Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  I asked, “What’s up with you?”

  “Costas has abdicated,” said he, “miv his contortionist of a sister, so-called. Sister! They were living in horrible sin, the no-goodniks! In horrible sin they were living; and that’s what happens when Gveek meets Gveek. Uxcuse me, I’m upset. After all I done for this enemy of society, off he goes miv this contortionist! All right, all right, so I always suspected—so? She resisted the advances of the yobbos. This, in itself, was suspicious. Even me, when I tried to touch her a little bit—even me she resisted. Praps, I said to myself, she’s got syphorrhea and wouldn’t like to unfect me, knowing I got a family, a piano, responsibilities? No. When Gveek meets Gveek, first thing they do they take their clothes off. It’s on record. Leverage, did you ever go to the Bvitish Museum? If not, do so—it’s got a seating capacity I haven’t yet worked out—but that’ll teach you Gveeks and Romans. You’d be surprised, Lavitoff, you’d be surprised.

  “Some of them went about miv wings dressed like cows: Assyrians, which was a kind of Cypriot. My heart is too full, but the Romans had no bodies. My worst enemies should go bust like those fellows miv their carryings-on! But the Gveeks were the worst lot of bastards of the whole bloody lot. No exaggeration. Look, I’ve been around—specially in Fowlers End—but the Gveeks I do not know how to describe. I’m sorry, it’s not my fault—the men ran around stark bollock naked, except for a helmet, a randy shield, miv a shiv. Miv their things hanging out! Believe me, when you were twelve you had such a thing—in marble, yet. And the women? Twenty times worse. What’s a Gveek idea of beauty? Confidentially, I’ll tell you: to take their arms off above the elbows so they can’t defend themselves and then, the crook of the arm in the thvoat, and off miv their drawers. Believe me! Otherwise, would there be so many Gveeks?

  “And what do they come to this country for? To make trouble miv the police. Tutric acid I got in the kitchen; a batch of Greenburgers ruined so they smell like cabbage; and the bloody Gveeks abrogated. I knew it all along; I felt it in my heart. And on top of it, the coppers are here—this is all I’m short of—accusing me of androcity miv putric acid! This reminds me: Mrs. Grue was sick in the aisle, and there’s enough acid in that carpet to burn a hole in your stumminck. On this I want you should get cracking.... Gveek women: their face is all in one straight line, and they got no holes—I seen it, in museums I seen it. Malnutrition. Give the layabouts a shiv and a shield, and that’s all they want, the uncivilized bastards. And putric acid—I suppose they drank it all up, the bloody foreigners! Oh, give me civilization or I don’t know what! No, Lavatory, there is a limit to the lucrid. I’m ruined.” Then he said, in a different voice, “Would you cook me up a few Greenburgers?”

  “No,” I said.

  I think he meant to quote a play he must have seen in some penny gaff before the turn of the century, saying, “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!” It came out as: “Ertcher, Brute—I got Scissors—” and pretended to faint. There being no Pompey’s statue, he fell into the ladies’ lavatory, out of which I hauled him by the lapels of his coat. He moaned, “Cut out that lark, ruffian—this suit cost me seven and a half guineas. Oh, ungratitude!”

  He got up, and his lips were trembling now, as he said, “The bogeys ask me, ‘So? How come putric acid in the kitchen?’What can I say? I can only say, ‘Ask the Gveeks; don’t ask me. If you want my opinion, Booligan has got something to do miv this.’ I offered them twenty complimentary tickets. They wouldn’t take ‘em. There was traces mytroglycerin in the Greenburger boiler. I’m a married man—already I’m astigmatized as a blow-off. I count on you.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  That stumped him. He shouted, “I don’t want you should ask idiotic questions! I’m counting on you, I told you—isn’t that enough?”

  “Buy an abacus,” I said, “and count on that.”

  Sam Yudenow rose to the occasion. “What’s an abacus?”

  “Something you can count on, made of wire and beads.”

  “Oh,” he said, relieved, “we got plenty wire in the genevator room, and a lot of pearl beads. Tell Copper to knock one together. So I’ll count on it. In the meantime, what am I going to do about my Greenburgers?”

  “Pack ‘em dry,” I said.

