Книга - The Palace of Curiosities

The Palace of Curiosities
Rosie Garland


A luminous and bewitching debut novel that is perfect for fans of Angela Carter. Set in Victorian London, it follows the fortunes of Eve, the Lion-Faced Girl and Abel, the Flayed Man. A magical realism delight.Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She buys a penny twist of coloured sugar and settles down to watch the heart-stopping main attraction: a lion, billed as a monster from the savage heart of Africa, forged in the heat of a merciless sun. Mama swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps…and when Eve is born, the story goes, she didn’t cry – she meowed and licked her paws.When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, the mudlarks are sure he is long dead. As they search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open and he coughs up a stream of black water. But how has he survived a week in that thick stew of human waste?Cast out by Victorian society, Eve and Abel find succour from an unlikely source. They will become The Lion Faced Girl and The Flayed Man, star performers in Professor Josiah Arroner’s Palace of Curiosities. And there begins a journey that will entwine their fates forever.









THE PALACE OF CURIOSITIES

ROSIE GARLAND








For everyone who believed

I would get here,

even when I didn’t


CONTENTS

Cover (#u53c8f85b-1cb9-5638-b0af-6ff9cf60c956)

Title Page (#u4e701c0b-6e2f-5244-b7d3-7e379916ce17)

Dedication (#u1319dd60-60c3-59d9-a358-9e871103e040)

EVE: London, November 1831 (#u6490d1e6-72a4-5a4c-a3b9-5cf0ff2807ed)

ABEL: London, October 1854 (#ub7378196-9650-5d4b-9df3-97745dd0a980)

EVE: London, November 1845 (#ua9fdda04-75d9-52c2-95dc-9f685a2bc816)

ABEL: London, January 1857 (#uc38b52ab-85c5-5982-8963-0afe41ca7af4)

EVE: London, March–April 1857 (#u635b8ae4-27e9-5f10-8103-356038cda49f)

ABEL: London, May–August 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)

EVE: London, May–July 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)

ABEL: London, August 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)

EVE: London, October 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)

ABEL: London, February–March 1858 (#litres_trial_promo)

EVE: London, June 1858 (#litres_trial_promo)

ABEL: London, September 1858 (#litres_trial_promo)

EVE: London, November 1858 (#litres_trial_promo)

ABEL: London, November 1858 (#litres_trial_promo)

EVE: London, November 1858 and onwards (#litres_trial_promo)

ABEL (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




EVE

London, November 1831







Before I am born, my mother goes to the circus.

She has smelled sweat before: she knows the stink of mouldy cloth, meat left too long, the mess kicked into drains. But tonight, the world is perfumed with fairy tales. She gulps down its promise and a rope tightens across her stomach, causing her to stumble against Bert.

He doesn’t notice. He pulls her up the theatre steps, head turned away, hair sleek black ink. She feels like a princess, even if she is being dragged headlong to the ball. She’s no idiot: she won’t let go of this charming prince come midnight.

Bert pays for them both as if sixpences are a trifle, and bustles her through the crowded foyer so fast the gilded plaster and frosted glass are a blur. She grips his arm above the elbow and he doesn’t push her off. He is a good one: a stopper, a stayer-in. How he will love her! He flings his arm round her shoulders and squeezes her into his buttoned-up jacket.

‘Now, girl,’ he rumbles. ‘Mind how you go.’

He will ask her that very night, she knows: will ask the question she’s been working up to for three months now. She is seized with such a fierce certainty that it makes her dizzy. She does not realise it, but this commotion bubbling through her veins is all in preparation for me. The velvet drumbeat of her heart and the fanfare of her gasps are heralding my arrival. I have never kept an audience waiting.

Bert pushes them to the front row of benches. They are full, so he flaps his hand and the people already seated there shuffle up a little, but not enough. He curls his hand into a fist: they shrink away, and he and Mama sit down.

‘This is the best place,’ he says loudly, although no-one seems about to disagree. ‘I would not sit in the galleries. No, I would not.’

He pauses and stares at my mother.

‘You are right, Bert,’ she says, for an answer is needed.

She gazes up at the tiers of seats climbing the walls towards a roof she can barely pick out in the darkness.

‘Batty’s Amphitheatre is far grander,’ he continues. ‘There is a chandelier with a thousand crystals.’

He is so close she can feel the feather of his breath stir the down on her cheek.

‘Oh?’ she whispers, and it takes a moment for her to realise he is still waiting for a response – a good one. ‘This is marvellous, Bert. All I could want.’

The sun comes out in his face when he smiles. He is as tall as a statue in a park, and certainly as good-looking. But there is no more time to adore her new idol, for a gentleman appears in the circle before them, eyes ringed with black, lips and cheeks rouged.

‘Gentleman!’ he cries. ‘And ladies!’

This creates a swell of merriment, and Mama thinks it best to smile also.

‘Tonight we have mirth!’

A cheer bursts out.

‘Wit!’

Another whoop.

‘And jollity!’

Mama joins in the cheering, and for once no-one tells her to be quiet. The Master of Ceremonies strides about the arena, brandishing his hands.

‘You have come on a very special evening!’ He grins, eyes gleaming. ‘How happy I am to welcome you to this Palace of Delights on such an auspicious occasion! What Luck! What Serendipity! What Felicitous Providence!’

There is a hum of appreciation. Mama wonders why he is stretching his words out so, pulling at them so hard they are in danger of breaking.

‘We humbly offer, for your discernment, Wonders Unparalleled! Incredible Feats of Daring! Please welcome the Italian Fairy, lately arrived from Milan, the Empress of the Air! Signorina Chiarini!’

A storm of clapping breaks over their heads. From the muddy dark of the carved ceiling a rope uncoils, lowering a hoop studded with rubies and emeralds more precious than those kept in the Tower. Balanced there is a magical creature who sparkles even more brightly, thighs bulging with diamond garters, beautiful as a fairy. She waves at my mother, winking at how clever she is to have such a handsome young man on her arm. Mama leans into Bert’s shoulder. My hero, she thinks.

The lady does a swift pirouette, somersaults on to her hands, kicks up her heels and swings backwards and forwards on the golden ring. She strikes pose after impossible pose, accompanied by the gasps and moans of the crowd, for she plays so close to the brink of letting go. The whole time her grin is as broad as the street outside. My mother bites her lip: She smiled at me.

Then the acrobat climbs the rope, hand over glittering hand, wrapping it around her leg and dangling upside down, spinning like a whipped top. She spreads her arms; she falls. Mama is deafened by shrieks of dismay, only to hear them transformed into cheers of astonishment as one ankle is caught in the cord, cleverly twisted. The signorina swings, a gemstone on the end of a chain.

In the intermission, Bert buys her a penny twist of coloured sugar; she licks a finger and sticks it into the sweetness. She remembers she must not appear selfish, and offers him the paper cone, waiting for him to push his finger into the dint she has made. Instead, he grabs her hand, presses his lips around her fingertip and sucks.

‘You’re sweet enough for me,’ he says.

She feels herself colour up like rhubarb and wishes she could be one of those nicely brought-up girls who blush delicately. As she turns to hide her embarrassment, a new lady steps into the light, wearing a tight dress that shows off most of her titties. She sings a song about her sailor boy, and it is a good song, and many voices accompany her during the chorus.

As she trills up and down the scales, a number of low stools are carried out and placed in a circle around her. The painted gentleman appears from the side and bows her off, to whistles and shouts.

‘Ah yes! The Fair Clara!’ he simpers. ‘The Most Dainty of Girls, lately from her Mother!’

The crowd roar once more.

‘Be assured she will return. But now, it is time for stronger meat. Ladies and gentlemen! I require of you to engage your sternest courage! I ask you boldly: are you prepared to be petrified?’

‘Yes,’ they cry.

‘Are there any amongst you of fragile disposition?’

‘No,’ they declare.

‘No cowards?’

‘No!’

‘Brave men and true?’

‘Yes!’

‘Are you stout enough to come to the aid of any delicate creature who may faint and fall gasping into your lap?’

At this, there is howl of laughter Mama does not quite understand.

‘Yes, indeed!’

‘Can you view the most monstrous potentate of the animal kingdom without fear?’

‘Yes, oh yes!’

‘I present to you, brought in at great expense from the Savage Heart of Africa! A Monster Forged in the Heat of a Merciless Sun! Gentlemen! I call upon you now to protect your lady companions!’

‘Hurrah!’

‘Behold then, the Fearsome King of the Beasts, the Ethiopian Sovereign, Djambo! And his Master, that most courageous of men, Mr Edwin Phillips!’

As the crowd applauds, a lion is hauled out on a chain and padlocked to one of the stools. It has been beaten bald as an old carpet. Its face is swiped with ancient scratches and one flank sports a hand’s-breadth of dull pink skin. Mr Phillips cracks the long tail of his whip and Djambo staggers on to the seat. He slashes again, adding a fresh welt to the tip of the great cat’s nose.

‘Ho!’ shouts Mr Phillips.

Djambo yawns. Mama is close enough to hear the lion-tamer hissing, ‘Move, you scabby bastard, or I’ll make a rug out of you.’

Djambo opens his eyes and looks directly at my mother. She feels like a package of pork, wrapped in brown paper. Mr Phillips is sweating. A moustache of dirt creeps across his top lip.

‘Ho, Djambo!’ he cries, bringing down the lash.

Very slowly, the lion moves his gaze from my mother to Mr Phillips.

‘Now! I command you! Jump!’

‘Yeah! Jump, why don’t you!’ bawls someone at the back.

‘Hey, Puss! Didn’t get your saucer of milk this morning?’ chirps another wag, to great amusement.

‘Boo!’ says Bert, and a few pick it up.

The lion ignores them all and opens his mouth wide, gusting Mama with a reeking gale of dead breath. She claps her hand over her nose, but it is too late. Deep in her belly, the clot of blood that will be me in under an hour has smelled it, too. Mr Phillips whispers, ‘Move, for Christ’s sake, or I’m finished,’ and they’re the last words she does hear him say. He lifts his arm, flogging the beast again and again with the leather strap. The straggle of catcalls gains strength.

Mama is sure she hears Djambo sigh, just before he leaps. The chain rattles, tightens, but stretches far enough. The lion peers into the eyes of its torturer, and grins. For a moment the candles around the circle burn as bright as the hot bronze of an African sky; the baying of the audience is translated into the filthy laughter of hyenas. Then Djambo opens his jaws and closes them tight. The hyenas start to scream like women, and the sky flickers back into black.

The lion shakes his head from side to side, and Mr Phillips swings also. Three men with clubs race into the circle and wallop the beast until he lets go of the dying man, who slumps to the floor, a cat-o’-nine-tails of blood spurting from his neck and lashing the air. Djambo turns up his muzzle to catch the crimson rain beating down and lets loose a roar. Mama feels her face speckled with a spray as fine as drizzle. The lion’s cry thunders down her throat; a raging tide of blood carries its essence into her womb and I stir.

She sits quiet, still. She has never felt so calm. But around her, the world is going mad. The mob is on its feet, and everyone’s feet are in the way of everyone else’s; the air is raw with screaming at the sight of a man’s head bitten off. Bert is gone from her side. Mama stands, spies him a way in front of her and panics into movement, afraid of losing him, tonight of all nights. She races after his shining head, bright as a billiard ball on the tide of terrified bodies.

The wave spills her on to the street. She doubles over at the sudden stitch in her stomach as I dig in my claws and take root. She falls on to all fours, fingers squeezing the safety of the gutter muck. Dirt, she knows. Dirt, she understands. But just now she needs something more than dirt, something to swill away this new pain I am causing her. She crawls into a side-alley and hugs the wall, panting.

Bert appears, towering above her. She looks up, wondering how he found her, for it seems a very long time since she saw him last. There is such an uproar at the bottom of her belly, such a storm. He pats her on the back, very gently.

‘Here, girl, here,’ he says. ‘You all right?’

She lurches to her feet, grabs his wrist, pulls him towards her. Now she understands why he is there: she needs him to flush me out.

‘Bert,’ she says. ‘Now, Bert. Do me now.’

He makes a show of pulling away, but his heart quivers. He flicks his eyes left, right, but the alley is empty enough for no-one to take notice.

‘Oh Bert. Help me, Bert.’

She drags his hand up her skirt, points the way up the road he didn’t think to find so easy; she pulls at his buttons and he’s hard already, for doesn’t he know women change their minds in a second? He pokes between her legs and finds the soft ready core of her. They rock me in the cradle of their rutting.

Not that I need the swim of his seed: I am already made. I am nothing to do with him and everything to do with snips and snails and lion’s tails. I hunker down for my nine-month wait. He’s done quickly; looks to see if he read this right but she’s smiling, wider than she’s ever smiled.

‘Oh Bert,’ she says, and will not let go of his hand. Her eyes are inky with pleasure.

‘You all right, Maggie love?’ he says.

‘It was wonderful,’ she sighs, unsure if she means what he has just done to her, or the lion.




ABEL

London, October 1854







Eyes closed. Waking. Hands upon me. Voices swarming into my ears. They start with my pockets, ferreting their fingers deeper and deeper into the ruins of my clothing.

‘Not much here,’ whines the voice of a boy. ‘Not so much as a bloody wipe.’

