The Great Stink Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sample Chapter from BEAUTIFUL LIES

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © Clare Clark, 2005

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Clark, Clare.

  The great stink/Clare Clark.—1st U.S. ed.

  p cm.

  1. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Underground

  areas—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Ragpickers—Fiction.

  5. Sewerage—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.L3725G74 2005

  823'.92—dc22 2005002405

  ISBN-13: 978-0151-01161-2 ISBN-10: 0-15-101161-3

  First U.S. edition

  eISBN 978-0-547-54008-5

  v4.1117

  For Chris, always

  I

  Where the channel snaked to the right it was no longer possible to stand upright, despite the abrupt drop in the gradient. The crown of William's hat grazed the slimed roof as he stooped, holding his lantern before him, and the stink of excrement pressed into his nostrils. His hand was unsteady and the light shuddered and jumped in the darkness. Rising and rushing through the narrower gully, the stream pressed the greased leather of his high boots hard against the flesh of his calves, the surge of the water muffling the clatter of hooves and iron-edged wheels above him. Of course he was deeper now. Between him and the granite-block road was at least twenty feet of heavy London clay. The weight of it deepened the darkness. Beneath his feet the rotten bricks were treacherous, soft as crumbled cheese, and with each step the thick layer of black sludge sucked at the soles of his boots. Although his skin bristled with urgency, William forced himself to walk slowly and deliberately the way the flushers had shown him, pressing his heel down hard into the uncertain ground before unrolling his weight forward on to the ball of his foot, scanning the surface of the water for rising bubbles. The sludge hid pockets of gas, slop gas the flushers called it, the faintest whiff of which they claimed could cause a man to drop unconscious, sudden as if he'd been shot. From the little he knew of the toxic effects of sulphuretted hydrogen, William had every reason to believe them.

  The pale light of his lantern sheered off the black crust of the water and threw a villain's shadow up the curved wall. Otherwise there was no relief from the absolute darkness, not even in the first part of the tunnel where open gratings led directly up into the street. All day the fog had crouched low over London, a chocolate-coloured murk that reeked of sulphur and defied the certainty of dawn. In vain the gas-lamps pressed their circles of light into its upholstered interior. Carriages loomed out of the darkness, the stifled skitters and whinnies of horses blurring with the warning shouts of coachmen. Pedestrians, their faces obscured by hats and collars, slipped into proximity and as quickly out again. On the river the hulking outlines of the penny steamers resembled a charcoal scrawl over which a child had carelessly drawn a sleeve. Now, at nearly six o'clock in the evening, the muddy brown of afternoon had been smothered into night. William was careful to close the shutter of his lantern off beneath the open gratings, as furtive as a sewer-hunter. It was bad enough that he was alone, without a look-out at ground level, in direct contravention of the Board's directives. It would be even harder to explain his presence here, in a section of the channel recently declared unsafe and closed off until extensive repair work could be undertaken. William could hardly protest to be innocent of the decision. He had written the report requiring it himself, his first official report to the Board:

  Within the southern section of the King-street branch deterioration to interior brickwork is severe, with the shoulder of the arch particularly suffering from extensive decomposition. While tidal scour can be relied upon to prevent undue accumulation of deposits, the high volumes of floodwater sustained within the tunnel during periods of full tide and heavy rainfall pose a grave threat to the stability of the interior structure. Underpinning of the crown is urgently required to prevent subsidence. DANGER.

  The precision of the words had satisfied him. Within them was contained the evidence of a world where method and reason strapped down chaos. On their very first day as assistants to the Commission the group of young men had been taken to meet Mr Bazalgette himself. One of their number, eager to ingratiate himself with the master, had begged him to disclose what he considered the characteristics of a successful engineer. Bazalgette had paused, his fingers against his lips. When he spoke it was quietly, almost to himself. The great engineer, he said, was a pragmatist made conservative by the conspicuous failures of structures and machines hastily contrived. He was regular in his habits, steady, disciplined, methodical in his problem-solving. He was equable and law-abiding. Carelessness, self-indulgence, untidiness and fits of temper were foreign to him. From the turmoil of his natural instincts he brought order.

  'How unutterably tedious he'd like us!' one of the pupils had hissed at William as they were dismissed. William paid no attention. In the months that followed he had held on to Bazalgette's words, repeating them to himself until their shape acquired the metre of a magic charm. William no longer trusted in prayer.

