Pincher Martin Read online

  He leaned over the binnacle and felt how his body shook.

  “I am chasing after—a kind of peace.”

  Barmaid’s blush with hair that was coarse even for a barmaid. He looked at the ledges of rock.

  “A kind of peace.”

  Coral growth.

  *

  He shook his head as though he were shaking water out of his hair.

  “I came down here for something.”

  But there was nothing, only weed and rock and water.

  He climbed back to the Red Lion, gathered some of the uneaten mussels that he had left from the morning and went up the High Street to the Look-out. He sat under the south side of the winking Dwarf and opened them with his knife. He ate with long pauses between each mouthful. When he had finished the last one he lay back.

  “Christ.”

  They were no different from the mussels of yesterday but they tasted of decay.

  “Perhaps I left them too long in the sun.”

  But they hang in the sun between tides for hours!

  “How many days have I been here?”

  He thought fiercely, then made three scratches on the rock with his knife.

  “I must not let anything escape that would reinforce personality. I must make decisions and carry them out. I have put a silver head on the Dwarf. I have decided not to be tricked into messing about with the water-hole. How far away is the horizon? Five miles? I could see a crow’s-nest at ten miles. I can advertise myself over a circle twenty miles in diameter. That’s not bad. The Atlantic is about two thousand miles wide up here. Twenty into two thousand goes a hundred.”

  He knelt down and measured off a line ten inches in length as near as he could judge.

  “That makes it a tenth of an inch.”

  He put the blade of his knife on the line at about two inches from the end and rotated the haft slowly till the point made a white mark in the grey rock. He squatted back on his heels and looked at the diagram.

  “With a really big ship I could be seen at fifteen miles.”

  He put the point of the knife back on the mark and enlarged it. He paused, then went on scraping till the mark was the size of a silver threepenny-bit. He put out his foot and scuffed the seaboot stocking over the mark until it was grey and might have been there since the rock was made.

  “I shall be rescued today.”

  He stood up and looked into the silver face. The sun was still shining back at him. He traced mental lines from the sun to the stone, bounced them out at this part of the horizon and that. He went close to the dwarf and looked down at the head to see if he could find his face reflected there. The sunlight bounced up in his eyes. He jerked upright.

  “The air! You fool! You clot! They ferry planes and they must use this place for checking the course—and Coastal Command, looking for U-boats——”

  He cupped his hands at his eyes and turned slowly round, looking at the sky. The air was dense blue and interrupted by nothing but the sun over the south sea. He flung his hands away and began to walk hastily up and down by the look-out.

  “A thinking day.”

  The Dwarf was all right for ships—they were looking across at a silhouette. They would see the Dwarf or perhaps the gleam of the head. But to a plane, the Dwarf would be invisible, merged against the rock, and the glint from the silver might be a stray crystal of quartz. There was nothing about the rock to catch the eye. They might circle at a few thousand feet—a mile, two miles—and see nothing that was different. From above, the stone would be a tiny grey patch, that was eye-catching only by the surf that spread round in the sea.

  He looked quickly and desperately up, then away at the water.

  A pattern.

  Men make patterns and superimpose them on nature. At ten thousand feet the rock would be a pebble; but suppose the pebble were striped? He looked at the trenches. The pebble was striped already. The upended layers would be grey with darker lines of trench between them.

  He held his head in his hands.

  A chequer. Stripes. Words. S.O.S.

  “I cannot give up my clothes. Without them I should freeze to death. Besides if I spread them out they would still be less visible than this guano.”

  He looked down the High Street between his hands.

  “Pare away here and here and there. Make all smooth. Cut into a huge, shadowed S.O.S.”

  He dropped his hands and grinned.

  “Be your age.”

  He squatted down again and considered in turn the material he had with him. Cloth. Small sheets of paper. A rubber lifebelt.

  Seaweed.

  He paused, lifted his hands and cried out in triumph.

  “Seaweed!”

  8

  There were tons of the stuff hanging round the rock, floating or coiled down under water by Prospect Cliff.

  “Men make patterns.”

  Seaweed, to impose an unatural pattern on nature, a pattern that would cry out to any rational beholder—Look! Here is thought. Here is man!

  “The best form would be a single indisputable line drawn at right angles to the trenches, piled so high that it will not only show a change of colour but even throw a shadow of its own. I must make it at least a yard wide and it must be geometrically straight. Later I will fill up one of the trenches and turn the upright into a cross. Then the rock will become a hot cross bun.”

  Looking down towards the three Rocks he planned the line to descend across the trenches, parallel more or less to the High Street. The line would start at the Red Lion and come up to the Dwarf. It would be an operation.

  He went quickly down the High Street: and now that he had found a job with point, he was muttering without knowing why.

  “Hurry! Hurry!”

  Then his ears began to fill with the phantom buzzing of planes. He kept looking up and fell once, cutting himself. Only when he was already pulling at the frondy weed by Food Cliff did he pause.

  “Don’t be a fool. Take it easy. There’s no point in looking up because you can do nothing to attract attention. Only a clot would go dancing and waving his shirt because he thought there was a plane about five miles up.”

