The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  It was a formidable poker, one of a set of brass-and-steel fire-irons—another of the old man’s acquisitions. Poker, tongs, shovel, brush, and brass fender—it would have been hard to give that rubbish away. I. Small, however, had come home sweating under the weight of them, triumphantly proclaiming that he had got the lot for fifteen shillings. The poker alone was massive enough to knock down a cow, and this he brandished over the boy’s head, repeating: “Or over goes this poker on the wrong side of your head, beggar it!” He was muddled, of course, as usual: by “wrong side” he meant the other end, the great brass butt. It was all hot air, naturally. A rolled-up newspaper, preferably the Westminster Gazette, was more like I. Small’s weapon—and even armed with this he had run, screaming bloody murder, from a bumble bee.

  At last they sat at table in uneasy peace, and Charles devoured buttered muffins, while his mother—with her usual air of anxiety, as if this might be the end of the world—asked where had he been? What had he done? Had he offended the teachers?

  Comforted with muffins, smeared with butter, Charles took out of his jacket pocket the little pink-eyed white rat, and, putting it on the table, said: “Look at what I’ve got.”

  Ah, Lord God in Heaven, then there was a to-do! Mrs. Small opened her mouth and let out such a screech that (as it was later falsely alleged) the workmen in a factory several streets away knocked off the shift, thinking that it was the whistle. I. Small was petrified with terror. He sat rigid, looking at the white rat on the white table-cloth. The white rat, almost equally terrified, crouched on the white table-cloth, stealthily watching I. Small—who later said that it had “eyes like a bleddy murderer.”

  Mrs. Small screamed: “Srul, be careful! They fly at your throat!”

  “They fly?” whispered I. Small, too frightened to move. One could see that he was gathering himself for direct action. Suddenly he leaped away, bounded backwards, took hold of the mighty poker in order to annihilate the rat; but dropped the poker with a yell of agony because, having thrown it down too near the fire, the end was hot. So he got the tongs, immense brass tongs that weighed about ten pounds. With these tongs he proposed to catch the little white rat before it flew (he probably thought that it had wings) at his throat, and … he was not quite sure of what might happen after that.

  Crying: “Stand back, beggar it!” he snapped at the rat with the tongs, and broke the sugar bowl. The white rat, having regained something like composure, leaped off the table and into a partly-opened cupboard. Now I. Small became terrible. He hurled a full teapot at the rat, following it up with a saucer, a muffin, and a pot of jam. But the rat got into the cupboard. “Lock the bleddy door!” bellowed I. Small. “Bleddy-well lock the bleddy door! Don’t worry! From me the bleddy beggar bleddy-well doesn’t get away! Sis an order! Boil a kettle water!”

  Pale as the paper upon which this is written, Millie Small put on a kettle, while I. Small stood on guard at a reasonable distance with the poker. Charles was appalled by all this. Tea was disorganised, ruined. In a few minutes Mrs. Small came out of the kitchen with a kettle full of boiling water. “Funny!” shouted I. Small, the strategian.

  Even in this crisis, Mrs. Small instinctively said: “You mean a funnel—you’re not in Cracow now.”

  “Funnel, schmunnel—quick!”

  So Mrs. Small brought a tin funnel, which I. Small applied to the keyhole of the cupboard, whispering: “Stand back.” Then, with a trembling hand, he poured in boiling water; some of it splashed his hand, and he moaned like an Aeolian harp. Mrs. Small crouched, half-admiring him, by the fireplace. (She had a dread of rats and mice. They might fly at her throat, or run up her skirts into her private parts … as if any self-respecting rat …) Then from the cupboard came a plantive howl.

  I. Small, putting down the kettle, and gasping like a horse, nodded heavily, and said: “See? I got the bleddy little beggar.”

  The noise continued in the cupboard. Mrs. Small said: “Better call a policeman.”

  I. Small, arming himself again with the poker, said: “Policeman? What should I do with a policeman, what? Stand back! I am going to open the bleddy door!”

  Mrs. Small covered Charles with her body in a corner of the room, while I. Small with the ponderous poker unlocked the cupboard and, with a magnificent gesture, threw the door open. Then he appalled the neighbourhood with a noise such as had never been heard before. An immense white thing came out. It was the cat, slightly scalded.