  Where the floor of the tunnel levelled out once more William paused, holding his lantern up to the wall. The water tugged impatiently at his boots. Where the light caught it, the masonry bulged with overlapping wads of fungi. They sprouted fatly from between the spongy bricks, their fleshy undersides bloated and blind, quilting the holes that pocked the walls. They were the closest that the tunnels came to plant life but William could find no affection for them. He ducked further, pulling in his shoulders to avoid brushing against their pallid flesh. Their cold yeasty smell rose above the privy stench of the filthy water. William's throat closed. For a moment he felt the tilt of the ship and his hair crawled, alive with vermin. Men moaned all around him, crying out for help that never came. He had a sudden urge to dash the glass of the lantern against the wall. A shard of the broken glass would be as sharp as a knife. It would slice through the stinking fungi until their flesh fell away from the wall. Would it bleed or would it simply yield the yellowed ooze of a corpse too long in the sun? The craving quickened within him and his breath came in shallow dips. He imagined his fingers closing round a dagger of glass, tight and then tighter until his blood ran in narrow black streams between his knuckles. The hunger pressed into his throat, and crowded his chest. He stared into t
he lantern, watching the worm of flame curl as he swung it slowly backwards and forwards. Just one hard blow. That was all it would take. He pulled back his arm...

  No! The lantern swung dizzily as he snatched in his hand and a pale fragment of mushroom swirled away in the stream. A fine crack ran upwards through the glass of the lantern but the light did not go out. Unhurriedly the flame stretched, shivered and then steadied. Sweat trickled from beneath the brim of William's hat. He gripped the handle of the lantern tightly, angry at his imprudence. Without the lantern he would never find his way back to the shaft. Forcing his mouth full of saliva he licked his lips. Regular in his habits, steady, disciplined, methodical in his problem-solving. Equable and law-abiding. He repeated the words to himself as he moved further into the tunnel. His knees were unsteady.

  Once again the tunnel narrowed. Here there was barely room to accommodate the spread of William's shoulders and the water rushed over his knees. At high tide the flow would fill the channel almost to the roof. Where the stream scoured the walls there were no more mushrooms. Instead the walls were slick with a fatty dew of nitre that gleamed silver in the lantern's light. In the darkness beyond, a row of stalactites hung like yellowing teeth from a narrow lip of brick in the curve of the roof. This was the place, the place where young Jephson had finally gone to pieces.

  It had not come quite without warning. Jephson, a gangly surveyor with the raw oversized knuckles of the not-quite man, had been discomfited for at least a half-mile, the perspiration standing out on his forehead as he complained of stomach aches, headaches, of difficulty breathing. He had insisted that the ganger pause every few yards and hold out his lantern on its pole in the darkness, checking and rechecking for the presence of choke-damp. While the measurements were being taken his hands had trembled so violently that William had taken the spirit level from him, anxious it might be lost in the underground sludge. But it was not until they reached this point that the boy finally lost his head. His fear had travelled backwards through the tunnel like gas, poisoning the other men, but not William. William had watched with a detached disinterest as Jephson flailed, screaming, in the filthy water. He had noted the lettuce-green tinge of his pinched face as his hat was carried off by the current. He had observed the spots of red flaring on each of his sharpened cheekbones, the bony white fingers clutching at the crumbling walls. He had felt nothing but a faint impatience as Jephson thrashed and shrieked in the restraining grip of the ganger and his assistant. The flushers were stout as butchers and their great fists encircled Jephson's arms as easily as if they were axe-handles but for a time the young man's movements were so violent that it had been as much as they could manage to hold him at all. At last Jephson's wild legs had kicked out with such force that he had dislodged a welter of bricks. 'Get 'im out of 'ere!' There had been no mistaking the edge of warning in the ganger's habitually lugubrious tone. When finally they bundled him up into the street, the rest of the surveying party following in subdued silence, Jephson's hair was clumped with filth and his nails had been quite torn away.

  After that Jephson had been transferred to Grant's department. These days he was making studies of Portland cement, experimenting with the weight-carrying potential of beams of varying dimensions. It had been left to William to make the required assessment of the tunnel's condition to the Board. Since then Lovick had placed him in charge of the review of the existing system on the north side. Reportedly he had emerged from the Jephson incident as a man capable of retaining a cool head in a crisis.

  The recess that remained in the brickwork was clear of the water and almost a foot across at its widest point. If this was not the work of Jephson's boots then it would do just as well, although William would have to open it up further. The space needed to be large enough for him to sit in, and to accommodate his lantern. He could not do it one-handed. William shone light into the space. The wall was patterned with grooves, inked with shadow. Most were shallow, short and clustered in fours and fives, like the ones carved by prisoners to mark the passage of time; some were broader and blunter and showed up only in pairs. Rats. They had tried to burrow here, presumably seeking refuge against the rising current, grinding their claws and even their teeth into the masonry. But they had been confounded. The brickwork was soft enough but the putrid black stream that surged around William's knees had once been a river. Once, a long time ago, there had been a bridge here and large blocks of the Portland stone that had supported it remained embedded in the brickwork of the tunnel. The rats' efforts had achieved no more than chalky scratches on its unyielding surface.

