Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  “Over my dead body!” I said. “I’m entrusted with this. It’s a lady’s property.”

  “Kyra’s?”

  “No discussion, if you don’t mind, Copper.”

  In his moody, ruminative way he muttered, “People think that Greek is tough. But ‘e’s watered butter by the side o’ that bitch. Piss against the edge of a knife.”

  I said, “Now that you mention it, Copper—never mind the knife, but...”

  “You want a leak? Go back o’ Ma’s place. Avoid the lavatory even at two feet—tram drivers use it. Use the wall. Nobody looks except Ma and she’s blase. I’ll mind this ‘ere keyster for you while you’re gorn.”

  “Thanks, Copper. But don’t drop it—it’s full of valuable Crown Derby china.”

  “I’ll sit on it.”

  And, in fact, when I came back he was sitting on it, picking his teeth with one of his screwdrivers. The tram arrived and the driver and conductor bounded out for their jugs of tea and their few seconds of persiflage with Ma. I got Kyra’s case aboard, and said to the conductor, “I’ll hold this with me, if you don’t mind—it’s full of precious Crown Derby china.”

  He said, “My poor old mother had a china clock too—only it was French.” And now that I came to think of it, the ticking inside that zinc-lined suitcase got louder and louder.

  Since I was the only passenger, the conductor got cozier and cozier. He was a man to whom I took an instant dislike. He had a certain confidential air. “Been in long?” he asked.

  I said, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to. In? In where?”

  With an air of disgust, he said, “Oh, I get it. Raffles. Okay.... Now to come back to the matter of this ‘ere Crawn Darby china, plus the clock: ‘ow much a piece was you going to flog it for? Because, between men o’ the world, for real Crawn Darby I could get you as much as sixpence a cup and saucer. Carm on, open it, and I might go as ‘igh as eightpence.”

  “I do not know what the bloody hell you are talking about,” I said, “but this case and its contents are somebody else’s property.

  He invoked the excrement of the bull and, not without reason, said, “Crawn Darby china from Fowlers End?— ” Then, to paraphrase: “Innumerable gonads on that, for a copulating lark! See this jug? Black as ink, ain’t it? Kind of a jam jar, ain’t it? That’s as near as you’ll get to Crawn-bloody-Darby round Fowlers End. Besides, what’s it ticking for? Carm on, let’s look-see.”

  I took hold of him where the arm joins the shoulders and shook him a little. To deal plainly, my nerves were getting a little frayed. But I was polite as I could be when I said to him, “Forgive me. It is not in my nature to talk in this tone of voice to gentlemen upon whom the public rely, but if you do not watch your step—so help me!—I will tear your bloody head off and stick it up your arse and call it fistula. You’ll forgive my mentioning it, I hope.”

  He said, “Leggo my arm.”

  “That,” I said, “if you don’t mind my saying so, I would stuff down your throat. But first I would beat it digestible over the top of your head. Now, will you have the goodness to keep your hands off my property?”

  Cowed, the conductor said, “Honest, guv, I never meant nothing by it. Only I thought if you was going to plong and wallop a bit o’ stuff ... Well, piss me, ain’t I entitled to a bit o’ the ting-a-ling? I mean, where’s your buggerin’ democracy? No, I mean, what ‘ave we fought for? No need to go screwing a transport worker’s arm orf, what the sod! Way I look at it, you’re a bit of a tea-leaf. Well, Gord Almighty—I’m ideologically an atheist but use the term for convenience—way I look at it, spoil the Philistines bofe ways. You take it from the bourgeois, and a good job too. I take it orf you. It’s the same as taking it orf the bourgeois. Ain’t it? Only I give it back to the belly of the working class where it was took from. But is there any need, Comrade, to go twisting a fellow worker’s arm orf?”

  I intimated that I would twist off not only his arm but other vital portions of his anatomy if he did not leave me alone. The brutality of Fowlers End was getting me, I suppose.

