Incomparable World

by S. I. Martin

  ‘Young man,’ he whispered, barely audible above the oar-teased water. ‘Lichfield’s a small place. My wife apart, his is the only black face I see.’ He scratched his ear and hunched his shoulders. ‘Can’t always choose your friends, eh?’

  ‘That’s the truth, Mr Tell,’ concurred Buckram. ‘That is the truth.’ This was the first time he had ever unmockingly addressed another black man as Mr.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ said Mr Tell, pointing at Betsy with her head over the side by the prow. ‘Not another sick woman, I pray?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Buckram, checking the horizon and the bag between his feet.

  Betsy had obtained a clear view upstream. Buckram saw how her muscles locked as another ferry rounded the river by Lambeth Palace. This ferry was full of bare-chested men with their hats turned back to front.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, what new torment?’ whimpered Charlotte’s mother as the other ferry changed course to draw up alongside Wheeler’s Right.

  ‘This, good woman,’ Francis declared excitedly, ‘is your famous London river josh. Great sport, wouldn’t you say, pilot?’

  The pilot was completely uninterested.

  ‘Let the ark-ruffians make the first move,’ Buckram said aloud, reluctantly acknowledging his role as the ablest-bodied male passenger.

  ‘Ahoy there,’ hailed a river ragamuffin. ‘You ugly black sons-of-bitches! Your mothers are all bawds and your women are tupp’ny tups!’ Much laughter.

  ‘Ah well,’ Buckram sighed. ‘Let’s get it over with.’ He stood up and cleared his throat. ‘Talk to me like that! You chicken-stinking, cockless white bastard! Go bend for Satan and sear your mouthpiece!’ With the exception of Mrs Tell, the passengers and crew of Wheeler’s Right cheered loudly.

  ‘Talk to me like that!’ came the reply, ‘I’ll run a rusty needle through my ol’ mare’s doo ’n’ sew up yer fat black lips!’

  Buckram cleared his throat again. Someone patted his back. ‘Allow me,’ said Francis, eager to join the exchange. He stood. ‘You lousy crew of grey-bellied rats! The only clap you’ve clapped is your mothers! Talk to me like th …!’

  A soggy onion flew across the water and caught him square on the nose.

  ‘Oooh, that’s it!’ squealed Lizzie, pulling up her bag of muck. ‘Here we go! Have at them!’ She hurled two rotten eggs at the onion-thrower. They missed him, but one splattered neatly against the opposing pilot’s neck.

  The air was soon thick with malodorous missiles flying between boats. Charlotte discreetly emptied her stomach over the port side as the battle raged.

  Mrs Brookes screamed. A heavy, pungent projectile had exploded on her apron. ‘Dung!’ she gasped. ‘They’ve got dung! That’s not fair. They’re using dung!’

  Buckram was holding his last lamb’s skull and Betsy was taking aim with baby carrots. Lizzie chucked a handful of compacted maggots. More manure was coming on board. It wasn’t looking good.

  The pilot of Wheeler’s Right tugged a fat sack from the stern and tipped out its contents. ‘Here, use this.’ Great chunks of coal littered the deck around him. ‘And look lively! Won’t get your hands dirty, will it?’

  They pounced on the new ammunition and commenced a judiciously aimed barrage against the gong-wielders. Two of their crew fell immediately. The river rats had run out of things to throw. The volleys of coal grew heavier, became demented, in fact. Even Mrs Tell was up and lobbing. Buckram heard her laugh, k-k-k-k-k-k …

  The enemy pilot pulled down his breeches and mooned at the black people. He singled out Betsy for a final piece of abuse. ‘Aaah, you dirty sow, better you marry a pig than a monkey. May dogs defile your unborn litter! Bugger the lot o’ you!’

  Francis bunged a last lump of coal, but it fell short and splashed dead in the wake of the departing ferry. ‘The swine,’ he fumed. ‘Listen to them!’

  The scoundrels sang as they sculled out of reach:

  The Blackies have taken my sweetheart away,

  The Blackies have taken my sweetheart away,

  The Blackies have taken my sweetheart away,

  Turra-lie,

  Turra-lee,

  Turra-lay … O.

  Visitors were arriving at the Pleasure Gardens in flotillas of small ferries and wherries, like elves floating in nutshells. Bands of mudlarks, equipped with brushes, waited on the steps to clean up the new arrivals.

