The Giant, O’Brien

‘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.

Wullie had also a narrow white gentleman’s face, chronically disappointed. It was some four years since his fiancée 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 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.’

The Giant folded himself stiffly, and sat down in the straw. Pybus bounced down beside him. Jankin was admiring the pig. Joe Vance looked easy. Claffey looked peevish.

‘We saw pigs on our way,’ Jankin said. ‘Skinny brutes. Not a one that could hold a candle to this. Why, at home, he’d be the admiration of a parish.’

‘All of us own this pig,’ the blind man said. ‘He is our great hope.’

A young girl with an open face, slightly freckled across the nose, reached up and plucked at the Giant’s sleeve. ‘Would you oblige, and cheer us now with an anecdote? We are, all of us, far from home.’

‘Very well,’ said the Giant. He looked at Claffey, at Pybus, at Joe Vance. He stretched out his legs in front of him; then, seeing he was taking too much floor space, drew them up again. ‘Here’s one you’ll know or not, and you may make your comments as if we were at home and gathered at Connor’s.’

He thought, there’s only this earth, after all. The ground beneath us and God’s sky above, and we will get used to this, because people can get used to anything, and giants can too.

The young girl looked down, smiling in pleasure. She had long fair hair, almost white even in the cellar fug: like a light under ground, O’Brien thought, Persephone’s torch made from a living head. The girl’s cheeks were pink and full; she had eaten only yesterday. She settled her hair about her, combing it with her fingers, arranging it about her shoulders, drawing it across her face like a curtain. And now the outline of bowed shoulders, of sharp faces, must be blurred for her, and the facts of life softened: like a slaughter seen through gossamer, or a throat cut behind a fan of silk.

‘A year or two ago,’ said the Giant, ‘there was a young woman, pretty and light of foot, walking the road alone at night, coming to her cousin in Galway, with her babby of scarce six months laid to her breast. She had been walking for many a mile, walking through a dense wood, when—’

‘A demon comes up and eats her,’ said Pybus, with confidence.

‘—she emerged at a crossroad,’ the Giant continued, ‘just as the moon rose above the bleak and lonely hills. She stood there bedazzled, in the moonlight, wondering, which way shall I go? She looked down, into the face of her babby, but snug in his sling he was asleep and dreaming, dreaming of better times, and she could get no direction there. Shall I, she thought, linger here till morning, making my bed in the mossy ditch, as I have done many times before? It may be that in the morning some knowledgeable traveller will come along, and direct my way, or perhaps even in my dream I will receive some indication of the shortest route to my cousin’s house. I need hardly add, that her hair was long and curling and pale, her form erect, her body low and small but seemly, so that if the most vicious and ungodly man had chanced to glimpse her he would have thought her one of the gentry, and would have crossed himself and left her unmolested. Now this was her protection, as she walked the road, and she knew it; what man would touch a fairy, with a fairy babby bound in a cloth? And yet she was a mortal woman, with all her perplexities sitting heavy on her shoulders, and her worries making the weight of the babby increase with every mile she trod.’

A man said, from the shadows, ‘I’ve heard of a type of fairy where they carry their babbies on their backs, and the nursing mothers have tits so long and supple that they can fling one over their shoulder so the babby can suck on it, which is a great convenience to them when they’re labouring in the fields.’

‘Yes, well, some people will believe anything,’ the Giant said.

‘Must be foreign,’ said a woman. ‘A foreign type. I’ve never heard it. Still and all, it would leave your hands free.’

A man said, ‘Whoever heard of gentlefolk that labour in the fields?’

‘Will you be quiet, down at the back?’ Vance asked testily. ‘I’ve brought you over a master storyteller of unrivalled stature, and you’re just about going the right way to irritate him, and then you’ll be sorry, because he’ll stamp on your heads and burst your bloody skulls.’

‘It’s not worrying me, Joe,’ the Giant said. ‘Calm yourself and sit down, why don’t you? Shall I go on?’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘So: just then, as she was casting around, she heard a noise, and it was not the sound of a horse, and it was not very distant, and she discerned it was the slap of shoe-leather, and she thought, here is a man on the road who is either rich or holy, either merchant or priest, and I will beg either a blessing or a penny—who knows which will do me more good, in the long run?

‘Then out of the shadows stepped a little man, with a red woollen cap upon his head, and carrying a leather bag. So he greeted her, and Step along with me, he says, and I’ll fetch you to a place you can sleep the night. Now she looked at him with some dismay, for he was neither merchant or priest, and she did not know what he was, or what he had in his leather bag. She said, The wind is fresh and the moon is high, and I think I’ll step out, because my relatives are gathered about their hearth in the town of Galway, and they are waiting for me.

‘And he says to her, very low and respectful, Mistress, will you walk with me for all that? I will bring you to a hall where a little baby is crying with hunger, with no one to feed him, because his mother is dead and we have no wet nurse among us. Do me this favour, he says, as I observe your own child is plump and rosy, and he will not miss the milk, but without it our babby will die. And if you will do me this favour, I will give you a gold piece from my leather bag.

‘And then he gave the bag a good shake, and she could hear the chink of gold pieces from within.’

‘She ought not go, for all that,’ the red-haired woman observed. ‘It will end badly.’

‘And aren’t you the shrivelled old bitch!’ Pybus said. ‘Not go, and have the babby starve?’

‘I’m telling you,’ the woman said. ‘Just wait, you’ll see.’

‘Do you know this story, then?’ Pybus asked her.

