by Dylan Thomas
‘You’ll find the House of Commons on the second floor at the end of the passage,’ said Mr. O’Brien.
At the door, he turned to Lou and smiled with all his love, declaring it to the faces of the company and making her, before Mr. O’Brien’s envious regard, smile back and say: ‘Don’t be long, Jack, Please! You mustn’t be long.’
Now every one knew. Love had grown up in an evening.
‘One minute, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here.’
The door closed behind him. He walked into the wall of the passage. He lit a match. He had three left. Down the stairs, clinging to the sticky, shaking rails, rocking on see-saw floorboards, bruising his shin on a bucket, past the noises of secret lives behind doors he slid and stumbled and swore and heard Lou’s voice in a fresh fever drive him on, call him to return, speak to him with such passion and abandonment that even in the darkness and the pain of his haste he was dazzled and struck still. She spoke, there on the rotting stairs in the middle of the poor house, a frightening rush of love words; from her mouth, at his ear, endearments were burned out. Hurry! hurry! Every moment is being killed. Love, adored, dear, run back and whistle to me, open the door, shout my name, lay me down. Mr. O’Brien has his hands on my side.
He ran into a cavern. A draught blew out his matches. He lurched into a room where two figures on a black heap on the floor lay whispering, and ran from there in a panic. He made water at the dead end of the passage and hurried back towards Lou’s room, finding himself at last on a silent patch of stairway at the top of the house; he put out his hand, but the rail was broken and nothing there prevented a long drop to the ground down a twisted shaft that would echo and double his cry, bring out from their holes in the wall the sleeping or stirring families, the whispering figures, the blind startled turners of night into day. Lost in a tunnel near the roof, he fingered the damp walls for a door; he found a handle and gripped it hard, but it came off in his hand. Lou had led him down a longer passage than this. He remembered the number of doors: there were three on each side. He ran down the broken-railed flight into another passage and dragged his hand along the wall. Three doors, he counted. He opened the third door, walked into darkness, and groped for the switch on the left. He saw, in the sudden light, a bed and a cupboard and a chest of drawers with no handles, a gas fire, a wash-basin in the corner. No bottles. No glasses. No photograph of Lou. The red counterpane on the bed was smooth. He could not remember the colour of Lou’s counterpane.
He left the light burning and opened the second door, but a strange woman’s voice cried, half-asleep: ‘Who is there? Is it you, Tom? Tom, put the light on.’ He looked for a line of light at the foot of the next door, and stopped to listen for voices. The woman was still calling in the second room.
‘Lou, where are you?’ he cried. ‘Answer! answer!’
‘Lou, what Lou? There’s no Lou here,’ said a man’s voice through the open door of the first dark room at the entrance to the passage.
He scampered down another flight and counted four doors with his scratched hand. One door opened and a woman in a nightdress put out her head. A child’s head appeared below her.
‘Where does Lou live? Do you know where Lou lives?’
The woman and the child stared without speaking.
‘Lou! Lou! her name is Lou!’ he heard himself shout. ‘She lives here, in this house! Do you know where she lives?’
The woman caught the child by the hair and pulled her into the room. He clung to the edge of her door. The woman thrust her arm round the edge and brought down a bunch of keys sharply on his hands. The door slammed.
A young woman with a baby in a shawl stood at an open door on the opposite side of the passage, and caught his sleeve as he ran by. ‘Lou who? You woke my baby.’
‘I don’t know her other name. She’s with Mrs. Franklin and Mr. O’Brien.’
‘You woke my baby.’
‘Come in and find her in the bed,’ a voice said from the darkness behind the young woman.
‘He’s woken my baby.’
He ran down the passage, holding his wet hand to his mouth. He fell against the rails of the last flight of stairs. He heard Lou’s voice in his head once more whisper to him to return as the ground floor rose, like a lift full of dead, towards the rails. Hurry! hurry! I can’t, I won’t wait, the bridal night is being killed.
Up the rotten, bruising, mountainous stairs he climbed, in his sickness, to the passage where he had left the one light burning in an end room. The light was out. He tapped all the doors and whispered her name. He beat on the doors and shouted, and a woman, dressed in a vest and a hat, drove him out of the passage with a walking-stick.
