The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  In Trinity College, I listened to a man thunder against admitting Catholics to the classrooms, but no one really cared for his speech, and most of the Catholics present thought it was a mite old-fashioned.

  In the pubs clinging to the sluggish, stinking waters of the Liffey, men grumbled at the tyranny of the British and the failures of their parties; but their mouths were washed with ale and their stomachs yearned for bread, and their hearts beat out a drumbeat not of flaming revolution, but of better wages and the luxuries they saw their neighbours had, which if they could not get by damned hard working on the docks must surely be an injustice that society and law must settle.

  Langa was then some seven days behind. The truth was not a deep, burning secret of the soul, but rather the pedestrian realities of day-to-day. I did my usual rounds, sometimes with the baron, sometimes without. A Fenian said to have taken a shot at Gladstone’s cousin was beaten in Dublin Castle, his mouth too swollen to speak a confession, and in his heart he was proud that he would die without talking, and hoped his family would know and no longer think he was useless and needed to get a job. He was terrified of the rope, and prayed that he would be shot. He had not, in fact, pulled the trigger, but considered it good to die for Ireland.

  “Let him go,” I said. “And pay for the infirmary.”

  A missionary fresh from Africa was said to have slaughtered, or permitted to die, or in some other way enacted barbaric acts upon his native servants as he wandered along the Niger delta, and this was a source of some embarrassment. We shared tea in an establishment hung heavy with the stench of cigars, curtains gummy and yellow, windows clouded from the puffing habits of the clientele, and he told me with fire in his eyes of Jesus and salvation, of a new faith born in the heart of the continent, and of the mouth of hell. He had raped one black woman who did not speak his language but who he thought had something of the Jezebel about her, and afterwards given her his Bible that she might find peace, though she did not read. Her family told her to go with him, being no longer worth keeping, and he found her presence awkward for a while, until at last he managed to sell her to a man from Angola, and that settled that.

  It had all been terribly educational, and he was humbled by the experience, and had for sure come closer to Jesus. He had not learned the woman’s name.

  He was also oozing a thin yellow discharge laced with blood from his penis, and sometimes the head of a living white worm appeared from the bottom of his left foot, but no matter how many times he pulled, sliced, burnt or cut at it, still it would poke its head out of his ravaged limb, as he wasted thinner and thinner away.

  I reported his crimes to my employers, who judged that it was fitter that he die a hero than become even more of an embarrassment, and lo, he was dead three months later and the mourners lined the streets for him.

  And then there was Margot.

  We met in the house of an Irish Conservative by the name of Hutton, whose cosy position as undisputed master of local parliamentary politics had been grievously disturbed by the rise of Parnell and the Irish Home Rulers, and who had found safety in an alliance with racketeers who beat heads in his name, and with his blessing. Those beaten heads then beat back, and the beaters beat harder, and so it went on, spinning towards destruction. That was all very fine and well; the money he was embezzling from the exchequer was less so.

  In the hall of his house there were dried flowers in white bowls to smother the stink of the coal-soaked, rain-slithered city outside. Women laid aside fur mufflers and extravagant blue capes to reveal beneath demure high-collared white necks; tittered in corners to discuss terrible secrets in the politest of ways. Portuguese wine, American tobacco, a man from Scotland who had once shot a bear; another from Cornwall whose father had taken eleven years to die, and he had resented every minute of it. Two journalists, three soldiers, four lawyers, five bankers and six men of land and governance made up the potentates of note, along with the usual muddle of lesser cousins, hangers-on and earnest fresh-faced boys who yes sir, no sir, how droll sir as they quested for a living from older, richer men.

  The baron offered up his assessment: “Terrible place, Ireland! Can’t see what Cromwell saw in it!”

  There was music, and a little dancing of the tight four-step kind that allowed the women who fancied themselves beautiful to flutter their eyelids in promise of unnamed temptations restrained beneath social courtesies, and every girl who had been told she was plain and could only hope for a middling kind of man, maybe a doctor or someone of that sort, to look down at the floor without reproach.

  I stood by the baron, as I often did, his personal physician, and let the men swirl round him in smoke and alcohol, their spirits roused by his regular, merry provocation.

  “Parnell, Parnell… isn’t he the fella who’s topping that Essex girl?”

  Scandal! Outrage! Where even to begin on the baron’s crudeness? And there was something terribly liberating, was there not, in being able to say out loud all the terrible things you loved to whisper in the privacy of quieter places?

  No one was much interested in me, and that was fine, and as the night turned and the music played, Langa came, he came, he came, and so did the truth of Hutton’s heart.

  And it was righteous, as most men are.

  He was righteous when he ordered men beaten, and he was righteous in his victory.

  He was righteous in his friends, his purpose, his politics and his God.

  He was righteous in his enemies, broken, and his motives and his deeds.

  He was righteous, too, in the mistress he kept across town, and in the blackmail money he had been paying, stolen from the government, to keep that secret from his wife, his family and the press. He was a man who had very carefully made himself righteous, because when he was not righteous, he was tiny, frightened and ashamed.

  Blackmail. What a depressingly predictable outcome.

