Stranger Things

Black's Bones

Black is ostensibly a Psychic and seller of bones, human bones. Less ostensibly he is a raiser of hopes, a crusher of dreams and a dealer in the macabre.

His shop is back from the main shopping precinct, located in a premises in a little alleyway that people struggle to recollect if asked. The building has a narrow frontage; it is as if a thin paperback in a packed bookshelf has been forced in between two larger volumes. As if to emphasise the narrowness as the frontage Black only has two items on display in the front window. A worm riddled oar placed vertically in front of a painting of an ancient whaling ship at sea. In the foreground two wooden boats packed with whalers cut through the scudding waves in chase of a solitary, bloodied sperm whale. Those of an inquisitive nature will stop and see that the brass plaque on the oar says it is from a skiff of the whaler Portland out of Nantucket in 1817.

I supply Black with old relics from all sorts of sources. House sales, downbeat auctions, items my deadbeat friends can scrounge from sources I care not to question. They all contribute to the jettison of the dead that Black seems to treasure so much. It just has to be bone, human bone. That is all that matters to Black. The more personal, the more traveled, the better. A Tibetan Mala, an African tribal nose ring, a pile of stained Waterloo teeth human head will all find a place on his dusty shelves. He almost jumped out of his whale bone seat when I managed to secure a Jivaro shrunken head for him. You may think things such things uncommonly rare but the testimony of his cluttered shop would take issue with you on that matter. The medical trade is grisly selective in its needs and specialist collectors uncommonly ghoulish in theirs.

I pass him a piece of a finger bone I have dug from the mud in the tidal reaches of the Thames. 'Ah yes,' he says portentously holding it up to the light,' a finger bone.' His eyes roll up like pickled eggs floating in brine and like a blind man his fingers test the jagged edges of the broken knuckle. 'A finger of a pirate hung from a cage at Tybourne docks and left to rot.' And for a moment his flicking eyeballs suggests he is reliving the rogues experiences, reaching back through time to tavern brawls, fights with customs men and the taking of Chinese treasure ships in the crystal waters of the Orient.

I sit and spin in Black's high backed chair, his throne. Found by Black in a tattooists it is made of whale skin, braced with bone rib and slightly waxy to the touch. He acquired it from a French tattooist for a price tag that would make the Queen of Sheba's Chief Eunuch wince. But it was worth every franc. Sit in it, close your eyes and your head fills with the dull flapping of fluttering canvas, hot tarred ships timbers and the cries of the wandering albatross.

Black is a gaunt, serious man, with a rumour of a smile, a goatee beard of whispery thinness and a way of assessing you as if for a coffin. His thin white arms poke out too far from his oddly unfashionable frock coat and his rickety fingers play incessantly with each other when he talks, which is rarely.

He places the finger bone carefully on his wooden workbench and returns to his whittling. Black is a great whittler of things, mostly bone. He sits on a high stool, bent close over his pieces as he works, as if the light is constantly fading about him. He hums as he carves and drifts off into a series of chants like an Indian shaman. Sometimes he whistles, sometimes he sings, flipping from language to language as he goes from dirge to hymn to sailors shanties. Odd things that are disjoined, like he is re-discovering the knots in the rope of time of his memories.

He pauses and lays his knife on the table and lifts his piece up to inspect it. 'I find myself caught somewhere between being a horologist and anthropologist,' he muses. 'There being no official name for a bone collector. I am, officially, outside the boundaries of scientific categorisation, bone collecting not being important enough to be a 'gist' of some designation, it appears my endeavours bear no official recognition.' He finds his smile and shows it to me through a row of broken teeth then hides it quickly away.