Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  The merchant spot-checked the shop. He shrugged. “Tesco is big. Yunnum Fun is small.”

  “You get a nice glazed ham at the Tesco, do better. A good full ham, less dear, more lean, and far and away better than those poor things.” She gestured to three fist-sized hams on the tray to her left. “Good chops, veal, ribs, too.”

  “Ham is costly, very so.”

  “Well, yours cost a packet, don’t they?”

  “Man say in China: what melts the butter, hardens the egg.”

  “You won’t hear that in London. They don’t talk like that here. They’d think you were potty if you went around talking like that in England, which, may I add, is where we are. Me, anyway.”

  Yunnum Fun snatched up a piece of paper and stridently blew his nose in it. It sounded like a quack. Mrs. Proby winced and sourly turned away with her eyes wrinkled shut. He looked up, smiled. Quickly, she stuffed her purchases into a straw satchel, her jaw set firm. She pointed to a row of glass jars. “How much are those Huanese nuts, or however they’re pronounced?”

  “About twelve bob.”

  “What do you mean about twelve bob? Either they are twelve bob or they are not twelve bob.”

  “Up or down according.”

  They faced each other, rivetted in a unity of hatred; both knew what the other thought, each thought what the other knew. Mrs. Proby regarded him with the pity that tries to indict, but also which includes the mask of dismay that implies it is a pity uselessly, if wisely, given. She knew his teeth were smiling perpetually behind his lips.

  “We’ve been speaking the King’s English here since Adam and Eve, and I haven’t seen it hurt anybody, yet, by the way.” She threw her shoulders back, majestically. Yunnum Fun shrugged and made the sound of a pip. “But if people want to get on with it and skip about like St. Anthony’s Pig, oinking and what-have-you, it’s jolly well good enough with me.” It was not jolly well good enough with her.

  Yunnum Fun watched her through the gun-hole slits of his eyes as he tickled up in his mind all her lies, protestations, moral thieveries. She was like a mad dentist trying to extract his every dying nerve. His father had been correct. Then, Yunnum Fun’s eves twinkled philosophically. He had a lesson for her. He folded his hands into his sleeves, bowed, and began:

  A great lady of Ping was. At meal of fowl say she, with bullying to servant which had arrived at treacheries, what undergoes here here? Is stuffing of this my fowl forever gone of hognuts always? Fowl uncapable in taste when gone of hognut. Woeful personage of servant make abruptions in sowow and him drag in dinky monkey who smile six thumbs wide. That, say servant who want to whip it. It dip into you hognut, of two pounds on the button. Lady of Ping, wise as great, on balances weighted dinky monkey, and here it smile much much with great deal. It weight one an half pound—and no more, any. Neither now is woeful personage of servant.

  Yunnum Fun, again, bowed.

  “I’ve never heard such tripe in my life.”

  “We indeed, too, say in China: speak is not so good as do.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “They say in China.”

  “Christianity’s good enough for me, thank you.”

  Yunnum Fun fought a crucial impulse to broadjump the counter and bite her. Instead, he watched. Mrs. Proby walked to the door, opened it, and turned. She clutched the satchel like a football under a right arm healthily michaelangelesque, the humerus within empirically the size of a Westphalia ham. Her face twitched.

  “You see,” she fumed, “we were always taught that if people go mucking about and foraging around with yellows, blacks, or any another cribbage-faced nit who steps here and about as free as Dick’s hatband in a country not his, well then, the country won’t be worth tuppence.” Her full face was wide, flapping, incarnadine. “And don’t you think for one iota we’re going to become another Shanghai with all its cheap cloth and jerry-made cameras, because you’ve got another thing coming, dearie. We’ve had the war. Once burned, twice shy, they say. Mark me well, we know what you’re about, too, and you are not, you heard me just say not, pulling the wool over anybody’s sheep’s clothing. Certainly not mine, least of all.” Her womb was smoking with wrath. And then the exit line came. “Rice or no rice,” she said, “if I was a Chinaman I’d flap right back where I flew from.”

  Mrs. Proby breezed out the door, her popliteal fat winking in several places just before she disappeared, and the bell clacked its weak reprisal. It was then that Yunnum Fun decided to kill her.

