The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

easy prey because carried by their clergymen and the more fussy and nervous type of old fellow.”

“Such as,” Bitch Mary said, “those who think rain will run through their skins and thin their blood.”

“The boys like to throw stones after, then chase the fellows and collapse the tent on their heads, making them sopping.”

“Ah well,” said the Giant. He yawned. “I’m sure they wish they had such a lively time in Dublin.”

That night the three followers came back battered and bruised. Pybus, in particular, was shockingly mangled. They were cheerful and brimming with gin, and had hardly stepped over the threshold when Claffey demanded, “Give us Prince Hackball, the beggar chief!”

“Hackball?” the Giant said. “I remember when you yearned for stories of the deeds of kings.”

Joe had brought him a flask of spirits, the necessary sort. His head was clear and ringing, his speech precise and tending to echo in his own ears: as hero’s speech should do.

“Hackball,” the lads chanted. “We want Hackball.”

“Hackball was prince of beggars,” Claffey said. “Two dogs drew his cart.”

“For God’s sake.” Joe looked up in irritation from his prince book. “I think you confuse him with Billy Bowl, a man with no legs, who went along through the city in a wood basin with an iron skiddy under it, and his arms propelled him forwards. One day there were two women provoking him and calling him deformity, and did he not flail the flea-bitten she-cats? For which he was brought up—Charlie, was he not, support me here—”

“For which he was brought up before the justices, and—his bowl and skiddy being damaged in the fracas—he was brought to court in a wheelbarrow, and sentenced to hard labour for life.”

The Giant put his head in his hands. The bones there seemed to pulse, as if bones were living, as if they were fighting. The skin at his temples seemed frail, and he wondered if inner provocation would break it. Pybus and Claffey went away to bathe their contusions. The Giant was afraid that, under the new moon, his followers had got a taste for riot, and he wondered what they would do when the nights were lighter and the moon was full.

At full moon they went out with cutlasses, spits, bottles, and pokers, for an informal fight with some Englishmen. Afterwards they chased a Jew, finding themselves part of a light-night mob with drink taken, and passed on from Jew-baiting to window-breaking to tearing up railings.

The Giant was alone in their chambers. It was a hot night, and he opened the casement. The hour was ten and it was still and grey. The cries and groans of Londoners, their bedside prayers, drifted to him faintly on a breeze dank as the Honduras. Behind him the candle flame guttered, threatened to fail: as if underground. By its feeble light, he stretched out his hands and examined them. I need, I do so need, he thought, a stick for measuring. It may be that I’m seeing what I want to see—or, to be exact, what I don’t want to see. He stretched out his hand, to test its span. His new shoes were tighter, but then a man’s feet swell in the summer heat, it’s what’s to be expected. He crossed the room and ducked experimentally under the door frame. This was more informative. He had been in these rooms some weeks now, and the instructions for ducking were coded into his knee-joints. And it was not his imagination-in the last fortnight, he had to bend them deeper.

So.

He drifted back to the window. He looked down into the courtyard. Bitch Mary was standing by the gate, talking to a woman. He saw the pale glowing curve of the child’s skull; her hair streamed silver. She reached up her arms to embrace the woman, and as the woman stepped forward the Giant saw that he knew her; she was the red-head from the cellar, who wore a green kerchief and had punctured Joe Vance with her wit. He almost called down to them; but no, he thought, I will be poor company. He felt in his bones and his gut the truth of what anecdote and observation had taught him: a giant who begins to grow again does not live long.

Hunter stalks alone, by the crepuscular Thames. He thinks, I have had no opportunity of making actual experiments on drowned persons. Not his fault if he hadn’t. Still, it’s not the season for suicide. Spring kills the melancholy rich man, who seeks relief from his humour; in late autumn the beggars drown themselves, for better reasons, after they have spent the first night of the season in a trough or hole awash with icy rain. Women bearing disgraceful children drown themselves at any season of the year. If his people were only vigilant, he would have a constant supply of them, either for reanimation or dissection. Do not assume she is dead. Beat the water out of her. Tenderise the trollop as if she were a piece of meat. Squeeze her spongy lungs as if you had them in your very fists. And when they drown themselves in the depths of winter, when the ice is breaking up, then there is every hope—for the cold, he already suspects, brings on a shock to the system, which holds a specimen in a kind of suspended life. Properly treated, such a person may be revivified, though he has been under water for ten minutes, twenty minutes … where is the frontier of death?

What if, he thinks, this state of cold might be artificially induced, and suddenly induced—if a man in possession of his health and spirits, let’s say, were to volunteer to be packed around with Greenland ice … the cold would numb him, the cold would sleep him, and if the supply of ice were constantly replenished … . I want to get a white bear from Greenland … might he not sleep away a year or so? Or would his organs fail? It might be a welcome specific for bored men-about-town: an elegant excuse for failing to visit maiden aunts and plain heiresses. “I am iced up till next June, alas …” Or a good way to evade your debtors, of whom he has plenty. Imagine Howison, ushering them into his freezing-cabinet: “Gentlemen, you may see John Hunter now—but John Hunter is unable to see you.” Yet he doesn’t think, not seriously, of icing himself. His man Howison is a reliable man and wouldn’t let him thaw, but all the same, he has work to do, the progress of his disease to observe.

The clamminess of his skin, the natural clamminess of the humid night, has turned to a cold sweat that drips down his back. He thinks of the dead. His mind turns to them often. Corpses are my library, he would say, when an importunate bookseller pressed on him the vast Death Encyclopedia (illustrated) of Dr. Knogus-Boggus of Amsterdam or Professor Schniffle-Bum of the Vienna School of Medicine. Experiment, he would say, see for yourself, go in with the knife and lay bare and see what you see.

And yet the dead defy him. Something in their nature. The principle of life has gone out of them—the principle that he knows exists, but he is not sure what it is. He tells his men, you can never be sure, with the hanged no more than the drowned—reanimation is possible—do not pick their pockets, for fear of future prosecution. But when the body is brought to him, and stretched on the slab, it is frequently the case that he finds tears in his eyes. He says to himself, come now, John Hunter, this is mere dissection room nostalgia, mourning for the days when you used to cut shoulder-to-shoulder with Wullie, before you had your schism over the nature of the placenta; it is nostalgia for the early days, when you were a raw boy and not all Europe’s veneration.

But in his heart he knows it is more than that. It is the dead themselves who move him to tears. Numb to the scents of a hot summer’s evening; deaf to laughter, blind to clouds. Not just still, and not just cold, but waxen, quenched, extinct—and gone … gone where? This is what anguishes him: the question where. He wants to haul them back, with iron hooks. He wants to question them: where? He wants to know if there is a soul and if the soul can split from the body and if so, what is its mechanism for getting out—a usual orifice or permeation through the skin? What is the weight of the soul? If you pushed him, he’d guess a couple of ounces, not more.