Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

  Where is Jack? they asked in the gardens of the place he had left. Up on the hills with a butcher’s knife, they said, smiling. But the knife was gone, thrown at a tree and quivering there still. There was no heat in his head. He ran on and on, howling for sleep.

  And she, alone in the house, was sewing her new dress. It was a bright country dress with flowers on the bodice. Only a few more stitches were needed before it would be ready to wear. It would lie neat on her shoulders, and two of the flowers would be growing out of her breasts.

  When she walked with her husband on Sunday mornings over the fields and down into the village, the boys would smile at her behind their hands, and the shaping of the dress round her belly would set all the widow women talking. She slipped into her new dress, and, looking into the mirror over the fireplace, saw that it was prettier than she had imagined. It made her face paler and her long hair darker. She had cut it low.

  A dog out in the night lifted its head up and howled. She turned away hurriedly from her reflection, and pulled the curtains closer.

  Out in the night they were searching for a madman. He had green eyes, they said, and had married a lady. They said he had cut off her lips because she smiled at men. They took him away, but he stole a knife from the kitchen and slashed his keeper and broke out into the wild valleys.

  From afar he saw the light in the house, and stumbled up to the edge of the garden. He felt, he did not see, the little fence around it. The rusting wire scraped on his hands, and the wet, abominable grass crept over his knees. And once he was through the fence, the hosts of the garden came rushing to meet him, the flower-headed, and the bodying frosts. He had torn his fingers while the old wounds were still wet. Like a man of blood he came out of the enemy darkness onto the steps. He said in a whisper, Let them not shoot me. And he opened the door.

  She was in the middle of the room. Her hair had fallen untidily, and three of the buttons at the neck of her dress were undone. What made the dog howl as it did? Frightened of the howling, and thinking of the tales she had heard, she rocked in her chair. What became of the woman? she wondered as she rocked. She could not think of a woman without any lips. What became of women without any lips? she wondered.

  The door made no noise. He stepped into the room, trying to smile, and holding out his hands.

  Oh, you’ve come back, she said.

  Then she turned in her chair and saw him. There was blood even by his green eyes. She put her fingers to her mouth. Not shoot, he said.

  But the moving of her arm drew the neck of her dress apart, and he stared in wonder at her wide, white forehead, her frightened eyes and mouth, and down onto the flowers on her dress. With the moving of her arm, her dress danced in the light. She sat before him, covered in flowers. Sleep, said the madman. And, kneeling down, he put his bewildered head upon her lap.

  THE VEST

  He rang the bell. There was no answer. She was out. He turned the key.

  The hall in the late afternoon light was full of shadows. They made one almost solid shape. He took off his hat and coat, looking sidewise, so that he might not see the shape, at the light through the sitting-room door.

  “Is anybody in?”

  The shadows bewildered him. She would have swept them up as she swept the invading dust.

  In the drawing-room the fire was low. He crossed over to it and sat down. His hands were cold. He needed the flames of the fire to light up the corners of the room. On the way home he had seen a dog run over by a motorcar. The sight of the blood had confused him. He had wanted to go down on his knees and finger the blood that made a round pool in the middle of the road. Someone had plucked at his sleeve, asking him if he was ill. He remembered that the sound and strength of his voice had drowned the first desire. He had walked away from the blood, with the stained wheels of the car and the soaking blackness under the bonnet going round and round before his eyes. He needed the warmth. The wind outside had cut between his fingers and thumbs.

  She had left her sewing on the carpet near the coal scuttle. She had been making a petticoat. He picked it up and touched it, feeling where her breasts would sit under the yellow cotton. That morning he had seen her with her head enveloped in a frock. He saw her, thin in her nakedness, as a bag of skin and henna drifting out of the light. He let the petticoat drop onto the floor again.

  Why, he wondered, was there this image of the red and broken dog? It was the first time he had seen the brains of a living creature burst out of the skull. He had been sick at the last yelp and the sudden caving of the dog’s chest. He could have killed and shouted, like a child cracking a black beetle between its fingers.

  A thousand nights ago, she had lain by his side. In her arms, he thought of the bones of her arms. He lay quietly by her skeleton. But she rose next morning in the corrupted flesh.

  When he hurt her, it was to hide his pain. When he struck her cheek until the skin blushed, it was to break the agony of his own head. She told him of her mother’s death. Her mother had worn a mask to hide the illness of her face. He felt the locust of that illness on his own face, in the mouth and the fluttering eyelid.

  The room was darkening. He was too tired to shovel the fire into life, and saw the last flame die. A new coldness blew in with the early night. He tasted the sickness of the death of the flame as it rose to the tip of his tongue, and swallowed it down. It ran around the pulse of the heart, and beat until it was the only sound. And all the pain of the damned. The pain of a man with a bottle breaking across his face, the pain of a cow with a calf dancing out of her, the pain of the dog, moved through him from his aching hair to the flogged soles of his feet.

  His strength returned. He and the dripping calf, the man with the torn face, and the dog on giddy legs, rose up as one, in one red brain and body, challenging the beast in the air. He heard the challenge in his snapping thumb and finger, as she came in.

  He saw that she was wearing her yellow hat and frock.

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?” she said.

  She went into the kitchen to light the stove. He stood up from his chair. Holding his hands out in front of him as though they were blind, he followed her. She had a box of matches in her hand. As she took out a dead match and rubbed it on the box, he closed the door behind him. “Take off your frock,” he said.

  She did not hear him, and smiled.

  “Take off your frock,” he said.

  She stopped smiling, took out a live match and lit it.

  “Take off your frock,” he said.

  He stepped towards her, his hands still blind. She bent over the stove. He blew the match out.

  “What is it?” she said.

  His lips moved, but he did not speak.

  “Why?” she said.

  He slapped her cheek quite lightly with his open hand.

  “Take off your frock,” he said.

  He heard her frock rustle over her head, and her frightened sob as he touched her. Methodically his blind hands made her naked.

  He walked out of the kitchen, and closed the door.

  In the hall, the one married shadow had broken up. He could not see his own face in the mirror as he tied his scarf and stroked the brim of his hat. There were too many faces. Each had a section of his features, and each a stiffened lock of his hair. He pulled up the collar of his coat. It was a wet winter night. As he walked, he counted the lamps. He pushed a door open and stepped into the warmth. The room was empty. The woman behind the bar smiled as she rubbed two coins together. “It’s a cold night,” she said.

  He drank up the whisky and went out.

  He walked on through the increasing rain. He counted the lamps again, but they reached no number.

  The corner bar was empty. He took his drink into the saloon, but the saloon was empty.

  The Rising Sun was empty.

  Outside, he heard no traffic. He remembered that he had seen nobody in the streets. He cried aloud in a panic of loneliness:

  “Where are you, where are yo
u?”

  Then there was traffic, and the windows were blazing. He heard singing from the house on the corner.

  The bar was crowded. Women were laughing and shouting. They spilt their drinks over their dresses and lifted their dresses up. Girls were dancing on the sawdust. A woman caught him by the arm, and rubbed his face on her sleeve, and took his hand in hers and put it on her throat. He could hear nothing but the voices of the laughing women and the shouting of the girls as they danced. Then the ungainly women from the seats and the corners rocked towards him. He saw that the room was full of women. Slowly, still laughing, they gathered close to him.

  He whispered a word under his breath, and felt the old sickness turn sour in his belly. There was blood before his eyes.

  Then he, too, burst into laughter. He stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, and laughed into their faces.

  His hand clutched around a softness in his pocket. He drew out his hand, the softness in it.

  The laughter died. The room was still. Quiet and still, the women stood watching him.

  He raised his hand up level with his eyes. It held a piece of soft cloth.

  “Who’ll buy a lady’s vest?” he said. “Going, going, ladies, who’ll buy a lady’s vest?”

  The meek and ordinary women in the bar stood still, their glasses in their hands, as he leant with his back to the counter and shouted with laughter and waved the bloody cloth in front of them.

  THE TRUE STORY

  The old woman upstairs had been dying since Helen could remember. She had lain like a wax woman in her sheets since Helen was a child coming with her mother to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the dying. And now Helen was a woman under her apron and print frock and her pale hair was bound in a bunch behind her head. Each morning she got up with the sun, lit the fire, let in the red-eyed cat. She made a pot of tea and, going up to the bedroom at the back of the cottage, bent over the old woman whose unseeing eyes were never closed. Each morning she looked into the hollows of the eyes and passed her hands over them. But the lids did not move, and she could not tell if the old woman breathed. “Eight o’clock, eight o’clock now,” she said. And at once the eyes smiled. A ragged hand came out from the sheets and stayed there until Helen took it in her padded hand and closed it round the cup. When the cup was empty Helen filled it, and when the pot was dry she pulled back the white sheets from the bed. There the old woman was, stretched out in her nightdress, and the colour of her flesh was grey as her hair. Helen tidied the sheets and attended to the old woman’s wants. Then she took the pot away.

  Each morning she made breakfast for the boy who worked in the garden. She went to the back door, opened it, and saw him in the distance with his spade. “Half past eight now,” she said. He was an ugly boy and his eyes were redder than the cat’s, two crafty cuts in his head forever spying on the first shadows of her breast. She put his food in front of him. When he stood up he always said, “Is there anything you want me to do?” She had never said, “Yes.” The boy went back to dig potatoes out of the patch or to count the hens’ eggs, and if there were berries to be picked off the garden bushes she joined him before noon. Seeing the red currants pile up in the palm of her hand, she would think of the stain of the money under the old woman’s mattress. If there were hens to be killed she could cut their throats far more cleanly than the boy who let his knife stay in the wound and wiped the blood on the knife along his sleeves. She caught a hen and killed it, felt its warm blood, and saw it run headless up the path. Then she went in to wash her hands.

