Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

“Are you out of bed right now?” asks Marc sleepily.

“Yes, I was too hot to sleep tonight anyway so I stayed in my apartment with a lot of friends.”

“Have they any ideas on how to get the bed into the apartment?”

“I daren’t ask them, I’m not intimate enough with them to approach the question of beds in apartments.” Together they laugh at the joke. It is like when Tom and I saw two old negroes in the Bowery fighting desperately with their crutches. Tom just about broke up laughing, a strange, high, utterly delighted and slightly diabolical laugh. I felt very schmaltzy in my amusement by comparison. Which only goes to show that one must not compare oneself with writers like Tom, especially as one hardly knows who they are, you have to be careful whom you mix with, psychosis is more contagious than German measles and can also cause a woman to give birth to blind monsters. I know how easily caught are curses and psychoses, I can remove such things from people by begging an article of their clothing and wearing it in public. I have a cupboard full of old clothes and a closet full of succubi in alcohol and people tell me that I am uncommunicative these days. They ask me why I have had the phone taken out. To save expense and interruption, I reply. Interruption? Yes, I’m hibernating.

Who said Tom was psychotic, I didn’t, I only said he might be, anyone might be, these days you never know what you are talking to, do you? Just because he did not invite you to dinner, will not discuss things with you, does not exert himself to make your weird little existence more fabulous whenever he gets the opportunity? Don’t talk to me like that, the truth is, I’m jealous as hell of his magnificent tattoos and his capacity for riding a powerful motorbike. I can’t ride a motorbike, I have tried but I fall off. Too unstable you see. It’s going round bends that’s dangerous, and you also have to know your way back.

“Do you think you would like it in Africa?” asks David who is Tom’s friend from way back. No, he did not ask me that, nobody asked me that, they don’t care whether I would like it in Africa or not, it doesn’t affect them at all. But Marc had a dream of Mombasa once, and that seemed like a sparkling coincidence if ever there was one. As a student of Jung I am interested in synchronicity, being unable to explain certain series of coincidences. I turned to Jung as always, for he is The Philosopher for the Next Hundred Years, and I do not like to be left behind. It was a hell of a coincidence that Marc was visiting England and I lived there. It could be nothing but synchronicity at work that Marc was going to Paris and so was I. It could be nothing but a complete balls-up on Jung’s part that my trip was canceled and Marc went traipsing around the Bois de Something-or-other taking photographs of American exiles who used the slang of fifteen years ago.

It must be synchronicity that I live here and now, have just lighted a fire of coals in preparation for a cozy evening and am about to cook sausages and eggs and bacon for tea, it being Monday and no cold meat in the fridge. A friend came yesterday and stayed for dinner even though it was the middle of the afternoon—”Well if it really is only four you have time to stay,” I said and between us we ate all the roast lamb except for some scraps which Colin made into sandwiches. I hate making sandwiches, the fillings always elude the bread.

I CANNOT KEEP MY BREAD STRAIGHT

I lay in bed the night before last and I started to swell. I gradually expanded until I filled all the bed and Colin began to moan and snore in his sleep and I heaved to accommodate my newly enormous body, and he would have fallen onto the floor except the covers must have been well tucked in. My tongue got enormous, it grew at first at a greater rate than my mouth so I had to open my jaws, back and back they creaked and grew slowly big enough and squared-off at the front, my top lip and my nose became all one huge mound of flesh. I knew that if I sneezed I would blast the bedcovers right off. My great stumpy arms and legs rested heavily across my vast belly and my little fat ears twitched. My insides began to rumble like a distant volcano. I was almost too heavy to move and everything was incredibly awkward, but somehow I managed to get a hoof under the mattress and scoop out some salted peanuts. Most of them rolled onto the floor but I managed to throw a few into my gaping maw onto the domed tongue and slowly close my hps over them before they rolled into my throat. I chomped noisily, slurp slurp in the otherwise silent night. I thought of creeping downstairs and opening the bottle of champagne but I knew that champagne is meant to be shared amongst friends and I was the only hippopotamus for miles around, and besides it had all been drunk. I called Tom, long distance to New York at a cost of three pounds per minute.

“Tom?”

“Hullo, who’s that?”

“This is Josephine. Tom, can you help me, I have a problem.”

“A problem— you’ve got a problem?” He laughs delightedly, I am pleased to have made contact so easily, perhaps he is telepathic?

“Yes, listen. I can’t get through the door to the toilet and I think I have dysentery.” I listen to his wonderful trilling amusement until I reckon I have spent about twenty pounds sterling and ring off feeling better already. I make the whole room tremble with a wonderful bassoonlike stale-peanut-smelling fart which reaches an impossible vibrating nadir and then rises crescendo like a Swanee whistle and dies away on a series of staccato squeaks and a final flabby silent gust. I am small again, about a hundred and eight pounds, most of that ossified brain cell. I turn over in bed and Colin struggles for air dreaming of Africa. In his sleep he speaks. “Jesus Christ how these native women snore!”

Yes, it had to be synchronicity that made me small and active again by the time my little girl called out in the night.

“Mummy, mummy, the curtains are coming out at me!”

I stagger quickly into her room and growl at the curtains.

“Back, back you rose-patterned poltroons, back I tell you! How dare you frighten my little girl!” She is already asleep, secure in the knowledge that I can deal with anything supernatural. With curtains like ours how could I ever leave her behind, who else has the power to subdue them when they try to attack in the night? A child needs a nice stable mother in this crazy world, someone to reassure her and help

TO KEEP HER HEAD STRAIGHT

So I shan’t be setting off with a rucksack to the wilds of Greenwich Village alone just yet, and if we get to Africa it will be as a family, because in Africa there will not only be a plethora of curses and witches and bogies and so on, there will be snakes and spiders under the pillow, things I can’t deal with but Colin can—you should see him hunt with a slipper—and elephants on the road and crocodiles in the only decent swimming water for miles, I shall be needed to warn and nag and exorcise. We shall go on weekend trips to the Mountains of the Moon and see the shimmering leopards from the safety of our Land Rover, and see the Blixen-type coffee farms and see hippos in their habitat. If we went to America we should go to look at bears I expect. Family trips are like that. In Africa I shall get a magnificent tan and seek out African writers and ask them questions and with luck they might even ask me questions too. I might even write an African novel!

Excuse me, the telephone is ringing.

“Hello, who’s that?”

“This is Marc in New York.”

“Oh how lovely to hear from you, how are you, are you quite better?”

“Oh yes, lots and lots better thank you Josephine, I’ve been eating avocados and they seem to have an—ah—curative property you know?”