The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 41

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything, Eva.’

  ‘It does! It does!’

  ‘Nonsense, Eva.’

  ‘They’ve got him screened round.’

  ‘You must be brave, Eva.’

  We led Mrs Dakin to Mrs Cooksey’s sittingroom, made her sit down and watched her cry.

  ‘It burst inside ’im.’ Mrs Dakin made a wild gesture across her body. ‘They had to cut him clean open, and – scrape it out.’ Having uttered this terrible word, she abandoned herself to her despair.

  ‘Come now, Eva,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘He wouldn’t like you to behave like this.’

  We all took turns to look after Mrs Dakin between her trips to the hospital. The news didn’t get better. Mrs Dakin had tea with the Cookseys. She had tea with the Knitmistress. She had tea with me. We talked gaily about everything except the sick man, and Mrs Dakin was very brave. She even related some of her adventures in the police force. She also complained.

  ‘The first thing Mr Cooksey said when he came up that evening was that the room was like an oven. But I couldn’t help that. My husband was cold. Fancy coming up and saying a thing like that!’

  I gave Mrs Dakin many of the magazines which had been piling up on the enormous Victorian dresser in my kitchen. The Knitmistress, I noticed, was doing the same thing.

  Mr Cooksey allowed himself to grow a little grave. He discussed the operation in a sad but clinical way. ‘When it bursts inside ’em, you see, it poisons the whole system. That’s why they had to cut ’im open. Clean it out. They hardly ever live afterwards.’

  Mrs Cooksey said, ‘He was such a nice man. I am so glad now we enjoyed ourselves on New Year’s Eve. It’s her I’m really sorry for. He was her second, you know.’

  ‘Aah,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘There are women like that.’

  I told the Knitmistress, ‘And he was such a nice man.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’

  I heard Mrs Dakin sobbing in everybody’s rooms. I heard her sobbing on the staircase.

  Mrs Cooksey said, ‘It’s all so terrible. Her brother got married yesterday, but she couldn’t go to the wedding. She had to send a telegram. They are coming up to see Mr Dakin. What a thing to happen on anybody’s honeymoon!’

  Mrs Dakin’s brother and his bride came up from Wales on a motorbike. Mrs Dakin was at the hospital when they came and Mrs Cooksey gave them tea.

  I didn’t see Mrs Dakin that evening, but late that night I saw the honeymoon couple running upstairs with bottles wrapped in tissue paper. He was a huge man – a footballer, Mrs Cooksey said – and when he ran up the steps you heard it all over the house. His bride was small, countrified and gay. They stayed awake for some time.

  Next morning, when I went down to get the paper, I saw the footballer’s motorbike on the doorstep. It had leaked a lot of oil.

  Again that day Mrs Dakin didn’t come to our rooms. And that evening there was another party in the flat above. We heard the footballer’s heavy footsteps, his shouts, his wife’s giggles, Mrs Dakin’s whine.

  Mrs Dakin had ceased to need our solace. It was left to us to ask how Mr Dakin was getting on, whether he had liked the magazines we had sent, whether he wanted any more. Then, as though reminded of some sadness bravely forgotten, Mrs Dakin would say yes, Mr Dakin thanked us.

  Mrs Cooksey didn’t like the new reticence. Nor did the rest of us. For some time, though, the Knitmaster persevered and he had his reward when two days later Mrs Dakin said, ‘I told ’im what you said about the nervousness, and he wondered how you ever knew.’ And she repeated the story about the fall from the defective ladder, the bent arm, the foreman burning the ladder.

  We were astonished. It was our first indication that the Dakins were taking an interest in the world outside the hospital.

  ‘Well, really!’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  The Knitmistress began to complain about the noise in the evenings.

  ‘Pah!’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘It couldn’t ’ave burst inside him. Feeding through a glass tube!’

  We heard the honeymoon couple bounding down the stairs. The front door slammed, then we heard the thunderous stutter of the motorbike.

  ‘He could be had up,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘No silencer.’

