Pincher Martin Read online

  Nathaniel bowed and beamed his way into the room and stood looking down at the window.

  “I thought I might catch you. I’m back for the weekend.” Then as an afterthought: “Can I come in?”

  “My dear man!”

  Nathaniel operated on his great-coat, peered round solemnly as though the question of where to put it was a major one.

  “Here. Let me take that for you—sit down—I’m—my dear man!”

  Nathaniel was grinning too.

  “It’s good to see you, Christopher.”

  “And you can stay? You don’t have to rush away?”

  “I’ve come up to give a lecture to the——”

  “But not this evening?”

  “No. I can stay this evening.”

  The centre sat opposite, right on the outside of its window—right out in the world.

  “We’ll talk. Let’s talk, Nat.”

  “How’s the social whirl?”

  “How’s London?”

  “Doesn’t like lectures on heaven.”

  “Heaven?”

  Then the body was laughing, louder and louder and the water was flowing again. Nat was grinning and blushing too.

  “I know. But you don’t have to make it worse.”

  He smeared away the water and hiccupped.

  “Why heaven?”

  “The sort of heaven we invented for ourselves after death, if we aren’t ready for the real one.”

  “You would—you curious creature!”

  Nathaniel became serious. He peered upwards, raised an index finger and consulted a reference book beyond the ceiling.

  “Take us as we are now and heaven would be sheer negation. Without form and void. You see? A sort of black lightning, destroying everything that we call life——”

  The laughter came back.

  “I don’t see and I don’t much care but I’ll come to your lecture. My dear Nat—you’ve no idea how glad I am to see you!”

  The burning fuse whipped through Nathaniel’s face and he was gone. The centre remained looking down into the funnel. His mouth was open in astonishment and terror.

  “And I liked him as much as that!”

  *

  Black and feeling one’s way to the smooth steel ladder that glinted only faintly in the cloud light. The centre tried to resist, like a child trying to resist a descent into the midnight cellar but its legs bore it on. Up and up, from the waist to the level of the fo’c’sle, up past Β gun. Shall I meet him? Will he stand there tonight?

  And there, sketched against the clouds in Indian ink, random in limb and gesture, an old binder by a rick, was Nathaniel, swaying and grabbing at a midnight salute. Wotcher, Nat, rose in his throat and he swallowed it. Pretend not to see. Be as little connected as possible. Fire a fuse from the bridge that will blow him away from her body and clear the way for me. We are all past the first course, we have eaten the fish.

  And it may not work. He may not bother to lay aft and pray to his aeons. Good-bye, Nat, I loved you and it is not in my nature to love much. But what can the last maggot but one do? Lose his identity?

  Nathaniel stood swaying and spread-eagled in the dark, understanding obediently that he had not been seen. Instead he stood away from the officer’s approach and fumbled on down the ladder.

  Everything set, the time, the place, the loved one.

  “You’re early for once, thank God. Course o-four-five, speed twenty-eight knots. Nothing in sight and we press on for another hour.”

  “Anything new?”

  “Same as was. We’re thirty miles north of the convoy, all on our own, going to send off the signal in an hour’s time. The old man’ll be up for that. There you are. No zigzag. Dead easy. Oh—the moon’ll be up in ten minutes’ time and we’d make quite a target if we tripped over a U-boat. Pass it on. Nighty night.”

  “Sweet dreams.”

  He heard the steps descending. He crossed to the starboard side of the bridge and looked aft. There was engine-noise, outline of the funnel. The wake spread out dull white astern and a secondary wave fanned out from midships. The starboard side of the quarter-deck was just visible in outline but the surface was dark by contrast and all the complications of the throwers, the depth-charges, the sweeps and lifted gun made it very difficult to see whether there was a figure leaning on the rail among them. He stared down and wondered whether he saw or created in his mind, the mantis shape with forelegs lifted to the face.

  It is not Nathaniel leaning there, it is Mary.

  I must. I must. Don’t you understand, you bloody bitch?

  “Messenger!”

  “Sir.”

  “Get me a cup of cocoa.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “And messenger—never mind.”

  Feet descending the ladder. Darkness and the wind of speed. Glow over to starboard like a distant fire from a raided city. Moonrise.

  “Port look-out!”

  “Sir?”

  “Nip down to the wheel-house and get me the other pair of night-glasses. I think these need overhauling. You’ll find them in the rack over the chart table.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Ι’ll take over your sector while you’re gone.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  Feet descending the ladder.

  Now.

  Ham it a bit. Casual saunter to the port side. Pause.

  Now. Now. Now.

  Scramble to the binnacle, fling yourself at the voice pipe, voice urgent, high, sharp, frightened——

  “Hard a-starboard for Christ’s sake!”

  A destroying concussion that had no part in the play. Whiteness rising like a cloud, universe spinning. The shock of a fall somewhere, shattering, mouth filled—and he was fighting in all directions with black impervious water.

  His mouth screamed in range at the whiteness that rose out of the funnel.

  “And it was the right bloody order!”

  Eaten.

