The Giant, O’Brien

‘What did he eat?’ O’Brien asked.

‘God alone knows. Here we live on green plants, just as in my grandfather’s rime men ate grass and dock. The children have found something that poisons them, and it is always the ones who are too young to explain it—you could ask them to lead you to where they have plucked it, but by the time you know they are poisoned they are too weak to lead you anywhere. Or maybe—I have thought—it’s something we give them—some innocent herb—that we can eat, but which murders them.’

‘That’s a hard thought.’

‘It is very hard,’ she said.

The Giant and his train enjoyed nettle soup, and before the craving became acute Vance appeared with his flasks of the good stuff. Squatting in the cabin of the woman, the Giant told these stories: the Earl of Desmond’s wedding night, and how St Declan swallowed a pirate. All the town had come in, some bringing a light and others a turf for the fire, listening to the tales and praying in between them. When the death agony arrived, O’Brien took the child on to his knee, so that the rattle in his throat was interlaced and sometimes overlaid by his light, mellifluous tones, that tenor which surprised the hearers, coming as it did from a man so grossly huge. He tried to fit the cadence of his tale to the child’s suffering, but because he was a fallible person there were moments when it was necessary for him to pause for thought; at these times, the mud walls enclosed the horror of labouring silence, the scraping suspension of breath before the rasping cry which brought the babby back to life for another minute, and another. His body sleek with hair, his bones thick as wire, he looked like a mouse under O’Brien’s hand.

When the crux came, he cried out once, with that distant, stifled cry that hero babies make when they are still in their mothers’ wombs. It was cry of vision and longing, of the future seen plain. When O’Brien heard it he scooped the little body in one hand and placed it in his mother’s lap, where within a second the child became a corpse. Within another second a green sludge dripped from the nostrils, leaked out between the thighs, dripped like the sea’s leavings even from the cock curled like a shell in its rippling beach of skin.

At once, Pybus began to sing, his high-strung boy’s voice rising to the sky. The clouds had no call for it; they sent his song back, stifled, to die between the wasted shoulders and the mud walls. ‘At least you’re not short of water,’ Claffey said, raising his eyes to tomorrow’s certainty of rain.

At dawn, the youths met them and escorted them to the end of the town. ‘Can’t you voyage with us?’ the Giant asked. ‘You’re brave boys, and there’s nothing here for you.’

Joe Vance looked daggers.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the foremost youth said. ‘We are decided to remain here. A better age may come. Are you a poet, by the way?’

‘In a poor sort,’ the Giant said. ‘I can make a song. But who can’t? As for the old systems, the strict rules, I never learned them, and if I’m honest with you it’s a matter of training rather than aptitude. I believe there is no one of my generation who is confident in them. That was the use of Mulroney’s, you see, we met the old men there, and we would learn a little.’

‘Let’s get on the way,’ Joe Vance said. He shifted his feet.

‘There was a time when friars walked the roads, disguised as rough working men: friars from Salamanca, from Rome, from Louvain. They have left me with the rudiments of their various tongues, besides a sturdy and serviceable Latin, and a knowledge of the Scriptures in Greek. Travelling gentlemen, all: never more than a night or two under the one roof, but always with time to spare for the education of a giant boy.’

Joe Vance reached up, and tugged at his clothing.

‘A fly besets me,’ the Giant said. He pretended to look about. ‘Or some hornet?’

Joe removed his hand, before he could be swatted. ‘A honey bee,’ he said.

That night in his sleep, the Giant sat among the dead, and heard the voices of the old men at Mulroney’s: dry whispers, like autumn leaves rubbed in a bag.

2

Scotland, day: the child is alone in the field, the black ruts rising around him: flat on his belly on the damp ground, a vast sky swirling. His chin is on the earth, his body is blue in bits, where he has got his clothes wrong. It is his own task to dress himself, cover himself decently, and if he’s cold that’s his fault. He has been sent out to scare crows. In other places they have a doll to do it, made of sticks and old clothes. He has heard of it: English luxury. Here old clothes are not wasted.

To scare a crow, jump up, wave arms. Bugger it. Bugger it off.

Up a blade of grass a crawler goes. Little black feet on a sweet, edible stalk. He watches, his brow furrowing; it’s apt to cross your eyes. He puts out his finger. The crawler goes on to it, though it doesn’t make a feeling; it is too light, or his finger is too cold? His finger tastes of salt, earth and shit.

