Sleep of Death (3 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, brushing at my clothes, and growing more angry, even as the hulk opposite me seemed to be sailing into calmer waters. ‘In fact, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, to adopt your terminology.’

Three or four people had stopped in the street, drawn by the prospect of trouble. The large boatman had stepped back a pace or so, and I mistook the look of bovine stupidity that was now begining to usurp his angry features for sheepishness. ‘And another thing,’ I said, foolishly deciding to demonstrate my intellectual superiority. ‘What did you call me . . . shitting turd I think it was?’

‘So what if I did, you arse-wipe.’

‘Interesting example of pleonasm is that shitting turd,’ I said as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘Pleonast, are you?’

Both of the boatman’s eyes trained themselves on me more or less at once. I had said the wrong thing, been stupid by being clever at the expense of a no-wit. He took a step towards me and I stepped back. Unfortunately that was as far as I could go. Now the boatman had me between his sweaty self and a flinty wall. A few more people had assembled in the hope of seeing violence done to one who was young and blameless.

‘What’s a fucking pleenast when it’s at home?’

He had his arm rammed across my throat so that, even if I had wanted to correct the way he said the word, I couldn’t have spoken. His beard, which was as clotted as a bunch of seaweed, tickled my face. I made ineffectual attempts to push him off but he pressed himself against me, and I smelt on him a mixture of riveriness and fishitude and it was not agreeable.

‘I said, you bum-sucker, what’s a pleenast?’

There was a real danger that if I didn’t answer, he was going to crush me as completely as a fallen mast would have. But it was all I could do to drag air through a dented windpipe, let alone produce any explanation. The fine summer morning was flecked with orange spots and there was a roaring in my ears.

‘Pleenast – pleenast? Fucking tell me. I’ll give you pleenast!’

I had time to think that this was perhaps the first occasion in the history of the world that anyone had died for the sake of a little word from the Greek, and time also to consider that if I were to have my life over again then I would learn not to be so foolishly clever as to try to impress those who are, by nature, unimpressible. And I had time to think that this business of dying took too long, as the half-circle of white faces looking at this spectacle merged into a blur.

‘It’s a compliment,’ came a voice close to one of my roaring ears. ‘Let him go, boatman. It’s a compliment. Let him go, I say.’

After a moment the pressure on my throat was lifted. I was too busy forcing air inside myself to pay much attention to the exchange which followed, but was able to reconstruct it afterwards.

‘When you’ve released him I’ll tell you what he is unable to tell you himself. That’s better.’

‘All right, you tell me then. What’s a pleenast?’

There was still aggression and injury in what the boatman was saying to the newcomer but, even in my preoccupied condition, I was aware of a retreat in the man’s tone, as well as an absence of fucking, shiting and arse-wiping.

‘Pleonasm,’ said the individual who had interrupted my throttling, ‘is a rhetorical figure by which more words than are strictly necessary are used to express meaning. For example, if I said that you were a fine boatman as well as a good boatman and an excellent one, then I would have committed a pleonasm.’

‘Fine . . . good . . . excellent,’ said the boatman, half to himself. I noticed that the number of people about us had grown, rather than the dribbling away of a crowd which usually occurs when the promise of violence has not been fulfilled. They too were listening to the explanation of a pleonasm. Something about the man’s calm and certain speech drew them, just as it pacified the boatman. I glanced at my rescuer. I’d seen him somewhere recently.

‘I think that what this young man meant by calling you a pleonast is that you are a person of linguistic means – that you have a full share of that wealth of language which is available to all Englishmen whatever their class – in short you know a lot of words and it pleases you to express yourself in full – even at the risk of some repetition.’

I struggled for the irony in this speech, because I was afraid that if I could detect it then the boatman would pick it up too, but not a tremor of insincerity, not a streak of piss-taking, did I hear in the other man’s tones. He appeared to mean what he was saying.

‘I’ll say what I fucking like,’ said the boatman, but in a docile fashion.

‘To be accused of having too many words is a fine thing,’ said the other. Then I realised that it was the man who had slipped unobtrusively past Master Burbage and me as we were talking by the tiring-house, the man who played the Ghost in the drama of the Prince of Denmark, ‘our author’, Master William Shakespeare. Well, he’d certainly saved my bacon.

