The Thing About Thugs (19 page)

‘How dare he!’

‘Well, my dear, he has, and now I will have to do something about it.’

‘You won’t do anything rash, will you, dear?’ interrupted his good wife. ‘I hope you don’t intend to challenge him to a duel, do you?’

She asked the question with a brittle laugh and a glitter in her eyes, gasping slightly, for a moment undecided between the rashness of the possibility and its romance.

The Major laughed. ‘Those days are over, missus. And in any case, rodents like him cannot be confronted: they crawl away into holes and hide. I will have to do something else.’

‘Something else?’

‘I shall arrest that man, that thug.’

‘Arrest him? But do you believe he is the murderer, the beheader!’

‘It hardly matters. He is the only suspect we have, and after this article, it might be safer to put him behind bars than to let him roam free on the streets. That is, if he is still in London.’

‘You mean, the murders will stop if you arrest him.’

‘Perhaps, my dear, or perhaps not. But I know he will get murdered by some drunken mob if I do not arrest him. This Oates has an eye for detail; his description hardly leaves anything out.’

‘The cheek of the man’, Mrs Grayper burst out again, returning to her original sentiment, ‘and to think we once invited him to dinner in this very house.’

But by then, the Major, having resolved the matter in his head, was concentrating whole-heartedly on his breakfast. Mary, who always got up a little late, joined them at this moment, and the conversation assumed a merrier tone.

Jaanam,

In all stories of great passion — Laila-Majnun, Shirin-Farhad — suffering and loss walk shoulder to shoulder with love. Perhaps that is why I feel a certain dread at times. Having come so long a way, heading into nothing, running away from everything, I had only hoped to survive, not to flourish. For what is the gift of love if not a flourishing? In this bleak climate, under these grey skies, a great blossoming, the rising of a greenness far more luxuriant than anything even the monsoon could bring to my village.

And with it comes a dread of loss and decay.

As when you are fate in keeping an appointment.

As when you wake up suddenly at night, reliving that moment of discovery, of your aunt lying dead and beheaded

As when you sometimes fear that there is someone stalking you.

As when I want to hold you and know that I cannot, that it would be dangerous to do so in the eyes of the world.

As when you look at me with the sun of love clouded by doubt, unable to decide between the stories I have told you about myself, and those everyone knows I have been telling Captain Meadows and his friends.

As when the evening deepens into oppressive night, burdened with darkness and fumes, and I try to sleep, not to think of where you might be, in whose home, in what alley, doing God knows what to earn a livelihood.

As when I wake up some morning, terrified not to find you by my side, forgetting that you had not come to me that night.

As when I think of the past and its inevitability, and the future and its fickleness. Or is it the other way round, jaanam, is it the other way round?

As when someone knocks on the door, unexpectedly...

Shields, John May observes bitterly to himself, has been given the wrong skull by providence. It ought to be bumpy and dented, with the knobs, or whatever they are, for superstition and credulity exaggerated and the thingummy for logic and rationality absent. Instead, it is smooth and regular, lush with hair, almost noble in its dimensions, if only because the short stature of the man imparts to his head a leonine expanse.

There he sits, twittering about ghosts and spirits, now that he is half drunk. May curses under his breath and plies Shields with another drink. The only way to get him out of this superstitious mood is to get him properly sozzled, for only then will he switch to his other role of excessive bravado. If only Jack would arrive soon: John May needs that drily garrulous man’s aura of unflappability. After all, they have a job to do tonight.

Perhaps he is pressing Shields too much, two jobs within the week, but why not; why not strike while the iron is hot? And who knows how long M’lord will continue to pay for the skulls? He has already started showing less and less interest, and once even told John May that he might soon be going away on a scientific expedition to the ‘empire.’ John May resents this vague empire which, he suspects, serves no other purpose than to drain London of its best minds, noblest names and heaviest purses. He is determined to share a bit more of M’lord’s bounty before it is wasted on savages. Already, John May has made more from this enterprise than from all his stratagems and tinkering in the past.

