The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small Read Free Page B

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 left shoulder-blade. The Painruns 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