The Giant, O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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The black man reached out, and took Jankin’s forearm in his hand. Gently he removed it from himself, pressing it inexorably into Jankin’s chest, as if he would fuse it with the ribs. His mild eyes were quite dead. His mouth twitched, but it did not speak. He passed on, his tread firm, over the cobbles and towards the city he now called home.
The Giant said, ‘People are staring at me.’
Vance said, ‘Yes, they would. I should hope so. That is the general idea.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Sooner we get you indoors and housed, the better for us all. We don’t want them gaping for free.’
The Giant saw the parakeets, green and gold, flit and swoop in a hot tangle of deeper green, and heard the alarm shrieks from their beating throats, and felt rope cut into skin and smelt the sweet, burnt, branded flesh.
He called out after the black man, ‘Poor soul, you have a brand on your body.’
The man called back, ‘Shog off, freak.’
The first night of their walk to London, they begged lodgings in a barn. Joe Vance parlayed with the farmer, and purchased from him some milk, some beer and some nasty dried-up bread with green mould on it. Claffey became militant, and raised a doubt about Joe Vance’s abilities. The Giant was forced to detain their attention with a long tale. He settled them among the straw, and turned his cheek to the alien breeze. They had come so far in thin rain, their heads down, purposefully observing as little as they could. London would be all wonder, Vance said. They were disposed to believe it, and not notice anything immediate: just walk. They had expected lush valleys, mounts snow-topped, fountains, a crystal house or mansion at each turn in the road: but no, it was tramp, tramp, just tramp. ‘Look now,’ the Giant said. ‘Shouldn’t we have a conveyance, Vance? I’d have thought a coach would have been sent for me, or some sort of elegant chariot?’
Hm. Or possibly not. Vance seemed likely to break out into a rage, which he did too readily when things went wrong. ‘What kind of a coach?’ he yelled. ‘One with the roof cut off? Who’s going to wreck a perfectly good coach for the one-time transport of a giant? It isn’t as if England is teeming with giants, it isn’t as if having made a ruin of a perfectly sound vehicle they can hire it out again on a weekly basis, is it? No Englishman does business that way!’
‘What about a chariot?’ the Giant asked mildly. The same objection cannot be raised to a chariot.’
‘Oh yes, a chariot, but then it would have to be reinforced! You couldn’t have your customer stepping in and putting his giant foot through it, so it would have to be strengthened—which costs money—and then drawn by 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, ho, hey! Wallopy-hic, clattery-hey—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 gibbeted 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 on to 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,’ he 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 swans-down. And silk cushions with tassels on.’
London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitch-soaked 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.