  III

  The magnificence of a sun hidden made the afternoon English, the sun typical, and magnificence a word highly subjective. Shoppers, transients, and businessmen hurried through streets stamped along for years. Small and large shops that lined the Brompton Road spilled forth customers, in heavy coats and mufflers, who emerged diffident, obtuse, and ready for a snack. The sky above was the color of pewter: toward it no one looked, for it no one cared. The utter impossibility of alteration, determined through centuries of unquizzical resignation and fortified by a trust in the fancy of a capable God, makes of the grey day in London an inexorability that translates into the accepted gratitude of a traditional pain known to an untraditional pleasure not. Enthusiasm, then, is modified by habit; habit is reinforced by schedule; and the schedule which excludes a hearty drink at the local is not only unimaginable, but irregular—the very situation that finds in a bright sun an afternoon foreign and the word magnificence absurdly objective. The pubs were crowded.

  A short, fat girl in a pale blue workcoat came over to the snug and, with her hands on her hips, asked for the orders of three women who sat with their hands folded, worshipfully, like a tripartite version of a female Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior grown thirsty.

  Mrs. Cullinane wrinkled her nose and smiled coquettishly. “A nice Dubonnet.” She held her thumb and index finger a straw apart.

  “Oh me. My turn. I think I’ll be a devil and have a Babycham.” She hugged herself, for Mrs. Shoe on few occasions was used to neither deviltry nor drink. A nondescript somewhat ibis-headed English lady, she was prone to hypochondria and wore a sort of reed-woven culotte, adorned with a sprig of ceramic cherries, but, in her favour, she freely beamed from a face as bright as the Colenso diamond. She was rather tall and unlovely and had a sore throat. Her eyes sparkled at the thought of a good glass. “One finds one needs it in the nippy cold.”

  “A pint of Guinness,” Mrs. Proby bit off the words. They all looked at Mrs. Proby. “I’ve been shopping,” she excused herself.

  “Eating?” The waitress leaned on her left foot. Mrs. Proby looked at Mrs. Cullinane. Mrs. Cullinane looked at Mrs. Shoe. Mrs. Shoe looked at Mrs. Proby. The waitress walked away.

  The Bunch of Grapes was an old pub rebuilt in the nineteenth century but evocative of Dickensian solidarity and cheer: wooden beams, smoked windows cut fine with curling designs, red walls, rubbed brass rails, and a long bar in the shape of a rhomboid upon which sat a phalanx of clotted saucebottles, plates of fresh sandwiches, toad-in-the-hole, and hot sausages stuck through with toothpicks. The long gilt mirror that reached around the bar reflected men in dark suits, gathered in whispers and loud laughter, each one with one hand in a pocket, one foot resting on an ankle-high pipe just above a red and yellow carpeted floor. Three or four old men sat buckled on a bench in their cigar smoke and newspapers as they read the horses over glasses of bitter.

  Mrs. Proby’s feet hurt. A doctor had recently diagnosed it as Talipes Plantaris and told her to use her head about these matters, but when Mrs. Cullinane suggested the damp, Mrs. Proby said she blamed no one but herself (“In my day, you see, we were not afraid of a walk”). Otherwise she felt fairly comfortable: her ham was ready for the oven; the salad was diced up and mixed and wanted only dressing; then she would bake her potatoes, for she liked them crisp in their jackets. She wanted a green, but runner beans were out, the Chinaman saw to that, the little pig, so she would make do without. She had done in the war and could do i
t again. Meantime, she had promised herself an afternoon at the pictures; the matinee would guarantee that she would, consequently, arrive home for any last details by way of preparation for her nice dinner. She would take her sweet time. Decisions had been made: the girls, as was usual, met together in the pub for what they called a “hello” but what was, in fact, a masterful if somewhat dirty coup de jarnac which squeaked out platitudes and shibboleths and made the day the day.

  Mrs. Cullinane flapped her collar up and held it to her neck in a prissy, fragile pose. “There’s a filthy wind shushing through that door,” she said.

  “Gnf,” said Mrs. Proby, her mouth bulging wet and full with stout.

  “My doctor is too busy for my throat,” whined Mrs. Shoe, picking a nut from a dish. “I went to see him Friday last as hoarse as ten crows, but would he write me up a chit for the chemist? Not if two Sundays came together in a row, he wouldn’t. He told me to go off and suck a mint humbug, hello and goodbye.”

  “A mint humbug?” Mrs. Cullinane’s face turned sour.

  “Your five-penny sucker,” Mrs. Proby added. “One of those after-dinner lozenges. Imagine.” She lighted a cigarette.

  “A pastille.”

  “A lozenge.”

  “A pastille,” Mrs. Shoe assured them.

  “A lozenge!” shot Mrs. Proby, jumping up like a gigged frog. “I ought to know a lozenge when I take one.”