‘Nothing.’ This sounds like a woman.

‘No use.’ And this, a girl.

‘It was nice, his jacket, but it’s finished.’

‘Waste of bloody time.’ This, another child.

‘Now that’s where you’re wrong,’ says a deeper voice, a man. ‘There’s a good doctor at the hospital as will give a few shillings.’

It seems there is a crowd gathered. I can hear the gentle prowl of the river draining towards the sea. Fingers lift my wrist, let it fall.

‘Doctor? Too late for quacks. He’s stone cold.’

‘He’s not breathing.’

‘He’s a dead one.’

I wonder if I am the dead man they are talking of so freely. My eyes are sticky with some insistent glue, my mouth also. Neither will open.

‘The doctor I know will take a gentleman in any condition, if you get my meaning.’

‘Ooh, that’s not right, George. Not decent.’

‘What’s he to you, all of a sudden?’

At that moment my body chooses to unseal itself: eyes crack open, mouth gapes and I cough black water. They spring away: the corpse they thought I was is suddenly too lively for comfort.

‘He’s alive!’

I vomit again, to prove the truth of it. My vision is unsteady. I am surrounded by vole-faced creatures with yellow teeth, breath hanging before them, the bones of their faces harsh. They are the colour of the mud in which they stand.

‘Not a chance.’

‘Got half the river in him, George.’

‘Enough to fill the Fleet ditch.’

‘He’ll be a stiff soon enough if he’s swallowed any of that.’

‘He’s coming round.’

The man they call George detaches himself from the pack; lowers himself to my side.

‘Give this man his boots back,’ he says.

‘They’re mine,’ whines a skinny boy.

‘Give him his trousers, at least. Can’t have him walking around with his crown jewels up for grabs.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘And your sister.’

Small hands lift me out of the peaceful cushion of slime. I retch with the movement.

‘He stinks.’

‘So do you.’

‘What’s your name, man?’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Pissed, were you?’

My head swims with the need for words, for a mouth to form them, lungs to squeeze air, a tongue to shape the sound. There are so many tasks to perform and it is too much for me. I try a word, drawn up from deep inside the well: it meant a greeting when I used it before. They look from one to the other, raising bony shoulders.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Don’t ask me. Some wop nonsense,’ says George.

‘What are you trying to say? Say it again.’

I choose a different word. Their eyes remain blank.

‘Still a load of codswallop.’

‘Here. He’s that Italian fellow. That nob as went missing.’

‘Yeah. Look at his eyes.’

‘Jumped off Blackfriars Bridge.’

‘They said he was shouting, raving. Ladies were screaming.’

‘Sank like a stone.’

‘But it was a week ago. A week, in that shit? Can’t be him. Can it?’

‘Rich bloke, I heard. A real swell.’

‘I told you his jacket was nice.’

‘Rich? Ooh. They’ll want him back, then.’

‘They’ll be grateful, like.’

The ring of eyes glitter diamonds. One small creature – male or female, it is hard to say for its hair is a felted mat obscuring the face – raises its paw to touch my face, only to be clouted away. It whimpers, but almost instantly reaches out again, to be smacked off as fiercely.

‘Grateful to them as found him.’

‘Them as saved him,’ corrects George.

I want them to go away and leave me here. I want to worm myself back into the mud and pull its blanket up over my chin. I am filled with the feeling that I have not been dead long enough. I do not know why, but I want to be dead a good while longer.

‘Come on, sir. Say something else.’

I search for sounds to please them. ‘I am drowned,’ I say.

‘What’s he on about?’

‘He says he’s drowned.’

‘That’s English. Doesn’t sound wop to me,’ says George.

‘Well, he looks Italian.’

‘Maybe that’s just dirt.’

‘He’s got to be that rich dago. There’s no money in it if he’s just some English bastard.’

‘Can’t we just say he’s that Italian, George?’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’ The man puts his face close to mine. ‘Who are you, then? Eh?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply.

‘What’s your name?’

I scrabble for the answer, paddling in the gutter of my mind, turning up nothing. I try harder. It is not a blank wall I come up against: there is no wall, no structure of any kind. I am void, featureless as the thick stew of human waste in which I am lying. They look at each other across my body.

‘He ought to be a goner.’

George snorts, placing his hand upon me. I see a bird made of blue ink flap its wings in the space between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Bird,’ I whisper.

‘He’s a nutter,’ someone laughs.

‘He’s not right,’ is the opinion of another.

‘No one could last a minute in that, let alone a day.’

‘He looks like he’s coming out of the mud.’

‘Like he was buried in it.’

‘He ought to be dead. Why ain’t he?’

‘Something’s not right.’

They begin to shrink back, all but the tattooed man, who regards me with thoughtfulness rather than fear.

‘Come on, George. Leave the likes of him be.’

One of the women throws my trousers back at me; spits.

‘I don’t want nothing of him. Ooh,’ she whinnies. ‘I touched him.’

She wipes a hand on her greasy skirt. The boy holding my boots shifts from sticky foot to sticky foot.

‘I’m keeping these,’ he mutters defiantly.

George grins. ‘Up to you, mate, but I’d not walk one inch in this man’s shoes. He’s not got the decency to die when he should.’

The lad chews the inside of his mouth awhile, and then hurls my boots into the muck.

‘Fuck you, George.’

‘And your sister. Your mother and all. And when I did, they didn’t charge me, neither. Which is not like them in the least.’

George places his mouth close to my ear.

‘Now. You tell George here your little secret. I can spot a queer one when I see it. How come you’re not dead?’

‘I do not know.’

Again, it is the truth. I cough up another mouthful of the river and it dribbles down my chin.

‘Could be worth your while. And mine.’ His eyes gleam like sovereigns. ‘I think you’ll be coming with me, Lazarus.’

He grasps my hand, winches me into a sitting position. I heave, spill more oily slops down my chest. It seems I cannot stop leaking.

‘Ooh,’ squeals a girl from her safe distance. ‘George is touching him.’

The words do not make George let go. I look at the way his fingers clasp mine, the ruddy glow of them against the bleached grey of my sodden flesh.

‘I should be dead,’ I whisper. ‘Why am I not so?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out, Mr Lazarus,’ says George, showing me two rows of even teeth.

‘What’s he saying?’ calls out one of the mudlarks.

‘Nothing you lot need to know. This is man’s business.’

‘Talking up horrors, that’s what they’re doing,’ wails a female voice.

The clacking of a rattle winds its way into the space between my ears.

‘Fuck me, it’s the Peelers.’

‘Stay where you are,’ yells George. ‘We’re breaking no bloody laws.’

‘When did they ever care about the law?’

‘Stay if you want. I’m legging it,’ says the boy who gave up my boots.

I hear the suck and slather of mud as they hurry off. George looks from me to their retreating backs to me again. The rattling grows louder. He chews his lips.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck the Queen and her fucking consort too.’

He lets go of my hand and I fall back. I stare at the sky. My thumbs dig into the soft quilt of the filthy ooze, and I let myself slide into the comfort of its tight wet mouth. I am lullabied into a drowse by the slurp of their footsteps retreating, the moist tread of other men approaching.




EVE

London, November 1845







They say when I was born I didn’t cry; I meowed and licked my paws. They say that the midwife dropped dead of fright. They told a lot of tall stories but none of them were as tall as the ones I told myself when I looked in the mirror. Mama said I shouldn’t look in mirrors: it would upset me. What she meant was, it upset her.

Other girls look in the mirror and see the fairest of them all. I saw a friend. Her name was Donkey-Skin. I can’t remember when she came to me, only that she was always there. My only companion, born of imagination and loneliness, which is a hectic brew for a child. What did it signify if no one else could see her? I liked it so. She was mine and mine alone.

I did not want to share her with another soul, so I kept our conversations whispered, our games quiet. When Mama asked me whom I was talking to, I said, ‘No one!’ in my most innocent voice. She took it for another sign of my strangeness and it was not long before she ignored my chattering. Donkey-Skin wove herself from all the things I hid from my mother, knitting herself from the truths Mama would not tell me but I found out anyway.

Donkey-Skin was ugly: even uglier than me, which was quite something. If I was hairy, then she was as furry as a cave full of bears. If I was a freak, she was a cursed abomination in the sight of God. If I was lonely, she was abandoned on a hillside for wolves to devour. She was different because she did not care. Her life’s work was to teach me not to care either.

When we were alone she murmured, Kitten, kitten, my very own pet. Her lullabies rang over the terrifying stretches of the night as I rested my cheek on her breast, safe under the press of her arm. She loved me because of my thick pelt of fur rather than despite it. Only she could sort my tangles. I purred beneath her gentle comb as she groomed my baby hair.

Of course, Mama was having none of that. Every day she reminded me that God made me foul-featured for a reason: punishment for a sin I could not remember and she never revealed. It could have been so much worse, she said. I was lucky, she said. Was I beaten? No. Was I fed? Yes. I had a roof over my head; I had a mother who was respectable. I should bow my head, keep my eyes down, keep the peace, be sweet, be grateful that someone cared enough to put bread in my mouth. I could have been sold to trim fur collars or made into a muff. I could have been tied in a bag and dropped in the Fleet.

My earliest memory is of Mama shaving me. She sat me upon the table and I kicked out my heels. She caught my foot and kissed the only part of me that was smooth and counted out my toes: ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy got shaved.’ Or was it ‘saved’? I do not remember. Her songs were hopeful spells to make the fairies take pity and return the pretty pink and white babe they’d stolen from her womb. There was no escaping the truth of it. I was a changeling and as furry as a cat.

She doesn’t want a baby, Donkey-Skin whispered in my ear. She wants a piglet.

I giggled.

A naked pink wobble of a thing, with that sore scalded look of them, tiptoeing as though the ground hurts and makes them screw up their eyes.

You are not a piglet, said Donkey-Skin. Don’t be one, not for anyone.

Donkey-Skin was right; I did not want to be a piglet. Piglets grew into pigs, fat overblown pillows slathering in their own muck. Pigs were dinner. I had no wish to be sliced, smoked, fried, salted, stewed or pickled.

Mama grasped the kettle and heaved it from the mouth of the range, poured a bowlful and soaked the dishcloth. A cowlick of steam curled off the face of the liquid. She folded the rag in half and hung its hot wet curtain across my face.

‘Mama?’ I whimpered. ‘Mama?’

‘Is it too hot, little one?’ she said.

She pulled the flannel away and I tingled with the sudden cold. I grabbed at it, but my reach was far too short. She picked up a jug, took the brush, dipped in the bristles and swiped foam across my cheek. I giggled and wiped it away, slapping the white mess on to the floor.

‘No,’ she said and sopped my other cheek.

I wiped that away also, squeaking with delight.

‘Stop it,’ she said, louder, and I squealed louder, to match her.

She aimed quick blobs at my chin, my cheek, my forehead. I could not get enough of this new game. Even when she held my wrists with one hand and soaped my face with the other, I wriggled free.

‘I am making you beautiful,’ she snapped, and started to cry. ‘I’m doing this because I love you.’

Then she smacked me. I had been stung far harder in the past, and deserved it too. This small slap spelled me into stone.

‘Stay very, very still.’

I sat obediently and let her lather up my whole face and neck. She unfolded the razor, stropped it keen and laid it on my forehead. I quivered under its chilly stroke, stranger than the licking of a cat. The blade came away loaded with scum, and more. With each scrape the water grew dirtier, clogged with brown silky threads which collected in thick clots. I grew cold. When she finished, she kissed me and tickled my hairless chin.

‘Now you’re my pretty girl, my real girl, the girl I should have got, the one who loves her mama and will never leave her side.’

That night, Donkey-Skin visited me as I undressed for sleep.

‘Mama’s made me pretty,’ I sang, spinning in a circle to show off my new nakedness.

Pretty? she snorted. She’s made you ordinary.

‘Mama told me I am a real girl now. It must be true.’

You look like all the rest of them: simpering, feeble, wet-wristed, snickery-whickery, snappy-snippy little girls made of milk and money.

‘Then what is a real girl, Donkey-Skin?’

It’s a long story. I have plenty of answers. We have time.

Every week Mama shaved me. When I was old enough, I said no. She did it anyway. I grew and still she shaved me naked, until I was tall enough to smack the razor from her hand.

‘You’ll look like an animal,’ she wept. ‘Is that what you want?’

I stood in front of the looking-glass and admired myself. My moustache wormed across my lip, the tips lost in the crease behind my ears. My eyebrows met over the bridge of my nose and spread like wings up the side of my forehead. My chin sprouted a beard the colour of combed flax, reaching to my little breasts.

You are my very own princess stuck in the tower, whispered Donkey-Skin.

I laughed. ‘A very small tower!’

Donkey-Skin tugged my moustache.

I will spin you into gold. Weave a happy ending with a handsome prince …

‘I will weave my own story,’ I replied, and she smiled.

‘Listen to you talking to yourself!’ cried Mama. She wiped her nose. ‘Look at you,’ she sneered. ‘You’re not even human.’

I stuck out my chin and my beard swung backwards and forwards.

‘I know that I am different. How could I not? If God intended me to be this hairy, I shall find out the reason, however long it takes me.’