  The conductor withdrew and came back with a copy of the Sunday Special, turned back to a headline which said:

  I.R.A. OUTRAGE AT WATERLOO

  Suitcase of Dynamite Explodes Time Bomb in

  Cloakroom Kills Three

  The article went on to say that the cloakroom attendant had been alarmed by a loud ticking noise coming from a fiberoid suitcase that had been deposited there by a man in a black hat. He was not quite sure whether the depositor was wearing a mask but remembered the number of the slip. Rendered uneasy, by some sixth sense, he called the police, who, uncertain of the law pertaining to this matter and having no right to break the locks and look at the contents of the suitcase, banged on it with their fists; whereupon its contents exploded. A matron was taken to a near-by hospital to have a brass lock removed from one of her founts of motherhood, and two cloakroom attendants and a policeman were killed on the spot.

  “And how is this supposed to concern me?” I asked.

  He did not reply in words, but turned a page and pointed to another smaller item:

  CYPRUS OUTRAGES

  Desperate Measures Threatened Cypriots to

  Demonstrate

  As the story ran, there was a movement to give Cyprus back to Greece. Since Greece was hopelessly insolvent and Britain (those were the days!) was not, the Cypriots had nothing to gain and everything to lose by such a move. But someone had given them a slogan: enosis— which, it appeared, caused confusion, enosis, I gathered, meant something like “union.” The much-traveled Cypriots—the waiters, the kitchen porters, and what not— who had scraped the trenchers of half a dozen languages and carried the spat-out leavings away under their celluloid shirt fronts, mistook the word for amessos, which means “At your service.” Somebody threw a dynamite bomb at the garrison; only, having been bought off a Syrian, it turned out to be nothing but five sticks of shaving soap. The detonator went off with a sharp crack; a hopeful prowling dog was splashed with soap. Then there had been a demonstration. After all, it was little enough they asked for, the Cypriots maintained: simply, in the name of independence, our strong point in the Mediterranean to give to Greece to sell to Russia.... In general, there was going to be hell to pay.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick went Kyra’s suitcase, while I handed the newspaper back to the tram conductor and told him, as politely as I could, to go to the devil. He did so—I mean, of course, to the devil of avarice and acquisitiveness that lived under his blue tunic—and I, idiot, hugged the suitcase, figuring while I listened to the heavy metallic tick-tick-tick-tick that came from inside it, amplified by its zinc lining....

  Nitroglycerin. Electric batteries. Clocks.... Kind of a questionable concatenation, I thought. Apply all this to the cloakroom at Charing Cross during a Cypriot demonstration after an open threat of violence, and there was something extraordinarily fishy about it. I began to sweat—not at the thought of a wrecked station echoing with the screams of mangled women and children, but at the idea of my Uncle Hugh identifying my remains and saying, “If only he had taken my advice...”

  The tram stopped and I went to catch the bus. Looking back, I saw that tram conductor running. He stopped on one foot between a policeman and a telephone booth. It was possible almost to feel waves of cupidity emanating from him. Just as I caught the bus, I saw him make up his mind and plunge into the telephone booth: he was reasoning, of course, that there might be a reward out for me. Upon my word, I could almost see the workings of his vile mind in so many diagrams.... Very likely there was a reward for the apprehension of the likes of me and the prevention of the commission of such an act as he suspected me of. If not, the railway or the insurance company would certainly come down with something handsome. Then, judicially, a hat might be passed round among those who hadn’t been hurt but could have been.

  So he got on the phone. It was not that I disapproved of the conductor’s action in th
is matter: his greed and his perfidy annoyed me, so I was determined at all costs to circumvent him. As I have said, I am curiously without fear; but I have nerves, like the next man. Kyra’s suitcase seemed to get hot between my knees, and its ticking made its way into every joint in my body. Also, I have a social conscience, and there were about forty other people in the bus. Opposite me a nice old lady in a bonnet was soothing a little girl in plaits with peppermints. The child was weeping with an abandonment of grief such as I have seldom heard before or since. I gathered that she had a Teddy bear and one of its eyes had come out. Cross-examined, she confessed that, trying to put the Teddy bear’s eye back, in moistening it with her tongue, she had swallowed it.... And, to my left, sat a hearty young woman carrying a lusty little boy with round eyes who could not be dissuaded from sucking his thumb. But she didn’t mind—she was eating butterscotch, which, between her powerful teeth, sounded like breaking glass. There was a nice old gentleman, too—a clean old gentleman in a black coat and gray trousers—with that heart-rending air of meekness which decent old people cannot help assuming when they feel their age and have a tendency to ask, ten times a day, if they are a burden to you. And of course, they are a burden to you; children are a burden to you, you are a burden to yourself; what is the matter with a burden? “It makes muscle,” as Copper Baldwin would say, adding, “provided it don’t break your bloody heart.”

