The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  So time went on. I got very careful, more careful after each one. I mean, you never know. Someone may always be watching you. I remember how my dad used to peep round doors at me when I was small, and it gave me a start even when I hadn’t done nothing wrong.

  Also I got more curious. It was the intellect at work, you see.

  Now this brings us up to date, right smack up to date. Today!

  See, I mean, it’s been eighteen months since I – well, since I had a partner, as I sometimes think of it. But you get terribly lonely. So I went back to the Seven Dials, and this time I said to myself, ‘Vern, my son, you have been very patient, and as a result, I’ve got a little treat for you with this one.’

  Oh, I did it very carefully, watched and watched and was sure to pick on a type who obviously wasn’t local, but passing through the area, so that there would be nothing to connect him with the Seven Dials.

  He was a business man, quiet smart and small, which suited me well. Directly he went in the convenience, I was after him, strolling in very slowly and naturally.

  This fellow was in the one and only cubicle with the door open, panting in an unusual way. But I don’t change my mind when it is sort of cold and made up, so I went straight over to him and held my little bayonet so that it pricked his throat. He was much smaller than me, so I knew there wouldn’t be a nasty scene – being fastidious, or squeamish you might say, I hate anything nasty like that.

  I said to him, ‘I want to hear about a big secret in your life – something you did that no one knows about! Make it quick, or I’ll do you!’

  His face was a vile colour, and he did not seem to be able to talk, though I could see by his clothes he was a superior man, rather like me in a way. I pricked his throat till it bled and told him to hurry up and speak.

  Finally he said, ‘Leave me alone, for God’s sake! I’ve just murdered a man!’

  Well, that’s what he said. It made me mad in a freezing way. Somehow I thought he was being funny, but before I could do anything, he must have seen the look in my eyes, and he grabbed my wrists and started babbling.

  Then he stopped and said, ‘You must be a friend of Fowler’s! You must have followed me to his flat! Why didn’t I think he might be clever enough for that! Oh God! You’re a friend of Fowler’s, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him. I’ve nothing to do with your dirty business!’

  ‘But you knew he was blackmailing me? You must know, or why are you here?’

  We stood and stared at each other. I mean, I was really as taken aback by this turn of events as he was. For me this whole thing was meant to be a – well, I mean it was a sort of relaxation, I mean, it really is necessary for me, else I’d probably be flat on my back with asthma and goodness knows what else, and quite unable to lead a normal life, and the last thing I wanted to do was get mixed up with – well, with murder and blackmail and all that.

  Just as I had reached the conclusion that I ought to let this one go, he started to draw a gun on me. Directly his hand went down, I knew what he was after – just like in those horrible films that they really should be banned from showing where they go for their guns and shoot those big fellers kak-kak-kak out of their pockets!

  So I mean I let him have it, very cold and quick, a very beautiful stroke that only comes with practice.

  This time I could not wait for any sentimental nonsense. I opened the inspection cover and dropped him down, and then climbed down after him. It was very distasteful because he was still moving. I took his gun because I wished to examine the beastly thing well before disposing of it. And I slipped my hand into his warm inner pocket. Inside, I found an open envelope, containing a strip of film together with some enlargements from the negatives. Those photographs were positively indecent – I mean, really indecent, for they showed a girl, a grown girl, with no clothes on whatsoever. I did not need telling they were something to do with this blackmailer Fowler. They just showed what sort of a mind he had! The world was well rid of him, and this beauty who had tried to shoot me.

  In an agony of embarrassment, I slipped those vile things into my pocket to be examined later, opened the other hatch, and tipped our friend into the fast-flowing water. Then I shut down everything, wiped my face on my handkerchief, and walked out into the alley.

  Two plainclothes men were waiting for me outside.

  I was just so astonished, I could not say a word. They said they wished to question me about the shooting of Edmond Fowler, and before I knew what was what, before I could even telephone Mother, they were taking me away in a police car.

  Everyone says the police aren’t what they were. This time, they really have made a big mistake! But I have got a solicitor coming to sort things out for me, and at least I was able to send a message to Mother telling her that I was fine and not to keep lunch waiting for me. I didn’t tell them a thing – I mean, I can still keep my wits about me. I keep on saying I never heard of Edmond Fowler, and that’s all I say. Of course, the little pistol and those revolting photographs are going to be rather difficult to explain.

  But I’m innocent – absolutely innocent! You can’t tell me otherwise.

  The O in José

  They had seen no human habitation for two days when they came unexpectedly on a mountain village. Here their servant arranged that an old woman should guide them over the mountains and back to civilisation.

  After spending an uncomfortable night in the village, they were off early next morning, the five of them: the old woman on foot, the servant on a mule leading a pack mule, and the three men on horses. Of the men, one was by some years the oldest, a spare man with a trim white beard and somewhat over-meticulous gestures. The two younger men were of contrasting type; one of them, the bon viveur, was a thick-set man in his forties, with a plump face and an intelligent glance not entirely marred by a snub nose. His humorous manner acted as a foil for the more serious ways of the youngest man, who was a philatelist of some repute, although only among other philatelists.

