T. Boyle - Water Music

But safe. And safety is everything. That and invisibility. He’d made a lot of enemies that fateful night — Smirke, who was fined and sentenced to three hours in the pillory; Mendoza, Brummell and the others, whose names appeared in the paper the following afternoon; Nan and Sal, who wound up in Bridewell until they were bailed out by the Forlorn Female Fund of Mercy; and Lord Twit, who was publicly upbraided for consenting to the moral corruption of his black nigger servant. A lot of enemies — but none of them suspected he’d risen from the dead. And Ned Rise was not about to disabuse them.

So here he is, in the Leggotty Brothers’ fish shop, Southwark, breathing fishstink, hacking away at cold bloodless flesh in a welter of dumb-staring eyes. They pulled him from the river, Shem and McClure, three-quarters dead, and then nursed him for a week till he came round. He was penniless, having jettisoned pants, boots and bulge in a frantic effort to stay afloat. They offered him a job and a place to sleep. Fish chowder and black bread twice a day. Liam loaned him a pair of trousers. “All right,” said Ned.

It’s not that he’s ungrateful — he just isn’t cut out to be a fisherman. The nets slip through his hands, the oarlocks have a mind of their own, he’s afraid of the water, boats, oars, docks, the smell of fish turns his stomach. He can hardly swim. What’s more, he’s fed up with their dull talk and duller lives (“Aye,” says Liam, sucking at his pipe like a sage, “a storm’ll either take ‘em or bring ‘em”), and he longs for the gaming tables, the coffeehouses, the Pig & Pox and the Vole’s Head. Southwark is nothing but a festering slum, the hind end of the earth. How can you expect to rise in the world if you’re stuck in a fish shop in Southwark? He hacks at the heads and fins. He grows despondent.

Then one afternoon, as he’s stripping the scutes and hide from a shortnose sturgeon, an idea hits him. A modest idea, but one that combines invisibility and profit both. He looks round for someone to break the news to. Shem and Liam are out back in the alley, passing a jug and spitting in the dirt.

“You know wha’ they got over there in Africa, Liam?”

“Hamadryads?”

“Nope. They got river perch six hunnert pund.”

“Go on.”

“It’s true. Ned read it to me out of the Evenin’ Post .”‘

“Six hunnert pund?”

“In the River Nigel. There’s this young Scotsman disappeared up there tryin’ to bring one back.”

“Go on.”

Ned wipes the blood and fishslime from his hands and steps through the doorway. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

Liam salutes him with the jug. “Well then lad, have yerself a snootful o’ mother’s finest and tell the old graybeards all about it.”

Ned takes a slug, pounds his breastbone and asks them if they’ve ever heard of caviar.

“That’s Latin, isn’t it?” says Liam.

“What I’m talking about is fish roe — sturgeon’s eggs. Here we are throwing away fistfuls of the stuff, when all the nobs over in the West End are paying the Russians three pounds a jar for it.”

“Three pund a jar? For offal?”

“It’s na offal, Liam — the Swedes eat it.”

“Bah, the iggorant squareheads. They gobble up pickled heering too, doan’t they?”

“Leave it to me,” says Ned. “I’ll strain it and salt it myself, undercut the Empress by half and peddle it door-to-door from Tottenham Court to Mayfair. You watch: we’ll be rich inside of a month.”

♦ ♦ ♦

A month later, Ned Rise strolls across Westminster Bridge in false nose and spectacles, white periwig, silk hose and brocaded waistcoat, a rich man. Or comparatively so. Chichikov’s Choice (named after a whaling companion of Shem’s brother Japheth) is selling like lemonade at a track meet. Gentlemen’s clubs, coffeehouses, taverns, inns and even private residences are buying up Ned’s caviar as fast as he can bottle it. “The finest Russian caviar,” he tells them, his voice lingering over the double s and the final rumbling r , “—at half the price.” It gets them every time. From parlormaids to head cooks to the white-capped chefs at Brooke’s or White’s. He pitches, they buy. Within the month, half the haut monde is spreading its crackers with Chichikov’s Choice.

And the beauty of the whole thing, Ned reflects, as he strides along with a basket of fish roe under his arm, is that the stuff is practically free to begin with. It’s like bottling air and selling it for one and ten the bottle. There is an outlay, it’s true — he gives Liam and Shem two shillings a fish out of gratitude, pays a penny the dozen for terra-cotta jars and labels, and sixpence a day to a pair of street kids who strain and salt the stuff for him. But that’s nothing. A good fish will hold twenty or thirty pounds of roe — so for an outlay of a few shillings here and there he’ll recoup thirty or forty quid. It’s like a dream. Of course, he can’t count on its lasting forever — he knows that. For one thing, sturgeon only breed for two months out of the year — April and May — and so his egg supply will be tapering off soon enough. Then too, Shem and Liam are bound to wise up and ask for a bigger cut. . But for now, Ned Rise is riding an updraft: the Bank of the Bulge is solvent again, and under the bed of his new lodgings in Bear Lane an iron chest is slowly turning to silver.

On this particular morning — a morning struck through with sun and birds and bloom — Ned is off to try his luck on some of the households round Berkeley and Soho squares. As he traverses the grim dark line of the bridge, he breaks into an energetic whistle and begins twirling his cane.

The wind off the river ruffles his wig. A gull coasts by overhead. “Ah! The glory of life!” he thinks, striding along like a young lord on his way to an afternoon at croquet. But when he reaches the far side of the bridge, a sudden change comes over him. It’s as if the God of the Spastics has touched him with his crooked wand: his limbs contort, tongue goes awry, neck falls loose. Suddenly he’s round-shouldered and stooped, dragging his leg as if it were cut from a tree — and now there’s a tic under his left eye and his shoulder has begun to buckle. Is it an attack? Convulsions? Tic douloureux? Ned smirks with satisfaction as passersby back away from him in alarm. “Gah,” he says to them, chewing at his tongue and holding up his mutilated hand like a badge. “Gah,” he says, lurching up the street like a dog with a broken back. All this of course is part of his design to escape detection — he likes to think of it as his “mantle of invisibility.” The false nose and spectacles, the outmoded dress, the tics and twitches, the palsied walk — why he’s just another harelipped cripple peddling fish eggs in the street. God Himself, come Judgment Day, wouldn’t recognize him in this getup.

He crabwalks up Great George Street, through St. James’s Park and across the Mall, limping and scraping like a terminal syphilitic, when suddenly he hears a voice call out behind him. “Ned Rise! Ned Rise! Wait up a minute there!”

It’s Boyles, the ass, his face flushed with drink and hurry. “Ned!” he puffs, jogging up to him. “We thought you was dead. Drownded in the river. Why, when I seen you roundin’ the corner back there I couldn’t hardly believe me eyes.”

Ned shrinks into his jacket and pulls the three-cornered hat down over his brow. His head and limbs are flapping like wash in the wind. A battery of tics surges across his face.

Boyles has a hand on his sleeve. “But wot’s the anty-quated weeds for? And all this limpin’ and cringin’? Did you catch the ague or is it just a bit of playactin’?”

The world is coming down round his ears, a piece of the sky has broken off and clapped him in the back of the head. He can’t think. His hands are trembling. Twit, Smirke, Mendoza — they’ll be down on him like hounds.