by Edward Carey
In the background, from a room quite full of steam, a very large shape began to stir.
‘No,’ I said, ‘please, miss, not to be so hasty. I said I have money and here it is indeed. Here.’ I took it out, out in the open. The wretched girl looked down at it, she lay her hand out flat.
‘This is my money,’ I said.
‘That’ll cover it,’ she said. ‘More than cover it several times over.’
‘It’s a half sovereign,’ I said.
‘So I see,’ she said.
‘It’s my half sovereign,’ I said. ‘My particular half sovereign.’
‘Is it though?’
‘I’m to look after it.’
‘Loyalty’s first to your stomach, I always say.’
‘I’m never to spend it.’
‘Shan’t do nothing for you if you don’t.’
‘It’s mine you see.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re wrong there. Mine now.’
She had it in her own filthy hand then.
She was walking away with it.
My sovereign!
Why did I feel so sad of a sudden? Why was I crying, the tears coming so fast?
My own sov!
My bloody sov!
2
DEEPDOWNSIDE
The narrative of the Former Ward of the Borough of Forlichingham, no longer resident at that address, disposed, thrown out
into the heapland
I found it and so it is mine. Takes one such as me to find such a thing as that. I scrambled upwards. Hadn’t been on top for many a day. The weather had been so miserable that it wasn’t safe to go up, so I lived under, in the dark. I sees in the dark and am comfortable enough there. I live under, in the deeps. I knows it, knows it well. Sometimes, when I get the fancy, I surface. I find me a spot, a place to perch, and I sing out. I cry out. I groan and whoop and make my big noise.
‘Binadit!’ I screams. ‘Binadit! Binadit!’
That’s what I sound most. That’s much of my vocabulary. They threw me out here in the Heaps, sent me out over a mile in distance and left me here to drown. But you can’t sink me. I’m made of such stuff I am. I survive. I live out in the Heaps and have grown big on it. I’m twice the size I was before who was already much. They’re frightened of me, those indoor dwellers, terrified of me. Whenever they catch sight of me they run inside for cover. I’m the outdoors, I am.
I made a deal with the objects. We’re one. We’re of a piece, me and the wastelands. We’re familiar. Intimate. The people from over the wall don’t spot me mostly, lumbering in their distance. I’m invisible to them. I’m every piece of rubbish. I can be big. I can be monstrous as a mountain when I call all the rubbish to me, and it plays and throws around me and we are BIG BIG!
I’m everywhere all about.
You can’t see me.
Here I am.
But where was I? I move in my mind about from bit to bit. I’m no constant thinker, I tell a bit of this a bit a that. I’m as varied as the Heaps, which to the unfamiliar observer is only brown and greyish, but to me is a kaleidoscope of experience. I move from object to object and with it shifts my mind, roll me over, lift a cover, drag out a bone: I’ll tell you another story. Binadit am I. ’Tis home. ’Tis mine. I found it! There we are again! That was it. I found it! And so it’s mine. Wot is it? Nothing much you might say, but I knows it. I feel it’s good. I take it, I grab at it and hold it to me safe, and quick down I take it, deep deep under where I sleep in the deeps. Drowned dead. I am rubbish. Yes, yes, but wot is it? The new thing?
Wot?
I didn’t say again?
No, I never.
Dumb old Binadit, foolish old Binadit, wobbly old Binadit, forever moving on, living heap, man of filth, heaphead, idiot, idiot. Meant to say. Well, I’ll tell you then, I mean to.
Didn’t say again.
Wot again?
No, you never.
Well then, here it is:
A clay botton.
My clay botton.
I found it.
I’ve a nose for it, always have had. I know your fresh filth from your old filth, I knows new stinks from ancient stunk. I can smell a mile off. I knows it, I feels it. I hop about upon the surface rummaging here and there finding my grubbing. I love it, I love it, it’s all my living. Picking it up, putting it in, swallowing, sometimes sicking it back up, not often. I do digest most things. Rubber, cloth, rich pickings for me they are, metal sometimes. I like the slice of it, like blood it is.
