Astray: Stories Read online

  ASTRAY

  EMMA DONOGHUE

  For my seven far-flung siblings

  (Dave, Helen, Hugh, Celia,

  Mark, Barbara, Stella),

  with love always.

  Tell us underneath what skies,

  Upon what coasts of earth we have been cast;

  We wander, ignorant of men and places,

  And driven by the wind and the vast waves.

  Virgil, The Aeneid,

  translated by Allen Mandelbaum (1971)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  DEPARTURES

  MAN AND BOY

  ONWARD

  THE WIDOW’S CRUSE

  LAST SUPPER AT BROWN’S

  IN TRANSIT

  COUNTING THE DAYS

  SNOWBLIND

  THE LONG WAY HOME

  THE BODY SWAP

  THE GIFT

  ARRIVALS AND AFTERMATHS

  THE LOST SEED

  VANITAS

  THE HUNT

  DADDY’S GIRL

  WHAT REMAINS

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR Astray

  PRAISE FOR Room

  ALSO BY EMMA DONOGHUE

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DEPARTURES

  LONDON

  1882

  MAN AND BOY

  Off your tuck this morning, aren’t you? That’s not like you. It’s the chill, perhaps. These March winds come straight from the Urals, up the Thames, or so they say. No, that’s not your favorite Horse Guards playing, can’t fool you; you never like it when they change the band. Fancy a bun? You’ll feel the better for a good breakfast. Come along, have a couple of buns…. Please yourself, then.

  Maybe later, after your bath.

  I had some unpleasantness with the superintendent this morning. Yes, over you, my boy, need you ask? He’s applied to the trustees for permission to buy a gun.

  Calm down, no one’s going to shoot you, or my name’s not Matthew Scott. But let it be a warning. I don’t mean to lay blame, but this is what comes of tantrums. (Demented rampages, the superintendent calls them.) Look at this old patched wall here; who was it that stove it in? To err is human and all that, but it don’t excuse such an exhibition. You only went and hurt yourself, and you’re still not the better for that abscess.

  Anyway, the superintendent has an iddy-fix that you’re a danger to the kiddies, now you’re a man, as it were. Oh, you know and I know that’s all my eye, you dote on the smalls. You don’t care for confinement, that’s all, and who can blame you? I can always settle you with a little wander round the Gardens to meet your friends. But the superintendent says, “What if you’re off the premises, Scott, when the musth next comes on Jumbo? No other keeper here can handle him; every time I assign you an assistant, the creature terrorizes the fellow and sends him packing. It’s a most irregular state of affairs, not to mention the pungency, and stains, and … well, engorgement. That member’s wife almost fainted when she caught sight!”

  I pointed out you could hardly help that.

  “Besides, bull Africans are known for killing their keepers,” he lectured me. “In one of his furies, he could swat you down with his little tail, then crush you with his skull.”

  “Not this elephant,” I said, “nor this keeper.”

  Then he went off on a gory story about a crazed elephant he saw gunned down in the Strand when he was knee-high, 152 bullets it took, the superintendent’s never been the same since. Well, that explains a lot about him.

  I assure you, my boy, I stood up for you. I looked the old man in the watery eye and said, “We all have our off days. But Jumbo’s a cleanly, hardworking fellow, as a rule. I have never felt afraid of him for one moment in the seventeen years he’s been in my care.”

  He muttered something impertinent about that proving my arrogance rather than your safety. “I believe it’s gone to your head, Scott.”

  “What has, Superintendent?”

  “Jumbo’s fame. You fancy yourself the cock of the walk.”

  I drew myself up. “If I enjoy a certain position in this establishment, if I was awarded a medal back in ‘sixty-six, that is due to having bred, nursed, and reared more exotic animals and birds than any other living man.”

  He pursed his lips. “Not to mention the fortune you pocket from those tuppenny rides—”

  The nerve! “Aren’t I the one who helps the kiddies up the ladder, and leads Jumbo round the Gardens, and makes sure they don’t topple off?” (By rights the cash should be half yours, lad, but what use would it be to you? You like to mouth the coins with your trunk and slip them into my pocket.)