Jaanam,

My legs still ache from the blows. There are marks all over my body. Not bleeding cuts, they were far too careful and experienced for that, but bruises and blue marks.

I am to blame, partly. If you are not in your element, you have to be more careful than usual. The swimmer in the water has to be more wary of drowning than the runner on the ground is of falling. An old lesson, which I thought I had learned years ago. And yet, when I heard the knock last evening, I hastened to open the door without peering through the chinks. I thought it was you, or Gunga and the boys, who had gone for a ‘walkabout’, which is their word for any activity that involves scavenging, hustling, begging on the streets.

I opened the door, still thinking of you, still holding the feather with which I had been writing in my notebook, and I was faced with three hefty men. At first, I did not notice the colour of their frockcoats. They did not waste words or time. One of them asked me, Are you Aye-mir Al-I? I was too confused to do anything but nod. At that, two of them made to grab me; I resisted, for I still had not realized who they were, and they showered me with blows and curses. It was only after I had been battered into the gutter that one of them said I was being arrested. And it was then I noticed the blue frockcoats, the rabbit-skin high top hats and naval cutlasses of two of the men.

They were Peelers, sent by one Major Grayper to apprehend me, the ‘prime suspect’ in the beheading cases, as he told the pen-pushers who were already lounging around his superintendent’s desk when I was brought there. I think the Major was a little taken aback by the condition in which I was dragged into custody. In any case, he instructed the policemen to treat me properly, reminding them that I was not guilty until proved to be so, and he even asked me if I desired something. This enabled me to ask for some basic things — the prayer beads that Mustapha Chacha had given me, my inkpot, quills and notebook, all of which were delivered to me only this afternoon by Gunga and Qui Hy’s Irish husband. I learnt that Gunga had been denied access to me earlier in the day and had to return reinforced by the presence of Qui Hy’s husband. The two of them assured me that they
would do all they could to get me out, and that there was no evidence against me, that on most of the nights of the murders I had been with one of them. Not that I think their evidence will hold much water. What witnesses! A beanpole of a lascar; an emaciated Irish soldier obviously given to the habit and known to dance to tunes in his head. I cannot imagine Major Grayper or any respectable jury taking them seriously.

Of course, Major Grayper, though proper, was not inexperienced in the art of interrogation. He woke me up well after midnight for my first interrogation — after a bucket of cold water had been splashed on me because, it was said, I had not responded to the prodding earlier on. He interrogated me until it was almost dawn, and then had me carted off to another prison. This place: a place that is more frightening to me, for I do not know what it is, or where. What the Major was interested in was the night, just five days ago, when the so-called ‘head cannibal’ killed his latest victim. It was that night I had to explain away. Where was I that night?

How could I reply to that, jaanam? For you and I know where I was — I was lying with my head in your lap, shaded by the cascade of your brown hair which smelled of vinegar and the husky odour of your body. How could I tell him that? And so, in my silence — my ‘sullen silence’, as he called it — I have condemned myself in Major Grayper’s eyes.

Now I wait in this cold, damp cell for time to decide my fate. The prison they have remanded me to is not very far from Superintendent Grayper’s police station. I sensed that much. I was brought to this place hooded and blindfolded: perhaps this was done for my own safety, for everyone assumes that the Rookery Beheader is confined at Superintendent Grayper’s station; or perhaps it was done to intimidate me. This place is more like a dungeon than a police station. It is possibly less than fifteen minutes by horse and carriage from the Superintendent’s station. This, I fear, is not for my convenience but to enable the Major’s men to fetch me easily and at short notice for interrogations, but there is a sense of security in not being interred far away, forgotten and overlooked by the authorities. I have also not been put in with anyone else, though there is a person who often swears at me from one of the other cells, a faceless voice that threatens to break the bars of his cell and devour the cannibal that I am supposed to be. Cannibal, he shouts, beware, for thy doom approacheth; nigger, prepare thyself, for mine is the vengeance. He thinks he is quoting from the Bible. I think he is drunk. if so, this is not a prison but another police station.

