When I awoke, I had no idea where I was.
I looked up at a tiny window, covered in grime and dust. At the end of my bed a dim shaft of light shone down from a large hole in the roof, making the specks of rain that drifted in shine like snow. Beneath it a steel basin was nearly full of rainwater, and round the rim a family of robins was perched, chatting happily to each other in confidential little peeps and chirps.
Very slowly and carefully I crawled to the end of the bed, rested my chin on my folded arms and watched them.
‘Hello,’ I said quietly, so as not to disturb them.
They stopped talking at once and all looked at me. I held my breath, worried that they’d fly away. Instead, after a second, the biggest one chirruped loudly in my direction, as if to say ‘shut up!’ and then they all looked back at each other and carried on fluttering around, and sipping at the water, and ignoring me entirely. I smiled.
There was a sharp knock at my door, and all of a sudden it swung inwards. My landlady stood there looking impatient, and holding a cup and saucer.
‘Up!’ she shouted. ‘Your lessons start in half an hour!’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked, startled.
‘You told me last night. Come on, it’s nearly nine! Don’t mind the Robinses (that’s their name) – I want you out on the street in five minutes flat. There’s your suit, look!’ She pointed to my clothes on a hanger fixed in a crack in the wall, put the tea down on the room’s only chair and slammed the door on her way out, as though to rid my brain of the vestiges of sleep.
Out on the street in five minutes flat I was, with a map she had drawn showing me the route. It was unlike any map I’d ever seen because it didn’t have any words on it, but the route clearly marked with arrows and little pictures.
I carried with me my leather satchel containing the instruments I had been told to bring along to the first day of class (a scalpel, a stethoscope, a glass syringe and a bone-saw). Somehow I had survived my first day in this tumbling, rushing place with these things intact. Now my life here was about to begin.
Running most of the way, I reached the school building with a few minutes to spare. But standing in front of it I was uncertain – this wasn’t like any school I had ever seen. Streams of moving people surrounded the building, carrying all manner of goods, or pushing them in barrows, and talking and arguing. I was only now starting to realize for the first time that arguing was not always bad, and that for some people it was their normal way of talking– as if for exercise, or fun. Certainly wherever you were in the streets around Tumblewater there was heated bartering and bargaining going on all about you, and everyone seemed to go about it in such a cheerful fashion that it didn’t seem harmful at all.
The front part of the school building seemed to be some sort of unusual marketplace. A different form of business was being carried out from each window. From the second floor a thickly bearded chap in a worn sailor’s jacket was bellowing, ‘SEA SALT FROM THE SEASIDE TUPPENCE A POUND, FINE AS YOU LIKE!’ in a voice as though he was at the top of a ship, and had just spotted land. A woman called out to him and he threw a paper packet down right into her basket from a height of twenty feet or more. ‘Mind me eggs!’ she said, as she bustled past me to hand twopence to the nearest window-merchant, who handed it above him to the next man, who handed it to the next until it reached the bearded sailor who nodded his thanks and dropped it in his top pocket. From other casements women sold home-baked bread and buns and pies from a tray, and a thin spiky-looking man was droning on about something he called ‘’surance’.
‘’Surance, ladies and gentlemen!’ he called plaintively. ‘So’s your loved ones will be looked after when you’re gone. Life ’surance, death ’surance, ’surance from injury and illness. Sickness ’surance, health ’surance, goodness and badness ’surance. Let us at the Mutual Beneficial ’Surance Company ’sure YOU!’ The very persuasiveness of his voice made me suddenly feel how horrible it would be to die without insurance, even though I had nothing to pay it with and no one who would benefit from it. But the face of the man was so thin and spiky, and his eyebrows arched so much like arrowheads when he was excited, that he had the look of someone who was more likely to slip a knife under your ribs than kiss you goodnight (to use a phrase I had overheard), which somewhat undermined his sales pitch.
