The Palace of Curiosities

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.