‘He got in my way, didn’t he,’ said the boatman to the playwright, his beard wagging in justification. ‘My fare did a fucking runner, saving your reverence. I’d no sooner touched the bank than the bugger was out my boat and up the stairs like a parson’s fart, gone before you can sniff it. So what d’you expect a poor boatman to do? It may be only a couple of pennies to a gentleman like yourself but to me and Bet and our five kids it’s our fucking dinner. Me, I can’t afford to let a fare get away like that, the bastard. So I took off in hot pursuit and this bloke got between me and my quarry. And he fell down and I fell down on top of him and then he accused me of that – plea-nasty – what was it?’

‘Pleonasm,’ said our author.

‘That one. So what am I expected to do, go home to my Bet and our six kids and tell her that I was rooked out of threepence by some cunt who was too slippery for me? Jesus, I tell you, I’d be in the doghouse from Tuesday to Doomsday.’

The crowd had begun to disperse, recognising the man’s whinge, no doubt, and expecting him to whip out a wooden leg gained in the sea battle of El Dago as a means of enforcing their sympathy.

‘Just now you said five ki—’ I started to say before the playwright threw a warning glance at me. His brown eyes didn’t look so benevolent, but when he turned back to the boatman he spoke softly, almost kindly.

‘I know how hard it is to earn even a modest living in these times,’ he said. ‘I know how our business depends on you boatmen. Without you, I think we would not be here.’

Our author spoke the truth. There was a constant traffic to our side of the river, for the playhouses, the bears and the whores, and the single Thames bridge was convenient only for the few who lived either side of it.

‘What business would that be, sir?’

‘The play business.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, I took you for a gentleman.’

Now it was my turn to take offence. Despite my having just recovered breath and wits, despite my having escaped death by a hair’s width, I was ready to take up arms on behalf of my calling. But our author smiled as if he agreed with the boatman – and the common opinion was with him, it must be said – that the playhouse was no place for a gentleman to work.

‘Tell me who was the first gentleman, boatman,’ he said.

‘I’m not educated in the way of answering questions of that sort, kind or shape, sir.’

Our ferryman might have no respect for players in general but he seemed prepared to make an exception for the playwright.

‘Then I shall tell you, master boatman. It was Adam was the first gentleman,’ he said.

‘That’s my name!’ said the boatman, as eager as a child.

‘A happy coincidence. Your ancestor and my ancestor Adam, Adam, was a gentleman, for he bore arms. You know it is the right of a gentleman to bear arms?’

‘Most infalliably, sir,’ said the boatman, now thoroughly mollified.

‘Adam ’ad arms, one might say,’ said the playwright, who appeared more pleased with his words than the circumstances justified.

‘How’s that, sir?’

‘The Scripture tells us that he digged – and could he dig without arms?’

The playwright seemed over-amused at what I considered to be only a mediocre joke. A stale one too. I was sure I’d heard it somewhere before. But whatever I thought, the words seemed to work some kind of magic on the boatman. His mouth cracked open to reveal teeth like boat-ribs, while gurgles of laughter sounded like water in the bilges.

‘Very good, sir . . . dig . . . yes, how could he . . . without arms . . . very good.’

‘Now, Adam, take this for your lost custom, and as a mark of my general respect for your profession.’

The boatman’s grin remained. He didn’t glance at the coins; long practice made him familiar with weight, size, number, amount. Oh, he knew a gentleman when he saw one.

‘Thank you, sir. And I’m sorry if I crashed into you . . . sir.’ It cost him an effort to speak to me in almost the same tone that he managed with our author. ‘I’ll remember what it was you said. What was it again?’

‘Oh, pleonasm,’ I mumbled, thoroughly embarrassed now and wanting to be shot of him and the whole business.

‘Pleenasm,’ said Adam, and then to my rescuer, ‘And if you ever need a boatman for something special, sir, you just bear your old Adam in mind.’

‘We should all bear our old Adam in mind,’ said the playwright.

‘Adam Gibbons you will ask for. On either bank they know my name and face,’ said the boatman, and he lumbered round and headed off in the direction of the river.

