Foulsham

by Edward Carey

  I Fall Out to Myself

  The emaciated man picked me up from the dirt, scissors in his hands.

  A seagull cried overhead, ‘Ark! Ark!’

  Then the pain came, like I was splitting and shifting inside, like I should rupture myself.

  ‘Not yet, mustn’t yet,’ the Tailor hissed. ‘It’s too open, keep small, you devil! It’s not safe!’

  But I was struggling and shifting, hurting so, I couldn’t calm, wouldn’t calm, I should burst.

  ‘Curse you!’ he cried.

  Then, holding me hard in his fist, he ran. For a while I was only aware of moving fast and turning, dashing, onwards and onwards, and then we would stop suddenly, wait a moment, and then on, sometimes I heard cries behind us, then he hastened on further and faster. He hid in the entryway to a house, stood in the shadows, panting in a porch. People rushed by, people with lanterns, and some pushing some sort of wheelbarrow, and in that wheelbarrow, I heard a voice that I was shocked to understand I knew, because behind it a metal instrument sounded its sharp noise,

  ‘Geraldine Whitehead.’

  ‘Wait, wait, hold you there my lovelies!’ My Uncle Idwid, the Governor of Birth Objects, was very close to me, listening in the street, his ears out on high alert. ‘I hear something, silence all. Not a sound. Hush, hush. I do hear! Come now, a little louder, a little more yet. I’m certain I heard.

  ‘Come to me, oh come, come to me. Don’t be shy now. It is your own uncle calling. You can hear me. I know you can. You are in terrible danger. Let me help you. Just whisper, whisper your name. Let me hear that little syllable: Clod. Come, Clod. Come, come, Clod to me, sing Clod to me.’

  All the people were still around him as the little man in the wheelbarrow listened out. The Tailor pushed me deep down in his pocket, and I in my agony tried so hard to think of nothing, I tried to be nothing, nothing at all, to forget the pain.

  ‘I heard ‘Iremonger’! I heard at least one thing call ‘Iremonger!’ Where are you, love? Speak to me!’

  Silence. Silence but the distant noise of the heaps and the drip dripping of Foulsham Town.

  ‘You’re here. I know you’re here somewhere!’ sang Uncle Idwid. ‘I can almost hear you. Whisper, just whisper and I’ll come to thee.’

  Such an itching, such an agony to call out, to scream out my name, as if Idwid in all his cleverness was tickling me with his words.

  ‘You’ve grown strong. You’ve grown cunning, little Clod, but you cannot hide from me. You cannot fool such ears as mine. I can hear you, I can hear your very soul, Clod, I hear it breathing!’

  And I should have screamed, I should have called out there and then and surrendered myself to the sharpness of Geraldine Whitehead were it not for the sudden noise of heavy boots breaking the irresistible call of Idwid’s will.

  ‘Idiot!’ he cried. ‘I should have had him but for thee! Manlump, thick of ears, deaf of mind! Fool, noise-murderer!’

  ‘Please sir, please governor!’

  ‘What, what is it, you thug?’

  ‘There’s been a half sovereign spotted, sir. In a ratcatcher’s house!’

  ‘All the cacophony of Foulsham streets: it’s enough to make a fellow mad. Who saw the coin? When?’

  ‘There’s a man over yonder, sir, under that umbrella there. He’s the one that saw it, swears he did.’

  ‘Well then, that’s different, we may hear him a little.’

  The whole brood, noisy now, rushed away, and I felt at last I might breathe a little. In a moment the Tailor was on the move too, putting streets between him and Uncle Idwid’s party. But there were watchmen everywhere; it seemed from every corner I heard voices calling out.

  ‘Not yet, not yet!’ he said. He took me out, held me in his hands, nearly dropped me. ‘So hot! We shall not make it back in time. Curse you. We must do it here; we must find a place!’

  He ran on for a while longer, stopped in somewhere and, with the aid of a handkerchief, he placed me on the ground. The Tailor was looming over me. I saw him clear then for the first time. He was a very tall, shabbily dressed man in a long coat of patched leathers, unhappily tall, like he’d been pulled and stretched, with a white, livid face, with eyebrows that joined in the centre, very lean and underfed almost to the point of being a skeleton. He swallowed; he looked at me.

