T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned is suddenly seized with a sense of déjà vu.

“Ye’ve got ‘er nekked up in some garret then, ain’t ye? Tore the threads right off ‘er, didn’t ye, ye wicked beast? Eeeeeeeeee!” she laughs, nudging him again.

Ned steps back a pace. The woman’s face is fleshless, skin stretched over bone. She is half bald. Something glitters on her lower lip.

“ ‘Ow’ll this be, then?” she puffs, bending to pluck a bundle of flowered skirts from the floor. “And this?” She reaches up for a veiled bonnet piled high with artificial fruit and gilded dromaderies.

“F-fine,” Ned stutters, his arms heaped with cotton, muslin, wool and chintz. He seems to have lost command of the situation, taken aback by the old slut, wrestling with the feeling that he’s been through all this before.

“Petticoats?” the old woman leers. “Undies?”

Ned heaps his clothes atop the makeshift counter — a plank stretched between two barrels. The proprietress produces a filthy scrap of paper and a pencil, and begins scrawling figures across the page. She is humming. No: singing. He recognizes the tune. The Ballad of Jack Hall .

“Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,” she moans, scraping away at the octaves like a saw cutting through a wet log. “It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o.” Then she leers up at him. “Four shillin’s, tuppence, Lothario,” she cackles. “Eeeeeee!”

“Have you got a back room?” Ned asks.

“Back room? Can’t ye wait till ye gets ‘ome to yer own mizzable lodgin’s? Wot are ye, anyway: one o’ them perverty types wot runs around jackin’ off on ladies’ garmints like a cat in ‘eat? Eh? Eh? That wot it is, peach fuzz?”

Ned lays another shilling on the counter. “Just point it out, will you?”

The old woman points, then looks down to count her money. “Takes all kinds,” she mutters. “Eeeeeee!”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later he steps from the back room, a blushing beauty. The skirts are soiled, and they reek a bit, but you’d never know it from a distance. He’s tied a white cap under his chin, letting his own hair fall down his back, and crowned the whole thing with the foot-high bonnet.

The old woman perches on a stool behind the counter, a pewter cup and a jug before her. When she throws back her head with the cup, she catches sight of him and begins gargling out her weird laugh. “Ye didn’t tell me it was ‘alloween,” she chokes, pounding the plank and hooting. “Or is it the faggots’ ball ye’re going to? Hee-eeee! Eeeeee!”

Ned draws up his skirts and swishes past her, too uneasy to trade insults. There’s something about the old slut that rushes back to his earliest memories, pokes at him like a nightmare in the womb. He shudders as he hurries out of the shop, the splintered old voice ringing in his ears:

Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,

It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o;

I must hang until I’m dead, dead, dead,

I must hang until I’m de-e-ad;

I must hang until I’m dead, ‘cause I killed a man,

And I left him layin’ on the cold, cold ground.

♦ INBREEDING♦

“Soho Square,” says Ned.

The chairman eyes the bonnet, skirts, flounces. He is a tall and singularly ugly fellow, his head close-cropped and disproportionately small. There are tufts of hair growing out of his ears. “Oy’m sowwy, Madame, but this conweyance is spoken for,” he says.

“You stupid ass,” growls Ned. “Can’t you see it’s me?”

The man takes hold of Ned’s arm, preventing him from stepping into the compartment. “Me ‘oo?”

“Me. The gentleman what owns them fish eggs on the seat there.”

The chairman looks hard at Ned’s bustline, the frilly ribbon tied under his chin, the curls trailing down his back. Then he glances at the basket of fish eggs and back again. He looks confused. “ ‘Ey Bob,” he calls, and his co-worker peeks out from behind the rear of the conveyance. “Was it a gennelman we ‘auled over ‘ere from St. James’s, or am Oy in fear of me sanity?”

Bob is short and moonfaced, with high-set ears and a fringe of orange hair that gives him the look of a neutered cat. “That’s royt,” he says. “An elderly gent, somewhat lame. ‘Ee was all decked out in a three-corner ‘at and wig and such — like they useter wear in me granddad’s day.”

“Ye see?” says the crophead. “It’s like Oy told ye, Madame — the conweyance is otherwise occupied.”

A carriage rattles up the street and splashes the side of the compartment with dung. Two blocks down a baby falls from a window.

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” shouts Ned. “That gentleman is me.”

Bob looks suspicious, crophead puzzled.

“I’ve changed my clothes in the shop, don’t you see?”

No response.

“Look: think of it this way. A man is invited to a costume ball. He hires a sedan chair—”

“Aye,” says crophead, nodding vigorously.

“—in St. James’s Square, and takes it over to Monmouth Street — Rose’s Old Clothes, to be exact — gives the chairman half a crown to mind his basket, then enters the shop, purchases a lady’s outfit, changes into it, and hops back in the sedan chair ready to shoot off to the costume ball — disguised as a lady.”

“Gawn!” scoffs Bob.

“Yeah,” adds crophead. “ ‘Oo’d do a thing like that?”

“All right: fuck you both, then,” Ned snarls, lashing out with his parasol and springing into the compartment.

“But Mistress,” pleads the crophead, “Oy appeals to yer sense o’ fair play. A gennelman give us arf a crown to ‘old the chair for ‘im and to mind ‘is basket o’ fish eggs. Now wot are we going to tell that gennelman should ‘ee come out o’ the shop and see that ye’ve ‘propriated ‘is eggs and ‘is conweyance both?”

Ned motions the man closer, takes hold of his elbow and whispers in his ear. “I’ll level with you,” he says “ — this is a very delicate situation here. You see, I’m the lady friend of the gentleman in the shop, and we don’t want to be seen together for fear his wife should hear of it. Now: he’s left these fish eggs as a special present for me and he’s slipped on out the back way to meet me at his flat for what the French call an assignation.”

The man scratches his head.

“We call it ‘dipping the wick.’ “

The man breaks out in a grin. “Woy didn’t ye say so?. ‘Ey Bob — she says she’s ‘is konkabine then.”

Bob’s voice is distant and faint, emanating from somewhere on the far side of the chair. “Well, I guess it’s all royt then.”

“Aye,” says crophead. “Guess it’s all royt.”

“Soho Square,” says Ned.

♦ THE HEART OF DARKNESS♦

The woods. Dark and deep. Two figures squat over an anemic flame, roasting meat. Lions roar, and lightning plays over the horizon like the flicker of ideas.

“So tell me, Mr. Park, if I ain’t gettin’ too personal, just what it is you see in this explorin’ business anyhow? I mean you been starved and abused, sick with the ague and the fever, your clothes is in rags, half your goods is gone and your horse is layin’ over there in the bushes like it ain’t never goin’ to get up again.”

“I’m glad you asked me that, Johnson. You see — my lord that smells good. What did you say it was?”

“Paw pads of the jackal. Only thing the vultures won’t touch.”

“Hmp. Learn something new every day. . Anyway, I’m the eighth of thirteen. Know what that means?”

Johnson looks up from the skewered bits of meat. “You’re consumed with a almost demonic obsession to prove yourself?”