Round the side of the building, between lots of people packing stalls away or laying things out on tables, from old shoes and bottles to fruit (both fresh and rotten-looking) to tin whistles and songsheets, I could see a door. I squeezed through the stalls to reach it, and it opened at my touch to reveal a staircase. The address I had written down said to go to the third floor, and so I made my way upward, glancing around with apprehension. The sign by the first-floor entrance offered the services of W. HOBSON, ESQ: TRANSLATOR, MASTER OF THE OCCULT SCIENCES & EMERGENCY DENTIST, while the second-floor sign declared that I was at the door of MADAME PERKINSINI’S FAMOUS BALLET SCHOOL. The doors on which the notices hung were so dirty and disused that they made the words on the signs seem somewhat dubious, but nevertheless I climbed onwards, refusing to be disheartened.
At the third floor I found myself in front of a door that was rotten and peeling, with no sign at all and a pane of shattered glass at eye level. When I knocked, I got no response, and after waiting tensely for a while knocked again. I didn’t know the rules – perhaps you were just supposed to march in? – so I turned the handle and opened the door.
The corridor in front of me was dim and silent, the air pungent with damp and rot. A cat walked between my legs and with its nose poked open another door further up the hall. I glanced round it, and found myself looking at a tubby man sitting at a small desk.
‘Hello,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’m not sure I’ve come to the right place . . .’ He said nothing, but jumped forward on his seat and burped, then covered his mouth, looking embarrassed, and hiccupped. He was about fifty years old, with a round face and round glasses, and wavy grey hair. He wore a very old suit and a very food-stained waistcoat.
Having hiccupped, he twitched and banged his knee on the underside of the desk, and then jerked backwards and knocked against what I at first thought was the wall, until I realised it was a huge stack of paper as dense as granite. Looking up I saw it rose all the way to a high ceiling – and the top was now swaying dangerously.
‘Look out!’ I said.
‘Don’t wo—’ he tried to say as a lump of paper landed on his lap, making him jump. ‘Don’t worry,’ he went on, and a second, huge mass of paper crashed into the space just beside his chair. We both waited for a second, then looked up slowly at the remaining pile. It seemed to have steadied itself for the moment.
‘Hello,’ I said a little more confidently. ‘I’m here to see Mr Preston. To enrol in the surgery course that starts today’
After shuffling in his chair for a few moments to get it out from under the desk, he came out to shake hands with me.
‘Quite pleased, I’m sure,’ he said in a surprisingly high, whistling voice. ‘Mr Preston will be most pleased as well. My name is Stamps. I’m his secretary.’ He smiled widely at me, tugged the edges of his waistcoat and brushed some pie crumbs off it, hoping I wouldn’t notice. Then he stood, smiling and swaying from side to side, as though he was so happy to see me he could hardly contain himself.
The man seems quite mad, I thought, and this is clearly an eccentric establishment. I wondered if Mr Stamps was being employed as a favour to a relative.
‘You sent your cheque ahead?’ he asked as he sat back down, making a great fuss of sliding his chair back under the desk. His eyes looked up at me anxiously from above his wide smile.
‘Of course,’ I said earnestly. ‘And I’ve got all the instruments I was told to bring,’ I added, patting the leather satchel.
‘Oh good!’ he squeaked. I noticed he was beginning to sweat. ‘Some students,’ he said, nervously fingering a statuette of two toads swordfighting, ‘some students unfortunate
ly find the school quite hard to locate.’ He shuffled some papers around. ‘The advertisement was written a long time ago, and still mentions the old name for this building.’
‘I was lucky – someone was able to direct me,’ I said. ‘Is . . . Mr Preston in?’
‘Of course! I’ll fetch him.’ Giving me another enormous smile, he wrenched himself from under the desk and disappeared around the corner of the paper stack. ‘Classes are due to start any minute, after all!’
Clutching my satchel, I looked around the room and saw what a truly amazing amount of paper had been collected there. It lay in piles and boxes and on shelves and in cabinets. Among it other effects could be seen, such as a French horn, and a teapot, and a golf club suspended halfway up the wall keeping two pillars of paper from collapsing into each other. The cat had somehow found its way to the top of one of them, where it rested its chin glumly on the edge and looked down at me.
