The Giant, O’Brien

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 would 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 smelt the sweet, burnt, 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 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 a coach?’ he yelled. ‘One with the roof cut off? Who’s going to wreck a perfectly good coach for the one-time 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, ho, hey! Wallopy-hic, clattery-hey—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 gibbeted 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 on to 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,’ he 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 swans-down. And silk cushions with tassels on.’

London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitch-soaked 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 corpses, 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.

Two arms—I mean, a right and a left—are they from the same man? I mean, is he dead, or was he in an accident?’

He was a raw boy, after all. He’d done little but stone the crows, follow the plough. Glasgow had been an intermission, and had not taught him about men with no arms.

Wullie said, ‘When I was a student in France, there was none of this nonsense of forty men crowding round the dissecting table, craning their necks and babbling. To each Frenchman, there was one corpse, and in the dissecting chamber there was an aura of studious calm. The French are a frivolous nation, and deeply mistaken in many of their inclinations, but in this vital matter they have the right of it.’

John got to work dissecting the arms. Later, he castigated himself for a jimmy idiot—bursting out like that in front of Wullie, as if it should matter where limbs came from. Still, he couldn’t help wondering, speculating in his mind: making up a life to fit the possessor of the fibrous, drained muscle. It was matter, no impulse to drive it; only half its nature was on display, structure but not function, and he knew this was less than half the truth, for how can you understand a man if you don’t see him in action? He couldn’t help thinking of Martha, when he himself lay down at night: he saw her narrow and flat and yellow-white against the bed linen, and Wullie puffing above her, his shirt scooped up, and he heard the little chattering cries of pleasure escaping her non-existent lips.

‘Slig!’ said Joe Vance. ‘Hearty Slig!’

They were standing in some alley. Vance clapped the man on his shoulder. His head indicated a low door, half-open, from which the man had just emerged: behind him, steps running down into the earth. ‘Can you lodge us?’ Joe asked. ‘One night only. Tomorrow we move on to greater things.’

Slig gnawed his lip. Two pennies each,’ he said.

‘Slig! And yourself an old friend of mine!’