comprehend. I send my man around with an agreed sum in cash. And in return, you put your thumb-print to a compact we’ll draw up, saying I’m to have your corpse. So you see the advantage I’m offering you?” He paused. “Have the money while you’re alive and can enjoy it. Man, ye may as well.”
He thought he’d explained it clearly enough. But before he’d finished talking, something had fallen out of the man’s features. Some kind of understanding. Leaving a great blank. Wiped.
“Look at it this way,” he’d said encouragingly. “It’s your chance to contribute to the sum of human knowledge, after you’re gone. If you don’t want the money yourself you could distribute it among your followers. Or send it back to your relatives.”
The man said—and in his voice there was no expression at all—“I could apply it to charitable purposes. The relief of indigent freaks.”
“Ye could, at that,” said John.
Then the man asked him, oddly, “This contract, will it be written in English?”
“Of course,” he said.
The Giant said, “I thought it might.” Then he lay down on the floor.
Hunter hugs himself. He knows he can get this giant, somehow. If the price is right. He’ll have to borrow, of course.
No answer from his wife. Mr. Bach—or one of his offspring—is tripping down the stairs.
What’s the Giant doing, when he lies on the floor? There is a point—and you may know it yourself—a point in fatigue or pain when logic slowly crumbles from the world, where reason’s bricks sieve to crumb. Where content flits from language, goes its ways and departs, its pack on its back: you take the high road and I’ll take the low. Where meaning evaporates into the air like ether.
The Giant has reached this point. When he seals his senses, he’s sealing out the meaningless, because inside he’s trying to preserve some sense of what meaning means. He examines the words. He interrogates them. Bones. Compact. Corpse. But finally, here’s why he’s lying on the floor. No fancy reasons. Forget philosophy. He’s lying on the floor because he’s realised this, that there’s nothing to be done. There’s simply
There’s
But the Giant rises: and to vituperate. To say, curse him, John Hunter, he thinks I can’t read. To smash the satires out of their frames, to splinter the rattling sash, to hurl against the stained wall the three-legged stool that of its very nature don’t wobble: for God help us, in this quaking sin-sodden world, why should tripods be privileged?
The Giant’s voice is shaking the beams. He is smashing the glass from here to Fleet Street. He is setting up quivers in the foundations that will crack down Cockspur Street, one fine day; vibrations that will blow London apart.
“Will I take him on in a contest?” he howls. “Trigonometry? Or singing? Will the dog match me, God rot him, in Socratic dialogue? I tell you what it is.” He turns, his face blazing, his feet pounding the boards; we can expect soon a billet-doux from the tenants below. “It’s a new and original wickedness. To come to a man, to say ‘I’ll buy you,’ to say ‘I’ll buy you while you’re still breathing, I’ll buy you now against the hour of your death.’”
“Not so,” said narrow Slig.
“How not so?”
“Not so because it ain’t,” drawled Con Claffey. “Not new, not original. Not wicked, even.”
“Enlarge,” the Giant demanded.
“It is a familiar pretext,” said Con, “for anatomies to approach those felons about to be hanged—among which company we may enumerate ourselves one day—”
He paused, and waited for a comradely titter: which proceeded, in the end, from Tibor the Terrible Tartar. “They approach those felons, I say—and offer to purchase their corpses in advance, so that they may have a good suit to hang in.”
“Jesus,” said Slig. “You remember Sixteen-String Joe?”
“Jesus, do I,” said Con. “What a figure he cut, when he was bound in the cart. Joe was a redoubtable highwayman, a landpirate of the first water. He departed this life with his hair curled, and his waistcoat embroidered with the flowers of the forest, the pearls of the sea. By God, and with an ode in his mouth. He croacked well, did Joe.”
“So it’s regular?” said the Giant. He wanted to think the approach of the little Scotsman was some stealthy, snuffling seduction, peculiar to him. Their faces showed him the truth: it’s regular.
He thought, where’s Joe Vance?
Where’s he lying tonight?
I wish he were by me now.
Good old Joe.
Money or not.
Would agent, but never sell me.
Sack of lucre.
Never do it now. Mulroney’s. Never the lyre-backed chairs. And horribly enough, that’s what Joe understood. He knew what was beautiful. He knew what would last. And he thefted his own vision. Go explain that.
twelve
Jankin stood stock-still, regarding the Spotted Boy. Studying him. The boy looked about twelve years old. He was kept undressed to show his pigmentation; grey-white patches against dull brown. Old scars laced his body, thin black ropy scars; from cuts, from worms, from insect bites that had festered. But it was his patches that distinguished him, and Jankin remembered the black man he had seen on the quay on his first morning in England.
“See.” His grin shot over his shoulder. He almost said, Joe Vance, Joe Vance. “See, I told you. Told you it would rub off. Rub off more,” he advised the Spotted Boy. “Then you’ll be white and a free man like me.”
Down in that cellar where the freaks cluster, that’s where they’re to be found, the Giant and Jankin and Pybus who is only a boy. They were drawn there by Claffey’s ambition to become an agent, and from now on it’s among these freaks they will live, crawling back at night to Cockspur Street to their lousy beds. Nobody was doing the housekeeping these days. Bitch Mary was hatching a bastard, her frame broadening and coarsening to accommodate it. “Let me have twenty children,” she said, sneering. “Then I can sell my boys to chimney-sweeps and my girls to Drury Lane snatch-purveyors.”
