The night shift arrived and the room filled up. Standing in front of these weary, exasperated officers, Andrews gave a speech explaining that the present situation would not last, that things would soon go back to normal. He had learned how to deal with these hot-tempered ex-soldiers who, despite the disadvantages of serving two masters – commerce and the state – were always proud to continue working for the companies. Their pride made him laugh a bit, but at least these men knew how to obey orders and didn’t complain too much.
Andrews sucked at his pipe as his gaze swept the room.
“Where’s Bowman?”
A few men shrugged.
“Is he on days or nights this week?”
There was no response. He gritted his teeth around the mouthpiece of his pipe.
The church bells rang out over the rooftops. Arthur Bowman emerged from the Corney & Barrow warehouses, swallowed a mouthful of gin, slipped the flask under his shirt and turned right into the deserted Nightingale Lane. People only came out later, after nightfall, when the temperature dropped a little, to buy anything they desperately needed. The shop windows were boarded up with planks or blocked off with wall-hangings, which were watered regularly because it was said that airborne diseases did not pass so easily through water. The shopkeepers, even if they doubted the effectiveness of this tactic, did it anyway once they realised that their customers were deserting them in favour of other, better-watered stores. They filled their buckets from the rotten wells and fountains of London and splashed their storefronts with brown liquid.
Bowman turned into Chandler Street and saw the small façade of the Fox and Hounds at the corner of Wapping Lane, with the lantern lit over its door. Its light was barely visible at this time of day, but it signalled that the establishment was open.
The door was locked. He knocked several times and heard the key turn with a creak. Mitchell, Big Lars’ dogsbody, pinched his nose as he stood aside to let the sergeant in. He closed the door behind him and put back in place an improvised portico, made with tool handles and strips of fabric. He pressed this against the doorframe, grabbed a bucket of water and threw it over the hangings.
Lars must be a fan of the water theory, only he had taken it a bit further, presumably deciding that the watering was more effective when carried out from inside the building.
There were half a dozen customers at the bar: the fine few whose thirst was not disturbed by the infernal stink.
“Fucking hell, Mitch! Will you stop throwing that shit?”
Lars, the landlord of the Fox, stood behind the bar reading a newspaper, a damp cloth covering his mouth and nose.
“Rather catch cholera, would you?”
Then, with a movement of his head, he greeted Bowman, who went over to sit at his table. The landlord grabbed a pint glass from the shelf, pumped some amber beer into it, and placed it on the countertop. Mitchell took it over to the policeman’s table.
When Bowman had finished it, Lars poured him another one.
Big Lars had been a corporal in the West India Company and had smuggled enough spices and furs to buy this mouldering pub when he retired. An unvarnished wooden counter lit by two oil lamps, four tables and unlit candles, a beer pump, some kegs of wine, behind the counter a trapdoor, on the trapdoor Big Lars, and beneath it a cellar from which not a single free drink had ever been taken.
The place was safe, forbidden to blacks, to Indians, to Pakistanis, to beggars (except those with old military stripes in their pockets), to Mohammedans, Chinamen, bluebloods, redskins, and anyone else Lars didn’t like. Hung on the wall above the boss’s head was a stuffed fox, its teeth bared, eyes staring at the entrance.
Bowman started his third pint. Sitting at his table, he was mostly in darkness, the light from the oil lamp casting only a few meagre rays towards his feet. Lars’s brown ale was just as bad as everyone said, but in heat like this it tasted almost cool. The Fox’s landlord, his voice muffled by the cloth that covered his mouth, yelled:
“Mitch, you fucking halfwit! The sergeant’s candle!”
Mitchell rushed over, lit the candle on the table without daring to glance at the man known as “the sergeant”, and went back to the bar to wait with the other customers.
Lars returned to his newspaper.