He closes his palm. Then opens it, and teasing with his finger takes off one of the crawler’s legs. A time ago, when he first did this, he felt a hot wetness deep inside himself, as if water had begun to run there, above his belly button; but now when he does it he feels nothing at all. He pinches off leg two. He can count; they say he can’t, but he can. One leg, two leg, three leg, four. Count, yes; and read, by and by. The crawler goes round and round on his palm. Why didn’t it fly away? It had the chance. One leg off, it could have flown. It’s kicking now, with what’s left. It must have stayed because it liked him, because it was his friend, even despite what he’d done. He didn’t mean malice; he only wanted to see what would happen. He would like to give it back one leg, two legs, three. He would like to know, now, if it’s alive or dead. He breathes, John Hunter, and the words come out on his breath: ‘It was a trial. It was nothing cruel.’

Crows above. Foreign black hands stretching across the sky. He brushes the crawler away. He stands up. The wind’s tooth strikes at him, gnaws and gnaws. He flails his arms. John Hunter, he yells, John Hunter. Bugger off all crows. Over and over he shouts: John Hunter, bugger off crows.

3

My brothers are James, lately dead; John, dead. Andrew, dead. William is living but gone away. My sisters are Elizabeth, dead. Agnes, dead. Isabella, dead. Janet, dead.

I have also one sister living yet. Her name is Dorothea. We call her Dolly, when we are in a lighter mood.

Our family suffers from rotten lungs and rotten bones.

The John who is dead is not to be confused with me, the younger John. I say this because though in most cases the dead and the living are quite unalike, there are special circumstances when it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. There are many accounts, some from antiquity, of unfortunate people buried alive. Such burials may be the origin of quaint stories, stories of vampyres and ghouls and hauntings; of voices from underground, and the earth welling with fresh blood. But I have been in a small room with many a dead man and woman. I have slept under a dissecting bench in brother Wullie’s workroom, and I have hauled many a corpse to its final resting place on Wullie’s narrow bench. I can tell you that there are no ghosts. If there were, they’d haunt Wullie, would they not?

And haunt me. But don’t think it. It’s a slab of butcher’s meat you have to haul, head waddling and hands flapping; the rigor’s passed by the time their keepers knock at the door, and they’ve once again a semblance of flexible life, yet they’re heavy, they don’t help you, you have to drag them, and their faces are fallen in, their noses are rims, sharp edges of falling flesh, and their lips are invisible already, shrunk back against the gum.

So why are the living sometimes confused with the dead? Often the physician or surgeon is to blame, for his lack of care. But there are other occasions when even the keenest will not detect a pulse, yet the pulse exists. There are times when the breath does not lift the ribs, nor mist a mirror, nor stir a feather, but the corpse is breathing still. I have heard that sometimes when people fall into deep water, deep water that is very cold, they may remain chill and extinguished for an hour or more, and yet the spark of life is flickering within them; when warmth returns to their organs, when it spreads to their limbs and their heart and their muscles gather strength—why, then they may sit up, and speak, to the horror and astonishment of the mourners.

This is what I have heard: although, unfortunately, I have had no opportunity of making actual experiments upon drowned persons.

The house is built of stone, a farmhouse, built on ground that is thin and poor. In his family, he is the tenth child, and the last. When there is no room at the fire, he is kicked out into the yard.

Gradually, as he sees his siblings carried to the churchyard, room is made, but by then he is not accustomed to hearthside comforts, and the company of those who remain makes him uneasy.

At six years old he is sent out into the fields to pick stones, and also to scare crows. The crows watch him for any advantage. They circle in the air, talking about him in their intelligent voices. Sometimes he thinks they are plotting to take out his eyes.

Once your eyes are out you can’t get a second pair. He pictures himself flipping on his back like a landed fish, his spine flexing and arcing, beating the ungiving ground with the flat of his palms. The first scream is practising to come out of his mouth and the first stream of vomit. The crows have got his eyes in their beaks and are toddling over the ruts in the direction of East Kilbride.