  ‘You have caused much trouble this night!’

  He came close and tapped me with one of his emaciated fingers.

  ‘I shall not hang for thee!’

  He pulled at his own lank black hair.

  ‘I shall not be put out on account of you,’ he cried. ‘But come now, come! Will you not come out, you’re hot enough. Come, before it is too light and we are trapped here. It must be now. Now! Come out!’

  And then –

  And then –

  And then.

  The pain! The burning pain.

  And then, breathing, breathing as if I’d never breathed before. How my arms seemed to tug from me, my legs to rip out of me, my head, my boiling brain seemed to bubble up in agony. Spreading out, filling up, back, back.

  Alive.

  There I was.

  Clod.

  I was me again. I was flesh once more.

  Flesh again in some dingy, abandoned place.

  And I said the only words I could at first say,

  ‘Clod Iremonger, Clod Iremonger, Clod Iremonger!’

  ‘Shut it! Shut it, Clod Iremonger,’ said the Tailor, ‘or you’ll have the whole town down upon me. Shut it, or you’ll give us all away.’

  ‘Clod,’ I whispered.

  ‘Careful,’ he said, raising a fist.

  ‘Iremonger,’ I involuntarily finished.

  ‘Not a sound, Clod Iremonger,’ he said, his long scissors in his hands now, ‘or they’ll hear you. Not a murmur. There’s someone in the alley. Another squeak and I swear I’ll gut you here and now.’

  9

  THE EFFRA AND AFTER

  Continuing the narrative of Lucy Pennant

  I cannot say what it was that we passed through in the darkness, only sometimes it cut me and sometimes it wetted me, sometimes it moved as I touched it. Once it bit, once it was soft and even warm, and all of it passed alongside me as Benedict, pulling on a length of rope he had tied about my waist, pulled me down and down after him.

  You don’t feel you’re falling so much if there are objects all around you, pressing against you, trying not to let you have your bit of space. Down through his little passages, moving bits before me out of the way, and when I was stuck he did not try to carefully win my freedom. His answer was only to tug me down and down by force, to muscle the objects out of the way. There are holes in the heaps, deep lanes, tunnels like the flues of the chimneys of Heap House and like them with hot and cold breaths, and with other creatures, rats as big as cats, forcing their own way along them, unhappy at the company.

  At last we came to the bottom, or rather to a shelf in all that rotting land. I tried to call to him but there was no sound to come out of you that deep, and breathing was the hardest thing all on its own, the air so thick and soiled it felt liquid.

  We forced our way along on top of a huge brick ceiling. At last there was some kind of hatch, for which Benedict found the thick cover and lifted it up and he pushed me through first and there were winding stone steps but no light, and the going was very wet and I slipped and soon enough the steps came to an end and there was only the sound of water then, rushing by.

  ‘What now?’ I asked. ‘There’s no more steps.’

  ‘Jump,’ he said.

  ‘How far is it?’ I asked. ‘Stop, Benedict, I’ll fall to my death I think.’

  In response he shoved me and I fell in and he came after.

  Icy, icy water. Quite took my breath from me.

  We were in the buried river called the Effra, being swept along. I thought I should freeze to death. I’d be ice any moment. The place was alive with dripping sounds, with the plonk, plonk, of water dropping down, and
then of waves, of things moving in the dark flow. Like being inside the organs of a massive whale, swimming along its colon.

  ‘Is low tide,’ he said.

  ‘What luck,’ I panted. The river was slowing and I could stand now, shivering and miserable, the foulness reaching quite up to my waist.

  What a place it was, long ago, so long ago ancient Britons must have fished this river, and Romans had marched beside it, where I was now. Only then, back then, back then the river was on the surface, there’d be ground and sunlight beside us. The past, our past is buried deep beneath us, dig down and there is ancient land. Alfred the Great might have bathed where we waded.

  ‘And here’s our stopping,’ called Benedict. ‘Here’s Filchin’ steps now.’