It took him all day to get through the Morning Chronicle, whose front page he generally saved for the evening, so he could share the information with his customers, who came to hear the news while having a drink. He would spend five minutes squinting at a paragraph, then raise his head and translate it the way he had understood it, and in a way that his regulars would understand. Today, the article seemed to be giving him particular difficulty because Lars was bent over it for a good quarter of an hour, rereading it over and over, his fingertip following the words as he frowned in concentration. Finally he brought the oil lamp closer and held the pages up to the light.
He started with the headline:
“Lecture at the Linnean Society, in the presence of Professors Lyell, Hooker and Wallace: ‘Nature at War!’”
Heads bobbed up over pint glasses. Mitch blinked and stared at his boss, who went back to reading the article.
“For an hour and a half, yesterday in Burlington House, Professor Alfred Wallace, biologist, presented a summary of the foundations of a new scientific theory, as well as that of Professor Charles Darwin, concerning the origin of animal species.”
The silence in the Fox and Hounds was total. Lars’s customers opened their eyes wide as the bottoms of bottles.
“What is this crap? Isn’t there anything else in the paper?”
Big Lars looked up.
“I already read the rest. Just let me continue, will you? It’s the lead article, for fuck’s sake!”
“Yeah, well, I don’t understand a bloody word of it so far.”
“Haven’t you got the Gazette, Lars? Who got hanged?”
“And what about the sewers, eh? When are they going to unblock those bloody sewers?”
“Shut your mouths!”
The landlord reread the article for another five minutes. Mitch brought back Bowman’s empty glass. Lars filled it and put his finger back on the newspaper.
“Ah! There you go!”
He looked back up at his customers, with a satisfied expression.
“The article says that these blokes, at the lecture, they don’t believe in God! ’Cos there are birds on islands and some rabbits in Papua and there aren’t enough of them to live, so they fuck everything that moves.”
There was another silence.
“You sure you read that right?”
“Let me finish! So there still aren’t enough rabbits even if they make loads of little ’uns, and that’s ’cos nature is at war . . . At war with itself! That’s what they say.”
One of the drunks lifted his nose from his beer.
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with God.”
Lars put his hands on his hips.
“Fucking hell.”
He reread a few lines.
“Ah, there you go! It’s ’cos nature is at war, and ’cos the animals, between ’em, they get rid of the weakest, and the strongest ones survive.”
There were smiles all around, and mouthfuls of beer went down throats.
“So that’s their new theory?”
“Well I fucking never!”
“Yeah. I should have been a professor!”
Two customers burst out laughing. Big Lars went on.
“And those ones, the strongest, it’s like the rabbit that runs fastest, for example, or the bird that flies fastest to catch the worm.”
“I still don’t see what that’s got to do with God.”
“I like the war bit, but the rest . . .”
“Fucking shut up!”
Lars finished a paragraph and raised a finger.
“Ah! So the ones that go fastest, they make little rabbits and baby birds that also go faster, ’cos it’s hereditary.”
One of
the drinkers put his pint down.
“Hereditary?”
“It’s passed down from parents to children, in the mother’s womb. You know, like stupidity!”
“Ah . . .”
Lars became animated.
“That’s where it’s got to do with God, ’cos this Darwin and the other bloke, Wallace, they say that the animals and all the other living beings at war in nature, they keep what suits them best – going fast or having bigger ears than their mates’ ears – and that way, they evolve.”
The landlord was silent for a moment, thinking that evolution would have a certain effect on his audience. No-one reacted and the customers all waited to hear what came next. In the end, Lars pulled the cloth off his mouth. Suddenly, his voice rang out more loudly and when he leaned forward the customers flinched backwards on their stools.
“Evolution! For fuck’s sake, don’t you understand anything? That means that the rabbits and the birds, a long time ago, they weren’t the same as they are now – they evolved and the species of rabbits changed!”
The silence was punctuated by a few swallowing sounds. Not that the Fox’s customers had given up listening, but still, this story was becoming increasingly uninteresting to them. They pushed their empty glasses in front of them and Lars filled them up again.