  Each of the men was pleased with the excellent company afforded by his two fellows. They had established among themselves a combination of seriousness and gaiety, of reserve and intimacy, which is rare and which more than compensated for the ardours of their long and difficult journey. Where the road would allow it, they spent much of each morning, before the sun was too hot, conversing as they rode; and these conversations were often protracted after dusk, while the servant prepared and they ate their supper.

  But now, as the old woman led them higher into the hills, and as the scene became more desolate, the elder fell silent. The bon viveur was delivering a long mock-heroic about why people told stories of what their dentists did, but finally he too lapsed into silence. All that morning, they rode in a quiet broken only by the echoes of the horses’ movements among the canyons they traversed, or by an occasional word from the servant to his mules.

  The bon viveur secretly resented this silence that he felt radiated from the elder and rebuked him inwardly for not thrusting off a fit of old man’s melancholy. His feeling was that they were three intelligent men whose inward resources should be proof against transitory outside influences. So when they stopped at midday to take the cold meat, wine, and coffee that the servant set before them, the bon viveur said to the philatelist in a provoking tone, ‘Our old guide woman is more silent and dismal even than we are. We’ve not had a word out of her, or out of us.’

  ‘She has more right to be taciturn than we have,’ the philatelist said with a laugh. ‘Think what awaits us over the mountains: hot baths, music, elevators to whisk us to choice restaurants, libraries, conversation, the company of fair women! What awaits her? Only that dreadful village again, and work till her life’s end.’ Addressing himself to the old woman in her own tongue, he called, ‘Hey, my charming madam, you only left your home at dawn today! Are you pining already for some vagabond of a husband?’

  The old woman had come barefoot from the village with seemingly no provision
for the three- or four-day journey but a loaf tucked under her shawl. She sat now away from them, awaiting the order to move on again, and did not look up or answer when the philatelist spoke.

  ‘You’ll have to find something else to distract yourself with,’ the elder said, not approving this baiting of an old woman.

  As they got up to go, and were mounting their horses, the servant came over and told the bon viveur and the philatelist, rather shame-facedly, that he had heard in the village that the old woman was once a great beauty who had suffered a great love and a great betrayal.

  The bon viveur laughed and nudged his friend in the ribs. ‘All these old crones claim to have been great beauties,’ he said. ‘We shall indeed have to find something else to distract ourselves with.’

  Although the elder smarted a little at this remark, which he felt to be directed against him, he said nothing, and they rode on; but as it happened it was only a half hour later that they found something to distract them back into their old companionable humour.

  They worked their way through a defile, the end of which was marked by one wretched tree clinging to the rockface, and were suddenly on a plateau. To one side lay mountain peaks, ribbed with snow and half-hidden under fuming cloud, while to the other lay an immense panorama of the land they had so painfully traversed, all the way to the distant sea, now hidden in the hazes of noon. With a common instinct, the three men turned aside from the way the woman led and directed their mounts toward the precipice.

  For a long while they stood drinking in this view of the distant world of grass and shade and fertility, so different from the place in which they now stood. At last the elder said, ‘Well, I still say there is nothing more melancholy than a mountain, but it was worth the journey just to look down at this spectacle. Sometime, I would like to have you gentlemen’s opinions on why a view from a height has such power to move the spirit.’

  ‘Come and look at this!’ exclaimed the philatelist. Something in his voice made the others turn immediately to see what he had found.

  Perched a few feet away from them, on the very lip of the plateau, so that its outer edge hung into space, was a giant rock. It was grey in colour, and most of its surface had been worn smooth by the elements. But what drew the attention of the men was a human addition to the rock. Someone had carved here in its centre, and in large letters, the name JOSÉ.

  ‘Well, that’s a disappointment, I must say,’ the bon viveur remarked humorously. ‘Just when I was thinking we were the first people ever to set foot in this remote spot.’

  ‘I wonder who José was, and why he carved his name here of all places,’ the elder said. ‘And when. And a dozen other questions connected with the mysterious José.’

  ‘Perhaps he carved this as his memorial and then jumped over the edge,’ suggested the bon viveur. ‘I can think of few more dramatic spots in which to commit suicide, if one were so inclined.’

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ said the philatelist. ‘Here we have a little mystery at our very feet. Let’s each tell a story about this José. Obviously, it is beyond our power to arrive at the truth about him, so let’s each arrive at a fiction about him.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said the bon viveur, ‘though I have run out of bright ideas. The oldest among us must tell his José story first.’

  ‘Seconded,’ agreed the philatelist and, turning to the elder man, asked him to think of a story.

  The elder stroked his beard a little and protested that he was being given the hardest task in beginning; but he was a resourceful old man and, setting one foot on the carved rock, he stared into space and began his story.

  ‘I am not at all sure,’ he said, ‘that this name was not written here by supernatural means, for this plainly is a supernatural place. If I have doubts, it is because José is hardly a supernatural name. Of all names it is the most earthy; all round the world, you can find peasants called José or Joe or Jozé or some close local equivalent. Of all names, it is the most impersonal, the name of a force rather than a man. You know, in the first human tribe, all the males were probably called José.