  He was no longer able to look at the waves, for every few minutes they were hidden by the rising whiteness. He made his sight creep out and look at his clothed body. The clothes were wringing wet and the seaboot stockings smeared like mops. His mouth said something mechanical.

  “I wish I hadn’t kicked off my seaboots when I was in the water.”

  The centre told itself to pretend and keep on pretending.

  The mouth had its own wisdom.

  “There is always madness, a refuge like a crevice in the rock. A man who has no more defence can always creep into madness like one of those armoured things that scuttle among weed down where the mussels are.”

  Find something to look at.

  “Madness would account for everything, wouldn’t it, my sweet?”

  Do, if not look.

  He got up and staggered in the wind with the rain and spray pelting him. He went down the High Street and there was his oilskin made into a basin and full of water. He took his sou’wester and began to bail out the oilskin and take the water to the water-hole. He concentrated on the laws of water, how it fell or lay, how predictable it was and manageable. Every now and then the rock shook, a white cloud rose past the look-out and there were rivulets of foam in the upper trenches. When he had emptied his oilskin he held it up, drained it and put it on. Fooling with buttons the centre could turn away from what was to come. While he did this he was facing the Claudian where the foam now hung in gobs and the oilskin thrust him against the cut. As he stood pinned, he was struck a blow in the back and bucketfuls of water fell in the trench. It washed round then settled scummily in the bottom. He felt his way along the Claudian to the crevice and backed himself in. He put on his sou’wester and laid his forehead on his arms. The world turned black and came to him through sound.

  “If a madman heard it he would think it was thunder and of course it would be. There is no need to listen like that. It will only be thunder over the horizon where the ships are passing to and fro. Listen to the storm instead. It is going to fl
ail on this rock. It is going to beat a poor wretch into madness. He does not want to go mad only he will have to. Think of it! All you people in warm beds, a British sailor isolated on a rock and going mad not because he wants to but because the sea is a terror—the worst terror there is, the worst imaginable.”

  The centre co-operated but with an ear cocked. It concentrated now on the words that spilt out of the mouth because with the fringes of flesh and hair lowered over the window the words could be examined as the thoughts had been. It provided background music.

  “Oh help, help! I am dying of exposure. I am starving, dying of thirst. I lie like driftwood caught in a cleft. I have done my duty for you and this is my reward. If you could only see me you would be wrung with pity. I was young and strong and handsome with an eagle profile and wavy hair; I was brilliantly clever and I went out to fight your enemies. I endured in the water, I fought the whole sea. I have fought a rock, and gulls and lobsters and seals and a storm. Now I am thin and weak. My joints are like knobs and my limbs like sticks. My face is fallen in with age and my hair is white with salt and suffering. My eyes are dull stones——”

  The centre quivered and dwindled. There was another noise beyond the storm and background music and sobbed words from the mouth.

  “—my chest is like the ribs of a derelict boat and every breath is an effort——”

  The noise was so faint in comparison with the uproar of the wind and rain and waves that it caught and glued attention. The mouth knew this too and tried harder.

  “I am going mad. There is lightning playing on the skirts of a wild sea. I am strong again——”

  And the mouth sang.

  The centre still attended through the singing, the background music, the uproar from outside. The noise came again. The centre could confuse it for a while with thunder.

  “Ηοé, hoé! Thor’s lightning challenges me! Flash after flash, rippling spurts of white fire, bolts flung at Prometheus, blinding white, white, white, searing, the aim of the sky at the man on the rock——”

  The noise, if one attended as the centre was forced to attend was dull and distant. It might have been thunder or gun-fire. It might have been the sound of a drum and the mouth seized on that.

  “Rata tat tat tat! The soldiers come, my Emperor is taken! Rat a tat!”

  It might have been the shifting of furniture in an upper room and the mouth panicked after that thought with the automatic flick of an insect.

  “Put it down here. Roll back that corner of the carpet and then you can get the table out. Shall we have it next to the radiogram? Take that record off and put on something rocklike and heroic——”

  It might have been flour-sacks slid down an iron ladder to resound on the steel deck.

  “Hard a-starboard! Hard a-starboard!”

  It might have been the shaking of the copper sheet in the wings.

  “I must have the lead or I shall leave the coal flat——”

  The cellar door swinging to behind a small child who must go down, down in his sleep to meet the thing he turned from when he was created.

  “Off with his head! Down on the block among the kindling and coal-dust!”

  But the centre knew. It recognized with a certainity that made the quacking of the mouth no more help than hiccups. The noise was the grating and thump of a spade against an enormous tin box that had been buried.

  13

  “Mad,” said the mouth, “raving mad. I can account for everything, lobsters, maggots, hardness, brilliant reality, the laws of nature, film-trailers, snapshots of sight and sound, flying lizards, enmity—how should a man not be mad? I will tell you what a man is. He goes on four legs till Necessity bends the front end upright and makes a hybrid of him. The finger-prints of those hands are about his spine and just above the rump for proof if you want it. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out in the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there and sets a thunderstorm flickering inside the hardening globe, white, lambent lightning a constant flash and tremble. All your lobsters and film-trailers are nothing but the random intersections of instant bushes of lightning. The sane life of your belly and your cock are on a simple circuit, but how can the stirred pudding keep constant? Tugged at by the pill of the earth, infected by the white stroke that engraved the book, furrowed, lines burned through it by hardship and torment and terror-unbalanced, brain-sick, at your last gasp on a rock in the sea, the pudding has boiled over and you are no worse than raving mad.”