  The white rat got away, found a hole, dived into it, but a pair of brown rats tore it to pieces and devoured it. So wags the world. I. Small beat Charles severely with the middle page of the Globe, shouting: “Rets he should bring into the house, bleddy murderer! Thank God he doesn’t take after me!”

  “He doesn’t get it from my side!” said Millie.

  “He’s a born murderer!” said I. Small, belabouring Charles with the front and back pages of the Globe, rolled into a hollow truncheon. “To bed! To bed!”

  The indignant white cat, licking herself, curled up before the dying fire and, out of her yellow eyes, looked complacently and contemptuously upon the scene.

  CHAPTER XXII

  NOW, in his agony and shame, Charles Small wonders why he was born. But in those days he was beginning to wonder how. One day when his mother was in the kitchen making (of all things!) kreplach, the boy, having brooded fruitlessly over the mystery of his coming into being, approached her and asked: “Mummy, how was I born?”

  Millie’s face grew red, then pale, and she put her hand to her heart. The hand was thick with flour, and Charles Small remembers the ghostly imprint on her bosom. To this day, he cannot see a hand in a white glove without an uncomfortable sensation of embarrassment and the fear of birth and death. Mrs. Small had been dreading this moment. She had lain awake at night worrying about it, when she had explored all the other avenues of anxiety and could find nothing more with which to harass herself. What was she to say? How was it possible to tell a child the truth?

  Finally, she said: “You were found under a cabbage.”

  Charles Small was unconvinced. He went to his father and asked: “Daddy, how was I born?”

  I. Small stood aghast. Muddle-headed at the best of times, this completely stumped him. He said: “Bleddy beggary—wait a minute!” and went to the kitchen, where little Charles heard him demanding, in his penetrating whisper: “Millie, for God’s sake—the bleddy little beggar wants to know how he was born! Quick! You’ve got the education. How was he bleddy-well born?”

  “Under a cabbage,” said Mrs. Small.

  At this the old man, in relief, drew a deep breath and came back jauntily saying: “Under a cebbage.”

  “Where? Did you grow cabbages?”

  Now I. Small was in a quandary. Explanations were exhausted. He flapped at his son with a handkerchief, shouting: “Murderer, if your father says cebbages, it’s cebbages!”

  He hoped that he had put an end to this zoological research. It was embarrassing, it brought blood to the cheeks. Born, schmorn—what for did they want to know, the bleddy little beggars? As a matter of fact I. Small himself was not quite sure. He knew that it was a frightful business, a necessary evil, an unmentionable process in the course of which a woman who was superficially like any other woman became a martyr, and a plain decent man became a ravening beast. He shied away from the whole business. You did something bloodily culpable under the blanket of the dark, and after many months of sighing, sewing, knitting, vomiting, languishing, and secret conferences with dirty old women, there came a dreadful dawn or midnight when the wife of your bosom burst asunder with great outcries, and had dragged out of her an inhuman-looking thing with a bottom that was smacked, so that from the other end there proceeded a wail of misery. So. That was how you were born. A smack on the arse, a doleful cry, and off you went into the world, always feeling a little guilty for having been born out of your mother; and—he shed a couple of tears—a man had only one mother. Of love and birth, these filthy things, how
was it possible to talk to a child? He had an inspiration. He would tell little Charles that his mother had laid an egg.

  Meanwhile, Charles, making his way into some near-by fields, was caught by a small-holder crouching on his hams by a big cabbage. The small-holder, who also kept pigs, took Charles by the ear and said: “After my cabbages, are you?”

  Charles Small whispered: “I was looking for babies, sir.”

  “What d’you mean, babies, you young imp?”

  “Please, sir, babies are found under cabbages.”

  The small-holder, a huge man named Scrip, threw his head back and laughed thunderously into the crisp air. Then Charles Small heard him say: “Bloody lot of fools. Come with me, son,”—and led him to a pen where there stood a great white sow, steadily chewing at something—a muddy, dirty-looking animal. “Here’s how you were born,” said Scrip. Out of a pen came a black boar. He coupled with the sow in a few seconds and then trotted off to bury his dirty muzzle in a mess of mash. Mr. Scrip took Charles to another pen and showed him eight little pink pigs, saying: “That’s how it is, my son. That’s how it goes, see? One thing leads to another, get the idea? Get away with your cabbages!”

