T. Boyle - Water Music

“Shhhh!” warns Johnson, dismounting in a tangle of burrs and glossy black thorns. The explorer’s heart is drumming at his ribs. He climbs down from the wheezing nag and crouches in the vegetation. “Think we lost him?” he whispers.

Out on the road the slow fuliginous procession rumbles past. The explorer makes out a leg here, a head there, the back end of a goat or sheep. The din is steady, broken now and again by a curse or shout. There is no sign of Dassoud. And then suddenly — a bogey leaping out at a sleeping child — there he is! Tireless, fixated, trotting along the roadway and peering into the dustcloud, his eyes so swollen with rage they look like hard-cooked eggs. His shins seem battered and bruised, his calves veined with blood. He never even turns his head.

Deep in the bushes, Johnson holds out his hands, palms up.

The explorer looks him in the eye, a silly euphoric grin creeping across his face, then reaches out and brushes the upturned palms with his own.

♦ THE STREETS OF LONDON♦

At this time in history the streets of London were as foul, feculent and disease-ridden as a series of interconnected dunghills, twice as dangerous as a battlefield, and as infrequently maintained as the lower cells of an asylum dungeon. It was pretty rough. Drunks lay sprawled across the footpaths, some dead and stinking and blanketed with crows. Whole families squatted on streetcorners and begged for bread. Murders were committed in the alleys. There were yellowed newspapers clinging to the lampposts, smashed crocks and bottles underfoot, bits of produce and the bones of gamebirds and fowls moldering in the corners. There was pigeonshit. Mud, coal dust, ashes, dead cats, dogs, rats, scraps of cloth stained with excrement, and worst of all, open sewers. “We live. Sir, like a colony of Hottentots,” complained Lord Tyrconnel, addressing the House. “And our streets abound with such heaps of filth as even a savage would look on with amaze.” Others agreed. A society for Civic Salubrity was formed, a Clean Air Club. They held regular meetings, followed Bledsoe’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure , aired complaints, accomplished nothing.

There were a few private nightsoil collectors, it’s true, and a handful of dustmen. But the nightsoil collectors built festering mounds of muck in their backyards and the dustmen merely created smoldering dumps. And this still left the overwhelming majority of the city’s residents with no means of sewage disposal save their own backyards and the choked gutters which bisected the streets like running wounds. Grim shopkeepers trudged out into the roadway to dump their chamberpots, barmen limed the walls outside their establishments to deaden the reek of urine, housekeepers flung buckets of nightsoil from second- and third-story windows. “Gardy loo!” the chambermaid would shout, and a dark clot of it would arch out over the walkway to slap down in the street, there to ooze inch by inch toward the fetid gutter. Of course, this was inconvenient for the passerby, who might already be limping and brushing at his clothes as a result of tumbling into an open cellar or blundering across one of the several thousand mad dogs that roamed the city at will. And as if that weren’t enough, the gutters were generally clogged with horsedung, pigs’ ears and other offal, causing the sewage to back up in dark rills and steamy swamps — not only was the pedestrian up to his ankles in human waste, he also found himself dodging the airborne clods thrown up by the wheels of passing carriages.

Because the streets were so unpleasant, people of means took to traveling from place to place by coach or sedan chair. The sedan chair was particularly well adapted to its time and place, providing comfort and security for the privileged and a means of employment for some few of the starving masses. It consisted of an enclosed compartment attached to a pair of parallel bars. These bars were hoisted on the shoulders of the chairmen, one fore and one aft. The chairmen, impoverished inbreeds with harelips and misshapen heads, made a few pennies; the lady going out to tea could arrive with a petticoat free of shit smears. Advantages all around. But there was a further advantage to the sedan chair: once inside, one was invisible. Merely pull the curtains and peep through the cracks. See, and remain unseen.

What better means of conveyance for an invisible man?

♦ THE BALLAD OF JACK HALL♦

With a sinking feeling, Ned watches Boyles’ pinched shoulders and flat-bottomed head recede into the crowd. He looks round furtively, feeling naked and vulnerable, a crab without a shell. Up the street, a chairstand. Ned hobbles up to the first chair, hands the chairman a coin and disappears within. The curtains are drawn. It is dark as a womb. Ned’s mind rushes with schemes and ruses and counterschemes. His own voice surprises him. “Monmouth Street,” he calls. “Rose’s Old Clothes.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Rose’s Old Clothes is a secondhand shop specializing in women’s attire and highly recommended by Sally Sebum (“She’s got the keenest bargains in town. Rose does”). It is one of a dozen shops of the rag-and-bone variety squeezed into a two-block span, all of which cater to the servants of the rich (selling), the wives of frugal burghers (buying), and the poor (just looking). The grimy bow windows out front are heaped with the strata of fashion: hoops, hats and whalebone corsets; petticoats, parasols, caps, bonnets and bustles. A cockeyed sign hangs over the door:

WE LAWNDERS ALL GARMINTS

PRIOR TO SELLING

Ned’s chair scrapes down outside the shop. “Monmouth Street,” announces the chairman, swinging back the door.

In the dark, jostling through the crowded streets, Ned’s mind has been active. Boyles, he realizes, is totally untrustworthy. As soon as he gets a few drinks in him he’ll blab the whole thing: Ned Rise is alive! I talked to him. Had me hand on his arm! The rumor spreads like ink in water, passes round barrooms, served up with the soup, until finally it whispers in the ears of Mendoza, Smirke, Twit and the rest. Two weeks. That’s all he needs. If he can get through two weeks more he’ll have cleared five hundred pounds on Chichikov’s Choice and he can get out of town altogether. Try his luck on the Continent maybe. Paris, The Hague, Leghorn.

“Monmouth Street,” the chairman repeats.

Ned straightens his nose and adjusts his wig, then limps out into the street. He hands the chairman half a crown. “Wait here,” he says, “and keep an eye on my basket of fish eggs, will you?”

♦ ♦ ♦

An anemic bell murmurs over the door as Ned steps into the shop. He finds himself in a foul-smelling room lit only by the odd strands of light that seep in through the avalanche of ladies’ apparel heaped up round the windows. The smell is of clothes tight at the groin and under the armpit, clothes worn without washing for years on end, clothes harboring all the vermin and disease known to man. He looks round for the proprietor.

“Shopkeeper!” he calls. The place seems deserted.

But then, in the far corner, a bundle of rags disengages itself from the general disarray and begins shuffling toward him. The bundle of rags turns out to be an old woman wrapped in a moth-eaten cloak. She looks as if she feeds on nothing but thousand-year-old eggs. “Yes?” she cackles, her voice full of rust. “Wot’ll it be? Buyin’ or gapin’?”

“A woman’s outfit,” Ned says. “The whole works: skirts and gloves and shoulderknots, a cap that ties under the chin and the biggest bonnet you’ve got.”

“EEE-ee-eeeee!” cackles the proprietress. “A bit o’ finery for the littul mistress, ‘ey?” She nudges him with her elbow and winks.