For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no love now to wait for and no bed but his own too many miles away to lie in, and only the approaching day to remember his discovery. All around him the disturbed inhabitants of the house were falling back into sleep. Then he walked out of the house on to the waste space and under the leaning cranes and ladders. The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.
Adventures in the Skin Trade*
A Fine Beginning
1
That early morning, in January 1933, only one person was awake in the street, and he was the quietest. Call him Samuel Bennet. He wore a trilby hat that had been lying by his bedside in case the two house-breakers, a man and a woman, came back for the bag they had left.
In striped pyjamas tight under the arms and torn between the legs, he padded barefoot downstairs and opened the breakfast-room door of his parents’ six-room house. The room smelt strong of his father’s last pipe before bed. The windows were shut fast and the curtains drawn, the back door was bolted, the house-breaking night could not enter anywhere. At first he peered uneasily into the known, flickering corners of the room, as though he feared that the family might have been sitting there in silence in the dark; then he lit the gaslight from the candle. His eyes were still heavy from a dream of untouchable city women and falling, but he could see that Tinker, the aunt-faced pom, was sleeping before the burned-out fire, and that the mantelpiece clock between hollow, mock-ebony, pawing horses, showed five to two. He stood still and listened to the noises of the house: there was nothing to fear. Upstairs the family breathed and snored securely. He heard his sister sleeping in the box-room under the signed photographs of actors from the repertory theatre and the jealous pictures of the marriages of friends. In the biggest bedroom overlooking the field that was called the back, his father turned over the bills of the month in his one dream; his mother in bed mopped and polished through a wood of kitchens. He closed the door: now there was nobody to disturb him.
But all the noises of the otherwise dead or sleeping, dark early morning, the intimate breathing of three invisible relations, the loud old dog, could wake up the neighbours. And the gaslight, bubbling, could attract to his presence in the breakfast-room at this hour Mrs. Probert next door, disguised as a she-goat in a nightgown, butting the air with her kirby-grips; her dapper, commercial son, with a watch-chain tattooed across his rising belly; the tubercular lodger, with his neat umbrella up and his basin in his hand. The regular tide of the family breath could beat against the wall of the house on the other side, and bring the Baxters out. He turned the gas low and stood for a minute by the clock, listening to sleep and seeing Mrs. Baxter climb naked out of her widow’s bed with a mourning band round her thigh.
Soon her picture died, she crawled back grieving to her lovebird’s mirror under the blankets, and the proper objects of the room slowly returned as he lost his fear that the strangers upstairs he had known since he could remember would wake and come down with pokers and candles.
First there was the long strip of snapshots of his mother propped against the cut-glass of the window-sill.
A professional under a dickybird hood had snapped her as she walked down Chapel Street in December, and developed the photographs while she waited looking at the thermos flasks and the smoking sets in the nearest shop-window, calling “Good morning” across the street to the shopping bags she knew, and the matron’s outside costumes, and the hats like flower-pots and chambers on the crisp, permed heads. There she was, walking down the street along the window-sill, step by step, stout, safe, confident, buried in her errands, clutching her handbag, stepping aside from the common women blind and heavy under a week’s provisions, prying into the looking-glasses at the doors of furniture shops.
‘Your photograph has been taken.’ Immortalized in a moment, she shopped along forever between the cut-glass vase with the permanent flowers and the box of hairpins, buttons, screws, empty shampoo packets, cotton-reels, flypapers, cigarette cards. At nearly two in the morning she hurried down Chapel Street against a backcloth of trilbies and Burberries going the other way, umbrellas rising to the first drops of the rain a month ago, the sightless faces of people who would always be strangers hanging half-developed behind her, and the shadows of the shopping centre of the sprawling, submerged town. He could hear her shoes click on the tramrails. He could see, beneath the pastelled silk scarf, the round metal badge of Mrs. Rosser’s Society, and the grandmother’s cameo brooch on the vee of the knitted clover jumper.