  I headed for the garden, soft drizzle and wet leaves, and as I did, I caught in the corner of my eye the look that Hutton threw to a woman in a yellow dress, and a bare second later, a glimpse of her heart that froze me in my place.

  She laughed, a practised thing that had within it a secret that amused only her. Brick-brown hair curled high above a long, skinny neck, black silk gloves, a bird’s plumage of taffeta at the rear of her gown, a copper band around her wrist, eyes that danced to Hutton in every other moment, and from whose gaze he turned away.

  Now, there she was.

  There she was.

  Brown eyes laughing at her prey.

  Laughing at Hutton.

  His blackmailer had come to the ball.

  And she was like me.

  She was like me.

  She was like me, and her curse was coming, and her shadow was Doireann, child of her blood, whose body was buried in an unmarked grave in Clonakilty, and she would never tell the father where to find her girl, no matter what he took from her.

  All this I knew, as surely as I knew that I stood feet upon the earth and blood within my veins. I knew as surely as you may know the ending of a final breath.

  And then she turned, feeling perhaps a stare upon her cheek, a silence from the dark.

  And looked at me.

  And saw the truth of my heart with the same potency with which I saw hers.

  And for a moment there were just the two of us, she and I, hanging in that frozen moment when the heart beats its last, when the rivers of the body cease their motion.

  She knew me, as I cannot. And I knew her.

  Of the two of us, she was always faster.

  She met my eye, and saw my soul, and putting one hand on the arm of her colleague, she murmured an apology, and turned, and ran.

  Chapter 25

  Other truth-speakers I have met:

  Hideo, who should have died long before I killed him.

  Saira, who said, “There are some things you cannot cure.”

  Polina, kept in a cage.

  Patigul, who caught religion to save her
life, and was accounted sacred to Muslim, Buddhist, Daoist, Shinto, Christian and Hindu, depending on where she wandered and what she wanted for dinner that day.

  Nashja, hunted from one ocean to another.

  Khanyiswa, who swore blind that there was no one she loved, and who lied.

  Taavi, who was lucky in that he met me after I had learnt the truth, so lived, and wandered in the desert, and said he had an allergy to rain.

  Jarli, following the songlines beneath a crimson sun.

  Margot, who liked to blackmail great men, and who on that wet night in Dublin looked me in the eye, and ran.

  I had no doubt about my course. I followed.

  It was not a very long chase. Her dress was impractical, her shoes absurd, slipping on wet stone and catching in cobbled streets. She hitched her skirts up to scamper, but there was such a mass of daffodil to hoick that the weight of it all between her fists made her sway from side to side like a conker on a string. She kept her eyes fixed firmly to the gaslit ground, the sickly green of the street lamps turning everything into a diseased pall, flaring dull around each sconce and muted by the rain. I came level with her easily, and half hopped, half skipped by her side as she struggled to get any kind of speed, demanding to know who she was, begging her to stop, blurting out, I’m like you, I’m like you, listen! I’m like you!

  Having caught up with her, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was meant to stop her short of grappling her to the floor. I caught her arm and she whipped it at once away, pulling it back as if she might strike me. My hand slipped on silk and the truth of her heart was that she hated this dress and these shoes, which she had told herself she loved for the character they helped her play; well, all things contrary, all things change, we make our certainties, we make our truths. This was the beating mantra of her soul.

  “Wait,” I implored. “Surely you can see that I don’t mean you any harm?”

  She sees it, of course.

  Why then does she run?

  Ah, here it is, here is the answer as we swing sharply round the side of a low white church, here it is. She sees that I am a spy, and that I am therefore her enemy, as men so often are.

  This understanding came a few seconds too late to be of much service. She’d carried the knife for so long it was not important to her, and so I only saw it too late.

  She shoved me back against the wall in this tight little space away from the eyes of men, and I was easily shoved, so desperate not to be a threat to her that it took a moment for me to recognise in the dark that the new sensation itching for attention at my throat was the little folded blade she had removed from her boot, resting against my trachea.

  I was so surprised I didn’t even cry out, or start begging for my life. Sixty seconds ago I had been drinking bad wine; my mind was not as fast as my feet in racing from that moment to this.

  And yet even here, what I felt more than fear was curiosity.

  Would she really kill me?

  Could she?

  I looked into eyes like marble, and she looked into mine, and I nearly laughed to see that she did not know if she could kill me either, and she saw me understand this, and pushed the blade a little closer to my throat, testing whether in fact she could, and that silenced me, because ultimately, she hated people doubting her abilities and would fight a lion to prove a point. This too she saw, and as the sickly thought that perhaps I would die right here, right now, as the details of how it would be, the medical precision of my death, ran across my mind, so it ran across hers.

  And the blade relaxed, just a little, and I thought I might laugh again, and thought I might cry, and for a moment had no idea where my heart ended or hers began. Drunk on fear, intoxicated on it, was the beating in my ears my pulse, or hers? She didn’t know either, wondered in a moment of fancy if our shadows were now meeting on the road, squaring up to each other as we did now in this slithering corner of the tar-black city.

