T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned’s grin is sleek and wide. “Told you so, didn’t I Smirke? Leave it to Neddy. You’ll be rich.”

A stentorian voice, the voice of a temperamental mountain, calls from within: “Drink! Goddamn and curse the virgin for a whore, drink!” “Booza!” shouts another. “Yaaaaar!” The shouts are like hot wires applied to Smirke’s spine. He shudders, stiffens, twitches, his muscles gone clonic, the glasses teetering on the rim of the tray. Then he throws back the door like a soldier and takes the full blast of a sirocco redolent of sweat, sperm, spilled beer and urine. His eyes are like peas. “Be gad this show better be good Ned Rise or I’ll, I’ll—”

“Have me liver out?”

“Fricasseed!” he roars, and offers himself up to the din.

Ned slams the door and takes a pull at his flask. It’s been a bitch of day. First there was the business of the carpenters and the stage. Then the advertisements. Shorthanded, he’d painted up the sandwich boards himself:

FOR THE BLOOD WHAT’S BOARD WITH PATIENCE

A New Entertainment

The Vole’s Head. 8 p.m. Tonight.

TITILLATION.

The V.’s Head. Tonight.

COME TO THE VOYEER’S BALL

The Vole’s Head. 8 p.m. Tonight.

Then he had to pay Billy Boyles and two other reprobates a shilling each to display them outside the gaming houses and gentlemen’s shops. They were to answer inquiries sotto voce and fill in the details as delicately as possible.

But if he knew Boyles, the flaming ass would be coarse-mouthing it up and down the street till every Charlie and magistrate in town got wind of it. Worries on worries. But that was just the beginning. Throughout the afternoon, in the midst of placating Smirke and hounding the carpenters, he’d had to keep Nan and Sally at a fine pitch of intoxication — soused enough to stay happy and yet not too far gone to perform. And then there was the biggest headache of all: leasing Jutta Jim, the black nigger of the Congo, from his master/employer, Lord Twit. Twit wanted three guineas and a firm assurance that his precious manservant would be returned before dawn, “sweet energies intact.” Shit. The whole thing — the hassles, the tension, the long hours of enforced sobriety — it’s nearly crippled him. His head is a suppurating blister and gin is the only tonic.

And so he is standing there in the dim hallway, pulling at the flask, dreaming, caressing the golden bulge at his crotch (thirty-two new guineas so far). . when suddenly he finds himself pinned up against the woodwork.

There is a fist beneath his chin, iron fingers at his throat. A smell of lavender, ruffled shirtsleeve. Mendoza.

“The entertainment better be stimulatin’, sucker, or I’ll snap off yer legs and arms as if they was matchsticks. You see, I’ve brung Beau along with me and I’m bleedin’ anxious the boy should be uplifted and edyfied by wot ‘ee’s about to see, understand?” The fingers relax their grip, and the impresario’s chin — assisted by the gravitational pull of the planet — regains its customary plane. Ned clears his eyes and looks past the Champion Fisticuffer to where a young dandy of seventeen or eighteen stands sneering at him. The dandy’s hair is curled like a gilded poodle’s, his eyes are the color of honey. His linen is so pure it glows. “Leave the sorry turd alone, Danny,” he says in his nasal whine. He pauses to float a jeweled snuffbox from his pocket, dab a pinch on the back of his hand and inhale it with an elegant toss of his head. When he looks up his eyes cut into Ned like lamb skewers. “There’ll be no charge for friends, will there Rise?”

Ned grins till his gums ache. “No,” he says. “No charge at all.”

