Trickery

by Roald Dahl

  ‘We’d better just take half a dozen each and get out quick,’ I said.

  ‘I would like to count them, Gordon.’

  ‘There’s no time for that.’

  ‘I must count them.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘One …

  ‘Two …

  ‘Three …

  ‘Four …’

  He began counting them very carefully, picking up each bird in turn and laying it carefully to one side. The moon was directly overhead now and the whole clearing was brilliantly illuminated.

  ‘I’m not standing around here like this,’ I said. I walked back a few paces and hid myself in the shadows, waiting for him to finish.

  ‘A hundred and seventeen … a hundred and eighteen … a hundred and nineteen … a hundred and twenty!’ he cried. ‘One hundred and twenty birds! It’s an all-time record!’

  I didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  ‘The most my dad ever got in one night was fifteen and he was drunk for a week afterwards!’

  ‘You’re the champion of the world,’ I said. ‘Are you ready now?’

  ‘One minute,’ he answered and he pulled up his sweater and proceeded to unwind the two big white cotton sacks from around his belly. ‘Here’s yours,’ he said, handing one of them to me. ‘Fill it up quick.’

  The light of the moon was so strong I could read the small print along the base of the sack. j. w. crump, it said. KESTON FLOUR MILLS, LONDON SW17.

  ‘You don’t think that bastard with the brown teeth is watching us this very moment from behind a tree?’

  ‘There’s no chance of that,’ Claud said. ‘He’s down at the filling-station like I told you, waiting for us to come home.’

  We started loading the pheasants into the sacks. They were soft and floppy-necked and the skin underneath the feathers was still warm.

  ‘There’ll be a taxi waiting for us in the lane,’ Claud said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always go back in a taxi, Gordon, didn’t you know that?’

  I told him I didn’t.

  ‘A taxi is anonymous,’ Claud said. ‘Nobody knows who’s inside a taxi except the driver. My dad taught me that.’

  ‘Which driver?’

  ‘Charlie Kinch. He’s only too glad to oblige.’

  We finished loading the pheasants, and I tried to hump my bulging sack on to my shoulder. My sack had about sixty birds inside it, and it must have weighed a hundred-weight and a half, at least. ‘I can’t carry this,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to leave some of them behind.’

  ‘Drag it,’ Claud said. ‘Just pull it behind you.’

  We started off through the pitch-black woods, pulling the pheasants behind us. ‘We’ll never make it all the way back to the village like this,’ I said.

  ‘Charlie’s never let me down yet,’ Claud said.

  We came to the margin of the wood and peered through the hedge into the lane. Claud said, ‘Charlie boy’ very softly and the old man behind the wheel of the taxi not five yards away poked his head out into the moonlight and gave us a sly toothless grin. We slid through the hedge, dragging the sacks after us along the ground.

  ‘Hullo!’ Charlie said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s cabbages,’ Claud told him. ‘Open the door.’

  Two minutes later we were safely inside the taxi, cruising slowly down the hill towards the village.

  It was all over now bar the shouting. Claud was triumphant, bursting with pride and excitement, and he kept leaning forward and tapping Charlie Kinch on the shoulder and saying, ‘How about it, Charlie? How about this for a haul?’ and Charlie kept glancing back pop-eyed at the huge bulging sacks lying on the floor between us and saying, ‘Jesus Christ, man, how did you do it?’

  ‘There’s six brace of them for you, Charlie,’ Claud said. And Charlie said, ‘I reckon pheasants is going to be a bit scarce up at Mr Victor Hazel’s opening-day shoot this year,’ and Claud said, ‘I imagine they are, Charlie, I imagine they are.’

  ‘What in God’s name are you going to do with a hundred and twenty pheasants?’ I asked.

  ‘Put them in cold storage for the winter,’ Claud said. ‘Put them in with the dogmeat in the deep-freeze at the filling-station.’

  ‘Not tonight, I trust?’

