Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

When Aymer woke on Saturday the pain was hardly bearable. His chest and thighs felt as heavy and inert as iron. In this he didn’t differ much from King Swing who, contrary to all the bets, had been defeated in fourteen rounds the night before by Massa Hannibal. But King Swing’s face wasn’t much harmed. He was only bruised around one eye. The upper part of Aymer’s face was colourless. It hardly showed on the pillowcase. Both eyes were clear and moist. But everything below his nose was blue and swollen. His lips were a pair of overripe damsons, bloated, syrupy and sapped together by dry blood, with stripy wasps of scab feeding at the juice. His cheek and chin were stripped of skin. His jaw was bruised. He’d almost bitten through his tongue. It looked as if a three-inch worm was squashed across it. But his gums were worst of all. What teeth remained were shaken in his head, like gravestones in soft earth. The gravestones tilted and the earth was lifted up and split.

It was odd that he could think and see so clearly, yet hardly breathe or move, and that he should be so reassured and in such brutal pain at once. It was the bed that settled him and made him feel so like a child: its freshly laundered smell, its punched-up pillows, its quilted counterpane, its height and buoyancy. He looked around the room for clues to where he was. The windows were ten feet tall at least — an opulent house — and the room was full of calming winter light, yellow, penetrating, cool. Everything seemed sharp and mutely colourful. A silver candelabrum on a stand, which burned fine-smelling whale oil. A walnut dressing table and closet. Two brocaded chairs. A bedside table with a washing bowl and a pot pourri. A white marble fireplace. A watercolour of some ochre church in Italy or Spain. Hand-painted wallpaper, the latest fashion. This was no hospital. It smelled of furniture and cloth — and money.

At first he thought he was in Wherrytown. Inside some better inn. The footsteps in the corridor would belong to Mrs Yapp. Or George. How happy he would be to see the parlourman. But when Emma entered with fresh poultices and he saw his nephew and his nieces staring in and giggling, he knew exactly where he was.

Emma pressed cold flannels to his forehead and his face. She put him back onto the pillows. ‘You mustn’t move,’ she said. She pushed his eyelids up. She felt the temperature of his hands and the nape of his neck. ‘You’re doing fine.’

‘What day is it?’ He sounded drunk. It hurt.

‘It’s Saturday. Excuse me, sir, but you’re not allowed to talk, not until your mouth is on the mend. Mrs Smith says I am to keep you quiet at all costs. You mustn’t smile. You mustn’t talk or smile. You must just rest. Shall I draw back the curtains, sir? Don’t say.’ A wedge of light spread out across his bed. Emma took the flannels off his face. She spooned some water in his mouth, and gave some Greenoughs Tincture and a draught of laudanum. He couldn’t swallow it. It made a sticky pool between his lips and then seeped into the splintered cavern of his mouth. He had to fight a sneeze.

Then, while Emma changed the dressings on his wounds, he had sufficient time (before her draught of laudanum returned him to the night and to the sweetest dreams of all) to recall the details of the Friday evening, the endless crack and thud of it. And he remembered every word they said. Shut up. Your name? Your name? You’re a thief and not a gentleman. Good boots. I know it’s him. Say it, say it! Have you been recently in Wherrytown?

AYMER SMITH was at the end of tired. He was sleeping now, and truly dreaming: his landscape was a childish one. A beach, some dunes, some kelp, a granite headland, gulls, the numbing blanket of a sea-stunned sky, a dog. He put his shoulder up against the Cradle Rock. He had the strength. He rolled it back onto its pivot stone. He set the Rock in motion. He made amends. He put the world to rights again. Helped only by the muscle of the wind, and by the charity of dreams, the Cradle Rock ascended and declined.

A public announcement from

Oliver’s Register of Ships and Shipping

Toronto, February 1837