The barman points him to the door. As the man is leaving, the boy arrives with a tin plate of mussels, steaming and fragrant. They look at each other for a moment, and the man feels a new pulse of certainty.
He walks back down Sykes Street. He does not think of the Volunteer, now lying at dock, which he has spent the past week laboring to trim and pack, nor of the bloody six-month voyage to come. He thinks only of this present moment—Grotto Square, the Turkish Baths, the auction house, the ropery, the cobbles beneath his feet, the agnostic Yorkshire sky. He is not by nature impatient or fidgety; he will wait when waiting is required. He finds a wall and sits down upon it; when he is hungry he sucks a stone. The hours pass. People walking by remark him but do not attempt to speak. Soon it will be time. He watches as the shadows lengthen, as it rains briefly, then ceases raining, as the clouds shudder across the dampened sky. It is almost dusk when he sees them at last. Hester is singing a ballad; the Shetlander has a grog bottle in one hand and is conducting her clumsily with the other. He watches them turn into Hodgson’s Square. He waits a moment, then scuttles round the corner onto Caroline Street. It is not yet nighttime, but it is dark enough, he decides. The windows in the Tabernacle are glowing; there is a smell of coal dust and giblets in the air. He reaches Fiche’s Alley before them and slides inside. The courtyard is empty except for a line of grimy laundry and the high, ammoniacal scent of horse piss. He stands against a darkened doorway with a half brick gripped in his fist. When Hester and the Shetlander come into the courtyard, he waits for a moment to be sure, then steps forwards and smashes the half brick hard into the back of the Shetlander’s head.
The bone gives way easily. There is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping. The Shetlander flops senselessly forwards, and his teeth and nose break against the cobblestones. Before Hester can scream, the man has the blubber-knife against her throat.
“I’ll slice you open like a fucking codfish,” he promises.
She looks at him wildly, then holds up her mucky hands in surrender.
He empties the Shetlander’s pockets, takes his money and tobacco, and throws the rest aside. There is a halo of blood dilating around the Shetlander’s face and head, but he is still faintly breathing.
“We need to move that bastard now,” Hester says, “or I’ll be in the shit.”
“So move him,” the man says. He feels lighter than he did a moment before, as if the world has widened round him.
Hester tries to drag the Shetlander around by the arm, but he’s too heavy. She skids on the blood and falls over onto the cobbles. She laughs to herself, then begins to moan. The man opens the coal shed door and drags the Shetlander inside by the heels.
“They can find him tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll be long gone by then.”
She stands up, still unsteady from the drink, and tries impossibly to wipe the mud from her skirts. The man turns to leave.
“Give us a shilling or two, will you, darling?” Hester calls out to him. “For all me trouble.”
*
It takes him an hour to hunt down the boy. His name is Albert Stubbs and he sleeps in a brick culvert below the north bridge and lives off bones and peelings and the occasional copper earned by running errands for the drunkards who gather in the shithole taverns by the waterfront waiting for a ship.
The man offers him food. He shows him the money he stole from the Shetlander.
“Tell me what you want,” he says, “and I’ll buy it for you.”
The boy looks back at him speechlessly, like an animal surprised in its lair. The man notices he has no smell to him at all—amidst all this filth he has remained somehow clean, unsullied, as if the natural darkness of his pigment is a protection against sin and not, as some men believe, an expression of it.
“You’re a sight to see,” the man tells him.
The boy asks for rum, and the man takes a greasy half bottle from his pocket and gives it to him. As the boy drinks the rum, his eyes glaze slightly and the fierceness of his reticence declines.
“My name’s Henry Drax,” the man explains, as softly as he is able to. “I’m a harpooner. I ship at dawn on the Volunteer.”
The boy nods without interest, as if this is all information he had heard long before. His hair is musty and dull, but his skin is preternaturally clean. It shines in the tarnished moonlight like a piece of polished teak. The boy is shoeless, and the soles of his feet have become blackened and horny from contact with the pavement. Drax feels the urge to touch him now—on the side of the face perhaps or the peak of the shoulder. It would be a signal, he thinks, a way to begin.
“I saw you before in the tavern,” the boy says. “You had no money then.”
“My situation is altered,” Drax explains.
The boy nods again and drinks more rum. Perhaps he is nearer twelve, Drax thinks, but stunted as they often are. He reaches out and takes the bottle from the boy’s lips.
“You should eat something,” he says. “Come with me.”
They walk together without speaking, up Wincomlee and Sculcoates, past the Whalebone Inn, past the timber yards. They stop in at Fletcher’s bakery and Drax waits while the boy wolfs down a meat pie.
When the boy has finished, he wipes his mouth, scours the phlegm from the back of his throat, and spits it out into the gutter. He looks suddenly older than before.
“I know a place we can go to,” he says, pointing across the road. “Just down there, see, on past the boatyard.”
Drax realizes immediately that this must be a trap. If he goes into the boatyard with the nigger boy he will be beaten bloody and stripped down like a cunt. It is a surprise that the boy has misprized him so thoroughly. He feels, first, contempt for the boy’s ill judgment, and then, more pleasantly, like the swell and shudder of a fresh idea, the beginnings of fury.
“I’m the fucker, me,” he tells him softly. “I’m never the one that’s fucked.”
“I know that,” the boy says. “I understand.”
The other side of the road is in deep shadow. There is a ten-foot wooden gate with peeling green paint, a brick wall, and then an alley floored with rubble. There is no light inside the alley, and the only sound is the crunch of Drax’s boot heels and the boy’s intermittent, tubercular wheezing. The yellow moon is lodged like a bolus in the narrowed throat of the sky. After a minute, they are released into a courtyard half-filled with broken casks and rusted hooping.
“It’s through there,” the boy says. “Not far.”
His face betrays a telling eagerness. If Drax had any doubts before, he has none left now.
“Come to me,” he tells the boy.
The boy frowns and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. Drax wonders how many of the boy’s companions are waiting for them in the boatyard and what weapons they are planning to use against him. Does he really look, he wonders, like the kind of useless prick who can be robbed by children? Is that the impression he presently gives out to the waiting world?
“Come here,” he says again.
The boy shrugs and walks forwards.
“We’ll do it now,” Drax says. “Here and now. I won’t wait.”
The boy stops and shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “The boatyard is better.”
The courtyard’s gloom perfects him, Drax thinks, smooths out his prettiness into a sullen kind of beauty. He looks like a pagan idol standing there, a totem carved from ebony, not like a boy but more like the far-fetched ideal of a boy.
“Just what kind of a cunt do you think I am?” Drax asks.