The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  “He’s talking!” says the voice.

  “So soon! It can’t be!”

  “I should live so sure—he said mama.”

  “Maa-maa!”

  “Would you believe it! Bless him!”

  He is struggling desperately, striking out with an impotent square inch of hand. He has no strength: he is enraged. They have pinned him up in something rough which chafes the tenderest parts of him. Moistening itself to cut more efficiently, this rough thing is filing away the soft skin between his thighs. He shuts his eyes, opens wide his toothless mouth, and empties his lungs in one terrible cry.

  “Quick! Quick! For God’s sake, quick! He’s holding his breath! What shall I do? Send for the doctor!”

  “Give him to me, Mrs. Small.”

  He is picked up like a straw on a high wind, thrown on his belly upon a canopy of stinking black cloth, and beaten in the ribs. Drawing breath again, he weeps. His head is down, his heels are up, and since he has no muscles to hold what remains of the sour liquid stuff inside him, he is sick again—whereupon everything spins and he is passed from hand to hand, until he lands on his back, exhausted.

  “I had such a fright….”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I thought it was convulsions.”

  “Convulsions! All your life you should have such convulsions! Change him, go on.”

  Something clicks and the coarse wet stuff peels away. For a second or two—only for a second or two—he feels free and cool, so he croons a little, while they dry him and powder him before imprisoning him again. But now he is completely empty, empty with an emptiness that hurts. Feeling pain, he cries out, and gropes for something to make him feel better.

  “You should feed him now, Mrs. Small.”

  Jerkily, buttonhole by buttonhole a darkness is split by a great white triangle, out of which bursts another mountain, from the purple summit of which a reticulated pattern of blue rivers runs down into the dark. Maa-maa he bleats.

  “K’nehora, already he understands everything. Imbeshrier, he’s talking!”

  The mountain falls. Charles Small’s mouth finds what it has been seeking. A gentle warmth fills his belly. Now he is content; he will sleep. But the voice says: “He hasn’t had anything! For God’s sake, look! Look! He’s closing his eyes! He brought everything up, and now he won’t eat! What’ve I done! What’ve I done to deserve it?”

  “He’ll eat, he’ll eat, please God, he’ll eat, Mrs. Small. Believe me. Encourage him, and he’ll eat.”

  The purple-summited pale mountain darts at him as a terrier attacks a rat. He claws the air with nails that are soft as films of transparent pink varnish, and screams, throwing his head back. This head of his is covered with black fluff: in the centre of the crown of it there is a boneless quadrilateral hot and soft, beneath which the brain, full of blood, throbs and grows. He is caught by the hard, round back part of his skull, and pushed, in spite of resistance, to the mountain. Hot milk is forced into his mouth. Charles Small must drink or suffocate. He drinks, and at last he is put to bed. He would keep that which was forced into him if he could, but he cannot: his overloaded stomach rejects the milk. Then he is comfortable and happy, and would gladly sleep. But the rough stuff about his loins and in his crutch has moistened itself again to lubricate its jagged teeth. It bites.

  Charles Small cries. The voice cries: “Oh my God, Oh God, he’s got convulsions!” Then he is picked up, pounded, rubbed, kissed, undressed, wiped, powdered, and pinned up again. After that the mountain comes to him out of a long white nightdress, and at last there is the dark. He sleeps a little and, awakening, sees nothing. He is alone. So he cries. Springs squeal. Someone moans. Still in the dark he feels the embrace of powerful arms, and inhales a familiar smell—which he hates. Still, it is better than nothing; and alone, Charles Small is nothing. Soothed, he allows himself to be put down again, and then, missing the protective warmth, he cries again. A flat paraffin-wax night-light makes a hole in the shadows—a hole no bigger than an orange-pip. “My little dolly! What do you want then? Let Mummy sleep a little, then!”

  Charles Small weeps desperately. The voice says: “Sha! … Sha! …” Out comes the mountain. As a man nibbles a blade of grass, chews a piece of gum, or smokes a cigarette—so he sucks. “… Was he hungry? There, little dolly, was it then? There then, there then….”

