The Gullet was just down the snaking lane; we plunged through the humid crush toward the back where the ramshackle stairs dove down into the grotto. Jekyll paused on the last step. There too Jeannie had stood, at the bar, one foot curled around the other ankle, gesturing at the barman as he rag-cleaned a glass. And one more for the lady. It was the same beefy barman, grizzle bristling from his lardy face. Eyes fishy and measuring as Jekyll approached. What’ll it be, then? I’m looking for a girl, Jekyll said. Her name is Jeannie. Red hair, chatty. Have you seen her? The barman’s lips parted, a big dented gold tooth in front. Lotta girls in through here, sir. Jekyll pulled off a banknote and slapped it on the tacky plank. I remember Jeannie, the barman allowed, peeling up the note. But I haven’t seen that one in ages. Heard she fell in with some, like, unsavoury company and that.
Glancing over the barman’s shoulder, we caught our unexpected reflection in the warped mirror: a bulging mass of flesh with eyes goggling on the distended forehead and an octopus mouth. Jekyll backed away.
On the lane outside, yanking at the bow tie noosed around the throat. Clothes plastered to the skin. He leant against a brick wall. Sir! a lady cried in mock alarm. A pair of hefty dollies arm in arm, looking like Siamese twins, both their curly-wigged heads tipped to one side. Sir, you look downright peaky. Don’t he, Lorrie? The other nodded. He do, he’ll catch his death out here, the poor man. They came closer, and I could smell their perfume and meaty pungency. Sir, why don’t you let Lorrie and Dorie take you someplace nice and warm, eh? Each had taken one of Jekyll’s arms and were pulling him from the wall. Their mammal smell was making him harden. Jekyll let himself be dragged along a few steps before he jerked his arms away, and the ladies teetered back, off balance. Lorrie clapped a hand to her wig. Fucking poof! she screeched. Fucking cock-sucking poof! Dorie shrieked laughter and grabbed her crotch. Jekyll turned and ran down the lane, skidding in his ballroom shoes onto Greek Street, where a cab was clopping at a trot and nearly bowled him over. Horses stamped and screamed, the driver yelled, and Jekyll threw himself at the door. Leicester Square!
He pressed his thighs together, teeth locked in chatter. His hands were shaking so bad he could barely separate out a banknote when the cab pulled up before Big House, and he dropped his keys on the stoop before managing to crunch the right one into the hole. The entrance hall blasted us with godly warmth, rippling from the log fire. Jekyll ripped off the bow tie and sank to his knees on the flagstones. He stripped off his tails and then his waistcoat, held his hands toward the heat until they stopped trembling. He rose and limped across the main hall, kicking off his shoes as he climbed the carpeted stairs.
In his bathroom he twisted the taps and eased down on the edge of the tub as hot water roared from the swan-necked spigot. The thing still thudded with blood below, pulsing a sick ache into the belly. Jekyll unbuckled his trousers and reluctantly drew back the hem of his drawers. The flesh was almost purple, the sheathing peeled back at the angry knob. Jekyll swallowed and wrapped his fingers round, and Father whispered in our roaring ear, That’s it, boy, go on. Immediately Jekyll stood, yanked up his trousers, and twisted off the bath. Plink, plink, plink.
He strode to the far end of the upstairs corridor, gripping his hands, then he paced back and went down the stairs. The cinders in the parlour were almost dead. He continued into the darkened side parlour and up to the hidden panel in the wall. He pushed the partition until it clicked and dropped open an inch, then he slipped into the servants’ pantry. Heart was beating like a rabbit’s. Was he letting me loose? He turned left down the narrow corridor. The gas was tuned very low. Shadows ebbed like scampering spiders toward the darkness of the big courtyard door at the far end. Half a dozen smaller doors on either side, behind each one a servant asleep. Jekyll’s weight creaked on the wooden floor. A crack of light appeared to the right, five paces ahead.
He froze. The crack widened, and someone peered out. Hello? she whispered. Weak light from the room within touched the side of her face; a braided rope of hair hung below the white nightcap. Sir?