  Charles Small walked home thoughtfully. It was somehow unimaginable. He could not for the life of him see I. Small trotting out and mounting his mother, who stood, cloven-hoofed, in the filth, and behaving in so improper a fashion. As for the little pink pigs, he could not imagine from which body orifice they might have come. His first guess was, the mouth. (He remembered that when his mother was big with Priscilla, she was occasionally sick, and there were always, somehow, tomatoes. He still associates tomatoes with gestation.)

  Well, away he went, enlightened, visualising the old man prancing or waddling with amorous snorts after a Millie Small who, wide-legged in the mud, received the seed that was to germinate into the wretchedness that was himself.

  He got home in time for tea. Seated, he looked from I. Small to Millie, thought of the pigs, and shuddered. In spite of his nausea he ate heartily, and then sat by the fire with a paper-backed book about Sexton Blake, the detective. And then there were more ructions.

  I. Small, that confounded idiot, had made a bosom friend of the radical cobbler who had told him that he had nothing but his chains to lose. One day the cobbler saw I. Small poring over a copy of the Boy’s Friend. At this the journeyman-cobbler became indignant, and said that such rubbish was the working-man’s drug. He had nothing but his chains to lose, and all the world to gain. Such literature was devised by the bourgeosie to keep the toiler in subjection. Into the fire with it! “Make him read Robert Blatchford—knock that rubbish out of him!” cried the demented cobbler.

  Now, seeing young Charles crouching over the adventures of Sexton Blake, I. Small became a crusader, an intellectual. Snatching the little book out of the boy’s hands he roared: “My bleddy chains you want to lose? Into the bleddy fire, bourgeois!”

  Mrs. Small said: “Charley, how much did you pay for it?”

  “Threepence.”

  “Let him finish it first,” she said.

  So Charles Small read the last ten pages of Sexton Blake, and then I. Small snatched the little book out of his hands and hurled it into the fire, crying: “Bleddy bourgeois!”

  *

  Yet Charles Small remembers that he was not quite satisfied with the explanation of the pigs. Such carryings on were, somehow, beyond this world, out of imagination. He brooded over the pigs and his parents for a while, and then saw a pair of dogs coupling in a graveyard. The bitch was some kind of mongrel terrier. The male was a bumbling kind of crossbred Airedale with huge feet. They were ill-matched. The little white bitch, in heat, presented herself; whereupon, with a masculine growl, the big dog took her by the shoulders and made ardent love to the empty air four inches above her tail. It was all over in a minute. The big dog, having shot his seed into empty air, stood back lashing about with his silly great tail, panting, full of dark male ecstasy. The little white bitch, still randy, but hopelessly frustrated, turned and bit him viciously in the face. Then she went to look for something like herself; but strong and resolute. The dog, perplexed, put out a long pink tongue to lick away the blood the bitch had shed, pissed upon the headstone of a grave of a gentleman named Kessler, and wandered away.

  This was rather more like it. This touched a button. Yet it was not quite as it should be. Charles Small asked—he had a passion for confirmation of fact—how he was born, addressing himself to a school-mistress. He will always remember the dreadful embarrassment of this old maid, when she said: “You mustn’t ask questions … you were brought by a stork. Now run away and play.”

  So now it was a stork. He went home, deep in thought, and said to the old man: “Daddy, it wasn’t a cabbage, it was a stork.”

  I. Small became maroon-coloured with shame, but then he had an inspiration. He shouted: “Cebbeges! Storks! So for this you go to school? Haven’t cebbages got stalks?”—and aimed a terrible blow at the boy with the Observer.

  Pigs, cabbages, storks—Charles was confused. He looked up Storks in some children’s encylopædia of natural history, decided that the stork was nothing but a bird; inquired where birds got babies—did they lay them in eggs? “Eggs, schmeggs!” howled I. Small, hitting him with The Times.

  At last Charles Small spoke to his aunt, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer, and asked: “Auntie, how was I born?”

  She replied: “Out of your mother’s body.”

  Charles Small went away, overwhelmed. This was more than he had bargained for. At supper, having eaten enough to sustain a strong man for a week, and feeling chipper, as the saying goes, he said: “I know how I was born.”

