The Wilful Eye Read Free

pistol back in my belt. What had she done, the old biddy, to annoy me so? I went around the stump and looked at her. She was only disgusting the way old women are always disgusting, with a layer of filth on her such as war always leaves. She had no weapon; she could not have been dangerous to me in any way. Her face was clean and bright between her dirt-black hands – not like a face, of course, but clean red tissue, clean white bone-shards. I was annoyed with myself, mildly, for not leaving her alive so that she could tell me what all this was about. I glared at her facelessness, watching in case the drug should make her dead face speak, mouthless as she was. But she only lay, looking blankly, redly at the sky.
    She lied to you, my memory hissed at me.
    Ah, yes, that was why I’d shot her. You make no sense, old woman, I’d said. Sick of looking at her ugliness, I’d turned cruel, from having been milder before, even kind – from doing the old rag-and-bone a favour! Here I stand, I said, with Yankee dollars spilling over my feet. Here you sit, over a cellar full of treasures, enough to set you up in palaces and feed and clothe you queenly the rest of your days. Yet all you can bring yourself to want is this old thing, factory made, one of millions, well used already.
    I’d turned the Bic this way and that in the sunlight. It was like opening a sack of rice at a homeless camp; I had her full attention, however uncaring she tried to seem.
    Children of this country, of this war, will sell you these Bics for a packet-meal – they feed a whole family with one man’s ration. In desperate times, two rows of chocolate is all it costs you. Their doddering grandfather will sell you the fluid for a twist of tobacco. Or you can buy a Bic entirely new and full from such shops as are left – caves in the rubble, banged-together stalls set up on the bulldozed streets. A new one will light first go; you won’t have to shake it and swear, or click it some magic number of times. Soldiers are rich men in war. All our needs are met, and our pay is laid on extra. There is no need for us to go shooting people, not for cheap cigarette-lighters – cheap and pinkand lady-sized.
    Yes, but it is mine, she had lied on at me. It was given to me by my son, who went off to war just like you, and got himself killed for his motherland. It has its hold on me that way. Quite worthless to any other person, it is.
    In the hunch of her and the lick of her lips, the thing was of very great worth indeed.
    Tell me the truth, old woman. I had pushed aside my coat. I have a gun here that makes people tell things true. I have used it many times. What is this Bic to you? or I’ll take your head off.
    She looked at my pistol, in its well-worn sheath. She stuck out her chin, fixed again on the lighter. Give it me! she said. If she’d begged, if she’d wept, I might have, but her anger set mine off; that was her mistake.
    I lean over the king and push the door-button on the remote. The queen’s men burst in, all pistols and posturing like men in a movie.
    It was dark under there, and it smelled like dirt and death-rot. I didn’t want to let the rope go.
    Only the big archways are safe, she’d said. Stand under them and all will be well, but step either side and you must use my pinny or the dogs will eat you alive . I could see no archway; all was black.
    I could hear a dog, though, panting out the foul air. The sound was all around, at both my ears equally. I knew dogs, good dogs; but no dog had ever stood higher than my knee. From the sound, this one could take my whole head in its mouth, and would have to stoop to do so.
    Which way should I go? How far? I put out my hands, with the biddy’s apron between them. I was a fool to believe her; what was this scrap of cloth against such a beast? I made the kissing noise you make to a dog. Pup? Pup? I said.
    His eyes came