  Francis elected himself as guide, but before they entered the park he insisted on having his shoes cleaned, and he insisted that Betsy should watch him. While the bootblack set to work with his slop of egg-white and lamp soot, the rest of the party dawdled at a liquor parlour which had been decorated as a Moorish harem.

  Buckram settled Charlotte on a bench beside a table lined with vases of tulips and minute glasses of syrupy beverages. He plucked a flower and rubbed it softly under her nostrils.

  ‘For all that we have, and for all that’s to come,’ he uttered. He kissed the flower and placed it in her bag.

  ‘Thank you. It’s lovely,’ she said, absently. She was staring at a mewling doxy and her cull lost in a deep canoodle on a giant silk cushion.

  Buckram drew up a stool and straddled it. ‘How d’you feel?’ Charlotte’s face had that deathly, washed-out pallor, unique to beautiful, ailing women.

  ‘I’m fine. It’s nothing. Nothing grave.’ She nudged Buckram’s elbow, prompting him towards her beckoning father.

  ‘What do you drink, young man?’ Mr Tell passed a hand over the table. ‘There’s arrack, punch, ratafia, orange brandy, a world of it. Civilization, or no? What do you want?’

  Four jars of scurvy-grass, thought Buckram. He settled for orange brandy. It was the smallest serving of the brightest colour.

  ‘You must let Charlotte bring you up to Lichfield, one day,’ announced Mr Tell.

  ‘That, sir,’ Buckram raised his glass, ‘would be my greatest pleasure.’ He let the orange brandy wet his upper lip, then set it down again.

  Mrs Tell was lecturing Lizzie and Mrs Brookes on the writings of Samuel Johnson, Francis Barber’s deceased benefactor.

  ‘So it’s all Dr Johnson’s money, then?’ asked Mrs Brookes, awestruck. ‘They’ve none of their own, Francis and Betsy?’

  Mrs Tell nodded and shook her head at the same time.

  ‘Why, that’s terrible,’ clucked Lizzie. ‘A man of his age, with children, too. Quelle horreur! What do you think, Buckram? Shouldn’t a man, by honest toil alone, support his own family?’

  ‘That’s as it should be,’ said Buckram, barely registering her comments. He was busy scanning the gardens, ticking off points of potential conflict; the plain-clothed, freelance pressmen slowly counting through the gagglers under the hot-air balloon, the ecstatic, primal gasps from the nearby labyrinth of arboured walks, the long line of tense men standing silent by the Hairy Woman’s tent, and the same at the White Negress’s. Gravel paths were everywhere: a noiseless flight would be impossible. A pair of sword-jugglers, a fire-eater, the bear-pit … ‘Mmmm, that’s the way it is,’ he replied to whatever Lizzie had been preaching.

  The women fell silent as the subject of their gossip appeared in the pavilion.

  ‘Look what I’ve found!’ Francis came strutting up from his shoeshine. His right hand pulled a toddler of mixed race. She had short, clumpy hair, torn up in places by someone’s combing. Her face was a nest of worm eggs.

  Huge, open sores wept down her neck and chest. A soft, happy spark twinkled from deep-sunken eyes.

  ‘Found her kneeling by the riverbank, lapping Thames water like a foal,’ Francis explained. ‘Seems to have taken a shine to me, the little urchin.’ He chucked her under the chin. ‘Truly it’s as the poet said: “From the strangest admixtures the greatest beauties grow”.’ He glanced at his wife who was pursing her lips.

  ‘Whaddy’ say, we take her for a swing ride and a feed of pease pottage?’ he proposed.

  Mrs Brookes sniffed. ‘I was rather hoping to hear the operetta over a dish of oysters and cold collation
s.’

  The girl staggered up to Charlotte. ‘Mama,’ she cried, ‘MAMA!’

  Betsy sighed with ill-concealed relief.

  ‘Awhhh, she thinks I’m her mother, poor thing.’ Charlotte smoothed her skirts down between her knees and let the thumb-sucking youngster burrow. ‘Poor thing,’ she murmured, dusting bugs from the child’s head. ‘Poor thing, poor little thing.’

  A shower of rude laughter was moving through the Pleasure Gardens. It trickled across the Italianate rotundas, it swept through the grottoes and beer lodges, it gathered over the dicers and the sharps in the pagoda, and coursed down to the riverside to splash viciously about the pavilion.