  And tick-tick-tick-tick went the suitcase.

  I guessed that Kyra had timed her bomb according to the schedule she had drummed into my head; but I was afraid the bus might be late. I swear that in all the tortuous history of London transportation, there never were such intolerable delays as on that Sunday morning. Everybody wanted to go to town. The hearty young woman with the thumb-sucking son confided to me, “I’m taking the nipper to the zoo. You ever been to the zoo?”

  “Now and again,” I said.

  “He wants to see the lions fed. You ever see the lions fed, young man?”

  “When I was young,” I said.

  Then the old gentleman must pick on me and say out of the blue, “Ah, you might not believe it to look at me, but I got my wound at the Battle of Omdurman, yes I did! Winston Churchill was there, he was, not that I see him—”

  “Oh, now, stop it, Grampa,” the young woman said.

  He stopped it, but said, “I don’t want to poke my nose in where it’s not wanted.”

  To the heartbroken little girl with the half-blind Teddy bear, I said, “I’ll bet you you never saw a Teddy bear with a silver eye,” and took out a sixpence. It fitted the furry orbit to perfection. She took a peppermint out of her mouth and gravely offered it to me. There was—because, perhaps, it wasn’t raining—a prevalent holiday atmosphere. Even the bus conductor, pointing with a sour smile to a courting couple at the front of the bus, said, “Billing and cooing. Wait and see. The cooing’s the woman’s department; but wait till it comes to the bills.”

  It seemed to me that everybody was incredibly happy. I recognized myself, again, as one of the most stupid men that ever walked in the mud. “Stop the bus and let me off,” I said abruptly.

  “This is only Euston,” said the conductor.

  “That’s fine.”

  I got off, with that suitcase, and looked for a policeman. There was none in sight. I looked at my watch. It said twenty past nine, and my heart leaped up—until I noticed, by the seconds hand, that the watch had stopped. A clock over a pawnshop said five to twelve. Another, outside a bakery, had stopped several years previous at twenty past nine. Desperate, I called a taxi and, in the melodramatic style, shouted, “Ten shillings if you will get me to the nearest police station in five minutes!”

  The driver said, “Gimme fifteen bob if I get you there in one minute?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “‘Op in. Put your trunk in front?”

  “No, no!”

  “Okay, guv, take it easy. We’ll get you there, don’t you worry.” Then he simply turned his cab round and stopped, saying, “‘Ere you are then. Six tosheroons, I think you owe me. I mean, you said the nearest police station.”

  “But I was standing right outside it,” I protested.

  “That’s right. And let me tell you, many another man would’ve taken you to the other end of town and back—”

  There was no time to argue. “Have you change for a pound?” I asked.

  “Now let me see,” said he, unbuttoning two overcoats and a waistcoat, scratching his head, undoing a cardigan, lifting a pullover, and slapping himself. “Fact is, guv, I come out today without a float. But if you like—”

  “Keep the change!” I shouted. “Why, you didn’t even put your flag down!”

  “Werll, I mean to say, what for? That’s the trouble wiv the present generation: no social sense. Are you aware of the fact that wear and tear of machinery is equivalent to working hours of manpower? So I should put my bleeding clock dahn? Let me explain—”

  “Don’t!” I said, and ran into the police station.

  Now there is something about the atmosphere of an English police station that hardens the evildoer but strikes terror into the heart of the innocent. The man at the desk looked at me like the Angel of Death—he didn’t want to do it but he had to—and the conversation went somewhat as follows:

  “Yes, sir? Lost something, sir? Found something, sir? What’s the trouble, sir?”

  “I beg your pardon, Sergeant.... I hate to disturb you on a Sunday.... But this suitcase contains enough nitroglycerin to blow up half the city. And I’m sorry to say it’s due to go off at any moment now.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Couldn’t that wait till afterwards?”

