Pincher Martin Read online

  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.

  “I
f 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.”

  He paused for a moment and concentrated on the feeling in the flesh round his window. His hands and skin felt lumpy. He swivelled his eyes sideways and saw that there might indeed be a slight distortion of the semicircle of the eye-hollows.

  “Heat lumps? When it rains I shall strip and have a bath. If I haven’t been rescued by then.”

  He pressed with the fingers of his right hand the skin round his eyes. There were heat lumps on the side of his face, that extended down beneath the bristles. The sky pressed on them but they knew no other feeling.

  “I must turn in. Go to bed. And stay awake.”

  The day went grey and hot. Dreary.

  “I said I should be sick. I said I must watch out for symptoms.”

  He went down to the water-hole and crawled in. He drank until he could hear water washing about in his belly. He crawled out backwards and dimensions were mixed up. The surface of the rock was far too hard, far too bright, far too near. He could not gauge size at all.

  There was no one else to say a word.

  You’re not looking too good, old man.

  “How the hell can I tell how I look?”

  He saw a giant impending and flinched before he could connect the silver head with his chocolate paper. He felt that to stand up would be dangerous for a reason he was not able to formulate. He crawled to the crevice and arranged the clothing. He decided that he must wear everything. Presently he lay with his head out of the crevice on an inflated lifebelt. The sky was bright blue again but very heavy. The opening under his bristles dribbled on.

  “Care Charmer Sleep. Cracker mottoes. Old tags. Rag bag of a brain. But don’t sleep because of the cellar. How sleep the brave. Nat’s asleep. And old gin-soak. Rolled along the bottom or drifting like an old bundle. This is high adventure and anyone can have it. Lie down, rat. Accept your cage. How much rain in this month? How many convoys? How many planes? My hands are larger. All my body is larger and tenderer. Emergency. Action stations. I said I should be ill. I can feel the old scar on my leg tingling more than the rest. Salt in my trousers. Ants in my pants.”

  He hutched himself sideways in the crevice and withdrew his right hand. He felt his cheek with it but the cheek was dry.

  “The tingling can’t be sweat, then.”

  He got his hand back and scratched in his crutch. The edge of the duffle was irritating his face. He remembered that he ought to be wearing the balaclava but was too exhausted to find it. He lay still and his body burned.

  He opened his eyes and the sky was violet over him. There was an irregularity in the eye sockets. He lay there, his eyes unfocused and thought of the heat lumps on his face. He wondered if they would close the sockets altogether.

  Heat lumps.

  The burnings and shiverings of his body succeeded each other as if they were going over him in waves. Suddenly they were waves of molten stuff, solder, melted lead, heated acid, so thick that it moved like oil. Then he was fighting and crying to get out of the crevice.

  He knelt, shaking on the rock. He put his hands down and they hurt when he leaned his weight on them. He peered down at them first with one eye then the other. They swelled and diminished with a slow pulsing.

  “That’s not real. Thread of Life. Hang on. That’s not real.”

  But what was real was the mean size of the hands. They were too big even on the average, butcher’s hands so full of blood that their flesh was pulpy and swollen. His elbows gave way and he fell between his hands. His cheek was against the uniquely hard rock, his mouth open and he was looking blearily back into the crevice. The waves were still in his body and he recognized them. He gritted his teeth and hung on to himself in the centre of his globe.

  “That must mean I’m running a temperature of well over a hundred. I ought to be in hospital.”

  Smells. Formalin. Ether. Meth. Idioform. Sweet chloroform. Iodine.

  Sights. Chromium. White sheets. White bandages. High windows.

  Touc
hes. Pain, Pain, Pain.

  Sounds. Forces programme drooling like a cretin in the ears from the headphones hitched under the fever chart.

  Tastes. Dry lips.

  He spoke again with intense solemnity and significance.

  “I must go sick.”

  He lugged the clothes off his body. Before he had got down to his vest and pants the burning was intolerable so that he tore off his clothes and threw them anywhere. He stood up naked and the air was hot on his body, but the action of being naked seemed to do something, for his body started to shiver. He sat painfully on the wall by the white scar of the Claudian and his teeth chattered.

  “I must keep going somehow.”

  But the horizon would not stay still. Like his hands, the sea pulsed. At one moment the purple line was so far away that it had no significance and the next, so close that he could stretch out his arm and lay hold.

  “Think. Be intelligent.”

  He held his head with both hands and shut his eyes.

  “Drink plenty of water.”

  He opened his eyes and the High Street pulsed below him. The rock was striped with lines of seaweed that he saw presently were black shadows cast by the sun and not seaweed at all. The sea beyond the High Street was dead flat and featureless so that he could have stepped down and walked on it, only his feet were swollen and sore. He took his body with great care to the water-hole and pulled himself in. At once he was refrigerated. He put his face in the water and half-gulped, half-ate it with chattering teeth. He crawled away to the crevice.