Looking at all this I completely forgot my studies for a moment and edged to the left to peer around the huge bank of paper in front of me. I gasped.
The wall of paper, ten feet wide or more, extended all the way to the back of the room, in one solid block. Except I now saw it wasn’t entirely solid, because out of this, someone – I knew at once it must be Mr Stamps – had carved their own little apartment.
Paper stairs led up to a large square-shaped hole where there was an armchair and a small table holding a bottle of port and a glass. Behind it, set deep into the white paper as though it had been half dug out of the snow, was a writing desk and on top of it a bookshelf with a row of books uniformly bound in blue leather, as though he didn’t think much of stories that were in any other colour.
And then above this there were steps to an upper layer, where a hammock hung from two ceiling hooks, with a chest of drawers, down which many years’ worth of candles had dripped streams of wax.
I saw this great monument of madness, and felt the cold silence of the room, and the utter emptiness of all the rooms around me. With a shock I suddenly knew that there was no medical school, that there was no Mr Preston. I felt light-headed and sick as though I was looking down from a terrifying height.
I’m alone, I thought. I’m totally alone, stuck in this huge insane city!
I ran through the room and found that Mr Stamps had locked the door behind him to stop me following. I went to the window. As I stared into a writhing mass of people, I realized the silence of these rooms had been amplified by the muffled noise of the huge marketplace outside. And down there in its centre, pushing and shoving his way through, I saw the bespectacled Mr Stamps, hurrying as fast as he could to get away.
I pulled at the door again desperately, but it was locked fast, so I ran back through the apartment, and down the stairs.
Outside I squeezed between the stalls again, and ran into the crowd. I was (and still am) a thin and wiry being, and I slipped through quickly, being jostled by people’s elbows and baskets, tripping over their feet, apologizing and receiving shouts for my trouble. Overwhelmed and feeling I was going to be crushed by the crowd, I realized that I had nothing – no money, no food, no one to whom I could turn for help. I was qualified for no job. I would be thrown out of Turvey House as soon as my landlady became aware of my situation, I was sure, and on to the streets with nothing to protect me except a leather satchel of useless surgical tools.
I refused to give up so soon after coming to the city. As I got a clout to the back of the head, I started to get angry, and fought and squeezed and slid through the gaps, without apology, pushing against the crowd so determinedly that I didn’t even know what direction I was going in. It was only after ten minutes of constant fighting, when a bash from a large barrel of a man elbowed the wind out of me, that my anger was exhausted.
I drifted with the crowd, and let the smells and sounds crash over me. Roasting chestnuts, fresh flowers, cheeses, coffee and ale mixed horribly with much ranker smells – dogs and rot and old clothes and the clammy smell of people’s breath and flesh. But that was nothing compared to the noise of a thousand people trying to shout each other down and sell their wares all at the same time. Pleading and aggressive, musical and monotonous (and almost all of them incomprehensible), they made an all-encompassing and never-ending roar.
After a while I fell through a hole in the crowd and found myself standing in a circle that had formed round a man and a pig. Inside it was a smaller circle of excited-looking children. The man was big and muscular with long greasy hair and his face was sweaty from shouting.
‘Ask Stanley!’ he bellowed over our heads. His voice was deep, as though he’d stolen it from a man five times his size.
‘Stanley knows the answers, see if he doesn’t. Arrrsk STANLEY!’ Looking around the circle, he met each and every one of us in the eye. Then, byway of introduction, he announced, ‘Stanley, the sapient pig.’
He got down on his haunches and looked Stanley level in the eye and said as he might say to a friend, ‘Stanley – which hand is the coin in?’ He had been fumbling his hands behind his back and offered them both to the pig, who for his part didn’t seem very interested. He sat up against the wall on his large pig’s backside with his trotters hanging limply in front of him. Being ‘sapient’ – I was pretty sure it was supposed to mean ‘clever’ – seemed to bore him a lot.
He was a brown-skinned pig with bloodshot eyes, which rolled slowly to and fro in silent contemplation. His tongue occasionally licked out to snap at the two flies that kept landing on his snout, and he gave the overall impression of an ancient emperor, too lazy to speak and afraid of nothing.