‘Do you think this is a game? You’re only safe out there on the streets because I make you look like a real girl.’

I crossed my arms.

‘People know who I am. Whatever I look like, they’ll say, There goes Eve, Maggie’s daughter.’

‘You are stupider than you look. And you look particularly stupid. Can’t you see my way is better?’

‘I shall prove you wrong,’ I said. ‘Today, I shall take the air.’

I opened the door and stepped into fog as thick as oatmeal. Dim hulks of buildings swam towards me as I strolled along the pavement. No one pointed at me. Shadows tiptoed past, hands on the wall like blind beggars, and at first I was comforted by the thought that I was walking unseen, and therefore in safety. This soon changed to frustration: I would have no proof that our neighbours did not care what I looked like. I wanted to show Mama that I could be seen and accepted.

I kept walking, picking my way carefully, and did not realise how far I had come until the gate of the Zoological Gardens gaped before me. I strode past the ticket office, and smiled at saving sixpence. The mist had cleared a little and I found myself in front of the lion’s cage. The great cat lolled within. A raven pecked at its beard.

The dark form of a man appeared next to me. He lifted his arm and threw a stone at the lion. It bounced off the animal’s head.

‘Oh, Harold, don’t carry on so,’ said a woman’s voice.

His answer was to throw another.

‘Oh, Harold,’ she simpered.

A small crowd began to gather. More stones were thrown, until the lion was surrounded by a ring of pebbles. It continued to ignore us. Then a boy spotted me.

‘Hey, look!’ he squealed. ‘Look at that, will you!’

Every nose swivelled to follow the compass point of his finger. There was a pause. I smiled. What better place to prove I was no animal than here, where the dividing line was drawn so clearly? They were in cages, and I was not. The mist grew thinner. I held my breath as it peeled away.

‘Oh, Lord, will you look at that,’ said the first of them.

‘That’s not right.’

‘It’s not decent.’

‘If that were mine I’d never let it out.’

‘If that were mine, I’ve never of had it, if you get my meaning.’

Their eyes poked knitting needles at me. I took a step backwards and felt the bars of the cage.

‘Shouldn’t be allowed out. Should hide itself away from decent folk.’

‘Mind you,’ chirped one wag, ‘right place for it, ain’t it? You know, the zoo, like,’ he said, in case they missed the joke.

They did not. There was a rattling of unpleasant laughter.

‘Here, monkey. You a monkey or what?’

‘Even a monkey ain’t that hairy.’

‘It’s a dog.’

‘Nah. Dog is man’s best friend. It ain’t no friend of mine.’

‘Perhaps it’s an exhibit got out of its cage.’

‘Can’t see no park-keepers,’ one growled.

There was another pause as they ran out of amusing things to say. A boy bent down, picked up a stone and let it fly in my direction. It was weakly thrown and wide of the mark, in that way of first stones. I waited to see if anyone would tell him off. No-one spoke. In their eyes I read drowned cats, kicked dogs, rabbits skinned alive. I saw my own pelt stripped off and spread like a rug before the kitchen fire.

There was no point in searching for escape. The moment I looked away I would be piled up with rocks high as a hill. The cage pressed its bars into my back, too narrow to slip through. Then I felt the sweltering breath of the lion on my neck. I waited for its claws to rake me open, but instead my skin was sandpapered with a tongue the size of my foot.

‘Look! Even the bloody lion thinks it’s a cub!’

‘Freak!’

The stones had started as a drizzle, but now turned to rain, bouncing off the bars. One hit the lion on the face, and its roar boomed like thunder over the heads of the mob, which turned and ran. I reached into its prison and scratched the top of its head. A purr rumbled in its throat. A man in a peaked cap came running up to the enclosure.

‘You bothering my lion?’ he panted; then he saw my face and stepped away. ‘Oh. Sorry, miss.’

‘I won’t bite you,’ I said, but he muttered an excuse and left.

I did not cry. I would not shed tears. I took myself back home bent double with my shawl tied round my head. Mama did not say a word, but she smiled for the first time in many months.

Donkey-Skin was my only comfort. She called me all the names they shouted; all the cruelties made of words. Hours and hours we played the game; for days, for weeks, for years; until the words were mine again, and I was not just bitch, but the queen of all the bitches: not just freak, but empress of all the freakish, with a dazzling crown.

She told me new stories: of a prince clever enough to spot a princess through her wrapper of dirt, who would kiss the beast to make it beautiful. A fearless man who would fight through the bramble forest a hundred years’ thick, past the wolf at the door and the witch at the gate. My fur was my protection. Only the most true of heart would find their way through.

There is a man for you with knife in hand to cut through the world’s binding. A man of blood and flesh and bone and strange in all of them.

Keep an eye out for him. Watch carefully. You may not know him when he appears.

I am Donkey-Skin. Peel away this fur and I am as pink as you. The blood in my veins is as crimson. If you flay me, we stand equal. Beauty is truly skin-deep. We are all horrors under the skin.




ABEL

London, January 1857







It’s not like waking up. I’m awake already. I have been somewhere. Like sleep, but not. My body rocks backwards and forwards. Something has hold of my shoulder and is shaking it, vigorously.

‘Wake up, Abel,’ a voice whispers. ‘It is time.’

‘Time?’ I ask, and forget everything.

I open my eyes. The first things I see are blocks of grey. They move: to and fro, up and down, side to side. A dark column hovers before me and I hold my breath. It leans over my bed, a swirl of mixed brightnesses. It touches my arm, and speaks.

‘Wake up. Are you awake?’

With the words, the ghost becomes a man.

I answer, ‘Yes.’

The smell of dried blood is on his shirt, under his fingernails, on the soles of his boots. I know this smell, for I have it on myself.

‘It is time for work. Come now.’

I look about me, and see blotched and crumbling plaster above my head. Narrow slots pierce one wall close to the ceiling, letting in a dribble of pale light. I am surrounded by a multitude of pallets, packed close together. The spectres rising from them become other men. I inhale the comforting stink of my own body and the warm reek of the others crowded into this place; a morning chorus of belching, hacking, spitting and farting giddies me with happiness. I remember: I sleep here. It is my home.

‘Shift yourself, Abel. You’re like this every morning.’

His name will come to me in a moment. The man waking me works with blood. I sniff again: animal blood. Meat. A butcher? No, a butcher has his own business, and does not need to sleep in a cellar. Then I know: he is a slaughter-man. We work together. This reasoning takes very little time, but he is impatient.

‘Abel, get bloody moving.’

It is my name. This man is my friend.

‘Yes, yes,’ I say cheerfully.

‘You’re in a good mood. Move, you old bastard.’

I am already dressed in most of my clothes. All I need do is put on my cap and boots. I get them from under my head, where I have been using them as a pillow. My friend pats me on the shoulder and smiles. We climb the grimy steps out of our cellar and join the troop of men lining up to pay the tally-man, who leans against the door-jamb, book in one hand, pint bottle of tea in the other, and a stub of a pencil behind his ear. Many of our companions thumb their caps and promise to cough up that evening. But we pay our sixpence on the spot for the next night’s lodging as we leave, and I recall that we do this each morning, at my friend’s insistence.

‘We must pay one night at a time. A man never knows what might happen,’ he says.

The moment the words come out of his mouth his name comes back to me, making me suddenly joyful at the gift of remembrance, at the realisation that he returns me to myself thus every day.

‘Alfred,’ I say. ‘You are my friend.’

He laughs and calls me an old bastard once more.

We step out on to the street and my breath catches at each new sight, which stops being new the moment I look at it. I wonder how I would find myself in this blur of grey and brown if it were not for Alfred, shaking me into wakefulness, striding at my side, half a pace in front, urging me on, drawing me out of my drowse and into a beginning of myself.

The world reveals itself to me piecemeal: the flat surface at my side becomes a long terrace of filthy brickwork interrupted by black holes, which resolve themselves into doors and windows. One of these doors leads to my cellar. I gape at how similar it is to all the others, how simple a thing it would be to confuse one door with another. I lose myself in the contemplation of this wondrous revelation and Alfred grasps my elbow, steering me away from the ordure running down the middle of the street.

‘What would you do without me?’ he says.

‘I do not know.’

I blink at this new world, which of course is the same world as yesterday, only somehow mislaid by me overnight.

‘You’d walk through shit the whole time, that’s for sure!’ He laughs, and I understand that it is a joke, and that he does not realise what he means to me. I feel an urge to thank him, but I do not.

At this early hour the rough sleepers are still piled up in doorways, wrapped around each together against the chill. But Alfred and I are different: we are men of purpose. Men like us stride swiftly to a rightful place of employment. We have work to attend to, work that directs our hands and steers our feet, that fills our bellies with food and drink, that shakes us awake and tires us so we sleep deeply; work that gives us the money to pay for a place that is warm and comradely, a place where one man shares his good fortune with another, and where Alfred and I are often the men with that good fortune, for the pieces of meat that we bring.

Work prompts me with a purpose, with something to remember every morning. Without work I would be empty. I shake my head, and with it that unpleasant notion; I am not empty. I have work, I have food, I have lodging, I have Alfred. I am a happy man. There is no more contentment for which I could ask.

A coal-train heaves itself across the viaduct and we pass beneath, the vaulted arches shuddering a rain of soot on our heads, which Alfred dusts from my shoulders with many jokes about how I look even more like a gyppo when I’m blackened with smuts. The first criers are about, shouting, ‘Milk! Watercress! Hot bread!’ Carts jolt past, the iron clanging of their wheels dinning in my ears, bringing me further back into the glove of my senses. We cross over a stream of raw sewage.

‘I don’t know how you manage it. The smell,’ says Alfred, voice muffled by the kerchief he has clapped over his mouth. ‘What are you about? Make haste.’

I pause and look down at the mess. Not a whit of movement.

‘It does not trouble me,’ I say.

‘Now I know you are lying,’ he replies, uncovering his mouth when we are clear of the sewer.

But I am not. It is an aroma, that is all. I stand a while longer, but then realise that Alfred is no longer by my side. I glance down to see what my feet are about, and they are still when they should be moving. I have been looking down too long; when I look up Alfred has drawn some distance away. I command my feet to pick up their pace and keep up with him, for his legs are transporting him very swiftly, his body slipping neatly between the other men passing to and fro along the thoroughfare. I quicken my pace and after some shoving I draw level.

‘You not awake yet, Abel?’ he says. ‘Come now, buck up, or there’ll be no time to eat.’

My mouth waters at the thought of food.

‘Ha! That’s put a spring in your step! Sprightly, now.’

We bound forward. With each stride, I am bolder and the world takes on more solid form. Each step breathes fire into my legs; the flagstones thump back at my heels, prickling my skin with wakefulness; my liver and lights quiver with the blood pumping around my veins. The jostling and jarring of the passers-by returns the awareness of my arms and ribs; the screaming of this waking city brings back my ears. I smile at every assault, for each serves to remind me of my flesh, my meat, my muscle, bone and blood. I am a man again, not the phantom I was upon waking.

A boy passing to my right shrieks the news so piercingly I clench my teeth: ‘Savage Murder! Shocking Discovery!’Alfred sees my grimace.

‘You all right?’

I nod.

‘Loud, isn’t he?’

I nod again. ‘I am very hungry,’ I say.

‘Ah! A fine suggestion.’

He claps his hands together in the cold. We stop at a stall, which I know is the place we usually take our breakfast, and the man shouts his halloa, handing us fat bacon wrapped in a square of dirty bread; a pint of tea each. I shove all into my mouth, and Alfred laughs.

‘Your stomach, the great pit!’

The vendor roars at the joke. I smile through my bread, spilling some, filling them with even more merriment.

‘You will make yourself sick, you silly bastard,’ says Alfred. ‘Yes, we must hurry, but not that much.’

It occurs to me that I am never sick, but I do not say as much. It comes to me that I have tried to explain this before; but such things confuse him, and confusion takes away his cheerfulness. So I continue to play the fool, and he is happy. The grease sticks to my chin and I wipe it off, licking my fingers.

‘Good stuff?’ says Alfred through his bread.

‘Good stuff,’ I reply.

‘That’s you fixed up.’

Right away I know he is speaking the plain truth. The sticky bacon weighs me down into the earth. I pat my chest, feeling the smoke of the chimneys clogging each breath; rub my belly, testing the ballast of the half-loaf within.

‘Thank you,’ I say to him. ‘You are my friend.’

For a moment, his face changes, and I recognise the look. Suddenly I am aware that I have seen it before, over and over. How I know this I do not recall, nor who has looked at me thus: only that many have. I search for names and faces, but find none. It is most confusing. Alfred pushes the last of his bacon between his lips and is once again my gruff companion.

‘It’s only breakfast,’ he grunts. ‘Any pal would do the same.’

The day is no warmer when we hand back the tin mugs; indeed, it is still dark, but I no longer care for I am hot inside. We bow into the wind and head past the tannery and turn left. As we walk through the gate a church clock somewhere begins to strike the hour. I count five.

‘It is the best part of the day,’ Alfred says. ‘And winter too: the best time of year for men like ourselves.’

We strap on our leather aprons, and are ready. I know why I am here. I am a slaughter-man.