  Mrs. Shoe looked at Mrs. Cullinane. Mrs. Cullinane, smiling nervously, looked away and began to hum “I’m Shy, Mary Ann, I’m Shy.” A few uneasy minutes passed. The triquetrum sulked.

  “Tiny premium, if you ask me,” Mrs. Cullinane eventually said, adding a deep sigh. “About your doctor, I mean, Mrs. Shoe.”

  Mrs. Proby had now cooled off and renewed everyone with a newscast. “I hear the doctors in America won’t operate unless a patient has eaten money,” she said. “They play golf, and all their wives bob their noses.”

  “My doctor never plays golf,” said Mrs. Shoe.

  “What is your doctor’s name, The Cripple Hermit of Malvern?”

  “Crapman. Dr. Irving.”

  “His Noseship? A bobbed nose there, the wife and him,” snickered Mrs. Proby with fruitful incivility and leaned forward in a kind of grim hunker. Suddenly she grew serious. “They’d nick the wallet off Good Father Hodge, you give them a chance. They eat cardboard. Their mothers use paper underwear, to save.” Mrs. Proby leaned forward again in a revealing gesture of semi-secrecy, balancing her cigarette, as she did, on an ashtray of fat white ceramic advertising Watney’s Red Barrel. The ladies came together in what looked like a rugby scrum. “I say,” she continued in a low voice, “I say send those devilish awful Hebrew Jewish People from Israel right back where they live, with those beards and pained expressions and stovepipe hats, like the pictures in the Bible, even if it was written there, is what I think. They’re into the woodwork, never you mind Threadneedle Street, and false as dicers’ oaths, milking us white, and, let me tell you, sooner than you think we’ll be burying every poor dead Englishman, pudd’nhead though he may be, in nothing but potted-meat tins and lowering him into bogwater on the Isle of Dogs without so much as a three-day deacon on hand to say ta-da.” Mrs. Proby puffed her cheeks, fighting, as she was, a bulb of rising gas. It passed away in a rumble.

  The fat waitress bustled over to the snug with three drinks on a tray, set it down on the table, and mumbled a perfunctory, “Seven and three, then.” Each dropped her coins into the girl’s hand.

  “I’m the Guinness,” Mrs. Proby said. The other ladies cooed and eased their drinks from the tray. The waitress paused a bit, rubbed her nose, and coughed. Nothing happened; she slid the tray away with a slight hiss and walked back to the bar, with seven shillings and three old pennies. The ladies each raised her glass an inch.

  “Shillings in your sock,” said Mrs. Cullinane.

  “Love and a kiss/and a man for a tryst,” Mrs. Shoe giggled, blushed, and her lips formed into a red bow.

  “Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of Windsor and our own,” said Mrs. Proby. “Full stop.” They clinked glasses and drank. “Tasty, this,” said Mrs. Cullinane. “I find Dubonnet can often get rather fruity. Whereas, you see, I like a happy medium: dry but with a grape feeling in it, too. I won’t touch it if there is shaved ice in it, however. They flit through me like fish. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.” Mrs. Proby, having glugged two fast mouthfuls, wheezed, coughed, and her tongue flew out. She slapped at her neck. “Is it your liver, dear?” Mrs. Cullinane asked, a winsome expression on her face, her lips pursed worriedly above her m-shaped chin.

  “Not a word. My liver’s as right as the mail,” Mrs. Proby managed to say; then she swiveled her head and barked until her eyes watered. “Only a furball in the throat,” she sputtered in the midst of the spasm, her face the colour of ox-blood. She looked like the Dong with the Luminous Nose.

  “Lord love a duck,” said Mrs. Cullinane.

  “My doctor is too busy for my throat,” repeated Mrs. Shoe.

  “You’ll want to watch that throat,” said Mrs. Cullinane.

  “I tried. He told me to suck a mint humbug.”

  “I meant Mrs. Proby.”

  “Oh.”

  Mrs. Shoe smiled sadly.

  The door of the saloon side of the pub opened, and a large sandy-haired Irishman punched through to the wooden bar in his gum boots; he wore a paddy cap, and a folded newspaper was stuffed into the right pocket of his mouse-grey trousers, partially evident through a stained, flapping mac. Mrs. Proby registered an obvious disesteem with a slug of Guinness and, through an eructation that spattered several drops of foam, grumbled, “Stinks of the bog.” Mrs. Cullinane held her glass to the light and addressed it quietly, “I’ve seen a hundred faces like that lying in the puddles in Camden Town every Saturday night.”

