The North Water(2)
“Just one more drink and that’ll be the last you hear of it.”
The Shetlander ignores him, but the man doesn’t move. His patience is of the dull and shameless kind. He feels his heart swell, then shrink; he smells the usual tavern stench—farts and pipe smoke and spilled ale. Hester looks up at him and giggles. Her teeth are more gray than green; her tongue is the color of a pig’s liver. The Shetlander takes his blubber-knife out of his belt and places it on the table. He stands up.
“I’d sooner cut ye fucking balls off for ye than buy ye another drink,” he says.
The Shetlander is lanky and loose-limbed. His hair and beard are dank with seal grease and he reeks of the forecastle. The man begins to understand now what he must do—to sense the nature of his current urges and the shape of their accomplishment. Hester giggles again. The Shetlander picks up the knife and lays its cold blade against the man’s cheekbone.
“I could cut ye fucking nose off too and feed it to the fucking porkers out back.”
He laughs at this idea, and Hester laughs with him.
The man looks untroubled. This is not yet the moment he is waiting for. This is only a dull but necessary interlude, a pause. The barman picks up a wooden club and creaks up the hinge of the bar.
“You,” he says, pointing at him, “are a skiving cunt, and a damned liar, and I want you gone.”
The man looks at the clock on the wall. It is just past noon. He has sixteen hours to do whatever it is he must do. To satisfy himself again. The ache he feels is his body speaking its needs, talking to him—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a mumble, sometimes a shriek. It never goes silent; if it ever goes silent then he will know that he is finally dead, that some other fucker has finally killed him, and that will be that.
He steps suddenly towards the Shetlander to let him know he is not afraid, then steps away again. He turns towards the barman and lifts his chin.
“You can stick that shillelagh up your fucking arse,” he says.
The barman points him to the door. As the man is leaving, the boy arrives with a tin plate of mussels, steaming and fragrant. They look at each other for a moment, and the man feels a new pulse of certainty.
He walks back down Sykes Street. He does not think of the Volunteer, now lying at dock, which he has spent the past week laboring to trim and pack, nor of the bloody six-month voyage to come. He thinks only of this present moment—Grotto Square, the Turkish Baths, the auction house, the ropery, the cobbles beneath his feet, the agnostic Yorkshire sky. He is not by nature impatient or fidgety; he will wait when waiting is required. He finds a wall and sits down upon it; when he is hungry he sucks a stone. The hours pass. People walking by remark him but do not attempt to speak. Soon it will be time. He watches as the shadows lengthen, as it rains briefly, then ceases raining, as the clouds shudder across the dampened sky. It is almost dusk when he sees them at last. Hester is singing a ballad; the Shetlander has a grog bottle in one hand and is conducting her clumsily with the other. He watches them turn into Hodgson’s Square. He waits a moment, then scuttles round the corner onto Caroline Street. It is not yet nighttime, but it is dark enough, he decides. The windows in the Tabernacle are glowing; there is a smell of coal dust and giblets in the air. He reaches Fiche’s Alley before them and slides inside. The courtyard is empty except for a line of grimy laundry and the high, ammoniacal scent of horse piss. He stands against a darkened doorway with a half brick gripped in his fist. When Hester and the Shetlander come into the courtyard, he waits for a moment to be sure, then steps forwards and smashes the half brick hard into the back of the Shetlander’s head.
The bone gives way easily. There is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping. The Shetlander flops senselessly forwards, and his teeth and nose break against the cobblestones. Before Hester can scream, the man has the blubber-knife against her throat.
“I’ll slice you open like a fucking codfish,” he promises.
She looks at him wildly, then holds up her mucky hands in surrender.
He empties the Shetlander’s pockets, takes his money and tobacco, and throws the rest aside. There is a halo of blood dilating around the Shetlander’s face and head, but he is still faintly breathing.
“We need to move that bastard now,” Hester says, “or I’ll be in the shit.”
“So move him,” the man says. He feels lighter than he did a moment before, as if the world has widened round him.
Hester tries to drag the Shetlander around by the arm, but he’s too heavy. She skids on the blood and falls over onto the cobbles. She laughs to herself, then begins to moan. The man opens the coal shed door and drags the Shetlander inside by the heels.
“They can find him tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll be long gone by then.”
She stands up, still unsteady from the drink, and tries impossibly to wipe the mud from her skirts. The man turns to leave.
“Give us a shilling or two, will you, darling?” Hester calls out to him. “For all me trouble.”
*
It takes him an hour to hunt down the boy. His name is Albert Stubbs and he sleeps in a brick culvert below the north bridge and lives off bones and peelings and the occasional copper earned by running errands for the drunkards who gather in the shithole taverns by the waterfront waiting for a ship.
The man offers him food. He shows him the money he stole from the Shetlander.