The Giant, O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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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 corpses, 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; and his job to dissect, to make preparations, to serve the students with a feast for their eyes. His voice quivered. Whose are they?’
‘Whose?’ The little query dripped with ice.
Two arms—I mean, a right and a left—are they from the same man? I mean, is he dead, or was he in an accident?’
He was a raw boy, after all. He’d done little but stone the crows, follow the plough. Glasgow had been an intermission, and had not taught him about men with no arms.
Wullie said, ‘When I was a student in France, there was none of this nonsense of forty men crowding round the dissecting table, craning their necks and babbling. To each Frenchman, there was one corpse, and in the dissecting chamber there was an aura of studious calm. The French are a frivolous nation, and deeply mistaken in many of their inclinations, but in this vital matter they have the right of it.’
John got to work dissecting the arms. Later, he castigated himself for a jimmy idiot—bursting out like that in front of Wullie, as if it should matter where limbs came from. Still, he couldn’t help wondering, speculating in his mind: making up a life to fit the possessor of the fibrous, drained muscle. It was matter, no impulse to drive it; only half its nature was on display, structure but not function, and he knew this was less than half the truth, for how can you understand a man if you don’t see him in action? He couldn’t help thinking of Martha, when he himself lay down at night: he saw her narrow and flat and yellow-white against the bed linen, and Wullie puffing above her, his shirt scooped up, and he heard the little chattering cries of pleasure escaping her non-existent lips.
‘Slig!’ said Joe Vance. ‘Hearty Slig!’
They were standing in some alley. Vance clapped the man on his shoulder. His head indicated a low door, half-open, from which the man had just emerged: behind him, steps running down into the earth. ‘Can you lodge us?’ Joe asked. ‘One night only. Tomorrow we move on to greater things.’
Slig gnawed his lip. Two pennies each,’ he said.
‘Slig! And yourself an old friend of mine!’
‘Be reasonable. I have to cover the cost of the straw. And fourpence for the big fella. I shall have to turn two away if I’m to let him in.’
‘But it’s a privilege to have him under your roof! Besides being huge, he can tell tales and make prophecies.’
‘Fourpence,’ Slig said. ‘Liquor’s extra.’
Sighing, Vance disbursed the coins. Pybus and Claffey were heroes about the steps, striding down into the cellar as if they had been doing steps all their lives—though there was a moment of nervous hesitation from Claffey at the top of the flight, and the manner in which his frown changed to a cocky grin showed that he had harboured some anxiety. Jankin could not be persuaded to put his first foot forward, even though Pybus ran up and then down again to show how easy it was: eventually, the Giant had to carry him.
The room was low and filled with smoke. There was straw underfoot, and men and women sitting, convivial, their pots in their hands, and nobody drunk yet; rush light on exiles’ faces, the sound of a familiar tongue. And a grubbing sound from the shadows, a snorting.
‘Jesus,’ Jankin said. ‘We have touched down among the rich. These fellows have got a pig.’
There was a moment’s silence, while the people considered the Giant; an intake of breath, and then applause rang to the roof. Men and women stood up and cheered him. ‘One boy of ours,’ a woman said. ‘The true type.’ She stretched up, and kissed his hip. ‘Giants are extinct here for hundreds of years.’
‘And why is this?’ the Giant asked—for the woman, who was not young, had a look of some intelligence, and the matter puzzled him.
She shrugged, and with a gesture of her small fingers pulled her kerchief down, modest, hiding her rust-red curls. ‘It may be that they were shut up and starved, or hunted with large dogs. The Englishman craves novelty, as long as it will pack and decamp by the end of the week. He does not like his peace disturbed—it is the English peace, and he thinks it is sacred. He magnifies his own qualities, and does not like anyone to be bigger than himself.’
‘This bodes ill for my projected fame and fortune,’ the Giant said.
‘Oh, no! Your keeper was right enough to bring you. You will be the sensation of a season.’
‘At the end of which, I shall still be tall.’
‘But I expect you can tell stories? Giants usually can. Even the English like stories—well, some stories anyway. The ones where they win.’
‘This is not what we were promised,’ Claffey said. He looked around. ‘Here, Joe Vance! This is not what we were promised! But for the breath of the mountain air, we might be back at Connor’s.’
‘No, Vance,’ the Giant said. ‘It’s not what I’d call commodious.’
‘Contain yourself in patience,’ Vance said. ‘Give me the chance, will you, of a day to prospect for some premises for us.’
‘I’d have thought you’d got it already fixed,’ Claffey said. ‘That’s what it means, being an agent, doesn’t it?’
‘Being an agent is an art you will never acquire, Bog-Head.’
‘Now, Vance,’ said the Giant. ‘Temperate yourself.’
‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can do,’ Vance said.
‘Claffey, have patience,’ Pybus said. ‘Joe will get us a place tomorrow. One with a pagoda.’
‘Did we agree on a pagoda?’ the Giant said. ‘I still favour a triumphal arch.’
‘A triumphal arch is timeless good taste,’ said a man squatting at their feet. ‘Whereas a pagoda, it’s a frivolity worn out within the week.’
‘It’s right,’ said the red-headed woman. There’s a whiff of the vulgar about a pagoda.’
Vance spread out his hands, smiling now. ‘Good people! He’s a giant! I’m a showman! Don’t say vulgar! Say topical! Say it’s all the buzz!’
‘Tell that giant to sit down,’ said an old man, who was leaning against the wall. ‘He is disturbing the air.’
‘He is blind,’ said the squatting man, nodding towards the speaker. ‘Strange vibrations bother him.’
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