abhorred and abhorring

It’s only a shallow indentation in the ice and stone – only a small grave and a mean one, cut out of the frozen earth with spades and spars. That’ll do for him. The only part he cannot bear is the thought of someone else taking the coat from his back, the boots from off his feet. At Hull Fair when he was only a boy someone had stolen his shoes, and he’d been too dog-tired to turn the tables – they might have done other things too if the fancy had struck them, but they’d been content to leave him barefoot in the mud. But that is another indignity, and another time.

The broken spade lies beside them. His bleeding hands are balled in fists, his arms bent at an impossible angle in the grave. There’s a fistful of torn-out hair for his trouble, a rare prize; matted curls torn from the head of a Royal Marine as easily as you’d pull the quills from a goose. The fellow can put it up, even now; the two of them might have done business, once upon a time, but now he grits his teeth and presses Hickey’s face into the earth with his sleeve rather than look at him. He fucks like it’s a grim duty, like he means to bring him to some useful conclusion with a bayonet-point pressing into his throat and a prick up his arse. Hickey talks and talks in a continual stream, anything to underscore that he isn’t yet dead – thin jeers, lovers’ talk, Solly this and Solly that as the blood runs down.

This is his last rite, his sacrament. The men are standing around like it’s a divine service they’re watching – no hisses and jeers, only a discomfortable silence under the sound of groans and gasps. Perhaps they’ll leave him be afterward after all. Sailors are superstitious, and these men might not have the stomach to paw through another man’s leavings, as though frozen spunk on a dead man’s thigh were any more vile than shit and blood and cast-up puke.

Hickey will die here. Hickey will melt away into the land, he will walk these stones as a hungry ghost, he will whisper in the witch’s ear – here he lies very still, being buggered, and feels with his fingertips for the splintered wood of the broken spade-handle. A man is softest after he’s fucked.