Jekyll pushed her into the room and shut the door. Lizzie’s hair was caught in his fingers as he grasped for her face. She was trying to shake loose his grip on her nightdress. She jerked her shoulder free and backed away, crouching. Little box of a room, a desk and a bed and four pulsating walls. Lizzie’s fingers were splayed and her eyes wide in the white face, her nightcap askew. No, she was whispering, sir, no, please just wait, sir, please. Jekyll reached out and she stumbled back against the bed. He caught her slender forearm, spun her in a rough pirouette, slipped his arm around her throat. You little whore, he breathed into her ear, grinding the thing into her hip. His other hand was fumbling with the buckle, and then the trousers dropped to his ankles. She kept whimpering, Please, sir, not like this, oh God, please wait. Jekyll took the collar of her cotton nightdress and tore it with a gratifying rrrip. He pressed her down at the edge of the bed; her knees buckled, and she collapsed onto her belly. Dizzy with urgency, he peeled off her drawers; her slim white buttocks were clamped. He drooled a glob of saliva into his fingers and then felt into her cleft for the seam. I watched him work in his thumb and smear her petals apart as Father had taught us. By the hair, Father had held us tight, a haze of whisky in our ear whispering what to do, Jekyll obediently fitting the bell of his thing into her seam and beginning to push. It was like Father was here in the room behind us, his fingers twisting our hair from our scalp, his goading whisper on our cheek. That’s it, boy, all the way in, now, to the hilt. Jekyll shut his eyes and turned his head aside and suddenly groaned out, Hide! The spasming began, a bucking from the core as the grip on our hair tightened in climax and then gradually, almost tenderly, released, his fingers fading like a ghost’s.
Trying to stand up, Jekyll staggered into the bedside table and knocked something off. He put a hand to the wall until the floor stopped rocking. He pulled up his trousers and tucked in his shirt, averting his eyes from the girl on the bed. At the door he stopped. His face burned with a kind of boyish pride. He turned and looked back at her, sitting in the bed’s corner, hugging her knees and staring at the wall. Her face was hard and pale as bone.
Thank you, he said.
He stood in the servants’ corridor as if he did not remember where he was. This was his house, this bare dingy hallway? Where was everyone? Why were they not crowded in the doorways? He returned to the pantry and pushed through the partition into the side parlour, where a portrait of a wigged gentleman in riding breeches gazed tranquilly down in the gloom. Upstairs, Jekyll peeled back the covers and climbed in his clothes into bed.
We were lying on the dissecting table in the surgery again. Except this time it was us alone, operating on our own torso. Head lifted and fingers probing the slimy piles of our intestines, searching for something, like a tumour, to cut out. A cure.
We woke together: pink light in the windowpanes, like the morning before. And like before, it seemed that maybe the evening had been just a dream, and it was 8 January, Jekyll’s birthday, all over again. From beneath the covers, Jekyll withdrew his hands, shapely and white and stained, the right one with a brownish smudge in the fork between his thumb and finger. He brought the hand to his face, sniffed, and caught the metallic trace of her. He flung the covers back and yanked his tucked-in shirt from the trousers, expecting to see it caked in blood. There was just a splotch down the shirttails that flaked like rust when he rubbed it. Not a dream.
From the window we looked down on the square, everything—trees, ground, pavement—frosted in a frail lamina of pink snow. Jekyll pulled on his overcoat and stamped into a pair of boots, and a minute later he was striding north along the square in the pure sharp morning air, bareheaded, collar unfastened, blowing out plumes of breath. Each fresh step left a perfect print in the gritty crunch of hoarfrost. On the main road, the early cabs had cut twin lines into the pink, veering and intersecting and pocked with the clop of hooves. We passed a horse pulled up to the kerb wh
o lifted his tail and ejected a pile of green droppings that steamed like hot food. As we neared, a clutch of pigeons pecking at the ground took off in explosive unison, banking together over the rooflines where the sky was turning from coral to palest blue. Soon men started blooming from the Underground, and little boys appeared on the corners selling hot chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. Jekyll walked and walked, bringing a film of sweat to the skin that cooled instantly around the ears and throat. We were heading north. On a street lined with white stone houses, he came to a path that led to a gated enclosure of barren trees. Jekyll opened the gate door and strolled down the gravel aisle, hemmed on both sides with hedges. Mist clung to the ground, making phantoms of the trees and the equestrian statue rearing in triumph ahead. At a black slatted bench, Jekyll sat down.