  ‘Well!’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘I am glad somebody’s having a nice time. So cheap too. Where do you think they’re off to?’

  ‘Not the hospital,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘Football, more likely.’

  This reminded him. The curtains were drawn, the tiny television set turned on. We watched horse-racing, then part of the football match. Mrs Cooksey gave me tea. Mr Cooksey offered me a cigarette. I was back in favour.

  The next day, eight days after Mr Dakin had gone to the hospital, I met Mrs Dakin outside the tobacconist’s. She was shopping and her bulging bag reflected the gaiety on her face.

  ‘He’s coming back tomorrow,’ she said.

  I hadn’t expected such a rapid recovery.

  ‘Everybody at the hospital was surprised,’ Mrs Dakin said. ‘But it’s because he’s so strong, you see.’ She opened her shopping bag. I’ve got some sherry and whisky and’ – she laughed – ‘some Guinness of course. And I’m buying a duck, to have with apple sauce. He loves apple sauce. He says the apple sauce helps the duck to go down.’

  I smiled at the little family joke. Then Mrs Dakin asked me, ‘Guess who went to the hospital yesterday.’

  ‘Your brother and his wife.’

  She shook her head. ‘The foreman!’

  ‘The one who burned the ladder?’

  ‘Oh, and he was ever so nice. He brought grapes and magazines and told my husband he wasn’t to worry about anything. They’re frightened now all right. As soon as my husband went to hospital my solicitor wrote them a letter. And my solicitor says we stand a good chance of getting more than three hundred pounds now.’

  I saw the Knitmaster on the landing that evening and told him about Mr Dakin’s recovery.

  ‘Complications couldn’t have been serious,’ he said. ‘But it’s a nervous thing. A nervous thing.’

  The Knitmistress opened the kitchen door.

  ‘He’s coming back tomorrow,’ the Knitmaster said.

  The Knitmistress gave me one of her terrible smiles.

  ‘Five hundred pounds for falling off a ladder,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘Ha! It’s as easy as falling off a log, ain’t it, Bess?’

  Mrs Cooksey sighed. ‘That’s what the Labour has done to this country. They didn’t do a thing for the middle class.’

  ‘Bent arm! Can’t go to the seaside! Pamperin’, that’s what it is. You wouldn’t’ve found ’Itler pampering that lot.’

  A motorbike lacerated the silence.

  ‘Our happy honeymooners,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  ‘They’ll soon be leaving,’ Mrs Cooksey said, and went out to meet them in the hall.

  ‘Whose key are you using?’

  ‘Eva’s,’ the footballer said, running up the stairs.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Mrs Cooksey called.

  Mrs Dakin said: ‘I went down to Mrs Cooksey and I said, “Mrs Cooksey, what do you mean by insulting my guests? It’s bad enough for them having their honeymoon spoilt without being insulted.” And she said she’d let the flat to me and my ’usband and not to my brother and his wife and they’d have to go. And I told her that they were leaving tomorrow anyway because my husband’s coming back tomorrow. And I told her I hoped she was satisfied that she’d spoiled their honeymoon, which comes only once in a lifetime. And she said some people managed to have two, which I took as a reference to myself because, as you know, my first husband died during the war. And then I told her that if that was the way she was going to behave then I could have nothing more to say to her. And she said she hoped I would have the oil from my brother’s bike cleaned up. And I said that if it wasn’t for my husband being so ill I would’ve given notice then and there. And she said it was because my husband was ill that she didn’t give me notice, which any other landlady would�
��ve done.’ Three things happened the next day. The footballer and his wife left. Mrs Dakin told me that the firm had given her husband four hundred pounds. And Mr Dakin returned from hospital, no more noticed by the rest of the house than if he had returned from a day’s work. No sounds came from the Dakins’ flat that evening except for the whine and rumble of conversation.

  Two days later I heard Mrs Dakin racing down to my flat. She knocked and entered at the same time. ‘The telly’s coming today,’ she said.

