God's Fool (24 page)

For a time, we did well at this. Soon enough we learned to judge which streets were workable; which, that is, were neither too fine (risking a run-in with the constable) nor too poor (containing too few with money to spend on a moment’s diversion). By moving about from street to street, we were able to keep a fairly steady stream of customers. At the end of three weeks’ time we had nearly seven pounds and had moved to a threepenny house with a wooden floor and cut bedsheets for towels. Such is the perversity of human nature (or the power of habit) that for a moment we almost missed the warren we had left behind.
Though it was true that the other residents had hardly ever spoken to us except to grunt or ask for something, the rough-looking man with the cut brows had always exchanged a word or two with us when we sat by the stove or ate at the table. He had seemed amused by us, and, as the undisputed leader of that little community of beggars and bone grubbers, his willingness to acknowledge our existence had made our lot marginally easier.

He was crouching by an empty slop bucket as we left, calmly lancing an ugly, festering cut on his thumb with a knife. “Onwards and upwards, eh, boys?” he said, nodding to the folded blankets under our arms. “Well, good luck to you then.”

“God be with you, Jack,” said my brother, touched by his generosity.

He chuckled. “You take ’im,” he said, squeezing a few drops of evil-looking liquid from the opened cut. “I’d be ’appy jest to stay out of ’is sight.”

Which was more than we managed to do. Two days later my brother, on waking, reached inside his shirt to where we kept our tattered clip purse (for we always slept with it next to our skin) and found it gone. For a few frantic, desperate moments we thought it might have slipped down into his trousers, or out into our blanket. Clawing through our bedding, we turned and shook it, then shook it again, looked inside our shoes (as though the purse, grown animate overnight, might have hidden itself away), even paged, absurdly, through the novels by my side of the bed. Feeling increasingly sick to our stomachs, we searched the floor for ten feet around, crawling about on our hands and knees like beggars scrabbling after pennies. Nothing. It
couldn’t
have been stolen, we told ourselves. Not only would the thief have had to know where we kept it, but my brother had always been a light sleeper, and the purse had been securely wedged against his skin under two layers of clothes which had been securely buttoned in the morning. And yet the unassailable fact remained—it was gone. The purse had simply—impossibly—disappeared.

We made less than a shilling that day peddling our condition in a city
that seemed to have lost its taste for freaks, though small packs of runny-eyed urchins still came to taunt when they heard our carnival barker’s cry of “Siamese Twins! Penny a look to see the incredible Siamese Twins, connected since birth!,” squeezing their eyes half-shut and walking about stiff-legged with their arms around each other’s waists until Eng, with a sudden furious lunge that sent us both to the ground, managed to grab one that had come too close by the hair.

It was late in the afternoon on Rosemary-lane near Fisher’s-alley. For weeks—while I raged and fumed—my brother had quietly endured the chanted rhymes and crude jokes, the quick darting raids of those who bet on whether they could pull our coats or trip us, the occasional peltings with speck fruit (the dwarfish apples or mud-soft plums tossed on the streets by the fruitsellers) that left us no choice but to take to our heels. Now, nearly weeping with rage and frustration, he slapped and cuffed him about the head mercilessly as the little beggar tried to wrench himself loose and passersby stopped to laugh and stare—perhaps thinking it was a show of some kind, a pair of circus freaks beating a pauper.

Growing tired, finally (twice we’d fallen to the cobbles in a tangle of arms and legs), my brother took him by the shirt and the scruff of his pants and sent him on his way. He fell a short distance away, more stunned than hurt, and was just gathering his wits when a well-dressed man, seemingly walking right into him, gave him a good hard kick to the middle. We called out at this injustice and started after the man, but he walked on as though nothing had happened. When we turned around the boy was running down an alley, holding his stomach. The crowd had dispersed.

That evening we bought three onions and a halfpenny’s worth of soft pears off an Irish refuse seller who waved away the wasps crawling over his browning, syrupy produce and loaded up the brimless hat we had found the day before. Later, still hungry, we bought a baked potato from a street vendor, who pulled it steaming hot out of the can with his fingers and laughed while we juggled and danced the thing between us: “Aye, be glad there be two a you, lads,” he said, rolling his r’s. “Y’ll burn yer fingers half as much.”