  … Charles Small starts out of a dyspeptic doze with a vile, sour taste in his mouth. He feels crop-full of curds and awash with a gurgling bilge of whey. “What a life, what a bloody life!” he says, grinding his teeth and tenderly pressing his throbbing temples. His head is neither aching nor not aching. He grips it hard in his damp hands, and shakes it until it rattles like a money-box, wishing that he could tear it off, dash it to the floor, and stamp on it. Damn you, ache or don’t ache—don’t threaten to ache! bellows the exasperated inaudible voice inside himself; and he hits himself hard on the forehead. The blow drives the indeterminate headache into some hole or corner in the fog. Obedient but always malignant, it slips into a secret passage, wriggles around his cheek-bone, and finds a back tooth, where it sits sulkily picking at the nerve, while it says:

  All right then, if you don’t want me I’ll go away!

  Damn you, damn you! Oh, if only I could get hold of you! screams the noiseless voice of Charles Small, and he snaps his jaws together, baring his teeth. At this the vague ache hunches its shoulders, curls up, and becomes a concentrated pain. Charles Small cries “Ow!”

  Smugly nodding, and sending home a new pang with every nod, the Pain says, with hypocritical bewilderment, strongly tinged with hysteria: What’s the matter? What d’you want of me? Didn’t I do what you told me to do? Don’t I try to please you? Whatever I do is wrong. If I stay, that’s not good. If I go away, that’s not good. What am I to do? Die, to please you? The Pain begins to cry: the nerve in the tooth seems to shudder, hiccup, and twitch. Charles Small strikes it with his fist; whereupon it cowers, and runs to a safe place, behind his left shoulder-blade, not far from the base of his neck, where it swells big and glows bright and says: Well, does this suit you?

  He groans aloud, and puts out his hand for something cold to drink. The sour curds inside him have become a great ball of soapy cheese floating in burning acid. His unsteady hand finds the glass his wife has put on the little table by the bed. Greedily, he swallows two great mouthfuls: then he sits up retching, with a shudder, and sees that the glass was full of milk. Milk! He makes as if to throw the glass away but, remembering that he is thirsty, drinks the rest of the milk; and then hurls the empty glass across the room and sees it smash and hears the pieces fall. Charles Small is angry with himself. As the little Pain prods his shoulder he asks, angrily: What the hell do you want?

  Control yourself!

  Then, of course, someone knocks at the door, and he must shout: “Oh, come in, come in!” His ten-year-old daughter Laura is there, asking if he is all right.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Yes! Can’t you let me rest?”

  Laura looks at him with round, startled eyes. Charles Small perceives that her feelings are hurt, and he loves this little girl, he believes, more than she deserves. He wants to apologise, to say: I’m sorry, Laura, my little darling, if I sounded as if I was angry with you. I’m not, you know—I couldn’t be angry with you. I was angry, darling, but not with you, and I knocked a glass over. Come in, my sweet, and let me tell you a story….

  Something makes him say: “What the hell do you want? What do you take me for, your slave? I work my fingers to the bone for you and I can’t get a minute’s peace in my own house, is that it?”

  Laura says: “Mummy told me to come and see if you were all right and ask you if you’d like a nice glass of hot milk.”

  “No!” shouts Charles Small, right into the child’s face. “Go away!”

  She goes downstairs, trying not to cry. In an ecstasy of remorse he stretches his right arm so that his knuckles can strike the painful place by his lef
t shoulder-blade. The Pain runs back to the place it came from and settles down in his head, while his insides grow more and more sour, and a soft, invisible hand squeezes his belly like a sponge until bitter water comes out of his eyes.

  To-morrow he will buy Laura a present. He will take her to the best toyshop in town and say: “Choose whatever you want.” Whatever her heart desires, or her fancy dictates, she shall have, if it costs fifty pounds. But he knows that fifty thousand rocking-horses with crimson nostrils and snow-white tails could not drag out of her recollection the memory of the last ninety seconds.

  He feels that he has hurled a brick at a priceless vase.

  If wishing could make it so, Charles Small would drop dead: twenty thousand shot-guns would blow him into a fine spray. The Pain in his head laughs a laugh, that shakes every nerve in his body. What for? Why? What’s the use? he asks himself. Die, die, you idiot, die!