  Mr Dakin was going to put up the aerial himself. I wondered whether he was as yet strong enough to go climbing about the roof.

  ‘They wanted ten pounds to do it. But my husband’s an electrician and he can do it himself. You must come up tonight. We’re going to celebrate.’

  I went up. A chromium-plated aeroplane and a white doily had been placed on the television set. It looked startlingly new.

  Mrs Dakin emptied a bottle of Tio Pepe into three tumblers.

  ‘To good ’ealth,’ she said, and we drank to that.

  Mr Dakin looked thin and fatigued. But his fatigue was tinged with a certain quiet contentment. We watched a play about a 400-year-old man who took certain drugs and looked no more than twenty. From time to time Mrs Dakin gave little cries of pleasure, at the play, the television set, and the quality of the sherry.

  Mr Dakin languidly took up the empty bottle and studied the label. ‘Spanish sherry,’ he said.

  Mr Cooksey waylaid me the following day. ‘Big telly they’ve got.’

  ‘Eighteen inch.’

  ‘Those big ones hurt the eyes, don’t you find?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Come in and have a drink. BBC and Commercial?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Never did hold with those commercials. Ruining the country. We’re not going to have ours adapted.’

  ‘We’re waiting for the colour,’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  Mrs Cooksey loved a battle. She lived for her house alone. She had no relations or friends, and little happened to her or her husband. Once, shortly after Hess had landed in Scotland, Mr Cooksey had been mistaken by a hostile crowd at Victoria Station for Mussolini, but for the most part Mrs Cooksey’s conversation was about her victories over tenants. In her battles with them she stuck to the rules. The Law of Landlord and Tenant was one of the few books among the many china animals in the large bookcase in her sittingroom. And Mrs Cooksey had her own idea of victory. She never gave anyone notice. That was almost an admission of defeat. Mrs Cooksey asked me, ‘You didn’t throw a loaf of stale bread into the garden, did you?’

  I said I hadn’t.

  ‘I didn’t think you had. That’s what the other people in this street do, you know. It’s a fight to keep this house the way it is, I can tell you. There’s the mice, d’you see. You haven’t any mice up here, have you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I had one yesterday.’

  ‘I knew it. The moment you let up these things start happening. All the other houses in this street have mice. That’s what the sanitary inspector told me. He said this was the cleanest house in the whole street. But the moment you start throwing food about you’re bound to get mice.’

  That evening I heard Mrs Dakin complaining loudly. She was doing it the way the Knitmistress did: talking loudly to her husband through an open door.

  ‘Coming up here and asking if I had thrown a loaf of bread into ’er ’orrible little garden. And talking about people having too much to eat these days. Well, if it’s one thing I like, it is a warm room. I don’t wrap myself up in a blanket and ’uddle in front of cinders and then come and say that somebody else’s room is like an oven.’

  Mrs Dakin left her kitchen door open and did the washing up with many bangs, jangles, and clatters. The television sound was turned up and in my room I could hear every commercial, every song, every scrap of dialogue. The carpetsweeper was brought into action; I heard it banging against walls and furniture.

  The next day Mrs Cooksey continued her mice hunt. She went into all the flats and took up the linoleum and put wads of newspaper in the gaps between the floorboards. She also emptied Mrs Dakin’s dustbin. ‘To keep away the mice,’ she told us.

  I heard the Dakins’ television again that night.

  The next morning there was a large notice in the hall. I recognized Mr Cooksey’s handwriting and style: WILL THE PERSON OR PERSONS RESPONSIBLE SEE ABOUT THE IMMEDIATE REMOVAL OF THE OIL STAINS ON THE FRONT STEPS. In the bathroom there was a notice tied to the pipe that led to the geyser: WILL THE PERSON OR PERSONS WHO HAVE BEEN TAMPERING WITH THIS TAP PLEASE STOP IT. And in the lavatory: WE NEVER THOUGHT WE WOULD HAVE TO MAKE THIS REQUEST BUT WILL THE PERSON OR PERSONS RESPONSIBLE PLEASE LEAVE THESE OFFICES AS THEY WOULD LIKE TO FIND THEM.