  He could see in the damp darkness, I could not. He had us winding up different slipping steps, not so many, and after a moment Benedict had found the manhole cover, and there was a circle of light.

  Filching!

  It was early evening. The sky was darkening which was never best bright in Filching, but bright brightness did it seem after that dank darkness. Like I was newly bathed in life, more beautiful than I ever knew possible.

  ‘Filchin’ foul,’ said Benedict. ‘I know the smell on it.’

  ‘You showed me the way back there in those different darks, now I’ll show you. I’ll be your candle, Benedict, allow me.’

  I saw him properly then, in Filching light. To think I’d taken up with such a one as that. You’re braver that I thought, Lucy Pennant. He really did not seem a human being exactly, more a great mound of rubbish joined together into something almost human-shaped. There were eyes but they were so dark and yellowed they were hard to notice. The mouth more a rip than anything else. The hair was a wiry threadbare growth of weed. The clothing he wore was not to be described in any way like other people wore clothes, no recognisable garments there, just different things grown together. Bits of rat stuck upon him like fur in patches. If he wasn’t moving you’d take him for just a pile of stuff, not living, just raked up. Like a mountain all of his own. But this, even this, was a person, this giant beside me.

  ‘Don’t like it,’ he said, and he had begun a-trembling. ‘Don’t like it here. Don’t want no cage.’

  ‘It’s all right, Benedict. I promise you.’

  ‘You got no power to promise. Who are you to promise anything? You don’t know, you’re as nothing. You’re a little bit with a bright red top. What protection can that be? No, no I shan’t. Go home!’

  ‘But what is home, Benedict? What is there for you? It’s just rubbish and filth. I shall show you new things, new things and new people. You’ll find a home here, here among the lodgings of Filching.’

  We had come out close to the heap wall, it was very cracked the wall was, it never used to be so cracked, there were metal girders propping it up and huge buttresses made of brick. I wondered how long it should hold. I thought then it surely shall come down one day.

  In the distance I saw the long slipway leading up to the wall. It was lined thick with carts piled high with London dirt. There were carts back as far as the eye could see, a great queue of wastedroppers. It was always so, it was a familiar enough sight. The carts came and went with their heavy loads through the day and into the night. They never stopped coming, there never was an end on it. More and more and more. Seagulls were thick about it all and on the other side, I knew, there would be a whole great army of Filching sorters, all of them married to the heaps, thousands of them, with their forks and pikes and shovels and bags, and the rats working their own work between them.

  Has always been so. Would seem most strange for that road to have no carts on it, not to see the full ones lining up, not to see the empty ones going back. The horses pulled the loads and were whipped to keep them at it. They pulled and were pulled, until, giving up, buckling under the hopeless endlessness of it all, they slumped to the ground, were opened up and skinned on the spot, or if there were already too many gulls and rats about the carcass, they were shovelled over the wall and into it with all the rest. It was a grand and harrowing sight. Something Bible about it all.

  ‘My home,’ I said. ‘Here I am.’

  Binadit grunted.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, my teeth chattering, my whole body shaking with the cold. ‘We’d best get in before we freeze to death.’

  ‘Am fearful.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Your hair,’ he said.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Most red.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘always has been. Can’t help it.’

  ‘Like it,’ he said. ‘Fond on it.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘I’m going to where I grew up, to where I lived with Mother and Father before they got the sickness and died. I’m going back there, to my old boarding house!’

  ‘On then,’ he said, grinning I think, I couldn’t be sure. ‘Show us! Bottons!’

  ‘Here we go!’

  ‘Lucy Pennant,’ he said and the clarity of it was a bit alarming, ‘don’t be a botton. Stay as now ever.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘Come on!’

  10

  THE TAILOR OF FOULSHAM

  Continuing the narrative of Clod Iremonger

  My Companion

  ‘Clod Iremonger,’ I said, though I’d rather have said something else. ‘Help’ should be more justified. ‘Help’, screamed out, may have been the most sensible.

  In response the long jaws of his scissors snapped once. And came closer, and snapped again.