  The superintendent plucked at his beard. “Be that as it may, it’s inequitable; bad for morale. You’re all charm when it earns you tips, Scott, but flagrantly rude to your superiors in this Society, and as for your fellow keepers, they’re nervous of saying a word to you these days.”

  That crew of ignorami!

  “I have plenty of conversation,” I told him, “but I save it for those as appreciate it.”

  “They call you a tyrant.”

  Well, I laughed. After all, I’m the fifteenth child of seventeen, no silver spoons in my infant mouth, a humble son of toil who’s made good in a precarious profession, and I need apologize to nobody. We don’t mind the piddling tiddlers of this world, do we, boy? We just avert our gaze.

  There’s a crate sitting outside on the grass this morning. Pitch-pine planking, girded with iron, on a kind of trolley with wheels. Gives me a funny feeling. It’s twelve feet high, as near as I can guess; that’s just half a foot more than you. Nobody’s said a word to me about it. Best to mind my own business, I suppose. This place—there’s too much gossip and interference already.

  It’ll be time to stretch a leg soon, boy. The kiddies will be lined up outside in their dozens. They missed you yesterday, when it was raining. Here, kneel down and we’ll get your howdah on. Yes, yes, I’ll remember to put a double fold of blanket under the corner where it was rubbing. Aren’t your toenails looking pearly after that scrub I gave them?

  There’s two men out there by the crate now, setting up some kind of ramp. I don’t like the looks of this at all. If this is what I think it is, it’s too blooming much—

  I’m off to the superintendent’s office, none of this Please make an appointment. Here’s a sack of oats to be getting on with. Oh, don’t take on, hush your bellowing, I’ll be back before you miss me.

  Well, Jumbo, I could bloody spit! Pardon my French, but there are moments in a man’s life on this miserable earth—

  And to think, the superintendent didn’t give me so much as a word of warning. Just fancy, after all these years of working at the Society together—after the perils he and I have run, sawing off that rhinoceros’s deformed horn and whatnot—it makes me shudder, the perfidiousness of it. “I’ll thank you,” says I, “to tell me what’s afoot in the matter of my elephant.”

  “Yours, Scott?” says he with a curl of the lip.

  “Figure of speech,” says I. “As keeper here thirty-one years, man and boy, I take a natural interest in all property of the Society.”

  He was all stuff and bluster, I’d got him on the wrong foot. “Since you inquire,” says he, “I must inform you that Jumbo is now the property of another party.”

  Didn’t I stare! “Which other party?”

  His beard began to tremble. “Mr. P. T. Barnum.”

  “The Yankee showman?”

  He couldn’t deny it. Then wasn’t there a row, not half. My dear boy, I can hardly get the words out, but he�
�s only been and gone and sold you to the circus!

  It’s a shocking smirch on the good name of the London Zoological Society, that’s what I say. Such sneaking, double-dealing treachery behind closed doors. In the best interests of the British public, my hat! Two thousand pounds, that’s the price the superintendent put on you, though it’s not as if they need the funds, and who’s the chief draw but the Children’s Pal, the Beloved Pachydermic Behemoth, as the papers call you? Why, you may be the most magnificent elephant the world has ever seen, due to falling so fortuitously young into my hands as a crusty little stray, to be nursed back from the edge of the grave and fed up proper. And who’s to say how long your poor tribe will last, with ivory so fashionable? The special friend of our dear queen as well as generations of young Britons born and unborn, and yet the Society has flogged you off like horse meat, and all because of a few whiffs and tantrums!

  Oh, Jumbo. You might just settle down now. Your feelings do you credit and all that, but there’s no good in such displays. You must be a brave boy. You’ve got through worse before, haven’t you? When the traders gunned down your whole kin in front of you—

  Hush now, my mouth, I shouldn’t bring up painful recollections. Going into exile in America can’t be half as bad, that’s all I mean. Worse things happen. Come to think of it, if I hadn’t rescued you from that wretched Jardin des Plantes, you’d have got eaten by hungry Frogs during the Siege of Seventy-one! So best to put a brave face on.