The first bullock of the morning is brought in. It is barely through the rectangle of the door before Alfred lifts his hammer and strikes the blow. The eyes roll and it falls forward on to its chin, grey tongue flopping between its teeth, gentle eye dim between the stiff, gummed lashes. Alfred shouts a brief huzzah at such a clean start and grins.

‘Barely twitching!’ he exclaims.

Two fellows hook the hind legs and winch the carcase upwards. Their names have not yet returned to my recollection, though I should have them before another hour has passed. I grasp the soft, warm ear and strike the knife beneath it; blood pours.

‘He never misses,’ mumbles one of the winchers, still chewing on his breakfast, a piece of bread clamped between his teeth.

His name surfaces in the mud of my mind.

‘Yes, William,’ I agree, pleased with myself.

‘There is a man at peace with his labour,’ says Alfred, and smiles. ‘I can see William snoring in long, untroubled sleep. Can’t you?’ He looks slantwise at me. A blade scrapes against bone. ‘Just like us, eh, Abel? You’re not disturbed by what you see here. Are you?’

‘Me? No.’

‘Good. Me neither. Steady hands and a steady stomach. That’s the two of us.’

The beast starts to kick, and Alfred frowns, but it is only a brief show. I raise the blade and watch it fall, guided by a precision I possess without knowing how as it strikes the exact midline of the belly and splits it open; the insides begin to cascade out in a sodden fall.

William and his companion heave out the innards, briefly sorting through the coils for any obvious signs of sickness. They are quickly satisfied, and I slice away the heart, liver and lights, giving a final grunt of exertion as my blade breaks through the cartilage between the vertebrae. The skinners set to work straight away. Three lads carry away the pluck; four others slop the black waters away continuously, bent into their work, never looking up to see whence comes the thick dark stuff they push into the grille of the drain.

I delight in the handsome geometry of the beast: the soft handshake of the intestines coiling about my arms, humid from the belly, delicate green and blue; the perfect smoothness of the liver; the pink and grey lungs, matched in wonderful symmetry and nesting the heart between. There is no time to ponder each marvel, for we have many beeves to work through.

‘This is a hungry city,’ says Alfred.

Each carcase I split open reveals the same beautiful workings, each with their particular differences: a larger pair of lungs; a surprisingly violet twist of gut. But these small variations only seem to further underline the natural majesty of them all; I cannot avoid the sensation that I am close to some revelation about myself. Why the mysterious insides of beasts should make me feel thus I do not know, but they draw me with an uncanny power that here I might solve some riddle. I push towards the answer: I am a man who knows the mystery of beasts.

I see the way they come in after hours of stamping down a hard road: their ankles gone, hooves raw; driven, beaten, thrashed and pushed towards their deaths – and any man who says a beast doesn’t know it is a fool. No fellow-beast comes back from the killing to tell them, but they guess it true enough.

They smell it on the road. Keeping their heads low: not sniffing for grass to chew, but getting a sniff of those who passed before, the excruciating spoor of that last drive, the screaming muscle, the aching bones. Most of all they smell the fear.

And if they are bad on the road in, that is nothing to how they are when they get to the yard and are left standing, listening to the sharpening of blades. They smell death before it happens; hear the thump of the stunning blow before it cracks the first skull of the day; taste the blood of their brothers misting the air from the day before, when their guts spilled out of the bag of their bellies.

The fear of beasts. It is a fire that runs between them dry as tinder. When they get it in them the worst things happen. So I strive to make it quick. Today, we are unlucky.

Alfred raises his hammer with a good will, but when it falls some agency turns it awry and it falls to one side, a feather’s width only, but enough to inflict pain without release. The bullock rears up, its skull caved in. How can a dead animal leap up? When they are hammered, that should be an end to it. But I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Slaughter-men know these things.

It pauses, hanging in the air. We are fixed also, though we must clear out of its way for the plunge that will follow: it wants to take us into that animal darkness, and Heaven help anyone in the way when it comes crashing down. I have seen a man lose an arm, torn off at the shoulder by those fiendish hooves, and heard the beast give a last moan of delight to hear its murderer scream.

It falls, staggering. Alfred tries a second blow, but it swings its head despite our attempts to hold it steady, and this blow is worse than the first, breaking the bone beneath the eyes. The screaming starts: a sound no-one would believe who had not heard it. Women have it when they push a child out of them; beasts have it when we push the life out of them, and do it badly.

It is dead enough to fall to its knees, undead enough to thrash out when the hooks dig through its tendons and the hauling starts, so it takes four men to get it up there, the four who should be mopping the floor, so now we are slipping in the bile it has spewed up. I cut its throat right across, more than is needed, to sever the windpipe as well as the vein, and air whistles out, but at least it is a hiss and not the awful keening.

Finally, we tie it off: heels up, head down, tongue licking the floor; and still struggling. The blade is in my hand. My fellows are getting angrier, and I am the only one who can do a thing about it. I lift my hand; the blade falls and I have some comfort that this stroke at least is deep and true. I lose myself in the sight of its guts, gushing out in a smooth clean tumble. I do not let myself see its juddering terror as I kill it for the last time. I will not let myself think of that at all.

The hauliers are bringing up the next beast, shouting, ‘Get a move on, you fuckers. How long does it take to kill a bullock, for Christ’s sake?’Their charge is restless: it can smell and hear and taste and see what is before it, and knows its share. Then it is in, stamping out its complaint, and we must continue. I look at Alfred: he is sweating, his hand unsteady. The haulers hate him, the winch-men hate him, the sweepers hate him, the animals hate him. His day is already bad, and the only direction it can go is to the worse.

‘Alfred,’ I say.

I hold out my hand and he places the hammer into my grasp. The bullock looks at me with wet brown eyes, and I look back; I lay my hand on its flank until it grows still. Then it happens: it stumbles forwards, as though kneeling in prayer. I am to be its killer, but I am kind, each blow struck by me being on the mark. It knows it will be fully dead when it is split open. I am the only one it can be certain of. Other men try but I succeed, every time. It closes its eyes, knowing I will be quick and sure. It is my nature.

I do not disappoint: neither the beast nor my companions. They see my kindness, and each of them pauses, even the most brutish of the hauliers, and breathe out their relief.

‘You’re a good man,’ says Alfred, and rubs my shoulder, swabbing it with blood.

His voice snaps in the middle, dry and thin. I return the hammer to him.

The day swims past, and I drift upon its languorous current. My arm continues to rise and fall and I am drawn into a drowse by the movement, by the length and silkiness of black hair flowing in a stream from wrist to elbow, the veins standing out along the length.

With each fall of the blade the muscles of my hand and thumb stiffen and relax, and I find myself thinking how simple a thing it would be to make a vertical incision upwards from the wrist; how soft the curtains of skin as I part them, warm as the inside of a mouth, revealing the workings of the body within.

I see myself slip a flat-bladed knife beneath the musculus coracobrachialis and biceps brachii – for these notations are suddenly known to me – and raise them slightly from their accustomed bed against the bone of my upper arm. I do not want to fix my gaze anywhere but on this work, which terrifies me yet is familiar, and comforting in its familiarity.

I am opened up, and am possessed of a knowledge that sparkles through me. My heart soars: I know this. For what are men but hills, swamps, sinkholes, deep abysses, flat plains? I understand now. This is no gazetteer of any country; it is the terrain of man’s interior geography, and I am a geographer of that body for I know the mountains and rivers, the highways and cities. I gaze at my flesh, opened up so beautifully. It prickles, quickens. I behold the mappa mundi. All I need to know is here.

I feel wetness on my cheeks, hear a cough and the softness flies away, as though I have been roughly shaken from sleep. My heart beats fast, and I am filled with a fear that I shall find everyone looking at me, somehow knowing my strange imaginings, but the sound is one of the sweepers. I examine my arm: it is untouched. My body is quiet again.

I shake my head and empty it of what I have just witnessed. I do not know whence it came. I have been affected by the terrified beast earlier, that is all. I am a plain man and do not know such long words, nor such an overwhelming philosophy. It is nothing. I press my knowledge into a deep well.

At mid-morning my companions lay down their tools and go out for a mug of tea and piece of bread.

‘I shall stay,’ I say, for I desire a peaceful spot in which to gather up my ragged thoughts.

‘Come now, Abel. You’ve earned a breather.’ Alfred grins.

‘You more than any of us bastards,’ adds William, and they laugh.

‘One-Blow Abel, that’s you!’

I make my mouth smile also.

‘There is but one carcase needs finishing off,’ I say, lightening my voice to make it careless.

Alfred dawdles.

‘I shall stay also. We shall follow presently.’

He grins at me as they depart.

‘Just the two of us, eh? Best company a man could have.’

I set myself back to work, striking the carcase before me; but my hand trembles and I only split it halfway. I try again and strike untrue, jarring the bone so hard my shoulder numbs, and I drop the axe. The steel rings against stone, and Alfred calls out.

‘Abel?’

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘What is it?’

‘I have dropped my blade.’

‘Dropped it?’ His voice sounds with shock, and he pushes through the curtain of cadavers to my side. ‘What ails you, Abel?’

His eyes search mine.

I shrug. ‘It is nothing.’

‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘Very well.’

He coughs, busying himself in picking up my blade and placing it into my hand.

‘See,’ I say. ‘I am steady again.’

I make another stroke to prove my words, but it is a poor effort, shearing away and striking my forearm, and I am sliced to the bone. For an instant, all is peaceful as we stare at my arm, the dark crimson of muscle within. He speaks first.

‘Christ, your arm.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

It is true. It is my arm. He, like me, can see the sick whiteness showing at the heart of the slit. I should be afraid, but I am not; I feel no panic as I watch the wound fill with sluggish blood. I wait for it to commence pumping, in the way that kine do when I cut their throats, but it does not. The liquid rises partway to the brim and then pauses, small bubbles winking on the surface. As I watch, I am aware of another sensation: my soul begins to beat sluggish wings, unfolding them after a long sleep. My body tingles, stirs.

‘Christ,’ says Alfred. ‘Dear, sweet Christ.’

He sits upon the floor, not caring about the stickiness and filth.

‘Sit down, man,’ he croaks.

‘Yes,’ I say, lowering myself to sit next to him.

He is trembling.

‘You are dying. You will die. What am I to do?’ he stutters. ‘You will bleed to death. You are slain. What can we do?’ His hands patter all over his apron, wringing the corners. ‘I must get help,’ he says, but does not move.

‘Yes,’ I agree, and do not move either, for my eyes will not leave the sight of my inner workings revealed in this impossible fashion.

I am surprised, but not in that way of a new thing, a never-before-seen thing. It is the stillness of curiosity. I ache to dip my thumb into the dish of the wound to see if I am warm or cool; indeed, I lift my hand to do so, and only hesitate because Alfred is shaking violently, small sobs coming from deep within his chest.

‘I must go. I must go and find a doctor,’ he says, over and over, not stirring. ‘I should not have spoken to you. I distracted you. This is my fault.’

I want to say, It is not, but I am lost in contemplation of this phenomenon.

‘I am not bleeding,’ I muse, and find I have spoken aloud.

Alfred is sitting quite still. ‘Dear Christ,’ he breathes. ‘You are not.’

It is the truth. The injury is full of blood, but is not spilling over.

‘I wonder why,’ I say, for it holds me in a fascination.

I am a slaughter-man: I know well the fountaining of heart’s-blood when an artery is severed.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ repeats Alfred. ‘Look.’

I look. The blood is sinking, and as it subsides the edges of the wound begin to close together very slowly, but fast enough that it is possible to observe the motion. I am held in the grip of a terrific stillness, so entrancing is the sight of my body re-sealing itself. After minutes I forget to count all that can be seen is a red seam along my forearm. I flex my fingers, and they move: I can bend easily at the elbow. Nothing is damaged. Alfred gets to his feet, staggering backwards.

‘You …’ he says, his eyes wild. ‘When a man is cut, he should stay open. You close up. It is not right. You should be dead.’

His gaze darts up and down and from side to side; everywhere but at me.

‘I am not,’ I say simply.

His breathing is rough. ‘I do not—’ he begins, and stops. ‘I do not know you.’

He walks away. I inspect my miraculous arm, twisting it about and watching the line where I cut myself grow smooth and pink. After a while I pick up my axe and continue with my labours. I am determined to concentrate, for I do not wish to slip into another bout of this dangerous half-sleep. The others come back in; Alfred also, but he says nothing, and will not look at me.

I set my teeth and apply myself to my labour. I am a slaughter-man, I say to myself. I cut open the bodies of beasts. They stay open. I was cut, and I closed up. I did not bleed. I shake the troubling thoughts away. I must have been mistaken: I cannot have cut myself so deeply. These things are not possible.

The remainder of the day is simpler. Each beast waits patiently in line, and the greatest noise we hear is the sigh of each giving up its spirit gladly. At the end of the day, I walk out of the gate to find Alfred waiting.

‘Let’s be walking home, then,’ he says grudgingly.

He keeps half a pace ahead of me, and looks back every now and then, as though expecting something, eyes sliding to my forearm. I wince with the knowledge of my body and how it healed; and how he witnessed it happening.

‘Alfred?’

‘What?’ he growls.

‘You are my friend,’ I mumble.

