The Vorrh

convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three-deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated each other in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with working men; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods, and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.
    At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river which so gently flowed through his home town. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty, it was for fishing, idle boating and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.
    He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family whilst on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey Side.
    William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.
    Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muybridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting and ill.
    They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muybridge sat, and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muybridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them further forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk, and began to make notes of his observations.
    ‘Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?’
    The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. ‘Here,’ he said.
    ‘Tell me,’ the surgeon said, ‘when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?’
    ‘I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.’ His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. ‘Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside-down.’
    ‘How do you sleep?’
    ‘Badly. Sometimes not at all.’
    Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.
    ‘Is that a bad sign?’ asked Muybridge.
    ‘No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter, the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.’
    ‘I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.’ But before Muybridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.
    The questions lasted for