There never was a man that wanted to be a great man ever was a great man. My present state of life I neither thought of nor could imagine. I am not a rich man, in fact I am poor, yet not poor in esteem; I say without boasting – pride not being in my nature—that the finest medical scholars of Europe have written me testimonials, and the most eminent surgeons in these islands and beyond crave for their sons a place at my table. And how, as the unmannerly Scots lad I am, could I have predicted this eminence?

While my brothers prospered at the academy, my school was the moor, hedge and field. I asked questions to which few knew the answer and none cared to give it. Why do the leaves fall? Why do the birds sing? They would hit me across the ear and shove me out into the stark, away from the smell of humanity. In the end I preferred it so, I liked the keen wind against the smoky fug, my silent company against their chattering. My outdoor life, the labour to which I was born, hardened my hands and my spirit. I was thought of small account, and believed I was. My eyes followed the turning leaf, the bird in flight, the moon’s phases.

His father, fifty when he was born and suffering with the gravel, frequently hit him across the ear. Mostly; whenever he saw him. This went on until he was thirteen, when his father died. By then he had acquired a high-shouldered look, and a habit of trying to see behind him.

4

London is like the sea and the gallows. It refuses none.

Sometimes on the journey, trapped in the ship’s stink and heave, they had talked about the premises they would have at journey’s end. They should be commodious, Vance said, and in a fashionable neighbourhood, central and well-lit, on a broad thoroughfare where the carriages of the gentry can turn without difficulty.

‘My brother has a lodging in St Clement’s Lane,’ Claffey said. ‘I don’t know if it’s commodious.’

Vance blew out through his lips. ‘Nest of beggars,’ he said. ‘As to your perquisites and your embellishments, Charlie, they say a pagoda is the last word in fashion.’

‘A pagoda?’ The Giant frowned. ‘I’d sooner a triumphal arch.’

‘Let’s see when we get there,’ Vance said. ‘I think we’ll call you Byrne, Charles Byrne. It’s more select.’

A lurch of the timbers, a fresh outswell of mould and fust; Jankin was sick—he had the knack and habit—on Claffey’s feet. Claffey kicked out. Hot words flew in the stinking space.

‘Will you have a story?’ the Giant soothed them. For the time must be passed, must be passed.

‘Go on,’ Vance said.

The Giant did not stop to ask what kind of story they would like, for they were contentious, like fretful children, and were in no position to know what was good for them. ‘One day,’ he began, ‘the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride.’

‘Where East?’ Vance asked. ‘East London?’

‘Albania,’ the Giant said. ‘Or far Cathay.’

‘The Land of Nod,’ said Claffey, sneering. ‘The Kingdom of Cockaigne.’

‘Wipe yourself, stench-foot,’ O’Brien said, ‘then pin back your ears. Do you think I tell tales for the good of my soul?’

‘Sorry,’ Claffey said.

‘One day the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the East to find a bride, and he hadn’t gone far on his road when he met a short green man. The strange gentleman hailed him, saying—’

‘I don’t like a tale with a short green man in it,’ Jankin said.

The Giant turned to him, patient. ‘If you will wait a bit, Jankin, the short green man will grow as big as the side of a hill.’

‘Oh,’ Jankin said.

The wind moaned, the boards creaked and shifted beneath them. From the deck the world appeared no longer solid but a concatenated jumble of grey dots, sometimes defined and sometimes fusing at the margins, the waves white and rearing, the clouds blackening en masse, the horizon crowded with their blocky forms and their outlines unnatural, like the sides of unimaginable buildings, set storey on storey like the tower of Babel. Conversing with the sailors—who cowered away from his bulk—the Giant found he had regained his command of the English language. One day, he thought, we will be making tales out of this. Our odyssey to the pith of London’s heart, to undying fame and a heavy purse. Rancour will be forgotten, and the reek of our fear in this ship’s dark hole. In those days Jankin will say, Do you remember, Claffey, when I was sick on your feet? And Claffey will clap him on the back, and say, O I do indeed.

And so at that time, after his father’s death and he being fourteen, fifteen years of age, John Hunter was still in the fields largely, the business of sending him to school having met with scant success. Having come home from the field to drink a bowl of broth, he heard one day a beating at the door, the main door of the house at Long Calderwood, and himself going to open it and propping out the door frame, short for his age but sturdy, his sleeves rolled and his red hands hanging, and there’s the carrier with some distressed bundle wrapped in a blanket. It’s human.