That was the first night we slept on the street, curled under a cart in a dead-end alley just off the river. We woke before dawn. It was so quiet we could hear the rattle of the milkmaids’ cans in the next street. Gathering up our blankets, we crept away before the owner of the cart could discover us there, and having nowhere else to go, made our way back through the silence to Rosemary-lane. Nothing moved. At the cab stand a horse dozed on his feet, his head hanging down as though grazing on invisible fields while his driver slept peacefully behind him. We didn’t talk. There was nothing to say. In the distance the fires of the first coffee stall sparked in the darkness. I could see the coffee man tending his steaming cans—blowing on the charcoal, setting the white mugs between the railings on the stone wall.

To another man the scene might have seemed familiar, even welcoming. To us it was just a reminder of how utterly exiled we now were: already distanced from the world around us by our culture and language, distanced further by the insurmountable fact of our condition, we had been exiled a third time by the loss of our money. Most daily discourse, we now realized, revolved around some transaction; money was the fuel, the oil in the lamp. Without it there was no particular reason to speak to anyone, and even less reason for them to speak to you. You passed through the world like a ghost.

The coster girl selling watercress, bonnetless and sleepy, was already in place. Behind her we could see the rabbit man lift the crate of warm jostling bodies off the barrow with a jerk, then begin setting up his table. They were both somewhere else now, in a world far removed from ours. In all my life, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt as lonely as I did at that moment.

XII.

I had heard it said that imprisoned men would weep and fight to keep from being moved from one cell to another perfectly identical to it, that they would kill to be allowed to eat their bread first and then their broth, and not the other way around. Now I believed it. Stupid with hunger, unable to think of anything else to do, we clung to habit, walking the same pattern of streets, returning to the same cart every night, creeping away each morning before dawn … Over the last ten days, by a kind of logic as irresistible as the settling of silt, we had been reduced to picking over the discarded vegetables left on the stones. Every night we would bring our collection of marshy stems and stunted roots to a pump we had found not far from where we slept and wash the dirt off of them by feel.

He came up to us as we stood on the street near a man selling a boxful of wet-nosed puppies, still crying our wares.

“Can’t say as the change had done ye good,” he said, planting himself in front of us, the folds of his trousers shiny with grease and his brown, threadbare shirt rolled up his arms. Next to him lay a wooden cage full of twittering sparrows. Something in his hand caught my eye. I realized it was his thumb. Swollen to the size of a hen’s egg, it had turned a smudged yellowish-black—the color of a winter sunset.

“You’re not looking so well yourself,” I said.

He chuckled. “See this here?” He patted the cage by his side. “Three dozen sparrers. Got the order yesterday for a shootin’ match this afternoon. Two pounds for the lot I says and not a penny less.”

“Toasters! Come and look at ’em. Toasters!” screeched a rusty-haired boy a short distance away, holding up a yellow-brown fish impaled on a fork.

He contemplated us for a moment, his hands deep in his pockets. He seemed solid as a wall. “When’s the last time you boys put yer teeth to a good Yarmouth bloater?” he said.

He bought us two fried fish and a bun apiece, then walked us over to a coffee stall where a man in a tattered cap and trousers brown with tar refused pay for three cups of coffee. “Don’t even be thinkin’ of it, Jack,” he said gruffly, as he busied himself getting the cups off the wall and wiping them out with a rag. “I’ll be owin’ ye more ’n a few cups a coffee.” He peered into one of the cups, scratched at something with a thick wedge of a nail, then carefully poured the black liquid from the can without spilling a drop. “There ye are, gentlemen,” he said, grandly, and then, turning to our friend: “Not a day goes by, Jack, but the little ones says to me: ‘Say hello to Mr. Ratty for us, Father,’ and not a day goes by but the wife and I’re glad they’re there to say it.”

We walked off a short way along the wall to a pile of bricks and ate our food—slowly, savoringly, almost giddy with gratitude—drawing out the bits of meat around the gills and sucking on the bones, then pulling them out to see whether the job was complete. Our friend, whose full name, we now learned, was Jack Black, seemed disinclined to talk about himself, and so it was only by persistent prodding that we learned that years earlier he had been known throughout London as “the Queen’s Ratcatcher”; that he had had a wife and family and a fine house in Battersea; that for fourteen years he had had a thriving business complete with a cart with rats painted on the panels and printed handbills that read, “J. Black, Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty.”

