The Thing About Thugs Read Online Free PDF Page B

can read and write.
    He remembers his various professions and jobs (at least from the time he turned eighteen and became aware of his own thoughts; became a man, as he puts it) in terms of what he had when he went into it and what he had when he left it. As a rule, he has come out of each profession a richer man. He is a self-made man, that he is, and he takes no nonsense. Well, most of the time. There were a few occasions when a profession seemed to be a complete waste. For example, when at the age of twenty-one, he worked for a taxidermist in Leeds. It paid little, and left him with a smell in his nostrils that deprived him of sleep for days. When he gave up the position after two years and left for London, where he was finally headed, thank heavens, he could only think of the experience as a dead loss, a complete write-off in the narrow account book of life. For he had not even saved money in that position; he would have had nothing to show for those two years if he had not made off with some of the taxidermist’s recent work. And yet now, years later, even that experience was coming in useful.
    As John May slowly peels and slices the rotting skin off the skull, he wonders if M’lord would have continued to employ him without the skills he had picked up at the taxidermist’s. For John May, while he can do nothing but admire someone in M’lord’s position, is not blind to the fact that M’lord is unlikely to prepare his phrenological specimens himself. And there are few who can do it as well and as quickly as John May.
    For, thinks John May, slicing and drilling away, preparing a skull as a phrenological specimen is much simpler than stuffing an animal. Take the skin, for instance. With an animal, the skin has to be taken off carefully, with minimum incisions. After all, it has to be put back on a stuffed animal, and show as few flaws as possible. But here, well, here you can hack it off as you wish, as long as the skull is not damaged. And once the brain has been dissolved and emptied, you can colour the skull exactly the right ‘natural’ shade. This too, John May learned from that miserly, brutish old taxidermist in Leeds, for stuffed animals need to look natural: marble eyes, hide paint, fin and fishtail colours... He had his version of skull paint, and that was his secret, for it enabled him to prepare the skulls for exhibit more quickly than nature would permit. But now, John May is done for the evening. The acid will need time to work. He needs to wash his hands and join his hungry family for dinner. There is a time for everything, and this skull will have to await John May’s procedures the following morning. He walks into the kitchen and locks the scullery door behind him. His wife and children get nightmares if they see a skull. John May considers this a sign of weakness and is faintly disappointed, not in his wife and daughter (for they are women), but in his two sons. He does not believe in such things as ghosts: he is a no-nonsense man, a self-made man.
    Outside, the wind picks up; it fumbles with the chimney cowls, spins the weathercocks, bangs loose shutters all over East London.
8
    [WILLIAM T. MEADOWS, NOTES ON A THUG: CHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCES, 1840]
     
    ‘Bhowanee is a many-armed goddess, sahib. A mischievous devil to you, for you are favoured by your God of Reason, who enables you to read men like books. But to us — to me too, before you shed on me some of the illumination of your greater God — she is the mother of the world, protectress and patroness of our order. All this you know, Kaptaan Sahib, for I have already narrated the tale of my order to you. I will not tarry here, nor repeat myself, but proceed with my own story, the story of how I became a Thug.
    ‘When I was about twelve or thirteen, my father came up to me and my mother and said, it is time. At this, my mother looked both sad and proud. I knew my father went out for “trade” with his friends, sometimes for months on