  There was no point speaking. No need to beg for my life. She would look, and she would choose, as only God can do on judgement day. I nearly thanked her for it, asked in silence if she could tell me what she saw there, in the twisted knot of my heart. Did she see anyone worth forgiving? And if she could forgive me for what I had done, and who I had become, did that mean I could forgive myself? Was I a man worth sparing? I caught her arm, not fighting her, not trying to wrench the knife away, but steadying it, asking, what did she see? Who did she see? Who was I, and did she, who knew the truth that I did not, think my life worth living?

  For a moment then she pitied me, and I nearly howled with disappointment and rage. I wanted forgiveness and truth, not pity; to be a man, responsible for all I did, rather than fortune’s pet.

  She saw that too, and for a second smiled, and understood perfectly, and in that moment she cracked my soul in two, and I asked, “Is there a cure?”

  And she shook her head.

  Like Albert, she didn’t know.

  But neither did she seek to find the answer. A truth that baffled me; a shock written large across my soul. I had a thousand questions, but now the men came running; her bully boys set to watch over her from the shadows. I hadn’t noticed them there, nor seen them in her heart. They were irrelevant to her, an exasperating adjunct to her work – men sent to do her business because no one ever took a woman seriously, and who had in the course of this mistaken their role for something serious. One called her name, and she rolled her eyes at the stupidity of it all, and stepped away, folding the knife into its wooden handle, and didn’t take her eyes off me, and smiled again, and nodded, just once.

  I smiled back despite myself, and touched the fingers of my right hand to my heart in thanks. Then her men were on me, and they were ignorant, and frightened, and bored, and hadn’t got a clue what they were doing or why they did it, but at least it was something that seemed important. This sense of self-worth only increased in them as the first punched me in gut, the second across the jaw. I dropped to the street, not because I felt they were doing a good job at beating me, but because it seemed to be what they wanted and expected, men who could indeed throw a mighty punch, and there they set about kicking my back, my ribs and my arms where they barrelled around my head. They didn’t think about whether they would kill me, or what the consequences might be. Their condition had been, a few moments ago, one of absolute boredom as they waited for Margot to return. This boredom, settling colder and deeper upon the soul with every drop of rain, had exploded apart as they realised that she was being pursued by one such as I. Thought had not really manifested in the few seconds between deathly dullness and the dealing of blows. Kicking me to a jelly was something exciting, interesting and therefore most essential. Killing me would mean that their work mattered, and therefore they did too. Any engagement with the question of my humanity was secondary to this fluttering pride, and so they kicked, and kicked, and kicked, until Margot barked:

  “Enough!”

  At which point they stopped, a little disappointed perhaps, but obedient.

  She knelt down beside me, eased my bloodied face out from beneath the wrapping of my hands, brushed sodden hair back from my forehead, then leant down, and kissed me softly above my left eye, where it peered up from the street. Her lips came away with blood as she did it, and she smiled, and touched two fingers to her heart, and nodded, and rose, and turned away.

  “Come!” she snapped, and reluctantly, the men followed her into the dark.

  Chapter 26

  Injury is one of my greatest fears.

  We may flatter ourselves that we have come a very long way in our science, but in truth we have come as far as being able to pronounce “Ah yes, you have this disease, and this is how it shall kill you, goodbye!”

  Yet my very specific, very personal fear is this: being confined to a bed. Unable to walk, or run. Not able to reach a train, or catch a ferry, or sit upon the back of a horse should it come to that. Why then, I will lie, and wait, and bleed, and heal, and Langa will come.

  He
will come.

  So you see, lying at the side of a church in Dublin, every part of me in pain, it occurred to me that I must not lose consciousness, or fall apart too spectacularly, or let some well-meaning individual get me to an infirmary from which I might not be able to discharge myself. Calling out for help was unfashionably needy, and every breath I took into my lungs was a new kind of agony, but I gave it my best and was disappointed for nearly five minutes by the singular failure of help to arrive.

  When it did come, it came in the form of a stranger in flannel trousers, and I nearly wept to see his round, glistening face peering through the street-lamp gloom. Seeing me, he opened with a barrage of “Dear Lord!” and “Holy Mary!” and other such unhelpful imprecations. “What should I do, shall I get the police – the infirmary, we must get you to the infirmary, can I move you should I touch you are you stabbed what should I do?!”

  I grunted an address, and more came running, and finally the baron too, who barked, “A cab! Someone fetch a cab!” with much the same urgency he used to pronounce on matters of polo.

  A hansom was hailed. A little crowd formed as I was slung, groaning, into its musty recesses. The baron tutted loudly for the pleasure of his audience about the inconvenience of hiring a doctor who needed medical attention, and kept up his performance until the door slammed and the horses neighed.

  “Are you shot, boy?” he barked, the moment the blinds were down. “Are you stabbed?”

  “Not shot. Not shot.”

  The baron’s concern, a strangely brilliant thing, crumpled into relief, the force of which astounded me. “We’ll have to call a doctor!”

  He found this notion very funny, and with Langa near, in a way so did I.

  They put me to bed in our little suite of rooms to the north of Ha’penny Bridge. A doctor came, and examined the floral display of bruises blossoming across my ribs, hips, legs, arms and chest. “Bed rest, fresh air!”