‘Yes, yes,’ he mutters. ‘So you keep saying. Give it a rest.’

He thrusts his eyes ahead, walking faster so that I have to quicken my step to keep up with him. I chew the inside of my mouth until I taste iron. I hold out the package I have been given as my day’s perk: I bear the prize of an entire head, brains and all, for the way I turned things round, the gaffer said.

‘I like brains,’ I say. ‘Brains are tasty.’

He breathes out, slowing down so that I do not have to rush so.

‘They are,’ he agrees, and we fall back into step.

The evening is chilly: he is wrapped up in his coat like a boatman, breath standing before him, humming some tune I do not recognise. I try not to interrupt him. It is difficult. At last I speak.

‘About today—’ I start.

‘It is of no consequence,’ he snaps, picking up the pace again.

‘But it was—’

‘It was nothing!’ he cries. ‘It was a difficult day. That bullock! God, how it wouldn’t die! Enough to make any man see things.’

‘But, Alfred, at the slaughter-house—’

‘I do not want to talk about it. In fact, I remember nothing.’

‘Alfred—’

‘I said, I do not want to talk about it. Get a move on,’ he grunts. ‘It is time to get some food inside us.’

‘Oh.’

My mouth fills with water.

‘That’s the job. Think of that. Nothing else.’

‘Yes. You are right.’

He breathes out heavily, clouding the air around his head.

‘Of course I am. No more rambling. I’m freezing. Let’s get back and get this lot cooked. Of a sudden I have a powerful hunger upon me. Think how good it’ll taste. Any meat you’ve had a hand in is a clean and cheerful dish.’

He slaps my shoulder. I know that the events of today have brought me close to grasping something, but it is already beginning to slip away. If he would talk to me, maybe I could fix my understanding. But he will not.

We walk in silence to our lodging house, a narrow squeeze of a building caught between the muscular shoulders of the tenements to each side. Ours is little different, except the bricks are perhaps grimier, the steps to our cellar a little more slippery with spilt beer and bacon fat, the straw in our palliasses a little older. But there are just as many folk squeezed into the upper floors – three families to a room as I hear it. Their babies squall as lustily; their men and women argue just as cantankerously. It is our crowded ark, one of an armada of vessels crammed thick with humanity. I have no desire to move from my cellar, where everything is cosy and peaceful by comparison.

A woman from one of the upstairs rooms cooks the meat, and there is plenty to share. All the cellar-men fill up the kitchen, joining in the feast of my good fortune. One man brings beer, another, bread; for this is our way of a night. We eat until Alfred’s bad humour is quite taken away, and we are friendly once again. When we have finished, we return to the cellar and Alfred finds our pallets as sure as a seagull finds its nest from the hundreds on a cliff. I stretch out, cradled in the comfort of my companions patting their stomachs, smacking their lips and wiping gravy off their chins.

Alfred lolls on his elbow, picking at his buckled teeth with a straw. His rough sandy hair stands up in surprised tufts. He shifts his thin hips, cracks out a fart and laughs at the sound. His mouth is soft, for all his endeavours to hide it beneath a broad moustache.

‘You know what, Abel?’ he muses. ‘When we strike it rich, we’ll be out of here. Get a nicer room.’

‘Why would we want that? There are so many friends here.’

He scowls. ‘So I’m just one of many, am I?’

‘Not at all, Alfred. You are my dearest friend.’

‘Ah, get away with you.’

He is pleased, and I do not know why he demurs. It is true: I would not find my way through each day without his guidance. The thought is alarming, so I push it away. He clears his throat.

‘Time to reckon up, Abel.’ He rubs his palms together in pleasure. ‘Our little ritual.’

And I remember: every night before we turn in, I count out our wages.

‘This is for lodging,’ I say. ‘This for breakfast. And midday food. This for drink. And this left over.’

‘More drink?’ says Alfred.

‘Hmm. No. I need better boots.’

‘That will not buy you boots.’

‘Then I shall save each day until I have enough.’ I hand the money to him. ‘Will you keep it safe for me? I lose things, you know. I will forget where I have put it.’

Alfred laughs. ‘You’d forget your head!’

‘Yes, you’re a wooden-head, and no mistake!’ calls a man further down the row of sacks.

‘Old dozy!’ another man takes up the cry.

‘It is true,’ I say, for so it is.

‘Come on, lads,’ mutters Alfred.

‘Oh, we like him, Alfred; even if he is tuppence missing.’

‘You know there’s no harm in it.’

One of them punches my upper arm. ‘You’re our lucky charm.’

‘Not one of us has got hurt since you joined us.’

‘So we’re not going to chase you off, eh?’

‘Not our Abel.’

‘You’re a bit of a miracle, as I hear it.’

‘Fished you out of the mud, they did.’

‘You were mostly mud yourself.’

‘You should of been a goner. By all accounts.’

‘No-one as goes in the river comes out. Save you.’

‘Got a bit of luck you’d like to rub off on me?’

‘Come on, Abel, how about a good rub-down!’

They roar with laughter and I decide it is best to join in. I ache for them to say more. To paint in the blank picture of my forgetting.

‘You were in the papers and everything. Come on, Alf, show us.’

Alfred unbuttons the neck of his shirt to a scatter of playful whistles and draws out a much-folded sheet of newspaper. He lays it across his knee, smoothing out the folds carefully.

‘There you are,’ says one, leaning over Alfred’s shoulder and jabbing at the page.

‘Watch it, Pete. You’ll tear a bloody hole in it.’

‘Look, Abel. That’s you, that is.’

I squint at the small engraving: a man’s head; nose prominent, eyes dark and deep-set, a shadow of hair on the chin. Below, a cluster of uniformed men around a prone figure. They look very pleased with themselves. Mysterious Gentleman Rescued, reads the headline. Startling Discovery, of Particular Interest.

‘You can read it?’

I realise I have been speaking out loud.

‘Didn’t know you were educated.’

‘Neither did I,’ I say.

They laugh, and are easy with me again.

‘You can see why they thought you were that Italian.’

‘Go on, say something wop. You know you can.’

I do not have to think: the words fly easily to my tongue. ‘Piacere di conoscerla.’

‘He’s a living marvel!’

‘Yes, but not that posh one, as went missing.’

‘They found him with his throat cut.’

‘And his trousers down!’

‘So you’re common as muck, like the rest of us.’

‘Better off with us lot, eh, Abel?’

‘I am,’ I agree, and it pleases them greatly.

‘Why did you jump?’ says one, more thoughtfully.

‘I do not remember,’ I say. ‘Maybe I fell in.’

‘Lot of drunks fall in. No offence.’

‘I am not offended.’

‘You don’t seem like a drunk.’

‘Well, you weren’t in the pudding club. That’s why the ladies tend to take a late swim.’

They chuckle again, and after a while Alfred shoos them away.

‘Don’t chase them off.’

‘Only trying to help out a pal.’ He sulks. ‘Give you a bit of peace.’

‘I know. But I like to hear them talk. Truly, I don’t remember.’

‘Remember what?’

‘Any of it. Falling in the river. Being pulled out. Anything before this cellar.’

‘Now you’re pulling my leg.’

‘Alfred, I am not.’

‘Abel, I know you’re a wooden-head at the best of times …’ He stops. ‘You mean it?’

‘I want to remember. I can’t. I look into myself and find nothing. Each morning I wake up …’

He looks worried. I decide to stop. The look changes to thoughtful, and then he smiles.

‘It’ll come back,’ he declares, with a certainty I do not share. ‘Big shock, that’s what it is. Thing like that’d scare any man out of his wits. Make him imagine all kinds of nonsense.’

‘You are sure?’

‘Course I am. Wouldn’t lie to you, would I?’

‘No. You are my friend.’

‘You keep me straight, Abel, you do.’ He smiles, and grasps my shoulder.

‘Right, listen up!’ bawls one of the cellar-men. All heads turn. ‘I am chief bully for the evening, and I have a treat for us all.’

He flourishes his hand towards a woman at his elbow. There are a few whistles and rumbles of approval.

‘Some of you know her, some of you don’t. Not a tooth in her head. Eh, May?’

The woman grins, demonstrating the truth of his statement.

‘So, steady up, lads, finish your idle chatter,’ he says. ‘A gobble for sixpence; a helping hand for three.’

They gather into a knot and lay out their coins. She seems unconcerned by the number of acts they are negotiating, eyes brightening only when the take is firmly stowed in her bodice. She leads the first into the corner. The rest turn their backs and share a pipe, acting as though they cannot hear his shallowing gasps.

‘You’ve got a bit left over, haven’t you, Abel?’ says Alfred casually.

‘I have,’ I say.

He waves towards the female, who is already taking her next customer in hand. I consider her fingers working at my body in a similar fashion.

‘It’s there for the taking.’

‘No,’ I decide.

He smiles. ‘Me neither.’

Although I do not wish to participate, I find it difficult to take my attention from the hunched bodies in the darkness. One of the men, satisfied now and lounging on his mattress, notices the direction of my gaze.

‘Come on, cold-fish,’ he shouts. ‘You can have one on me if you like.’ He tosses a few coins in the air. ‘It’ll make a man of you.’

He laughs, not unpleasantly, and those men who are not distracted by the woman turn to regard me.

‘You have got one, haven’t you?’

‘Maybe it’s a tiddler,’ chaffs one, waggling his little finger.

‘She doesn’t mind small fry, do you, May?’

The woman hoots, washing down her most recent bout with a mouthful of beer and scratching at her skirts.

‘Maybe it’s as lifeless as he is. That soaking in the river has made it as much good as a herring.’

‘The river’ll do that to a man. Turn his every part to mud.’

‘Don’t plague him so,’ says Alfred, and their eyes turn from me to him. He is examining the laces of his boots as though they are fascinating objects worthy of deep study.

‘Only our bit of fun, Alf.’

‘He doesn’t mind, do you, mate?’

‘No,’ I say truthfully.

One of them thumps me on the back.

‘See? We’re only jesting.’

‘You’re all right, Abel, even if you can’t get it up. Anytime you change your mind, though, first one’s on us. Right, lads?’

They murmur assent, raising their smokes and cups in a toast. Then, finished with their companionable teasing, they settle to the more stimulating activities of the evening. After some time, the woman completes her labours and departs.

It occurs to me that I have heard taunts like theirs before, and I scrabble in my head for when it might have been. Last night? Last year? The harder I search, the more elusive the answer. I close my eyes, and it comes to me: I stand encircled, hands bound. My mind stirs unpleasantly and I shake my head. Perhaps I do not want to remember, after all. But now I have called them up, they will not leave me.

Dead fish.

Dead man.

Corpse-kisser.

I have heard every name before and they do not sting. My mouth fills with bile. I blink, and am back in the cellar. Alfred is peering at me closely.

‘You all right, Abel? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I am well,’ I lie.

‘They don’t mean anything by it,’ he says, and pats my knee.

‘I know.’

‘Don’t pay them any mind.’

‘I shall not.’

‘Some men are so,’ he reassures me.

‘Yes.’

He is sitting so close his thigh is pressed against mine.

‘Alfred,’ I say quietly.

‘Yes, Abel?’ he breathes.

‘Please let me speak to you.’

‘Is it about today?’ he grumbles.

‘Yes.’

‘I am tired, Abel. I do not wish to talk any longer.’

‘Please?’

‘Go to sleep, Abel.’

He turns, curving his back away from me. The cellar quietens into sleep.

I am left alone, now that there are no distractions. I roll up my sleeve, uncovering my left arm. It is the same shape and colour as it was this morning, the hair as dark, and sprouting a thick trail from elbow to wrist in the same fashion. It matches the right arm perfectly, except for the scar: now a pale silver trail.

I struggle to believe that it is a part of my body; yet when I cut into it, it was as familiar as looking into a dish of potatoes. I try to make sense of this, and tell myself it is because I spend my days and nights cutting open beasts, and am used to the sight of muscle, bone, yellow fat, grey slippery organs. I am not convinced. It is not the same. My flesh is quick; the beasts are dead.

How could my body accomplish such a feat of healing? I puzzle over this riddle but find no answer. Only a creeping fear: no true, honest man heals like this. Therefore, I am a monster.

My mind strains to escape from this terrible conclusion, for how can I live with such knowledge, with myself? I desire an answer, and for that answer to be that I am mistaken. My most sincere wish is to be man and not miracle. There is of course only one way to prove that I am a simple fellow who bleeds and heals in the slow, painful way of ordinary folk. I must cut myself again, and prove it wrong.

With a stolen candle stub in my pocket, I take myself to the yard privy. Alfred does not wake to ask me what I am about. I get out my pocket-knife. My fist closes about the handle, the blade hovers; I press the point into my forearm, where the last trace of the scar remains. I will cut myself in the same spot, and it will bleed, and I will have to bind it up. Yes. I will prove it was nothing more than a freakish mistake.

I draw the blade along my arm in a straight line, and my skin separates as it should. I close my eyes in relief, but when I open them once more I see the gash beginning to draw shut. It is most curious. I run the blade along the new join and tease it open. My body obeys, and parts its lips, only to begin closing once again the moment I lift the knife away.

