The Palace of Curiosities. Rosie Garland

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      ‘Oh, come now. No you didn’t,’ he says, forcing a brightness I do not share. It does not ease my confusion.

      ‘Last night. While you slept.’

      ‘You’re mistaken. Maybe you had a nightmare. Don’t carry on so.’

      ‘Alfred—’

      ‘This is too strange for me, Abel. You’re a man like any other.’

      ‘What if I am not?’

      ‘You are. Think it and you can make it so. Come now, give me a smile and leave it be.’

      ‘But don’t you ever have strange thoughts about your body?’

      ‘Thoughts?’ He looks startled, and draws closer. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

      ‘But, Alfred—’

      ‘But Alfred, but Alfred,’ he sneers, in a mincing mimic of my voice. ‘Let’s get breakfast and drop this.’

      ‘I am not hungry.’

      ‘Christ, I thought I was in a bad mood,’ he snaps, and sticks his hands into his pockets. ‘But you take the bloody biscuit.’

      We walk on in silence. I wish I could take back my words.

      ‘Alfred. Please do not be angry with me.’

      ‘Shut up, Abel. You’re tiring me out and we haven’t even started work yet.’

      It is a long walk to the slaughter-house. From the first beast brought in, I find myself looking over my shoulder, starting at every twitch of thought, wary of where my mind might lead me. However, no fearsome pictures come to plague me. I would like to be sure it is the force of my will that keeps me free, but I cannot be sure.

      I lift my arm, let it fall, and another carcase splits down the middle, the meat pale in the weak light. I push it aside and they bring in the next. It is easy work, the easiest I know. For all that I try to lose myself in the raising and falling of the cleaver, the line of uncountable carcases waiting to be split by my firm and unerring blow, my mind will not let off its needling.

      I am steeled to drop my blade and run at the first intimation of strangeness; I keep my sleeve buttoned at the cuff. I do not want to be catching sight of my healed arm all the time for it continues to fill me with a sick feeling.

      I do not want to drowse, do not want to be taken to any place but here, do not want to see the things I have seen. I press my attention to the slaughter-work with a great passion, and in under an hour every hook is hanging with the carcases of the beasts I have killed. My companions are delighted with the speed of the work, and go outside to smoke a pipe. For all their friendliness, I do not wish for company, so I busy myself cleaning all of the cleavers.

      I am confused. I should be dead. Every beast I have ever slaughtered tells me the plain truth of it. When a man is cut, he should stay cut. But I heal; and even more disquietingly, I do not even bleed. When a man is drowned, he is drowned. But not me: they tell me I was as good as a drowned man when they pulled me out of the river. I am no better than any other man.

      I have heard over and over how I am a miracle: spewed up on to the banks of the Thames. How no man comes out alive after supping on its liquor, but I stood up from my bed after three days, was working in less than two weeks. I do not disbelieve the tale; but it could have happened to a different man. I cannot remember my tumble into the river, nor anything before: nothing of home, father, mother.

      Alfred tells me it will return to me in time. But what if I am concealing some terrible secret from myself? I fear what I might have forgotten. Is that what I was so close to discovering when I cut myself last night? Am I running from some ghastly crime? Am I evil? Maybe I am a thief, a footpad, a murderer and do not know it. I shake these wonderings from my head: I do not want to fall into distraction and cut myself again.

      Why not? breathes the voice in my head, quite calm and reasonable. You will heal. You have seen it.

      I look at myself in the bright edge of the steel blade. I see brown eyes edged with dark lashes, a beaked nose, a broad mouth. Not the face of a wolf, or a bear. A man.

      This is what you are, says the voice. However different or strange, you are a man.

      I am not convinced. I shake the voice away, for all its kindness, and examine the sides of beef, hoping the sight of their symmetry might calm me. As I watch, the nearest carcase starts to sway in a current of air I cannot feel, gently back and forth.

      The meat grows darker, oozing with moisture. The ribs swell out, only to be sucked in. It is breathing; air whistling through the severed windpipe, the stump of its neck twisting from side to side, searching for its missing head. Then the forelegs start to twitch, straining to touch the floor; the hind legs kick out to free themselves from the meat-hook.

      Then they all begin: every dangling carcase dancing, thrashing back and forth on the hooks; fighting to free themselves, to find their scattered parts and knit themselves back together.

      I hack at the monster that began this vile waltz; but with each slash it grows ever more frantic, as it fights to be free. I do not know what to do – there is no throat to cut nor heart to slice out, these things having been done already – yet I strike and strike again at the dead thing for there is nothing else for me to do, but it will not lie still, and I weep with the ghastly hopelessness of it. A hand grips my shoulder and the axe falls from my hand.

      ‘You, man!’ shouts a voice, and I turn to see the face of my pay-master. ‘What are you doing?’ he bellows.

      I open and close my mouth.

      He presses his face close to mine. ‘I said, what in damnation are you doing?’

      My mouth is empty.

      ‘Look!’ he bawls, punching me so hard I stagger backwards. ‘Look, you bastard!’ he shouts again, and I do look: at shredded pieces of flesh and bone on the floor, the remains of the carcase hanging before me. All is still.

      ‘Waste my fucking meat, would you? You fucking lunatic. Get out of here and don’t come back.’

      I stare at the floor, at the quiet bones.

      ‘I said, sod off.’

      He thumps me again. I slip on a piece of fat and barely save myself from falling. He picks up my blade, brandishes it.

      ‘Now. Get out. Unless you want to replace the carcase you’ve just ruined. I always knew you were trouble.’

      I run. On the street I drag off my apron and let it fall into the gutter. I stare at it a long time. Alfred finds me there when he leaves work, for I have forgotten the way back to our lodgings. We walk in silence. When we arrive, I do not know what to do except lie down.

      I barely have time to close my eyes before the silt of my mind stirs and a picture floats up, urgent as a stream of bubbles from the bottom of a pond. I am scrambling over coiled rope, thick as a man’s thigh, headlong to the stern of a boat, its deck treacherous with oil and lurching from side to side in mountainous seas. I’m almost thrown off my feet as the hulk heels sharply.

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