The Palace Of Curiosities Part 6

How could my body accomplish such a feat of healing? I puzzle over this riddle but find no answer. Only a creeping fear: no true, honest man heals like this. Therefore, I am a monster.

My mind strains to escape from this terrible conclusion, for how can I live with such knowledge, with myself? I desire an answer, and for that answer to be that I am mistaken. My most sincere wish is to be man and not miracle. There is of course only one way to prove that I am a simple fellow who bleeds and heals in the slow, painful way of ordinary folk. I must cut myself again, and prove it wrong.

With a stolen candle stub in my pocket, I take myself to the yard privy. Alfred does not wake to ask me what I am about. I get out my pocket-knife. My fist closes about the handle, the blade hovers; I press the point into my forearm, where the last trace of the scar remains. I will cut myself in the same spot, and it will bleed, and I will have to bind it up. Yes. I will prove it was nothing more than a freakish mistake.

I draw the blade along my arm in a straight line, and my skin separates as it should. I close my eyes in relief, but when I open them once more I see the gash beginning to draw shut. It is most curious. I run the blade along the new join and tease it open. My body obeys, and parts its lips, only to begin closing once again the moment I lift the knife away.

A shallow cut proves nothing. I dig a little deeper. There is pain now, but one that rouses me to a strange wakefulness. As a man swimming underwater breaks the surface and feels breath fly back into his body, so do I fly into myself. My body sparks into liveliness, including that masculine part of me, which also raises its sleepy head. I grind my teeth: how can I possibly feel arousal with the cutting open of my arm? It is shameful. I would rather be the piece of dead meat that everyone calls me than this degraded creature.

I examine the wound, excitement mixing with horror. It gapes, and I can see through to the dark red within. I have seen enough meat cut open to know there should be blood, and now. Tentatively, I push the knife back in, draw it out once more. This time I should leak, but I do not. I turn my arm around in the small light, wondering at this mystery. The candle shows me what I do not wish to be real: other than a moist smearing on the metal itself, all is dry.

I stare at my disobedient arm, and once more the ragged edges of skin begin their drawing together. I push my finger into the hole to stop my body re-forming itself, but the flesh closes, pushing me out with a firm pressure, like the tongue of a cow. It takes a little while longer, but there is no halting the knitting-up of the slit.

I shake my head and tell myself that this is not a proper test. Perhaps only my left arm is possessed of these strange qualities. I should cut a different part of my body but not my other arm, for that is too similar. I roll up the leg of my trousers to the knee, select a spot on the calf and push in the point of the blade.

A drop of blood trickles down, catching in the mat of hair. My heart leaps with joy; I am bleeding. But no more follows and already the cut is barely to be seen. I jab at a different spot and feel a fresh surge of hope when a fat red bead falls as far as my ankle. A second drop spills from the wound, followed by a third. Breath gathers tightly in my throat. I am a normal man: I bleed.

Then the flow thickens, and stops. The wound blinks its eye, and closes. This is not possible. I must be normal; I have to be. There must be some place on my body that does not heal. But where? I drag my trouser-leg up as far as it will go and poke the blade into the pale ochre skin of my thigh. There is barely a smear of scarlet for my trouble. I try again; healing occurs straight away.

Maybe I need to go faster, to beat my body at its game of healing. But however quickly I jab the point of the knife, each cut starts to close up before I have time to make the next; the quicker I stab myself the quicker the doors of my flesh slam shut, matching my frenzy for hurt with a frenzy for healing. My breath scales a ladder of panting gasps as I climb closer and closer to myself. I am I am I am not Abel. Rather, I am not merely Abel. I am broad as the desert, tall as the sky, deep as the ocean. I know the answer to all my questions. It is all so clear, so simple. I am- So close. I soar towards the sun of understanding. As my body heals, heat sears my wings and I plummet into familiar darkness. There is no attainment to be found: my hand wearies, and I cease my battle. The knife is barely marked with moisture; the skin of my legs and arms flecked with creamy marks that fade as I watch. A few moments more and they are gone. My ribs heave up and down, and I realise I am weeping. The candle gutters and goes out.

I do not understand what manner of man can skewer himself with a knife and shed not one drop of blood, and have his body remake itself. I look like a man. I eat, drink, s.h.i.t, sleep, lift and carry, the same as every one of my fellows. But I am unlike them. I do not know who I am, or what I am.