  Sam Yudenow said, “I must think—” clutching his forehead and taking a green pencil out of his pocket—“I must think, Lavenduck. You don’t know what a comfort you are to me after those Gveeks. Believe me, you don’t know what they are. But Gord will punish them. Look at Socrates—he poisoned himself. Don’t think I’m ignorant just because I don’t know nothing. One of them went about in a tub miv a lamp: Diogenes. Alexander the Gveat died from alcoholic poisoning after he knifed his best friend. There’s show biz for you. Oh, the Gveeks, the Gveeks! Some of them were blind (but that was a poet, so what do you expect?) and mark my words—” he tapped my chest with an impressive forefinger—“they’re all dead. If they’re so tough, why aren’t they still alive?... Gveeks!”

  “You’ll die, too,” I told him.

  Loftily he said to me, “This is a subject I prefer not to discuss.”

  “I will die.”

  “Well,” said Sam Yudenow philosophically, “I suppose we must make exceptions?”

  “But not you? Upon my word, Mr. Yudenow, you shall decay—die and decay, and your flesh shall be eaten by worms. You can take it from me, the worms are waiting ...”

  “Worms I bar.”

  “Worms you cannot bar, unless you get yourself cremated to ashes.”

  “Ashes I don’t like. Play a game cards—so what you got in the ash trays? Ashes. And they smell. Boy, did you ever get up in the morning and smell an ash tray full of ashes? And where there’s ashes there’s smoke. No, did you ever come down miv bare feet to ashes, dust, and the curtains full of smoke?”

  “No,” I said. “I only know the smell of dead smoke. I mean, the smell of live cigar smoke is the soul going upwards. When it is cold and clings, it is rotten—”

  “I don’t like this kind of talk,” said Sam Yudenow. “There is a Gveekishness in it. So cut it out.”

  Then he left, thoroughly depressed. Before he got into his big car, he shouted, “And I hate the thought of bloody worms. Get that for a start!”

  But I saw in his eyes an anguish, an appeal. He yelled, “What’s more, I don’t like your altitude!” Then he was driven away.

  Copper Baldwin came out of the shadows, smiling his up-and-down smile, and said, with quiet relish, “Scared the balls off him, eh? You should ‘ave seen poor old Sam when the Greeks buggered off in a taxi—livid, definitely livid. Then the ice-cream machine broke down, a batch o’ Greenburgers got burnt, and when the police came in and a bogey tapped ‘im on the shoulder ‘e ‘ad a kind of convulsion and lost ‘is truss. No, I mean it was a scream. Well, this truss sort o’ slipped—it was out o’ nervousness—and clipped itself onto ‘is organs o’ reproduction. It’s in the Bible, you know, in the Song of Solomon: ‘My love put ‘is ‘and into a hole in the door and my belly shrank at the touch.’ Oh boy, did his old bastard of a belly shrink at the touch! You should ‘ave ‘eard ‘im yell, ‘Copper! For Christ’s sake, Copper!’Plainclothes-man says, ‘You’ve got one, Mr. Yudenow: I’m one. And I’d like the favor of a word.’ But poor old Sam keeps on yelling, ‘A file! Bring a small trilingular file, and get me out o’ this!’ Naturally, they make a note o’ that. Well, I came along, I surveyed the situation, and got ‘im out of bondage with an oil can and a tack hammer. Laugh? It’s a shame you wasn’t ‘ere, you would ‘ave died.”

  I asked, “What was the cause of all this?”

  “Oh, Costas’ trousis exploded. You know, they was cooking soup—I mean, home-made, and that’s tricky stuff. He was wearing overalls—I mean, a bib-and-brace—and it seems he must ‘ave upset some o’the stuff over ‘imself. So when ‘e changed to scram, ‘e left this bib-and-brace behind ‘im. Old Sam comes in, in a rage, to find out why the cafe ain’t open, sees these trousis, and goes ber
serk. ‘E chucks ‘em out o’ the window, right across the road. They blew down a wall. Somebody ‘ad dropped the word, anyway, that there was a dynamite outrage being planned on the premises. So, by sheer chance, the busies got ‘ere just when the trousis went bang.”

  I told him that I, too, had been suspected of an attempt with a time bomb on Charing Cross Station; and that I had had a fine time of it.

