The Great Stink Read online

  It was time. He was ready He slid the shutter on the lantern.

  The darkness closed over him. It no longer mattered if his eyes were open or closed but he closed them all the same. Behind his eyelids, no longer connected to the movements of his own fingers or the ghost of his white-tipped nose, he separated from himself. In the darkness he could feel the quickening of life within him. Up there in the unending press and clamour of the city its light grew faint, its circle of heat so infinitesimal that it was possible to believe it had been quite snuffed out. But under and away, in the darkness, beneath the wheels and the hooves and the hobnails, knee-deep in the effluvia of the largest city on earth, his spirit found freedom. Here, where there was no light, no warmth, nothing but the sickening stink of shit, somehow here it found its own oxygen so that it might reignite and brand its living form on to the frozen surrender of his flesh. Here it mutinied. It forced itself to be heard. William May was not dead! He had only to purge the blood in his veins, the air in his lungs, ridding them of the black putrefactions that poisoned them, infecting all that they touched. If he could only flush away the filth, the poison, and establish in its place a spring of sweet clean blood, sweet clean air, that would bring with it health and life...

  Dreamily William raised his knife. Gripping its bone handle, he cut into the flesh of his arm.

  The ecstasy exploded within him. William wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream out loud. At this perfect moment of climax he occupied himself once more. He was whole. The relief was exquisite. He cut again, deeper this time, and felt himself filled with a calm that was at once peaceful and exultant. Blood gushed from the long gashes, spilling on to the rag on his lap. He smeared it across his skin. It was warm, real, wonderful. On impulse he held his arm up to his mouth and licked it. It tasted beautiful. He licked again. The pain was on the outside now, held safely where he would manage it. It was real at last, defined. Something he could hold on to, something he could control. The disintegrating sand of his self no longer slipped from his fingers. Instead its particles began to pull together, asserting themselves back into a solid whole. Inside his head the shadowy twilight darkened and tightened to reveal at its centre a single vivid pinprick of light. The muscles in his thighs tautened as his feet pressed against the jagged brick floor. He felt strong, clear-headed. He cut one last time, the pain singing out from his flesh in triumph. The blood filled the palm of his hand and he clasped it so that it ran between his fingers. He wanted to cry out with the sheer joy of it. I'm alive! he wanted to shout until the darkness echoed and the bricks shivered in their sockets with the categorical certainty of it. I, William Henry May of 8 York-street, S., am alive!

  II

  Long Arm Tom tipped back his grizzled head and sniffed. Once, a long time ago now, Joe'd reckoned it a lark to take the rise out of Tom about the sniffing, had liked to call him Long Nose Tom or Lurcher Tom or just Dog, on those days when his words came out in ones. Joe hadn't reckoned it was worth a farthing, the sniffing, not till they came out early that time on account of Tom's certainty that it was going to rain and those other coves had gotten themselves drowned over King's-cross way. After that he'd seen it different. He could never get hold of how Tom did it though, how he pulled the smell of the rain clear of all the others. To his mind all the smells just mixed themselves up together so as you got one big soup of a stink that smelled like London. Tom didn't think much of that. It wasn't just that every part of London had its own flavour so even with your eyes closed you could tell to the nearest street where you were. It was that the stinks came in layers, each one thick and sticky as the river sludge on the soles of your boots. If you only used your nose you could pick them out neat as fleas.

  At the bottom of the stink was the river. It stretched a good few streets back from the banks, in fact there weren't many places in the city you couldn't catch a whiff of it on a warm day, but in Thames-street it was certain as the ground you stood on. You couldn't see so much as the surface of the water through a fog like this one, not even if you hung right over the river wall, but you couldn't miss knowing it was there. The smell was solid and brown as the river itself. The water didn't know nothing of any modesty or shame. It wasn't going to hide its filth among the narrow alleys and rookeries in the lower parts of town like them in the Government might wish it to. It grinned its great brown grin and kept on going, brazen as you like, a great open stream of shit through the very centre of the capital, the knobbles and lumps of rich and poor jostling and rubbing along together, faces turned up to the sky. The rich ladies could close their doors and muffle their noises all they wanted; theirs stank same as anyone else's and out here was the proof, their private doings as clear to see as if they was on display at the Crystal Palace. There were times, mornings and evenings in particular, when there was twenty steamers at least churning their great wheels below London Bridge, when the water was so dense and brown it seemed that it should bear a man's weight, so as he could walk clean across it without so much as wetting his feet. On a hot day the stink could knock you flat. Through the windows of hansoms on London Bridge Tom had seen ladies swoon dead away and white-faced gentlemen cover their mouths with handkerchiefs. But on a November afternoon the salt-water tang of the sea ran in silvery threads through its thick brown stink, at least up as far as Southwark. Sometimes, when Tom came out on to the river bank at night down Greenwich way, he swore he could see the salt rising from the river, glinting and dancing above its muddy plough like clouds of silver midges.

  The next smell you got, when you was done with the river smell, was the sour soot-smudged stink of the fog. London's fogs came in all sorts and each one smelled only of itself. This one was a slimy yellow-brown gruel that sank and crawled along the streets, skulking into courts and cellars, looping itself around pillars and lampposts. You tasted it more than smelled it. It greased itself over the linings of your nostrils and choked your chest, distilling in fat droplets in your eyebrows and whiskers. When Tom breathed through his mouth it coated his tongue with the taste of rancid lard, faintly powdered with the black flour of coal dust. It had mouldered over the city for close to a week, rusting iron and smearing soot over all it touched. Through its gloom the buildings looked like grease stains on a tablecloth.

  South of the river, of course, the fog got itself mixed up with the smoke. There were parts of Bermondsey where the sky looked like it was held up by nothing but chimneys and the same again in Southwark. Each smoke had its own particular flavour, so as you could always tell where you were. The smoke from the glue manufactories had a nagging acid smell that caught in the back of your skull and made you dizzy, while the soap-boilers, their stink had the sickly flavour of boiling fat. The match factories' chimneys pissed a kind of yellow smoke that reeked bad as the alley behind a public house. Then there was the particular drugging smell of hops from the breweries, which didn't smell nothing like the reek of leather and dog shit from the tanneries. South of the river you could smell the change in the neighbourhood when you crossed the street.

  Here in Thames-street the smell was all of its own. In a fog like this one the market was no more than a dirty smudge looming out of its moat of mud, the everlasting clamour of the hucksters muffled even thirty yards off. But the reek of fish, stale and fresh, that was stately and self-important as a church. At its base, for foundations, was the seashore smell of seaweed and salt water, and upon these smells were built, layer by layer, reek by reek, the pungent stinks of smelt, of bloater, of sole, herring, whiting, mussel, oyster, sprat, cod, lobster, turbot, crab, brill, haddock, eel, shrimp, skate and a hundred others. The porters that hustled between the boats and the stalls carried them from shore to shop and back again, every inch of them given over to the intoxicating brew of stinks. The stallholders swung their knives in it and sent it splattering across their bloodied wooden boards. Their leather hats and aprons were dark and stiff with the contents of a thousand fish stomachs. Streaks of blood striped the fish-women's arms, their faces, the hems of their
quilted petticoats. Fish scales caught in the mud on their boots and glinted like scraps of silver. Melting ice slid from their tables, shiny and thick with fish slime. Beside them wooden crates packed with straw leaked salt and fish fluids into ditches and gullies. Even if you was only in Billingsgate an hour or less the stench caught in the pelt of your greatcoat so that you carried a whisper of it with you the remainder of the day.

  Tom stood aside as a fish fag bullied her way through the crowd, a dripping basket of flounder on her head. When the stalls finally were shut up for the day and the fish-women went home, the flattened mess of their bonnets and caps and hair would be lush with the stink. In Thames-street the everyday every-place smells of London, smells so common you had to remind yourself to smell them at all, crept into the nostrils for no more than a moment before being straightways knocked out again. Tobacco, the rotting straw and dung of a cab-stand, hot bread, the pungent gush from an uncovered sewer, the occasional surge of roasted beef and spilled porter from an ale-house door, the hot red heart of a lit brazier, none of them were any match for the fish. Not even the sharp sour odour of unwashed clothes and bodies and breath, a smell that had occupied Tom's nostrils without pause for all the decades of his life so that he no longer took any account of it at all, not even that could make more than the faintest scratch on the proud edifice of stink that was Billingsgate Market.

  Tom sniffed one more time. He could not be certain, not top to bottom certain. A city so full of tricks and dodges as this one could get the better of even him but to his mind there was no hint of the metallic edge of rain. The fog made things unpredictable, of course. Its swirls and flounces could hide pockets of rain that fell sudden as a boot tipped out on the street. And then the waters down under rose in the blink of an eye. If you were in the wrong place then you didn't have long to get yourself out. Still, the tide was right. They had eight or nine hours straight, he reckoned, maybe longer. And the fog had its advantages too. Now the law'd started offering rewards to people who reported any goings-on in the sewers, the johnnies on the water were vigilant as spiders. But in the fog they couldn't make you out so easy and, what with the streets all blind clamour and confusion, the traps had other things to concern them. In the fog it was harder to make out a light through the grating too. If people chanced to see it they were like to take it for a trick of the mist.

  Joe was set to meet him at the cellar. There was a hidden place there where they stowed the necessaries, the crates, the shovels, the hoes they'd rigged up with hooks for the lanterns. Tom could still remember the way the old man had taught him how to thrust the lantern into the tunnel ahead of him to test for the gases. If the flame didn't go out it was safe to go on. It was Brassey who wanted the rats this time, no less than one hundred and fifty of the buggers for a big fight at his place in Soho. It had been a great day for Brassey, the day the law'd come in banning the dog-fighting. Suddenly there were all these coves looking for sport any which way they could get it, their pockets fair springing with money. Course everyone said there were still dog fights aplenty in the big houses. The nobs could get away with it where the traps weren't exactly like to come barging in. But the dog-pits at Westminster had been closed a good long time and only a few of the public houses dared to go on with the dog-fighting after that. The dogs had gone, and into their place had come the rats. It hadn't taken Brassey long to smell the profit in it. He'd set up a pit in what had once been his upstairs parlour and, though it was a long time since Tom had been one for the fight, there was no doubt the publican's business was booming. There were weeks when he'd be at you for fresh supplies two, even three times in as many days so as you could hardly keep up with the call for them. Not that Tom was complaining. There was money in it and no shortage of the devils. The usual arrangement was two for a penny but Brassey had agreed to pay a penny a rat this time, on account of being particular about the size. Five pounds, all told. These days the rats was worth ten times the tosh, whichever way you chose to look at it.

  The fog darted ahead of Tom as he ducked beneath a low archway no wider than a door. It opened into a kind of courtyard, twenty feet long and no more than two across, surrounded by tall wooden houses with so many rooms jutting out from the upper stories that they formed a roof across it that quite hid the sky. The courtyard in turn drained into a narrow alley and then another and another, each one twisting away from the other. All along them the broken-down houses jostled and pushed for space, sagging against one another like drunks.

  The lanes swarmed with ragged children, some of whom tried to clasp Tom's hand or tugged hopefully at the hem of his coat. Tom shook them off without so much as looking at them. He walked quickly, slipping easy as an eel through the confusion of the rookery until he reached a corner where two walls of crumbling brick met. An iron bracket rusted on the wall above him, the glass globe of the gas-light long smashed. Even the fog struggled to penetrate this far. Only a thin slice of blacker shadow revealed that one wall was in fact set slightly ahead of the other, concealing a tiny courtyard no wider than a man's outstretched arms and, set low in one corner, a rotting wooden door that slumped between the fingers of its hinges. Tom eased the door to one side and, stooping, went down a shallow flight of steps into a low windowless cellar.

  In the mouldering gloom he slung his lantern from a nail and reached into the wall for his wire crates. They were broad and flat, of the kind used to take chickens to market. At a pinch you could get a hundred rats to a crate, stacked one over the next like bowls. His fingers worked into the corners of the cages, checking for holes. You didn't want to find a rat had worked his way out, not once you were in the tunnel. The rats were more skittish in the fog, more likely to turn nasty. It rattled them, though for the life of him Tom couldn't see why. Surely when you was underground it made not the least odds whether twenty feet up it were possible to see nothing but your hand in front of your face or clear to the golden flames of the Monument. It wasn't like the buggers didn't know their way around down there blindfold, well as he did. But then there wasn't much future in trying to understand rats. They might have a vicious bite on them but they were too stupid for sense. He and Joe had been trapping them the same way three years now and they'd never cottoned on. Not that he was complaining of course. Without the rats times would be bad. The work might not have the excitement the toshing had, when you never knew what was around the next corner. But it was a business and you had to be grateful for that. There weren't many men of his age could learn a new trade, even if there was one out there for the learning. If he'd been pushed to guess he'd have reckoned himself to be a few years long of sixty, although he was strong still and had some of his own teeth. He was lucky to have the rats and he knew it. The speed with which everything was changing these days it seemed like there was a new dodge come along every day of the week to knock the bread out the mouths of ordinary men.

  The rats could still give him the creeps, though, even after all these years. Rum, it was, when you thought about it. Above ground they'd never bothered him. Where he came from, the constant scrabbling, the darting movements across the floor, the taking turns to watch over the newest infant as it slept so it might not be bitten or snatched, they were as much a part of life as the mud. But down in the tunnels it was different. Gathered in great shifting swarms in their caves in the brickwork, some of them big as dogs, they had a whole different air about them. As though it was them that was in charge and the only reason they let you alone, for now, was that they couldn't be bothered with you. Some days Tom'd been certain they followed him, thousands of them, their cold rat feet scrabbling in the darkness, waiting for him to falter, to fall in the rising water or to stray down the wrong tunnel. Once or twice he'd tried to turn on them but they were quicker. He never caught them at it. But he knew they were there. And when he made his mistake, they'd have him. They would swarm over him then, their claws and teeth tearing at his flesh, eating him alive. It would take no time at all. When the old man finally found him he'd be n
othing but yellow bones. The old man would click his tongue and shake his head and put the bones in his bag. The glue works at Bermondsey took every bone they could get.

  Tom'd never said nothing to the old man of course. It was the best thing that had happened to him, Tom reckoned, nearly drowning that time at Cuckold's Point. In the mud there you were lucky to happen across more than ropes and bones and the occasional spar of iron. Coal didn't turn up there too often and if you found a coin you could barely believe your luck. It wasn't much of a living even for a young lad. It was his third winter doing the Point when he sank. Afterwards the only thing he had remembered about it was the sense of bewilderment he'd felt as he was sucked into the mud, his feet struggling for a solid purchase that wasn't there. He'd always boasted he knew that stretch backwards, the places where you'd go over head and ears in the mud, and the solid slices of ground just alongside them where you could walk safe as you liked, the dirt beneath your bare feet steadier than granite. Other boys went in groups, fearful of the place's reputation. Not Tom. It was his patch. The mud was up around his armpits when the old man saw him. Tom had stopped struggling by then. Instead he had laid his head back in the mud and stared at the sky. Even if he didn't sink deeper the tide would get him when it came. Two hours, he'd reckoned, and he'd wondered if the mud would taste the same as it smelled.