Maybe he done it that way. He couldn’t member it rightly. But if they got them particulars from the papers they got em wrong.
Jack made his way toward his doss on Flower and Dean Street. His pa run that one, and even though he was the very devil Jack knew he was lucky to have the free deb and not have to pay the four pence, which was more than he had most days. All he had to do was not speak to the man or let on that the warden was his pa. But everybody knew anyway, seeing as how he didn’t have to show no tin ticket to get his bed.
They was some Irishmen round the front door smoking their short pipes, a couple old women with walnuts in their hands, a fellow in tar-smeared trousers tearing up a piece of gray chicken with his dirty fingers, stuffing it in his mouth, watching against them what would steal it. Two children dressed in a mismatch of rags huddled against the wall close by. They’d been there the day before—Jack figured they was dead or sleeping but he didn’t want to be the one to check. He went down the steps into the area. His pa was there in his little booth. They locked eyes but neither said nothing. Jack walked into the kitchen and the big fellow with the burnt face and no name tossed him a bit of the herring he’d been toasting. The stench of it filled the downstairs. That was the way his pa sometimes give him some food—always from somebody else’s hand. A fellow might think the old man was bang up to the elephant, except that very same day he might betray Jack, fill his bed with some stranger so that Jack had to go somewheres else or fight for his bed.
Two old fellows was sitting at the table spreading the broads. Jack didn’t know the stakes, but there was a couple of gen on the table. When they seed Jack one of them covered the shillings with a rough hand that looked mashed and crooked. Jack didn’t care—he never stole in the doss house.
There was a bunch of others lying around on the benches, coopered. One skinny bloke he’d seen afore, and he couldn’t figure how the fellow was still breathing air. He had a head like a lamb been sheared, starved, his wrinkles crisp as folded paper. He breathed like he been punched with every gulp.
Jack climbed the stairs to the beds—another way he was treated special. Every other soul had to wait. The broken windows patched with rags and paper. Hardly no air, even through the ones they could open, and everything stinking from no proper washing. He found the old bed where they said his ma used to sleep, and his, the one he still had. Seven foot long but not even two across, a four foot tall wood partition on both sides. Like a coffin, though he never understood why a body needed such a thing. When you ain’t gonna wake up who cares where?
He was beginning to feel a might glocky and went back downstairs. He got that way sometimes, not wanting to sleep in the room with all them other people. He waited until nobody was in the downstairs hall, crouched down, and pulled aside a couple of boards under the stairs, crawled in like a snakeman on a burglary. The vein he was in was dark and smelled like the world was dying, same as it always had.
In the first stretch he didn’t have a lamp, but he didn’t need one. He’d known the way almost since he was born, after his pa stuck his ma in this hole, her being pregnant and him not wanting nobody to know.
So she’d laid in here until she died, him inside her. Pa said he found Jack like he’d just crawled out of her filth hole, like the rutting and the birthing and the dying was all the same to her, and here Jack was still hanging by the cord. And it might ha’ been that way, but there was no way for him to know now for positive.
Over the years Jack had dug it out further. It went down in under the foundations between the buildings, widening out as it went until you couldn’t stand but you could almost. Finally he got there where he kept a lamp and some food, a bed of straw and rags, a few secret treasures, all to hisself. Most would think it a terrible place to be, some kind of way station along the road to Hell, but he still felt safer than upstairs with all them others watching him dream. It was a quiet place where he could bury hisself in sleep.
Did she scream in pain when she brought him out of one dark and into another? Or was she screaming in pleasure, or maybe there weren’t no difference no more? Did she know she’d even had him? Sometimes Jack could conjure up her voice and he’d lie there for hours listening to her speak. Born from a dead mother, that was Jack’s story. It was a short one, but it said all that was needed. And it always made him grin.
Oh, Jack had always been a grinner. His pa reckoned it were a tic because of the way Jack was born. Growing up he tried to control the grin, but the flesh above his upper lip bunched and fought him all the way. It pinched his nostrils, making him look like he was always smelling a bad smell. And the more he got excited, the more he felt about anything, the more he grinned. Happy Jack was a grinning fool.
That’s why he grew that dark moustache. The grin was always under there, but now nobody else could see it.
He felt the roaches’ legs at his lips, stiff wings brushing his thighs. He began to cry as the roach mounted him, carrying him deeper into the darkness, but at least he could sleep, come at the cost of one of them awful dreams.
“JACK? YOU ASLEEP, Jack?”
He opened his eyes. “Ain’t my name. Least not one anybody else can use.”
The other eyes stared back. “Sorry. Penny for a suck?”
Jack struck out but there was nothing there. Then he saw the lad, half there and half not. But the boy was just a child, doing what others taught him. He needed to be patient with the lad.
Jack had no idea what time it was outside. Down in here it was always night time, dirt time, dead time. But he was too awake to stay dead, so he climbed out of his hole and went back out into the chapel.
This was when they come out. The haybags with that particular look about them, the dollymops and the judys and the night flowers and the three-penny-uprights what had no money for a doss, or the ones what had given up, now waiting for Fate to come and decide. The ones so plain about it—the death waiting in their soft parts. The death mothers. The teeth mothers. Dry wings raking, scraping the back of his brain. Oh mother of God forgive me as I… he whispered softly, as to a dream.
“Come on, Jack. Time to do your business.” The lad walked ahead of him, leading him down the path. They’d done it all his life, leading him down one path or the other. But Jack followed, the London Particular so thick he couldn’t find his hand afore his face. “Come on, Jack,” the boy kept repeating. Jack followed the voice.
Hands kept coming at him out of the soup, like the walls and the dark itself had growed em. It was all he could do to keep hisself from slicing them hands off, but he wouldn’t be distracted—he had to follow the lad. The lanes was full of lurkers, mumpers, and gegors with them hands out, griddling him for some coin or some food.
He’d battered a few at first… no knives then; he hadn’t yet seen his calling. They’d bend over and spread their dresses for him in the alleys, and then he’d push their faces into the wall and beat em there. He took no pleasure in it. That was the point. Not a thing he done was about pleasures.
He’d started a long time ago, just a lad hisself, tearing up whatever he could get his hands on, acting the master of mayhem. His pa kept him locked up most days, said he couldn’t trust him round the belongings. Then there was Jack’s little parties in private, down in his secret place or in some quiet lane with the mice and the birds, all done serious‑like, like he was a surgeon, or a priest in a church. Taking things apart weren’t much different from putting them together in the first place, now was it? And God done both, two sides of the same hand. God the Father and God the Mayhem. But them little parties just didn’t raise the blood no more.