the future seen plain. When O’Brien heard it he scooped the little body in one hand and placed it in his mother’s lap, where within a second the child became a corpse. Within another second a green sludge dripped from the nostrils, leaked out between the thighs, dripped like the sea’s leavings even from the cock curled like a shell in its rippling beach of skin.

At once, Pybus began to sing, his high-strung boy’s voice rising to the sky. The clouds had no call for it; they sent his song back, stifled, to die between the wasted shoulders and the mud walls. ‘At least you’re not short of water,’ Claffey said, raising his eyes to tomorrow’s certainty of rain.

At dawn, the youths met them and escorted them to the end of the town. ‘Can’t you voyage with us?’ the Giant asked. ‘You’re brave boys, and there’s nothing here for you.’

Joe Vance looked daggers.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the foremost youth said. ‘We are decided to remain here. A better age may come. Are you a poet, by the way?’

‘In a poor sort,’ the Giant said. ‘I can make a song. But who can’t? As for the old systems, the strict rules, I never learned them, and if I’m honest with you it’s a matter of training rather than aptitude. I believe there is no one of my generation who is confident in them. That was the use of Mulroney’s, you see, we met the old men there, and we would learn a little.’

‘Let’s get on the way,’ Joe Vance said. He shifted his feet.

‘There was a time when friars walked the roads, disguised as rough working men: friars from Salamanca, from Rome, from Louvain. They have left me with the rudiments of their various tongues, besides a sturdy and serviceable Latin, and a knowledge of the Scriptures in Greek. Travelling gentlemen, all: never more than a night or two under the one roof, but always with time to spare for the education of a giant boy.’

Joe Vance reached up, and tugged at his clothing.

‘A fly besets me,’ the Giant said. He pretended to look about. ‘Or some hornet?’

Joe removed his hand, before he could be swatted. ‘A honey bee,’ he said.

That night in his sleep, the Giant sat among the dead, and heard the voices of the old men at Mulroney’s: dry whispers, like autumn leaves rubbed in a bag.

2 (#ulink_4a016449-a73c-5a8e-b407-5c285fe9b6e3)

Scotland, day: the child is alone in the field, the black ruts rising around him: flat on his belly on the damp ground, a vast sky swirling. His chin is on the earth, his body is blue in bits, where he has got his clothes wrong. It is his own task to dress himself, cover himself decently, and if he’s cold that’s his fault. He has been sent out to scare crows. In other places they have a doll to do it, made of sticks and old clothes. He has heard of it: English luxury. Here old clothes are not wasted.

To scare a crow, jump up, wave arms. Bugger it. Bugger it off.

Up a blade of grass a crawler goes. Little black feet on a sweet, edible stalk. He watches, his brow furrowing; it’s apt to cross your eyes. He puts out his finger. The crawler goes on to it, though it doesn’t make a feeling; it is too light, or his finger is too cold? His finger tastes of salt, earth and shit.

He closes his palm. Then opens it, and teasing with his finger takes off one of the crawler’s legs. A time ago, when he first did this, he felt a hot wetness deep inside himself, as if water had begun to run there, above his belly button; but now when he does it he feels nothing at all. He pinches off leg two. He can count; they say he can’t, but he can. One leg, two leg, three leg, four. Count, yes; and read, by and by. The crawler goes round and round on his palm. Why didn’t it fly away? It had the chance. One leg off, it could have flown. It’s kicking now, with what’s left. It must have stayed because it liked him, because it was his friend, even despite what he’d done. He didn’t mean malice; he only wanted to see what would happen. He would like to give it back one leg, two legs, three. He would like to know, now, if it’s alive or dead. He breathes, John Hunter, and the words come out on his breath: ‘It was a trial. It was nothing cruel.’

Crows above. Foreign black hands stretching across the sky. He brushes the crawler away. He stands up. The wind’s tooth strikes at him, gnaws and gnaws. He flails his arms. John Hunter, he yells, John Hunter. Bugger off all crows. Over and over he shouts: John Hunter, bugger off crows.

3 (#ulink_1ea64435-fcb3-5d90-8ea8-be73c01ca734)

My brothers are James, lately dead; John, dead. Andrew, dead. William is living but gone away. My sisters are Elizabeth, dead. Agnes, dead. Isabella, dead. Janet, dead.

I have also one sister living yet. Her name is Dorothea. We call her Dolly, when we are in a lighter mood.

Our family suffers from rotten lungs and rotten bones.

The John who is dead is not to be confused with me, the younger John. I say this because though in most cases the dead and the living are quite unalike, there are special circumstances when it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. There are many accounts, some from antiquity, of unfortunate people buried alive. Such burials may be the origin of quaint stories, stories of vampyres and ghouls and hauntings; of voices from underground, and the earth welling with fresh blood. But I have been in a small room with many a dead man and woman. I have slept under a dissecting bench in brother Wullie’s workroom, and I have hauled many a corpse to its final resting place on Wullie’s narrow bench. I can tell you that there are no ghosts. If there were, they’d haunt Wullie, would they not?

And haunt me. But don’t think it. It’s a slab of butcher’s meat you have to haul, head waddling and hands flapping; the rigor’s passed by the time their keepers knock at the door, and they’ve once again a semblance of flexible life, yet they’re heavy, they don’t help you, you have to drag them, and their faces are fallen in, their noses are rims, sharp edges of falling flesh, and their lips are invisible already, shrunk back against the gum.

So why are the living sometimes confused with the dead? Often the physician or surgeon is to blame, for his lack of care. But there are other occasions when even the keenest will not detect a pulse, yet the pulse exists. There are times when the breath does not lift the ribs, nor mist a mirror, nor stir a feather, but the corpse is breathing still. I have heard that sometimes when people fall into deep water, deep water that is very cold, they may remain chill and extinguished for an hour or more, and yet the spark of life is flickering within them; when warmth returns to their organs, when it spreads to their limbs and their heart and their muscles gather strength—why, then they may sit up, and speak, to the horror and astonishment of the mourners.

This is what I have heard: although, unfortunately, I have had no opportunity of making actual experiments upon drowned persons.