The Star of the Sea (32 page)

His mother had spent a fortnight in Dublin as a girl. Any time she spoke of the customs of the city she remarked disapprovingly and deeply suspiciously that it was a place where you could truly be yourself. But it seemed to Pius Mulvey that you could be anyone you chose: that the city was a blank folio on which your past might be redrawn. ‘Palimpsest’ was the English for a document written in the place created by the erasure of another. He came to think of
Belfast as Palimpsestia, County Antrim. There was no reason to confine yourself to being yourself. And soon enough, he discovered in Palimpsestia, there were plenty of reasons to be someone else.

It was there that he began to go by an assumed name. A kindly Protestant comrade with whom he shared lodgings had discreetly confided a few of the rules. Belfast was changing. People were talking ‘auld nonsense’. He’d have no truck with bigotry and never had. A man’s own religion was business of his own; the world would be a deal happier if it stayed that way. But it was important for a Roman Catholic to be careful now. Certain territories of the city were not to be walked by the bearer of a name as richly suggestive as Pius.

For a while, he became his own brother; but being Nicholas Mulvey seemed a kind of indecency; too severe an act of colonisation. And anyway ‘Mulvey’ was still a little too Papish for most employers to be able to stomach. To settle on the right name proved difficult in the extreme. As John Adams he was a stevedore for almost four months; as Ivan Holland a cattleman’s helper; as Billy Ruttledge a deck-hand on a pilot’s tug. Waterfront life was various enough to allow such frequent christenings.

As William Cook he was mate to a longshoreman who loved the Lord, and who persistently encouraged Mulvey to love him too. Mulvey had as little interest in finding Jesus as he hoped Jesus had in finding Mulvey, but he loved to listen to the extraordinary poetry his superior spoke. Dancing was ‘back-legs fornication’; whiskey or porter ‘the devil’s buttermilk’. People didn’t die, they ‘fell asleep’. Pope Pius was ‘Captain Redhat’ or ‘Johnny Longstockings’.

He was a Justified Bible Protestant, the longshoreman would say, separated unto the gospel by Holy Ghost Power. Mulvey didn’t know what ‘justified’ or ‘separated’ might mean in such a spiritual context; why justification was a necessary aim, nor from which heavy impositions separation might be required. But to be able to talk like that about your religion seemed a thing that could give you a reachier punch. He was baptised an Evangelical in a tent in Lisburn and went to Mass in Derriaghy on his way home the same night, his clothes still sodden from the earlier immersion. Neither rite had revealed much of Holy Ghost Power to him; but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn’t expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.

In time Mulvey began to grow weary with port life, its new mistrusts, the mutual suspicion now growing among the men, and he decided to try his luck in some other place. It was Daniel Monaghan who signed on the cattleboat that plied across to Glasgow. It was Gabriel Elliot who came back the following month, having found no work whatsoever in that impoverished city, and many of the same tensions which quietly throbbed in Belfast.

Physical labour bored him now and he wondered how else he might procure a living. He began to go about the pubs of the dockside at night, singing to the drinkers the ballad he had composed. He learned to adjust it to the requirements of his audience, to tread carefully within the multiple borders of Belfast. If the drunks were Protestant he would make the insulted sergeant a lazy Irish Catholic begging for a hand-out; if they were Catholic he would cast him as a bible-thumping vicar prowling for converts among the reverently starving. When it was finally discovered, as he knew it must be some time, that essentially he had been singing the same song to the two opposing sides, both came together in fleeting coalition to have him beaten unconscious and slung from the city.

He woke up under a tarpaulin on the deck of a coalboat with his pockets empty and his clothes in shreds. Men were talking a language he did not know; a curious vowelly tongue he took to be German. It took him a while to realise that actually it was English but spoken in an accent he had never heard. They dropped their aitches and exaggerated their consonants. ‘Ed’ was a head. ‘Gored’ was God. Norsemen, maybe. Latter-day Vikings. Or perhaps they were Americans, Mulvey thought. Americans were known for such swagger and braggadocio. It was only when their Captain proposed a toast ‘to the very good elf of King Willum’ (Gored blissim) that Mulvey understood who the strange creatures were. The beings after whom the language was named.