What I have confessed in this notebook is something I will never tell anyone else: I will not have them laughing at you, pointing a finger of reproach at you. If I cannot be cleared silently, I will accept my verdict in silence. My only fear is that the verdict will snatch me away, for ever, from you — condemned as I would be to death, or to transportation for life after weeks in those brooding hulks on the river.

It is a myth of the lazy storyteller that ghosts primarily inhabit desolate houses and crumbling castles.

No ghost ever walks down the stairs and corridors of my grandfather’s house when I visit it now, once every year; no spectre looks in from the other side of the window. The library is empty. My grandmother’s keys have been buried with her, as she had stipulated in her will. The house is simply empty, curtains pulled down, windows boarded up. Its emptiness has no voice. But when I return to the bigger cities I now inhabit, I encounter my ghosts: the lilt of a voice from the past, the glimpse of a familiar expression on a stranger’s face, the return of a cornice, a windowpane, a gesture, a book. It is in the strangeness of their fleeting presence that I feel haunted; it is in the familiarity of their absence.

No, it is in the big cities that we live with beings that are always there and not there. They live around us, yet we know nothing of them. But they know a little (or is it everything?) of us. Because they are always there, walking past us, living their own lives, watching, shouting, whispering; we live with the knowledge of their presence. These ghosts who fill the streets, who lurk behind shuttered windows.

London is full of ghosts. It is a place of hauntings, of betrayals, hangings, beheadings. And above all, it is a place of dreams and hopes. Ghosts are born of failure, perhaps, but failure itself hatches from hope. If death spawns ghosts then, surely, before death there must be birth, or at least gestation. The ripening of dreams. The swollen belly of hope. And then, well, then comes the knife and the scream, then comes the blood.

Blood has been pouring into the dreams of Shields. He wakes up in terror, choking on the blood of his imagination. He cannot see a knife without starting. He needs half a day to drink himself out of terror so he can accomplish at night, if necessary, if prodded by Jack, tempted by John May, the deed that will soak his nights in blood again. Day after day, night after night.

From a squat little man with few thoughts, Shields has become a thin nervous wreck, haunted by ghosts, trying not to think of damnation. For, unlike John May, he believes in the Devil. He saw the Devil in his dreams one night. The Devil was every inch a gentleman; his face was a mask, but he wore a big, filthy patch over one eye.

Nelly Clennam had done her duty. She had reported to Captain Meadows: that girl Jenny, you know, the girl who sometimes gives us a hand downstairs in the kitchen — not that we would ask her often if you had not given instructions about it — that Jenny is asking to see you, sir. To which the good Captain, God bless his soul, had replied, as was to be expected, given her years of dedicated service: ‘But Mrs Clennam, surely you can take care of the matter, whatever it might be.’

‘So I said to the girl, sir’, Nelly had sniffed, ‘but she insists on seeing you, personally. Says it is a private matter.’

The Captain had looked surprised. His broad brow — it ran to his father’s side, a receding hairline — had furrowed. ‘Private matter? With me, Mrs Clennam?’ he had inquired dubiously.

‘Yes, sir’, Nelly had replied, her thin lips pressed together to illustrate her disapproval. Come to think of it, she had never really liked Jenny, with her free ways and her precious hair kept cleaner than the starched cap that Nelly insisted the maids wore in the house, and she was sure there had been some hanky-panky between the girl — she had bold eyes and walked and laughed like a man — and that heathen thug who, everyone was saying, had finally been arrested, thank God.

‘Well, show her in then, Mrs Clennam’, the Captain had replied.

‘Here, sir? In the library?’

‘Where else’, said the Captain, putting down the thick book he had been reading a moment earlier.

And now the girl had been in the room for close to half an hour and Mrs Clennam, who never eavesdropped, no, not her, happened to pass the thick door a few times, once detecting a sob, once overhearing the name Aymir, uttered by the hussy; yes, she thought it had something to do with that smooth cannibal. She hoped the Captain would send her off with a good dressing down, the cheap...