Completely Unexpected Tales

by Roald Dahl

  ‘Take it off then and get into the far corner and touch your toes. I’m going to give you four.’

  Slowly I would take it off and lay it on the ledge above the boot-lockers. And slowly I would walk over to the far corner, cold and naked now in my cotton pyjamas, treading softly and seeing everything around me suddenly very bright and flat and far away, like a magic lantern picture, and very big, and very unreal, and sort of swimming through the water in my eyes.

  ‘Go on and touch your toes. Tighter – much tighter than that.’

  Then he would walk down to the far end of the changing-room and I would be watching him upside down between my legs, and he would disappear through a doorway that led down two steps into what we called ‘the basin-passage’. This was a stone-floored corridor with wash basins along one wall, and beyond it was the bathroom. When Foxley disappeared I knew he was walking down to the far end of the basin-passage. Foxley always did that. Then, in the distance, but echoing loud among the basins and the tiles, I would hear the noise of his shoes on the stone floor as he started galloping forward, and through my legs I would see him leaping up the two steps into the changing-room and come bounding towards me with his face thrust forward and the cane held high in the air. This was the moment when I shut my eyes and waited for the crack and told myself that whatever happened I must not straighten up.

  Anyone who has been properly beaten will tell you that the real pain does not come until about eight or ten seconds after the stroke. The stroke itself is merely a loud crack and a sort of blunt thud against your backside, numbing you completely (I’m told a bullet wound does the same). But later on, oh my heavens, it feels as if someone is laying a red hot poker right across your naked buttocks and it is absolutely impossible to prevent yourself from reaching back and clutching it with your fingers.

  Foxley knew all about this time lag, and the slow walk back over a distance that must altogether have been fifteen yards gave each stroke plenty of time to reach the peak of its pain before the next one was delivered.

  On the fourth stroke I would invariably straighten up. I couldn’t help it. It was an automatic defence reaction from a body that had had as much as it could stand.

  ‘You flinched,’ Foxley would say. ‘That one doesn’t count. Go on – down you get.’

  The next time I would remember to grip my ankles.

  Afterwards he would watch me as I walked over – very stiff now and holding my backside – to put on my dressing-gown, but I would always try to keep turned away from him so he couldn’t see my face. And when I went out, it would be, ‘Hey, you! Come back!’

  I was in the passage then, and I would stop and turn and stand in the doorway, waiting.

  ‘Come here. Come on, come back here. Now – haven’t you forgotten something?’

  All I could think of at that moment was the excruciating burning pain in my behind.

  ‘You strike me as being an impudent and ill-mannered boy,’ he would say, imitating my father’s voice. ‘Don’t they teach you better manners than that at this school?’

  ‘Thank… you,’ I would stammer. ‘Thank… you… for the beating.’

  And then back up the dark stairs to the dormitory and it became much better then because it was all over and the pain was going and the others were clustering round and treating me with a certain rough sympathy born of having gone through the same thing themselves, many times.

  ‘Hey, Perkins, let’s have a look.’

  ‘How many d’you get?’

  ‘Five, wasn’t it? We heard them easily from here.’

  ‘Come on, man. Let’s see the marks.’

  I would take down my pyjamas and stand there while this group of experts solemnly examined the damage.

  ‘Rather far apart, aren’t they? Not quite up to Foxley’s usual standard.’

  ‘Two of them are close. Actually touching. Look – these two are beauties!’

  ‘That low one was a rotten shot.’

  ‘Did he go right down the basin-passage to start his run?’

  ‘You got an extra one for flinching, didn’t you?’

  ‘By golly, old Foxley’s really got it in for you, Perkins.’

  ‘Bleeding a bit too. Better wash it, you know.’

  Then the door would open and Foxley would be there, and everyone would scatter and pretend to be doing his teeth or saying his prayers while I was left standing in the centre of the room with my pants down.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Foxley would say, taking a quick look at his own handiwork. ‘You – Perkins! Put your pyjamas on properly and get into bed.’