But so, there I was up above after the big winter storm and out in the sunlight, and moving me here and there seeing wot’s come up, wot’s new, a bit of this a bit a that. Have a bite of seagull. That I will, thank you very much. Maybe I’ll catch me a rat, alive or dead doesn’t much signify. Iron gut, that’s wot I am. Mister Eat All, ever have been. And there it was, very near the top. I picked it up, a botton, a clay botton, so wot? So very much. I like bottons. I keep bottons, shiny or dull. I’ll have the lot. I’ve got me a tin Deepdownside and in that tin I keep my bottons. I smelt the clay botton, put it to my old nozzle, those sniffing tunnels of mine. Where’d you come from? And I looks up and I sees the House way over yonder and I says, you’re from there, from that ugly heap, the foul heap, the big blood heap, the spit heap, the dung heap, that heap of heaps where the real filth is, that’s where you’ve been, ain’t you? You’ve been tossed out. Why did they? Wot did you do? You’re a botton, you are. Why do they hate you so? Well, I’ll have you, little thing. Come under. Come down. Come deep down into the darks. My botton. Come along.
Past. Future. Present. Wot’s that to me? Every day for me is like the one before it, just as much the one after it. They tumble in on each other. I can’t tell any from the other. It may as well be a Tuesday as a Friday. I see times of the year only when I come up. Sometimes I’m down so long the season’s shifted while I’ve been in the dark places eating my fill of the ooze at the bottom, where the black rivers run, and I hadn’t noticed the spring come till I saw the flowering weeds growing out of the dirts. We do got flowers here, even here they shall grow. There’s beauty for you. Tenacious, beauty is, you can’t blot it out.
Deep down where I live with me, there’s no summer and no winter. There’s no Mondays or Sundays. We don’t do Christmas or Michaelmas or Candlemas or Martinmas, never no Lent, never was an Easter to speak of. All’s the same down deep in the dark, all year, day and night, all the same, and down here, down below in the thick black of it, it’s always the same temperature, never varies. Down here, at this depth, down here in Deepdownside (my address, that is, my castle, my shed, my lean-to, my kingdom, my box, my place), in the thick black, deep black, pitch black, black black.
Down here the creatures alongside me, the deep ones, are all blind. Little white eyes. There are rats deep down here and white things which once upon a time were perhaps seagulls but now are closer to fish than birds, all blind. There’s no use in seeing this deep under, no future in it. Sometimes I think I might go blind, and that didn’t use to worry me much, but every now and then I have a fancy to see a thing and then I clamber up, gets harder to go all the way up there. I heaves and pushes and eats my way up and then how the light stings. After a while all that terrible light spooks me, the great height of sky, the cold bigness of it, and back down I go into the darkness. It’s constant, it’s peace, it’s forgetting: it’s home.
Home is a big metal room, was a huge safe room from a banking house that went bust and was thrown out, the whole jimmy of it. That’s where I keep me deep under, with drawers and treasures, sharp and soft and crackling and spiking and dead and forgot and rescued and remembered and this and that I have for my liking, to stroke or to eat or to have for company. My home.
Was home.
Not no more.
Not the same after, was it? It was home but home was taken from me, different afterwards, suddenly very different. After I found the clay botton time came back to my life. I began to remember. I thought of
things I hadn’t thought of for years in the dark. I joined candlestubs collected and made me light below, hadn’t had light down there for so long.
They called me ‘It’.
I am It.
It of the Heaps.
Wot thoughts! All because of that newest botton. And then I seem to know streets and leaning buildings. I remember people just over the wall, people on the edge of Lundin, and another wall keeping them in in their turn. For they are not loved either. The Lundin ones think them horrible and build a wall ’tween them, and they think the Heaps horrible and build a wall to keep Heaps away. So much walling there is. Filchin’, the place is called. Filchin’, the town between the walls. One wall keeps Lundin away, the other keeps the Heaps out. Heaps! Heaps! How they fear them! And something else I know: I was born out here in the Heaps. It was my own mother, the Heapland was, a loving mother to me. That other mother, she that bore me, flesh mother, she that tried to poison me inside her, she left me out here in the Heaps, hoping I’d never be seen by anyone. Didn’t happen, did it? She left a little token, a scratch on scrap tin. BINADIT read the wobbly hand. She must a done it after I was born, made the name with some hair claps or shard of glass or rusting nail. Put it there, my own name in faint hand, BINADIT. And beneath that, RIP. Only I didn’t rip, no, no I didn’t. Why did you not want me, Mother? Why did you leave me there? I wasn’t alone though. Heaps, heaps all about me, the Heaps they protected me, they fed me. I don’t like to remember.
