The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  Pym went to the Duchess of Douro, drank a double brandy, ordered another, and washed his mouth with it before swallowing it.

  Yet after four double brandies Pym still tasted the smoke of something burning. He gulped down a pint of bitter to take the taste away; but still it lingered, clinging to the roof of his mouth.

  “Want a handkerchief?” said the barmaid.

  “No, thank you. No. No, I do not. Why do you ask … may I ask?” said Pym.

  “Sniff, sniff, sniff,” said the barmaid. “Why don’t you have a good blow?”

  “I thought … tsnff-tsnff-tsnff … something burning.” Pym looked at the ash-tray, examined his sleeves, and sniffed again: “Tsnff … tsnff …” Then he said: “Give me another double brandy … tsnff-tsnff-tsnff …”

  “Stop it, for goodness’ sake! It’s not nice: you’re making me nervous,” said the barmaid.

  “Tsnff … tsnff … tsnff …” Pym sniffed at his double brandy, drank it and sniffed again. A big woman glowered at him, exchanged looks with a heavy man in a striped suit and then, lowering her face until her nose touched the point of one of her shoulders, sniffed.

  “Anything the matter?” she said, between her teeth.

  “Tsnff-tsnff-tsnff … ah!”

  “Annoying you?” asked the heavy man.

  “Keeps on smelling,” she said, confidentially.

  “Oh! Change place with me, Lila, will you? … Hey, you! Do you mind? What the——”

  “Now then,” the barmaid said.

  “I see that I am de trop here,” said Pym, with drooping lips and bloodshot eyes. “Good evening to you!”

  The big woman examined the soles of her shoes, lifted a forefinger to her nostrils, looked at the heavy man and said: “Do you smell something?”

  He curled back his upper lip until it touched his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and said: “Why?”

  “Tsnff … tsnff … tsnff …”

  “The gentleman said he thought he smelt something burning,” said the barmaid.

  “Oh, I thought he was trying to take liberties,” said the heavy man.

  “No, but no jokes,” said the big woman, “can’t you smell something burning?”

  “Come to think of it, there is a kind of a smell of burnt,” said the barmaid.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE rainy evening, like a patient grey nurse, sponged his face and helped him to cleanse his throat and nostrils. He drew several deep breaths and walked aimlessly to the end of the street, mildly wondering how he could ever have wanted to go and eat steak in the Marquis of Bute—sickeningly thick, detestably bloody, bubbling steak, with reeking fried potatoes… collops hacked from the backside of dead beasts and dung-nurtured roots cooked in the fat of filthy pigs that had screamed horribly before dying when they were singed with fire, scraped with knives….

  Pym helped himself to some more damp air, and tried to think of other things. Food was not to be thought of: food was burnt flesh, roasted or boiled tubers, roots, or leaves. Even grass stank of old ladies burnt to death, since all flesh was grass.

  He went on, avoiding the windows of the restaurants, pushed open the door of another saloon bar, and ordered another double brandy, which he swallowed in two gulps. An old, white-headed barman watched Pym out of the corner of one eye and saw a sad, brooding man rocking to and fro on a bar stool and flipping the rim of a glass with an idle forefinger.

  “Did you call, sir?”

  “Eh? Call? Me? No, I was just fiddling.”

  “Did you want the same again?”

  “Well, yes, I think you’d better let me have the same again.”

  Pym’s right-hand trousers-pocket was full of silver and copper coins. Something was wrong with his fingertips. Money felt like discs of leather and flannel. He pulled out a fistful and emptied it on to the bar. Two or three coins rolled away. The old barman, pushing a glass towards him, said: “After this one I should say you’ve just about had enough, sir.”

  “Fruit of the vine,” said Pym. “Often wonder what you vintners buy one half so precious as the goods you sell … And they that drink the blood of God will never thirst again …” He emptied the glass. The barman, dexterous as a banker, flicked the price of it away from the little pile of change. Another man stood, frozen in an unnatural attitude a yard and a half away: he had one of his feet on a shilling.

  “You put that money back in your pocket,” said the barman.

