Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (4 page)

“Poor little fellow, he—or was it she—was scalded almost to the knee. The suppertime soup, the cabbage leaves bobbing in it—I remember, though, the suppertime soup. And the faces round the table, so many, many faces. And such meagre soup that many a time, my small stomach sonorous as a pair of maracas, I would creep down in the silence of the night to scoop up a little of Dapple’s steaming mash on my fingers, for myself.

“Indeed, though one would scarcely credit it, for many years my mother, in error, called me by the name of an elder sister who had died in infancy. My father, on the other hand, a grey, precise man who smelled of horse dung and kept a list of all our names (together with brief descriptive notes) sewn to the inside of his black greasy hat, scrupulously referred to me by my baptismal name whenever he chanced to see me, removing his hat and running a gnarled finger down the columns until he came to the thumbnail sketch which tallied with the wide-eyed, pigtailed child before him. Those were the only occasions on which I recall him taking off his hat.

“Jason, cigarettes.”

The boy, cross-legged at her feet, leapt into darkness; came the sound of an unsnapped case, a clicked lighter. The red tip of the cigarette glowed in the shadows like a warning traffic-light—STOP—and the petals on another full-blown rose trembled but did not fall.

“Forced into myself, I became bookish, walking five miles to the free library in my cracked clogs. I read, I read, I read. Anything, everything … My father, dipping the quill in the penny bottle of ink, laboriously added ‘steel-rimmed spectacles’ to the note beside my name in his directory. Charity spectacles. I was so ashamed.

“But I was a helpless addict; so precious were those books to me that I carried them around next to my heart, beneath the ragged liberty vest from the parish poor-box but above the layer of newspaper that, for warmth, my mother sewed around us, renewing it each autumn.

“My mind grew in the darkness like a flower. But my isolation increased. I could not communicate my love, my wonder, my veritable lust for things of the spirit, the intellect, with my parents—nor, indeed, with my teachers, for them I hated. They bound my face in iron: first my eyes, then my teeth.

“ ‘Teeth in brace,’ my father amended by the guttering light of the farthing candle. Or was it a penny candle? Or a halfpenny rush dip? One forgets—one forgets.”

Again the brief cry; then she resumed her narrative.

“Life went on. The years passed. The bright peonies of the menstrual flow blossomed. My breasts grew like young doves. I had a fever and they cropped my hair. To my wonder and delight it grew again in little soft curls.

“I stared at my reflection in Dapple’s trough. I took off my spectacles and pulled the brace from my mouth. I dimly saw this white face and this golden topknot and I was afraid, for the child I had been was dead; dead and replaced by a beautiful woman whom I did not know.

“Jason, the candles.”

He—the boy; slight, fair, delicate—struck matches, and the branched candlesticks sprang to life.

Her face was a painted mask of beauty. Eyes bluer than their blue-stained lids, precise discs of scarlet on her white cheeks, lambent hair piled above the winking lights of her tiara. And the diamonds burned with no more dangerous fire than did her white breasts, exposed to the nipples by the black chiffon robe that fell away from her thighs.

She was as beautiful as Venus rising from the waves in the celebrated picture by Botticelli, only more so. She was as beautiful as the celebrated bust of Nefertiti in the Louvre, only more so. She was as beautiful as the statue of the young David by the celebrated Michelangelo that gazes on the thronged traffic of Milan with such serenity, only more so.

Slowly she ground out her cigarette in the wounded onyx of an ashtray on the arm of her chair. She resumed her narrative.

“At fifteen, I went walking in the park. I glowed with beauty on the boating pond, in a canoe, at half a crown an hour. I disputed about Plato, whose books I read deeply, with a small brown man in a loin cloth, and all the time I gazed on my reflection in the rippling water.

“When I concentrated on my reflection, I
was
that lovely being.
Je suis un autre.
Dizzied, drunk on the miracle of arriving at a personality with the suddenness of epiphany, I turned from the pool to make some brilliant point to my companion—and my new self fell away like a cloak. I wept, stammered: ten years old again.

“I ran, stumbling, back to the familiar warmth of the stable, to weep saltily into Dapple’s warm mane. And there my mother, coming from the streets with her hands full of potato peelings that she gleaned from the ashcans of our neighbours (when no one was looking; she had a fierce pride), to enrich Dapple’s mash … my mother, returning, saw me.

“ ‘Susan,’ she said, ‘hush your moitherings.’ And then she paused, bewildered, laid her burden on a nearby tea chest and came close to me, so close that I could count the grey hairs growing from her nostrils. Her rheumy eyes filled, overflowed.

“ ‘But you be not my Susan!’ she cried. ‘My Susan didn’t live to be as old as you!’ And she buried her head in her apron and her shoulders heaved with sobbing. But, selfishly, I dried my own tears on Dapple’s tail, for my mother had at last recognised my true identity and I perceived a glimmer of hope.

“Jason, my knee.”