‘On either bank they know my name and face,’ repeated the playwright, giving the words a tum-ti-tum lilt. Then, ‘Well, Master Revill, you have come to us from the Admiral’s. I can never get used to calling them Nottingham’s Men.’

‘I, yes, I . . . thank you for helping me just then. If you hadn’t come along . . . I don’t know what would have happened.’

The playwright shrugged and turned to go. I was taken aback: he already knew the name of an insignificant jobbing actor, as well as the company I had briefly been associated with. Also, I felt that he would have been fully entitled to lecture me on the perils of crossing swords, or paddles, with a runaway boatman. He could at least have called me a foolish young man. Yet he said nothing. I was almost disappointed.

Unwilling to have him leave me so abruptly, I caught up with him in a couple of strides. This area around the theatre was criss-crossed with ditches, a little stirred by the tidal slop of the river. Because the bridges across them were narrow, hardly more than a few pieces of planking, I was compelled to hover at my rescuer’s shoulder as we traversed one little inlet after another.

‘You appear this afternoon?’ I said, more to make conversation than anything else. Speaking was a little painful after the boatman’s assault. I visualised a red weal across my throat.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have Jack Wilson’s parts, don’t you? He makes a good ambassador in my thing today but he has not quite the look for the poisoner in the play, I mean the play inside the play. There is something a little straightforward about Wilson – although perhaps that is the best guise for a poisoner.’

‘King Claudius seems straightforward enough, sort of a hail-fellow-well-met sort and he’s a poisoner,’ I said, my words tumbling over themselves in my eagerness to impress the playwright.

‘You know the play?’

The same words, the same intonation as Master Burbage’s. Evidently, it was surprising that a mere player should show himself capable of judging characters rather than merely
being
them.

‘I saw it a couple of months ago.’

I would have gone on to say something to the playwright about how magnificent he’d been in the part of the Ghost, but the fact was that, although I remembered the Ghost, I couldn’t remember
him
as the Ghost, if you see what I mean.

The playwright glanced at me, and seemed to approve.

‘You have more of the saturnine in your face than Wilson. Remember that you must grimace.’

‘Master Burbage said that I should play, as it were, badly.’

Master WS appeared amused. ‘That’s typical of Dick, I think. I’m not sure I’d give anyone the licence to play badly, as it were, or in any other way – but it’s true that I have made Hamlet say something about “damnable faces”, so perhaps he is right.’

‘And then I am Cinna in your
Caesar
,’ I said.

‘Which Cinna? The conspirator?’

‘The poet, I believe.’

‘Torn for his bad verses. Alas, poor Cinna. Of course we are all poor
sinners.’

It was a moment before I grasped the pun, which the playwright stressed in case I missed it. As with the joke to the boatman about Adam and his arms, I have to confess that I found his sense of humour a bit . . . well . . . obvious.

‘Like Orpheus,’ I said, trying to elevate the conversation.

‘Who is like Orpheus?’

‘Your poet Cinna. Torn to pieces by the mob, just as Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Thracian Maenads.’

The reference, intended to show my nimbleness of mind and range of learning, did not appear to leave its mark upon the playwright.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. Then, ‘You are lodging near here?’

‘Yes, in Ship Street,’ I said. In fact, we were walking in the opposite direction to that in which my squalid accommodation lay. I was so reluctant to leave my rescuer’s company that I pretended to be sharing his destination.

‘Then you will need to go the other way.’

‘What – oh God, how stupid!’ I clapped my hand to my head in showy forgetfulness. ‘Yes it’s the other way.’

The playwright stopped on the far side of a little ditch. Behind him was the Bear Garden. Outside was the usual crowd of loiterers and ne’er-do-wells. Somehow, I was on the opposite bank of the slimy channel.

‘Till this afternoon,’ he said.

‘You’re the Ghost,’ I said, but he’d gone already.

*      *      *

‘Tell Nell,’ said Nell.

‘They’re quite small parts really,’ I said.

‘Not like this part, Nick,’ she said. ‘This one is growing larger by the second.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, distracted by what she was doing, but more excited, to be honest, about my afternoon at the Globe. ‘As Master Burbage says, we’ve all got to start somewhere.’