His first thought was that the man had been asked to transport some sick pauper, who being now about to take his leave of this mortal world was not required, I’ll thank you very much, to piss and shit his last in the cart, and so the fastidious tradesman was attempting to pass on his responsibilities and let some unsuspecting farmer’s floor be soiled. ‘Get off with you, and go to the devil!’ he’d cried, his temper even then being very hot if he thought anyone had made a scheme to take advantage of him.

But then from within the bundle came a long, strangulated coughing, and after that the words, ‘John, is that you, my brother John?’

His brow furrowing, John approached the cart, and pulled back the blanket where it obscured the man’s face. And who should it be, but his own dear brother James? James, who had taken a degree in theology? James, that was a gentleman? James, that had gone to London to join brother Wullie, and become a medical man, and a man of means? See how far education gets you.

‘Y’d best come in. Can ye step down?’

‘I’ll have your arm,’ James quavered. ‘Dear brother John.’

Stout brother John. He half-lifted his relative from the cart. ‘Is there a good fire?’ James begged to know. Through the cloth of his coat John felt the quake of his body, his jumping pulses. There was a nasty smell on his breath: rot.

Dumped on a three-legged stool, James seemed hardly able to support himself upright. ‘What means this?’ John enquired. ‘What brings you home in this condition, mon?’

‘I am done for,’ James said. ‘I am worn out from the dissection room, the noxious emanations from the corpses, their poisoned fluids and exhalations, and the long hours your brother Wullie keeps. So jealous is he of his subjects, that he bade me sleep at night under the post-mortem table, lest one of his rivals should crack in at the windows and carry off the corpse.’

‘I see. So theft of corpses is an ever-present worry, is it?’ John asked. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at his shivering brother. Well he remembered the day James left for London, sovereigns in his purse, felicitations ringing in his ears, and a new hat in a leather box completing his general air as a man of present prosperity and greater ambition. And now—the ribs were stoved in, the stomach collapsed. There were two red blotches on his cheeks—a sick parade of well-being. ‘It seems to me you have come back to die,’ he said. ‘All our family have a charnel disposition. Have you heard of a great man, called Sir William Harvey? He dissected his own relatives.’

James raised his head. Hope shone in his face. ‘Have you formed an interest, brother John, in matters anatomical?’

‘But only after they were dead.’ He turned aside, calling out to his sister Dorothea to come and view James. ‘You need not fear me,’ he said, under his breath.

Dorothea came, and made a great fuss and to-do, and boiled something nourishing for the invalid. Dolly never criticised or carped, and when he became a great man himself he would have her for his housekeeper, since all his other sisters were now residing in the churchyard under sod.

When they docked, and stood on dry land, Pybus fell about, and affected to be unable to walk except in the manner of a sailor, rolling and slowly riding upon the element he has made his own. Claffey grew impatient with the joke, and kicked him, saying, That’ll give you something to straggle for.’

The Giant looked up, scanned the English sky. A few scudding clouds, the promise of sun breaking through. ‘God’s same sky over us all,’ he said. But the voices were foreign, the shoving, shouting men, the tangles of rope and rigging, the salt and fish odours, and the buildings piled on buildings, one house atop another: they had boarded after dark, so now Pybus gaped, and pointed. ‘How do they—’

They fly,’ Vance said shortly.

‘Jesus,’ said Pybus. ‘Englishmen can fly? And the women also?’

‘No,’ Vance said. The women cannot fly. They remain on what is called the lower storey, or ground floor, where the men are able to join them as they please, or, when they sicken of their nagging chatter and wish to smoke a pipe of tobacco, they unfold the wings they keep under their greatcoats, and flutter up to what are called the upper storeys.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Claffey said. ‘They must have a ladder.’

The Giant gave Claffey a glance that expressed pleasure at his ingenuity. He was familiar himself with the principle of staircases, but in the lifetime of these young fellows there had been no great house within a day’s march, where they might see the principle applied.

‘Oh yes,’ Vance said, sarcastically. ‘Surely, they have a ladder. Take a look, Claffey—don’t you see them swarming over the surface of the buildings?’

