The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  I was lying, propped at an easy angle, on a hospital cot, at the foot of which a nurse was sitting, turning the pages of an illustrated magazine. “Where am I?” I asked.

  She dropped the magazine, and said: “Hello, there!” and reached for a thermometer.

  “Where the devil am I?”

  “You’re in the hospital. Just take it easy.”

  “But where in hospital?”

  “In Montreal, of course.” She slipped the thermometer into my mouth, saying: “That’s fine; now you keep still,” and went to the door. When she returned a couple of minutes later, someone was walking rather heavily behind her. She caught the thermometer—it fell out of my mouth, and bounced on the edge of the bed—as I cried: “Inspector Halfacre!”

  Obedient to his gesture, the nurse went out again, and then he sat beside me and said: “Thought I’d look in and see how you were, Mr. Kemp. Feeling better? You look like a hundred per cent.”

  “How did I get here?” I asked.

  “You were flown in. You were suffering from . . . some form of poisoning, I believe. You’ve been under one kind of anæsthetic and another, and after that just naturally asleep, for forty-eight hours or more.”

  “Where’s Mungo-Mitchell?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Mungo-Mitchell!” I cried.

  “I seem to remember the name,” said Halfacre with a blank face. “Mayfair boy, wasn’t he? Something to do with a jewellery job, wasn’t that it? Not in my department. What makes you ask?”

  “You know very well who I mean,” I said. “Not the real Mungo-Mitchell; the other one—Chatterton’s ‘man Powell’.”

  “Just take it easy,” said Halfacre, and he handed me a paper bag. “I brought you a few grapes.”

  “All right,” I said. “The man who brought me in—I think he had a broken ankle. Where is he?”

  “Well, Mr. Kemp, I don’t know anything about anybody with broken ankles. I’ll inquire around the hospital, if you like. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police brought you in, by plane, I believe.”

  “From where?” I asked.

  “From somewhere up in the Gaspé Peninsula, I’m told. . . . Mr. Kemp, if I were you, I shouldn’t bother my head about it any more. You’re alive and well. Count your blessings, Mr. Kemp.”

  His face was set like a plaster cast, but I said to him: “Halfacre, if you won’t talk, you won’t. Only one thing——”

  “—George Oaks? He is dead and gone,” said Halfacre.

  I said: “Yes . . . And that horrible light over the mountain? And Kadmeel’s Place . . . ?”

  “There isn’t any Kadmeel’s Place, Mr. Kemp.”

  I persisted: “Then George got through . . . ?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Halfacre. “. . . Come on, now, pull yourself together, Mr. Kemp. You’re an old soldier, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t cry: do they now?”

  I took the handkerchief he offered me, and blew my nose. “I wasn’t crying,” I said.

  “I know; you’re shaky, and a bit weak, but you’ll be all right again tomorrow, and it’ll all seem like a dream.”

  “But there are other Walled Cities in the world,” I said.

  “Mr. Kemp,” said Halfacre, very gravely, “if there are, you can write them off as dreams too, now. You must rest a bit; the doctor says you can get up tomorrow. The day after, I’m flying home, when I’ve finished with my little bit of business here. And I took the liberty of booking you a place on the plane. See you tomorrow. So long, Mr. Kemp.”

  “So long, Inspector.”

  “Oh . . . And, Mr. Kemp, perhaps you feel that somebody owes you at least a ‘Thank you’. Well, officially there is nothing to thank you for. Write it off, Mr. Kemp; write it off.”

  The day after next, we flew home to England; Halfacre to Parliament Street, and I to Sussex.

  In the Piebald Horse two drenched farmers cursed the weather, as farmers have been cursing it in Sussex these two thousand years. Titmouse cursed the hop-pickers who had stolen twenty-eight pint glasses on Saturday night. He told me his odd-jobs man’s wife had gone astray with a fishmonger. “Mr. Oaks gorn?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Back soon, Oy ’ope?” Titmouse said. I shrugged noncommittally, and he went on: “Dat’s a jolly liddle gendleman. Oy wish there were more loike Mr. Oaks, sir.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Titmouse, flattering me with his confidence, and lowering his voice as he kept an eye on the grumbling farmers. “Winter draws on, Mr. Kemp, sir, and if it wasn’t for moy licence Oy might as well close th’ eaowse. The loikes o’ them ’ll sit two eaours over a point o’ bitter. What’s moy profit eaout of a point o’ bitter? One penny! Then they must play their liddle game o’ darts, an’ there’s th’ upkeep o’ the board, an’ money eaout o’ pocket for chalk . . . Oy ask you, sir, is it worth it? Why eaout o’ the locals Oy barely pay moy electric loight bill. Naouw, wi’ gendlemen loike Mr. Oaks it’s ‘Double Whisky’, an’ ‘Set ’em up all reaound’ . . . Well, dat’s de way o’ the world, Oy suppose—The rich pays for de poor, loike. ‘Somebody else ’ll ’ave to suffer,’ as the man said when ’e picked up a two-bob bit in the gutter, eh?—Going, Mr. Kemp?”

  I went out into the mist of the Valley, feeling dreadfully lonely, and went home.

  THE END

  London,

  September, 1951

  About the Author

  Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, in 1911. He left school and took on a series of jobs—salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter—and at the same time was writing his first two novels. His career began inauspiciously with the release of his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, published when Kersh was 23: the book was withdrawn after only 80 copies were sold when Kersh’s relatives brought a libel suit against him and his publisher. He gained notice with his third novel, Night and the City (1938) and for the next thirty years published numerous novels and short story collections, including the comic masterpiece Fowlers End (1957), which some critics, including Harlan Ellison, believe to be his best.

  Kersh fought in the Second World War as a member of the Coldstream Guards before being discharged in 1943 after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. He traveled widely before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, because “the Welfare State and confiscatory taxation make it impossible to work [in Great Britain], if you’re a writer.”

  Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age 57 in 1968 of cancer of the throat.