Pincher Martin (14 page)

The globe of darkness turned a complicated window towards the sky. The voice evaporated at the gate like escaping steam on a dry day.

“I’m working too hard. If I don’t watch out I shall exhaust myself. Anyway I’ll hand it to you, Chris. I don’t think many people would——”

He stopped suddenly, then began again.

“Chris. Christopher! Christopher Hadley Martin——” 

The words dried up.

There was an instrument of examination, a point that knew it existed. There were sounds that came out of the lower part of a face. They had no meaning attached to them. They were useless as tins thrown out with the lids buckled back.

“Christopher. Christopher!”

He reached out with both arms as though to grab the words before they dried away. The arms appeared before the window and in complete unreason they filled him with terror.

“Oh, my God.”

He wrapped his arms round him, hugged himself close, rocked from side to side. He began to mutter.

“Steady. Steady. Keep calm.”

H
e got up and sat gingerly on the side of the trench. He could feel the separate leaves of rock and their edges through his trousers and pants. He shifted farther down the trench to a place where the leaves were smoothly cut but his backside seemed to fare no better.

“I am who I was.”

He examined the shape of his window and the
window-box
of hair that was flourishing between his two noses. He turned the window down and surveyed all that he could see of himself. The sweater was dragged out into tatters and wisps of wool. It lay in folds beneath his chest and the sleeves were concertina’d. The trousers beneath the sweater were shiny and grey instead of black and beneath them the seaboot stockings drooped like the wads of waste that a stoker wipes his hands on. There was no body to be seen, only a conjunction of worn materials. He eyed the peculiar shapes that lay across the trousers indifferently for a while until at last it occurred to him how strange it was that lobsters should sit there. Then he was suddenly seized with a terrible loathing for lobsters and flung them away so that they cracked on the rock. The dull pain of the blow extended him into them again and they became his hands, lying discarded where he had tossed them.

He cleared his throat as if about to speak in public.

“How can I have a complete identity without a mirror? That is what has changed me. Once I was a man with twenty photographs of myself—myself as this and that with the signature scrawled across the bottom right-hand corner as a stamp and seal. Even when I was in the Navy there was that photograph in my identity card so that every now and then I could look and see who I was. Or perhaps I did not even need to look, but was content to wear the card next to my heart, secure in the knowledge that it was there, proof of me in the round. There were mirrors too, triple mirrors, more separate than the three lights in this window. I could arrange the side ones so that there was a double reflection and spy myself from the side or back in the reflected mirror as though I were watching a stranger. I could spy myself and assess the impact of Christopher Hadley Martin on the world. I could find assurance of my solidity in the bodies of other people by warmth and caresses and triumphant flesh. I could be a character in a body. But now I am this thing in here, a great many aches of bruised flesh, a bundle of rags and those lobsters on the rock. The three lights of my window are not enough to identify me however sufficient they were in the world. But there were other people to describe me to myself—they fell in love with me, they applauded me, they caressed this body, they defined it for me. There were the people I got the better of, people who disliked me, people who quarrelled with me. Here I have nothing to quarrel with. I am in danger of losing definition. I am an album of snapshots, random, a whole show of trailers of old films. The most I know of my face is the scratch of bristles, an itch, a sense of tingling warmth.”

He cried out angrily.

“That’s no face for a man! Sight is like exploring the night with a flashlight. I ought to be able to see all round my head——”

He climbed down to the water-hole and peered into the pool. But his reflection was inscrutable. He backed out and went down to the Red Lion among the littered shells. He found a pool of salt water on one of the sea rocks. The pool was an inch deep under the sun with one
green-weeded
limpet and three anemones. There was a tiny fish, less than an inch long, sunning itself on the bottom. He leaned over the pool, looked through the displayed works of the fish and saw blue sky far down. But no matter how he turned his head he could see nothing but a patch of darkness with the wild outline of hair round the edge.

“The best photograph was the one of me as Algernon. The one as Demetrius wasn’t bad, either—and as Freddy with a pipe. The make-up took and my eyes looked really wide apart. There was the Night Must Fall one. And that one from The Way of the World. Who was I? It would have been fun playing opposite Jane. That wench was good for a tumble.”