‘No, but I know that type of man that wears a red woollen cap.’

‘Well now,’ the Giant said, ‘let the true facts of what occurred put an end to your debate. For she was an amiable, good-hearted young woman, and she says to him, For such a pitiful tale as you have told me I’ll come to the babby, and ask you no money, for you are an old man, and you may need your cash yourself, by and by.’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Joe Vance said. ‘If that were my wife, I’d beat her into better sense.’

‘So off they step together, many a mile, turning her out of her true path, and still her babby sleeps, until she grows footsore and says to the old man, I fear we will not be there by morning.

‘We shall come to the place before dawn, I promise you, says the old man. This is a king’s son I am taking you to nurse, and it is not likely I should find him lying under the next hedge.’

‘A pox on kings,’ said the blind man. ‘What do kings avail? Better he dies.’

‘You speak out of your bitterness and affliction,’ the Giant said. ‘Not all kings are bad.’

‘Yes,’ said the blind man. They are bad inherently. It is not a question of their personal character. Kingship is an institution merely silly in itself, and pernicious as well.’

‘Less politics,’ the fair young woman said. ‘I want to hear of the girl, she is feeling she can’t go a step more, so what is the old man going to do to coax her, as she doesn’t seem to want his money?’

‘Put his hand up her skirts and wiggle his finger?’ Vance asked. ‘That’s often known to invigorate a female.’

The red-head yawned. ‘Little man, you might wave your cock to the five points,’ she said. ‘Not a woman in Ireland but would be laughing.’

‘Go on,’ Pybus said, impatient. ‘Go on with the tale, Charlie.’

The Giant began again, taking up the young woman’s voice. ‘Good sir, I did not know it was a king’s son you were bringing me to. So off they step, across field and stream, for what seems another hour, and another, and another, and dawn does not break, nor does the sky lighten one crack, and on and on they go, into the dark. And again she is weary, the babby grown a leaden weight, her feet cold and sore, her breath coming short and painful and every limb crying out for rest and warmth, her belly rumbling too. She says, King’s son or no, I can walk no more. Then the old man takes from under his coat a silver flask, and hands it to her—and she marvels at its workmanship, for it was finer than any she had ever seen or dreamed of. Take a draught! says he, and she takes a draught, and it is like nothing she has ever tasted in her mortal life. It is like honey but sweeter, it is like new milk but milder, it is like wine but it is stronger than any wine that was ever poured into a chalice. And as soon as she drinks it down, she feels all weariness drop away from her, and all torment of mind, and the babby is as light as air, and her feet feel as if she’s on her way to a dance, twitching at the first strain of the fiddle and ready to jig through the night. So she says to the old man, With a draught like that I could walk for half a year.’

‘Hm,’ said the red-head. ‘You notice how he only offered it after she said she was all through and done for? Why didn’t he give her a swig when he met her? Too mean, that’s what.’

‘Presently,’ the Giant said, ‘they came to a halt. Before them was a forest.’

‘I knew a forest would be in it,’ Jankin said. There is a demon in that forest, I bet you.’

‘Seal your gawpy mouth, Mush-head,’ Joe Vance said. ‘Go talk to your friend the pig.’

The Giant glanced at Joe; he saw he was heart and soul in the tale. He’s not a bad man at that, he thought, and he’s a good standby when the weapon of words must be employed; with his natural, flowing abuse, he’s working within a fertile tradition. ‘She enters the forest,’ he said. They walk a half-mile. She’s light now, her steps bouncing. Before her, she can see nothing but trees. Then when she looks again, she can see a gate set into the trees—and the gate is made of gold.’

‘A common delusion,’ said the red-head.

Then the old man says, Mistress, will you enter in? She does so. And there she beholds such splendour as there never was this side of heaven.’

‘Silk cushions with tassels is in it,’ Jankin said.

‘Indeed,’ said the Giant. He closed his eyes, and drew in his brows. So many times he had been called upon to describe splendour, and so many times he had called upon himself to do it; by now the thread of his invention was wearing thin. There were hangings on the wall,’ he began, ‘rich and dense tapestries, with every manner of flower and child and beast depicted upon them. There were mirrors between these hangings, their gilt frames studded with rubies. There were candles blazing, and the skins of lions to sit on, and there was a huge joint of meat roasting on a spit, and a mastiff—no, a brace of mastiffs—to turn it. So when she sees all this, she thinks, I should have taken that gold piece after all, because it’s obvious now that there’s plenty more where that came from.’

‘First glimpse of sense she’s shown all evening,’ Claffey said.

‘So there she stood, her babby in her arms, looking about her open-mouthed. At one end of the great room a door opened, and in came a man and a woman, tall and elegant, attired in sumptuous robes embroidered with silk. She bobbed her head then, and she was shy and tongue-tied, having no acquaintance until now with princes, which was what she took them to be. But they spoke her very fair—their voices were low and gracious, a whisper merely—and stretching out their hands to her they drew her towards them, and said they would conduct her to where the child was. So they took her into another great chamber, its hangings even richer than the first, the logs blazing, and golden birds singing in their cages, and the music of a harp sounding in her ears as sweet as the breath of angels. Surely I’ve died and gone to heaven, she said to herself—but then the woman reached forward to her, and drew her babby out of her arms, and the man put a hand on her breast and, with the utmost reverence, uncovered her dug. Here, says the woman, and led her to the cradle, which was draped in purple velvet and set on a stand carved of ivory, fetched from—’