  Then, indeed, there was the Affair to end all Affairs. Mrs. Small swallowed a peach-stone. I. Small came near to swallowing a teaspoon. There were upheavals such as had never been heard before in that house. Catching his spoon in the nick of time between finger and thumb—it came out with a glutinous noise—beating his wife on the back with one hand and his son on the head with the other—I. Small shouted: “Murderer, bourgeois, what d’you mean?”

  Charles Small said: “Out of my mother’s body.”

  Once again I. Small became dreadful. He took up a dish, and he put it down. He picked up a heavy copper casserole, brandished it, and shouted: “Bodies? Bodies? Where the bleddy hell do they bleddy-well pick up such talk? Apologise, or over goes this saucepan on the wrong side of your head! Bodies! Your own mother? Bodies, yet?”

  Millie said: “Srul, for my sake, not on the head! He’s a child—he didn’t know what he was saying. Chastise him, yes; but not on the head!”

  “Bodies!” roared I. Small, striking his son a deadly blow with the News of the World, “bodies! What d’you mean, bodies? Have respect, him and his bodies!”

  “Not on the head!” cried Millie Small.

  The meal ended in silence. Charles saw his parents exchanging looks full of guilty meaning. His mother looked at the ceiling. His father looked at his boots. At last, furtively, Millie wormed out of him the name of the miscreant who had corrupted him with talk of bodies. Then, with a pretty little quarrel in hand, she went to bed. I. Small ordered the boy to follow her, shouting. He was a dignified figure, with his red moustache—awe-inspiring. With his upraised hand he looked like a Statue of Liberty. All he needed was a torch, a toga, tits, and lights in his hair, as he said: “No buddy bleddies!”

  Then an exhausted peace came down on the house.

  Charles Small took up this business of bodies later on, and, learning the ins and outs of it, was incredulous. A pig, yes. But …

  *

  … But, how, and why … After all these years Charles Small cannot get to the bottom of it all. He recognises himself as one of the most despicable cowards that ever infested the face of the earth, but, compared with I. Small, he was by way of being an Ajax, a Ulysses, a Jason.

  There was, he remembers, the dreadful business of the Stick Insects. At that time, in his s
chool, some broad-beamed head-mistress got a progressive idea. She took it into her head that, by observing stick insects, children might in some mysterious way become nobler, wiser, better citizens. Stick insects, Charles Small recalls, are narrow, green things something like grasshoppers. They eat leaves, and remain safe because of their extraordinary ability to keep still and become indistinguishable from the stem of the common privet. (This, of course, was perfectly in keeping. The stick insect, as an example. Dissolve, melt into your surroudings, nibble when no one is looking; be furtive, disguise yourself, hide—that was how it had been, was, and should be!)

  This head-mistress informed the school that every child might have, free of charge, a couple of stick insects, on condition that he brought a quantity of privet leaves in a cardboard box. All the boys went raving mad—there was scarcely a privet hedge left intact in the neighbourhood, and the tradesmen were driven almost to desperation by requests for cardboard boxes. Stick insects. They made a bit of a change.

  Charles Small, naturally, hadn’t the nerve to go to a hosier and ask for an empty box. He went to a tobacconist across the street, with whom the old man was on friendly terms, and was given a great box that had contained threepenny cigars, and a well-intentioned pinch into the bargain. Under the cover of twilight he picked a few sprigs of privet from a neighbouring hedge, put them in the box, and so received two live stick insects, which attached themselves at once to the stalks and became invisible. Informed, at this point, that now he could not see them, Charles Small was profoundly impressed. He carried the box home after school, put it on the dining-room table, opened it and watched. It seemed to be full of leaves. Nothing stirred. He blew, he waggled his fingers: the stick insects were not having any of it. They lay doggo, played possum. Then there was the echo of a “bleddy” and the old man tripped over the door-mat, and Charles hurriedly closed the cigar-box. I. Small came in, genially disposed, and saw the cigar-box on the table. His eyes twinkled, and he smiled, for he loved a good cigar—to him, any cigar was a good cigar—opened the box, and saw nothing but leaves. He was disappointed—there had flashed into his foggy mind an idea that Millie might have bought him a box of cigars for a surprise, just as she used to buy his ties, which were the most ornate that could be bought for the money.