  And that was the end of a day.

  Through the week, I never had a moment of time to myself. If Foxley saw me in the study taking up a novel or perhaps opening my stamp album, he would immediately find something for me to do. One of his favourites, especially when it was raining outside, was, ‘Oh, Perkins, I think a bunch of wild irises would look rather nice on my desk, don’t you?’

  Wild irises grew only around Orange Ponds. Orange Ponds was two miles down the road and half a mile across the fields. I would get up from my chair, put on my raincoat and my straw hat, take my umbrella – my brolly – and set off on this long and lonely trek. The straw hat had to be worn at all times outdoors, but it was easily destroyed by rain; therefore the brolly was necessary to protect the hat. On the other hand, you can’t keep a brolly over your head while scrambling about on a woody bank looking for irises, so to save my hat from ruin I would put it on the ground under my brolly while I searched for flowers. In this way, I caught many colds.

  But the most dreaded day was Sunday. Sunday was for cleaning the study, and how well I can remember the terror of those mornings, the frantic dusting and scrubbing, and then the waiting for Foxley to come in to inspect.

  ‘Finished?’ he would ask.

  ‘I… I think so.’

  Then he would stroll over to the drawer of his desk and take out a single white glove, fitting it slowly on to his right hand, pushing each finger well home, and I would stand there watching and trembling as he moved around the room running his white-gloved forefinger along the picture tops, the skirting, the shelves, the window sills, the lamp shades, I never took my eyes off that finger. For me it was an instrument of doom. Nearly always, it managed to discover some tiny crack that I had overlooked or perhaps hadn’t even thought about; and when this happened Foxley would turn slowly around, smiling that dangerous little smile that wasn’t a smile, holding up the white finger so that I should see for myself the thin smudge of dust that lay along the side of it.

  ‘Well,’ he would say. ‘So you’re a lazy little boy. Aren’t you?’

  No answer.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I thought I dusted it all.’

  ‘Are you or are you not a nasty, lazy little boy?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘But your father wouldn’t want you to grow up like that, would he? Your father is very particular about manners, is he not?’

  No answer.

  ‘I asked you, is your father particular about manners?’

  ‘Perhaps – yes.’

  ‘Therefore I will be doing him a favour if I punish you, won’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Won’t I?’

  ‘Y-yes?’

  ‘We will meet later then, after prayers, in the changing-room.’

  The rest of the day would be spent in an agony of waiting for the evening to come.

  Oh my goodness, how it was all coming back to me now. Sunday was also letter-writing time. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy – thank you very much for your letter. I hope you are both well. I am, except I have a cold because I got caught in the rain but it will soon be over. Yesterday we played Shrewsbury and beat them 4–2. I watched and Foxley who you know is the head of our house scored one of our goals. Thank you very much for the cake. With love from William.’

  I usually went to the lavatory to write my letter, or to the boot-hole
, or the bathroom – any place out of Foxley’s way. But I had to watch the time. Tea was at four-thirty and Foxley’s toast had to be ready. Every day I had to make toast for Foxley, and on weekdays there were no fires allowed in the studies, so all the fags, each making toast for his own studyholder, would have to crowd around the one small fire in the library, jockeying for position with his toasting-fork. Under these conditions, I still had to see that Foxley’s toast was (1) very crisp, (2) not burned at all, (3) hot and ready exactly on time. To fail in any one of these requirements was a ‘beatable offence’.

  ‘Hey, you! What’s this?’

  ‘It’s toast.’

  ‘Is this really your idea of toast?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You’re too idle to make it right, aren’t you?’

  ‘I try to make it.’

  ‘You know what they do to an idle horse, Perkins?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you a horse?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well – anyway, you’re an ass – ha, ha – so I think you qualify. I’ll be seeing you later.’

