The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(86)

But how else could he play the hand he had been dealt? His father had been a miserable wretch who believed he had landed the best job of his life when he was hired to collect the piled-up excrement in the cesspools at the back of people’s houses. Each night he ventured forth to unburden the city of its human waste, as though Her Majesty in person would one day thank him for his labors. He was utterly convinced that this loathsome task was the cornerstone upon which the British Empire was founded: how could a country stay on top if it was drowning in its own excrement, he used to say. His greatest aspiration—to his friends” amusement—was to buy a bigger cart that would allow him to shovel more shit than anyone else. If there was one childhood memory etched in Tom’s mind it was the unbearable stench his father gave off when he climbed into bed in the early hours, and which Tom tried to fend off by nestling against his mother’s chest and breathing in her sweet smell barely perceptible beneath the sweat from her exhausting toil at the cotton mill. But the foul smell of excrement was preferable by far to the stink of cheap alcohol his father began to bring home with him when the sudden blossoming of the city’s sewage system put an end to his absurd dreams. And now Tom could no longer even fend this off with his mother’s sweet fragrance, because a sudden outbreak of cholera had torn her from his side. There was more room in the communal bed after that, but Tom slept with one eye open, for he never knew when his father might wake him up with his belt, unleashing his anger at the world on his son’s tiny back.

When Tom turned six, his father forced him to go out begging to pay for his liquor. Arousing people’s sympathy was a thankless but ultimately undemanding task, and he did not know how much he would miss it until his father demanded he help him in the new job he had obtained thanks to his cart and his ability with a shovel. In this way Tom learned that death could cease to be something abstract and take on form and substance, leaving a chill in his fingers no fire would ever warm. But more than anything, he understood that those whose lives were worth nothing suddenly became valuable in death, for their bodies contained a hidden wealth of precious organs. He helped his father rob graves and crypts for a retired boxer named Crouch, who sold the corpses to surgeons, until during one of his frequent drunken binges his father fell into Thames and drowned. Overnight, Tom found himself alone in the world, but at least now his life was his own. He was no longer forced to disturb the sleep of the dead.

Now he would be the one to decide which path he took.

Stealing corpses had turned him into a strong, alert lad who had no difficulty finding more honest employment, although luck never deigned to shine on him enough to help him escape his hand-to-mouth existence. He had no trouble finding employment as a street sweeper, a pest exterminator, a doorman. He even swept chimneys, until the lad he worked with was caught stealing in one of the houses they were meant to be cleaning, and the pair of them were thrown out on their ears by the servants, not before being given a thrashing. But he put all that behind him the day he met Megan, a beautiful young girl whom he lived with for a few years in a stuffy cellar in Hague Street in Bethnal Green.

Megan was not only a pleasant respite from his daily struggle, she taught him to read using old newspapers they fished out of the refuse. Thanks to her, Tom discovered the hidden meaning behind all those strange signs and learned that life beyond his own little world could be just as awful. Unfortunately, there are some neighborhoods where happiness is doomed to failure, and Megan soon ran off with a chair maker who did not know the meaning of hunger.

When she returned two months later, face covered in bruises and blind in one eye, Tom accepted her back as though she had never left. Although her betrayal had dealt the final blow to a love already strained by circumstance, Tom cared for her day and night, feeding her opium syrup to keep the pain at bay and reading aloud from old newspapers as though he were reciting poetry. And he would have gone on caring for her for the rest of his life, bound to her by a feeling of pity, which in time might have changed back into affection, if the infection in her eye had not meant his bed was once more widened.

They buried her one rainy morning in a small church near the lunatic asylum. He alone wept over her grave. Tom felt they were burying much more than Megan’s body that day. His faith in life was buried with her, his na?ve belief he would be able to live honorably, his innocence. That day, in the shoddy coffin of the only woman whom he had dared give the love he had felt for his mother, they were also burying Tom Blunt, for suddenly he did not know who he was. He did not recognize himself in the young man who, that very night, crouched in the dark waiting for the chair maker to come home, in the frenzied creature who hurled himself at the man, throwing him against a wall, in the wild animal who set upon him, beating him into the ground with angry fists. The cries of this man he had never known were also the cries heralding the birth of a new Tom: a Tom who seemed capable of anything, a Tom who could perform deeds such as this without a flicker of conscience, perhaps because someone had extracted it and sold it to the surgeons. He had tried to make an honest living, and life had crushed him as if he were a loathsome insect. It was time he looked for other ways to survive, Tom told himself, gazing down at the bloody pulp to which he had reduced the chair maker.

By the age of twenty, life had instilled a savage harshness in his eyes. Combined with his physical strength, this gave him a disconcerting, even intimidating air, especially as he loped along the streets. And so he had no difficulty in being hired by a moneylender in Bethnal Green, who paid him to bully a list of debtors by day, and who he had no qualms about stealing from at night, as though the morality that had guided his actions in the past had become no more than a useless obstacle preventing him from reaping the benefits of life, in which there was no longer room for anything but self-interest. Life became a simple routine that consisted of perpetrating violence on anyone he was told to, in exchange for enough money to pay for a filthy dank room and the services of a whore when he needed to relax. A life governed by a single emotion, hatred, which he nurtured daily with his fists, as though it were a rare bloom, a vague but intense hatred, exacerbated by a trifle and often responsible for him arriving at the boardinghouse, face black and blue, barred from yet another tavern. During this period, however, Tom was aware of his numbness, the icy indifference with which he snapped people’s fingers and whispered threats in his victims” ears, but he justified his actions by telling himself he had no choice: it was pointless to fight against the current dragging him to where he probably belonged. Like a snake shedding its skin, he could only look away as he relinquished God’s mercy on his downward spiral to hell.