heavy horses.”
“Did you not think of this before?” Pybus asked. (And Pybus was only a boy.)
“Just what are you insinuating?” Joe Vance bellowed. “Are you insinuating that I have in some way exaggerated my experience as a giant’s agent? Because if you are, Pybus, I’ll slit your nostrils and pull your brains out through the opening, and then I’ll pound them to a paste and put them down for rat poison.”
The Giant asked, “Do you know the tale of the man that was drunk in the company of the priest, and the priest changed him to a mouse, and he got eat by his own cat?”
“No,” Jankin said. “By God, let’s have that tale!”
… As for what we can say of Buchanan—whoopsy-go Buchanan! Why John am I glad tae see ye—hup, whop, ye’ll take a drop, take another, take a flask, woeful tangle wi ma feet, here’s a go, here’s to you, here’s to lads, hup! Hic! Take a sip! Never mind, sit ye down, mind the chair, chink the cup, Saturday night, wife’s a-bed, hic! Whop! Saints Alive!
Slithery-go, oh, hey, clattery-hic—oh, phlat, hold yer cup out, no harm done—what a daft bloody place to put a staircase!
Well, Buchanan was an episode, nothing more. The man was not untalented as a cabinet-maker, but he could not keep his books straight, nor would a coin lodge in his pocket for more than an hour before it would be clamouring to be out and into the pocket of some purveyor of wine and spirits. In those first days in Glasgow, in the house of the said Buchanan, he would grieve—on windy days, the notion of fields would possess him, the sigh of the plane under his hand would turn to the breeze’s sough, and he would long to lie full length upon the earth, listening to the rocks making and arranging themselves, and deep in the soil the eternal machinations of the worms. But he said to himself, conquer this weak fancy, John Hunter, because fortunes are made in cities, and you must make yours. At night he opened the shutter, letting in the cold, watching the moon over the ridge tiles, and the stars through smoke.
Buchanan was a hopeless case. His slide to bankruptcy could not be checked. He had taught a skill, at least; now he, John Hunter, could say, “I am a man who can earn a living with my hands.” But he was glad when he was able to pack his bundle and foot it back to Long Calderwood.
Buchanan died. Brother James died.
One day a letter came. “Wullie’s sent for me,” he said to Dorothea. “I’ve to go south. He’s wanting a strong youth.”
“Then I suppose you’ll do,” his sister said.
Seventeen forty-eight saw John Hunter, a set-jawed red-head astride a sway-backed plodder, heading south towards the stench of tanneries and soap-boilers. He came to London across Finchley Common, with the gibbetted corpses of villains groaning into the wind. A hard road and a stony one, with constant vigilance needed against the purse-takers, but he was counselled against the sea voyage by brother Wullie, who had once been in a storm so horrible that the ship’s masts were almost smashed down, seasoned sailors turned white from terror, and a woman passenger lost her reason, and has not recovered it till this day.
At the top of Highgate Hill he came to the Gatehouse Tavern, and observed London laid out below him. The evening was fine and the air mild.
It was an undrained marsh, the air above it a soup of gloom. The clouds hung low, a strange white light behind them. The Giant and his companions picked their way among the stinking culverts, and hairless pigs, foraging, looked up to glare at them, a metropolitan ill-will shining red and plain in their tiny eyes. As they tramped, their feet sank in mud and shite, and the sky seemed to lower itself onto their shoulders. As night fell, they saw the dull glow of fire. Men and women, ragged and cold as hermits, huddled round the brick kilns, cooking their scraps of food. They squatted on their haunches, looking up bemused as O’Brien passed them. Their eyes were animal eyes, glinting. He thought they were measuring the meat on his bones. For the first time in his life he felt fear: not the holy fear a mystery brings, but a simple contraction in his gut. All of them—even Vance, even Claffey—stepped closer to his side.
“Keep walking,” the Giant said. “An hour or two. Then lavish baths await us, and the attentions of houris and nymphs.”
“And feather beds,” said Jankin, “with quilts of swansdown. And silk cushions with tassels on.”
London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitchsoaked ropes in the streets, and branched globes of light sprout from the houses. Pybus thinks they have come to a country where they do not have a moon, but Vance is sure they will see it presently, and so they do, drowned in a muddy puddle in Chandos Street.
John’s arrival was well-timed, for it was two weeks before the opening of brother Wullie’s winter lecture programme. “I hear you’re good with your hands,” Wullie said.
He grunted: “Who says so?”
“Sister Dorothea.”
Wullie put his own hands together. He had narrow white gentleman’s hands. You would never know, to look at them, where they ventured: the hot velvet passages of London ladies who are enceinte, and the rigid bowels of dishonourable corpses.
Wullie had also a narrow white gentleman’s face, chronically disappointed. It was some four years since his fiancee Martha died, and he had not found either inclination or opportunity to court any other woman; pale-eyed chastity had him in her grasp, and he thought only of sacrifice, late hours, chill stone rooms that keep the bodies fresh. The rooms of his mind were cold like this, and it was difficult to imagine him sighing and groaning, all night on a feather mattress beside the living Martha with her juices and her pulses, her dimples and her sighs and her “yes Wullie, yes Wullie, oh yes just there Wullie, oh my little sweetheart, can you do it over again?” Easier to imagine him a-bed with the dead woman, four years buried and dried to bone.
Easy to see, Wullie creeping up from the foot of the bed, his tongue out, daintily raising the rotted shroud: fingering her phalanges with a murmur of appreciation, creeping each pointed finger over the metatarsals and tarsals while his nightshirt, white as a corpse, rolls up about his ribs. It’s with a gourmet’s desire he sighs; then tibia and fibula, patella, and—ah, how he smacks his dainty lips, as he glides up the smooth femur, towards his goal! He pants a little, crouching over her, scarred Scottish knees splayed—and now he probes, with expert digit, the frigid cavity of her pelvis.
“Are you quite well, brother John?” Wullie asked.
“Aye. Oh, aye.”
“You are not fevered?”
“Only deep in thought.”
“Then fall to work on these arms. I am told you are observant and deft. Let us try your vaunted capacities.”
The arms came wrapped in cloths, bloodless like wax arms, but they were not wax. Severed at the shoulder;