They looked, and did not. Glass windows caught the light, but the Giant’s followers saw glinting, empty air, air a fist could pass through, that flesh could pass through and not be cut.

On the quayside, Jankin leapt in the air, pointing. He was swelling with excitement, bubbling at the mouth. The black man he had seen strolled calmly towards them. He wore a good broadcloth coat and a clean cravat, being, as he was, employed at the docks as a respectable and senior kind of clerk. He was young, his plum-bloom cheeks faintly scarred, his eyes mild.

Jankin danced in front of him. He gave a shriek, like one of the parakeets the Giant had heard of. His grubby hand shot up, massaging the man’s face, rubbing in a circle to see would the colour come off. Jankin stared at his grey-white, seamed palm, and clawed out his fingers, then rubbed and rubbed again at the fleshy, flattened nose.

‘Get down, dog,’ Joe Vance said. ‘The gentleman is as respectable as yourself.’

The black man reached out, and took Jankin’s forearm in his hand. Gently he removed it from himself, pressing it inexorably into Jankin’s chest, as if he would fuse it with the ribs. His mild eyes were quite dead. His mouth twitched, but it did not speak. He passed on, his tread firm, over the cobbles and towards the city he now called home.

The Giant said, ‘People are staring at me.’

Vance said, ‘Yes, they would. I should hope so. That is the general idea.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Sooner we get you indoors and housed, the better for us all. We don’t want them gaping for free.’

The Giant saw the parakeets, green and gold, flit and swoop in a hot tangle of deeper green, and heard the alarm shrieks from their beating throats, and felt rope cut into skin and smelt the sweet, burnt, branded flesh.

He called out after the black man, ‘Poor soul, you have a brand on your body.’

The man called back, ‘Shog off, freak.’

The first night of their walk to London, they begged lodgings in a barn. Joe Vance parlayed with the farmer, and purchased from him some milk, some beer and some nasty dried-up bread with green mould on it. Claffey became militant, and raised a doubt about Joe Vance’s abilities. The Giant was forced to detain their attention with a long tale. He settled them among the straw, and turned his cheek to the alien breeze. They had come so far in thin rain, their heads down, purposefully observing as little as they could. London would be all wonder, Vance said. They were disposed to believe it, and not notice anything immediate: just walk. They had expected lush valleys, mounts snow-topped, fountains, a crystal house or mansion at each turn in the road: but no, it was tramp, tramp, just tramp. ‘Look now,’ the Giant said. ‘Shouldn’t we have a conveyance, Vance? I’d have thought a coach would have been sent for me, or some sort of elegant chariot?’

Hm. Or possibly not. Vance seemed likely to break out into a rage, which he did too readily when things went wrong. ‘What kind of a coach?’ he yelled. ‘One with the roof cut off? Who’s going to wreck a perfectly good coach for the one-time transport of a giant? It isn’t as if England is teeming with giants, it isn’t as if having made a ruin of a perfectly sound vehicle they can hire it out again on a weekly basis, is it? No Englishman does business that way!’

‘What about a chariot?’ the Giant asked mildly. The same objection cannot be raised to a chariot.’

‘Oh yes, a chariot, but then it would have to be reinforced! You couldn’t have your customer stepping in and putting his giant foot through it, so it would have to be strengthened—which costs money—and then drawn by heavy horses.’

‘Did you not think of this before?’ Pybus asked. (And Pybus was only a boy.)

‘Just what are you insinuating?’ Joe Vance bellowed. ‘Are you insinuating that I have in some way exaggerated my experience as a giant’s agent? Because if you are, Pybus, I’ll slit your nostrils and pull your brains out through the opening, and then I’ll pound them to a paste and put them down for rat poison.’

The Giant asked, ‘Do you know the tale of the man that was drunk in the company of the priest, and the priest changed him to a mouse, and he got eat by his own cat?’

‘No,’ Jankin said. ‘By God, let’s have that tale!’

…As for what we can say of Buchanan—whoopsy-go Buchanan! Why John am I glad tae see ye—hup, whop, ye’ll take a drop, take another, take a flask, woeful tangle wi’ ma feet, here’s a go, here’s to you, here’s to lads, hup! Hic! Take a sip! Never mind, sit ye down, mind the chair, chink the cup, Saturday night, wife’s a-bed, Hic! Whop! Saints Alive!