  ‘No, Gordon, not tonight. We leave them at Bessie’s house tonight.’

  ‘Bessie who?’

  ‘Bessie Organ.’

  ‘Bessie Organ!’

  ‘Bessie always delivers my game, didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. I was completely stunned. Mrs Organ was the wife of the Reverend Jack Organ, the local vicar.

  ‘Always choose a respectable woman to deliver your game,’ Claud announced. ‘That’s correct, Charlie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bessie’s a right smart girl,’ Charlie said.

  We were driving through the village now and the street-lamps were still on and the men were wandering home from the pubs. I saw Will Prattley letting himself in quietly by the side-door of his fishmonger’s shop and Mrs Prattley’s head was sticking out of the window just above him, but he didn’t know it.

  ‘The vicar is very partial to roasted pheasant,’ Claud said. ‘He hangs it eighteen days,’ Charlie said, ‘then he gives it a couple of good shakes and all the feathers drop off.’

  The taxi turned left and swung in through the gates of the vicarage. There were no lights on in the house and nobody met us. Claud and I dumped the pheasants in the coal shed at the rear, and then we said good-bye to Charlie Kinch and walked back in the moonlight to the filling-station, empty-handed. Whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we went in, I do not know. We saw no sign of him.

  ‘Here she comes,’ Claud said to me the next morning.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bessie – Bessie Organ.’ He spoke the name proudly and with a slight proprietary air, as though he were a general referring to his bravest officer.

  I followed him outside.

  ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing.

  Far away down the road I could see a small female figure advancing towards us.

  ‘What’s she pushing?’ I asked.

  Claud gave me a sly look.

  ‘There’s only one safe way of delivering game,’ he announced, ‘and that’s under a baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, ‘yes, of course.’

  ‘That’ll be young Christopher Organ in there, aged one and a half. He’s a lovely child, Gordon.’

  I could just make out the small dot of a baby sitting high up in the pram, which had its hood folded down.

  ‘There’s sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little nipper,’ Claud said happily. ‘You just imagine that.’

  ‘You can’t put sixty or seventy pheasants in a pram.’

  ‘You can if it’s got a deep well underneath it, and if you take out the mattress and pack them in tight, right up to the top. All you need then is a sheet. You’ll be surprised how little room a pheasant takes up when it’s limp.’

  We stood beside the pumps waiting for Bessie Organ to arrive. It was one of those warm windless September mornings with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.

  ‘Right through the village bold as brass,’ Claud said. ‘Good old Bessie.’

  ‘She seems in rather a hurry to me.’

  Claud lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘Bessie is never in a hurry,’ he said.

  ‘She certainly isn’t walking normal,’ I told him. ‘You look.’

  He squinted at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘She does seem to be going a tiny bit quick, doesn’t she?’ he said carefully.

  ‘She’s going damn quick.’

  There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard at the approaching woman.

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to be caught
in the rain, Gordon. I’ll bet that’s exactly what it is, she thinks it’s going to rain and she don’t want the baby to get wet.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she put the hood up?’

  He didn’t answer this.

  ‘She’s running!’ I cried. ‘Look!’ Bessie had suddenly broken into a full sprint.

  Claud stood very still, watching the woman; and in the silence that followed I fancied I could hear a baby screaming.

  ‘What’s up?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘There’s something wrong with that baby,’ I said. ‘Listen.’

  At this point, Bessie was about two hundred yards away from us but closing fast.

  ‘Can you hear him now?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s yelling his head off.’

  The small shrill voice in the distance was growing louder every second, frantic, piercing, non-stop, almost hysterical.

  ‘He’s having a fit,’ Claud announced.

  ‘I think he must be.’

  ‘That’s why she’s running, Gordon. She wants to get him in here quick and put him under a cold tap.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. ‘In fact I know you’re right. Just listen to that noise.’

  ‘If it isn’t a fit, you can bet your life it’s something like it.’

