The Palace of Curiosities. Rosie Garland

      ABEL

       London, January 1857

      

      It’s not like waking up. I’m awake already. I have been somewhere. Like sleep, but not. My body rocks backwards and forwards. Something has hold of my shoulder and is shaking it, vigorously.

      ‘Wake up, Abel,’ a voice whispers. ‘It is time.’

      ‘Time?’ I ask, and forget everything.

      I open my eyes. The first things I see are blocks of grey. They move: to and fro, up and down, side to side. A dark column hovers before me and I hold my breath. It leans over my bed, a swirl of mixed brightnesses. It touches my arm, and speaks.

      ‘Wake up. Are you awake?’

      With the words, the ghost becomes a man.

      I answer, ‘Yes.’

      The smell of dried blood is on his shirt, under his fingernails, on the soles of his boots. I know this smell, for I have it on myself.

      ‘It is time for work. Come now.’

      I look about me, and see blotched and crumbling plaster above my head. Narrow slots pierce one wall close to the ceiling, letting in a dribble of pale light. I am surrounded by a multitude of pallets, packed close together. The spectres rising from them become other men. I inhale the comforting stink of my own body and the warm reek of the others crowded into this place; a morning chorus of belching, hacking, spitting and farting giddies me with happiness. I remember: I sleep here. It is my home.

      ‘Shift yourself, Abel. You’re like this every morning.’

      His name will come to me in a moment. The man waking me works with blood. I sniff again: animal blood. Meat. A butcher? No, a butcher has his own business, and does not need to sleep in a cellar. Then I know: he is a slaughter-man. We work together. This reasoning takes very little time, but he is impatient.

      ‘Abel, get bloody moving.’

      It is my name. This man is my friend.

      ‘Yes, yes,’ I say cheerfully.

      ‘You’re in a good mood. Move, you old bastard.’

      I am already dressed in most of my clothes. All I need do is put on my cap and boots. I get them from under my head, where I have been using them as a pillow. My friend pats me on the shoulder and smiles. We climb the grimy steps out of our cellar and join the troop of men lining up to pay the tally-man, who leans against the door-jamb, book in one hand, pint bottle of tea in the other, and a stub of a pencil behind his ear. Many of our companions thumb their caps and promise to cough up that evening. But we pay our sixpence on the spot for the next night’s lodging as we leave, and I recall that we do this each morning, at my friend’s insistence.

      ‘We must pay one night at a time. A man never knows what might happen,’ he says.

      The moment the words come out of his mouth his name comes back to me, making me suddenly joyful at the gift of remembrance, at the realisation that he returns me to myself thus every day.

      ‘Alfred,’ I say. ‘You are my friend.’

      He laughs and calls me an old bastard once more.

      We step out on to the street and my breath catches at each new sight, which stops being new the moment I look at it. I wonder how I would find myself in this blur of grey and brown if it were not for Alfred, shaking me into wakefulness, striding at my side, half a pace in front, urging me on, drawing me out of my drowse and into a beginning of myself.

      The world reveals itself to me piecemeal: the flat surface at my side becomes a long terrace of filthy brickwork interrupted by black holes, which resolve themselves into doors and windows. One of these doors leads to my cellar. I gape at how similar it is to all the others, how simple a thing it would be to confuse one door with another. I lose myself in the contemplation of this wondrous revelation and Alfred grasps my elbow, steering me away from the ordure running down the middle of the street.

      ‘What would you do without me?’ he says.

      ‘I do not know.’

      I blink at this new world, which of course is the same world as yesterday, only somehow mislaid by me overnight.

      ‘You’d walk through shit the whole time, that’s for sure!’ He laughs, and I understand that it is a joke, and that he does not realise what he means to me. I feel an urge to thank him, but I do not.

      At this early hour the rough sleepers are still piled up in doorways, wrapped around each together against the chill. But Alfred and I are different: we are men of purpose. Men like us stride swiftly to a rightful place of employment. We have work to attend to, work that directs our hands and steers our feet, that fills our bellies with food and drink, that shakes us awake and tires us so we sleep deeply; work that gives us the money to pay for a place that is warm and comradely, a place where one man shares his good fortune with another, and where Alfred and I are often the men with that good fortune, for the pieces of meat that we bring.

      Work prompts me with a purpose, with something to remember every morning. Without work I would be empty. I shake my head, and with it that unpleasant notion; I am not empty. I have work, I have food, I have lodging, I have Alfred. I am a happy man. There is no more contentment for which I could ask.

      A coal-train heaves itself across the viaduct and we pass beneath, the vaulted arches shuddering a rain of soot on our heads, which Alfred dusts from my shoulders with many jokes about how I look even more like a gyppo when I’m blackened with smuts. The first criers are about, shouting, ‘Milk! Watercress! Hot bread!’ Carts jolt past, the iron clanging of their wheels dinning in my ears, bringing me further back into the glove of my senses. We cross over a stream of raw sewage.

      ‘I don’t know how you manage it. The smell,’ says Alfred, voice muffled by the kerchief he has clapped over his mouth. ‘What are you about? Make haste.’

      I pause and look down at the mess. Not a whit of movement.

      ‘It does not trouble me,’ I say.

      ‘Now I know you are lying,’ he replies, uncovering his mouth when we are clear of the sewer.

      But I am not. It is an aroma, that is all. I stand a while longer, but then realise that Alfred is no longer by my side. I glance down to see what my feet are about, and they are still when they should be moving. I have been looking down too long; when I look up Alfred has drawn some distance away. I command my feet to pick up their pace and keep up with him, for his legs are transporting him very swiftly, his body slipping neatly between the other men passing to and fro along the thoroughfare. I quicken my pace and after some shoving I draw level.

      ‘You not awake yet, Abel?’ he says. ‘Come now, buck up, or there’ll be no time to eat.’

      My mouth waters at the thought of food.

      ‘Ha! That’s put a spring in your step! Sprightly, now.’

      We bound forward. With each stride, I am bolder and the world takes on more solid form. Each step breathes fire into my legs; the flagstones thump back at my heels, prickling my skin with wakefulness;