A shallow cut proves nothing. I dig a little deeper. There is pain now, but one that rouses me to a strange wakefulness. As a man swimming underwater breaks the surface and feels breath fly back into his body, so do I fly into myself. My body sparks into liveliness, including that masculine part of me, which also raises its sleepy head. I grind my teeth: how can I possibly feel arousal with the cutting open of my arm? It is shameful. I would rather be the piece of dead meat that everyone calls me than this degraded creature.

I examine the wound, excitement mixing with horror. It gapes, and I can see through to the dark red within. I have seen enough meat cut open to know there should be blood, and now. Tentatively, I push the knife back in, draw it out once more. This time I should leak, but I do not. I turn my arm around in the small light, wondering at this mystery. The candle shows me what I do not wish to be real: other than a moist smearing on the metal itself, all is dry.

I stare at my disobedient arm, and once more the ragged edges of skin begin their drawing together. I push my finger into the hole to stop my body re-forming itself, but the flesh closes, pushing me out with a firm pressure, like the tongue of a cow. It takes a little while longer, but there is no halting the knitting-up of the slit.

I shake my head and tell myself that this is not a proper test. Perhaps only my left arm is possessed of these strange qualities. I should cut a different part of my body – but not my other arm, for that is too similar. I roll up the leg of my trousers to the knee, select a spot on the calf and push in the point of the blade.

A drop of blood trickles down, catching in the mat of hair. My heart leaps with joy; I am bleeding. But no more follows and already the cut is barely to be seen. I jab at a different spot and feel a fresh surge of hope when a fat red bead falls as far as my ankle. A second drop spills from the wound, followed by a third. Breath gathers tightly in my throat. I am a normal man: I bleed.

Then the flow thickens, and stops. The wound blinks its eye, and closes. This is not possible. I must be normal; I have to be. There must be some place on my body that does not heal. But where? I drag my trouser-leg up as far as it will go and poke the blade into the pale ochre skin of my thigh. There is barely a smear of scarlet for my trouble. I try again; healing occurs straight away.

Maybe I need to go faster, to beat my body at its game of healing. But however quickly I jab the point of the knife, each cut starts to close up before I have time to make the next; the quicker I stab myself the quicker the doors of my flesh slam shut, matching my frenzy for hurt with a frenzy for healing. My breath scales a ladder of panting gasps as I climb closer and closer to myself. I am – I am – I am not Abel. Rather, I am not merely Abel. I am broad as the desert, tall as the sky, deep as the ocean. I know the answer to all my questions. It is all so clear, so simple. I am—

So close. I soar towards the sun of understanding. As my body heals, heat sears my wings and I plummet into familiar darkness. There is no attainment to be found: my hand wearies, and I cease my battle. The knife is barely marked with moisture; the skin of my legs and arms flecked with creamy marks that fade as I watch. A few moments more and they are gone. My ribs heave up and down, and I realise I am weeping. The candle gutters and goes out.

I do not understand what manner of man can skewer himself with a knife and shed not one drop of blood, and have his body remake itself. I look like a man. I eat, drink, shit, sleep, lift and carry, the same as every one of my fellows. But I am unlike them. I do not know who I am, or what I am.

I hide a great secret, one that marks me as grotesque. Am I man or animal? I can no longer call myself either: I do not have the comfort of calling myself a beast, for a beast can be butchered for the use of mankind, and I cannot serve any such purpose. Nor can I say that I am a man, for no man can do what I have done: cut myself and heal, against nature. It is terrifying. It raises my hopes towards understanding only to dash them most cruelly. It thrills and humiliates me. What kind of creature am I? I have no answer.

I stumble back to the cellar, crawl back to my mattress. Alfred is humped beneath his jacket. I want to shake him awake, and smile, and call him slug-a-bed, and thereby assure myself of my humanity. But it is the middle of the night. I close up the knife and put it under my blanket. There is nothing left to do but attempt to sleep.

My eyes bore into the darkness. I see my work: carcases swaying from the ceiling, each one cleanly cut, ready for the butcher’s slab; I know they are all my doing. I am proud and slap the nearest, feeling the cool clean flesh against my palm. I know this: it is what I do. I name each part: the shank, the loin, the flank, the rib, the wing, the blade, the clod, the words sinking into some deep, comforting place. I am a slaughter-man. It is all I am. A plain and simple man.

Let sleep come, I beg the night. The soft delight in which I take such pleasure. Where there is neither fear nor worry. It does not hear my prayer. The questions torment me. Why do I not bleed? How can I heal like this? I feel the granite ice of my mind begin to crack with such a groaning that it rends me head to heel. A cleft appears and light spears through the chink, casting fearsome shadows. I want to force myself shut, return to that safe vacancy where all is quiet. Yet I am also ravenous. I hunger to know what is in that great light, what I might discover when I shine the lamp of understanding upon myself.

I struggle with the need to know and the need to run. I blunder into nothingness: a dark room, darker than the inside of closed eyes, where I hold out my hands and pat the black air, afraid of stumbling into walls, or ditches, or worse. A day ago, I was a wiped plate. I was empty, clean, untouched. Now, I stand in the slaughter-house and see my body cut open, peeled by my own hand and yet healing. I do not want this body. I am too frightened to close my eyes again, for fear of what I might find there.

The next morning, Alfred does not need to rouse me, for I am already awake.

‘Let’s get to work,’ he grunts, and it is all the greeting I have from him.

I want his smile, the warmth of his eyes when I call him friend, the easy way he guides me into the day. We walk in silence, the air freezing between us. I try to think of a topic of conversation that does not involve cutting. I fail, so great is my need to be unburdened.

‘Yesterday. It was – strange,’ I try.

‘Indeed? I don’t recall,’ he snarls and hides his face behind his collar.

‘But, Alfred—’

‘Oh, can I have no peace? There’s nothing to talk about, Abel. Nothing.’

I grasp his shoulder and swing him about. All I want to do is talk to him. I do not understand why he will not listen.

‘Abel, get your hands off me. You’re really pushing your luck.’

‘Alfred, I am …’

My voice quavers, and his features soften. He takes my arm and pulls me to the wall, glancing up and down the street.

‘All right, all right; if you are truly that upset. Let me help you, then. Tell me.’

‘In truth? You want to hear?’

He sighs. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Yesterday, when I cut myself …’ I gasp. ‘You saw it. I healed.’ I chew on the words, straining to free themselves from my mouth.

‘Very well. I saw it. But it wasn’t so deep. Perhaps.’

‘I did it again,’ I breathe.

‘Oh, come now. No you didn’t,’ he says, forcing a brightness I do not share. It does not ease my confusion.

‘Last night. While you slept.’

‘You’re mistaken. Maybe you had a nightmare. Don’t carry on so.’

‘Alfred—’

‘This is too strange for me, Abel. You’re a man like any other.’

‘What if I am not?’

‘You are. Think it and you can make it so. Come now, give me a smile and leave it be.’

‘But don’t you ever have strange thoughts about your body?’

‘Thoughts?’ He looks startled, and draws closer. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘But, Alfred—’

‘But Alfred, but Alfred,’ he sneers, in a mincing mimic of my voice. ‘Let’s get breakfast and drop this.’

‘I am not hungry.’

‘Christ, I thought I was in a bad mood,’ he snaps, and sticks his hands into his pockets. ‘But you take the bloody biscuit.’

We walk on in silence. I wish I could take back my words.

‘Alfred. Please do not be angry with me.’

‘Shut up, Abel. You’re tiring me out and we haven’t even started work yet.’

It is a long walk to the slaughter-house. From the first beast brought in, I find myself looking over my shoulder, starting at every twitch of thought, wary of where my mind might lead me. However, no fearsome pictures come to plague me. I would like to be sure it is the force of my will that keeps me free, but I cannot be sure.

I lift my arm, let it fall, and another carcase splits down the middle, the meat pale in the weak light. I push it aside and they bring in the next. It is easy work, the easiest I know. For all that I try to lose myself in the raising and falling of the cleaver, the line of uncountable carcases waiting to be split by my firm and unerring blow, my mind will not let off its needling.

I am steeled to drop my blade and run at the first intimation of strangeness; I keep my sleeve buttoned at the cuff. I do not want to be catching sight of my healed arm all the time for it continues to fill me with a sick feeling.

I do not want to drowse, do not want to be taken to any place but here, do not want to see the things I have seen. I press my attention to the slaughter-work with a great passion, and in under an hour every hook is hanging with the carcases of the beasts I have killed. My companions are delighted with the speed of the work, and go outside to smoke a pipe. For all their friendliness, I do not wish for company, so I busy myself cleaning all of the cleavers.

I am confused. I should be dead. Every beast I have ever slaughtered tells me the plain truth of it. When a man is cut, he should stay cut. But I heal; and even more disquietingly, I do not even bleed. When a man is drowned, he is drowned. But not me: they tell me I was as good as a drowned man when they pulled me out of the river. I am no better than any other man.

I have heard over and over how I am a miracle: spewed up on to the banks of the Thames. How no man comes out alive after supping on its liquor, but I stood up from my bed after three days, was working in less than two weeks. I do not disbelieve the tale; but it could have happened to a different man. I cannot remember my tumble into the river, nor anything before: nothing of home, father, mother.

Alfred tells me it will return to me in time. But what if I am concealing some terrible secret from myself? I fear what I might have forgotten. Is that what I was so close to discovering when I cut myself last night? Am I running from some ghastly crime? Am I evil? Maybe I am a thief, a footpad, a murderer and do not know it. I shake these wonderings from my head: I do not want to fall into distraction and cut myself again.

Why not? breathes the voice in my head, quite calm and reasonable. You will heal. You have seen it.

I look at myself in the bright edge of the steel blade. I see brown eyes edged with dark lashes, a beaked nose, a broad mouth. Not the face of a wolf, or a bear. A man.

This is what you are, says the voice. However different or strange, you are a man.

I am not convinced. I shake the voice away, for all its kindness, and examine the sides of beef, hoping the sight of their symmetry might calm me. As I watch, the nearest carcase starts to sway in a current of air I cannot feel, gently back and forth.

The meat grows darker, oozing with moisture. The ribs swell out, only to be sucked in. It is breathing; air whistling through the severed windpipe, the stump of its neck twisting from side to side, searching for its missing head. Then the forelegs start to twitch, straining to touch the floor; the hind legs kick out to free themselves from the meat-hook.

Then they all begin: every dangling carcase dancing, thrashing back and forth on the hooks; fighting to free themselves, to find their scattered parts and knit themselves back together.

I hack at the monster that began this vile waltz; but with each slash it grows ever more frantic, as it fights to be free. I do not know what to do – there is no throat to cut nor heart to slice out, these things having been done already – yet I strike and strike again at the dead thing for there is nothing else for me to do, but it will not lie still, and I weep with the ghastly hopelessness of it. A hand grips my shoulder and the axe falls from my hand.

‘You, man!’ shouts a voice, and I turn to see the face of my pay-master. ‘What are you doing?’ he bellows.

I open and close my mouth.

He presses his face close to mine. ‘I said, what in damnation are you doing?’

My mouth is empty.

‘Look!’ he bawls, punching me so hard I stagger backwards. ‘Look, you bastard!’ he shouts again, and I do look: at shredded pieces of flesh and bone on the floor, the remains of the carcase hanging before me. All is still.

‘Waste my fucking meat, would you? You fucking lunatic. Get out of here and don’t come back.’

I stare at the floor, at the quiet bones.

‘I said, sod off.’

He thumps me again. I slip on a piece of fat and barely save myself from falling. He picks up my blade, brandishes it.

‘Now. Get out. Unless you want to replace the carcase you’ve just ruined. I always knew you were trouble.’

I run. On the street I drag off my apron and let it fall into the gutter. I stare at it a long time. Alfred finds me there when he leaves work, for I have forgotten the way back to our lodgings. We walk in silence. When we arrive, I do not know what to do except lie down.

I barely have time to close my eyes before the silt of my mind stirs and a picture floats up, urgent as a stream of bubbles from the bottom of a pond. I am scrambling over coiled rope, thick as a man’s thigh, headlong to the stern of a boat, its deck treacherous with oil and lurching from side to side in mountainous seas. I’m almost thrown off my feet as the hulk heels sharply.

I grip the iron railing and peer into the dashing spume of the sea, far below. Jump, commands the voice of the waters. My arms await you. I haul myself up the rungs to sway on the topmost bar.

‘Wait for me: I am coming!’ I yelp into the filthy spray.

The wind smacks the words back into my mouth.

Hurry, I will not wait.

Suddenly there are other voices: men approaching, screaming. I know the words mean Stop, come down, madman. I shall not be turned aside. This is not madness. This is escape. If falling on to land cannot kill me, then perhaps the death granted by water might.

I jump, and am sucked down into a darkness cut into small flickering pieces; my jaw falls open at the hinge, mouth taking in a slow river of silt, filling my lungs with cold hard fists. Weed slops around my tongue like a woman’s hair; the water is a stone in my lungs but there is no pain, no fire.

I move a piece of wood and it is my arm; I beat it against my face until the bridge of my nose swings towards my left eye. My arms do not break the surface; they stir the rusty mud and hide the broken window of the light, burrowing me deeper and deeper into the long night of the ocean.

