Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

‘I’ll fucking have you!’

I broke from my recollections. Someone was shouting at me. An instant more and the same someone had smashed into me. A great sweaty face was pushed into mine, foul breath shoving over the sill of his lower lip. I fell down on my back, and the great oaf tumbled on top me and panted there as if he really was fucking having me. After a time he levered himself off. From his costume I recognised a waterman. I would have known him for one anyway, partly because every third man in this borough of Southwark makes his living on the river, partly because he had that look, half sea-dog, half hang-dog, which most of them’ve got and which they claim comes from having served with Drake or Frobisher or the Lord High Duck or some other sea-worthy sea worthy — but mostly I would’ve known him for a waterman because of the flood of cursing that gushed out of his filthy lips the moment he had righted himself.

‘Fucking arse-wipe — bloody fucking shite — Jesus Christ — where the fuck’s the fucking fucker gone. .’

All of this was accompanied with gusts of sour air, heaves of his great chest and rollings of eyes that did not quite swivel together, so I had the unpleasant sensation that he was looking simultaneously at, before and behind me.

‘Where’d he fucking go? Why’d you let him get away, you shitting turd?’

I took a couple of deep breaths and stepped back from my panting assailant. What was going on? Instinctively I grabbed for my purse. When you come across a fracas in the street, there’s a fair chance that it is a put-up job, and that the tusslers are waiting for a ring of spectators to form before the third man or woman tiptoes round the outside and relieves the more agog of whatever valuables weigh them down. When this unofficial subscription has been raised, the fight will suddenly end with a handshake and the participants magically evaporate. My purse, however, had not gone. Most likely, if the oaf had wanted to get it off me he would have done so when we were tangled on the dusty ground. Looking at his fists, which hung down like bags of meat, I thought that if he’d asked me to surrender my purse I probably would have done so with only a token protest. After all, what was money? Other things were more important, like — Jesus! — my parts in the Globe plays. My hands flew back to where I’d tucked the scrolls under my shirt, near the heart. Still there. I breathed a quick and silent prayer of gratitude to the patron saint of players (one Genesius).

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, brushing at my clothes, and growing more angry, even as the hulk opposite me seemed to be sailing into calmer waters. ‘In fact, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, to adopt your terminology.’

Three or four people had stopped in the street, drawn by the prospect of trouble. The large boatman had stepped back a pace or so, and I mistook the look of bovine stupidity that was now begining to usurp his angry features for sheepishness. ‘And another thing,’ I said, foolishly deciding to demonstrate my intellectual superiority. ‘What did you call me. . shitting turd I think it was?’

‘So what if I did, you arse-wipe.’

‘Interesting example of pleonasm is that shitting turd,’ I said as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘Pleonast, are you?’

Both of the boatman’s eyes trained themselves on me more or less at once. I had said the wrong thing, been stupid by being clever at the expense of a no-wit. He took a step towards me and I stepped back. Unfortunately that was as far as I could go. Now the boatman had me between his sweaty self and a flinty wall. A few more people had assembled in the hope of seeing violence done to one who was young and blameless.

‘What’s a fucking pleenast when it’s at home?’

He had his arm rammed across my throat so that, even if I had wanted to correct the way he said the word, I couldn’t have spoken. His beard, which was as clotted as a bunch of seaweed, tickled my face. I made ineffectual attempts to push him off but he pressed himself against me, and I smelt on him a mixture of riveriness and fishitude and it was not agreeable.

‘I said, you bum-sucker, what’s a pleenast?’

There was a real danger that if I didn’t answer, he was going to crush me as completely as a fallen mast would have. But it was all I could do to drag air through a dented windpipe, let alone produce any explanation. The fine summer morning was flecked with orange spots and there was a roaring in my ears.

‘Pleenast — pleenast? Fucking tell me. I’ll give you pleenast!’

I had time to think that this was perhaps the first occasion in the history of the world that anyone had died for the sake of a little word from the Greek, and time also to consider that if I were to have my life over again then I would learn not to be so foolishly clever as to try to impress those who are, by nature, unimpressible. And I had time to think that this business of dying took too long, as the half-circle of white faces looking at this spectacle merged into a blur.

‘It’s a compliment,’ came a voice close to one of my roaring ears. ‘Let him go, boatman. It’s a compliment. Let him go, I say.’

After a moment the pressure on my throat was lifted. I was too busy forcing air inside myself to pay much attention to the exchange which followed, but was able to reconstruct it afterwards.

‘When you’ve released him I’ll tell you what he is unable to tell you himself. That’s better.’

‘All right, you tell me then. What’s a pleenast?’

There was still aggression and injury in what the boatman was saying to the newcomer but, even in my preoccupied condition, I was aware of a retreat in the man’s tone, as well as an absence of fucking, shiting and arse-wiping.

‘Pleonasm,’ said the individual who had interrupted my throttling, ‘is a rhetorical figure by which more words than are strictly necessary are used to express meaning. For example, if I said that you were a fine boatman as well as a good boatman and an excellent one, then I would have committed a pleonasm.’

‘Fine. . good. . excellent,’ said the boatman, half to himself. I noticed that the number of people about us had grown, rather than the dribbling away of a crowd which usually occurs when the promise of violence has not been fulfilled. They too were listening to the explanation of a pleonasm. Something about the man’s calm and certain speech drew them, just as it pacified the boatman. I glanced at my rescuer. I’d seen him somewhere recently.

‘I think that what this young man meant by calling you a pleonast is that you are a person of linguistic means — that you have a full share of that wealth of language which is available to all Englishmen whatever their class — in short you know a lot of words and it pleases you to express yourself in full — even at the risk of some repetition.’

I struggled for the irony in this speech, because I was afraid that if I could detect it then the boatman would pick it up too, but not a tremor of insincerity, not a streak of piss-taking, did I hear in the other man’s tones. He appeared to mean what he was saying.

‘I’ll say what I fucking like,’ said the boatman, but in a docile fashion.

‘To be accused of having too many words is a fine thing,’ said the other. Then I realised that it was the man who had slipped unobtrusively past Master Burbage and me as we were talking by the tiring-house, the man who played the Ghost in the drama of the Prince of Denmark, ‘our author’, Master William Shakespeare. Well, he’d certainly saved my bacon.

‘He got in my way, didn’t he,’ said the boatman to the playwright, his beard wagging in justification. ‘My fare did a fucking runner, saving your reverence. I’d no sooner touched the bank than the bugger was out my boat and up the stairs like a parson’s fart, gone before you can sniff it. So what d’you expect a poor boatman to do? It may be only a couple of pennies to a gentleman like yourself but to me and Bet and our five kids it’s our fucking dinner. Me, I can’t afford to let a fare get away like that, the bastard. So I took off in hot pursuit and this bloke got between me and my quarry. And he fell down and I fell down on top of him and then he accused me of that — plea-nasty — what was it?’