I hide a great secret, one that marks me as grotesque. Am I man or animal? I can no longer call myself either: I do not have the comfort of calling myself a beast, for a beast can be butchered for the use of mankind, and I cannot serve any such purpose. Nor can I say that I am a man, for no man can do what I have done: cut myself and heal, against nature. It is terrifying. It raises my hopes towards understanding only to dash them most cruelly. It thrills and humiliates me. What kind of creature am I? I have no answer.

I stumble back to the cellar, crawl back to my mattress. Alfred is humped beneath his jacket. I want to shake him awake, and smile, and call him slug-a-bed, and thereby a.s.sure myself of my humanity. But it is the middle of the night. I close up the knife and put it under my blanket. There is nothing left to do but attempt to sleep.

My eyes bore into the darkness. I see my work: carcases swaying from the ceiling, each one cleanly cut, ready for the butcher's slab; I know they are all my doing. I am proud and slap the nearest, feeling the cool clean flesh against my palm. I know this: it is what I do. I name each part: the shank, the loin, the flank, the rib, the wing, the blade, the clod, the words sinking into some deep, comforting place. I am a slaughter-man. It is all I am. A plain and simple man.

Let sleep come, I beg the night. The soft delight in which I take such pleasure. Where there is neither fear nor worry. It does not hear my prayer. The questions torment me. Why do I not bleed? How can I heal like this? I feel the granite ice of my mind begin to crack with such a groaning that it rends me head to heel. A cleft appears and light spears through the c.h.i.n.k, casting fearsome shadows. I want to force myself shut, return to that safe vacancy where all is quiet. Yet I am also ravenous. I hunger to know what is in that great light, what I might discover when I shine the lamp of understanding upon myself.

I struggle with the need to know and the need to run. I blunder into nothingness: a dark room, darker than the inside of closed eyes, where I hold out my hands and pat the black air, afraid of stumbling into walls, or ditches, or worse. A day ago, I was a wiped plate. I was empty, clean, untouched. Now, I stand in the slaughter-house and see my body cut open, peeled by my own hand and yet healing. I do not want this body. I am too frightened to close my eyes again, for fear of what I might find there.

The next morning, Alfred does not need to rouse me, for I am already awake.

'Let's get to work,' he grunts, and it is all the greeting I have from him.

I want his smile, the warmth of his eyes when I call him friend, the easy way he guides me into the day. We walk in silence, the air freezing between us. I try to think of a topic of conversation that does not involve cutting. I fail, so great is my need to be unburdened.

'Yesterday. It was strange,' I try.

'Indeed? I don't recall,' he snarls and hides his face behind his collar.

'But, Alfred-'

'Oh, can I have no peace? There's nothing to talk about, Abel. Nothing.'

I grasp his shoulder and swing him about. All I want to do is talk to him. I do not understand why he will not listen.

'Abel, get your hands off me. You're really pushing your luck.'

'Alfred, I am ...'

My voice quavers, and his features soften. He takes my arm and pulls me to the wall, glancing up and down the street.

'All right, all right; if you are truly that upset. Let me help you, then. Tell me.'

'In truth? You want to hear?'

He sighs. 'Yes, I do.'

'Yesterday, when I cut myself ...' I gasp. 'You saw it. I healed.' I chew on the words, straining to free themselves from my mouth.

'Very well. I saw it. But it wasn't so deep. Perhaps.'

'I did it again,' I breathe.

'Oh, come now. No you didn't,' he says, forcing a brightness I do not share. It does not ease my confusion.

'Last night. While you slept.'

'You're mistaken. Maybe you had a nightmare. Don't carry on so.'

'Alfred-'

'This is too strange for me, Abel. You're a man like any other.'

'What if I am not?'

'You are. Think it and you can make it so. Come now, give me a smile and leave it be.'

'But don't you ever have strange thoughts about your body?'

'Thoughts?' He looks startled, and draws closer. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'But, Alfred-'

'But Alfred, but Alfred,' he sneers, in a mincing mimic of my voice. 'Let's get breakfast and drop this.'

'I am not hungry.'

'Christ, I thought I was in a bad mood,' he snaps, and sticks his hands into his pockets. 'But you take the b.l.o.o.d.y biscuit.'