  I think I should rather have been any place, than in a mean hovel with a man so lean and stretched. I think I may rather have been back with the Hayward family, or even with the coins of the pieshop. But I was in this dismal, dark place, hopeless and lightless, abandoned by all other people, fit for nothing, fit for no person, for no thing. How was it that I felt less free now than I did when coined. I was myself, but how long may I stay so?

  ‘Clod,’ I whispered, ‘Iremonger?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Tailor and the scissors snapped once to his syllable, he leant in very close to me. I saw then that his very skeleton was stretched and thinned out, that his own skull beneath the limited pelt of his horrible skin was most elongated. ‘Yes, you are Clod Iremonger,’ he whispered. ‘Do you know me, Iremonger? Do you remember me?’

  ‘Clo— no, sir,’ I managed now. ‘I think I should recall you if ever we had met before. You are rather singular, sir. I mean no offence, but, excuse me sir, are you quite well?’

  ‘You do not know me?’

  ‘Please to excuse, I’ve not been myself of late, which brings me to wonder, sir, if you yourself were not exactly as you are now. That you have, perchance, over the time since our last acquaintance, if indeed there were ever such a thing, if you might have – a suggestion only, you understand – have added some to your height while perhaps simultaneously mislaying a fraction of your width?’

  How I cursed myself. No matter how I struggled against it, whenever I was in position of worry and terror I come over with a fit of talkativeness, and spouted out and could not stop myself from filling the room, perhaps in the hope of taking away a portion of the fear with words. Tummis, my dear late cousin, was much the same. And this was perhaps one of the causes of our intimacy.

  ‘You wonder if I have changed?’ he said, his painful face come close again.

  ‘Am I very much mistook?’ I said, though I’d hoped to make a simple ‘yes’.

  ‘Indeed, Clod Iremonger, I am changed, indeed I am. Last you saw me, I was but nine inches long!’

  ‘Then indeed, sir, you have made quite a progress! Indeed you have!’

  The Tailor pulled from a deep pocket a bundle wrapped in thick cloth, he unravelled the material to reveal a very dented and abused hip flask. ‘Recognise this?’ he asked.

  I had never seen the object before and was about to admit as much but then I heard its particular noise, a strained, shrunken calling out.
/>   ‘Rippit Iremonger, Rippit Iremonger!’

  And then I listened and heard within that stretched, bony form of the Tailor the sound leaking out, ‘Letter opener. Letter opener.’

  ‘Excuse me sir, but would it be relevant for me to wonder if that is not my cousin Rippit who was taken from us so many years ago?’

  ‘Very like, Clod Iremonger, very like. Though how you know so quick, I cannot say.’

  ‘And, excuse me then, sir, if I may wonder, is your name, your real name, might it be, Alexander Erkmann?’

  ‘Why yes, you devil!’

  My Cousin Rippit, Now a Hip Flask

  ‘I do remember Cousin Rippit,’ I said.

  There was never any forgetting of my cousin Rippit. Cousin Rippit had been Grandfather’s favourite. Dangerous Cousin Rippit who could set someone’s hair alight just for the fun of it, just by thinking of it. Cousin Rippit who bent metal just by pointing at it. Cousin Rippit whose calls of pain in the night upset the whole house.

  He was always ill, was Cousin Rippit, ill and dangerous. You might try to help him, you’d put your hand out to help him, and suddenly your hand would grow numb and have blisters upon it, because Rippit had somehow bewitched it. We steered clear of Rippit, we younger cousins, and I think the older ones too, and because of that he had a look of terrible loneliness about him, even as he was being cruel.

  I did not know him very well. Once he attempted to drop a book on my head from a great height, he nearly brained me. Once he got hold of one Tummis’s seagulls and plucked it without killing it. It was a very unhappy thing, that naked bird, until the rats got to it. And then, one day, he was gone, and later, much later, on that terrible evening when Lucy fell before me into a button, Grandfather told me that Rippit, most gifted and strangest of all Iremongers, had been subdued and stolen by his own birth object, a letter opener that I had heard calling ‘Alexander Erkmann’. And here was Alexander Erkmann in the flesh, my companion in this cruel shed.