The rock hurt the scar on the front of his right thigh. He shifted his leg and peered back into the pool. He turned his head sideways again, trying to catch the right angle for his profile—the good profile, the left one, elevated a little and with a half-smile. But first a shadowy nose and then the semicircle of an eye socket got in the way. He turned back to inquire of his full face but his breathing ruffled the water. He puffed down and the dark head wavered and burst. He jerked up and there was a lobster supporting his weight at the end of his right sleeve.

He made the lobster into a hand again and looked down at the pool. The little fish hung in sunshine with a steady trickle of bubbles rising by it from the oxygen tube. The bottles at the back of the bar loomed through the aquarium as cliffs of jewels and ore.

“No, thanks, old man, I’ve had enough.”

“He’s had enough. Ju hear that, George? Ju hear?”

“Hear what, Pete?”

“Dear ol’ Chris has had enough.”

“Come on, Chris.”

“Dear οl’ Chris doesn’t drink ’n doesn’t smoke.”

“Likes company, old man.”

“Likes company. My company. I’m disgusted with myself. Yur not goin’ to say ‘Time, Gentlemen, please’, miss, are you, gentlemen? He promised his old mother. He said. She said. She said, Chris, my child, let the ten commandments look after themselves she said. But don’t drink and don’t smoke. Only foke, I beg your pardon, miss, had I known such an intemperate word would have escaped the barrier of my teeth I would have taken steps to have it indictated in the sex with an obelisk or employed a perifris.”

“Come on, Pete. Take his other arm, Chris.”

“Unhand me, Gentlemen. By heaven I’ll make a fish of him that lets me. I am a free and liberal citizen of this company with a wife and child of indifferent sex.”

“It’s a boy, old man.”

“Confidently, George, it’s not the sex but the wisdom. Does it know who I am? Who we are? Do you love me, George?”

“You’re the best producer we’ve ever had, you drunken old soak.”

“I meant soak, miss. George, you’re the most divinely angelic director the bloody theatre ever had and Chris is the best bloody juvenile, aren’t you, Chris?”

“Anything you say, eh, George?”

“Definitely, old man, definitely.”

“So we all owe everything to the best bloody woman in the world. I love you, Chris. Father and mother is one flesh. And so my uncle. My prophetic uncle. Shall I elect you to my club?”

“How about toddling home, now, Pete?”

“Call it the Dirty Maggot Club. You member? You speak Chinese? You open sideways or only on Sundays?”

“Come on, Pete.”

“We maggots are there all the week. Y’see when the Chinese want to prepare a very rare dish they bury a fish in a tin box. Presently all the lil’ maggots peep out and start to eat. Presently no fish. Only maggots. It’s no bloody joke being a maggot. Some of ’em are phototropic. Hey, George—phototropic!”

“What of it, Pete?”

“Phototropic. I said phototropic, miss.”

“Finish your maggots, Pete and let’s go.”

“Oh, the maggots. Yes, the maggots. They haven’t finished yet. Only got to the fish. It’s a lousy job crawling round the inside of a tin box and Denmark’s one of the worst. Well, when they’ve finished the fish, Chris, they start on each other.”

“Cheerful thought, old man.”

“The little ones eat the tiny ones. The middle-sized ones eat the little ones. The big ones eat the middle-sized ones. Then the big ones eat each other. Then there are two and then one and where there was a fish there is now one huge, successful maggot. Rare dish.”

“Got his hat, George?”

“Come on, Pete! Now careful——”

“I love you, Chris, you lovely big hunk. Eat me.”

“Get his arm over your shoulder.”

“There’s nearly half of me left’n, I’m phototropic. You eat George yet? ’N when there’s only one maggot left the Chinese dig it up——”

“You can’t sit down here, you silly sot!”

“Chinese dig it up——”

“For Christ’s sake, stop shouting. We’ll have a copper after us.”

“Chinese dig it up——”

“Snap out of it, Pete. How the hell do the Chinese know when to dig it up?”