Dismissively he flicked a trotter at one of his owner’s hands. The man turned to the crowd and showed them that it did indeed contain the coin, and that the other hand was empty. A few of us clapped half-heartedly. Then he turned and invited us to ‘ask Stanley a question, ladies and gentlemen!’
A man called out, ‘What’s forty minus thirty-three?’
Everyone’s eyes turned back to Stanley with interest. He raised a trotter and clapped it on the floor seven times. All at once everyone grew silent and fascinated.
Another man said: ‘How many days are there in the year?’ Everyone laughed, and the big-voiced man said, ‘Ask him anything he’s able to answer, sir, and he’ll do so. He can’t answer you with speech. Which is quite understandable, being a pig.’
‘How many years have I been married, then?’ said the same man, with a smile.
The pig clapped the floor twice, and the man nodded, and laughed.
The owner asked us again: any other questions? And a man leaned forward from deeper in the crowd. There was something about his lined face, and the mean set of his mouth, and the unforgiving hardness of the eyes that unnerved me. ‘Tell me this, little piggy,’ he said. ‘How many murderers are there in this crowd?’
Utter silence as we all looked at the speaker, who stared down at the animal, waiting for his answer. The gaze of the pig travelled down slowly from the clouds where it had been resting, and his tongue flicked, and the flies danced for a second before resting again on the brown snout. One of his trotters twitched, and then it rapped down hard on the ground, once. The whole crowd broke up into shouting as men and children alike scrambled to get away. In the midst of the chaos was the pig’s owner, holding out a cap and begging for contributions, but no one paid him any attention. I tried to run too, but before I could escape I caught sight of the man who’d asked the disturbing question. He had grabbed another man around the throat and was pinning him to the ground.
‘Bradley Fuller,’ he said into the other man’s ear, ‘I’m Inspector Rambull of the District Police and you’re under arrest.’
At that, I too disappeared into the crowd, not caring who I bumped into. Horrified though I was, I felt a sick thrill at having been in the presence of a real murderer – although I knew such people existed, I had never really thought that you could meet one – and once I was safely away from the scene I drifted through the crowd
again until I found myself in front of a fruitseller’s stall. Realizing I had not eaten since lunchtime yesterday, the fruit in front of me suddenly appeared delicious and – feeling the few shillings in my pocket that were all I had in the world – impossibly expensive. The stallholder had no other customers for the moment and eyed me carefully.
‘Help you, lad?’ he asked warily.
My stomach bubbled emptily and I felt a little sick, asking, ‘How much are the apples?’ even though I knew I couldn’t afford them.
‘Three a penny,’ he said, still suspicious. He watched my hands hovering near the fruit, so I stuffed them back in my pockets. Only a few minutes ago I had been about to start a prestigious education that might one day make me a gentleman – now I couldn’t afford an apple and was being watched like a thief. The unfairness of it made me turn my face away angrily.
‘You OK, lad?’ asked the stallholder in a softer voice. ‘Can’t afford nothing?’
I shook my head miserably.
Before I knew what was happening, he’d clouted me on the shoulder with one of his massive hands (I reeled for a second before realizing he was being friendly) and dragged me back behind the stall. He pointed to the man with the stall next to him who was packing up his goods.
‘Stick some of them spuds in a bag for him,’ he said, ‘and when you’re done you can help me. You shift them fast enough maybe we’ll spare you a bit of our lunch.’
I didn’t hesitate but grabbed the sack on the ground by my feet and began helping the man (who pretended not to notice I was helping him) pile the potatoes, cauliflowers, onions and carrots into bags and stack them next to each other on his barrow – which was like the ordinary wheelbarrows I had seen back in the countryside but ten times larger, and taller than a man. The next thing I knew the man who’d made me the offer was packing up his stall as well and I was helping him. Then, with the market dying out all around us and the road opening up, we were all moving together and to my amazement the men pulled the barrows – which looked as though they needed horses to move them – with their own arms.
Grisly Tales from Tumblewater Page 4