  “I will, I will,” said Pym, scraping up a handful of shillings and pennies. But then, swallowing back an eructation of brandy, and remembering the word “grape”, he thought of peasants, French peasants with rotten teeth, stamping with great sticky bare feet in scummed wine vats, their shirts tucked up to their hips. God only knew what nastiness they let fall … and voila—the gourmet warmed it in his manicured hands and sniffed the vapours of it up into his chiselled nose … and the cook poured it over the Christmas pudding, and struck a match, and whuff!——

  —Up went the old lady, blazing like one of Nero’s Christians dipped in pitch!

  Pym drank some soda water. The bubbles stung the back of his mouth, and the last mouthful went down slowly, like a balloon, until it hit his stomach and exploded in a hiccup: Hup-pass!

  “Gas,” said Pym, with a grave, apologetic bow: “carbon dioxide. This is nothing but water into which they force CO2. You can find this gas in the Cave of Dogs. It will not support life. You breathe it out with every breath,” he said, turning to an old man on his left. This old man had sores in the corners of his mouth.

  “Are you a doctor?” he asked, coming nearer.

  “I am not a doctor. Every schoolboy knows this sort of thing. Soda-water is water charged with carbon dioxide. You breathe carbon dioxide. Trees and flowers take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. This is a fact, I give you my word of honour, an incontrovertible fact. If you pass CO2 through a tube of red-hot coke, you get CO, carbon monoxide, which is deadly poison. But CO2, I can tell you for a fact, is inert. It is not poisonous, it suffocates. It puts out fire.”

  “I once put out a fire with a soda-water syphon,” said the barman.

  “Water puts out fire,” said the old man on the left.

  “Water is a product of fire,” said Pym. “If you take oxygen, by means of which everything lives, and then … excuse me if I put it unscientifically … mix it up with hydrogen and put a match to it, there is a terrible explosion (you could blow this place to smithereens with it) and the result, I give you my word of honour, is water. Again, electrolyse water by the process known as electrolysis, and you break water back into oxygen on the one side and hydrogen on the other. Mix these two together again and …”

  Pym looked at the bubbling half-inch of soda-water in his glass. In that water he saw fire. He saw the flicker of flames in a grate, and gagged at the mixed odours of an old lady in flames. “Look!” Pym struck a match and dropped it into the soda water, where it hissed and became black. “Fire is water, water is fire, everything is fire,” he shouted.

  “Why don’t you pick up the rest of your change and get along home?” said the barman.

  “Fire is water, water is fire!” said Pym, striking the bar with a fist.

  “You pick up that change and go home,” the barman said.

  *

  Pym will never forget that night. It left a scar in his memory. The wound cicatrised, skinned over, and paled … but only the worms could take it away. Like a scratch from a lion’s claw, which would not let itself be forgotten, and ached abominably in bad weather. He cannot remember everything that happened: nothing but the skeleton of the night hangs in the cupboard of recollection. He never will know what happened to the flesh and the entrails: he hates to speculate. He remembers buying double gins-and-lime for a hideous woman with orange-coloured hair, who developed a high regard for him because he became maudlin over her dog—an aged, stinking, vixenish, flea-bitten bitch. Yes, Pym clearly remembers embracing the animal, covering it with tender kisses, and buying i
t a roast-beef sandwich and some sweet biscuits. The raw head and bloody bones of that night are sharply defined enough! The woman said: “What I like about you is, you’re kind. I like a person to be kind. I bet you wouldn’t raise your hand to strike a lady.” Pym said, with tears in his eyes, that he would cut his right hand off and swallow it rather than use it for anything but caressing her. She said: “I wish you meant it,” and Pym swore with frightful vehemence that he did mean it. In demonstration he took her left hand (when he thinks of that he thinks of a plate of thick hot porridge into which some slut has let fall a thick gold wedding-ring and a few dirty finger-nails). He scooped up this hand, rose unsteadily, and bowed low to kiss it, knocking over his double brandy. At this the orange-headed lady turned to a man, who seemed to materialise out of the smoky air, and said: “You see, Joe? That’s a gentleman. Catch you doing that! … Catch him doing that,” she said to Pym; “this is more his line.” Then she lifted her upper lip with both thumbs and curled a little finger to point to a space where one of her teeth had recently been. The man told her to shut up. Pym flew into a rage:

  “You dare to speak to my friend in that tone of voice! To Woman, suffering, persecuted Woman? You swine!” He would have thrown his brandy into the man’s face but his glass was empty: so he threw the lady’s gin-and-lime. The man licked some of it off the back of his hand where most of it had fallen, and got up slowly. Sitting, this man was of average height—a little on the heavy side. But when he stood he seemed to grow, foot by foot, like a carpenter’s ruler, until he stopped with a jerk six feet from the floor. A little publican with the voice of a field-marshal said: “That’s enough of that. Get out, you!” He grasped Pym by the arms and with the miraculous skill of a piano remover, found a point of balance and rushed him out into the street, saying: “And don’t come back here again.”

  Pym intended to go back immediately, but he walked in the wrong direction, straight into a lamp-post which became two lamp-posts. Rearing over him, both of these lamp-posts bobbed and weaved defiantly. Their heads were lighted catherine-wheels, throwing out ripples of red, yellow, blue, green, indigo and violet. “Come on, both of you,” said Pym, and grappled. Then he was clinging, giggling, to one cold wet lamp-post haloed with muddy rainbows in the moist, misty night.

  Between this and the next rib of the skeleton there was a dark emptiness, out of which blazed a public-house with a bohemian atmosphere: the customers talked louder and were untidier than the taxi-drivers and labourers in the public bar, and there were pictures on the walls. An extraordinarily filthy young woman and a pale, fat, featureless man, who reminded Pym of a chamber-pot curiously cracked, said: “Let’s have a party.” Two people produced four quarts of pale ale and Pym bought three bottles of gin. They all went out shouting as loud as they could. A coster offered chrysanthemums at sixpence a bunch. Pym got five-shillingsworth—an armful—and gave them to the filthy woman. “It is because I love you,” he said. A rim of the chamber-pot rolled down: the featureless man was scowling. But the woman kissed Pym voluptuously, fully visible in the light that streamed through the window of a Cypriot café. They went on, singing.

  Pym slid over the round edge of another rib into another darkness, and came up gradually into a studio furnished with a divan, two chairs and a table, and lighted by candles. How long had these candles been burning? He did not know. One of them was guttering. He was sitting on the divan arguing metaphysics with an old man whom he seemed to have offended, because the old man was saying:

  “Will you repeat what you said?”

  “I repeat what I said,” said Pym.

  The old man hit him in the eye with a small fat fist. Then a long, thin man in black with golden hair (Pym likened him to a fountain-pen) said: “You’ve been picking on everybody all the evening. Be friendly or go away.”

  “I see that I am de trop here.”

  In and out of the interstitial blacknesses between the bones of the skeleton in the cupboard Pym went rolling, down and down, to the heel of the night. Later Pym found himself in the Strand, opposite Charing Cross Station. He had some idea of crossing the road: his heels were on the kerb, his toes were in the air, and his hands were groping for something to hold on to. Two men took him by the arms, and one of them said: “For your own good, you know, you’d better come along with us.”

  “I will come along with you anywhere you like, with pleasure,” said Pym.

  They were policemen; but on the way to the police station Pym insisted that they were angels of God. He said that he could walk along in their company for ever. “Do you know, I feel as if my feet weren’t touching the ground?” he said. One of them replied: “Why, you see, sir, your feet aren’t touching the ground, you know.” Then it occurred to Pym that he was being carried. This affected him so deeply that he tried to kiss one of the policeman and, reaching uncertainly in the half dark, counted the silver buttons on a blue uniform with a playful forefinger and said: “Eeny-meeny-miney-mo.” At last they reached Bow Street Police Station, where Pym, holding hands with both policemen, ran in a little ahead of them crying: “Yoo-hoo!” Charged with being drunk and incapable he began to argue the point. Drunk, yes: incapable, no. When they asked him his name he replied, with a girlish titter: “My name is Norval.” His address, he said, was Saint Busto’s Hotel. They emptied his pockets and locked him in a cell with a wooden floor, designed for the temporary accommodation of irresponsible inebriates. There was a wooden bed like a shelf with a severely hygienic little water-closet fitted into the far end. The authorities are not unacquainted with the suicidal gloom of the debauchee in the small hours of the morning when you taste yourself, smell yourself, remember yourself, and want to pick yourself up between thumb and forefinger and throw yourself away.