The trees dripped as the sun burned through. We sat listening to the pattering of droplets. Inside Jekyll’s trousers the thing was thickening as in our mind Lizzie whimpered into the bedding. Why hadn’t she screamed? Why hadn’t anyone stopped him? How could Jekyll be sitting here in this park, and I inside him, on this flawless morning? Jekyll removed the hand from his pocket and again pressed the palm to his face, and I could smell her too, as if it were my own hand. How simple it had been! All this time, convinced of his impotence. All the trouble he’d taken to hide inside while I discharged his desire.
He tipped back his head and gaped at the sky through the interwoven branches. We could hear birds scattered in the trees chattering like old friends returned from long travels apart. The oblivious birds. What did they care about us? What did it matter to them what we had done? Our adventures meant no more to them than their little adventures meant to us. It did not matter what we had done. It dawned, this cautious, glorious revelation. There was no curse, no plot to destroy us. There was only the chaos of the world. And the world did not care. The world didn’t care! The branches overhead shook with a squirrel and shivered down drops of silver sunlight. One struck our brow with a cold miraculous plop. Then the black gnarled branches all flashed white as lightning forked against the greenish sky. The earth lurched around in a roll to flip us upside down. Ecstatic with terror, we gripped the slats of the bench to keep from dropping and smashing through the tree limbs into the ocean of outer space. Blood filled our head and we groaned in the suction of gravity, and then everything flipped upright again.
Stars and dazzles danced in the eyes. I clutched the bench for life. The gorge of sickness went down in my throat, and the park shimmered into place. In a flood of relief, I clasped myself, panting laughter. Then I stopped, and looked down at my hand.
My hand.
I could feel the air passing over the fine hairs. The cricking in the joints as I flexed and relaxed. I watched the action in wonder, then looked up, heart booming. It had happened again. I was back in the body. Jekyll was paralysed, a block of ice behind my sternum. I glanced up the path and saw with a jolt two men ambling down the path toward me. I jumped to my feet, flipped up the collar of Jekyll’s overcoat, and scurried the other way, toward the statue.
I had forgotten how huge and unwieldy Jekyll’s clothes felt. His trouser cuffs scuffed the ground as I hurried along, and his overcoat banged against the backs of my ankles. I turned the collar up to cover my face as I swept through a gateway at the far end and emerged onto a mirror street of white stone houses. A cab was clipping up toward me, and I turned away as it rattled by. My mind felt like rats in a sack. I had to slow it down, I had to think. I was nowhere near Big House. I couldn’t knock on Big House’s front door anyway; I was a wanted murderer. And Jekyll had destroyed my key to the Castle Street door, and his own key ring for some reason was not in his roomy pockets. I had to get off the street. At the next corner I peered around for a sign, then found a tile embedded in the brick: Howland Street. Howland, Howland—did this sound familiar? I reached inward for Jekyll, to draw him into the moment. Pay attention; where could we go? Another cab was clopping up toward me, and then with a leap of epiphany I hailed it and flung myself inside.
It was an open two-seat affair with the driver in front. He turned, his skin pitted with pimples. Donne Hotel. I panted. You know it? The ugly gnome just glimmed at me. I had to control the urge to lean back and kick him into action. Donne Hotel, I said again through my teeth, do you know it? His lashless eyes slid down to my clothes and then back to my twitching face; then he turned around and flicked the reins. I gripped my hands into a shaking lump. Was it possible he had recognised me? Did I really look like that grinning baboon on the posters? I scanned the passing street, poised to spring down at the slightest hint of suspicion. When he stopped a minute later I almost pounced from the cab, certain the bastard was up to something—but then I glanced at the crimson awning with the words in white across it: Donne Hotel.