  A massive woman was striding through the crowd as if it was invisible. She reeked of soused herring and wore a patched mob cap, a patched dress, and a patch over one eye. She was barefoot, breathless and quite white beneath her dirt-caked face. Rotting lungs rattled against her ribs every time she inhaled. She stamped across to the pavilion, looked left, then looked right.

  ‘How now, my sweet?’ She addressed the infant at Charlotte’s waist. ‘Found favour in a new family, have yer!’

  Her voice almost jolted Buckram from his seat. She bulked straight towards Charlotte and scooped up the child between her fleshy arms. She snarled chuckles at the horrified black women and shook the toddler at them.

  ‘Mine!’ she yelled in a broad Northern accent. ‘Not yours, she’s mine. She is mine!’

  Buckram felt his gonads shrivel. She turned to the massing sightseers who had followed her through the park. ‘Mine, mine, yes, mine!’ she declared defiantly.

  She turned to Francis and to Betsy. ‘This girl is mine. This is my daughter. Right?’

  She turned to Buckram.

  He wet himself.

  Strangely enough, she was much bigger than before. Those shoulders, once full and straight, bowed and sloped under the weight of her enormous, dangling breasts. Nipples, thick as otter’s snouts, stood out against the fabric on either side of her navel. Now face to face, he noticed her split nose and her many missing teeth. Her single eye, now voided of gleam, was compacted and bloodshot as a Smithfield gutter. It dilated, as did her nostrils, and was welling in recognition of the man before her, who echoed her petrification.

  Her voice was unaltered and the lips hadn’t changed. That was the very mouth that had once worked for him. It was fighting to find words.

  ‘You … you … you … bastard!’ shrieked Harriet. She shook her daughter at him. ‘You evil, black bastard!’ The suffocating child warbled a wail.

  Hullside Harriet pushed the wretched, snivelling infant in Buckram’s face. ‘For all that we have, and for all that’s to come.’ She blew a sneer through clenched teeth, bathing Buckram’s head in gin fumes. ‘That’s what you said. You lyin’ black arsehole. You’re all the same, you dark men. Fook ’em ’n’ forget ’em. Look at her! You don’t even know your own fookin’ kid!’

  The little girl struggled to escape her mother’s mighty forearms, as if to swim the air to another’s embrace.

  ‘Mine?’ Buckram choked.

  ‘Look at you, a-quaffing in your fancy threads with your gang o’ Sanchos, and your own blood penniless and two years starvin’.’ The strumpet bared her gums and tossed the bawling child into his lap. The little girl pinched him. He wasn’t dreaming.

  ‘Your dadda,’ seethed Harriet. She nodded savouring ancient, well-brewed hatred. ‘This is yer fookin’ black sire, Cary-lass. Give ’im a good bite ’fore yer ol’ ma gets one.’

  Harriet lunged, all teeth and nails, at her old lover’s freshly soiled breeches.

  Buckram said, ‘Urrrrgh!’ and toppled backwards off his stool. He said it again as the girl fell from his arms and bounced one and a half times, knocking her head and hands against the pavilion’s hard granite floor.

  Harriet moved with unearthly speed, snatching wildly at Buckram’s flailing ankles. He twitched frantically on the ground, like a terrier in a rat-pit, between the bawling babe on one side and Harriet looming on the other, like a lunar eclipse darkening his future.

  The crowd in the pavilion was now afoot and staring at them. Beloved Charlotte, her mother and father and friends, were shocked speechless, aghast and gawping.

  Harriet was standing over him, trying to kick his face.

  ‘Buckram?’ Charlotte, with a parent clutching each arm, was straining towards Harriet. ‘Buckram?’ Her voice was high and trembling, like a rope-walker’s toes more than halfway across. ‘Do you know this dishclout?’ she cried. ‘What is she saying? Who is she? Who is she?’

  Onlookers cheered as Harriet’s huge, hardened heel connected with Buckram’s jaw.

  Buckram pulled himself onto his knees and elbows. He closed his eyes, covered his head and let himself be kicked, once or twice like an untrained cur.

  How many more times …? he wonders. How many more …?

