The Giant, O’Brien

‘Be reasonable. I have to cover the cost of the straw. And fourpence for the big fella. I shall have to turn two away if I’m to let him in.’

‘But it’s a privilege to have him under your roof! Besides being huge, he can tell tales and make prophecies.’

‘Fourpence,’ Slig said. ‘Liquor’s extra.’

Sighing, Vance disbursed the coins. Pybus and Claffey were heroes about the steps, striding down into the cellar as if they had been doing steps all their lives—though there was a moment of nervous hesitation from Claffey at the top of the flight, and the manner in which his frown changed to a cocky grin showed that he had harboured some anxiety. Jankin could not be persuaded to put his first foot forward, even though Pybus ran up and then down again to show how easy it was: eventually, the Giant had to carry him.

The room was low and filled with smoke. There was straw underfoot, and men and women sitting, convivial, their pots in their hands, and nobody drunk yet; rush light on exiles’ faces, the sound of a familiar tongue. And a grubbing sound from the shadows, a snorting.

‘Jesus,’ Jankin said. ‘We have touched down among the rich. These fellows have got a pig.’

There was a moment’s silence, while the people considered the Giant; an intake of breath, and then applause rang to the roof. Men and women stood up and cheered him. ‘One boy of ours,’ a woman said. ‘The true type.’ She stretched up, and kissed his hip. ‘Giants are extinct here for hundreds of years.’

‘And why is this?’ the Giant asked—for the woman, who was not young, had a look of some intelligence, and the matter puzzled him.

She shrugged, and with a gesture of her small fingers pulled her kerchief down, modest, hiding her rust-red curls. ‘It may be that they were shut up and starved, or hunted with large dogs. The Englishman craves novelty, as long as it will pack and decamp by the end of the week. He does not like his peace disturbed—it is the English peace, and he thinks it is sacred. He magnifies his own qualities, and does not like anyone to be bigger than himself.’

‘This bodes ill for my projected fame and fortune,’ the Giant said.

‘Oh, no! Your keeper was right enough to bring you. You will be the sensation of a season.’

‘At the end of which, I shall still be tall.’

‘But I expect you can tell stories? Giants usually can. Even the English like stories—well, some stories anyway. The ones where they win.’

‘This is not what we were promised,’ Claffey said. He looked around. ‘Here, Joe Vance! This is not what we were promised! But for the breath of the mountain air, we might be back at Connor’s.’

‘No, Vance,’ the Giant said. ‘It’s not what I’d call commodious.’

‘Contain yourself in patience,’ Vance said. ‘Give me the chance, will you, of a day to prospect for some premises for us.’

‘I’d have thought you’d got it already fixed,’ Claffey said. ‘That’s what it means, being an agent, doesn’t it?’

‘Being an agent is an art you will never acquire, Bog-Head.’

‘Now, Vance,’ said the Giant. ‘Temperate yourself.’

‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do,’ Vance said.

‘Claffey, have patience,’ Pybus said. ‘Joe will get us a place tomorrow. One with a pagoda.’

‘Did we agree on a pagoda?’ the Giant said. ‘I still favour a triumphal arch.’

‘A triumphal arch is timeless good taste,’ said a man squatting at their feet. ‘Whereas a pagoda, it’s a frivolity worn out within the week.’

‘It’s right,’ said the red-headed woman. There’s a whiff of the vulgar about a pagoda.’

Vance spread out his hands, smiling now. ‘Good people! He’s a giant! I’m a showman! Don’t say vulgar! Say topical! Say it’s all the buzz!’

‘Tell that giant to sit down,’ said an old man, who was leaning against the wall. ‘He is disturbing the air.’

‘He is blind,’ said the squatting man, nodding towards the speaker. ‘Strange vibrations bother him.’

The Giant folded himself stiffly, and sat down in the straw. Pybus bounced down beside him. Jankin was admiring the pig. Joe Vance looked easy. Claffey looked peevish.

‘We saw pigs on our way,’ Jankin said. ‘Skinny brutes. Not a one that could hold a candle to this. Why, at home, he’d be the admiration of a parish.’

‘All of us own this pig,’ the blind man said. ‘He is our great hope.’

A young girl with an open face, slightly freckled across the nose, reached up and plucked at the Giant’s sleeve. ‘Would you oblige, and cheer us now with an anecdote? We are, all of us, far from home.’

‘Very well,’ said the Giant. He looked at Claffey, at Pybus, at Joe Vance. He stretched out his legs in front of him; then, seeing he was taking too much floor space, drew them up again. ‘Here’s one you’ll know or not, and you may make your comments as if we were at home and gathered at Connor’s.’

