The Giant says, “Joe, whenever I pass a stairhead, I feel an attraction to fall down it.”
Bitch Mary comes home with her face beaten in.
Joe says, “These are not the days we have known.”
John Hunter keeps to his routine. He rises in the dark, and rinses his mouth in water that has stood since the night before. He pisses—an activity less painful than formerly—and rubs grit out of his eyes. He strokes his bristling chin, he scrubs his white freckled body and dabs it with his linen towel. He begins dissecting before six, and the frigid dawn peeps in at his indecencies, at his scoured-raw hands hauling bowel, at his excised bladders and hearts thrown in a dish.
At nine, he breaks off for breakfast. Gooseberries in a mutton tart remind him of eyes rolling on the slab. Eyes reminds him of optics, optics reminds him of that Swiss devil Marat with his increasingly twisted-up and mad set of theories about the nature of light. Where is Marat this morning? Hunter stops eating, and starts imagining. His pulse shoots up. He pushes his pie aside. Remembers brother James, jiggling like a half- disjointed idiot on the stool in the kitchen at Long Calderwood; and how sister Dolly tenderly placed an extra log on the fire, at the sight of him. James with his cheeks blazing, his cold sweat, his bones fighting out through the skin. Marat reckoned he could cure tisick and bone rot, cure the pox too, and if he could do either or any it was from gab gab gab, his continental blawflum and the gradual, creeping, magnetising power of his gold-striped eyes—gentle as sin, God rot him.
Put off his breakfast by thoughts of Marat and other malpractitioners, he would receive his patients. He would go on his rounds, and dine at four. He put little on his plate, he drank no wine. (Wine, and even more, spirits, disposes to springing skullsplitters, headaches so vast, so penetrating, so mobile, that he feels some vast satanic fisherman has gaffed him through the hard palate and is working him to land.) He would leave the table as soon as good manners allowed, and go to lie down for an hour; but this time for recuperation, if he had dined too heavy, was filled with the heaving spectres of democrats, and the dead. When he rose, he would dictate case-notes, or write them up himself. He would prepare a lecture, or deliver one. By twelve midnight, the household was in bed; and he alone, walking till one or two, listening to the clocks as they struck across the city.
Five years ago—he consults his notebooks, and sees it was five years ago now—he took a turn for the stranger—his routine broken, his patients deserted and referred elsewhere, while for ten days he lay suspended it seemed on air, his body spinning, faster and faster spinning. This was stage one: waking in the night, to this gyroscopy.
Stage the second: he is two feet long.
Stage third: John Hunter’s feet lost. He can move them, but they are someone else’s. He can’t claim ownership, despite the motive power.
In this stage, he can’t stand the light. They close the shutters but he begs to be blindfolded; not that anyone can understand his speech. A noise makes him scream: any noise, the hooves of horses clip-clop in Jermyn Street, the buzz of a fly blunting its head in the corner, or Anne’s voice calling out, “Oh, the post’s come.” The harpsichord-clavichord-any-bloody-chord, hammer or quill on string, they hurt his viscera, pluck liver and lights, pluck and plick, conducing to shriek, and a sort of terrible silent sobbing inside himself, which occasionally lurches up into his throat and batters at the back of his clenched teeth: in which he’s saying, Bring me Mesmer, bring me Marat, bring me any bleeding bollocking quack you care to name—pay him to stop it, stop it happening, stop it happening now.
Stage fourth: after ten days, he’s out of bed, leaning on an arm. He claims kinship with his feet—he knows, intellectually, that they belong to him—and he accepts that he has returned to his true size. Colour is unreliable; the fire burns purple in the hearth, and no one will explain why this is so. There is no centre in him, so he can’t balance. His hands swim in dislocating space. They feel their way towards nothing. If he wants to put his hand on an object, he has swiftly to calculate the distance, and watch his hand as it moves. If he wants to plant his feet, he has to predetermine where they’ll rest, heel and toe. It’s as if something’s gone inside, as if his spring were broken.
And now, in times of violence and cold weather, he sometimes feels the wash of nausea, sees through slitted eyes the city jaundiced, which he takes to be a warning, for this yellow pigmentation stained his world for ten days before the strangeness and the pain arrived inside him.
After this, Anne persuaded him to Bath. He drank the waters. He still believed he would die. He slept lightly and had dreams, in which blood ran down the walls, and it was his. Returning to London, he went to the meeting of a committee, at St. Georges’. The agenda swam before his eyes. The faces around him adopted singular arrangements, eyes on top of nose, nose floating off to the left, teeth detaching themselves and falling with a soundless clatter to the table top. The chairman rapped on this table top with his pencil. “Come on, John Hunter. Keep up.”
John Hunter is nervous of speaking in public. Standing before his awed, gaping students, his thoughts disorder, slip sideways, and snag themselves. He needs thirty drops of laudanum, before he can stand up to it like a man. Otherwise, what happens? His scribbled-over papers fumble and flit to the floor.
Long after midnight, Pybus went into the yard for air. Fumes of spirits went before him, gusting on the night. There was frost in the air, and the frost killed the fumes; he stood breathing quite sweetly. He shifted his feet on the stones; since he came to England his feet were more calloused than ever, but the hard skin did not keep out the chill. Vance, at the Giant’s behest, had provided them all with leather shoes, but Jankin had thrown his overboard, when they were at sea. He believed they were a torment or some kind of shackle; and yet he, Pybus, was resolved to persevere—except when he was in private—because both the Giant and Joe Vance insisted that the constant wearing of shoes was a mark of the high life, and after all, Pybus, they would say to him, your daddy wore them, your grandaddy wore them, it is only in your own poor generation that you are forced to be so closely acquainted with mother earth. The Giant himself wore great boots, which he said were made from the skin of forty calves, and it was the work of Pybus to polish them with a rag; but by and by, he thought, this task will pass to Jankin, and I will go on to greater things.
So, standing as he was, the smoke of evening fires drifting around him, he heard a sound, a grunting, rutting sound. He thought, it is the pig! His ears were attuned that way; all of them, constantly, were expecting Toby Goss, the slick black genius from Dublin. His head swivelled in the direction of the noise, and then he began to walk.
Beside the house was a little passage. It led him to a back court, very cramped. Very stinking, and dark shapes moving in it, confused animals, two heads and a heaving back. His heart came into his mouth, for he remembered that creature they had seen in Ireland, running in the ruins: half-hound, half-babby. He stepped back into the passage, and crossed himself. At that moment the moon—so soiled, so grounded in puddles—came sailing high above the buildings.
By its gentle light, he was able to separate the animal shapes into human form. He saw that on the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief
