God's Fool (25 page)

He laughed. “Yer hangin’ on like a baby to its mother’s tit. And the might’ve-been tit is dry, boys, take my word for it. Ye can suck till ye draw yer arse t’ yer neck. It won’t do ye any good.”

Suddenly he turned to face the ragtag group of coster boys and pickpockets who had been following us at a distance of twenty feet or so—yelling and laughing, gathering steam—since we had left the coffee stall. There were eight or ten of them—more than usual—some hovering along the walls, some appearing now and again in the crowd, backpedaling against the current. Now and then a twelve-year-old wit would yell “Freaks!” or “Lookit the freaks!” or “Whyn’t ye get a saw, ye bloody freaks!” and the rest, thin as jackals, would grin and show their teeth.

We had grown used to this. Rarely did an hour pass without at least a few of the little ruffians in attendance; they attached themselves to us like burrs. Still, though a thrown rock had cut my brother’s scalp a week ago, we had found that most of their work was limited to insults and an occasional rotten plum. Eventually, if we were lucky, a constable would come into view or the other costers would threaten to beat them for interfering with their business (though often as not they would turn on us for having brought them), and we would have a few minutes of peace.

The crowd had thinned for a moment, the current slowed. Our friend stood with his hands, as usual, deep in his trouser pockets, his feet planted as firmly as though his shoes had sent roots into the cobbles. Seeing him turn and come toward them, the group had shifted back, step for step, until he stopped.

“Billy,” he called out now to a tight-faced, older-looking boy whose skin seemed to have been forcibly drawn to the back of his head. “Who am I?” His voice was warm, familiar.

“What d’ye mean?” replied the youth, uneasily.

“Who am I, Billy? I want you to tell me who I am.”

“I don’t …”

“Tell me who I am, Billy.”

“Yer Jack Black, king of the ratcatchers.”

“That’s right, Billy,” said our friend, looking at him pleasantly. “An’ yer a lad with ten toes, an’ two whole ears, and a pair a seein’ eyes.” The group fell back. Prodded by some unseen signal, a full-grown rat had struggled out of our friend’s baggy shirt and scrambled to his shoulder. A second took the other shoulder. A third climbed up his collar to the top of his head and sat up like a small dog.

“I want you to spread the word, Billy,” he went on, as though he hadn’t noticed. “Ye listenin’? I hear a
one
a ye troublin’ me friends here,
one
a ye as much as forgettin’ t’ say ‘g’d mornin’ to you’ when ye sees ’em about, and by Christ I’ll sick the blood rats on ye in yer sleep.” He smiled.

Five or six of the boys nodded. They seemed mesmerized, not just by the rats but by that calm, caressing voice, gently cutting into them.

“They’ll cover ye like a blanket, me boy. They’ll shear ye smooth. Ye hear?”

They nodded again, rabbits in the viper’s eye. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for them.

“Now off with the lot a ye.”

The boys vanished. He waited till they were gone, then gently picked the rats off his head and right shoulder and slipped them back in his shirt. The third he handed to my brother. “Gentle as cats, they is,” he said by way of explanation. “Sleeps next to me at night.”

“We had ducks when we lived in Siam,” said my brother to no one in particular, petting the beast between its transparent little ears.

And just for a moment the distance we had come seemed as unbridgeable to me as time itself.

We did whatever we had to do to survive. Unable to climb trees, we were prevented from joining the birdcatchers who swarmed out to the country lanes after the redbreasts and linnets and thrushes that began to fly about at dawn; everything else we tried. Pushing a broken barrow we found near the London dock, we joined the scavengers who poured each morning over the refuse heaps. Stuffed birds and broken shaving boxes,
shoehorns and pocket ink-bottles, decanters and files and trivets and chimney cranes—all these we cleaned as best we could and sold for whatever we could get.

For a while we joined the community of waste-paper gatherers who collected everything from tailors’ bills and hymn books to cheap editions of Molière; tearing the covers off the books, wrapping the rest with twine, we would sell them by the pound to a waste-paper buyer on Cartwright-street. At times it seemed to us that somewhere in London there was a buyer and seller for almost everything, from secondhand harnesses to African cowries. Unfortunately for us, we had nothing of value to sell. For a time we joined the small army of bone grubbers and rag gatherers who dug through the heaps of ashes and dirt thrown out of the houses with spades and hooked sticks, looking for anything sellable.