He thought, there’s only this earth, after all. The ground beneath us and God’s sky above, and we will get used to this, because people can get used to anything, and giants can too.

The young girl looked down, smiling in pleasure. She had long fair hair, almost white even in the cellar fug: like a light under ground, O’Brien thought, Persephone’s torch made from a living head. The girl’s cheeks were pink and full; she had eaten only yesterday. She settled her hair about her, combing it with her fingers, arranging it about her shoulders, drawing it across her face like a curtain. And now the outline of bowed shoulders, of sharp faces, must be blurred for her, and the facts of life softened: like a slaughter seen through gossamer, or a throat cut behind a fan of silk.

‘A year or two ago,’ said the Giant, ‘there was a young woman, pretty and light of foot, walking the road alone at night, coming to her cousin in Galway, with her babby of scarce six months laid to her breast. She had been walking for many a mile, walking through a dense wood, when—’

‘A demon comes up and eats her,’ said Pybus, with confidence.

‘—she emerged at a crossroad,’ the Giant continued, ‘just as the moon rose above the bleak and lonely hills. She stood there bedazzled, in the moonlight, wondering, which way shall I go? She looked down, into the face of her babby, but snug in his sling he was asleep and dreaming, dreaming of better times, and she could get no direction there. Shall I, she thought, linger here till morning, making my bed in the mossy ditch, as I have done many times before? It may be that in the morning some knowledgeable traveller will come along, and direct my way, or perhaps even in my dream I will receive some indication of the shortest route to my cousin’s house. I need hardly add, that her hair was long and curling and pale, her form erect, her body low and small but seemly, so that if the most vicious and ungodly man had chanced to glimpse her he would have thought her one of the gentry, and would have crossed himself and left her unmolested. Now this was her protection, as she walked the road, and she knew it; what man would touch a fairy, with a fairy babby bound in a cloth? And yet she was a mortal woman, with all her perplexities sitting heavy on her shoulders, and her worries making the weight of the babby increase with every mile she trod.’

A man said, from the shadows, ‘I’ve heard of a type of fairy where they carry their babbies on their backs, and the nursing mothers have tits so long and supple that they can fling one over their shoulder so the babby can suck on it, which is a great convenience to them when they’re labouring in the fields.’

‘Yes, well, some people will believe anything,’ the Giant said.

‘Must be foreign,’ said a woman. ‘A foreign type. I’ve never heard it. Still and all, it would leave your hands free.’

A man said, ‘Whoever heard of gentlefolk that labour in the fields?’

‘Will you be quiet, down at the back?’ Vance asked testily. ‘I’ve brought you over a master storyteller of unrivalled stature, and you’re just about going the right way to irritate him, and then you’ll be sorry, because he’ll stamp on your heads and burst your bloody skulls.’

‘It’s not worrying me, Joe,’ the Giant said. ‘Calm yourself and sit down, why don’t you? Shall I go on?’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘So: just then, as she was casting around, she heard a noise, and it was not the sound of a horse, and it was not very distant, and she discerned it was the slap of shoe-leather, and she thought, here is a man on the road who is either rich or holy, either merchant or priest, and I will beg either a blessing or a penny—who knows which will do me more good, in the long run?

‘Then out of the shadows stepped a little man, with a red woollen cap upon his head, and carrying a leather bag. So he greeted her, and Step along with me, he says, and I’ll fetch you to a place you can sleep the night. Now she looked at him with some dismay, for he was neither merchant or priest, and she did not know what he was, or what he had in his leather bag. She said, The wind is fresh and the moon is high, and I think I’ll step out, because my relatives are gathered about their hearth in the town of Galway, and they are waiting for me.

‘And he says to her, very low and respectful, Mistress, will you walk with me for all that? I will bring you to a hall where a little baby is crying with hunger, with no one to feed him, because his mother is dead and we have no wet nurse among us. Do me this favour, he says, as I observe your own child is plump and rosy, and he will not miss the milk, but without it our babby will die. And if you will do me this favour, I will give you a gold piece from my leather bag.

‘And then he gave the bag a good shake, and she could hear the chink of gold pieces from within.’

‘She ought not go, for all that,’ the red-haired woman observed. ‘It will end badly.’

‘And aren’t you the shrivelled old bitch!’ Pybus said. ‘Not go, and have the babby starve?’

‘I’m telling you,’ the woman said. ‘Just wait, you’ll see.’

‘Do you know this story, then?’ Pybus asked her.