  Sensations. Coffee. Hock. Gin. Wood. Velvet. Nylon. Mouth. Warm, wet nakedness. Caves, slack like a crevice or tight like the mouth of a red anemone. Full of stings. Domination, identity.

  “You are the intersections of all the currents. You do not exist apart from me. If I have gone mad then you have gone mad. You are speaking, in there, you and I are one and mad.”

  The rock shook and shook again. A sudden coldness struck his face and washed under him.

  To be expected.

  “Nathaniel!”

  Black centre, trying to stir itself like a pudding.

  The darkness was shredded by white. He tumbled over among the sensations of the crevice. There was water everywhere and noise and his mouth welcomed both. It spat and coughed. He heaved himself out amid water that swirled to his knees and the wind knocked him down. The trench was like a little sea, like the known and now remembered extravagances of a returning tide among rocks. What had been a dry trench was half-full of moving water on which streaks of foam were circling and interlacing. The wind was like an express in a tunnel and everywhere there was a trickling and washing and pouring. He scrambled up in the trench, without hearing what his mouth said and suddenly he and his mouth were one.

  “You bloody great bully!”

  He got his face above the level of the wall and the wind pulled the cheeks in like an airman’s. Bird-shot slashed. Then the sky above the old woman jumped. It went white. An instant later the light was switched off and the sky fell on him. He collapsed under the enormous pressure and went down in the water of the trench. The weight withdrew and left him struggling. He got up and the sky fell on him again. This time he was able to lurch along the trench because the weight of water was just not sufficient to break him and the sea in the trench was no higher than his knees. The world came back, storm-grey and torn with flying streamers, and he gave it storm-music, crash of timpany, brass blared and a dazzle of strings. He fought a hero’s way from trench to trench through water and music, his clothes shaking and plucked, tattered like the end of a windsock, hands clawing. He and his mouth shouted through the uproar.

  “Ajax! Prometheus!”

  The old woman was looking down at him as he struggled through bouts of white and dark. Then her head with its silver mask was taken by a whiteness and she hunched against the sky with her headless shoulders. He fell in the white trench over the book with his face against the engraving and the insoluble muck filled his mouth. There came a sudden pressure and silence. He was lifted up and thrown down again, struck against rock. For a moment as the water passed away he saw the look-out against the sky now empty of the old woman but changed in outline by scattered stones.

  “She is loose on the rock. Now she is out of the cellar and in daylight. Hunt her down!”

  And the knife was there among all the other sensations, jammed against his ribs. He got it in his hands and pulled the blade open. He began to crawl and hunt and swim from trench to trench. She was leaning over the rail but vanished and he stole after her into the green room. But she was out by the footlights and when he crouched in the wings he saw that he was not dressed properly for the part. His mouth and he were one.

  “Change your clothes! Be a naked madman on a rock in the middle of a storm!”

  His claws plucked at the tatters and pulled them away. He saw a glimpse of gold braid and an empty seaboot stocking floating away l
ike a handful of waste. He saw a leg, scarred, scaly and stick thin and the music mourned for it.

  He remembered the old woman and crawled after her down the High Street to the Red Lion. The back wash of the waves was making a welcome confusion round the three rocks and the confusion hid the place where the red lobster had been. He shouted at the rocks but the old woman would not appear among them. She had slipped away down to the cellar. Then he glimpsed her lying huddled in the crevice and he struggled up to her. He fell on her and began to slash with his knife while his mouth went on shouting.

  “That’ll teach you to chase me! That’ll teach you to chase me out of the cellar through cars and beds and pubs, you at the back and me running, running after my identity disc all the days of my life! Bleed and die.”

  But he and his voice were one. They knew the blood was sea water and the cold, crumpling flesh that was ripped and torn nothing but oilskin.

  Now the voice became a babble, sang, swore made, meaningless syllables, coughed and spat. It filled every tick of time with noise, jammed the sound so that it choked; but the centre began to know itself as other because every instant was not occupied by noise. The mouth spat and deviated into part sense.

  “And last of all, hallucination, vision, dream, delusion will haunt you. What else can a madman expect? They will appear to you on the solid rock, the real rock, they will fetter your attention to them and you will be nothing worse than mad.”

  And immediately the hallucination was there. He knew this before he saw it because there was an awe in the trench, framed by the silent spray that flew over. The hallucination sat on the rock at the end of the trench and at last he faced it through his blurred window. He saw the rest of the trench and crawled along through water that was gravely still unless a gust struck down with a long twitch and shudder of the foamy scum. When he was near, he looked up from the boots, past the knees, to the face and engaged himself to the mouth.

  “You are a projection of my mind. But you are a point of attention for me. Stay there.”

  The lips hardly moved in answer.