Mendoza throws back the door and Beau steps into the room like a swan lighting on a mountain pond. “Cocksuckers,” Ned mutters, so low and so far back in his throat he’s not even sure he heard it himself. The door slams shut. Ned pulls the stone from his pocket and glances at it. The stone is flat, smooth, two inches in diameter. Someone has painted a clockface on its surface. Eight o’clock, it reads. Showtime.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sally Sebum and Jutta Jim are onstage, performing. Nan Punt, in a broadcloth dressing gown, stands beside Ned, awaiting her cue. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,” says Sally. “Uh-aah, Aaah! AAaaahhh!” Jutta Jim backs off from her, bare-assed, buck black naked, his member slick and hard in the light from the oil lamps. Spikes of etiolated bone jut from his nostrils, quills pierce his earlobes, whorled cicatrices vein his torso like a relief map of the moon. The audience is hushed. He turns to them, slow, silent, methodical, and begins to pound at the hogshead of his chest. “That’s my cue,” whispers Nan, slipping out of the gown and tripping daintily onto the stage, drunk as a sow. After parading around and rubbing her bosoms a bit for the audience, she puts Jim’s cock in her mouth. The onlookers — they who a moment before had been stomping and whistling and throwing socks, hats, napkins and silverware — suddenly fall silent. Meanwhile, Sally peels herself from the stage’s only prop — a green-velvet confidante — and staggers off into the wings. Ned holds the robe open for her. “Whew,” she puffs, “the black cannibal like to’ve swived me to death.” She’s running sweat, her makeup a swamp, the rich black curls plastered to her cheeks and throat. Her breasts are red and white. They strain at the robe like vegetables in a sack. “And his breath! Like a fookin’ chamberpot. He’s got a tool on ‘im, though — I’ll say that for the beast.”

“Glad you enjoyed it, Sal.”

“Enjoyed it?” Indignant, hands on hips. “You think I enjoys being grunted over and slobbered upon by a stink-mouth nigger bebarian?” But then she winks. “Easiest four quid I ever made since Lord Dalhousie’s milk punch got the better of ‘im and ‘ee fumbled ‘is purse down the front of me sateen dress.”

Ned laughs. “Just the beginning, Sal. I’ve got another show lined up here for Thursday and then one for Saturday at the Pig & Pox. And I’ll tell you what — if you get back out there and do your histrionical best I’ll give you another two crowns on top of it.”

She’s about to remark how her mum always wanted her to pursue a career on the stage, but peeps out at the crowd and giggles instead. “Ned,” she whispers, “come have a look at this.” Ned looks. The entire audience — lords and Garterees, naval officers, shopkeepers, footpads and clerics, even Smirke himself — is caught up in a trance, their mouths hanging open, chins and beards wet with spittle. Jim is stretched out supine now, stage front. Nan riding him like a jockey, leaping the dikes, fences and water hazards of orgasm, panting and gibbering all the way. There’s not a whisper from the patrons, not a cough or snuffle, a golly or gee — they wouldn’t have looked up if Halley’s Comet had torn the roof off the place. Some are twitching in face and limb, others grip their hats and walking sticks as if they were grasping at twigs on the brink of a precipice. Here and there a handkerchief swabs a brow, restive teeth chew at the back of a chair, feet tap and knees knock. “Yahooo!” shouts Nan at the peak of a pure gallop, and poor Smirke pitches forward in a typhoon of crunching glass. No one notices.

Sally helps herself to a pull at Ned’s flask. Then she laughs. Laughs till she has to put a hand to her ribs.

“What’s the joke?” asks Ned.

“Well,” she manages, between bursts of giggles, “either they’ve took to wearin’ codpieces again or I’ll swear somebody’s put yeast in all them trowsers out there.”

♦ THE SAHEL♦

The Sahel is a strip of semi-arid land girding West Africa like a waistband, stretching from the Atlantic coast in the west to Lake Chad in the east. Above it lies the Great Desert; below, the rain forests of tropical Africa. Its northernmost fringes give way to steppe, baked and blanched, and then to the dunes and ergs of the Great Desert itself. To the south, the Sahel becomes savanna, lush with seas of blue-green grass from June to October, the months of the monsoon. During these months al-haj’ Ali Ibn Fatoudi moves his herds of goats and cattle, his people, tents, wives and milk-fed horses to the north, pressing the green line to its limits. From November to June he moves southward as the fierce harmattan winds shriek out of the desert with claws of flying sand, leaching the moisture from the air, the shrubs, the eyes and throats of his herds and his tribesmen. The sad truth is, Ali’s herds overgraze the northern Sahel. His cows crop the grass before it’s had a chance to germinate, his goats tear it up by the roots. Each year Ali drifts farther south, a mile here, a mile there. In two hundred years Benowm will be desert. The great ergs, Iguidi and Ehech, flow with the wind, drifting, stretching out tongues, fingers and arms, beckoning and beleaguering.