  He goes to the bathroom, takes from its oblong box one of his big hollow-ground German razors, and bares his throat. The broad blade sings under his thumb. One quick slash under the ear and then, shadowy jet by jet, comes the dark …

  … Downstairs he hears voices. He must know what is being said. Silent on his stockinged feet he goes to the bedroom door, closing the razor and replacing it in its box as he goes. What he is doing is shameful, and he knows it. He is spying, prying, eavesdropping; secretly listening to the private conversation of his own flesh and blood. Of all the despicable things to do, this is the most despicable. His mother and her sisters did such shameful and disgusting things—but still he listens, holding his breath and trying to gulp down his stomach, which is sticking in his throat. Laura, that wet-eyed little sneak—the spitting image of her damned mother—is snivelling again: “Mummy, Daddy shouted at me, Daddy grumbled at me!”

  Laura’s mother, Charles’ wife, says, in her tinny, monotonous voice—oh, that voice, that voice like a tap with a worn-out washer dripping into an enamel basin in a kitchen sink in the dead of night!—she says: “There, there, Laura darling, Daddy didn’t mean it, Daddy isn’t well. Daddy’s got a pain!”

  At this, of course, the child cheers up. Good news: Daddy has a pain. Excellent! “What kind of a pain, Mummy?” she asks. She hopes that it is a bad pain.

  “Daddy’s got a pain in the tum-tum. A naughty pain in his little tum-tum.”

  “Why has Daddy got a pain in his tum-tum?”

  “Daddy is worried, and it gives him a pain in his tum-tum.”

  Now “tum-tum” is more than Charles Small can bear: he must protest. But how? If he were an honest man he’d go downstairs and thrash the matter out. But an honest man would not have listened to this conversation in the first place; and he knows it. Curling a contemptuous lip at himself he reaches backwards, finds the door-knob, rattles it, and pushes the bedroom door open so violently that it rebounds from the wall with a quivering bang. (The people downstairs will believe that he has just thrown it open.) Then he roars: “What’s the matter down there? Tum, tum, tum—tum, tum, TUM! What’s the idea? What’s going on? Tum, tum, tum! Where is this? Africa? Can’t I get five minutes rest? Tum, tum-tum! Hire a hall if you want to practice the drums and let a man have a little peace!”

  There is a terrible silence. He goes back into the bedroom, slamming the door. He knows, now, that Laura, his accursed daughter, and Hettie, his damned wife, are whispering together. His wife’s eyelids, over her prominent blue eyes, are pink with a sickly pinkness. It is a psychological certainty that the whites of those disgusting eyes are going red at the corners, and that there is an exudation of tears. Charles Small can see it all. A big tear rises and stands, like a water-blister, between her white mouse’s eyelids—it wobbles tantalisingly, so that you want to take a stick and knock it off, or stick a pin in it. Then it seems to go pop, and a foolish little trickle runs to the bridge of her absurd nose. The bridge of this nose is situated less than an inch from the tip—it is an admirable distribution-centre for idle tears. Plip-plop, bloop-bleep—down fall the lazy, colourless drops. Laura, of course, blubbers in sympathy. Let them cry their confounded eyes out!——And put red pepper on them and swallow them like oysters, and drop dead! says Charles Small, lying down again.

  His face is hot, his ears are burning, and between his breast-bone and his spine he is aware of an unhealthy glow. From deep inside him struggles a puff of gas in a wriggling bubble which nudges itself away up through the sour curds, flutters through the acidulous whey, and bursts. Something like a branding iron burns his gullet, and in his mouth again is the taste of sour milk, milk so sour that it is wrinkled like a brain and powdered with grey-green mildew between the convulsions.

  Then, of course, he hears the thunder of a little boy’s feet. Jules, his son, has come home from school. The weather is warm; the boy is wearing rubber-soled shoes; and yet he manages to clump about the place like a Suffolk Punch stallion…. From somewhere inside Charles Small shoots something like a skyrocket, which bursts under his left collar-bone in a shower of gold and silver sparks that emerge, brilliantly glittering and burning like hot needles, from every pore of his skin. As the sparks die they grow cold, and their coldness freezes the sweat brought out by the burning heat. Wet and shivering, abnormally sensitive in the ears, he waits for what he knows must come. In some indefinable place, not far from where his neck joins his shoulders, there is the over-wound mainspring of a great clock, which, at a touch, will fly open with a whirring noise.