  I just hope you don’t get seasick. I reminded the superintendent you’d need two hundred pounds of hay a day on the voyage to New York, not to speak of sweet biscuits, potatoes, loaves, figs, and onions, your favorite…. You’ll be joining the Greatest Show on Earth, I suppose that has a sort of ring to it, if a vulgar one. (The superintendent claims travel may calm your rages, or if it doesn’t, then such a huge circus will have “facilities for seclusion,” though I don’t like the sound of that, not half.) No tricks to learn, I made sure of that much: you’ll be announced as “The Most Enormous Land Animal in Captivity” and walk round the ring, that’s all. I was worried you’d have to tramp across the whole United States, but you’ll tour in your own comfy railway carriage, fancy that! The old millionaire’s got twenty other elephants, but you’ll be the king. Oh, and rats, I told him to pass on word that you’re tormented by the sight of a rat ever since they ate half your feet when you were a nipper.

  Of course you’ll miss England, and giving the kiddies rides, that’s only to be expected. And doing headstands in the Pool, wandering down the Parrot Walk, the Carnivora Terrace, all the old sights. You’ll find those American winters a trial to your spirits, I shouldn’t wonder. And I expect once in a while you’ll spare a thought for your old pa—

  When you came to London, a filthy baby no taller than me, you used to wake screaming at night and sucking your trunk for comfort, and I’d give you a cuddle and you’d start to leak behind the ears …

  Pardon me, boy, I’m overcome.

  Today’s the evil day, Jumbo, I believe you know it. You’re all a-shiver, and your trunk hovers in front of my face as if to take me in. It’s like some tree turned hairy snake, puffing warm wet air on me. There, there. Have a bit of gingerbread. Let me give your leg a good hard pat. Will I blow into your trunk, give your tongue a last little rub?

  Come along, bad form to keep anyone waiting, I suppose, even a jumped-up Yankee animal handler like this “Elephant Bill” Newman. (Oh, those little watery eyes of yours, lashes like a ballet dancer—I can hardly look you in the face.) That’s a boy; down this passage to the left; I know it’s not the usual way, but a change is as good as a rest, don’t they say? This way, now. Up the little ramp and into the crate you go. Plenty of room in there, if you put your head down. Go on.

  Ah, now, let’s have no nonsense. Into your crate this minute. What good will it do to plunge and bellow? No, stop it, don’t lie down. Up, boy, up. Bad boy. Jumbo!

  You’re all right, don’t take on so. You’re back in your quarters for the moment; it’s getting dark out. Such a to-do! They’re only chains. I know you dislike the weight of them, but they’re temporary. No, I can’t take them off tonight or this Elephant Bill will raise a stink. He says we must try you again first thing tomorrow. The chains are for securing you inside the crate, till the crane hoists you on board the steamer. No, calm down, boy. Enough of that roaring. Drink your scotch. Oi! Pick up my bowler and give it back. Thank you.

  The Yankee, Elephant Bill, has some cheek. He began by informing me that Barnum’s agents tried to secure the captured King of the Zulus for exhibition, and then the cottage where Shakespeare was born; you’re only their third choice of British treasures. Well, I bristled, you can imagine.

  When you wouldn’t walk into the crate no matter how we urged and pushed, even after he took the whip to your poor saggy posterior—when I’d led you round the corner and tried again half a dozen times—he rolled his eyes, said it was clear as day you’d been spoiled.

  “Spoiled?” I repeated.

  “Made half pet, half human,” says the American, “by all these treats and pattings and chit-chat. Is it true what the other fellows say, Scott, that you share a bottle of whiskey with the beast every night, and caterwaul like sweethearts, curled up together in his stall?”

  Well, I didn’t want to dignify that kind of impertinence with a reply. But then I thought of how you whine like a naughty child if I don’t come back from the pub by bedtime, and a dreadful thought occurred to me. “Elephants are family-minded creatures, you must know that much,” I told him. “I hope you don’t mean to leave Jumbo alone at night? He only sleeps two or three hours, on and off; he’ll need company when he wakes.”