  The Dakins retaliated at once. Four unwashed milk bottles were placed on the stains on the steps. An empty whisky bottle was placed, label outwards, next to the dustbin.

  I felt the Dakins had won that round.

  ‘Liquor and football pools,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘That’s all that class spends its money on. Pamperin’! You mustn’t upset yourself, Bess. We’re giving them enough rope to hang themselves.’

  The television boomed through the house that evening. The washing-up was done noisily, the carpet-sweeper banged against walls and furniture, and Mrs Dakin sang loudly. Presently I heard scuffling sounds and shrieks. The Dakins were dancing. This went on for a short time. Then I heard a bath being run.

  There was a soft knock on my door and Mrs Cooksey came in. ‘I just wanted to find out who was having the bath,’ she said.

  For some moments after she left the bath continued to run. Then there was a sharper sound of running water, hissing and metallic. And soon the bath was silent.

  There was no cistern to feed the geyser (‘Unhygienic things, cisterns,’ Mr Cooksey said) and the flow of water to it depended on the taps in the house. By turning on a tap in your kitchen you could lessen the flow and the heat of the water from the geyser. The hissing sound indicated that a tap had been turned full on downstairs, rendering the geyser futile.

  From the silent bathroom I heard occasional splashes. The hissing sound continued. Then Mr Dakin sneezed.

  The bathroom door opened and was closed with a bang. Mr Dakin sneezed again and Mrs Dakin said, ‘If you catch pneumonia, I know who your solicitor will have to be writing to next.’

  And all they could do was to smash the gas mantle in the bathroom.

  It seemed that they had accepted defeat, for they did nothing further the next day. I was with the Cookseys when the Dakins came in from work that afternoon. In a few minutes they had left the house again. The light in the Cookseys’ sitting room had not been turned on and we stared at them through the lace curtains. They walked arm in arm.

  ‘Going to look for a new place, I suppose.’ Mrs Cooksey said.

  There was a knock and the Knitmistress came in, her smile brilliant and terrible even in the gloom. She said, ‘Hullo.’ Then she addressed Mrs Cooksey: ‘Our lights have gone.’

  ‘Power failure,’ Mr Cooksey said. But the street lights were on. The light in the Cookseys’ room was turned on but nothing happened.

  Mrs Cooksey’s face fell.

  ‘Fuse,’ Mr Cooksey said briskly. He regarded himself as an electrical expert. With the help of a candle he selected fuse wire, went down to the fuse box, urged us to turn off all lights and fires and stoves, and set to work. The wire fused again. And again.

  ‘He’s been up to something,’ Mr Cooksey said.

  But we couldn’t find out what that was. The Dakins had secured their rooms with new Yale locks.

  The Knitmistress complained.

  ‘It’s no use, Bess,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘You’ll just have to give them notice. Never did hold with that class of people anyway.’

  And defeat was made even more bitter because it turned out that victory had been very close. After Mrs Cooksey asked them to leave, the Dakins announced that they had used part of the compen
sation money to pay down on a house and were just about to give notice themselves. They packed and left without saying goodbye.

  Three weeks later the Dakins’ flat was taken over by a middle-aged lady with a fat shining dachshund called Nicky. Her letters were posted on from a ladies’ club whose terrifying interiors I had often glimpsed from the top of a number sixteen bus.

  J. G. BALLARD

  The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

  All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.

  Of all the cloud-sculptures we were to carve, the strangest were the portraits of Leonora Chanel. As I look back to that afternoon last summer when she first came in her white limousine to watch the cloud-sculptors of Coral D, I know we barely realized how seriously this beautiful but insane woman regarded the sculptures floating above her in that calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, were to weep their storm-rain upon the corpses of their sculptors.

  I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again. Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away. Swinging on my crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon. From the lathes and joists left behind I built my first giant kites and, later, gliders with cockpits. Tethered by their cables, they would hang above me in the afternoon air like amiable ciphers.