He remained in his hiding place for one more day, only venturing out when land became visible. The natives greeted his appearance with wails of cheerful surprise, but did not beat him or kick him or fling him into the water, at least one of which courses he had expected them to take. Instead they fed him and gave him to drink, bucked him up and pronounced him a good’un. He was addressed as ‘my covey’, ‘my chum’ or ‘my china’, all terms seeming
to connote fellowship among them. It was explained to the traveller exactly where he was, the names of the undiscovered lands he could discern in the distance. Foulness Island. Southend-on-Sea. The settlement of Rochford whose peoples were warlike. The ancient, tribal homelands of Basildon, Essex.

Fabled Sheerness. The Isle of Sheppey. They sailed up the Thames estuary, past Purfleet and Dagenham, Woolwich and Greenwich, the Isle of Dogs, Deptford and Limehouse, Stepney and Shadwell, through the fallow swirling fog that lay on the docks. Until the fallow fog parted like the curtains of some gargantuan theatre, and there stood London, city of cities. Majestic in the dusk, biblically colossal, for all her millions of twinkling lights, forlorn as a faded prima donna in borrowed jewellery. Stupefied Mulvey could not even speak. The diva might have dubious origins, but already he was conquered.

Into the docklands the slow ship wended, by Wapping and Pennington to St-George-in-the-East; the surface of the river like a sheet of beaten gold; the dome of St Paul’s a Croagh Patrick of copper. His rescuers wished him good fortune as they tied up at the dock. He stepped off the steamer and tottered away. The sailors chuckled with their waiting wives and put his gait down to a case of poor sea-legs. But the diagnosis was wrong. The voyager was love-drunk. He hoped he would never be sober again.

Two urchins, little mudlarks, were dicing on the quayside, warbling a ballad of dauntless highwaymen.

Oh, my name is Fred’rick Hall
,

And I rob both great and small;

But my neck shall pay for all
,

When I die, when I die
.

Pius Mulvey made the sign of the cross. Never again would he have to be baptised.

For two years Frederick Hall lived in the East End of the city, earning his bread by swindling and robbing. It was simpler than singing, and much more profitable, and much less likely to result in a beating, at least if you used your common sense. Gentlemen came into the quarter late at night to find girls, and they were such easy
prey that Mulvey could scarcely believe his luck. If you appeared in an alleyway and said you had a pistol, the mark would hand over his pocketbook with scarcely a word. If you took out a cudgel he would do anything you asked. And if you sidled up behind him just as he was leaving a brothel – just as he was buttoning up his flies and thinking to himself that he had got away with it again – and if you gently said at that precise moment: ‘I know where you live and I will tell your wife,’ he would practically beg you to take everything he had and thank you afterwards for having taken it.

Soon Mulvey discovered an interesting thing: that the easiest way to acquire money was simply to ask for it. He would single out a gentleman who looked a little uneasy in the street – a novice, perhaps, in the etiquette of the East End; some poor old duffer who had the horn so bad you could practically see it twitching through his Savile Row britches. Mulvey would amble up to him with the most empathetic smile he could muster and hold out his arm like a welcoming
maître d
. ‘I’ve a nice little Judy just around the corner, sir. Beautiful thing she is; breasts like peaches. Shall I go and fetch her for you, sir? Her rooms are nearby. Nice and discreet. She’ll do anything you want.’ Sometimes there would be a moment of nervous hesitance and Mulvey would quietly repeat the word ‘anything’. The gentleman would hand over a couple of hot coins and Mulvey would thank him and walk directly into the nearest pub, certain of not being followed into it by the toff. And certain, in the event he might ever be wrong, that no man would publicly ask for the whore he had been promised. No gentleman, anyway. They had to live by the rules. You could turn their rules to your own advantage; that was the secret on which London’s existence was predicated. Immigrants lived or died by their knowledge of that secret and Frederick Hall understood it better than most.