We walk on in silence. I wish I could take back my words.

'Alfred. Please do not be angry with me.'

'Shut up, Abel. You're tiring me out and we haven't even started work yet.'

It is a long walk to the slaughter-house. From the first beast brought in, I find myself looking over my shoulder, starting at every twitch of thought, wary of where my mind might lead me. However, no fearsome pictures come to plague me. I would like to be sure it is the force of my will that keeps me free, but I cannot be sure.

I lift my arm, let it fall, and another carcase splits down the middle, the meat pale in the weak light. I push it aside and they bring in the next. It is easy work, the easiest I know. For all that I try to lose myself in the raising and falling of the cleaver, the line of uncountable carcases waiting to be split by my firm and unerring blow, my mind will not let off its needling.

I am steeled to drop my blade and run at the first intimation of strangeness; I keep my sleeve b.u.t.toned at the cuff. I do not want to be catching sight of my healed arm all the time for it continues to fill me with a sick feeling.

I do not want to drowse, do not want to be taken to any place but here, do not want to see the things I have seen. I press my attention to the slaughter-work with a great pa.s.sion, and in under an hour every hook is hanging with the carcases of the beasts I have killed. My companions are delighted with the speed of the work, and go outside to smoke a pipe. For all their friendliness, I do not wish for company, so I busy myself cleaning all of the cleavers.

I am confused. I should be dead. Every beast I have ever slaughtered tells me the plain truth of it. When a man is cut, he should stay cut. But I heal; and even more disquietingly, I do not even bleed. When a man is drowned, he is drowned. But not me: they tell me I was as good as a drowned man when they pulled me out of the river. I am no better than any other man.

I have heard over and over how I am a miracle: spewed up on to the banks of the Thames. How no man comes out alive after supping on its liquor, but I stood up from my bed after three days, was working in less than two weeks. I do not disbelieve the tale; but it could have happened to a different man. I cannot remember my tumble into the river, nor anything before: nothing of home, father, mother.

Alfred tells me it will return to me in time. But what if I am concealing some terrible secret from myself? I fear what I might have forgotten. Is that what I was so close to discovering when I cut myself last night? Am I running from some ghastly crime? Am I evil? Maybe I am a thief, a footpad, a murderer and do not know it. I shake these wonderings from my head: I do not want to fall into distraction and cut myself again.

Why not? breathes the voice in my head, quite calm and reasonable. You will heal. You have seen it.

I look at myself in the bright edge of the steel blade. I see brown eyes edged with dark lashes, a beaked nose, a broad mouth. Not the face of a wolf, or a bear. A man.

This is what you are, says the voice. However different or strange, you are a man.

I am not convinced. I shake the voice away, for all its kindness, and examine the sides of beef, hoping the sight of their symmetry might calm me. As I watch, the nearest carcase starts to sway in a current of air I cannot feel, gently back and forth.

The meat grows darker, oozing with moisture. The ribs swell out, only to be sucked in. It is breathing; air whistling through the severed windpipe, the stump of its neck twisting from side to side, searching for its missing head. Then the forelegs start to twitch, straining to touch the floor; the hind legs kick out to free themselves from the meat-hook.

Then they all begin: every dangling carcase dancing, thrashing back and forth on the hooks; fighting to free themselves, to find their scattered parts and knit themselves back together.

I hack at the monster that began this vile waltz; but with each slash it grows ever more frantic, as it fights to be free. I do not know what to do there is no throat to cut nor heart to slice out, these things having been done already yet I strike and strike again at the dead thing for there is nothing else for me to do, but it will not lie still, and I weep with the ghastly hopelessness of it. A hand grips my shoulder and the axe falls from my hand.

'You, man!' shouts a voice, and I turn to see the face of my pay-master. 'What are you doing?' he bellows.

I open and close my mouth.

He presses his face close to mine. 'I said, what in d.a.m.nation are you doing?'

My mouth is empty.

'Look!' he bawls, punching me so hard I stagger backwards. 'Look, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' he shouts again, and I do look: at shredded pieces of flesh and bone on the floor, the remains of the carcase hanging before me. All is still.

'Waste my f.u.c.king meat, would you? You f.u.c.king lunatic. Get out of here and don't come back.'

I stare at the floor, at the quiet bones.