  He replied, “I shouldn’t be a bit surstonished; you bloody near was. Lucky for you, I got at the keyster with my little pair o’ pliers while you was out at the back. I disconnected that one.” He took down a fire bucket and pointed out twenty-three things that looked like exaggerated sticks of shaving soap.” ‘Ome-made dynamite, tell your mum, and by the smell of it about eighty-five per cent nitroglycerin. Before we do another thing, let’s get rid of it. If it was anything else, I’d say, ‘Chuck it into Godbolt’s.’ But there’s a risk implied ‘ere. Lately that vicious bastard ‘as been taking to reprisals. I found three dead cats in the vestibule this morning, and one of ‘em I distinctly recognized—a drowned tabby we gave ‘im three days ago. That bloody boy Tommy ‘as been bought over. It’s sabotage. What a little agent provocateur ‘e turned out to be! ... No, if this was something ‘armless, like shit or something, ‘e’d be welcome to it. But—and I was in the Engineers, and I know— this ‘ere dynamite is unstable. I never did trust that Greek’s cooking. What we got to do is, get it out o’ the way.” “How?” I asked.

  “We could send it to the War Office. Then it goes off, and that’s a hanging matter—twenty-odd sticks o’ dynamite in Whitehall, and the least you can do is blow the arse off somebody round the Admiralty. Maybe we better bury it.”

  “Where?”

  “I would suggest somewhere round Ullage, in the swamp. Point is, to get it there—I wouldn’t trust myself with this stuff on a bicycle, on these roads. Better put it in a shopping bag and walk it.”

  We did this thing and buried the dynamite in an inaccessible slough. Copper Baldwin comforted me, saying, “It’s bound to deteriorate. Sometimes it takes twenty years to go off. But the way we planted it, I think it will just be washed away.”

  “But say it goes off?” I asked.

  “There won’t half be a shower of mud,” said Copper Baldwin, “but you and me’ll be well out o’ range, and the cry will be ‘Poor old Ullage, serves it bloody well right!’ Did you get the bees-and-honey?”

  “The money? Yes, I got it,” I said.

  “Then, after tomorrow, cocko, we are company directors,” said he.

  “I was one, once,” I said.

  “I thought there was a peculiar kind o’ look about you,” he said.

  Swallowing this insult, I asked, “Incidentally, Copper, how did the police get the wire on Costas? Who gave them the word?”

  Copper Baldwin was lighting a cigarette while I spoke. Before the match flame went out on a puff of smoke, I saw him wink and heard him say, “Ask no questions and you will be told no lies. Verb sap.”

  13

  I ALWAYS consider the following day, Monday, as the eventful one. This, no doubt, is the quality of youth which takes its history in sips and has no memory.

  First of all, I was made into a limited company. Copper Baldwin came in with two hundred pounds, and I produced out of thin air (as it must have seemed) the five hundred pounds I had promised. Misgivings were already getting hold of me, so I kept the remainder next to my skin. This was a most sickening day. It got at my stomach and spoiled my appetite. I felt as I believe Ivar Kreuger felt in the small hours before he did away with himself. The weight of the guilt of the whole world was on my shoulders, and there was a Horatius’ Bridge between my gullet and my diaphragm where those behind cried Forward and those in front cried Back, making a clattering great lump there—a broken formation of myself. As for my heart, it seemed to me that it retrenched. First, it shrank to the size of a marble and made a piteous noise against my ribs; then it got to be, by sheer self-inflation, the size of a lung; but, deflating, got so heavy that I was afraid to take my left boot off. I knew that what was hurting my heel was a nail but—the way I felt that day—I couldn’t be sure.

  We worked all night getting ready for Monday, the “Change Day,” pasting up posters. I was already so nervous that I got myself involved in the sticky side of a twenty-four sheet and slapped down the various parts of a forty-eight sheet upside down and in reverse—which turned out to be the best bit of publicity the Pantheon had ever had. That evening, trying to make head or tail of it and failing in the attempt, Sam Yudenow said to me, “Now this I call nishertive. You’re learning, Daniels, you’re a comer. Good boy, get the buggers guessing. You and me, we’re thinkers, we read. But rahnd Fowlers End, give the sods puzzles. This is originality, and you can regard your wages raised as from any moment now.... Between ourselves, confidentially, what is this forty-eight sheet?”

  I said, “I’m afraid I was a little upset. That fortyeight sheet advertises three different pictures,” and waited for the outburst.