  It was in the first weeks of spring that she made up her mind to kill the old woman upstairs. She was twenty years old. There was so much that she wanted. She wanted a man of her own and a black dress for Sundays and a hat with a flower. She had no money at all. On the days that the boy took the eggs and the vegetables to market she gave him sixpence that the old woman gave her, and the money the boy brought back in his handkerchief she put into the old woman’s hand. She worked for her food and shelter as the boy worked for his, though she slept in a room upstairs and he slept in a straw bed over the empty sheds.

  On a market morning she walked into the garden so that the plan might be cooled in her head. It was a fine May day with no more than two clouds in the sky, two unshapely hands closing round the head of the sun. “If I could fly,” she thought, “I could fly in at the open window and fix my teeth in her throat.” But the cool wind blew the thought away. She knew that she was no common girl, for she had read books in the winter evenings when the boy was dreaming in the straw and the old woman was alone in the dark. She had read of a god who came down like money, of snakes with the voices of men, and of a man who stood on the top of a hill talking with a piece of fire.

  At the end of the garden where the fence kept out the wild, green fields she came to a mound of earth. There she had buried the dog she had killed for catching and killing the hens. On a rough cross the date of the death was written backwards so that the dog had not died yet. “I could bury her here,” said Helen to herself, “by the side of the grave, so that nobody could find her.” And she patted her hands and reached the back door of the cottage before the two clouds got round the sun.

  Inside there was a meal to be prepared for the old woman, potatoes to be mashed up in the tea. With the knife in her hand and the skins in her lap, she thought of the murder she was about to do. The knife made the only sound, the wind had dropped down, her heart was as quiet as though she had wrapped it up. Nothing moved in the cottage; her hand was dead on her lap; she could not think that smoke went up the chimney and out into the still sky. Her mind, alone in the world, was ticking away. Then, when all things were dead, a cock crew, and she remembered the boy who would soon be back from market. She had made up her mind to kill before he returned, but the grave must be dug and the hole filled up. Helen felt her hand die again in her lap. And in the middle of death she heard the boy’s hand lift the latch. He came into the kitchen, saw that she was cleaning potatoes, and dropped his handkerchief on the table. Hearing the rattle of money, she looked up at him and smiled. He had never seen her smile before.

  Soon she put his meal in front of him, and sat sideways by the fire. As he raised the knife to his mouth, he felt the full glance of her eyes on the sides of his eyes. “Have you taken up her dinner?” he asked. She did not answer. When he had finished he stood up from the table and asked, “Is there anything you want me to do?” as he had asked a thousand times. “Yes,” said Helen.

  She had never said “Yes” to him before. He had never heard a woman speak as she did then. The first shadow of her breast had never been so dark. He stumbled across the kitchen to her and she lifted her hands to her shoulders. “What will you do for me?” she said, and loosened the straps of her frock so that it fell about her and left her breast bare. She took his hand and placed it on her flesh. He stared at her nakedness, then said her name and caught hold of her. She held him close. “What will you do for me?” She let her frock fall on the floor and tore the rest of her clothes away. “You will do what I want,” she said as his hands dropped on her.

  After a minute she struggled out of his arms and ran softly across the room. With her naked back to the door that led upstairs, she beckoned him and told him what he was to do. “You help me, we shall be rich,” she said. He smiled and nodded. He tried to finger her again but she caught his fingers and opened the door and led him upstairs. “You stay here quiet,” she said. In the old woman’s room she looked around her as if for the last time, at the cracked jug, the half-open window, the bed and the text on the wall. “One o’clock now,” she said into the old woman’s ear, and the blind eyes smiled. Helen put her fingers round the old woman’s throat. “One o’clock now,” she said, and with a sudden movement knocked the old woman’s head against the wall. It needed but three little knocks, and the head burst like an egg.

  “What have you done?” cried the boy. Helen called for him to come in. He stared at the naked woman who cleaned her
hands on the bed and at the blood that made a round, red stain on the wall, and screamed out in horror. “Be quiet,” said Helen, but he screamed again at her quiet voice and scurried downstairs.

  “So Helen must fly,” she said to herself, “fly out of the old woman’s room.” She opened the window wider and stepped out. “I am flying,” she said.

  But she was not flying.

  THE FOLLOWERS

  It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking goloshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind—

  “Night, Mr. Macey.”

  “Going my way, Charlie?”

  “Ooh, there’s a pig of a night!”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Swan”—and older men, clinging onto the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fond, fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.

  Young women from the offices, who smelt of scent and powder and wet pixie hoods and hair, scuttled, giggling, arm-in-arm, after the hissing trams, and screeched as they splashed their stockings in the puddles rainbowed with oil between the slippery lines.

  In a shopwindow, two girls undressed the dummies:

  “Where are you going tonight?”

  “Depends on Arthur. Up she comes.”

  “Mind her cami-knicks, Edna …”

  The blinds came down over another window.

  A newsboy stood in a doorway, calling the news to nobody, very softly:

  “Earthquake. Earthquake in Japan.”

  Water from a chute dripped onto his sacking. He waited in his own pool of rain.

  A flat, long girl drifted, snivelling into her hanky, out of a jeweller’s shop, and slowly pulled the steel shutters down with a hooked pole. She looked, in the grey rain, as though she were crying from top to toe.