  ‘I quite agree.’

  Claud shifted his feet uneasily on the gravel of the driveway. ‘There’s a thousand and one different things keep happening every day to little babies like that,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I knew a baby once who caught his fingers in the spokes of the pram wheel. He lost the lot. It cut them clean off.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Claud said, ‘I wish to Christ she’d stop running.’

  A long truck loaded with bricks came up behind Bessie and the driver slowed down and poked his head out the window to stare. Bessie ignored him and flew on, and she was so close now I could see her big red face with the mouth wide open, panting for breath. I noticed she was wearing white gloves on her hands, very prim and dainty, and there was a funny little white hat to match perched right on the top of her head, like a mushroom.

  Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an enormous pheasant!

  Claud let out a cry of horror.

  The fool in the truck going along beside Bessie started roaring with laughter.

  The pheasant flapped around drunkenly for a few seconds, then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the road.

  A grocer’s van came up behind the truck and began hooting to get by. Bessie kept running.

  Then – whoosh! – a second pheasant flew up out of the pram.

  Then a third, and a fourth. Then a fifth.

  ‘My God!’ I said. ‘It’s the pills! They’re wearing off!’

  Claud didn’t say anything.

  Bessie covered the last fifty yards at a tremendous pace, and she came swinging into the driveway of the filling-station with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she cried.

  ‘Go round the back!’ I shouted. ‘Go round the back!’ But she pulled up sharp against the first pump in the line, and before we could reach her she had seized the screaming infant in her arms and dragged him clear.

  ‘No! No!’ Claud cried, racing towards her. ‘Don’t lift the baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!’ But she wasn’t even listening, and with the weight of the child suddenly lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the pram, fifty or sixty of them, at least, and the whole sky above us was filled with huge brown birds flapping their wings furiously to gain height.

  Claud and I started running up and down the driveway waving our arms to frighten them off the premises. ‘Go away!’ we shouted. ‘Shoo! Go away!’ But they were too dopey still to take any notice of us and within half a minute down they came again and settled themselves like a swarm of locusts all over the front of my filling-station. The place was covered with them. They sat wing to wing along the edges of the roof and on the concrete canopy that came out over the pumps, and a dozen at least were clinging to the sill of the office window. Some had flown down on to the rack that held the bottles of lubricatingoil, and others were sliding about on the bonnets of my second-hand cars. One cockbird with a fine tail was perched superbly on top of a petrol pump, and quite a number, those that were too drunk to stay aloft, simply squatted in the driveway at our feet, fluffing their feathers and blinking their small eyes.

  Across the road, a line of cars had already started forming behind the brick-lorry and the grocery-van, and people were opening their doors and getting out and beginning to cross over to have a closer look. I glanced at my watch. It was twenty to nine. Any moment now, I thought, a large black car is going to come streaking along the road from the direction of the village, and the car will be a Rolls, and the face behind the wheel will be the great glistening brewer’s face of Mr Victor Hazel.

  ‘They near pecked him to pieces!’ Bessie was shouting, clasping the screaming baby to her bosom.

  ‘You go on home, Bessie,’ Claud said, white in the face.

  ‘Lock up,’ I said. ‘Put out the sign. We’ve gone for the day.’

  The Visitor

  First published in Playboy (May 1965)

  Not long ago, a large wooden case was deposited at the door of my house by the railway delivery service. It was an unusually strong and well-constructed object, and made of some kind of dark red hardwood, not unlike mahogany. I lifted it with great difficulty on to a table in the garden, and examined it carefully. The stencilling on one side said that it had been shipped from Haifa by the m/v Waverley Star, but I could find no sender’s name or address. I tried to think of somebody living in Haifa or thereabouts who might be wanting to send me a magnificent present. I could think of no one. I walked slowly to the toolshed, still pondering the matter deeply, and returned with a hammer and screwdriver. Then I began gently to prise open the top of the case.

