Joe Vance stood looking after him. “He was a queer little pepper-and-salt gentleman, was he not? He tried to put us off our pig. Does he train creatures himself? I wonder. And seeks to get our trade?”
O’Brien said, “Have you heard of the Red Caps, small gentlemen of Scotland? They are four feet high, they carry a staff, their nails are talons, and their teeth long and yellow. How do their caps get red? They dye them in human blood.”
Pybus came up the stairs, bellowing, “Are you ready for your supper?”
Joe bawled down, “What is that supper?”
Yelled Pybus, “It is herring.”
“It is always bloody herring these days,” Claffey said.
John Hunter, back at Earl’s Court, surveys the space he has available. I must expand, he thinks, get better premises, somewhere central, and set up a gallery, where I can exhibit. Leicester Square strikes him as convenient; those environs generally. It will add to his fame and maybe bring some money in. He rubs his eyes. He rubs his head. I am ruined, he tells himself, by lashing out on specimens. Experiments will bring me to bankruptcy; I’ll go barefoot for knowledge. My wife will leave me. And my friends desert in droves. There, he thinks, just there shall Giant hang. I will move that armadillo three feet to the left, and the giant bones will sway, suspended on their wires, boiled and clean; for the man’s a goner. The freak says it himself; the tides are gathering behind his ribs, the salt oedematous tides. His digits no longer obey him, his faculties flag; give it six months, and the pagan object will be mine.
“So,” Joe Vance said, “despising your scepticism as I do, let me set out to you how such a pig works. You lay out letters around him, on cards, and ask him to spell a name and he goes to each letter and points with his trotter.”
“It’s superior entertainment,” the Giant said. “For those that can read.”
“Then you put down cards with numbers, and give it sums to do. After that, you put down letters again, and ask it to read the thoughts of the people in the audience and spell them out. Or tell their fortunes, as the Scotchman hinted. Sometimes, if your pig’s the prime article, you can blindfold it, and it will work just the same.”
“But would you trust your fortune,” the Giant asked, “if it were told by a pig?”
“Well, I do so think,” said Pybus. “For a pig won’t give you a favourable one, to get a tip.”
“The boy reasons well,” Joe said.
“And if a pig said, beware of a dray coming up fast on your left and mushing you against the wall, well, you’d beware.”
“But not if a human said it?” the Giant asked.
“You see, Giant,” Pybus explained, “the pig wouldn’t have any interest whether it came true or not. But if a human told it you, and the dray came up and dunted in your ribs, you’d suspect that the said dray was driven by the fortune-teller’s uncle. It’s what they call a ploy. It’s to get future money off you.”
“Well, well,” said the Giant. “You seem wise in the ways of the world, all of a sudden. Have you been looking into Joe’s book about the prince?”
Pybus reddened. “I cannot read,” he said. “And you know it, Charlie. Still less any book in a foreign tongue.”
“You much neglect your advancement.” The Giant sniffed. “Joe, how are you to persuade the ladies to our show? And the fine gentlemen? For a swine do smell.”
“There you are under a mistake,” Joe said hotly. “There is nothing in the breed, inherently, to make it smell, and you speak out of gross prejudice, O’Brien, at which I am surprised. Goss’s pig almost certainly does not smell.” He spoke with more loudness than conviction.
Claffey said, sniggering in the corner, “Joe Vance is related to a pig, that’s why he stands up for his tribe.”
“Come outside, skin-head,” Vance proposed, “and I’ll pound your liver to a fine paste that I will use to stop up the chinks in the door frame.”
“Gentlemen,” the Giant said, “your complaints are grating in my ears and your incessant quarrels are scratching around in my brain like a rat in a hatbox. Would you not like the story of Bernard Owen O’Neill, whose uncle when on his way to fish for trout met a man without a head?”
And from his shelf, Hunter plucks out a book.
Wm Harvey: “Blood is the first engendered part … blood lives of itself … blood is the cause not only of life in general but also of longer or shorter life, of sleep and of watching, of genius, aptitude and strength.” Give me a piece of luck, he prays. Get me this giant. For I have never had a piece of luck. Brother Wullie has had it all.
He lays down the book. Takes up tourniquet, his lancet. The instrument punctures the skin. Tender swollen vessels. Draw off a little ounce or five. Never miss it. As he bleeds his recalcitrant apes, to make them quiet; subdue the animal excitement as it rises inside. Like garnet lava, like molten jewels, it slides down the sides of the china basin. His lamp gutters. A draught lifts the papers on his desk, their fibres oppressed by the weight of his writing.
Pybus, going out to piss in the yard, found Bitch Mary crouching by the wall. When she lifted her head, he saw a dark patch around her mouth. “Get me a rag,” she said.
He tried to raise her to her feet. “A rag to staunch,” she said.
“Never mind,” he said. “Come indoors.”
“I need a rag to wipe the blood from between my legs. I do not want a man such as the Giant to see how his countrywomen are reduced.”
Wm Harvey, having observed the pulsating heart of the chick in a fertilised egg, misunderstood what he had seen, and reported that the blood had its life, its own quivering beat. Its vitality lasted so long as it was not shed. Once it was shed, the living principle escaped. The blood separated then into its dead constituents, some serous, some fibrous; into parts that had no existence in living blood. Its nature was transformed by death: corrupted, he said, resolved.
Mary was shaking with cold. Her hair was cropped, hacked off in patches, shorn above her ears. Her money was gone; not a halfpenny to bless herself with. The month was now November, and the moon small and peevish: a copper coin lightly silvered, a counterfeit light.
