Collected Stories Read Free Page A

hurt me, humiliated me and flirted with my girlfriends. I realize, with a flush of panic and guilt, that I don’t love him. In spite of which I say: “I love you.”
    My mother looks up sharply from her cards and lets out a surprised cry.
    I turn to my father. He has almost disappeared. I can see the leather of the chair through his stomach.
    I don’t know whether it is my unconvincing declaration of love or my mother’s exclamation that makes my father laugh. For whatever reason, he begins to laugh uncontrollably: “You bloody fools,” he gasps, “I wish you could see the looks on your bloody silly faces.”
    And then he is gone.
    My mother looks across at me nervously, a card still in her hand. “Do you love me?” she asks.

The Last Days of a Famous Mime
1.
    The Mime arrived on Alitalia with very little luggage: a brown paper parcel and what looked like a woman’s handbag.
    Asked the contents of the brown paper parcel he said, “String.”
    Asked what the string was for he replied: “Tying up bigger parcels.”
    It had not been intended as a joke, but the Mime was pleased when the reporters laughed. Inducing laughter was not his forte. He was famous for terror.
    Although his state of despair was famous throughout Europe, few guessed at his hope for the future. “The string,” he explained, “is a prayer that I am always praying.”
    Reluctantly he untied his parcel and showed them the string. It was blue and when extended measured exactly fifty-three metres.
    The Mime and the string appeared on the front pages of the evening papers.
2.
    The first audiences panicked easily. They had not been prepared for his ability to mime terror. They fled their seats continually. Only to return again.
    Like snorkel divers they appeared at the doors outside the concert hall with red faces and were puzzled to find the world as they had left it.
3.
    Books had been written about him. He was the subject of an award-winning film. But in his first morning in a provincial town he was distressed to find that his performance had not been liked by the one newspaper’s one critic.
    “I cannot see,” the critic wrote, “the use of invoking terror in an audience.”
    The Mime sat on his bed, pondering ways to make his performance more light-hearted.
4.
    As usual he attracted women who wished to still the raging storms of his heart.
    They attended his bed like highly paid surgeons operating on a difficult case. They were both passionate and intelligent. They did not suffer defeat lightly.
5.
    Wrongly accused of merely miming love in his private life he was somewhat surprised to be confronted with hatred.
    “Surely,” he said, “if you now hate me, it was you who were imitating love, not I.”
    “You always were a slimy bastard,” she said. “What’s in that parcel?”
    “I told you before,” he said helplessly, “string.”
    “You’re a liar,” she said.
    But later when he untied the parcel he found that she had opened it to check on his story. Her understanding of the string had been perfect. She had cut it into small pieces like spaghetti in a lousy restaurant.
6.
    Against the advice of the tour organizers he devoted two concerts entirely to love and laughter. They were disasters. It was felt that love and laughter were not, in his case, as instructive as terror.
    The next performance was quickly announced.
    TWO HOURS OF REGRET.
    Tickets sold quickly. He began with a brief interpretation of love, using it merely as a prelude to regret, which he elaborated on in a complex and moving performance which left the audience pale and shaken. In a final flourish he passed from regret to loneliness to terror. The audience devoured the terror like brave tourists eating the hottest curry in an Indian restaurant.
7.
    “What you are doing,” she said, “is capitalizing on your neuroses.Personally I find it disgusting, like someone exhibiting their club foot, or Turkish beggars with strange deformities.”
    He said nothing. He was