  For a moment William let himself imagine what it might have been like to stand here in a different time, the warmth of sunlight on his face and clear water playing over his feet. He pictured prosperous gentlemen in their powdered wigs promenading with their wives along its grassy banks, dipping their hands to drink its sweet water, or leaning from bridges and boats to admire their contented reflections in its mirror. As the pollen drifted across the brook, the silvered fish stretched lazily and offered their mouths to the waiting hook. William was not to know that this particular stretch of the stream had been little better than an open sewer for centuries now, lined from the time of Queen Elizabeth with slaughterhouses and tanneries that poisoned the fish and turned the water red so that Ben Jonson himself had written of it as eclipsing in foulness all four rivers of Hades. Perhaps the rats had sensed the river's grim past. Thwarted by history they had gone elsewhere, leaving William alone in the darkness. His unshed tears ground into his eyes, hard as stones.

  The screams were starting to build beneath his diaphragm, pressing up and out of his ribcage so hard it seemed they might force the bones through their covering of skin. William's hands shook. Strapping his lantern to the front of his leather apron he fumbled in the tool pouch he kept slung around his waist. His fingers were cold and clumsy and, as he pulled out the knife, he almost dropped it. Wrapping both hands tightly around the handle he swore at himself, a stream of quiet, intense obscenities as rank as the river he stood in. It was the first time that day that he had spoken and his unaccustomed voice creaked over the words. He cleared his throat. The curses surged forth, smoother and faster, asserting themselves over the rushing of the water. Their simple contours calmed him a little.

  Once again William felt the stirrings of purpose in his belly and then the cravings began to swell as they always did, scouring him with their voracious heat. In the frozen mud of the nights that William did not let himself remember the men had circled uneasily in the darkness and complained loudly of their unsatisfied desires. Nothing, it seemed, not the gnawing hunger, nor the vicious cold, nor even the sheer paralysing terror of the night-watch, could strip these lusty London boys of their yearnings. Women had done for them good and proper, the soldiers had lamented again and again, raking at the skin beneath their verminous uniforms; for a man would do almost anything to scratch an itch that fearful ticklish. Night after night they had passed the long hours describing Her, the fantastical amalgam of all their wild dreams and narrow experience, her feather mattress unrolled across the ridged mud of the trench and her white legs spread. In the beginning William had considered their rough talk an affront to gentlemanliness, to decency, most of all to Polly herself, but long after that was gone he found himself comforted by it. At least it was always the same.

  Those exchanges came back to him when at last he and Polly lay together once again and on the many nights afterwards when he lay awake listening to her soft snores. Before the war he could barely so much as hear her voice without wanting to touch her but since his return from Scutari he had been unable to summon up for her anything more than a vague disoriented kind of affection. She touched his face with her tender fingers, kissed the corners of his mouth, flickered her tongue over his neck and his nipples and his belly, but he could feel none of it. His penis hung as wrinkled as a discarded stocking between his legs. He saw the fingers, the lips, but they were no more than pictures to him, random pl
ates torn from a book. When Polly spoke to him, adjusting the tilt of his head so that his eyes were forced to meet her own gay twinkle, he had to recall himself, so far had he drifted from the place where they were together. Words lost their meanings. Colours faded or blurred. He had difficulty recognizing everyday objects. Sometimes he was unsure of who he was. There were days when William was certain that he was simply disappearing, fragmenting and disintegrating until he was nothing but dry sand, trickling away between the floorboards.

  Except when the cravings came. They licked him with their flame tongues and whispered of ecstasy. Their power overwhelmed him. He had no hope of resisting them, nor any wish to do so. They were the closest he came to hope. When the cravings began to burn inside him the frozen darkness thawed a little. In their flickering light he could finally sense the shape of a man, of someone who, despite everything, was still alive.

  William's breath came quickly and his heart sucked at his chest. His head felt empty, a balloon attached to his body only by a string so that he seemed to observe its movements from a great distance. But his skin was frantic with dread and anticipation. Quickly he worked around the slabs of stone, prising bricks out with the point of his knife. It did not take long. The mortar in this part of the network was soft as gangrene. As he removed each one he threw it into the narrowing mouth of the tunnel. The black water swallowed the bricks without a splash. Beneath the loose fabric of his shirt the skin on the soft underside of his arm prickled and burned.

  When the space was large enough he sat, placing the lantern beside him. The blade of his knife quivered as he held it up to the light. Crumbs of mortar clung to the fretwork of tiny scratches left by the whetstone. Sewer mortar would carry infection. His work in Scutari had taught him that. Carefully William wiped the steel with a large clean rag. Holding it close to his face he stroked the ball of his thumb over the blade to test its sharpness. Abruptly the cravings rose in him again, this time with such intensity that the hairs on his arms and neck pulled taut away from the skin. His fingers tingled. Clamping the knife between his teeth he folded the rag in half and then in half again and laid the pad of fabric across his lap. Then he unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt and rolled his sleeve to above the elbow. His fingertips skated lightly over the underside of his forearm but he did not look down. It distracted him to see it. It muddied the purity of the first moments. There was always a time, afterwards, when he felt completely purged, whole, happy even. For a while it was possible to persuade himself that he would never come back, that it was over, finished with. But there was always a part of him that knew that it would never stop.