The name seemed vaguely familiar, and so did the garishly decrepit lobby when I pushed my way in. A chandelier at a crooked angle. The walls papered in stripy crimson silk and peeling near the top, bloated. It smelt like fried food. Why would Jekyll know this place? At the front desk, a man was sprawled on his arm, asleep. I approached and smacked the brass bell beside the man’s elbow. He jerked awake with a snort. He was just a boy, dusky and dark-eyed, with a crop of cowlicked black hair and wearing an oversize maroon jacket. I want a room. He tipped his head to one side and his neck gave a crack. I snapped my fingers. A room, oi, let’s go. I hit the bell again. Speak English? English? We’re in England, yes? Then a woman stepped through the doorway behind him, toadish and squat with a ripe mole budding within her left nostril. Christ, who were these people? Yes, how may we help? she said, heavy Slav in her manly voice. A room you would like, my sir? A room, yes. She pruned her lightly moustachioed upper lip. Just you? I gave an exasperated sigh, spread my hands. Then I said, out of nowhere, One with a writing desk.
She laboured ahead of me on the stairs. The fusty odour of her underclothes wafted back at me as we clomped up like some appalling quadruped. At a door on the second floor, at the end of a deserted corridor, she worked a key into a lock. Once the door opened, I stepped past her into a sitting room.
Jaundiced wallpaper, cheap wingbacks by the poky fireplace, two muslin-draped windows brimming with daylight. Again I was struck by a weird familiarity. Without turning round I said, This will do. But Madame Toad stood wheezing in the doorway behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, despising her with a sudden passion, and she said, My sir, you will please to leave deposit, for the room? I slapped at Jekyll’s clothes for his billfold, snapped out a banknote, and handed it over with my face twisted away. She pointed at a bell rope by the fireplace, pantomimed yanking at it. If anything you should need, my sir. Then I was finally alone.
The windows looked down on Portland Street. Tobacconist, jeweller, cheese shop, pedestrians and cabs, a mass of droppings stamped and spread about in the road. I turned back to the room. I could feel Jekyll absorbing its details. Georgiana. He had been here with Georgiana, once, many years ago. I laid a hand on the wingback and caught a sudden vision of her standing here by the chair, young and bright with a pained, puzzled smile. A white door stood at each end of the main room. I crossed to one and opened it, expecting the bedroom. It was an empty closet, with a yellowed lacy dress hanging alone from the bar. The bedroom was behind the opposite door, dwarfed by a monster of a canopied bed that no one had slept in for months, it seemed. I shut the door, shook my head quickly. We needed a plan! I narrowed my eyes at the writing desk near the fireplace.
An antique, with slender curling legs, rather like the traitorous one from my bedroom at Ghyll, which I did not want to think about. But I had asked for a writing desk for a reason. If I couldn’t get into the cabinet myself, then I had to have someone transport the contents of E drawer to me. Someone had to bring it here. Or if not here, then somewhere I could access. So whom could we trust? Poole? Poole might be persuaded to bring the chemicals to us here at the hotel, but he wasn’t going to simply drop them off outside the door. He would insist on seeing
Jekyll, on speaking to him, at least. The same went for Utterson. Neither of them would simply play delivery boy and then retreat. We needed someone trustworthy and loyal and yet innocent of Jekyll’s connection to me, to Hyde—
Lanyon, of course. Lanyon had never seen my face, never heard Jekyll mention my name. And Lanyon lived on Cavendish Square, not a mile from here. Lanyon could get the chemicals from the cabinet and bring them to his home, where I could retrieve them at nightfall.
But that was the easy part. I would have to write to him, and to Poole, explaining everything in exact detail, and I would have to do it in Jekyll’s hand. I had never written anything with the right hand, in Jekyll’s flourishy style, unless one counted the signature I had signed on that blasted cheque a lifetime ago. I slipped my hand into Jekyll’s baggy pocket and felt the polished weight of Father’s fountain pen. I drew it out, the lethal implement. Dark red mahogany with a brass ring and a clip on the rounded cap. It was a more modern, expensive kind of pen than the one Father had trained us with, binding my right arm tight to my body and leaving my left hand free. The hand of art, Father would explain. The pen he had inserted into my fingers then was longer and lighter, with a spade-shaped blackened nib that squeaked and scratched at the paper as I contorted my tongue in Father’s watching shadow.
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