God's Fool (23 page)

Where would I begin? I would begin with fear. Fear like a smell. Like sweat, rank and unfamiliar. Like the short, sharp thrust of a five-inch knife in the dark. The kind of midnight fear, so rich with self-loathing, that can keep you from hearing the sounds coming from the other side of the room: the strenuous wheezing, the hand-muffled cries, the grunting plank … I would put that in. I would put in the cloud-shaped stains on the woolens above the stove, the caking shoes, the canvas trousers heaped by the wall. I would put in the jump and flinch of a man’s skin as he washes himself with a pocket handkerchief, the dip and trickle in the bucket, the way he opens the cloth with shaking fingers—carefully, reverentially—as though it were parchment and might tear. I would put in the lifted arm, the trembling flesh hanging off the bone.

I would put in the September morning I woke on a board in a quiet room with a dirt floor and didn’t know where I was. Ten feet away, a swirling chimney of light rose up to a fist-sized hole in the roof. In the gloom just outside it, like a figure in a Flemish oil, sat an old man, naked from the waist up, holding his face in his hands like a bowl.

Everyone else still slept—long bundles of rags lying against the walls. I watched him. I could see the fingers pressing into the speckled, alabaster skin, the dusty strands of hair, the ball-and-joint of the shoulders … He was wearing a pair of ladies’ side-laced boots with the toes cut off so he could get them on. He sat with his knees pressed together and his feet pointing toward each other, like a child.

I cried on my brother’s shoulder that morning, quietly, without waking him. Eventually, I fell asleep. When I woke again, the old man was gone. There was a caving pain in my stomach. I looked at Eng. His skull—the shape of it—had begun emerging through his skin. His lips, stretched tight by invisible fingers, had cracked and split; the sockets of
his eyes, enlarged, were pooled in shadow. He looked as if he were playing a child’s game—sucking in his cheeks, making himself look ghastly to frighten me.

I remember wondering—almost dispassionately, as though it were someone else—which one of us would wake to find the other dead. And then, careful not to disturb him, I pulled aside my clothes so I could see, yet again, the strangeness of my own ribs and hipbones rising to the surface, appearing like half-familiar shapes from an eroding cliff.

Boil it down and it comes to this: Death is a conjugation. The
I
dies. The narrative of your life, newly orphaned, is picked up by a third person.
I lay my head on the table by the iron gas-pipe, and slept / He died Tuesday afternoon in a lodging house off Black-horse yard
. But when, when—that is the essence at the bottom of the pot.

If only we had known then that someday we would have the privilege of being the narrators of our days. How quickly our despair would have vanished, our courage bloomed! The days would have passed like pages and we would have folded them back (absorbed in the narrative yet already half outside it) secure in the knowledge that their number, after all, was finite; that soon enough the book would end and we would snap it shut, and sigh, and wondering at the strangeness of life, take ourselves off to bed.

XI.

But that June afternoon in 1841 we knew nothing of where our lives would lead. We walked back to Rosemary-lane through streets crowded with ginger beer and lemonade stalls, the warm summer air smelling of old clothes and tar one moment, watercress and marigolds the next. The wind had died back to a breeze, the dust settled. The world was at peace. We passed by young men carrying trays heaped high with sponge cakes, and barefoot girls selling snails at two pennies a quart. Thin strips of meat and onions, heated by pans of charcoal, frizzled from the ledges of open windows. At the corner of Glasshouse-street, as always, stood the mole like little man with the pointy face, selling chickweed and groundsel from the bristling basket on his back. We were surprised to see that nothing had changed. We were still so young we believed the world would somehow mirror our fates, that the leaves would droop along the Meklong at the moment of our death, and children, playing in the dust in Tangier, raise their heads from their games, believing a small cloud had passed before the sun.

That evening we spread our possessions out on our coats and sold them on the curb in front of our lodging house. I kept a small jade Buddha and an English novel with two letters pressed in its pages. My brother kept his watch (we would only need one), the notebook in which he had figured what was owed us, and our father’s knife. When
the coats were empty, we put them on and left. It was almost dark. A small argument had broken out among the crowd of errand boys and broken-toothed costermongers that had gathered around us. “Show us yer stitch,” someone yelled as we pushed through the crowd of faces.