And we survived. Every morning we would divide our rags into lots, separating off the white rags from the colored ones, and both from the canvas and sacking we sometimes found as well. The white rags were the scarcer, and brought two or three pennies a pound; the colored ones, which we sold along with the bones at the rag shop, sold for just two pennies for five. Eventually, when we saw that the rag trade would never bring us more than five or six pennies a day, if that, we joined the grubbers of cigar ends, then the dredgers and the sewer hunters. For two memorable days, thinking our size and strength might be to our advantage, we even went out with the mudlarks, working the river’s edge, until we found ourselves beaten to the prize, time and again, by children who seemed to run over the muck, jumping from broken barrels to boards even as we floundered knee-deep and stuck fast, like a coal-laden lighter trapped by the tide.

Now and again, when we had the four pennies for our beds, we slept with a roofover our heads; more often we saved the money and slept where we could. For two giddy weeks in July or August we walked about with a mongrel bitch given to us, along with a bottle of evil-smelling stuff to rub in her fur, by one of the tribe of broken-nailed urchins who had previously delighted in tormenting us. What this sub
stance consisted of we never discovered, but whatever it was, it made our charge, who was already in heat, enormously popular. Every dawn (for this was when business of this nature was customarily transacted), we would walk our white-spotted bitch, well perfumed, up and down the alleys. And every morning, dogs of all shapes and sizes and dispositions would drift out of alleys and yards like enchanted poets following the first scent of spring and (after only the briefest of introductions) ask for—and generally receive—the love they sought. We would let them start to have their way, then walk them—two-legged and foolish—around the corner, where, having completed their business, they would happily consent to the rope around their necks. My brother, not surprisingly, disapproved of this line of work; I saw the humor in it, I recall, and rather enjoyed it. But our attitudes had little to do with it; the success it brought us was undeniable: We sold them one and all to an individual known only as Carrots, who sold them to the stokers and seamen on the
Hamburgh
and the
Antwerp
and the big French steamers scraping against the docks, who in turn, we were told, sold them abroad.

An unworthy line of work? No doubt. And yet we would be about it still, I believe, had we not run out of that magic potion. For a time we tried to acquire some more—even offering a substantial sum—but the urchin in question, having secured himself a sound night’s sleep by his generosity, would have none of it.

The fifteen pounds we made that week—a princely sum—we put in a purse I had sewed into the inside of my shirt. It was late September now. On cold mornings the coal smoke made everything look as though it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. The costers by their coffee or potato stalls stood a little closer to their coals now. Inspired, like ants, by the approach of winter, the armies of want now combed the city for every gap-toothed comb and crushed bonnet, every cracked spittoon. Our one fortnight of prosperity had been followed by two of increasing desperation. Despite our best efforts the money we had saved dwindled away—penny by penny, shilling by shilling, pound by pound.

Yet again it was Jack Black who showed us the way. A ready market
existed, he told us, for all the “pure,” or dog dung, we could collect. The tanyards in Bermondsey, he said, used it for purifying the leather for book covers and kid gloves and such, rubbing it into the flesh and grain of the skin to remove the moisture; they would pay ten pennies a stable-bucketful, sometimes more, depending on the quality.

And so, for a month or more, we were pure finders, scouring the streets at first light, carefully mixing a bit of mortar from old walls into the mixture to give it the desired quality, finally wending down to Lamont and Roberts’s or Murrell’s or Cheeseman’s before the offices closed at dusk to sell our take.

Strange to think how familiar this world was to us once: the tanyards where we sold our pure, the back-door office at Murrell’s with the candle on the shelf (a thumb stub, no more, drowning in its wax), the little hedgehog of a man who would always poke about in the bucket with a piece of wood he kept standing against the wall, as though expecting to find a brick. Every day, after we had bought our bit of bread and pennyworth of herring, we would walk out to a space between the back fences and add as much as a shilling to our savings.

It was on a windy early morning in mid-October, when the yellow flames of the coffee stalls lay sideways like miniature banners and the costers stood hunched with their backs to the dust, that I found myself thinking, less than a third of the way through our daily route, about how much further we had to go. Midway down Blue Anchor-yard I had to rush into a back alley and, praying no one would happen out at that moment, relieve myself against the wall.