“I don’t know why I bother reading you lot the news.”
He placed the pints on the countertop, picked up the newspaper with one hand, and tapped it sharply with the other.
“Don’t you get it? That means that Darwin, he doesn’t think God created rabbits the way they are today! That he didn’t do it in seven days, and that, back when it all started, the rabbits, if He created ’em, they weren’t finished properly!”
Lars burst out laughing, and the other drinkers began, hesitantly, to join in. Sensing that his audience was now more attentive, he went on:
“And the journalist from the Chronicle, he says that, too – that Darwin, if he didn’t come out and say it – he thinks that men, too, back at the beginning, they weren’t like us. They evolved!”
All the men, increasingly sozzled, exploded with laughter. This time, Big Lars had them hanging on his words. He pulled a fourth pint for Bowman while he continued to speak.
“They’re fuming, on the Chronicle! They say that what he said, this Darwin, is that, before, your mother, or your father, they maybe weren’t finished people. You know, like blacks or Chinks or Indians!”
The laughter suddenly stopped and some of the drinkers looked worried. Others puffed out their cheeks and looked ready to explode.
“Hang on! Hang on, that’s not even all!”
Lars put his nose close to the article again and reread the last lines as fast as he could.
“Yeah! That’s it, listen! This Wallace, he says we haven’t finished evolving!”
One man, drunker than the others, or less worried about having a black father, began choking with laughter. Lars forced himself not to react so he could continue reading.
“Wallace, he says we’re going to keep evolving and we’re going to help each other. Help each other! And that, in a thousand years, we’ll have a perfect society! With a Socialist government!”
The man who was choking fell off his stool, and the others spat the beer in their mouths back into their glasses, producing a head of foam. Lars smacked his thighs, and the old army veterans banged their foreheads against the bar top. They fell about laughing in the light from the oil lamps, as if the idea of having African ancestors, added to this prophecy of a world of justice and solidarity, was the funniest thing they’d heard since the last promise to increase wages. Mitchell, who did not really understand what had been said but liked a good laugh, stood at the end of the bar and watched them with a smile on his face. There were tears in Lars’s eyes and he was struggling for breath.
“I’m going to invite that bloke here, that Wallace, so he can make us laugh! He’ll teach us how nature is at war, the twat, and how all the nobs in Westminster are going to turn socialist! Oh, fucking hell! I won’t even make him pay for his beers!”
This promise of free drinks was the coup de grâce for those still able to breathe. Lars turned towards the back of the room.
“Twenty years of studying, and that’s what you end up with! Bloody hell, did you hear that, Sergeant? What do you think about it, eh? Nature at war and our ancestors being monkeys?”
Beaming faces turned towards Bowman’s table. Lars wiped his eyes with his cloth soaked in brown water. They laughed as they watched Bowman finish his pint, waiting for what he would say, this veteran of the Indies, about all this nonsense, the biggest pile of crap any of them had heard in a long time. Because he had been listening from the start, Bowman, in his corner, but no-one had heard him laugh yet. He wasn’t a chatty man, but with something like this, it would be entertaining to hear what he had to say, with his gruff face and his severed fingers that did not invite casual conversation. His eyes were not particularly welcoming either, concealed behind those constantly frowning eyebrows. No-one really knew his story, and people were wary of him even after so many years of his presence. Lars talked about it sometimes. Sergeant Bowman wasn’t just a hard man, he was something else: a dangerous man.
But they wanted to hear him too, Bowman, because they had a right to laugh at Darwin and Wallace and their animal war in the nobs’ lecture halls, forgetting all the rest for a moment: the real wars and the richest city in the world which stank like a corpse.
He had been listening, Bowman. What did he have to say about it?
Lars was the first to stop laughing, and soon there was only Mitchell, with his halfwit’s face, still showing his rotten teeth. The others, slumped on stools, had sunk their mouths back into their glasses.