The clock chimed and struck two. Samuel put out his hand and took up the strip of snaps. Then he tore it into pieces. The whole of her dead, comfortable face remained on one piece, and he tore it across the cheeks, up through the chins, and into the eyes.
The pom growled in a nightmare, and showed his little teeth. ‘Lie down, Tinker. Go to sleep, boy.’ He put the pieces in his pyjama pocket.
Then there was the framed photograph of his sister by the clock. He destroyed her in one movement, and, with the ripping of her set smile and the crumpling of her bobbed head into a ball, down went the Girls’ School and the long-legged, smiling colts with their black knickers and bows; the hockey-legged girls who laughed behind their hands as they came running through the gates when he passed, went torn and ruined into his pyjama pocket; they vanished, broken, into the porch and lay in pieces against his heart. Stanley Road, where the Girls’ School stood, would never know him again. Down you go, Peggy, he whispered to his sister, with all the long legs and the Young Liberals’ dances, and the boys you brought home for supper on Sunday evenings and Lionel you kissed in the porch. He is a solicitor now. When I was eleven years old and you were seventeen I heard you, from my bedroom, playing the Desert Song. People were downstairs all over the world.
Most of the history sheets on the table were already marked and damned in his father’s violet writing. With a lump of coal from the dead fire, Samuel marked them again, rubbing the coal hard over the careful corrections, drawing legs and breasts in the margins, smudging out the names and form numbers. History is lies. Now take Queen Elizabeth. Go ahead, take Alice Phillips, take her into the shrubbery. She was the headmaster’s daughter. Take old Bennet and whip him down the corridors, stuff his mouth with dates, dip his starched collar in his marking ink and hammer his teeth back into his prim, bald, boring head with his rap-across-the-knuckle ruler. Spin Mr. Nicholson on his tellurion until his tail drops off. Tell Mr. Parsons his wife has been seen coming out of the Compass piggyback on a drunk sailor, catching pennies in her garters. It’s as true as History.
On the last sheet he signed his name several times under a giant pinman with three legs. He did not scribble on the top sheet. At a first glance there was no sign of interference. Then he threw the coal into the grate. Dust drifted up in a cloud, and settled down again on the pom’s back.
If only he could shout at the ceiling now, at the dark circle made by the gas, at the cracks and lines that had always been the same faces and figures, two bearded men chasing an animal over a mountain edge, a kneeling woman with faces on her knees: Come and look at Samuel Bennet destroying his parents’ house in Mortimer Street, off Stanley’s Grove; he will never be allowed to come back. Mrs. Baxter, have a dekko from under the cold sheets: Mr. Baxter, who worked in the Harbour Trust Office, can never come back either. Mrs. Probert Chestnuts, your billygoat is gone, leaving a hairy space in the bed; Mr. Bell the lodger coughs all night under his gamp; your son cannot sleep, he is counting his gentlemen’s three and eleven-three half-hose jumping over the tossed blankets. Samuel shouted under his breath, ‘Come and see me destroying the evidence, Mrs. Rosser; have a peep from under your hairnet. I have seen your shadow on the blind as you undressed, I was watching by the lamp-post next to the dairy; you disappeared under a tent and came out slim and humped and black. I am the only gooseberry in Stanley’s Grove who knows that you are a black woman with a hump. Mr. Rosser married to a camel; every one is mad and bad in his box when the blinds are pulled; come and see me break the china without any noise so that I can never come back.’
‘Hush,’ he said to himself, ‘I know you.’