  “Address?”

  “I’m warning you—”

  “What’s your occupation?”

  At this moment the telephone rang and the Sergeant said, “No, sir ... Yes, sir ... By all means, yes, sir. Greek carrying a bag of dynamite. All right, sir. I’ll make a note, sir.... Six foot one, stoops, talks good English.... I got that—”

  “Yes, with a scarred face and a broken nose!” I cried.

  “Scarred face and broken nose,” repeated the officer at the desk. “How did I know? I thought you said so, sir.”

  “Fourth finger of left hand missing,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find it.... Don’t worry, sir, I’ll post a sharp lookout. Good-by, sir.” Then, to me, “What d’you want to beat about the bush for? Couldn’t you say in the first place something was missing? Where’d you see it last? Speak up. On your left hand, I believe you said. Aring, was it? Description, please.”

  “If you do not take this thing off my hands,” I said, “I will not be answerable for the consequences.”

  “Let me smell your breath.”

  Tick-tick-tick-tick went the suitcase. Almost weeping with vexation, I said, “This box has got a time bomb in it, due to go off at any moment. I warn you—“

  “I warn you, none o’ these larks. What d’you want? First, you’ve lost a ring. Now you’ve found this little trunk. Well then, why don’t you take it to the Lost Property Office? Oh, well, all right, fill in this form. If it is not claimed within six months, et cetera—”

  Then a jolly-looking old jailer came to my rescue, saying with wheezy good nature, “I think the gentleman’s got it into his head that there’s explosives in this case. Why not open it up and have a dekko?”

  The Sergeant looked at me closely and said in a knowing manner, “And it seems to me this person, or persons, has got a broken nose, too.” He shot a question at me: “Parlez-vous Greek?”

  Hopping from one foot to the other, I replied, “Non, mais cette Goddamned trunk est stuffed miv C3H5(N03)3. Ecoutez done, comme elle ticks, pour Christ’s sake!”

  “I thought so,” said the Sergeant. “Repeat that, please, while I take it down.”

  The jolly jailer said, “Look, mister, save time and public money, and open it up.”

  “I haven’t got the keys!”r />
  The man at the desk said, “He’s not here on a charge. No right to search him without his permission. Better fill up a form.”

  “I do detect a kind of ticking noise,” said the jailer dubiously. And he produced from some recess in his clothes what might be described as a Brobdingnagian charm bracelet hung with a thousand little keys. He squinted at the locks on the case and found the right key at once, lifted the lid and stood back. All that came out was a stale smell.

  Fascinated, tense in throat and stomach, I watched the Sergeant uncovering a knobbly object surrounded by old newspapers and covered with an old stained camisole. It was tamped in by a variety of old socks and a suit of woolen combinations worn into holes like a fishing net. At last were exposed a cheap alarm clock and two dry batteries in a tangle of wires with shiny, newly cut ends—nothing more. The hands of the clock stood at precisely twelve-thirty; I noticed this, because I didn’t know where else to look—and, right on the dot, the alarm went off in a tintinnabulation that frightened me into a state bordering on idiocy, so that between that and relief I could not hold back a high peal of laughter.

  Then the Sergeant let me have it. He had been a Lance-Sergeant in the Guards, in his time. It was not so much his vocabulary but his command of the most injurious phrases and epithets in the English language; and what he said to me I do not like to think about, let alone make public. He wanted to charge me with something—obstructing the police, for example—but, finding himself in a false position, decided to be merciful. It was hoaxers like me, he swore, that lost us half a million men at Passchendaele, and if he had his way he would take me into the cells and give me a bloody good hiding. Henceforward, he assured me, he would have his eye on me. If it were not for a corrupt administration, he would in any case squash me against the wall like a bedbug, drive me into the floor like a tintack— tough as I no doubt thought I was—belt me, scoff me, and in general make my life unbearable. When, about here, I asked if I might please have a glass of water, the jolly jailer intervened before the Sergeant fell dead of apoplexy and, citing some obscure law whereby they cannot apply the thumbscrew, crush to death a prisoner who refuses to plead, or refuse an accused man a drink of water, took me to the back of the police station and offered me, in the coziest of the cells, a mug of tea and a slice of cake.