  Behold, it was filled with books! Extraordinary books! One by one, I lifted them all out (not yet looking inside any of them) and stacked them in three tall piles on the table. There were twenty-eight volumes altogether, and very beautiful they were indeed. Each of them was identically and superbly bound in rich green morocco, with the initials O.H.C. and a Roman numeral (i to xxviii) tooled in gold upon the spine.

  I took up the nearest volume, number xvi, and opened it. The unlined white pages were filled with a neat small handwriting in black ink. On the title page was written ‘1934’. Nothing else. I took up another volume, number xxi. It contained more manuscript in the same handwriting, but on the title page it said ‘1939’. I put it down and pulled out Vol. i, hoping to find a preface of some kind there, or perhaps the author’s name. Instead, I found an envelope inside the cover. The envelope was addressed to me. I took out the letter it contained and glanced quickly at the signature. ‘Oswald Hendryks Cornelius’, it said.

  It was Uncle Oswald!

  No member of the family had heard from Uncle Oswald for over thirty years. The letter was dated 10 March 1964, and until its arrival, we could only assume that he still existed. Nothing was really known about him except that he lived in France, that he travelled a great deal, that he was a wealthy bachelor with unsavoury but glamorous habits who steadfastly refused to have anything to do with his own relatives. The rest was all rumour and hearsay, but the rumours were so splendid and the hearsay so exotic that Oswald had long since become a shining hero and a legend to us all.

  ‘My dear boy,’ the letter began

  I believe that you and your three sisters are my closest surviving blood relations. You are therefore my rightful heirs, and because I have made no will, all that I leave behind me when I die will be yours. Alas, I have nothing to leave. I used to have quite a lot, and the fact that I have recently disposed of it all in my own way is none of your business. As consolation, tho
ugh, I am sending you my private diaries. These, I think, ought to remain in the family. They cover all the best years of my life, and it will do you no harm to read them. But if you show them around or lend them out to strangers, you do so at your own great peril. If you publish them, then that, I should imagine, would be the end of both you and your publisher simultaneously. For you must understand that thousands of the heroines whom I mention in the diaries are still only half dead, and if you were foolish enough to splash their lily-white reputations with scarlet print, they would have your head on a salver in two seconds flat, and probably roast it in the oven for good measure. So you’d better be careful. I only met you once. That was years ago, in 1921, when your family was living in that large ugly house in South Wales. I was your big uncle and you were a very small boy, about five years old. I don’t suppose you remember the young Norwegian nursemaid you had then. A remarkably clean, well-built girl she was, and exquisitely shaped even in her uniform with its ridiculous starchy white shield concealing her lovely bosom. The afternoon I was there, she was taking you for a walk in the woods to pick bluebells, and I asked if I might come along. And when we got well into the middle of the woods, I told you I’d give you a bar of chocolate if you could find your own way home. And you did (see Vol. III). You were a sensible child. Farewell – Oswald Hendryks Cornelius.

  The sudden arrival of the diaries caused much excitement in the family, and there was a rush to read them. We were not disappointed. It was astonishing stuff – hiliarious, witty, exciting, and often quite touching as well. The man’s vitality was unbelievable. He was always on the move, from city to city, from country to country, from woman to woman, and in between the women, he would be searching for spiders in Kashmir or tracking down a blue porcelain vase in Nanking. But the women always came first. Wherever he went, he left an endless trail of females in his wake, females ruffled and ravished beyond words, but purring like cats.

  Twenty-eight volumes with exactly three hundred pages to each volume take a deal of reading, and there are precious few writers who could hold an audience over a distance like that. But Oswald did it. The narrative never seemed to lose its flavour, the pace seldom slackened, and almost without exception, every single entry, whether it was long or short, and whatever the subject, became a marvellous little individual story that was complete in itself. And at the end of it all, when the last page of the last volume had been read, one was left with the rather breathless feeling that this might just possibly be one of the major autobiographical works of our time.