Didn’t think of it till the botton.
Why does that botton make me remember so?
I curse that botton then. I hate it and want it gone. I want to forget! It hurts me so to remember. I’ll smash it, I tell myself. I’ll stamp upon it, I’ll crush it. I’ll eat it, I’ll crunch it and then it shan’t come again ever more.
Oh a botton, a botton! A botton’s a thing!
I have such other lovely bottons. Bottons that never did me no harm. Brass bottons with anchors, brass bottons with crowns, mother-a-pearl bottons, tin bottons, embordered bottons. Bottons, pretty bottons. Not that clay botton, not pretty one bit.
’Orrid botton.
Wot it has done to me? I was happy enough before now.
‘Binadit!’ I shout at it in my darkness. ‘Binadit!’
I put my fist out. I mean to thump it. I want to see it broken and rubbed into dust. I want to see it hurting. I strike a flint against a wall. I fire up my candlemess. Not enough. Spluttering sun. There too I have a little paraffin salvaged, but once in a rare while I flint it alight. There, how the flame makes the botton looks like it’s dancing, makes it looks like it’s shifting from side to side. I’ll crush it!
‘Binadit!’ I howl. I screams at it. I shake the light at it.
That thing dances, that ’orrible botton thing. It shifts and flips, and makes a dance all of its own. It’s just the light upon it, it’s only the flames that are wobbling so. I hold the light still. The light steadies but the botton doesn’t. It flips and turns and makes a general nuisance of itself.
A botton dancing in the dark.
Hold you now! Stop that!
But it don’t, not a bit. It flips and spins on, spins faster and faster and seems in fact to grow. A great botton. Wot will you do, shall you do damage unto me? I am the one to doubt it. I hate the botton then, I’m frightened of it. It stretches and twists and moves until it is no longer botton shape at all, and there in my dim light is something else.
Not botton no more.
It’s a great rat.
No, it isn’t.
’Tis.
Is not.
It’s a person-thing. It’s a person, an unleathered person. When did I last see a person out of leathers? This one in a thin black dress. So much pink! Then I think, then I have it: I’ll eat it. Yes, I’ll eat it. It’s very fresh. But then that thing, that person-thing, it shifts in its place and looks out and then it makes a noise. It says some sounds that I cannot make any sense of. It says the same sound over and over and then at last I think I have it. I seem to have it in my head, a new sound sitting beside my Binadit. This is the call it makes, here it is, very fast,
‘Loosypinnnnott.’
Eh wot?
‘Loooseee Pennnint.’
Eh?
‘Lucy Pennant.’
3
ODYSSEY OF A HALF SOVEREIGN
Beginning the narrative of Clod Iremonger, formerly of Forlichingham Park, London, moved to Bayleaf House, Forlichingham, stolen from that place
Bound and Round
Am I dead now? I think I may be dead. I am not a person, that much is certain, though I do so remember being one. I think I am a thing. I think I have been stuck in this thing-prison for some time, I cannot tell how long. Yet suddenly I can think more. I can feel more. I can hear, such new hearing, not the small and vague whispering of before, now I catch real sounds, all about me. I have been dropped in a dark place, there are many other things beside me, some of them make little noises.
‘Elsie Protherow.’
‘Teddy Newbolt.’
‘Joseph Turner.’
‘Ida Goldenbaum.’
‘How do?’
‘Welcome.’
‘Morning to you.’
Little lost voices trembling in the dark. I was huddled next to other things, heaped among them. I heard their mutterings.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Someone new?’
‘Is newness? Some new story?’
‘Tell us, tell us!’
‘We’ll tell you ours.’
‘It’s only friendliness.’
‘If you tell us yorn.’
‘Just being social.’
‘Who first?’