Bowman was staring down at his table, arms outstretched, hands tightly gripping the edge of the tabletop. His face had swollen above the candle and a line of yellow light ran across his forehead, in the fold of the scar that crossed through his wrinkles.
He stood up, knocking over his chair, and walked across the room, then got his hands tangled up in the portico and the cloths that blocked it up, and ended up tearing the whole thing off the door, before unlocking it and leaving.
*
Outside, the shadows of the buildings covered the road, ran up the pavements and climbed the façades like black water. Bowman turned on Reardon Street and crossed the Waterman Way footbridge. He drove onwards through back-alleys, until he reached China Court and took a side-street cluttered with sheets hung on washing lines. He shoved these damp cloths out of his way and stopped in front of a wooden crate on which some incense sticks were burning. He knocked on an old wooden door next to these scented twigs.
A Chinaman opened it.
Bowman walked through a corridor, and through half-open doors he glimpsed women sewing, children lying on mats, moon-faces with black eyes, half-naked bodies gleaming with sweat. Doors opened in front of him, and he crossed alleys, then went back through tunnels under buildings until he came to yet another door, guarded by two Chinamen who stood up tall when they saw him arrive. This door was opened for him and he entered the low-ceilinged room, with its rows of benches, bunks covered with mats and carpets, little square cushions, bodies lying close to each other in the heat and the smoke, wide eyes staring up at the ceiling. White wreaths of smoke escaped from open mouths, dry lips that no longer asked for anything to drink; pellets of opium cracked inside pipes. A pot-bellied Chinaman, squeezed into a long white tunic, bowed towards him, his hands joined, and pointed to a bunk. Bowman sat between two other corpse-like Englishmen.
A black-lipped old man, horribly thin, his arse and prick hidden by a knotted cloth, took off his shoes.
The Chinaman in the tunic prepared a pipe and held it towards the policeman. Bowman bit the mouthpiece, sucked in for as long as he could and then closed his mouth. The Chinaman stood up and waved again.
“Sweet dreams, Sergeant Bowman. Sweet dreams.”
Bowman opened his mouth wide, but instead of a scream, what came out was white smoke, which he let drift, rising, into the smoke-saturated air of the opium den.
His voice was thick, and it faded as he spoke:
“Fuck off. You . . . bloody . . . Chink.”
2
The opium den was deserted and daylight glowed through the curtains. The benches and cushions were abandoned, and in the cold morning light this nocturnal sanctuary looked drab and dusty once again.
The skeletal old Chinaman brought over a teapot and a glass of gin. Bowman sat up on the bench, rubbed his face and slowly drank a few mouthfuls of smoky black tea, then he downed the gin in a single gulp, tossed two shillings on the tray and left the opium den, feeling nauseous.
In the alleys of China Court, children pushed carts full of dirty laundry and pressed themselves against the wall to let him pass. Bowls of water boiled on fires, smelling insipidly of vegetables, the clouds of steam rising through the shadows of the dilapidated buildings. Bowman’s stomach contracted. When he passed a table covered with blood and saw a chicken’s head roll on the ground, cut off by a Chinese woman wielding an axe, he bent forward and vomited between his feet, right in front of the woman. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his police uniform and started walking again. He came out on a back-alley in Pennington Street. The agitation of China Court ended here and he found himself once again in the siege-like atmosphere of the city, with its barricaded windows and its empty pavements.
He joined Cable Street and walked to the corner of Fletcher Street, pushed open the door of his building and climbed the three storeys, breathing heavily. His room was in the corner of the building, just under the attic. One window looked over Fletcher Street, the other over Cable Street and the train tracks, while beyond it stretched the district of Whitechapel. A bed, a table and a chair, a little enamel sink, a shelf containing a razor and a shaving brush, a metal jug on the floorboards and a rope stretching between two walls on which hung two uniforms. One was red, the Company’s, and the other blue, the Thames Brigade, with the large hooded cape for winter.
Retribution Road Page 8