  ‘Consider the letters that form the name. Look at this three-fingered É! It reminds one, doesn’t it, of a crude agricultural implement, a rake that every peasant uses to rake the detritus of each season wearily from his land. And the J! Isn’t that another implement, the first, the curving sickle that must cut down the weeds and the choking grass from the land? What about this awkward She has made in the rock, of all the letters the most difficult to cut? Is it not the slow meandering path taken by his beast, along the shores of a lake, or winding over a mountain track? And look at the O in JOSÉ! What a symbol you have there, my friends – a symbol of the earth itself, which José will inherit, and of fertility, which is as much the concern of the Josés of our world as it is of the earthworm. You see what José means; it is a natural force like the rock on which it is written.

  ‘But this particular inscription has something individual about it, I fancy. You notice how the J is bitten deep, but the other letters are formed more shallowly. The É is too small. It all goes to show that this José lacked assurance. You may wonder why, and I will tell you.

  ‘This José was a quiet boy, not particularly clever, not particularly dull, not particularly brave, not particularly anything. But one day when he was going on the way to his father’s house, he was stopped in the lane by four bigger boys. José did not know these boys, and we can imagine that directly he saw them he could tell from their looks that there was trouble coming. Perhaps he tried to run from them, but they caught him and made him stand before them.

  ‘“What is your name?” they demanded.

  ‘“José.”

  ‘“OK, José – explain yourself.”

  ‘He tried to evade the question, indeed he tried to evade them, but always they grabbed him by the collar and said “Explain yourself.”

  ‘“I was born in the village,” he said pathetically at last.

  ‘“Why were you born, boy? Explain yourself.”

  ‘No answer he could give seemed to satisfy them. Moreover, the answers were not satisfactory even to José himself. When finally he escaped, their question worried him even more than his fresh bruises. Explain himself? He was totally unable to do so! Now it would be foolish of me to claim, even as an omniscient storyteller with the power of life and death over my character, that José never forgot that searching demand to explain himself. But let us say that it would come back to him at odd and sometimes inconvenient moments in his life, to puzzle and worry him: when he was making merry with his friends, when he was flirting with a village girl, or perhaps when one of them jilted him; or when he was in church, or ill, or taking a holiday, or swimming in the river, or lying lazily in his marriage bed, or cradling his firstborn, or sweating in the noonday field, or even squatting in the flimsy WC at the bottom of his patch of land. What I mean to say is, that at various moments throughout José’s life, the good ones or the bad, he would suddenly feel that a big question hung over him, that there was something about him that needed explaining, something that he was quite unable to explain.

  ‘He kept this thing secret, even from his wife whom he loved. He told himself it was not important, and you two gentlemen may like to judge if he was correct in so thinking. But not to let my story grow too long, for I grant you that stories about simple peasants can become very long indeed, José’s wife died one day. He was full of grief, so much so that he persuaded his old mother to look after his son for a week while he himself saddled up the donkey and rode off into the hills to be alone with his melancholy. It’s not my job to tell you why people have such an instinct, for to me hills are melancholy places in their own right, and more likely to induce than cure gloom. Still, for the purpose of my story, we have to have José riding into the hills – these hills, you know. The assumption will stand since it is not contrary to human nature.

  ‘In the hills, José let the mule – no, we said donkey, didn’t we? – he let the anim
al go where it would while he thought about his life and the meaning of life. But when it came to the meaning of life, he could no more explain himself than when he was a lad being bullied in the lane. In the depths of his brooding, he sat where we stand now, and he carved his name in this rock. And we three are not privileged to know whether José had the wit to see his name was his explanation, and that he himself was self-explanatory.’

  This story was much appreciated by the bon viveur and the philatelist.

  ‘I shall make a poor showing after that fine and philosophical story unless I have a drop of wine first,’ said the bon viveur. He motioned to the servant, who now stood respectfully behind them, holding the horses. The old guide woman remained beyond the group, dissociating herself from them. When the servant came forward with a bag of wine and the bon viveur had slaked his throat, he said apologetically, ‘Well, here is my story of José, though I’m afraid I’m going to have to move this hulking boulder over to another site for the purposes of the narrative.’

  ‘It is the privilege of fiction to move mountains,’ observed the philatelist, and with that encouragement, the bon viveur began his tale.

  ‘With a certain amount of diligence, it was possible to grow very good vines in José’s field. His field lay at the foot of a mountain next to a lake, so that it was sheltered and it was not too arduous to get water to moisten the roots of the vines.

  ‘José was cross-eyed. He had other and more serious troubles also. The field was small, and would barely support him and his pigs and his donkey. Then there were the changes of government, and the changes of forms of government; and although each form of government proclaimed itself more interested in José’s welfare than the last, each one seemed to require José to work harder than the last.

  ‘There was also the rock. The rock was shaped like an elephant’s foot and had fallen away from the mountain in some forgotten time, perhaps even before there were men to forget, or indeed elephants to have feet. The rock occupied a lot of José’s land where he might more profitably have grown vines. But he never resented it. On his twenty-first birthday he carved his name on it, and every day of his working life he rested his back against it.