  Oh, the agony of those days. To burn Foxley’s toast was a ‘beatable offence’. So was forgetting to take the mud off Foxley’s football boots. So was failing to hang up Foxley’s football clothes. So was rolling up Foxley’s brolly the wrong way round. So was banging the study door when Foxley was working. So was filling Foxley’s bath too hot for him. So was not cleaning the buttons properly on Foxley’s O.T.C. uniform. So was making those blue metal-polish smudges on the uniform itself. So was failing to shine the soles of Foxley’s shoes. So was leaving Foxley’s study untidy at any time. In fact, so far as Foxley was concerned, I was practically a beatable offence myself.

  I glanced out of the window. My goodness, we were nearly there. I must have been dreaming away like this for quite a while, and I hadn’t even opened my Times. Foxley was still leaning back in the corner seat opposite me reading his Daily Mail, and through a cloud of blue smoke from his pipe I could see the top half of his face over the newspaper, the small bright eyes, the corrugated forehead, the wavy, slightly oily hair.

  Looking at him now, after all that time, was a peculiar and rather exciting experience. I knew he was no longer dangerous, but the old memories were still there and I didn’t feel altogether comfortable in his presence. It was something like being inside the cage with a tame tiger.

  What nonsense is this? I asked myself. Don’t be so stupid. My heavens, if you wanted to you could go ahead and tell him exactly what you thought of him and he couldn’t touch you. Hey – that was an idea!

  Except that – well – after all, was it worth it? I was too old for that sort of thing now, and I wasn’t sure that I really felt much anger towards him anyway.

  So what should I do? I couldn’t sit there staring at him like an idiot.

  At that point, a little impish fancy began to take a hold of me. What I would like to do, I told myself, would be to lean across and tap him lightly on the knee and tell him who I was. Then I would watch his face. After that, I would begin talking about our schooldays together, making it just loud enough for the other people in the carriage to hear. I would remind him playfully of some of the things he used to do to me, and perhaps even describe the changing-room beatings so as to embarrass him a trifle. A bit of teasing and discomfort wouldn’t do him any harm. And it would do me an awful lot of good.

  Suddenly he glanced up and caught me staring at him. It was the second time this had happened, and I noticed a flicker of irritation in his eyes.

  All right, I told myself. Here we go. But keep it pleasant and sociable and polite. It’ll be much more effective that way, more embarrassing for him.

  So I smiled at him and gave him a courteous little nod. Then, raising my voice, I said, ‘I do hope you’ll excuse me. I’d like to introduce myself.’ I was leaning forward watching him closely so as not to miss the reaction. ‘My name is Perkins – William Perkins – and I was at Repton in 1907.’

  The others in the carriage were sitting very still, and I could sense that they were all listening and waiting to see what would happen next.

  ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ he said, lowering the paper to his lap. ‘Mine’s Fortescue – Jocelyn Fortescue. Eton, 1916.’

  Skin

  That year – 1946 – winter was a long time going. Although it was April, a freezing wind blew through the streets of the city, and overhead the snow clouds moved across the sky.

  The old man who was called Drioli shuffled painfully along the sidewalk of the rue de Rivoli. He was cold and miserable, huddled up like a hedgehog in a filthy black coat, only his eyes and the top of his head visible above the turned-up collar.

  The door of a café opened and the faint whiff of roasting chicken brought a pain of yearning to the top of his stomach. He moved on glancing without any interest at the things in the shop windows – perfume, silk ties and shirts, diamonds, porcelain, antique furniture, finely bound books. Then a picture gallery. He had always liked picture galleries. This one had a single canvas on display in the window. He stopped to look at it. He turned to go on. He checked, looked back; and now, suddenly, there came to him a slight uneasiness, a movement of the memory, a distant recollection of something, somewhere, he had seen before. He looked again. It was a landscape, a clump of trees leaning madly over to one side as if blown by a tremendous wind, the sky swirling and twisting all around. Attached to the frame there was a little plaque, and on this it said: CHAïM soutine (1894–1943).