  A snort from the Yank. “I don’t bed down with nobody but human females.”

  Which shows the coarseness of the man.

  Settle down, Jumbo, it’s only three in the morning. No, I can’t sleep neither. I haven’t had a decent kip since that blooming crate arrived. Don’t those new violet-bottomed mandrills make an awful racket?

  Over seven thousand visitors counted at the turnstile today. All because of you, Jumbo. Your sale’s been in the papers; you’d hardly credit what a fuss it’s making. Heartbroken letters from kiddies, denunciations of the trustees, offers to raise a subscription to ransom you back. It’s said the Prince of Wales has voiced his objections, and Mr. Ruskin, and some Fellows of the Society are going to court to prove the sale illegal!

  I wish you could read some of the letters you’re getting every day now, from grown-ups as well as kiddies. Money enclosed, and gingerbread, not to mention cigars. (I ate the couple of dozen oysters, as I knew you wouldn’t fancy them.) A bun stuck with pins; that’s some sot’s idea of a joke. And look at this huge floral wreath for you to wear, with a banner that says A TROPHY OF TRIUMPH OVER THE AMERICAN SLAVERS. I’ve had letters myself, some offering me bribes to “do something to prevent this,” others calling me a Judas. If they only knew the mortifications of my position!

  Oh, dear, I did think today’s attempt would have gone better. It was my own idea that since you’d taken against the very sight of the crate, it should be removed from view. I told this Elephant Bill I’d lead you through the streets, the full six miles, and surely by the time you reached the docks, you’d be glad to go into your crate for a rest.

  But you saw right through me, didn’t you, artful dodger? No, no tongue massage for you tonight, Badness! You somehow knew this wasn’t an ordinary stroll. Not an inch beyond the gates of the Gardens but you dropped to your knees. Playing to the crowd, rather, I thought, and how they whooped at the sight of you on all fours like some plucky martyr for the British cause. The public’s gone berserk over your sit-down strike, you wouldn’t believe the papers.

  I almost lost my temper with you today at the gates, boy, when you wouldn’t get up for me, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a sort of pride to see you put up such a good fight.

  That Yank is a nasty piece of work. When I poi
nted out that it might prove impossible to force you onto that ship, he muttered about putting you on low rations to damp your spirit, or even bull hooks to the ears and hot irons.

  “I’ll have you know, we don’t stand for that kind of barbarism in this country,” I told him, and he grinned and said the English were more squeamish about beating their animals than their children. He showed me a gun he carries and drawled something about getting you to New York dead or alive.

  The lout was just trying to put the wind up me, of course. Primitive tactics. “Jumbo won’t be of much use to your employer if he’s in the former state,” says I coldly.

  Elephant Bill shrugged, and said he didn’t know about that, Barnum could always stuff your hide and tour it as “The Conquered Briton.”

  That left me speechless.

  Will we take a stroll round the Gardens this morning before the gates open? Over eighteen thousand visitors yesterday, and as many expected today, to catch what might be a last glimpse of you. Such queues for the rides! We could charge a guinea apiece if we chose, not that we would.

  Let’s you and me go and take a look at your crate. It’s nothing to be afraid of, idiot boy; only a big box. Look, some fresh writing since yesterday: Jumbo don’t go, that’s kind. More flowers. Dollies, books, even. See that woman on her knees outside the gates? A lunatic, but the civil kind. She’s handing out leaflets and praying for divine intervention to stop your departure.

  But the thing is, lad, you’re going to have to go sooner or later. You know that, don’t you? There comes a time in every man’s life when he must knuckle down and do the necessary. The judge has ruled your sale was legal. Barnum’s told the Daily Telegraph he won’t reconsider, not for a hundred thousand pounds. So the cruel fact is that our days together are numbered. Why not step on into your crate now, this very minute, get the wrench of parting over, since it must come to that in the end? Quick, now, as a favor to your sorrowful pa? Argh! Be that way, then; suit yourself, but don’t blame me if the Yank comes at you with hooks and irons.