The Palace of Curiosities. Rosie Garland

humiliates me. What kind of creature am I? I have no answer.

      I stumble back to the cellar, crawl back to my mattress. Alfred is humped beneath his jacket. I want to shake him awake, and smile, and call him slug-a-bed, and thereby assure myself of my humanity. But it is the middle of the night. I close up the knife and put it under my blanket. There is nothing left to do but attempt to sleep.

      My eyes bore into the darkness. I see my work: carcases swaying from the ceiling, each one cleanly cut, ready for the butcher’s slab; I know they are all my doing. I am proud and slap the nearest, feeling the cool clean flesh against my palm. I know this: it is what I do. I name each part: the shank, the loin, the flank, the rib, the wing, the blade, the clod, the words sinking into some deep, comforting place. I am a slaughter-man. It is all I am. A plain and simple man.

      Let sleep come, I beg the night. The soft delight in which I take such pleasure. Where there is neither fear nor worry. It does not hear my prayer. The questions torment me. Why do I not bleed? How can I heal like this? I feel the granite ice of my mind begin to crack with such a groaning that it rends me head to heel. A cleft appears and light spears through the chink, casting fearsome shadows. I want to force myself shut, return to that safe vacancy where all is quiet. Yet I am also ravenous. I hunger to know what is in that great light, what I might discover when I shine the lamp of understanding upon myself.

      I struggle with the need to know and the need to run. I blunder into nothingness: a dark room, darker than the inside of closed eyes, where I hold out my hands and pat the black air, afraid of stumbling into walls, or ditches, or worse. A day ago, I was a wiped plate. I was empty, clean, untouched. Now, I stand in the slaughter-house and see my body cut open, peeled by my own hand and yet healing. I do not want this body. I am too frightened to close my eyes again, for fear of what I might find there.

      The next morning, Alfred does not need to rouse me, for I am already awake.

      ‘Let’s get to work,’ he grunts, and it is all the greeting I have from him.

      I want his smile, the warmth of his eyes when I call him friend, the easy way he guides me into the day. We walk in silence, the air freezing between us. I try to think of a topic of conversation that does not involve cutting. I fail, so great is my need to be unburdened.

      ‘Yesterday. It was – strange,’ I try.

      ‘Indeed? I don’t recall,’ he snarls and hides his face behind his collar.

      ‘But, Alfred—’

      ‘Oh, can I have no peace? There’s nothing to talk about, Abel. Nothing.’

      I grasp his shoulder and swing him about. All I want to do is talk to him. I do not understand why he will not listen.

      ‘Abel, get your hands off me. You’re really pushing your luck.’

      ‘Alfred, I am …’

      My voice quavers, and his features soften. He takes my arm and pulls me to the wall, glancing up and down the street.

      ‘All right, all right; if you are truly that upset. Let me help you, then. Tell me.’

      ‘In truth? You want to hear?’

      He sighs. ‘Yes, I do.’

      ‘Yesterday, when I cut myself …’ I gasp. ‘You saw it. I healed.’ I chew on the words, straining to free themselves from my mouth.

      ‘Very well. I saw it. But it wasn’t so deep. Perhaps.’

      ‘I did it again,’ I breathe.

      ‘Oh, come now. No you didn’t,’ he says, forcing a brightness I do not share. It does not ease my confusion.

      ‘Last night. While you slept.’

      ‘You’re mistaken. Maybe you had a nightmare. Don’t carry on so.’

      ‘Alfred—’

      ‘This is too strange for me, Abel. You’re a man like any other.’

      ‘What if I am not?’

      ‘You are. Think it and you can make it so. Come now, give me a smile and leave it be.’

      ‘But don’t you ever have strange thoughts about your body?’

      ‘Thoughts?’ He looks startled, and draws closer. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

      ‘But, Alfred—’

      ‘But Alfred, but Alfred,’ he sneers, in a mincing mimic of my voice. ‘Let’s get breakfast and drop this.’

      ‘I am not hungry.’

      ‘Christ, I thought I was in a bad mood,’ he snaps, and sticks his hands into his pockets. ‘But you take the bloody biscuit.’

      We walk on in silence. I wish I could take back my words.

      ‘Alfred. Please do not be angry with me.’

      ‘Shut up, Abel. You’re tiring me out and we haven’t even started work yet.’

      It is a long walk to the slaughter-house. From the first beast brought in, I find myself looking over my shoulder, starting at every twitch of thought, wary of where my mind might lead me. However, no fearsome pictures come to plague me. I would like to be sure it is the force of my will that keeps me free, but I cannot be sure.

      I lift my arm, let it fall, and another carcase splits down the middle, the meat pale in the weak light. I push it aside and they bring in the next. It is easy work, the easiest I know. For all that I try to lose myself in the raising and falling of the cleaver, the line of uncountable carcases waiting to be split by my firm and unerring blow, my mind will not let off its needling.

      I am steeled to drop my blade and run at the first intimation of strangeness; I keep my sleeve buttoned at the cuff. I do not want to be catching sight of my healed arm all the time for it continues to fill me with a sick feeling.

      I do not want to drowse, do not want to be taken to any place but here, do not want to see the things I have seen. I press my attention to the slaughter-work with a great passion, and in under an hour every hook is hanging with the carcases of the beasts I have killed. My companions are delighted with the speed of the work, and go outside to smoke a pipe. For all their friendliness, I do not wish for company, so I busy myself cleaning all of the cleavers.

      I am confused. I should be dead. Every beast I have ever slaughtered tells me the plain truth of it. When a man is cut, he should stay cut. But I heal; and even more disquietingly, I do not even bleed. When a man is drowned, he is drowned. But not me: they tell me I was as good as a drowned man when they pulled me out of the river. I am no better than any other man.

      I have heard over and over how I am a miracle: spewed up on to the banks of the Thames. How no man comes out alive after supping on its liquor, but I stood up from my bed after three days, was working in less than two weeks. I do not disbelieve the tale; but it could have happened to a different man. I cannot remember my tumble into the river, nor anything before: nothing of home, father, mother.

      Alfred tells me it will return to me in time. But what if I am concealing some terrible secret from myself? I fear what I might have forgotten. Is that what I was so close to discovering when I cut myself last night? Am I running from some ghastly crime? Am I evil? Maybe I am a thief, a footpad, a murderer and do not know it. I shake these wonderings from my head: I do not want to fall into distraction and cut myself again.

      Why not? breathes the voice in my head, quite calm and reasonable. You will heal. You have seen it.

      I look at myself in the bright edge of the steel blade. I see brown eyes edged with dark lashes, a beaked nose, a broad mouth. Not the face of a wolf, or a bear. A man.

      This is what you are, says the voice. However different or strange, you are a man.

      I am not convinced. I shake the voice away, for all its kindness, and examine the sides of beef, hoping the sight of their symmetry might