The mouths of fish flay me to the bone; as fast as they nibble the fruit of my flesh, it restores itself. They return to feed on me, over and over. I beg the sea to grind me into mulch, for I ache to lie still for ever. I shall not come out, I wail. But it pushes me away. Throws me out, on to earth. I surface from tea-brown water, flesh boggy from its long stewing, gasping for my first breath as the new air slaps life into my lungs. But I want to die, cries the voice of my soul.

The heavy embrace of the river resolves into the hands of children searching through my pockets, fingers boring holes into my shoulders as they strip me. My ears unlock to their complaints.

Not much here.

Not so much as a bloody wipe.

Waste of bloody time.

He’s a dead one.

I want to be a dead one for them. Blood settles in a slow night-fall into the pouches of my cheeks. The muscles of my face remember; begin to knit and heal and make me whole again, and they are never tired. I am already forgetting that I have done this. My body remembers, and keeps it secret. I go forward into darkness, into the fear. To find that light I saw and lost.




EVE

London, March–April 1857







Mama and I thought the knock at the door was the man come for the collars I had sewn; but a stranger’s voice gusted down the passageway to my customary sheltering place in the crook of the door, out of sight of the street.

‘My dear madam, forgive this intrusion,’said the voice.

I could sense Mama’s eyes creasing at the corners, the marbles of her thoughts clacking together. Who is he? Do I owe him money? The air rippled as he raised his hat; the stitching in his coat creaked as he bowed politely. I heard him say, ‘Is your sister at home?’ And Mama’s surprised, ‘Sister? I have no sister,’ and only then halting, realising it was flattery.

She brought him in, and he bloomed to the very edges of our meagre walls. He was of middling height, but held himself taller; of a middling girth, but bulged himself fatter. He pigeoned out his chin, which was shaved so close I wondered if he hated his own beard and moustaches. He looked at the small table and the sewing laid upon it; the truckle-bed huddled in the corner – everywhere but at me.

Mama stared at his waistcoat, a gaudy affair of vermilion brocade before which I could have warmed my hands. He turned this way and that, the fabric gleaming, complimenting Mama on the tidy industry of the room, the delicate embroidery of the collars, and every sentence held an apology for having so intemperately disturbed the retirement of her afternoon. His hands peeped from the tight cuffs of his shirt, soft as a midwife’s; there was a shine on the seat of his trousers, a stain of sweat creeping around his hat-brim.

Think of him peeled from his linen, his wool, his velvet, whispered Donkey-Skin.

I shushed her, and the noise made him turn, as though he noticed me for the first time. He bowed, very slowly.

‘Dearest miss,’ he breathed.

I dropped my eyes, tried to find a place to conceal my paws, and settled for behind my back.

‘Do not be alarmed, dear miss,’ he said. ‘I mean neither you nor your mother any mischief.’

Don’t be alarmed, sneered Donkey-Skin through her nose. I giggled: she was a very good mimic.

‘Have some manners,’ hissed Mama, and I was quiet.

‘Do not scold her on my account,’ he said. ‘It is fitting for a young lady to be shy in the presence of a stranger. Therefore let me introduce myself, I entreat you.’

He cleared his throat, and puffed himself out some more.

‘I am Josiah Arroner. Amateur Scientist. Gentleman of Letters. Entrepreneur.’

Taxidermist? murmured Donkey-Skin. Careful, girl, or he’ll skin and stuff you before you know it.

Mama was already bustling about him, offering him the sturdier of our little chairs, bleating excuses for the lack of tea, lack of sugar, lack of milk. He took out a sovereign from his pocket with the carelessness of finding a coat-button there and shone its little sun upon the dullness of our room.

‘Ah, the labours of a caring mother. They are never done, are they, madam? Pray do send a boy to bring us tea, and milk, and sugar – plenty of sugar.’ He smiled. ‘And a penny for the lad himself.’

‘Oh no, sir, I could not,’ Mama lied.

‘You are right. How unfeeling of me to expect you to work whilst I rest! No, it is not fitting that you should prepare tea for an unexpected caller. I observed a restaurant on the corner as I came this way. Pray, send the boy there instead, so he may fetch a can of good sweet tea ready-made, a plate of bread and butter and some slices of beef. I declare I am a little hungry and would not eat alone.’

Mama paused for precisely as long as was necessary to indicate her treasured respectability; then raced down the passage and bawled to the woman upstairs for her eldest to run an errand, now. I stared at my lap and counted the seconds before she returned and resumed fussing once more about our guest’s comfort. I was the one hairy as a dog, but I believe she would have rolled on her back and stuck her paws in the air if she had thought it might please him.

I watched him through my eyebrows, simpering at my mother, making little jokes at which she tittered. When the food arrived, Mama left the room to argue about the change and he occupied himself gazing at the tobacco walls, the empty grate, the unlit gas-bracket, the cracked picture of a cow up to its hooves in a puddle, once again avoiding the sight of me. I folded my hands, stroking the fur on my knuckles and wondering why my breathing seemed so excessively noisy this afternoon.

The boy followed Mama into the room, his right cheek glowing with the pinch of her fingers. Mama scurried like a girl-of-all-work, finding a plate here, a cloth for the table there, chasing the lad upstairs for a third chair, because our visitor refused to stay seated whilst one or other of us remained standing. At last the tea was poured, the beef slapped on to a little plate beside the bread, and all of it sitting between us, curling at the edges.

‘Take some,’ Mama urged me, ‘and do not be so ungrateful.’

I took the largest slice of meat, rolled it into a cigar and placed it in my mouth where it collapsed deliciously on my tongue. The more I chewed, the more delectable it became: I could not remember when I had tasted anything so good. We dined in silence, Mama and I endeavouring to eat as slowly as possible. The plate emptied. Mr Arroner cleared his throat once more.

‘Dear ladies, I hope you will forgive such a rude invasion into the peaceful business of your lives.’

He sipped at his tea with feminine delicacy.

Donkey-Skin snorted: Why does he not growl, and toss it down his throat?Why does he not drink it like a man?

I ignored her. He turned to Mama.

‘With your permission, I would present myself as a friend to you, madam. And may I blushingly say it, to your delightful and most remarkable daughter.’

Delightful? said Donkey-Skin, pretending to search the room. Remarkable? Of whom does he speak? You? Ha!

He put down his cup and pressed his hand to his breast. ‘Ah. Dear madam, I can dissemble no longer. I am a simple man and your wits have found me out: I confess it is indeed your daughter with whom I wish to be more closely acquainted.’

Mama’s tea-cup paused partway to her lips. ‘My daughter?’

‘I have heard of her. By reputation.’ He coughed gently. ‘I have also heard of certain cruelties visited upon her person. I declare this has moved me deeply. Ah! To hear of the callous spite of those who neither understand nor appreciate that which is truly gifted, truly different, truly extraordinary! I resolved that I would visit and offer myself as a kind soul possessed of fellow feeling. One who might dare to offer his hand humbly in friendship.’

Mama blinked at this vision. He scraped his chair to face me directly. I raised a lavish eyebrow. Moisture gleamed each side of his nose and upon the thick curtain of his lips.

‘My dearest miss, I entreat you, do not dismiss me as incapacitated with impetuous foolishness. It will be clear to you that I am no longer a young man. However I do declare that it is most distracting to find myself in such an intimate setting with you.’ He took a deep breath and bowed his head. ‘I hope you might forgive such a passionate outburst.’

I picked up the last slice of bread and beef and began to devour it.

‘Ah. I have said too much.’

I looked at him, in agreement for that moment. Mama kicked me under the table, and it wobbled.

Donkey-Skin laughed, and then grew quiet. He’s lying, she whispered.

I know, I thought in return, but discovered that I was blushing. I swallowed my mouthful.

‘Dearest miss, I can see by your bashfulness that it is true. I have spoken too hastily, and have offended your modest nature.’

I wondered if he thought he could read me through my fur.

Perhaps he is not lying, suggested Donkey-Skin.

Mama’s hands trembled; she could not lift the tea-cup to her lips.

‘What a fool I am!’ he continued. ‘Why should you trust me, when you do not know who I am? When I have not shown you my recommendations?’

He reached inside his coat and brought out a folded paper with fine scrollwork at its head, declaring itself sent from the Royal Society of Philanthropic Science. Mama crabbed her eyes at the scramble of fancy letters, taking in the sealing wax and the quality of the ink.

‘Read the whole, madam. The whole, I beg of you. I have noth-ing to conceal. I am a scientist, it is true; but alas, not wealthy. My studies are of the unrecognised kind. There is a fearful prejudice against men such as myself: men possessed of intelligence and skill, but lacking the requisite high birth. It is the greatest scourge and scandal of this society we live in.’

Mama nodded as though she understood what he was talking about.

‘However, there are gentlemen who recognise the talents of a man who does not have Lord So-and-So as his father, nor Lady Blank as his mother. Upon them do I rely, and to them I turn for encouragement and honest employment.’

Mama chewed her lower lip. ‘It is a fine document,’ she pronounced, when enough time had passed that our guest might think she had read it.

I scanned it carefully; it was a fine piece of work, full of phrases praising his tact, extolling his intelligence, his application, his scholarly virtues.

‘You appear before us a paragon,’ I said, when I had read enough to get a taste of the whole.

Donkey-Skin read it over my shoulder. Too princely, she tsked. He is lying after all.

He rocked back, and I hoped the chair would not faint beneath his well-fed shoulders.

‘So do men find me. I would not be so bold as to heap such compliments upon myself.’

He bent forward, bringing his face very close to mine. The chair groaned.

‘My dear miss, I desire most earnestly that you might trust me.’

He smelled of tea and beef and something else, some underlying spice I knew but could not name.

‘In some small way I know what it is to face the hurts of the world. A world which turns aside that which it does not comprehend. I offer you the hand of comradeship, and a fine understanding of the world’s wounds.’

He made one of his deep inhalations and my breath was sucked into his nostrils.

‘I know what it is to gird on a sword and buckler to withstand the onslaughts of society. I know the daily battle – the loneliness of the fight!’

He leaned back then, and I steadied myself from tumbling into his wake. Could he be the prince Donkey-Skin told me about? She wasn’t answering. I glanced at Mama, her tea growing cold in its cup, and saw the famished look written on her: hungry to be rid of me, to walk out of the house without the thought of me warming the shadow of her steps. She seethed with hope, and guilt, and fear; and though he saw less than half of it, I knew he saw enough to wet her, stick his thumb into her innards and spin her like a pot on a wheel.

‘Dear ladies.’ He stood, squeaking back his chair. ‘I have taken up too much of your valuable time. I will leave you now.’

He stood before me, and I dropped my eyes to the floor. His boots gleamed. I thought of his elbow, in and out, in and out, pumping a shine into the leather. He lifted himself on to the balls of his feet, lowered himself, and then rose again. My neck ached from staring at the rug.

‘Madam,’ he coughed. ‘You have a jewel here. A pearl of great price.’

I lifted my head at last, to snort a laugh into his face, but a fire had been lit in his eyes and it quenched all my sharpness. I had a sudden fancy he intended to swallow me up, then and there, thrusting his teeth into the pit of my stomach. I found myself quivering.

‘I have stayed too long. I should not wish to tire you or your esteemed mother any longer with my tiresome chattering.’

Mama jumped up, begging him to stay, but he would go with the most earnest politeness. I stayed seated, and did not speak a word to hold him. Still he paused, holding my eyes with his.

‘I beg your mother’s permission to leave you a small gift. Perhaps you would look upon it kindly after I have gone?’

He did not place it into my hand directly, but laid it on the table.

‘This token is for you,’ he said. ‘Open it later and think of the giver.’

Mama stood behind me and twisted the hair on the back of my neck so that I had to grind my teeth against the pain.

‘Thank you, Mr Arroner, for your kind attention,’ I squeezed out.

‘Dear madam,’ he said to Mama over the crown of my head. ‘I thank you for permitting me to visit you and your enchanting daughter today. Most devoutly I hope you might permit me to call upon you at a future date? If that does not inconvenience you overmuch?’

I felt the tremor of Mama’s frantic nodding. He gripped the brim of his hat and tipped it to me, flapped the tails of his coat like a ringmaster. I looked down straightway.

‘Dear ladies. I will now take my leave, and wish you a pleasant afternoon, and a more pleasant evening.’

His feet crossed the floor; the door opened, he stepped through it, and the door closed.

I hovered my hand in the empty space where he had stood only a few moments before and felt the air that had just now lapped his cheek.

Mama returned. ‘Well, then?’ she whispered.

‘Well what, Mama?’ I yawned.

‘The gift. What has he left you?’

‘I had almost forgot it,’ I lied. ‘I suppose I must see what it is.’

I stood and walked to the table very slowly, for all that Mama would not stop clucking for me to hurry. It was a kidskin pouch, glazed to a top-of-the-milk sheen, the breadth of my palm and containing something square and unforgiving: a piece of slate, perhaps. I lay my hand where his had been and took the pulse of whatever lay within, testing the beat of its tiny heart. I undid the string and ferreted my hand into the smooth dark burrow, soft inside as it was outside.

Donkey-Skin was whispering: Tight as a purse and you are the coin inside. Are you so ready to be spent?