  There was no chain with which Pym might have hanged himself. They had taken away his penknife—he remembers missing it. Nothing but death would do, he felt. Never again could he walk the streets like a free man. He was a jail-bird, pasty and furtive, stale with the smell of the bucket—ruined, lost.

  He lay down and wept. He could hear himself hiccuping and groaning like a worn-out gramophone—a gramophone with an unbalanced turn-table that squeaked and shuddered as it spun to a standstill … wobbling and grating … running down….

  In the morning they took him upstairs to be charged. One of the policeman who had arrested him said: “You had a good time last night.”

  “Lovely,” said Pym; “simply divine.” Bitterness gave place to shame and anguish. “What did I do?” he asked, looking at the stone floor.

  “You tried to kiss me,” said the policeman. “Kept counting my buttons and saying, ‘Eeny-meeny-miney-mo’, and you couldn’t stand up. Nothing much, really. Don’t take it to heart,” he added, touched by the horror on Pym’s face. “I arrested a Lord not so long ago and he thought he was a dog and was on all-fours by the lamp-post outside the florist’s shop trying to unbutton his fly. When we picked him up he went ‘Woof! Woof!’ and bit me. If I hadn’t picked him up in time he’d ’ave got it for ‘indecent exposure’——”

  “I’ll admit anything,” said Pym; “—anything you like—I was drunk. I hadn’t eaten—I wasn’t well. But don’t, for Christ’s sake, please don’t say I tried to kiss you!”

  “Don’t you worry—that’ll be all right.”

  “And cut out that ‘Eeny-meeny-miney-mo’, won’t you?”

  “Your name’s Norval, isn’t it?”

  “Good God, no! Pym—John Pym; that’s my name.”

  “You said Norval last night.”

  “It’s out of a poem. My name is Pym, I swear! Oh, God! God!”

  “I can see this is your first,” said the policeman, nodding like a midwife. “You wait in there and don’t worry. They’ll fine you a few shillings, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “That’s all right. Just don’t worry: it’ll all be over in a few minutes. Now you go and wait in there.”

  Pym pres
sed the fright out of his face. His mouth became a crack; his eyes became narrow, hard and glittering. Now he was a rock—a Gibraltar only a little the worse for wear. In the big, cool, dull-green waiting-room fifteen or twenty other prisoners were assembled.

  Here wavered stale, pale simulacra—worn-out carbon copies of men: uncorrected proofs and childishly-daubed miniatures of sinners. In one corner a methylated-spirit drinker with a green-and-mauve face crouched shivering: his mouth was a yellow perforation like a worm-hole in a plum—perfectly round. He was trying to blow spit-bubbles. One of the aristocrats of the place, a young man who had already served three months in prison and was to be charged with stealing an overcoat, looked down with amused disdain. Near-by a concatenation of little frail malefactors whispered mouth-to-ear, while a young man in a horribly-stained best suit wrung his poor little hands a yard away, as he explained to the missionary that he didn’t know what to tell his mother. A costermonger in an Anthony Eden hat was saying: “A b—— woman’s got to b——well do what ’er b—— old man b——well tells ’er to b——bloody do. You’re a man o’ the world, eh?” A youth of eighteen who had been taken in the act of dragging a rug out of the window of a parked car said: “Ah—you’ve got something there!” Pushing his Anthony Eden hat to the back of his head, the costermonger said, in a bewildered voice: “I chastised ’er. I didn’t know she was going to fall spark into the fire. I mean to say!”

  “You got something there!”

  “All I done: I ’it ’er across the mouf. I never told ’er to catch ’er ’air alight. I mean to say! They can’t take my living away—I got six boxes o’ ’zanths.”

  “’Zanths?”

  “Chrysanthemums.”

  “Will she charge you?”

  “She bloody better not. I’ll do ’er if she do.”

  “You got something there.”