‘I’ll go. I was a boy once. Was a good boy I was, was useful,’ came a small voice. ‘I was needed. I slunk about with the sifting lads in the heaps, top wave, that was me, but then I slipped and got a cut and then the Iremonger foreman he came for me. He pulled me from the line. Took me down a back way. He says, show me your cut and I shows it. And he says, “Well then, what are you worth? Eat this, it will make you useful.” And then, suddenly I am on the floor, not Jos Turner that I was before but now only this ha’penny bit.’
‘Tha’s as nothing,’ came another. ‘My own brother Porky – so named cos he was but skin and bone – he wot used to work one of the sump pumps. A cold came into his lungs and took up permanent lodging there. No matter how he tries to persuade it out, it stays on. So my bro Porky, getting thinner all the while, though you shouldn’t think it possible, he coughed and hacked and spat red poor boy he does, and then an Iremonger he comes along and says, “Well, Pork, I reckons you needs a rest, don’t ye?” And I never saw Porky again but that Iremonger when he came by he had some lead piping with him that was never there before. For myself, they just asked me my age and looked at my teeth. Eat this they say, and then all of a suddenly here I am, coin of the realm. Penny am I, though once I was Phil Bishop, please to remember.’
‘Tuppence, am I called,’ a different voice began. ‘Though once was counted little Jenny Northam. My mam and dad they turned over one morning into glazed tiles. Cannot say how it had happened, yet I knows it was them. I called out, screaming through the district. “Look what’s come of them, my own mam and dad!” and an Iremonger he sidles up and says, “Poor girl, let me help you now, give over the tiles. Have this to suck on, it shall make you good and useful.” And I don’t know if I’d given the tiles before I turned tuppence. I don’t know, and if I didn’t, did I then drop Mam and Dad? Did I shatter them?’
Such stories, stories in the darkness.
‘And you, you new round, what have you to say?’
There was a silence.
‘Come now, Shiner, cough it up. Let’s hear from you.’
Only silence.
‘I thought as much. Stuck up, that one, all shut up.’
Then something occurred to me.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
‘Oh, but now he
speaks!’
‘I can speak!’ I cried.
‘’Course you can. Whatever did you think?’
‘And you can hear me!’
‘Not fast, not a very quick one, are you?’
‘Hello, hello!’ I said. ‘Hello one and all!’
‘Morning.’
‘Morning. How do you do?’ I cried.
‘Polite for a half sov, ain’t you?’
‘All the half sovs and sovs I ever knewed before, they’d never talk.’
‘Not to such as us.’
‘We haven’t had such as you in here afore. I’ve seen sovs, but when I was in the counting house. Not ’ere, though, not in such a place as this.’
‘Excuse me,’ I added, ‘and forgive me if I am but slow as you say – am I to understand, am I to believe, that I am here among you all, in a drawer perhaps, and that we are all, to think of it, we are all coins?’
Laughter from the coins then, grim laughter.
‘Excuse me,’ I continued, ‘could you tell me then, if you shouldn’t mind overly much, if you might inform me how one, well … stops being a coin.’
No laughter then.
‘You are green, aren’t you,’ came a voice at last. ‘You’re a coin now, and you stay a coin, for always till you run down, that’s how it is. I’m Willy Mead that was, a penny now. One minute here one minute there, in a pocket out a pocket, through and through, I’ve been all over Foulsham I have. I was once out Kentish way, nearly had me up to Scotland, but I was back here again. Foulsham once more, got dented, so I’ll likely keep here now. I’m good for a half pie in this shop, equal to a bun, am I. I’m the poor person’s friend. I hungered once, when I was a boy, thought I’d run for it, out of Foulsham, took my chances. I got over the London wall, with rope, that was all. Heaved me up in the night, and then dropped me down the other side, and run in. Out of Foulsham and into London itself.’
‘What a thing!’
‘What a story!’
‘I come down hard enough the other side,’ the coin continued, ‘but they didn’t catch me, not at first. They heard me though, came running after. They caught up with me down the Old Kent Road. They found me soon enough, they knew I was from Foulsham, could tell in an instant. Didn’t want our type there. Gave me a beating so’s I knew it. Thought I shouldn’t survive it but I did. Sent me back.’