  But he said, “Quite right. When I get a anspiration, I could show Sam Katz something yet! Grauman? Let ‘im keep his Chinamen. Lavendrop, take a pair scissors and get cracking on the eight sheets and the double crowns! ... Oh, Jesus, will nobody never understand that nobody never understands nothing but what they don’t understand—specially rahnd Fowlers End? A yobbo looks at a forty-eight sheet. It says, say, ‘Norma Talmadge.’What does that name mean to him? All he can think of, the layabout, is to say, ‘So what’s Norma Talmadge?’ Anyway, as you know, rahnd Fowlers End they only go to the pictures to eat miv one hand a sausage and miv the other to have a feel in the dark sequences. This way, son, you ‘ave aroused the public imagination. The public says, ‘What the f.... is this?’And it comes twice.... Ah, when Yudenow meets Katz, hire an evening suit!”

  I remember, vaguely, that I had put together—thinking they were parts of the same poster—Maria Korda in Lady of the Pavements, The Four Feathers, and Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson. People did, indeed, suck their thumbs as they looked. But this was by no surrealistic design of mine: I was so emotionally disturbed on account of impending legal business that once I fell off the ladder and hit Copper Baldwin in the face with the paste brush. He, too, was in a state of exaltation. Having sat down in a paste bucket, he got up and said in a shamefaced manner, “Nothing like this ‘as ‘appened to me for forty years.” Then he went away, convinced that he was drunk, and pasted up double crowns at such extraordinary angles that medical opinion in Fowlers End attributes to this the fact that the old-age pensioners to this day hold their heads on one side. Truly, we had had a hard time of it becoming executives.

  First, there was a little argument concerning the name of the company we were going to float. As I reasoned, my mother, June Whistler, Copper Baldwin, and I were shareholders. I counted myself in on more or less metaphysical grounds: it was my mother’s money, after all, and my June Whistler’s. My mother’s maiden name was Morgan, and June’s middle name, as she reluctantly divulged, was Puddingberry. Legitimately combining names, I argued, why not call ourselves “J. P. Morgan”?

  Copper Baldwin said, “Cocko, don’t carry a good thing too far. But I’ll tell you what. My father’s name was Baldwin but my mother’s name was Steel. What about ‘Baldwin Steel’?”

  I said, not without irony, “No Rockefellers in your family, by any chance?”

  “Thank Gawd we never ‘ad no Dutchmen, but there was a Ford—”

  “No, wait a minute; a motor company is going to buy our land,” I said. “Best not annoy them, perhaps?”

  “Could put us in a better bargaining position.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Copper—they’d be on the wire in half a second.... Look, your nickname is Copper and my Christian name is Daniel—”

  “Then, for Christ’s sake, call it Daniels Copper Enterprises! It sounds like metal, and it looks like a five-to-two. I mean, a Jew. Most of the bourgeoisie are Gawd’s chosen people, and a Biblic
al name makes their ‘air curl.”

  “So be it,” said I heavily.

  “Daniels Copper,” said Baldwin, with glum satisfaction. “That’ll do. Daniels Copper Limited.”

  It was he who led me to the offices of a firm of attorneys in Chicken Lane, Threadneedle Street, uncomfortably close to my Uncle Hugh. I kept looking over my shoulder, half expecting to see him grinning at my heels and smelling of mixed grill out of Pimm’s. Threadneedle Street is formidable, but Chicken Lane is terrifying: it is the ghost of a street. The Great Fire of 1666 skipped it, and the more’s the pity. Men digging to lay drains constantly find human bones—victims of the Great Plague of 1665. You can smell them still, if you try. Even on a busy day, when it is full of people coming or going—for nobody seems to have any real business there—it preserves an atmosphere of senile decay. If you want to explore it, go there between Saturday evening and Monday morning, during which period the City lies like a dog in the shade.

  We went on a business day. Near the top of Chicken Lane was one of the last of the old cook shops, as we used to call them; one of those places into which one used to walk and ask for a pint of soup and a pennyworth of bread—threepence. There, in the good old days of the depression, they sold meat by the ounce—you could, for example, order four ounces of roast beef, pease pudding, and cabbage, put down a shilling, and get threepence change. I believe it was the forerunner of the cafeteria: you grabbed knife, fork and plate, waited in line, and gave your order to the carver, who justly weighed it out. There were no tables; you ate standing at a shelf, and very good it was, too.... I am letting nostalgia get at me again, forgetting that if I had kept the appetite I had in the old times I should by now have sunk into the ground by sheer dead weight. Still, perversely, my mouth waters at the memory of how it used to water at the sight of that bubbly-looking beef and those sizzling sausages. The aroma of the onions permeated the lane. I say nothing of the pork, which, with its glazed surface, was far more beautiful to me than old mahogany to a connoisseur.