Less than half an hour later it came again. We rushed into another alley. Holding on to the side of an old wagon, my legs trembling, I let the water pour out of me while my brother, squatting beside me, held me up. Just then, with the harsh scrape of metal against metal, a small window in the building over our heads was thrown open. A woman cried out. We looked up just in time to see her cross herself and disappear.

Unable to make it to the tanning yards, we hid our half-bucket of pure behind a fence near our lodging house, covering it with whatever refuse there was to be had. Somehow we made it past the woman in the office, through the kitchen and into the nearly empty bunk room. Every half hour or so my brother, who could do nothing but lie beside me in the darkness, would drag me to the buckets, then back to our blankets, laid out on the dirt. Eventually the light outside the small, dusty window began to fade. Then it was dark.

They wanted us gone. Though at any given time fully half the residents might suffer from some manner of complaint, true illness had always been cause enough for eviction. And though it was cruel, it wasn’t without reason: Disease brought into the close quarters of a boarding house would spread like fire through tinder.

I had no strength left to fight or argue; curled up on the floor or staggering to the bucket, I seemed to draw inside myself. The voices around me grew faint, then disappeared for stretches of time altogether. It was my brother who saved us, arguing from the floor where he lay next to me, helpless—bargaining for our lives. We would pay double if they let us stay. We would pay a penny to anyone who brought us food, another to anyone who offered to help us to the buckets, a half a shilling to anyone who fetched a doctor.

In many ways it must have been worst for him. He could do nothing. Though healthy and strong, he could neither work nor go for help. Lying beside me, hour after hour, he could not so much as relieve himself without first having to wake me. Having roused me sufficiently, he would have to stand me up, then drag me, half-unconscious, across the room, then lower me, floppy as a rag, down to the bucket next to his, and then, finally, answer nature’s call, all the while trying to keep me from collapsing forward or sideways (inevitably spilling the bucket’s contents) before he was finished. A pretty picture we must have made, the two of us—bound together, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death take you both, amen. But so it had always been, and so it would be. Illness, like love, made our prison visible, revealed the bond
for the iron ring it was—the symbol and substance of our arranged marriage. The same strip of flesh that had cost me my one chance at happiness would jealously drag us down, together.

As the fever took hold I babbled and tossed till the residents threatened to throw us out on the street. For a while I was back in Muang Tai as the palms thrashed and scraped in the wind; we were in our boat again. Ha Lung called out to us from the shore. I was so glad to see he wasn’t dead. He was holding something out to us, something I couldn’t see. It was wound between his arms, like bands of light. I realized it was a length of gray intestine.

He disappeared around the curve. A black-haired painter was standing before his easel. He waved us along irritably as we slowly drifted through his painting. And suddenly she was there, brushing my wet hair back from my face. “My love,” she whispered. I tried to speak but no sound came out. I wanted to tell her everything, to explain. Her face, her voice, were as familiar as my own. “Please don’t think badly of me,” she said. “I looked everywhere for you.”

Something was wrong. There was a tickle, an odd burr inside her voice. The touch of her fingertips along my temple disappeared. A heavy hand now lay across my forehead. “I looked everywhere for you,” I heard her say again, her voice falling back into some place I couldn’t follow, changing, by some uncontrollable alchemy, into something heartbreakingly unfamiliar to me. “Can your brother hear me?” it said. And then: “I represent the interests of Mr. Phineas T. Barnum, sir, and our first task, I believe, is to get you to a physician.”

PART FOUR

I.

And so, properly cleaned and restored, we were brought (vomiting all the way, for the passage was rough) to the happiest land in the world—the land of Sabbaths, as Charity Barnum once called it. Delivered from Egypt, we stepped out onto the wooden docks of Canaan. Around us, men of all ages and races were scrambling over mountains of boxes and barrels, pulling on ropes, tying down canvas. Standing in a quiet eddy, we took it all in: the smell of vinegar and wood, sand and stone; the man wrenching at a horse trapped between piles of lumber, the three bedraggled gulls standing on the roof of a shack advertising
COLLIN
’
S INVIGORATING ELIXIR
. We looked up. Far above us, thrusting like bayonets against the white December sky, was a tilting forest of masts, leafless and black as though ravaged by fire. We had never seen so many ships. In the distance, the webwork of rigging gave the air a woven, spidery quality, as though the world we had found ourselves in, seen rightly, were nothing more than foolscap.