He loved the city of London like most people love a spouse. Its inhabitants he found decent, fair-minded, tolerant; conversational when sober and wildly generous when drunk; far more hospitable to outsiders than he had been led to believe. What helped was that most of them were outsiders too; many living with the knowledge that they might be again. To walk the streets of Whitechapel was to walk around the world. Jews with black ringlets and skullcaps and beards; sloe-eyed women in fabulous saris; Chinamen with pigtails or
conical hats; navvies with skin so richly black that in a certain light it appeared blue as the Atlantic at dawn. Often it struck him as profoundly correct that the Irish term for a black man was
fear gorm
: a blue man.

Beneath the sagged beams of the loft in which he dossed, he would count the stars through the holes in the slating and listen to the clashing musics coming up from the street. If he couldn’t sleep – and often he couldn’t – he would sit at the window in his tattered underwear and watch the sailors wandering up from the docks; filtering into the bawdy-houses and grog-shops, to the freak shows and peepshows and streetside burlesques. Some nights he went down and strolled among them, for no other reason than to be among people. To be jostled; crowded; not to be alone.

Moroccans in turbans; teak-faced Indians; handsome Texans with suntans so vividly orange that when Mulvey first saw one he thought the poor Jack was jaundiced. Frenchmen; Dutchmen; Spaniards who smelt of spices. Wine merchants from Burgundy. Acrobats from Rome. One evening he had watched from his seventh-storey perch as a party of opera singers from somewhere in Germany came processing up from Tobacco Wharf, up through the East End like a pageant of judges. They were chorusing ‘Messiah’ as they majestically went, bestowing mock blessings on the cheering passers-by. Gazing down in wonder from his head-spinning rookery, Mulvey sang it back to them like a liberated slave.

King of Kings!

And Lord of Lords!

And He shall reign for ever and ever!

Most of all he loved the languages of London, the clamorous fanfare of the city in conversation with itself. To hear Italian or even Arabic was nothing unusual; Portuguese and Russian, Shelta and Romany; the mournfully beautiful entreaties and praisings that drifted from the synagogues on a Friday at sunset. Sometimes he heard tongues he could not even name; languages so strange and resistant to penetration that it was hard to believe they were languages at all; that any two speakers in the world could know them. ‘Pig Latin’ Carny; traveller Pidgin; the rhyme-slang of stall-boys; the ‘flash-code’ of
criminals; the patter of bookies and three-card-tricksters; the drawling patois of graceful Jamaicans and the singsong lilt of Welshmen and Creoles. They borrowed from one another like children trading streamers; a bold lingua franca which anyone could own. It was as though the Tower of Babel had emptied its multitudes into the reeking streets of Whitechapel. Mulvey came from a place where silence was constant as the rain, but never again would he know such an awfulness.

And the cockneys talked as though talking in colours. Brash, blowsy banners of words. He listened for hours as they nattered in the markets, as they dandered through the carnival in Paternoster Square. How he wished he could talk with such brio and bite. He practised in the evenings, over and over; made reverent translations into their tongue.

Our old guv’nor,

which dosses in Lewisham,

swelléd be thy moniker.

Thy racket be come;

thy crack-job be done,

in Bow as it is in Lewisham.

Scalp us this day our lump of lead

and let us be bailed for our dodges;

as we backslaps the pox-hounds and Berkshire Hunts

what dodges agin us. (The bumsuckers.)

And jemmy us not into lushery or lurks

but send us skedaddling from blaggery.

For thine is the manor, the flash and the bovver.

Till mother breaks out of the clink. Amen.

The lexicon of crime became his favourite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had
categorised
the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning;
buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing, and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.