  Drioli stared at the picture, wondering vaguely what there was about it that seemed familiar. Crazy painting, he thought. Very strange and crazy – but I like it… Chaïm Soutine… Soutine…‘By God!’ he cried suddenly. ‘My little Kalmuck, that’s who it is! My little Kalmuck with a picture in the finest shop in Paris!Just imagine that!’

  The old man pressed his face closer to the window. He could remember the boy – yes, quite clearly he could remember him. But when? The rest of it was not so easy to recollect. It was so long ago. How long? Twenty – no, more like thirty years, wasn’t it? Wait a minute. Yes – it was the year before the war, the first war, 1913. That was it. And this Soutine, this ugly little Kalmuck, a sullen brooding boy whom he had liked – almost loved – for no reason at all that he could think of except that he could paint.

  And how he could paint! It was coming back more clearly now – the street, the line of refuse cans along the length of it, the rotten smell, the brown cats walking delicately over the refuse, and then the women, moist fat women sitting on the doorsteps with their feet upon the cobblestones of the street. Which street? Where was it the boy had lived?

  The Cité Falguière, that was it! The old man nodded his head several times, pleased to have remembered the name. Then there was the studio with the single chair in it, and the filthy red couch that the boy had used for sleeping; the drunken parties, the cheap white wine, the furious quarrels, and always, always the bitter sullen face of the boy brooding over his work.

  It was odd, Drioli thought, how easily it all came back to him now, how each single small remembered fact seemed instantly to remind him of another.

  There was that nonsense with the tattoo, for instance. Now, that was a mad thing if ever there was one. How had it started? Ah, yes – he had got rich one day, that was it, and he had bought lots of wine. He could see himself now as he entered the studio with the parcel of bottles under his arm – the boy sitting before the easel, and his (Drioli’s) own wife standing in the centre of the room, posing for her picture.

  ‘Tonight we shall celebrate,’ he said. ‘We shall have a little celebration, us three.’

  ‘What is it that we celebrate?’ the boy asked, without looking up. ‘Is it that you have decided to divorce your wife so she can marry me?’

  ‘No,’ Drioli said. ‘We celebrate because today I have made a great sum of money with my work.’

  ‘And I have made nothing. We can celebrate that also.’

  �
�If you like.’ Drioli was standing by the table unwrapping the parcel. He felt tired and he wanted to get at the wine. Nine clients in one day was all very nice, but it could play hell with a man’s eyes. He had never done as many as nine before. Nine boozy soldiers – and the remarkable thing was that no fewer than seven of them had been able to pay in cash. This had made him extremely rich. But the work was terrible on the eyes. Drioli’s eyes were half closed from fatigue, the whites streaked with little connecting lines of red; and about an inch behind each eyeball there was a small concentration of pain. But it was evening now and he was wealthy as a pig, and in the parcel there were three bottles – one for his wife, one for his friend, and one for him. He had found the corkscrew and was drawing the corks from the bottles, each making a small plop as it came out.

  The boy put down his brush. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘How can one work with all this going on?’

  The girl came across the room to look at the painting. Drioli came over also, holding a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other.

  ‘No!’ the boy shouted, blazing up suddenly. ‘Please – no!’ He snatched the canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall. But Drioli had seen it.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘It’s marvellous. Like all the others that you do, it’s marvellous. I love them all.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ the boy said, scowling, ‘that in themselves they are not nourishing. I cannot eat them.’

  ‘But still they are marvellous.’ Drioli handed him a tumblerful of the pale-yellow wine. ‘Drink it,’ he said. ‘It will make you happy.’

  Never, he thought, had he known a more unhappy person, or one with a gloomier face. He had spotted him in a cafe some seven months before, drinking alone, and because he had looked like a Russian or some sort of an Asiatic, Drioli had sat down at his table and talked.

  ‘You are a Russian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Minsk.’

  Drioli had jumped up and embraced him, crying that he too had been born in that city.