We started walking. We had no idea where we were going. We simply sought the close and narrow the way an animal will seek a burrow or a pipe. Stepping over the puddles left by the watering cart, we turned away from the pickling smells of the Jews’ shops and the eerily fluttering cages of the birdsellers, alive with goldfinches and redpoles, blackcaps and thrushes, and headed into the dark. Our method was simple: Where two ways presented themselves, we chose the poorer—the guttering candle over the lamp’s coin of light, broken cobbles over whole ones, dirt over both.

Walking north toward the river, we left behind the Irishmen smoking their short pipes on rough wooden stools before their doors, the walnut sellers with their nut-stained fingers, the barrows purple with cabbages. For a time, turning this way or that, we could still hear voices calling “Eight a shilling, mackerel!” and “Large penny cauliflower!” and “Eels, live eels!” but it was as though we were dropping down into a well, and soon enough even these ceased, and the noise of the streets fell behind us. This was a world of smaller sounds: the creak of a lamp, the quick scrabbling of claws in the dark, a small cough in a wet fist. We could smell the river: a cool breath of mud, the rot of low tide.

We walked on. As though light and noise were one, the alleys here had grown both dark and silent. Some were so narrow we could have spanned them simply by stretching out our arms. Very few people seemed to be about. Here and there a vague mass turned into the shape of a man sleeping against a wall, his hands trapped between his legs.

We found it at the end of a narrow court hung with clotheslines and crowded with costermongers’ carts—a nameless lodging house consisting of nothing more than a kitchen (containing a stove and a big, pitted table) and a dirt-floored room with forty bunks, or planks. We purchased a tin ticket for two pennies at the wicket in the office and entered through the kitchen door. A line heavy with wet gray clothes bellied
down over the pipe. A rag had been stuffed into a broken pane. A half-dozen men, most of them naked from the waist up, looked up from where they sat at the table and stared. There was a moment of silence.

“Sweet suffering Mary,” said one.

“And the baby Jayzus, too,” added another, a grizzled older man with a thick, hairy back. I looked at him. A broken, pugilist’s face, small, tight ears, heavy brows, stepped and broken. No one said anything. I could now see that his big arms, which at first glance had appeared strangely diseased, were in fact covered with small, triangle-shaped scars.

Sizing us up a bit longer, he abruptly turned his attention back to the table in front of him, where a pair of dead rabbits with flies about their mouths lay next to a Dutch cheese, a silk shawl and an iron file. “Tommy, ye little ganef,” he said, picking up one of the rabbits and indicating a small, runny-eyed boy squatting in the corner. “Ye’ll be stayin’ outa Hairbrine-court and Prince’s-street till I tell ye otherwise. We kin let the princes take care a theirselves for a while,” he added, under his breath. The boy nodded. As though suddenly remembering us, the man turned back around to where we still stood by the door. “Ye can’t sleep here, gents,” he said matter-of-factly.

“We paid our money like everybody else,” I said. “We’ll sleep where we want.”

For an instant, something like amusement registered in his ugly features. “Suit yerself,” he said, turning his back on us once more, “but ’less you have a key to that hinge a yours, one a you will be sleepin’ on the plank whilst the other’s hangin’ off the edge like a side a beef.” One or two of the others chuckled.

Unable to think of anything to say, we walked to the door to the sleeping room. Knobless, it had been rigged with two pieces of rope strung through the hole and attached to a pair of short, fat sticks. Stepping in sideways, we pulled it shut behind us, then stood still for a moment or two, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness. Far off, on the opposite side of that long room, a single candle, set about waist-high, waved at our entrance.

“Freaks,” we heard a voice say behind us.

“Next thing you know’ll be trippin’ over bleedin’ midgets,” said another.

“Chinese or some such. Wot’s next?”

“I seen ’em down on Peter’s-court,” said a young voice.

“Shet yer gob, who gives a shit where you seen ’em, ye little crapper.”

“Imagine ’avin to go about all yer life chained to yer fuckin’ brother,” said another, raspy and weak. “I’d stick a knife in me throat, I would.”

“He’d do it for ye,” somebody grunted.

Narrow planks along the wall, stacked four-high like giant shelves, were coming out of the dark. Vague semicircles became the rims of two buckets by the wall. The floor was appearing now, a pair of toppled boots rising like a thick-leaved plant out of the dirt. The stench of human sweat—aged and ripe—filled that room like a physical presense.

