Steve Tem: Ubo

Other times it felt as if you were riding within a bubble inside your character’s brain. You could hear everything, and feel everything, but that was still you inside the bubble, horrified by everything your character was doing, and yet you were forced to watch. Their rage was not your rage—in fact when they raged against their victims, it also felt as if they were raging against you.

But if you were lucky, the walls of that bubble might be thick enough that you didn’t hear everything your character said, or see everything your character did, and sometimes you could even close your eyes and pretend you were back home with your family, no matter how hard the roaches tried to yank you out of there.

An invasion of nausea rose out of the ripper then, draining any thought of an earlier- or later‑day London, or of a Daniel or Jesse James or Caligula or of any other lifetime. There was only this…

He was here and now, trapped here in Jack, Happy Jack. Once again a tide of salt water lapped at his throat as he emptied himself of Daniel, was drained of any memories of a time or a place other than this. Inside the dark part of his eyeballs he could see a roach‑head, black eye‑globes glistening, barbed legs sawing against his tender brain tissue. A skittering through his head as the roach‑thoughts clawed, digging for some kind of understanding of why Jack done what he done. Like Jack had any idea at all.

Whitechapel High Street. A man with a rough old face, his patchy white beard like some kind of infection, goaded a small drove of cattle down the street toward the slaughterhouses at Aldgate. Deerstalker cap, brown kecks and a cutaway coat—even all that dunnage couldn’t hide the filthy white hair on the man’s face. Jack imagined that if he stripped off the coat he’d find more hair running the fullness of the man’s body, matted with cow shite and other filth.

Jack stared at the cuffs of the man’s trousers. They was so badly frayed he wondered if a dog had chewed them, or the man’s own cows when he slept with them. Mud speckled him from his cracked leather crabshells to his beard-eaten face. Jack could see the tiny balls of mud—or maybe they was shite—clinging to the ends of the man’s whiskers, as the horns of the lead animal snagged Jack’s coat. An explosion went off in Jack’s head, as much terror as anger. And suddenly he was God bringing the mayhem down on this transgressor.

Jack punched the man on the shoulder. “On yer way! Outta the street!” The old man raised his cane, looking startled, unable to speak. Jack punched him in the face. He felt the nose give way like it was made of eggshell. Blood spurted from one nostril, thickly painting the beard. Jack rocked back and forth on his feet, acting the bruiser, hitting at the old man, who was now trying to maneuver himself behind his cattle. Jack slapped out at his face, but a shoulder got in the way. The old man stumbled back against a cow, and Jack tried to pursue him around the lead animal, careful to avoid the horns. The cattle stirred restlessly, moaning deep in their throats.

“You!” Jack turned to see the copper splashing toward him through the stream of sewage in the lane. “Stop!”

Jack turned to the old man with a grin, nodded once at the blood spotting his coat and waist‑length beard, then hit him again, this time tagging a cheek. He could feel the crisp crack of bone beneath the mushy face afore the man went down, nobbled. The cattle bolted ahead of him as Jack ran, laughing. The brief beating had gotten his blood up, made his palms sweat, his lungs flutter. He’d have to get the tension out now; there was just no helping it. A fist fight or some quick work with a shiv, anything to raise his head a bit, keep the blood up. He laughed out loud. He howled, then bayed at a startled old lady in a black hood. His palms itched. His throat was so dry he knew he could down a full flagon on the run. He could smash gents’ heads and tear into ladies’ faces with his teeth. Spit em out and dance on the soft parts. Bloody, bloody kids and dollymops with their soft bits turned out. All their hanging down parts spotted with black soot and the sewage from the streets. Can’t be leaving your soft parts hanging. He’d found that out a long time ago. Asking for it if you did. The only way to have anything would be to raise the blood and spit and beat on it, break off the filth. Scratch it out. Then you’d be a giddy one, living higher than the steeple. You’d be a giddy bloody king, you’d be. Nobody gives it to you. You expect that and you’re lying in the street, letting the blood flow till it’s cold. The rich and the lovers and the famous gents all got their blood running hot. Jack’d found a way to get his blood hot, too. They had no idea. Helpless as cattle in the street.

Armored wings fluttering, barbed legs dancing in the shadows, antennae kiss to his lips…

Jack slowed to a stop after a couple of blocks. He picked up an old felt hat some swell had lost and ripped it with both hands, gnawing at the damp material. Felt like badger meat, or squirrel maybe, after it’s been left to soak. Tough but chewy. He bit his lip hard and sucked out a little bloody salt. No copper’d catch him, not that way, and not here. Who’d care anyway, in this sty?

It was a spiderweb of alleys and courts here. A shroud of dark shadow lay over everything, a blackish scum. Looked like shite, and Happy Jack liked to think it was shite. He imagined he smelled it all the time, even in his sleep. And throughout most of the area there was also a heavier layer—greasy rags and trash ancient when Jack’s judy of a mother was born, all glued together with liquid sewage into a kind of caul that slipped into all the cellars and slopped up into the house if you wasn’t careful. A separate country it was, a different world, even with the East End but a short distance from Bishopgate and the Leather Market and the Bank of England.

Jack knew the secret, though. They wasn’t human beings. How could human beings live six or seven or even twenty to a room? Rooms and rooms full of them lost souls, all the rooms of Hell.

He stopped, bewildered, then began to cry to himself. He let the tears wash out the gray city, and for a moment even the stench was missing from his enormous head, his skull full of the mad multitudes. He’d kill them all, he would. He’d kill them all. They was children dying… they was dying everywhere.

“Yer borned dead…” his flummut daddy once told him. “They bring your bloody carcass into this wurld and they slap ye good ’n silly so’s you’ll live and they do pretend pretty yer alive but you was borned dead…”

A scratching at his brain… their damned hard barbed legs. Wings across his eyes. Their enormous eyes always watching.

He membered that time he’d followed one of the ladybirds plying her trade on his street—she’d flashed her Miss Laycock at him and musta figured he’d pay her for the privilege—down down through a basement kitchen stinking of sin and the corruptions of the flesh, through a narrie hall moist and red, when she pulled him into her kes and turned her back, lifting her dress to show off her Nancy, pushing its plumpness against his Nebuchadneezar, and him about to do her in, he stepped off and messed around in his trousers looking for his shiv, when he seed that wee foot tucked under the edge of the bed, pulled on it and the dead tot slid out, its eyes closed and mouth open—that wee angel singing his way into death, a brown‑stained bundle too small even to raise a stench. Jack looking down at it like it was a wee puppy drowned, and her turning round saying she had no knowledge of the thing. Leaving it to Happy Jack to dispose of.

Jack got out quick, forgetting her well-deserved murder.

They was mothers here in the chapel, death‑mothers all, who’d turn their children into the streets at night because they let their rooms for whoring. Leave their own baby children out till past midnight, out there with the loafers and criminals to sleep with em in whatever staircase, doorway, dustbin, or loo they could find. But at least that was more money for the children than being a sackmaker for a farthing each or tuppence farthing a gross matchbox making.