  Here it comes—a terrible hiss, as of compressed steam from a boiler at bursting point—a noise that makes him cower in expectation of an awful bang. Hettie is whispering “Hush”. How like his mother she is—how well she thinks she means, and how ill she does! Little Laura is whispering now, and her whisper is like the noise of pent-up breath being blown into a toy balloon which swells tighter and tighter until you shut your eyes and cringe away with your fingers in your ears, dreading the inevitable pop … as if a toy balloonful of baby’s breath could hurt you, dirty little coward that you are! …

  The inevitable pop. The inevitable Mom and the inevitable Pop. There was Pop, there was his father to the life—a toy balloon, a bubble, a pennyworth of membrane puffed up with sour-milky baby’s breath, an inflated nothing obedient to every idle wind; but capable of inspiring idiot fear, fear that he might burst! The more you shuddered away from him the bigger he grew; until at last, poor skinful of wind, he deflated himself and became the shrivelled little empty bag that he was … so that out of sheer pity you lent him the breath of your life wherewith he might reinflate himself and feel like somebody again … whereupon, sucking your breath, he grew big to frighten you once more. He was dangerous as a toy balloon is dangerous—only if the baby swallows it.

  He used to come home, flabby and empty, to be pumped up by his family after the world had taken the wind out of him. Thus he made ready for another day … the nobody, the nothing, the dead-beat, the sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing, the failure.

  Charles Small’s son Jules is maturing early. He is only thirteen years old, but his voice is already breaking. Of all the irritating noises in the world—knives scratching plates, uninhibited soup-drinking, the gasping of Hettie’s father when he is drinking hot tea; the sucking noise Hettie’s brother makes when he gets a fibre of meat from between his teeth after a meal and, having held it up on his finger-nail for examination, swallows it with a smacking of the lips; Hettie’s whimpering glottal stoppage when she says: “Buts I didn’t meann it”; the adenoidal sing-song of Nathan when, opening his muddy eyes and slippery mouth, he reaches out with a shiny red hand to take the pot a second before he turns up the Ace King Queen Jack Ten of hearts, saying: “Give me the money”—of all these noises the sound of his son’s voice is the most unbearable.

  Jules starts to talk like a human boy. Then, somewhere in Jules’s stomach an invisible finger plucks one of the strings of a bass-viol, whereupon Jules roars like a bull. The instrumentalist who is practising on his larynx picks up a mandolin, then, and pl
inks a high note for a little while, before experimenting with a fret-saw on a dancing master’s fiddle—after which some apprentice breaks in, experimentally, with a piccolo, while an uncontrollable amateur pecks at the parchment of a kettle-drum. Then it is all given to the ’cello and the flute.

  “Tum-tum?” Jules roars and squeaks.

  “Ssshhh!”

  The over-wound spring breaks—not that there is more than enough of it to fill a boot-polish tin. Something touches it now, and it goes shrieking out of a tight blue disc into an inextricably tangled heap of shivering steel ribbon.

  Charles Small feels that his bowels have come up to strangle him. Then he remembers the gramophone … and up pops Daddy, that gassy, vacillating little popper. Pop! Pop!

  Oh, that windbag, that squeaked when it emptied itself; that ball of breath! He was full of sententious talk about a penny saved being a penny earned. As bums loaf around the stoves in doss-houses solving problems of state, so this man squatted on a heap of unpaid bills and talked big business. There was money in this, money in that, money in the other—old man Small had it at his finger-tips. One day, after he had been roaring and writhing and groaning about the unpaid rates and taxes, a pasty little man came into the shop carrying a great black box by a heavy leather handle, and said: “Want a bargain?”

  Up jumped I. Small the big shot, keen as mustard; watchful, cautious, cunning, ready to out-Machiavelli Machiavelli. The pasty man, lifting the box with difficulty—it must have weighed between thirty and forty pounds—put it on the counter, knocked down several clip-locks, and opened one of the first portable phonographs that was ever made.

  The lid of this fantastic box contained something like a nickel-plated wash-basin into which was clipped a tone-arm as big and heavy as a footballer’s leg, at the end of which hung a mica sound-box of a peculiarly club-footed shape. The basic half of this contraption was heavy with machinery. There was a turntable to which was glued a disc hacked out of one of those green plush tablecloths that used to be fringed with pom-poms.