In the kitchen behind us, someone hawked luxuriously and spat. “They’ll lose that shine in a day or two,” we heard a voice say.

“You should know, Jimmy,” said the man who had spoken to us. His words silenced the room like a blade drawn from a scabbard. “You’re the crowned king of losing. Why, next to you we’re all just dukes and counts.”

“I was just—” the other began.

“Ah, but don’t be troublin’ yourself, Jimmy,” the voice went on. “We’re grateful. Really we are. Any of us here ever begins to feel the weight of our riches, like we needs to lose somethin’ but don’t quite know how to go about it—ye followin’ me here, Jimmy?—we’ll know just who to ask.” We heard something crash on the tabletop. “Now you goin’ to bring that strip over here, Tommy,” we heard him say calmly, “or do I have to kill ’em all myself?”

This was when the counting began. It never stopped. A few weeks earlier, as though suspecting something, my brother had begun putting a few shillings aside from the small allowance Hunter and Coffin gave us for food and travel. In this way he had managed to secrete away a pound
and two shillings. Added to the three pounds eleven shillings we had in our pockets, this left us with exactly four pounds thirteen the hour we discovered we had been cast off.

It had been on our return to Rosemary-lane that evening that we discovered our rooms had not been paid for for nearly a week. When the landlord threatened to call the constable, refusing to accept anything less than a full and prompt payment of our debt, we were forced to reduce our worth by just over a pound, a sum we made up—and a bit besides—by selling off what we had on the street. And so it went. The dusty blankets—or flannels, as they were called—that we bought on the street (we didn’t find out until days later that they were infested) cost us nearly a shilling. Though we slept on the floor, the twopenny lodging houses charged us double.

I used to wonder why, in those first few days before our poverty began to show itself on our clothes, we didn’t seek the help of former acquaintances. The only answer I had was that, first, we had never known these personages well, but only entertained them, as it were, and second, that we knew, or sensed, that charity is always most gladly bestowed on those who need it least. A year ago, when we had neither asked for nor wanted aid, we had been made offers by gentlemen in silk hats and satin waistcoats who had read
The Times
of London and smelled our success. They would be less generous now.

But there was another, deeper reason for why we didn’t seek help from others. Simply put, we were ashamed. We were ashamed of our failure. We were ashamed of our appearance and our smell. Most typically, perhaps, we were ashamed of our bad luck. I had always believed the story of Job was somehow untrue, that most men would assume their guilt, accept their boils and their pain, curse themselves before they cursed their God. Now our behavior proved me right. Though we never said as much, to each other or anyone else, we felt vaguely guilty, as though we’d done something indecent, committed some crime, and were now being forced to pay for our deeds. And how very quickly we looked the part! By the first morning we looked as though we’d been dragged through the streets by our heels. By the second
we had lice. By the fourth we offended not just well-born strangers who came too close to us on the street, but ourselves as well.

Yet how could it have been otherwise? We slept each night, as best we could, on two straw mattresses we took from the planks and laid out side by side on the floor of the gangway between the rows of bunks. Having no leather or rug to cover ourselves that first night, we used our coats. Our fellows—even the cleanest of them—crawled with vermin. There were neither towels nor basins nor wooden bowls for washing—just a large bucket by the wall. We cleaned ourselves, as best we could, using the tails of our shirts.

We wasted three precious days looking for work among the dredgers and the ballast heavers on the river, wandering from Leman-street near the London docks to Sparrow-corner. There was none to be had. Some took our request as a practical joke, as though we were eccentric princes grown bored with life in the palace; these answered with exaggerated formality, begging a thousand pardons, doffing their caps. Some stared in disbelief, struck dumb by the sight of us standing in their door. Some swore us off their property as though we were the devil himself, come to demand his due. A few—older, sadder men, generally—replied politely enough, but they, too, had nothing. By the end of the week we were back to selling ourselves on Rosemary-lane; a halfpenny a look, a penny a touch. To make sure no one got a look for free, we would wait till a modest crowd had gathered (keeping them entertained all the while with tricks and jokes) then pass around a cup and then, and only then, pull up our shirts. The touchers, on the other hand, paid one by one.