  Everyone on earth will die before they die. Lives will be lost many times, in many ways. And the boundless, private voids – where one’s momentum is the only measure – must be haunted anew with fresh hope and new suspicion. Here is Buckram now, falling yet again, from nowhere to nowhere else, plummeting through the banked-up years of failure, strewn with the husks of his ever dwindling selves. And the single truth he now perceives, the last imploring memory from his fast-fading history is an intonation, once uttered by Neville, ‘The land of desire is like the kingdom of the dead: there is always room for more.’ And once more, this awful abyss must be re-peopled, but Buckram has no real science, he has no fast religion: he has to learn, just one more time, how to be a human he could love.

  There was nothing he could say or do. Nothing now. Nothing new. The child was theirs, his and Harriet’s, he knew it in his blood, that blood that pulsed thick-veined across the infant’s African eyes. He was the father of Carol (feeling the name stick in his mind, he knew it would forever stick in his throat), an English girl, a white woman’s child, and Charlotte, through her tears, could see his promises and his past, now torn and corrupted, for the living lies they were.

  Beadles were approaching, press-gangs converged, Mrs Tell had fainted. Buckram had no purpose here. He was a victim, a target: object of the world’s derision and subject to his own, errant will.

  He fled through the pleasure garden, punching a path through officials and bystanders, gaining comfort from his desperation now the world had re-drawn his goal. He was running to freedom. Running away, running to freedom, running from Charlotte, running from family. Running alone. Back to the wished-for brotherhood of men; the innocent, undemanding planet of play, where unjudged, he could wallow in his unrealized destinies, and, unwanted, he could flounder and nurse his wounded pride.

  Four trained hares, with drumsticks strapped to their paws, sounded his newest retreat from reality with their rhythmless beat on an old kettledrum.

  His last memory: Harriet lumbering up behind him with a tulip-chewing girl-child under one arm, and from somewhere behind them, the unmistakable racket of a Punch and Judy show.

  London, 2 August 1786

  The body of Mr Neville Franklin, late of the Parish of St Giles and also of Wilmington, Virginia, was discovered by the watch in Clare Court at three o’clock one Sunday morning.

  His throat had been cut and his upper body badly bruised. He was buried in the cemetery at St Giles’s churchyard. Only friends of the church were present at the funeral.

  William and Buckram were far too busy to attend.

  London, 17 August 1786

  It was a warm, breezy day, a hanging holiday, so they had Oxford Street all to themselves.

  The huge ruts in the road were filled with sticks and straw and Buckram enjoyed reining the two bay mares round them and letting the big, gaudy stagecoach jounce neatly on its springy, new chassis.

  William, leaning half-way out of the rattling carriage, shouted to him, ‘Slow down, Buckie, whoooa! Don’t draw so much attention to us! Remember, we’re supposed to be royalty!’
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br />   Both William Supple and Georgie George were dressed as African nobles in loose-flowing West African cloth of black, red, gold and green. Buckram and the triplets wore similar loud livery tailored to European styles as befitting a driver and footmen. Every individual surface on the coach was painted either glossy green, glossy brown, or glossy sky blue.

  Buckram sucked his teeth. Even in congested traffic such a carriage full of arguing black men would be the most conspicuous vehicle in the capital. He ignored his friend’s words and cracked his whip, setting the horses off at almost a hand-gallop.

  With some skill, he negotiated the turn into Duke Street then reined the mares stiffly to a short, neat stop.

  This was the approach to Grosvenor Square, their point of no return. Buckram sensed a cool, grim mood descend over him and his companions. They’d become soldiers again with relinquished identities, moving through a plan and geared to their goal. All possible manoeuvres had been discussed and confirmed. They were all on their own now, locked in their own separate roles, and there was nothing left to say. Not even ‘good luck’. Time for action.

  Hercules, Newton and Charles jumped out to join Buckram at their places, fore and aft atop the coach, their faces settling into masks of unblinking sobriety.

  Buckram waited, thoughtless in the silent street, seeing how the shadows of its single tree – an ash – dappled softly across the smooth, handsome walls of some rich person’s property.

  Georgie George called out, ‘Forward!’ and the coach set off towards Grosvenor Square.

  Buckram willed the horses to an easy pace and relaxed, taking in the glorious architecture of this most modern place. He marvelled at the flat but comely façades, the unity of design, the propriety of their disposition. There were no dunghills in the road, no boozed-up vagrants slouched against walls. An oval-shaped garden, sterile and undisturbed as a German park, sat in its centre. Here there were pavements, fresh air, light and space, and he felt exactly like what he was: an imposter, a black thief with evil intent.