He opened the door of the china pantry. The best plates shone in rows, a willow tree next to an ivied castle, baskets of solid flowers on top of fruits and flower-coiled texts. Tureens were piled on one shelf, on another the salad-bowls, the finger-bowls, the toast-racks spelling Porthcawl and Baby, the trifle-dishes, the heirloom moustache-cup. The afternoon tea-service was brittle as biscuits and had gold rims. He cracked two saucers together, and the horn-curved spout of the teapot came off in his hand. In five minutes he had broken the whole set. Let all the daughters of Mortimer Street come in and see me, he whispered in the close pantry: the pale young girls who help at home, calculating down the pavement to the rich-smelling shops, screwing up their straight, dry hair in their rooms at the top of the house; their blood is running through them like salt. And I hope the office girls knock on the door with the stubs of their fingers, tap out Sir or Madam on the glass porch, the hard, bright babies who never go too far. You can hear them in the lane behind the post office as you tiptoe along, they are saying, ‘So he said and I said and he said and Oh yeah I said,’ and the just male voices are agreeing softly. Shoo them in out of snoring Stanley’s Grove, I know they are sleeping under the sheets up to their fringes in wishes. Beryl Gee is marrying the Chamber of Commerce in a pepper-and-salt church. Mrs. Mayor’s Chain, Madame Cocked Hat, Lady Settee, I am breaking tureens in the cupboard under the stairs.
A tureen-cover dropped from his hand and smashed.
He waited for the sound of his mother waking. No one stirred upstairs. ‘Tinker did it,’ he said aloud, but the harsh noise of his voice drove him back into silence. His fingers became so cold and numb he knew he could not lift up another plate to break it.
‘What are you doing?’ he said to himself at last, in a cool, flat voice. ‘Leave the Street alone. Let it sleep.’
Then he closed the pantry door.
‘What are you doing, ranting away?’
Even the dog had not been wakened.
‘Ranting away,’ he said.
He would have to be quick now. The accident in the cupboard had made him tremble so much that he could hardly tear up the bills he found in the sideboard drawer and scatter them under the sofa. His sister’s crochet-work was too difficult to destroy, the doilies and the patterned tea-cosies were hard as rubber. He pulled them apart the best he could, and wedged them up the chimney.
‘These are such small things,’ he said. ‘I should break the windows and stuff the cushions with the glass.’ He saw his round soft face in the mirror under the Mona Lisa. ‘But you won’t,’ he said, turning away; ‘you’re afraid of the noise.’ He turned back to his reflection. ‘It isn’t that. You’re afraid she’ll cut her hands.’
He burnt the edge of his mother’s sunshade at the gas-mantle, and felt the tears running down his cheeks and dropping on to his pyjama collar.
Even in the first moment of his guilt and shame, he remembered to put out his tongue and taste the track of the tears. Still crying, he s
aid, ‘It’s salt. It’s very salt. Just like in my poems.’
He went upstairs in the dark, with the candle shaking, past the box-room to his own room, and locked the door on the inside. He put out his hands and touched the walls and his bed. Good morning and good-bye, Mrs. Baxter. His window, facing her bedroom, was open to the windless, starless early morning, but her could not hear her breathe or sleep. All the houses were quiet. The street was a close grave. The Rossers and the Proberts and the Bennets were still and safe and deep in their separate silences. His head touched the pillow, but he knew that he could not sleep again. His eyes closed.
Come down into my arms, for I shan’t sleep, girls asleep on all sides in the attics and spare rooms of the square, red houses with the bay windows looking out on the trees behind the railings. I know your rooms like the backs of my hands, like the backs of your heads in the pictures when you are leaning over on to the next-door shoulders. I shan’t sleep again. Tomorrow, today, I am going away by the 7.15 train, with ten pounds and a new suit-case. Lay your curling-pins on my pillow, the alarm at six-thirty will hurry you back to draw the blinds and light the fires before the rest come down. Come down quickly, the Bennets’ house is melting. I can hear you breathe, I can hear Mrs. Baxter turn in a dream. Oh, the milk-men are waking!
He was asleep with his hat on still, and his hands clenched.
2
The family awoke before six o’clock. He heard them, from a sunken half-sleep, bothering on the landing. They would be in dressing-gowns, stale-eyed and with ragged hair. Peggy might have put two blushes on her cheeks. The family rushed in and out of the bathroom, never stopping to wash, and collided on the narrow top of the stairs as they nagged and bustled to get him ready. He let himself sink deeper until the waves broke round his head again, and the lights of a city spun and shone through the eyes of women walking in his last remembered dream. From the lapping distance he heard his father shout like a man on the opposite shore: