No politics here on the Southbank. This was where the poor people lived. No politics because there was no money. This was where the leatherworkers and feltmongers lived, free of the powers and sanctions of the livery companies based north of the river. This was where the breweries were based, the brothels, the worst of the alehouses, and most of London’s beggars. The City dignitaries would not allow them to cross the Bridge into the City. It was also the place, I suddenly realised, reading the billings plastered here and there, where Harry Hunks was fighting in about twenty minutes’ time.
I hurried towards the bear-ring at Paris Gardens. The crowds milled around, ordinary folk in working clothes, men mostly, debating the prospects of the dogs against blind Harry. I paid my dues and found a seat. The acrid smell of stale sweat filled the air. There were two or three hundred people crammed into the ring, all crowded round the small arena. A single solid pole stood up in the middle of it. Chained to the pole was a big brown bear, his fur matted and dirty, moulded with his own excrement. Peering forth through streaming eyes, small and caked with hard lumps of dried pus, he waved his nose in the air, seeing what he could through smell and sound, his eyes useless. This was blind Harry Hunks, hero of the Southbank.
Two men jumped out into the arena, one struggling to hold a rope attached to the collar of a huge grey wolfhound, big as a man, its mouth and nose strapped in a leather muzzle. The dog strained forward, eyes and nose and every sinew pointed at the prowling bear. Saliva dripped from its muzzle and it growled in violent greedy anticipation. The two men looked much the same. A small fellow with barrel chest strode out into the ring and began introducing the afternoon entertainment, loud and bellowing, striving to rouse the crowd into a state of excitement. At last the time came and the crowd quietened, expectant. The two men crouched and took off the muzzle and the dog sprang forward, launching itself at the bear’s neck. But blind Harry could smell the dog, could hear the dog, and had been waiting for this moment just as avidly as the crowd. With perfect timing the bear rose up onto its haunches and casually swiped a great paw with talons extended. The wolfhound caught the blow across its jaw and ended up in the dirt on its head, tumbling over and against the palings. It rose to its feet unsteady and dizzy, shaking its head, surprised and confused. Blind Harry resumed his prowling, facing away, but fully aware of the dog’s whereabouts, its uncertainty and reluctance to continue. Blind Harry roared, and the crowd sat back satisfied, their fears that this giant dog might hurt blind Harry allayed. The dog trotted forward, growling again, but more timorous now, hovering out of blind Harry’s range, snapping, dashing forward and backward, looking for an opportunity. But blind Harry was ready every time, a seasoned veteran, too clever by half.
‘I love old Harry Hunks, don’t you, my lover?’ A woman leant across me and put a hand on the top of my thigh. She looked at me with bright, lively, brown eyes, round and wide, laughing, enticing. She allowed her hand to drift across my groin, resting momentarily upon my crotch before withdrawing once more to my thigh, then away.
‘Aye.’ I nodded.
‘Let me take you to the Leaguer, lover. We’re all clean at the Leaguer, can take away all that anger I see in your face.’ She smiled, lips parted, her teeth white and clean. She looked at me with an excitement of her own, the anticipation of a done deal.
‘Aye. Why not.’ I stood and let her lead me by the hand.
It was a little while later that it again occurred to me that I had been displaying less wit than a Kynchen cove and less fortitude than Agnes Hobson. I had to take to heart the lesson of blind Harry Hunks, and I had to begin by visiting my father.
Chapter Twelve
It is very probable the male avoids the female for no other reason than that of nourishment, and the female the male because it is like the hop in being a gross feeder.
‘He’s gone.’ My mother stared into space out of her one good eye. She always stared into space, for she was afraid of people, afraid that they would pick her words to pieces and make her feel foolish.
‘What do you mean — gone?’ I stood opposite her, ducking and weaving, trying to place my face in her eyeline. Her hand wandered up to her eyepatch — whereupon I stepped back hastily and let her look where she wished. It was a strategy she used that if any got too close, then her hand would go to the eyepatch and lift it. You did not want to see what lay under the eyepatch.
‘He went away the day before yesterday.’ Her hand stopped in mid-air and slowly sank back to her lap.
‘Aye, he did,’ her brother Robert called from the table. I turned to face him, though it was an even more disgusting sight than my mother’s ravaged eye. He sat at the table with his stomach hanging naked out of his torn shirt. Grease dripped from his chin and pieces of half-chewed pork flew across the room towards where he spoke. At the moment he was speaking to me.
I sidled around the room to position myself behind a giant pig carcass. The head sat in a dish on the table in front of Robert’s right elbow. Its lazy eyes followed me about the room as I walked. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Don’t know,’ Robert wiped his sleeve across his mouth, then sneezed. I will not describe one of Robert’s sneezes in detail, nor the consequences of it. This place was a disgusting and dirty hovel, populated by imbeciles and Whoballs. It was the country. My mother slowly turned her head towards me, her good eye momentarily making contact with mine before slipping away again to regard the earthy floor. I remembered who had done that to her eye and how. It was a recollection that still froze my thoughts.
‘He went with two men.’ Robert wiped a palm across his hair so that strands of it stood on end.
My disgust for this place was suddenly forgotten. In the context of events to date, his words made the hairs on my neck prickle. ‘What two men?’
Robert picked up a rib and stabbed it at me. He was offering me it to eat. I declined. Shrugging, he started to chew at it himself, making sure he had a mouth full of meat before replying.
‘One was the same man what came a week or so ago and helped him write that letter. The second man I have never seen before.’ Sticking out his bottom lip and furrowing his brow, he looked to my mother. ‘I think they were friends of his from London, wasn’t they?’
‘I don’t know.’ My mother shook her head slowly. ‘He didn’t say nothing to me.’
‘What were their names?’
‘Din’t say.’
I regarded them both with critical eye. My mother sat calm with her hands on her lap, peering at something on the ceiling. Robert drew a pork rib across the edge of his front teeth in an attempt to clean it of every speck of meat that still clung to it. Neither was worried in the least — yet he had left the day before yesterday?
‘Tell me what they looked like.’
‘They were dressed like city folk, Harry!’ Robert screwed up his face and talked to me like I was the idiot. ‘They was dressed like you.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Don’t know. He din’t tell us, did he?’ Robert belched and noticed his stomach was uncovered. He fiddled with the edges of his shirt then cast an eye in my mother’s direction. I hoped she washed it before she attempted to mend it.
‘You have no idea where he went?’
‘He’ll be back,’ Robert declared confidently.
‘None round here know where he went?’
‘You could ask.’
I could stand it no longer. I found that I had stopped breathing, holding my breath that I would not say something that I would later feel ashamed of. I looked to my mother.
‘One of the men came here and wrote a letter. Tell me about that.’