He knelt at once and began to massage her knee. The bones clicked under his long fingers. A candle flame flickered, casting a momentary shadow over the lower part of her face resembling a small black moustache and imperial.

“ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I am so shy.’ It was the first remark I remember addressing to her in my whole life. ‘Mother,’ I repeated; the word tasted wholesome as bread and milk in my mouth.

“She gazed at me thoughtfully, rolling a corner of her apron into a probe and cleaning wax from her ear with it. Then she gave me the formula, irradiating my life.

“ ‘If you picture them all on the lavatory, constipated, straining, then all the toffee-nosed bastards will seem defenceless and pathetic,’ she said.

“ ‘THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.’

“It was a revelation. I rushed out into the world, never to return, repeating those words, living by them.

“Jason, the world was my
OYSTER!”

Her voice rang like a sudden, brass-throated trumpet. The full-blown rose at last allowed itself to collapse, almost with the quality of muffled applause. The woman’s beauty was so intense that it seemed to have the quality of a deformity, so far was it from the human norm. The bones in her knees jostled one another with a faint mumbling.

As if recollecting vague, soft, fragrant, long-ago things, she murmured (more to herself than to the boy): “Ah, Jason, the childish thighs and baby buttocks of great men. You can stop massaging.”

He drew away. She lit another cigarette at the candle flame. Blinking, he drew a hand through his hair. The candle light shone along the brace in his teeth, made blinding pools in the steel-rimmed spectacles over his eyes. He backed, bumping against the mahogany table where the petals pooled redly.

“Jason,” she asked sharply, “why are you staring at me? Jason?”

He coughed. He fidgeted, the toes of his bare feet curling and uncurling in the thick carpet.

“Jason?” more urgently.

“And do you look pathetic on the lavatory, mother?”

The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers; she opened and closed her mouth but not a sound came out. She crashed forward on to the carpet and lay there, a tree felled, motionless.

The boy went to the door and vanished, laughing, into the night.

The Village, take a fright.
In the rookeries.

Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneters cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums.

In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.

A Hopping Giles gets a bloody Jemmy on the cross of a cut-throat; the snotters crib belchers, bird’s eye wipes, blue billies and Randal’s men.

In a boozing ken in the Holy Land, a dunk-horned cutter—a cock-eyed clack box in flashy benjamin and blood red fancy—shed a tear by the I desire.

But when he got the water of life down the common sewer, he bullyragged so antiscripturally that the barney hipped and nabbed the rust.

“This shove in the mouth makes me shoot the cat! Me dumpling depot is fair all-overish!”

He certainly had his hump up. He absquatulated. The bung cried: “Square the omee for the cream of the valley!” But the splodger had mizzled with his half-a-grunter.

At his ruggy carser, his poll—a killing, ginger-hackled skull-thatcher—kept on the nose for her jomer.

She had faked the rubber for her mendozy and got him up an out and out glorious sinner. There was an alderman in chains, a Ben Flake, a neddy of Sharp’s Alley blood worms, with Irish apricots, Joe Savace and storrac.

“Pray God,” she said, “that he be neither beargeared, bleary, blued, primed, lumpy, top-heavy, moony, scammered, on the ran-tan, ploughed, muddled, obfuscated, swipy, kisky, sewed up nor all mops and brooms! Or that he hasn’t lapped the gutter, can’t see a hole in a ladder or been to Bungay Fair and lose both his legs!”

But what a flare-up in the soush! He dropped into her on the spot. He’d got a capital twist for a batty fang and he showed her it was dragging time; she was sick as a horse. He was a catchy fancy-bloke.

“You mouldy old bed-fagot, you rotten old gooseberry pudden, you ugly old Gill, you flea-ridden old moll!” he blasted. “I’ll give you jessie, you Mullingar heifer!”

A barnacled cove (a spoffy blackberry swagger with a Newgate fringe) from the top floor back sang out: “Knife it, you head beetler! Stow faking!” But got a stunning fag on the twopenny that sent him half-way to Albertopolis.

She had bought the rabbit with that slubberdegullion. He peppered her and clumped her and leathered her till she went flop down on the Rory O’More and then he stepped it for the frog and toad, to go to Joe Blake the Bartlemy.

He hopped the twig on her.

“He ought to go to the vertical care-grinder!” she chived. “He ought to be marinated! I’ll never poll up with a liver-faced, chatty, beef-headed, cupboard-headed, culver-headed, fiddle-faced, glumpish, squabby dab tros like him again!

“I’m fairly in half-mourning—it won’t fadge, it just won’t fadge. He gives me the Jerry go Nimbles. I’ll stun him—I’ll streak. I’ll pick up my sticks and cut.”

So she bolted and took a speel on the drum to the top of Rome.

On Shitten Saturday, the worms pinned that scaly shaver of hers in a Tom and Jerry for starring the glaze; he went over the stile at Spike Park and got topped.

Glossary