“You shouldn’t. I seen what too much smoke does t’ men. It’s like sumfink’s eating away at ’em but from the inside out.”
“And you shouldn’t listen to so many penny dreadfuls.”
Alfie’s hip suddenly grazed Micha’s. “If you wanna feel good, maybe, I’m ’ere. Better value ’n’ all.” Micha recoiled, which made Alfie stumble and then glare. “What?”
The questionHow old are you?lodged in Micha’s throat, but he was too tired, too selfish, and too afraid to ask it. “We’re in the same business. Why the fuck would I pay for it?”
Alfie shrugged. “Dunno why anybody would.” Again, his eyes sought Micha’s, tugging at him like a hand upon his coat sleeve. “I fought it’d be ahwight wiv you. And everybody knows you’re a mandrake for real.”
Micha shocked himself by laughing, though it was not a happy sound. It echoed eerily between the houses and through the muffled noises of bartered pleasure and smothered misery. “Once maybe.”
“You ain’t a pervert no more?”
“I’m not anything.” As soon as he spoke the words aloud, Micha knew them for truth. He was a body or the façade of a body. A convenience for the desire and shame of others. And, as for his own—nothing. Lost, shed, forgotten, like so much else, leaving behind only the faintest residue of humanity: a bestial compulsion to survive and a base craving for a fleeting approximation of a higher form of happiness.
“I fought you liked me.” Alfie flared with unexpected rage. “You talk to me.”
“Only because you talk to me.”
“Yeah, ’cos I fought ... ah, forget it. Fuck you. Smoke yourself to hell.” Alfie made an obscene gesture and turned away.
This is hell,thought Micha.Nor am I out of it.But he did not believe in hell. Or heaven, for that matter. He sighed, dully annoyed. “Alfie,” he called out.
“What?” The boy turned, one hand resting on a jutted hip.
Micha flicked him one of his coins.
“What’s this? Charity? Ooh, lah-di-dah.” Despite the scorn in his voice, the boy showed no inclination to return the money.
“Call it whatever the fuck you want. I don’t fucking care.”
Micha walked on. From behind, he felt the impact of spattering droplets that were not the rain. A new coldness. He reached up and wiped Alfie’s spittle from his shoulder.
19
The first thing he does is hit me. I’ve never been struck before. It’s the shock more than the pain that sends me sprawling at his feet. Then he’s hauling me up and I think he’s going to hit me again—maybe he’s going to kill me, I’ve heard stories. But all he does is shove me onto the bed. His hand on the back of my neck pins me down. Dust, and the stench of strangers, rushes up my nose from the tawdry velvet coverlet. He’s rough enough that it hurts but it doesn’t last long. He sputters obscenities with every broken breath and tears himself away afterwards, spilling himself over me as well as in me. Mybody is trembling. The pain has gone but my skin feels as thin as parchment. I get up. Find him on the floor. He has his head in his hands. I think he’s crying. I kneel down beside him. I don’t know why but I try to tell him it’s all right. He looks at me, shame stark in his eyes, then hits me again. When I come to, it’s only moments later, but he’s gone.
Finally, Micha turned into an arched alleyway, as dark as a yawning, toothless mouth. He had to stoop beneath the dirt-smeared, weed-webbed brickwork. It led him into a tiny square of hunched and dilapidated houses, leaning against each other like drunks. The reek of sewage intensified. Occasionally light would move behind the fractured windowpanes, squeezing between the cracks like bile from an infected wound.
He approached one of the hovels and pushed open the door. The rotten wood felt spongy beneath his fingers, and from within came the faintest suggestion of vapour, the sweet-sickly essence of a scent as transitory as the promise of pleasure. He stepped inside and made his way up the narrow, filthy staircase, knowing better than to touch the handrail, which was coated with a damp, strange dust.
Inside the public smoking room on the first floor, he found Johnny Wu crouched before the fire in his filthy silks and curling-toed slippers. He was tending to a saucepan of simmering water, over which was hung a finely woven sieve containing shreds of raw opium. There was only a handful of customers tonight. One was just leaving—pushing past Micha on his way out—another was slumped in one of the three wooden chairs provided, and the last was sprawled, barely conscious, on the sagging four-poster bed that was the room’s most significant article of furniture. The mattress was bare but for some Chinese matting, the counterpane rolled into a thick bolster that lay lengthwise across it. Pieces of tattered silk in some oriental design were slung from the frame, the original colour and pattern long lost to dirt and grease. The walls and ceiling were blackened with smoke and smeared with a greenishdamp that spread across the flaking plasterwork like pox. The only window had no glass and was covered over with pieces of brown paper, but even so, it was almost suffocatingly warm from the fire.
Johnny Wu rose from his haunches and performed a grotesque semblance of something Micha thought was meant to be a bow. “Neen how, good sir, neen how.” He bobbed up and down. And, then, seeing it was Micha, he went on in a completely different voice: “Oh, it’s you. You better ’ave the cash this time, my buff.”
“I do.” Micha handed over his shillings. “And that should cover what I owe you.”
Johnny Wu nodded, and the coins disappeared somewhere into his robes. “Molly,” he bellowed, thumping one of his feet on the floorboards.
The man on the bed made a soft, indistinct sound but did not otherwise stir. After a moment, a woman, frail as a ghost, came into the room. Unlike her husband (at least, Micha presumed Johnny Wu was her husband), she wore a threadbare gown of English cut. Her skin had a yellowish, unhealthy tinge to it, and the hair that brushed her sharp-boned shoulders was as brittle as old straw. He nodded at the saucepan and she took his place, coughing softly, the same scent that permeated the house drifting from her clothes and hair.
Micha settled himself onto the bed, propping an elbow on the bolster as he waited for Johnny Wu to begin the ceremony of preparation. The first time he had come here, in company with someone he no longer remembered, he had been as repulsed as he had been fascinated. It had struck him as a new, and peculiar, indignity to lie so close to a stranger, both helpless in pursuit of private shadows. But he had soon forgotten everything but the pleasure. There was little for Micha’s clients to recognise in the cold, blank-eyed man who trod the weary circuit of his life beyond their sight and care. But here, at last, was an eagerness they might find familiar, though, on this occasion, unfeigned.
Johnny Wu sat down on the edge of the bed next to Micha and laid out cloth, an oil lamp, a pipe, and a small pot of cooked opium. From his box of tools, he produced an opium needle, dipped it into the treacle-thick opium, and held it to the flame, turning it carefully until the droplet had swelled and crystallised into a perfect, amber-coloured jewel. A jewel that was worth more to Micha than all the treasures of Christendom. The process continued until Johnny Wu had toasted enough opium to fill the pipe bowl, at which point he passed it to Micha.
Micha’s fingers trembled upon the bamboo stem as he held it over the lamp. Then he took it deep into his mouth and sucked, the pipe gurgling its sweet seduction as he swallowed down the smoke. A few threads of yellowish vapour drifted up from the bowl, dissipating to nothing in the fetid air and taking with them time and truth and everything Micha wanted to forget. He fell back against the bolster, eyelids flickering, the stupefaction of bliss easing the harsh, cynical lines of his face.
In a little while, the pipe was done, and Johnny Wu made him another and then a third. Micha would have smoked all night had his funds allowed it. But, for now, he was content, surrendering himself, moment by moment, to the spell of opium. Like falling into feathers. The room was beautiful. The shadows spun mysteries from the corners. The wind played symphonies on the paper that covered the window. The mould that wound its intricate labyrinth across the ceiling was the colour of the Chartreuse he had drunk in Paris with Isidore.