“Water rats, Norway rats … I don’t know as there’s anybody livin’ could tell ye more about a rat than I could,” he admitted finally, not
without a touch of pride. “The Norway rats is bigger—light brown atop with a dirty white belly, almost gray. The water rat’s got a larger head and thicker hair so the ears scarcely show; tail’s got more hair. I killed thousands and thousands of ’em. I killed ’em with ferrets, I killed ’em with traps … If I was in a tight space I just grabbed ’em with my hands. A rat’s bite is a particular thing: It’s got a triangle shape to it, y’ see—like a leech, only deeper. Twice I nearly died—once when I got bit on the lip, the other when I forgot to tie my shirt and a big Norway rat ran up my sleeve and bit me on the muscle of me arm.

“I never known anything like it. I just went numb—I bled awful bad. By the next day the arm had swole and gone so heavy I could hardly lift it. Like a brick it was. I was bone cold with fever one minit, rollin’ with sweat the next. The bite grew an ulcer big as a boiled fish eye, and every time I lanced it and squeezed the humor out it grew back.” He paused and took a long slurp of his coffee. “I remember the doctor opening me eyes with his thumbs to see if I was still alive. Young chap he was. Told me to have the arm off, but I wouldn’t do it, and it got better.”

“What about the coffee man?” Eng asked.

“Tom? Ay, that was a bad case. Last winter his lady wakes in the middle of the night. The little ones is cryin’. When she goes into the room and strikes a light, she sees rats running into the holes in the lath and plaster. The children’s nightgowns is kivered with blood, as if their throats ’ave been cut—the rats’d gnawed on their hands and feet, you see.”

“What did you do?”

“Poisoned ’em. Nux vomica an’ oatmeal. Worked like a charm until they got smart to it—clever beasts they are. The rest I got myself, though not without a bit o’ trouble.”

We walked back to the coffee stall, where Tom took our cups, wiped them clean with the rag, and set them back on the wall.

Jack Black picked up his cage. We started walking. “Sparrers is the rats of birds,” he said companionably, tapping the bars with a finger. “See how they pile up in the corners? Just like rats in a pit. Why, I once got fifty or sixty in the royal kitchen—rats, that is—and me with a cage
no bigger ’n this. Thought I’d have to carry ’em out in my coat, but they stacked up neat as cups, one on top of the other.” He nodded to himself, remembering. “I didn’t do too badly then.”

A Jew clothesman had spread out his wares on a folding table: coats and bonnets and reheeled boots, a soiled doll in a blue dress, a child’s blanket, its small-rose pattern faded nearly white.

“So what happened?” I asked. We had stopped at the corner of Stoney-lane and Meeting-house-yard. Not far away a pretty girl was standing behind a wet table piled with perch and roach and gudgeon.

“How do ye mean?” he said. “I carried ’em out and put ’em in the cart.”

“Not that. I mean …”

“Ye mean to Jack Black, Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty?” He smiled. “ ‘Hammer become the nail,’ ’s the song says.” He looked off past a man in a dented top hat selling oysters. “One minit yer walkin’ fine, the next yer on yer arse, lads. Like ice in January.” He ran a hand through his thick badger hair. “Nothin’ to be done about it. Run—ye fall. Try to walk slow an’ careful—ye never get anywhere an’ ye fall just the same.” He smiled. “I s’pose ye can crawl on yer belly like a snail, but what’s the use a that, eh?

“No, I let ’er rip and went down.” He paused, turning to look at us. “Not so very different from the two a you, I suspect. No more ’n a year since I saw the bills for yer show at Egyptian Hall. Ye seemed to be quite the thing for a spell there.”

“It feels like somebody else’s life now,” said my brother. It was the first thing he had said all afternoon.

“Did well, did ye?”

“We met the king of France.”

“That so?” We had started walking again. “G’mornin’ t’ye, Sally,” he said to a woman behind a table-sized tray of walnuts. And then, to us: “So where’s yer king of France now, eh?”

We said nothing.

“Ye want a word of advice? Give it up.”

“We
have
given it up,” said my brother, irritated.