‘It’ll make you sick,’ Harry said. ‘Tea’ll be O.K. — if you drink it slow.’
‘Water!’ Frank said, as if covered in sand. Someone rammed a javelin into his mouth. It stretched from throat to belly and burned like prime acid. He wanted to cough or be sick, jettison it from him, but was unable to make the effort, and in any case if he did all his life’s guts would go with it. He was sure of that, waited for his own heat to melt the metal of the javelin, so that he could dare to move again and one day stand up. When he tried, the earth spun in and blacked him out.
‘This is no joke,’ Harry said. ‘You might not be at death’s door, but you’re at the bloody side-entrance if you ask me. Was anybody mixing your booze?’
‘Give me some water.’
‘You’ll get some as soon as this kettle boils, so hold on.’ He closed the hut door and sat on a stool looking down at his guest. ‘You can take an Aspro as well, and have something to eat. There ain’t much I ain’t got in this hut. Home from home. Ida’s been on her holidays this last week, and I slept here a couple of times, so you’re lucky we’re well provided for. I’ve got some sardines and a chunk of bacon on that shelf, and some yesterday’s bread.’
Frank’s eyes were closed; the words ‘bacon’ and ‘sardines’ made him retch, but it stopped at that, though ever-ready Harry pushed a piece of sacking at his head: ‘Use that if you’ve got to.’
The clean aromatic smell of hot tea came to him, worse than the idea of oil-dripping sardines, though still the javelin stayed lodged in his body when another set of spasms jerked up from his stomach. ‘That’s what drink does,’ Harry handed him a cup of tea, ‘fills you full of bile. You ought to keep off it. Want summat to eat?’
‘Ay, give me a deathcake — and a cup o’ quick poison while you’re at it.’ He groaned, rolled away from the white heat of the flaring lamp. ‘You been in a fight?’ Harry wanted to know.
‘Only with myself. I’m still in it.’
‘Now you’re being funny.’
‘Do you ever think about the future, Harry?’
‘Eh? Get this.’
‘Water. I’m drowning in lung fluid and stomach piss but I’m thirsty as if I’ve worked a week in soot-dust. My breath’s a blowlamp.’ He tried to light a cigarette, choked, and lay back down, felt, in spite of feeling weak, sick and near death’s outward fires, as if his interior had been renewed after destruction, and the experience of scorched guts and humiliated stomach had somehow rejuvenated his heart and soul. Never before had so much happened in one day, and the thought made him laugh.
A sip of tea set him talking, relieved that his mouth liked the heat of the liquid. Maybe I’m coming back to life. A pan on the fire was frying bacon for a row of breadslices, and after a day’s gardening the smell of it was pleasant to Harry: ‘Of course I do think about the future. Even at my age. I suppose you’re too young to bother with it,’ he grinned.
‘You’re wrong. I’m full of it, the future, it’s on my mind all the time. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that there’s going to be any future. You remember that last crisis? Planes were going over day and night and I used to watch their vapour trails from the factory roof — all loaded to the gills with hydrogen bombs ready to go off any minute towards Russia. I felt my nerve going as I saw what might come — a complete deathfire burning everybody. But I’m strong, too bloody strong, and I just went back to my machine. “What’s the use?” I thought to myself. But I wondered why everybody was dead at a time when they should be alive. And I thought: maybe it’s because everybody’s talking about it on the telly and reading all about it in the papers, and while this goes on they think it’s a game and can’t happen. You don’t have a bleeding future while you’ve got the telly on, and that’s a fact. I feel I’ll go looney though if I don’t get on the move. I’d like to walk ten miles every day for ten years. I feel as if I’m being strangled. This country’s too little for me — you can walk to any coast in a week — a bit of eagle-crap dropped out of the sky. I look at all the people round me who have boxed their future up in the telly, and it makes me sicker than that whisky I slung down. The wide open spaces would frighten any dead bastard who didn’t like other people. That’s what the telly does anyway, teaches you to despise your fellow man. There’s nothing left to believe in in this country, nothing left, not a thing.’
‘Careful,’ Harry said. ‘That’s because you’ve got nothing to believe in yourself.’
‘You may be right. I’ll have to find it then. There’s nothing in this country that can help me do it and that’s a fact. There’s a spirit of rottenness and tightness in it.’
‘You can’t condemn a whole country.’
‘I don’t. I never wanted a country to believe in, either. I’m out of a factory. A machine will do me. I was just talking about the feeling. I feel like an ant on a gramophone record that can’t get off.’ He was sitting up, legs spread along the floor, having eaten his way through a bacon sandwich and drunk the mug of tea. Harry had said little, let him rave on, let the fire in his eyes burn undiminished, glowing as if he’d put back a bottle of paraffin instead of whisky. A hard wind kept up a continual bumping against the hut, as if a huge dog running blind across the gardens stumbled at the hut it could never learn to see: ‘You can talk, but the world will go its own way.’
‘As long as I go mine. That’s all I feel fit for now.’ He felt good for even less, but couldn’t admit it to Harry: head full of stones, legs dead, body paralysed and yet to be woken up from, as if the whisky had killed him, stopped his heart so that he had actually wandered around in the black limitless emptiness of unearthly death in the hour before Harry found him; travelled among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks, hands and shoulders that, thanks to the bacon and blind talk, and after so long, were getting blood through them again.
Harry spread more slices in the pan. ‘It’s all right you blabbing about England being rotten, but it’s better than some places I could name, for all its faults.’
‘That don’t say it can’t be better though. It won’t last much longer.’
He laughed, and turned the bacon over. ‘It’ll last me out.’
‘Enjoy it then, while you can.’
‘I’m not enjoying it. I’m too bloody busy living to let things get my goat the way you do.’
‘There’s some as can do both,’ Frank reminded him.
‘And there’s some as can’t help but do both,’ Harry said, ‘and delight in it’ — turning the rashers over for a final crispness. The hut air was close and heavy with breathsteam, fagsmoke and the top-heavy odour of burning fat, a total blend suggesting warmth and protection from the outside world. It was comfortable, even though Frank’s enduring prostration on the hard boards wore his bones away and ached into his muscles. It was inside, away from the vile attack of problems, and here the only problem Was in talk, and to catch into talk the numerous problematic thoughts that came into his head — before they spun away and lost themselves maybe in the sort of protected atmosphere he’d stumbled into, where no real problem could get at any other problem. His head dizzied at such spinning arrows. He wanted to get up and go outside, lean against the hut, push and strain until the whole ricketty fabric, Harry included, fell into a heap. But he wasn’t even strong enough for that after so much drink. I’m waking up in a way I’ve never wakened up before; or maybe the whisky’s scorched the jungle from my brain and left only a few steel bolts and rods that I can find my way through at last. Unless it’ll only feel like that until the last drop of whisky’s all pissed out and I get into my old leaf-bag skin again.