  He craned back his head and searched the sky but found nothing besides blueness and sun. He held his breath and listened and heard nothing but the inner, mingled humming of his own life, nothing outside but the lap and gurgle of water. He straightened his neck and stood there thinking. He went back to the crevice. He stripped naked and spread his clothing in the sun. He arranged each item carefully to one side of where the line of seaweed would lie. He went back to the Red Lion and looked down at the space between the Red Lion and the three rocks. He turned round and lowered himself over the edge. The water was colder than he remembered, colder than the fresh water that he drank. He ground his teeth and forced himself down and the rock was so sharp against his knees that he reopened the wounds of the first day. His waist was on the rock between his hands and he was groaning. He could not feel bottom and the weed round his calves was colder than the water. The cold squeezed as the water had done in the open sea, so that he was panic-stricken at the memory. He made a high, despairing sound, pushed himself clear of the rock and fell. The water took him with a freezing hand. He opened his eyes and weed was lashing before them. His head broke the surface and he struck out frantically for the rock. He hung there, shivering.

  “Take a grip.”

  There was whiteness under the weed. He pushed off and let his feet sink. Under the weed, caught between his own rock and the three others were boulders, quartz perhaps, stacked and unguessable. He stood, crouched in the water, half-supporting his weight with swimming movements of the arms and felt round him with his feet. Carefully he found foothold and stood up. The water reached to his chest and the weed dragged at him. He took a breath and ducked. He seized weed and tried to tear off fronds but they were very tough and he could win no more than a handful before he had to surface again. He began to collect weed without ducking, reaping the last f
oot of the crop. Sometimes when he pulled there would be a stony turn and slight shock, or the water-slowed movements of readjustment. He threw weed up on the rock and the fronds flopped down over the edge, dripping.

  Suddenly the weed between his feet tugged and something brushed over his toes. A line of swift and erratic movement appeared in the weed, ceased. He clawed at the cliff and hung there, drawing his legs up.

  The water lapped.

  “Crab. Lobster.”

  He kneed his painful way to the Red Lion and lay down by the weed till his heart steadied.

  “I loathe it.”

  He crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked down. At once, as if his eye had created it, he saw the lobster among the weed, different in dragon-shape, different in colour. He knelt, looking down, mesmerized while the worms of loathing crawled over his skin.

  “Beast. Filthy sea-beast.”

  He picked up a mussel shell and threw it with all his strength into the water. At the smack, the lobster clenched like a fist and was gone.

  “That line of seaweed’s going to take a devil of a time to build.”

  He shook himself free of the worms on his skin. He lowered himself over Prospect Cliff. The bottom four or five feet was covered with a hanging mass of strap-weed. At the surface of the water, weed floated out so that the sea seemed solid.

  “Low water.”

  He climbed along the rock and began to tug at the weed but it would not come off. The roots clung to the rock with suckers more difficult to remove than limpets or mussels. Some of the weeds were great bushes that ended in dimpled bags full of jelly. Others were long swords but with a fluted and wavered surface and edge. The rest was smooth brown leather like an assembly of sword belts for all the officers in the world. Under the weed the rock was furry with coloured growths or hard and decorative with stuff that looked like uncooked batter. There was also Barmaid’s Blush. There were tiny bubblings and pips and splashes.

  He tugged at a bunch of weed with one hand while he hung on to the rock with the other. He cursed and climbed back up the rock, walked up the High Street to the Look-out and stood looking at the sea and sky.

  He came to with a jump.

  “Don’t waste time. Be quick.”

  He went to the crevice, slung the knife round his neck by its lanyard and picked up the lifebelt. He unscrewed the mouth of the tit, let the air out and climbed down the rock. He slung the lifebelt over his arm and went at the weed-roots with the knife. They were not only hard as hard rubber but slippery. He had to find a particular angle and a particular careful sobriety of approach before he could get the edge of his knife into them. He wore the weed like firewood over his shoulder. He held the lifebelt in his teeth and drew fronds of weed through between the lifebelt and the tape. He reversed his position, holding on with his left arm and gathering with his right. The weed made a great bundle on his shoulder that draped down and fell past his knees in a long, brown smear.

  He climbed to the Red Lion, and flung down the weed. At a distance of a few feet from him it looked like a small patch. He laid out the separate blades, defining the straight line that would interrupt the trenches. In the trenches themselves the weed had no support.

  “I must fill the trenches flush with the wall where the weed crosses them.”

  When he had used up all the weed the load stretched from the Red Lion to the Look-out. On the average the line was two inches wide.

  He went back to Prospect Cliff and got more weed. He squatted in the Red Lion with his forehead corrugated. He shut one eye and considered his handiwork. The line was hardly visible. He climbed round to the cliff again.

  There was a sudden plop in the water by the farthest of the three rocks, so that he sprang round. Nothing. No foam, only a dimpled interruption in the pattern of wavelets.

  “I ought to catch fish.”

  He gathered himself another load of weed. The jellied bags burst when he pressed them, and he put one of the bags to his lips but the taste was neutral. He carried another load to the Red Lion and another. When he piled the weed in the first trench it did not come within a foot of the top.