  “Smarmy cheapjacks,” said Mrs. Proby. “Mr. Proby used to say there’s no bank on earth with thicker doors than an Irish head.”

  “They eat sandwiches they take out of their trouser pockets,” said Mrs. Cullinane.

  “They have no work over there,” said Mrs. Shoe. “The Labour Government says they’re good with a shovel. And so they pack up, tummy and tosspot, and breeze right over here from Seven Dials to Hornsey Rise just to find, well, ditches, don’t they? I mean, I suppose I’d be right along with them were I good with a shovel.”

  “Oh, but don’t you find they just out and buy everything on Hire Purchase, become general lay-abouts and all?” Mrs. Cullinane ran a finger around the rim of her glass. “They’re cute, say what you will.”

  “Shuttlecocks,” said Mrs. Proby, rapping the table, “of course they’re cute. Cunning as bissets would be more like it, wouldn’t it? It shakes my goddam foot, forgive me. And it will be on good St. Geoffrey’s Day in the Land of Never before we see an end to all those grog-blossomed faces disembarking on the Liverpool docks with their fiddler’s money and forty-eleven youngsters, nappies, and plans, I fancy, for eight dozen more, all to be had, mind you, for a common thrupenny bit. It makes me faint—ill—WRETCHED—MAD!”

  “You’d think people would have enough of—” Mrs. Cullinane went dramatically silent.

  “That? You bet your life,” Mrs. Proby pronounced. “And our sow has pigged with a vengeance.”

  “It’s all to do with this fertility thing” said Mrs. Shoe. Mrs. Cullinane paused, scanned the room, and nodded.

  “Well, the bed, isn’t it?” Mrs. Cullinane allowed herself to be frank. She was among friends. “I mean, don’t children and fertility really go back to the bed?” She was zeroing in.

  “Irish whist, they call it,” Mrs. Proby hocked out a crooked laugh and stopped short with a sober thought. “Well, you see, there you have your Catholic: mud on the hocks and an egg in the nest, say no more. The poor ignorant things can’t be out of bed ten minutes before the Pope rings them up and says, ‘Get on with it, hear!’ so what happens is, they’re back on the kip producing at full belt and hot as a tink
er’s monkeys, without giving so much as a farthing’s worth of thought to ripping out the bally telephone. What do they think a woman is, for mercy’s sakes, a bloomin’ valve?” Mrs. Proby blew down her snout a blast of exasperation. She lighted the middle of her cigarette.

  “The blacks are the ones that bother me,” said Mrs. Cullinane, “lazy as doorknobs and ne’er-do-wells on the Queen’s dole, without so much as a by-your-leave. All jumped-up and eating nothing but bread-and-drippins and kittycat meat as well, I hear.”

  “They’re furious in their pursuit of women,” said Mrs. Proby, watching the black smear on the cigarette. “A remark, I think, which explains itself.”

  “Awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful. Really,” said Mrs. Cullinane, “it’s awful.”

  “Asians eat hemp,” Mrs. Shoe joined in.

  “Pardon me, they pinch their wives,” Mrs. Proby warned, “and hit them on the bubbies with perfumed sticks. I think we can call that peculiar if we’re going to call it anything, can’t we?”

  Mrs. Shoe agreed here. ”Look at the children. That’s how one tells, you look in their eyes: all filmy and yellow as wet hay from the first day of spring to Boxing Day. Thin as sticks, to boot. You want to go up to these Asian youngsters in the street and say, ‘What have you been eating, crayons?’ I saw one last week down to Ickenham, small as a cod. The children: that’s how you tell.

  “You’re dead right,” added Mrs. Proby, reinforcing her friend with the écart of a lifetime’s observation.

  “That they eat hemp?” Mrs. Cullinane wiped some wine from her nose.

  Mrs. Shoe was not sure. “Well no, really, I suppose that they’re hungry. You know what they say: Want Not and You Won’t Be Found Wanting. Isn’t that in the Hymnal or something, Mrs. Proby?”

  “Rubbish, Mrs. Shoe.” A diapason broke through the vox humana. Mrs. Proby sat bolt upright. “We’ve been the world’s breadbasket since time began. Keep that up and we’ll have to turn Parliament into a bakery, and there’ll be a soup queue into Whitehall as long as the Burma Road. I think it’s a frost and a disgrace.” She drained her glass to prove it and ran her tongue in a circle through her mouth.