Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [37]
He entered the pothouse where he usually ate when he had money and often slept – they let him sleep in the yard in a little covered space behind the chicken coop. He took off leather harness and back-pads and fish-slimed apron and shook the rain out of his hair. He was squat and very muscular, broader in the nape than the skull, so that his head was tapering and blunt like a seal’s – a resemblance that the rain, by sleeking down his brown silky hair, had made more obvious. In the close, low-raftered room he gave off a steam of wet clothing and sheep’s blood and fish oil, enriching the effluvia of boiled mutton and stale beer already resident there.
He asked the serving girl, whose name was Kate and who was fourteen and had one leg shorter than the other, to bring him mutton broth – all the place offered. While it was coming he thought about his entertainment for the rest of the evening. He knew the cost of certain basic things and on his fingers he could balance accounts. He knew he could have his mutton broth and then some treacle tart from the pastry-cook’s on the corner – he was fond of sweet things – and that Kate would come out into the yard with him for two of his pennies and that he would still have enough for a pancake next morning …
These thoughts were producing a simultaneous salivation and erection, when a man came and sat at his table, a tallish, wiry, sharp-featured man in a blue pea-jacket and wide-bottomed trousers and with his hair in a pigtail.
‘Clammy night,’ this newcomer said. ‘Keeps on rainin’, don’t it?’
Calley smiled but said nothing – he was always shy with strangers. The saliva of his anticipations made little, stretching webs at the corners of his mouth. His eyes held an unchanging radiance, as at some remote delight whose source was long forgotten. He had a complexion a woman might have envied, clear and pale, without the smallest blemish. ‘I got wet,’ he said.
‘Aye, did you so?’ The stranger cast a brisk eye over the harness and the thick leather pads against the wall. ‘Been porterin’?’
The broth arrived and Calley launched a noisy assault on it. ‘I been workin’ in the market,’ he said between mouthfuls.
‘I see it has give you a happytite. You must of got two shillin’ at least for a heavy day like that.’
Calley looked up defensively. Some of his earlier feelings of frustration and distress had returned, but it did not occur to him to lie. ‘I got ninepence,’ he said.
‘What? You have been labourin’ all the livelong day with a saddle on you like a horse an’ you gets ninepence for it? I can scarce believe my ears.’
‘I ain’t a horse,’ Calley said.
‘That is a utterly pernacious state of affairs, it is scandalous.’ The stranger was looking round the room and shaking his head in amazement. He had a peering, sniffing way of seeming to interrogate his surroundings. ‘It is enough to freeze the marrer in a man’s bones,’ he said.
Calley rested his spoon in his broth. ‘You sayin’ I am a horse?’
‘You’re a man an’ a fine strong one an’ good-lookin’ – I’ll wager the ladies is after you, ain’t they? Linin’ up for it, ain’t they?’
‘Kate likes me.’
‘I dare say she does, an’ who would not? I have took to you myself. Here, try this.’ The stranger drew a bottle from the capacious side-pocket of his jacket. ‘Take a swig of this, then tell me if you have tasted a better brandy.’
Calley drank and the liquor coursed through him, bringing with it the knowledge that this man wished him well. ‘Good brandy,’ he said.
The stranger drank and smacked his lips. ‘Nectar of the gods,’ he said. ‘Here, have some more, that’s right. What’s your name?’
‘Dan’l,’ Calley said shyly.
‘Tell me, Dan’l, what is a man like you doin’, slavin’ up hill an’ down dale, for a few pennies? You are not a horse, but they are saddlin’ you up like a horse, they are workin’ you like a horse, see what I mean?’
‘Kate comes out in the yard with me,’ Calley said. He did not want this new friend to think that his portering