  He stood in the trench, looking down at the red and brown weed and felt suddenly listless.

  “Twelve loads? Twenty? And then the line to thicken after that——”

  Intelligence sees so clearly what is to be done and can count the cost beforehand.

  “I will rest for a while.”

  He went to the Dwarf and sat down under the empty sky. The seaweed stretched away across the rock like a trail.

  “Harder than ever in my life before. Worn out for today.”

  He put his head on his knees and muttered to the ghost of a diagram—a line with a grey blob on it.

  “I haven’t had a crap since we were torpedoed.”

  He sat motionless and meditated on his bowels. Presently he looked up. He saw that the sun was on the decline and made a part of the horizon particularly clear and near. Squinting at it he thought he could even see the minute distortions that the waves made in the perfect curve of the world.

  There was a white dot sitting between the sun and Safety Rock. He watched closely and saw that the dot was a gull sitting in the water, letting itself drift. All at once he had a waking vision of the gull rising and flying east over the sea’s shoulder. To-morrow morning it could be floating among the stacks and shields of the Hebrides or following the plough on some Irish hill-side. As an intense experience that interrupted the bright afternoon before him he saw the ploughman in his cloth cap hitting out at the squawking bird.

  “Get away from me now and the bad luck go with you!”

  But the bird would not perch on the boundary-stone, open its bill and speak as in all folk lore. Even if it were more than a flying machine it could not pass on news of the scarred man sitting on a rock in the middle of the sea. He got up and began to pace to and fro on the Look-out. He took the thought out and looked at it.

  I may never get away from this rock at all.

  Speech is identity.

  “You are all a machine. I know you, wetness, hardness, movement. You have no mercy but you have no intelligence. I can outwit you. All I have to do is to endure. I breathe this air into my own furnace. I kill and eat. There is nothing to——”

  He paused for a moment and watched the gull drifting nearer; but not so near that the reptile under the white was visible.

  “There is nothing to fear.”

  The gull was being carried along by the tide. Of course the tide operated here too, in mid-Atlantic, a great wave that swept round the world. It was so great that it thrust out tongues that became vast ocean currents, sweeping the water in curves that were ten thousand miles long. So there was a current that flowed past this rock, rising, pausing, reversing and flowing back again eternally and pointlessly. The current would continue to do so if life were rubbed off the skin of the world like the bloom off a grape. The rock sat immovable and the tide went sweeping past.

  He watched the gull come floating by Prospect Cliff. It preened its feathers and fluttered like a duck in a pond.

  He turned abruptly away and went quickly down to Prospect Cliff. Half the hanging seaweed was covered.

  To-morrow.

  “Exhausted myself. Mustn’t overdo it.”

  Plenty to do on a rock. Never a dull moment.

  He considered the mussels with positive distaste and switched his mind instead to the bags of jelly on the seaweed. He had a vague feeling that his stomach was talking to him. It disliked mussels. As for anemones—the bare thought made the bag contract and send a foul taste to his mouth.

  “Overwork. Exposure. Sunburn, perhaps. I mustn’t overdo it.”

  He reminded himself seriously that this was the day on which he was going to be rescued but could not rediscover conviction.

  “Dress.”

  He put on his clothes, walked round the Dwarf then sat down again.

  “I should like to turn in. But I mustn’t as long as th
ere’s light. She might come close for a look, blow her siren and go away again if I didn’t show myself. But I thought to some purpose today. To-morrow I must finish the seaweed. She may be just below the horizon. Or up so high I can’t see her. I must wait.”

  He hunched down by the Dwarf and waited. But time had infinite resource and what at first had been a purpose became grey and endless and without hope. He began to look for hope in his mind but the warmth had gone or if he found anything it was an intellectual and bloodless ghost.

  He muttered.

  “I shall be rescued. I shall be rescued.”

  *

  At an end so far from the beginning that he had forgotten everything he had thought while he was there, he lifted his chin and saw that the sun was sinking. He got up heavily, went to the water-hole and drank. The stain of red round the nearer edge was wider.

  He echoed.

  “I must do something about water.”

  He dressed as for bed and wrapped the grey sweater round his feet. It made a muffling between them and the rock like the cathedral carpets over stone. That was a particular sensation the feet never found anywhere else particularly when they wore those ridiculous medieval shoes of Michael’s all fantasticated but with practically no sole. Beside the acoustics were so bad—wah, wah, wah and then a high whine up among the barrel vault to which one added with every word one spoke as though one were giving a little periodic momentum to a pendulum——

  “Can’t hear you, old man, not a sausage. Up a bit. Give. I still can’t hear you——”

  “More? Slower?”

  “Not slower for God’s sake. Oh, turn it up. That’s all for today boys and girls. Wait a bit, Chris. Look, George, Chris isn’t coming off here at all——”

  “Give him a bit more time, old man. Not your pitch is it, Chris?”

  “I can manage, George.”

  “He’ll be better in the other part, old man. Didn’t you see the rehearsal list, Chris? You’re doubling—but of course——”

  “Helen never said——”

  “What’s Helen got to do with it?”