'I said, sod off.'

He thumps me again. I slip on a piece of fat and barely save myself from falling. He picks up my blade, brandishes it.

'Now. Get out. Unless you want to replace the carcase you've just ruined. I always knew you were trouble.'

I run. On the street I drag off my ap.r.o.n and let it fall into the gutter. I stare at it a long time. Alfred finds me there when he leaves work, for I have forgotten the way back to our lodgings. We walk in silence. When we arrive, I do not know what to do except lie down.

I barely have time to close my eyes before the silt of my mind stirs and a picture floats up, urgent as a stream of bubbles from the bottom of a pond. I am scrambling over coiled rope, thick as a man's thigh, headlong to the stern of a boat, its deck treacherous with oil and lurching from side to side in mountainous seas. I'm almost thrown off my feet as the hulk heels sharply.

I grip the iron railing and peer into the dashing spume of the sea, far below. Jump, commands the voice of the waters. My arms await you. I haul myself up the rungs to sway on the topmost bar.

'Wait for me: I am coming!' I yelp into the filthy spray.

The wind smacks the words back into my mouth.

Hurry, I will not wait.

Suddenly there are other voices: men approaching, screaming. I know the words mean Stop, come down, madman. I shall not be turned aside. This is not madness. This is escape. If falling on to land cannot kill me, then perhaps the death granted by water might.

I jump, and am sucked down into a darkness cut into small flickering pieces; my jaw falls open at the hinge, mouth taking in a slow river of silt, filling my lungs with cold hard fists. Weed slops around my tongue like a woman's hair; the water is a stone in my lungs but there is no pain, no fire.

I move a piece of wood and it is my arm; I beat it against my face until the bridge of my nose swings towards my left eye. My arms do not break the surface; they stir the rusty mud and hide the broken window of the light, burrowing me deeper and deeper into the long night of the ocean.

The mouths of fish flay me to the bone; as fast as they nibble the fruit of my flesh, it restores itself. They return to feed on me, over and over. I beg the sea to grind me into mulch, for I ache to lie still for ever. I shall not come out, I wail. But it pushes me away. Throws me out, on to earth. I surface from tea-brown water, flesh boggy from its long stewing, gasping for my first breath as the new air slaps life into my lungs. But I want to die, cries the voice of my soul.

The heavy embrace of the river resolves into the hands of children searching through my pockets, fingers boring holes into my shoulders as they strip me. My ears unlock to their complaints.

Not much here.

Not so much as a b.l.o.o.d.y wipe.

Waste of b.l.o.o.d.y time.

He's a dead one.

I want to be a dead one for them. Blood settles in a slow night-fall into the pouches of my cheeks. The muscles of my face remember; begin to knit and heal and make me whole again, and they are never tired. I am already forgetting that I have done this. My body remembers, and keeps it secret. I go forward into darkness, into the fear. To find that light I saw and lost.

EVE.

London, MarchApril 1857 Mama and I thought the knock at the door was the man come for the collars I had sewn; but a stranger's voice gusted down the pa.s.sageway to my customary sheltering place in the crook of the door, out of sight of the street.

'My dear madam, forgive this intrusion,' said the voice.

I could sense Mama's eyes creasing at the corners, the marbles of her thoughts clacking together. Who is he? Do I owe him money? The air rippled as he raised his hat; the st.i.tching in his coat creaked as he bowed politely. I heard him say, 'Is your sister at home?' And Mama's surprised, 'Sister? I have no sister,' and only then halting, realising it was flattery.

She brought him in, and he bloomed to the very edges of our meagre walls. He was of middling height, but held himself taller; of a middling girth, but bulged himself fatter. He pigeoned out his chin, which was shaved so close I wondered if he hated his own beard and moustaches. He looked at the small table and the sewing laid upon it; the truckle-bed huddled in the corner everywhere but at me.

Mama stared at his waistcoat, a gaudy affair of vermilion brocade before which I could have warmed my hands. He turned this way and that, the fabric gleaming, complimenting Mama on the tidy industry of the room, the delicate embroidery of the collars, and every sentence held an apology for having so intemperately disturbed the retirement of her afternoon. His hands peeped from the tight cuffs of his shirt, soft as a midwife's; there was a shine on the seat of his trousers, a stain of sweat creeping around his hat-brim.