My palm dampened inside the tight grip of the bag. It could almost make me believe I was hairless. I felt him watching me, so close his breath warmed my ear. Slip in your hand, he said. Discover what is within the suppleness of this little pouch. Think of me as you do it; for I am watching the expression in your remarkable face as you draw out the treasure I have given you.

Blood crackled in my veins; my fingers closed around a hard object and I pulled out a looking-glass. It froze at the sight of my face and leapt away from me, clattering against the skirting board.

Mama shrank away. ‘It is a vile thing!’ she cried. ‘What a cruel gift. Throw it away!’

I bent and picked it up. It had not suffered the smallest chip. I looked at it more carefully: it did not jeer ugly, ugly, ugly. Did not wink its broad silver eye and hiss, Who are you to crack me from side to side? How dare you look into a glass? Leave mirror-gazing to pretty girls with plump pink cheeks.

Instead, it shimmered with admiration at my hair: how it waterfalled down each side of my nose! See the curls twirling on each temple! It admired my beard: oh, the softness! Those honeyed lights shining like a twist of caramel sugar!

Who gave you that? asked Donkey-Skin, peering over my shoulder. She picked at a lump of mud in her hair.

I smiled. ‘No one important.’

She laughed, and her teeth rattled in my ears. The Cat-Faced Girl has got a beau! At last, at last, Beast has got a Beau. Let Heaven rejoice! Ma can be shot of you.

I had to smile. She was my friend. ‘I think it’s time for you to go,’ I said, not taking my eyes off the mirror.

When I was a child, I had Donkey-Skin for my friend, a thing sewn from raw-headed scraps of dreams and rag-tag stories, knitted out of all the words my mother could not say, from the grandmothers I never met, the fag-ends of fathers who never stayed long enough for me to know their names. Now I was a woman. It was time to put away childish things.

Me? Go? she hissed. Now? Not likely. You need me more than ever.

That night, as I lay in the bed beside Mama, I was glad that it was warm; it meant that she curled away on to the far side of the mattress, and I desired greatly to be alone. I stretched out on my back, listening to her mutter herself to sleep, about how hot I was to lie next to, why did I heat the bed so, it was impossible to sleep with such a hearthrug next to her, and over and over, ungrateful child, thoughtless and uncaring, to forgetall the years I have protected her from mirrors, until the words drifted into deep breathing.

I allowed my thoughts to creep out and fill the room: thoughts so thrilling and wicked I was sure they would wake her. I imagined Mr Arroner coming back into the room, standing at the foot of this very bed. He shucked off his clothing, piece by piece, and I watched him the while, my excitement growing. Then all at once he sprang: leapt on to me, pressing his face deep into my belly and biting me fiercely, teeth sharp as knives, but not fiercely enough to satisfy; not fiercely enough to tear my hide. I wanted him to rip me open, and my voice begged him, Harder. Bite me, my love, harder. Harder.

In the morning Mama sighed and held her aching places, as though the holding might make them sting the less. I feigned sleepiness, which was not difficult, because I had had so little in the night. She called me lazy.

‘Do you wish the world to wait upon you?’

She was angry. I did not care. I was courted. I offered to rub her feet.

‘I am not helpless yet,’ she grumbled.

‘I will have him,’ I said to her and tried to make it sound like submission and not greed. ‘If you will allow it.’

I tipped my head to one side, playing the shy maid at the thought of marriage, a ring on my finger, a handful of hurled rice. A wedding night.

‘You’ll leave me,’ she said. ‘Then what will I become?’

I had stopped listening. I dreamed of a priest with a swim of lace around his throat, four white horses pulling my carriage, hymns sung, bells rung, a fat cushion of orange-blossom in my arms; breakfast after, with beer for the men, tea for the ladies. I pictured myself swathed in a sumptuous gown of the latest organdie, primped with tulle so fine as to be almost invisible, a veil of tambour lace floating around my head.

Donkey-Skin leaned on her elbow, yawning at my fancies.

‘Are you not excited?’ I gasped.

Lace tears easily, she said, digging in her ears with a long fingernail. And you can never get the stains out of organdie. I’d rather have a sturdy pair of boots and a five-pound note tucked inside them.

‘You don’t have a breath of romance in the whole of you,’ I sulked.

Good thing too, she said, drily.

‘Won’t you be happy for me?’

There was no answer.

‘Glad to see the dirty back of you!’ I shouted into the emptiness. I would not let her spoil my day.

Mama begged and borrowed plates and saucers from every room in the house, so that my wedding feast was served on a higgledy-piggledy mismatch of crockery and all of it chipped and cracked. I barely noticed. I believe Mama could have poured tea from a leather bucket and I would not have cared.

All morning she was a fury of bread-buttering, slicing it so thin you could have hung it at the window and seen through to the houses opposite. There were three vast pots of tea, a whole cup of sugar. She kept muttering ‘Friday for losses’until I had to tell her to keep her empty-headed superstitions to herself. I was gaining a husband.

I stood at the window, pulling on my gloves only to draw them off when my paws grew too hot, which was very quickly. I kissed the soft lilac leather, for surely he had touched it when he picked them out for my trousseau. There was no extravagant gauzy bridal gown, but he had bought me a pleasing and practical costume: a going-away dress in dark lavender, a pretty hat and new boots made for me alone. It was very kind of him.

I paced up and down so that I would not sit creases into my new skirt, screwing my head first to one side and then the other so that I could keep my eye on the street. It had to be the most long-drawn-out morning in the history of the world. Surely the moments had never ticked by so slowly.

‘Mama, I think the priest is late.’

‘Eve, sit down. You are making me dizzy with all this to-ing and fro-ing.’

‘I cannot be still.’

‘It is unladylike to bustle about, and in such a nice dress. You will become overheated.’

She could not bring herself to say the word ‘sweaty’, but it was true: my fur was clinging to the inside of my blouse.

‘Mama, do not fuss.’

‘Do you want to faint away? That’d be a fine business, if the priest asks you to say “I do” and I have to fan you awake with a hymn sheet.’

At last the wedding party arrived, to a fanfare of much rapping at the outer door. I fought to stand still while Mama went to greet them. Mr Arroner was first through the door, greeting my mother with loud declarations of apology for his lateness. He burst into our room and bowed deeply, heaping me with tender compliments and presenting me with a small posy of violets to match the dress. He was followed by a priest and two plainly dressed strangers who stared at me and my not-quite-yet husband back and forth until I thought their heads might grind their necks down to their shoulders.

There was no Order of Service, no hymn sheet, no hymns of any kind; only the briefest of prayers and I do not remember a word of them. The only words worth treasuring were the ones which dropped from his lips when he said he would have me as his wife.

‘Do you take this woman?’ said the minister, too hastily for my liking.

‘Indeed I do.’

They were the sweetest sounds I had ever heard, so delightful I half expected doves to fly out of his hat. He could have stood before me in sack-cloth for that vow clothed him more royally than any king. Then the minister blinked at me.

‘Do you take this man?’ he said, unable to keep a curl of distaste from his lips.

‘I do,’ I said, boldly.

Holy eyes flickered between my husband and myself.

‘Yes, she can speak for herself,’ said my new man, and I squeezed his arm for the champion he was.

I went to throw my arms around his neck, but his eyebrows climbed so far up his forehead I thought they might drop off. Mama also shot me a look, and I tempered my behaviour. We would be alone soon enough: I could wait for marital embraces a little while longer. I dropped my head and made a courageous attempt to behave decorously, as befitting a bride. I clenched and unclenched my fingers around the spray of flowers so often that I quite strangled them.

My mother did not cry. We signed our names and my man gave a coin to the witnesses: they were quick to leave and I did not see them again. It was not a grand ceremony, but it was good enough. I had the greatest prize, a husband who had already taken up a shield in my defence against the world. I loosened the word ‘girl’ from my shoulders and dropped it at the side of the front door.

Mr Arroner took me then into my new home, our new home: a palace with high ceilings and five steps leading up from the pavement to the door and a pink-and-white maid who bobbed her head and called me ‘mum’.

‘You will want to prepare for bed, Mrs Arroner,’ he said as soon as we were through the door. ‘As shall I. I shall be in my dressing-room.’

‘Yes, Mr Arroner,’ I said, delighting in the words.

He was mine. I followed him up the stairs; he showed me into the bedroom and left me there. My head swam with the notion that he had an entire room in which to dress and undress, for it was thrilling enough that there was a room set aside for sleeping. Of course, not only for sleeping: there were the other things husbands did with wives in their bedrooms.

I flushed beneath my fur and began to undo the buttons at my cuffs, but discovered those running down the back of my blouse were out of reach. Mama had fastened me into my clothes that morning, which seemed a very long while ago. I was not sure what to do next. I looked around the room: a small fireplace, a jug and basin on the chest of drawers, the window shutters closed tight, a cheval-glass leaning into the corner.

He did not return. I did not know what mysteries husbands engaged in to prepare themselves for their wedding nights, and the room into which he had retired was very quiet. I thought of how he had looked earlier that day, not yet my husband, and I not yet his wife: his polished hat, new stiff collar, bright waistcoat and gloves so fresh they were not yet rubbed from holding the head of his cane. I had tried diligently to be as nervous as a virgin should be, but I could not stop my eyes from wandering over his body, even when Mama pinched me.

Still he did not come. There was no clock ticking, but it was my opinion that enough time had passed for him to remove his clothing. Perhaps he was smoking a cigar; perhaps he thought me so timid that he wished to give me time to compose myself. But I was not composed: I was sitting with my cuffs open and no other preparations made. I tried once more to reach the buttons laddering down my back but failed. It was easier at home: my clothes were simpler and I had Mama to help me. I slapped away the ungrateful thought. I was wearing the beautiful clothes he had picked out with his own hand. They were just troublesome to get out of.

Then it came to me: perhaps he did not want me undressed at all. He wanted to do it himself. I was deeply stimulated at the thought of him standing behind me, unlooping each pearl button from the nape of my neck down to the dip where spine flares to hip, pressing his palms on to my unclothed shoulders, weaving his fingers into my hair and pulling me towards him for our first wedded embrace. My pelt prickled, imagining itself ruffled up under his hands. These imaginings were no longer sinful, for I was a married woman and such thoughts were permitted.

My stays were very tight. I hoped he might come soon, for I needed loosening and a tickle of sweat was stirring between my breasts. I wondered if he was shaving himself; I thought how grand it would be to say to him, Now you are my husband, I wish you to grow a beard. I itched for him to open the door.

My delicious dream returned, that he had chosen me because he was hairy too, just like Donkey-Skin said he would be, but he shaved and kept it secret. Now he had me, he would no longer need to do so for I would throw away his razor, tie up his wrists with his handkerchief and feed him soup as I waited for him to sprout the bristles hidden in the gift-wrapping of his skin. Days would pass, and he would sigh, Oh, untie me, do. Set me free, my love,but not angrily, and each day with less conviction.

I imagined his hair set free from the confines of his clothing: wandering up and down his breast from navel to neck, spreading its paw-prints over his shoulders and down his back to the sweet damp crease of his buttocks. He would be my faun, my Pan, the Lord of my Woods, and I would be his maenad for he was the strange prince Donkey-Skin had told me to look out for. He must be.

The handle of the door turned; my heart leapt. I looked into my lap, I looked at the bedspread, at the ewer, the bowl, the wallpaper, the window-shutters. At last I looked at my husband. The dark rug between us seemed the width of a continent. He smiled.

‘My dear wife!’ he said. ‘Dear little wife!’

He crossed the space in three strides. He was dressed in a smoking jacket which reached past his knees, his oiled-down hair catching the light from the candle. His chin was smooth.

‘Dear little wife!’ he said again. ‘Or should I call you Mrs Arroner?’

‘Wife is a very good word.’

‘Is it not? A capital word! To me you are wife; to the world you are Mrs Josiah Arroner. What status! What gravitas!’

‘Yes, my dear.’

I thought it a little overwrought, but tonight I could allow him any of his fancies.

‘Come now, Mrs Arroner.’

He took my hand and patted it; I lifted my golden wrist to his chin and he pecked at it with dry lips.

‘My name is Eve, dearest.’

‘It is indeed. The sweetest of names to my heart from the day I met you.’

He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to the velvet of my forehead. A deep thrill swept from that spot down to my inmost parts until I was running over with richness, churning instantly from milk to cream.

‘Oh, Josiah,’ I breathed, and snatched at his coat, pulling him towards me.

The weight of his breath warmed the crook of my neck, perfumed with coffee and tobacco. I wrapped my arms around him and we rocked backwards and forwards. I rubbed myself against him, purring. Unsheathed my claws and dug them into his back, chewing on his neck.

He shoved me hard; my eyes sprang open to find him breathing in short bursts, his collar awry where I had torn it. He staggered to the mirror where he examined the spreading wine-stain of my mouth on his throat, and began to tie his cravat very high, to cover the dark spot. I watched the way his fingers slipped the silk over and about until he was satisfied with his handiwork, devouring his every gesture. However, I was confused, for I would be proud to have his mark on me – would parade our passion without shame. Then I understood: he did not want to share our secret. I giggled.





Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Получить полную версию книги.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/rosie-garland/the-palace-of-curiosities/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.