“They know. They got X-ray eyes. Have you ever heard a spade knocking on the side of a tin box, Chris? Boom! Boom! Just like thunder. You a member?”

*

There was a round of ripples by the three rocks. He watched them intently. Then a brown head appeared by the rocks, another and another. One of the heads had a silver knife across its mouth. The knife bent, flapped and he saw the blade was a fish. The seal heaved itself on to the rock while the others dived, leaving dimpled water and circles. The seal ate, calmly in the sun, rejected the head and tail and lay quiet.

“I wonder if they know about men?”

He stood up slowly and the seal turned its head towards him so that he found himself flinching from an implacable stare. He raised his arms suddenly in the gesture of a man who points a gun. The seal heaved round on the rock and dived. It knew about men.

“If I could get near I could kill it and make boots and eat the meat——”

The men lay on the open beach, wrapped in skins. They endured the long wait and the stench. At dusk, great beasts came out of the sea, played round them, then lay down to sleep.

“An oilskin rolled up would look enough like a seal. When they were used to it I should be inside.”

He examined the thought of days. They were a recession like repeated rooms in mirrors hung face to face. All at once he experienced a weariness so intense that it was a pain. He laboured up to the Look-out through the pressure of the sky and all the vast quiet. He made himself examine the empty sea in each quarter. The water was smoother today as though the dead air were flattening it. There was shot silk in swathes, oily-looking patches that became
iridescent
as he watched, like the scum in a ditch. But the wavering of this water was miles long so that a molten sun was elongated, pulled out to nothing here to appear there in a different waver with a sudden blinding dazzle.

“The weather changed while I was in the Red Lion with George and Pete.”

He saw a seal head appear for a moment beyond the three rocks and had a sudden wild sight of himself riding a seal across the water to the Hebrides.

“Oh, my God!”

The sound of his voice, flat, yet high and agonized,
intimidated
him. He dropped his arms and huddled down in his body by the Dwarf. A stream of muttered words began to tumble through the hole under his window.

“It’s like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on for ever. And I couldn’t go back to sleep because of the dream of the whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner. I’d lie in the hot, rumpled bed, hot burning hot, trying to shut myself away and know that there were three eternities before the dawn. Everything was the night world, the other world where everything but good could happen, the world of ghosts and robbers and horrors, of things harmless in the daytime coming to life, the wardrobe, the picture in the book, the story, coffins, corpses, vampires, and always squeezing, tormenting darkness, smoke thick. And I’d think of anything because if I didn’t go on thinking I’d remember whatever it was in the cellar down there, and my mind would go walking away from my body and go down three stories defenceless, down the dark stairs past the tall, haunted clock, through the whining door, down the terrible steps to where the coffin ends were crushed in the walls of the cellar—and I’d be held helpless on the stone floor, trying to run back, run away, climb up——”

He was standing, crouched. The horizon came back.

“Oh, my God!”

Waiting for the dawn, the first bird cheeping in the eaves or the tree-tops. Waiting for the police by the smashed car. Waiting for the shell after the flash of the gun.

The ponderous sky settled a little more irresistibly on his shoulders.

“What’s the matter with me? I’m adult. I know what’s what. There’s no connection between me and the kid in the cellar, none at all. I grew up. I firmed my life. I have it under control. And anyway there’s nothing down there to be frightened of. Waiting for the result. Waiting for that speech—not the next one after this, I know that, but where I go across and take up the cigarette-box. There’s a black hole where that speech ought to be and he said you fluffed too much last night, old man. Waiting for the wound to be dressed. This will hurt a little. Waiting for the dentist’s chair.

“I don’t like to hear my voice falling dead at my mouth like a shot bird.”

He put a hand up to either side of his window and watched two black lines diminish it. He could feel the roughness of bristles under either palm and the heat of cheeks.

“What’s crushing me?”

He turned his sight round the horizon and the only thing that told him when he had completed the circle was the brighter waver under the sun.

“I shall be rescued any day now. I must not worry. Trailers out of the past are all right but I must be careful when I see things that never happened, like—I have water and food and intelligence and shelter.”