Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

barking. How familiar these sounds of the human forest have become to him. At first they kept him from sleep, listening, weighing up each cry. He was wary, and though never fearful he kept himself in readiness for flight. It did not occur to him that Gummer might protect him.

He had found Gummer in Bristol, in a house in Denmark Street, hard by the hustle of the docks. He was not hard to find; it was merely a case of enquiring from those who in looks most approximated Gummer himself. Thus, by a trail of card-sharps, showmen, impersonators and pimps, he was brought to the door of the house. A middle-aged woman admitted him and passed him on to a younger woman who led him to a chamber, a bare room with clothes strewn on the cot and floor, a table with the remains of a meal, a glass broken at the stem. Gummer was kneeling by a wall, apparently in prayer. He turned at the sound of the door opening. He did not seem surprised to see the boy. He looked at him, then back at the wall, then waved the boy over. There was a small knot-hole in the wall. Gummer moved aside. James placed his eye to the hole, felt the coolness of air against his eye. The room he was looking into was larger than Gummer's and there were pictures on the wall and a four-poster bed with a cat and a chamber pot beneath it. On the boards an old man, naked, on hands and knees, was being ridden by a woman, who struck his flabby arse with a riding-crop and made him carry her about the

room, though his breath wheezed and the sweat dripped down his shanks. When she struck him the man's face flinched with delight. The woman looked towards the hole in the wall, stuck out her tongue, grinned.

'The delineations', whispered Gummer, 'of human pleasure.'

For the first weeks of their new alliance, James accompanied him around the city: a rat-run of taverns, bagnios, gaming-rooms, cockpits. Men eyed the boy shrewdly, weighing him up as they might another man's horse, another man's luck. The women, tempted by the prettiness of his face, approached him with a cautious, weary kindness.

At the end of June, sitting in the room in Denmark Street, sunlight in an orange flag unfurled over the black floorboards, a fly indolently tapping the diamond-patterned glass, Gummer hinted at the means by which he - no, they - should make their fortunes. He had already, on several occasions, satisfied himself that what he had witnessed in the parlour in Blind Yeo was no accident. Pins, candles and slaps had met with no more response than if he had tortured the table. To be quite sure, he borrowed a tool from a builder and extracted one of James's teeth. The result was so convincing, so overwhelming, he had stooped and hugged the boy, his shirt smeared with the child's blood. The boy was incapable of suffering! The boy had never suffered in his life! More than this, any wound he received healed at such a rate one could almost sit and watch the flesh draw together, knit, blanch, resolve. The site of a burn would be quite invisible three days after it was given, and though the child's hands had been pierced a dozen times the skin was smooth, untroubled.

The plan was simple. If they carried it out boldly they would make more in one summer than Gummer had made in ten years of laborious swindling and sharking. Naturally it was not without some attendant risks. People did not take kindly to deception,

to being made fools of. The greatest danger lay in James being recognised. To avoid this they would do fairs that lay at some distance from each other, move swiftly from one part of the country to another. It was vital, however, that the child should be convincing. He must learn to imitate suffering, he must study it, its effects. He should study it like a foreign language and for this he must have a teacher.

Gummer had a man in mind, ran him to ground in a drinking-shop by Christmas Steps where, among the sloped backs, the insensible roar, the close stink of the place, Cato Leigh, decayed thespian, legs swollen with the dropsy, his face a dozen faces, each slapped redly upon the other, underwent the familiar inferno of his nights.

He was declaiming, for the price of a drink, lines from Faustus, when he saw, out of the side of one large eye, through the prism of a tear, the lank figure of Marley Gummer, a hound on its hind legs, with whom, in the year seventeen something, he had passed himself off as a Spanish grandee in an elaborate scheme to defraud a cartel of sherry merchants. And next to Gummer, a boy with eyes like blue stars.

'This fellow, James,' said Gummer when they had lured Leigh back to Denmark Street with the promise of strong drink, will be your tutor.'

Leigh looked down at the boy. He was uncomfortable with children. He found it hard to believe he had ever been one. He said: 'And what, pray, Mr Gummer, am I to teach the boy?'

'You are to teach him how to suffer.'

'Life, sir' - Leigh's arm flourished through the air - 'will teach him soon enough.'

'But you shall teach him sooner, Mr Leigh. Start tonight. He must know how to scream, how to writhe, all the usual horrors. He must be good. He must convince. You have a week.'

'What manner of child have you discovered, Mr Gummer?'

'One I conjured up in the country, Mr Leigh. A most delightful, cold-blooded monster of a boy. Now then, where shall you begin?'

At first James did not understand what was required of him. The man's antics were utterly mysterious, but Leigh persisted and the boy caught on. Soon, the bawd who ran the house complained that it was driving away her business. A