Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

‘Have one?’ she proposed insultingly to Joyce as they walked out of the shop.

It was Joyce’s turn to be a profile on a coin.

At the stationer’s there were, unfortunately, no other clients to distract the attention of the people behind the counter. But Helen was equal to the situation. A handful of small change suddenly went rolling across the floor; and while the assistants were hunting for the scattered pennies, she helped herself to a rubber and three very good pencils.

It was at the butcher’s that the trouble began. Ordinarily Helen refused to go into the shop at all; the sight, the sickening smell of those pale corpses disgusted her. But this morning she walked straight in. In spite of the disgust. It was a point of honour. She had said every shop, and she wasn’t going to give Joyce an excuse for saying she had cheated. For the first half–minute, while her lungs were still full of the untainted air she had inhaled outside in the street it was all right. But, oh God, when at last she had to breathe … God! She put her handkerchief to her nose. But the sharp rasping smell of the carcasses leaked through the barrier of perfume, superimposing itself upon the sweetness, so that a respiration that began with Quelques Fleurs would hideously end with dead sheep or, opening in stale blood, modulated insensibly into the key of jasmine and ambergris.

A customer went out; the butcher turned to her. He was an oldish man, very large, with a square massive face that beamed down at her with a paternal benevolence.

‘Like Mr Baldwin,’ she said to herself, and then, aloud but indistinctly through her handkerchief, ‘A pound and a half of rumpsteak, please.’

The butcher returned in a moment with a mass of gory flesh. ‘There’s a beautiful piece of meat, Miss!’ He fingered the dank, red lump with an artist’s loving enthusiasm. ‘A really beautiful piece.’ It was Mr Baldwin fingering his Virgil, thumbing his dog’s–eared Webb.

‘I shall never eat meat again,’ she said to herself, as Mr Baldwin turned away and began to cut up the meat. ‘But what shall I take?’ She looked round. ‘What on earth … ? Ah!’ A marble shelf ran, table–high, along one of the walls of the shop. On it, in trays, pink or purply brown, lay a selection of revolting viscera. And among the viscera a hook—a big steel S, still stained, at one of its curving tips, with the blood of whatever drawn and decapitated corpse had hung from it. She glanced round. It seemed a good moment—the butcher was weighing her steak, his assistant was talking to that disgusting old woman like a bull–dog, the girl at the cash desk was deep in her accounts. Aloof and dissociated in the doorway, Joyce was elaborately overacting the part of one who interrogates the sky and wonders if this drizzle is going to turn into something serious. Helen took three quick steps, picked up the hook, and was just lowering it into her basket when, full of solicitude, ‘Look out, Miss,’ came the butcher’s voice, ‘you’ll get yourself dirty if you touch those hooks.’

That start of surprise was like the steepest descent of the Scenic Railway—sickening! Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! She tried to laugh.

‘I was just looking.’ The hook clanked back on to the marble.

‘I wouldn’t like you to spoil your clothes, Miss.’ His smile was fatherly. More than ever like Mr Baldwin.

Nervously, for lack of anything better to do or say, Helen laughed again, and, in the process, drew another deep breath of corpse. Ugh! She fortified her nose once more with Quelques Fleurs .

‘One pound and eleven ounces, Miss.’

She nodded her assent. But what could she take? And how was she to find the opportunity?

‘Anything more this morning?’

Yes, that was the only thing to do—to order something more. That would give her time to think, a chance to act. ‘Have you any … ’ she hesitated ‘…any sweetbreads?’

Yes, Mr Baldwin did have some sweetbreads, and they were on the shelf with the other viscera. Near the hook. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, when he asked her how much she needed. ‘Just the ordinary amount, you know.’

She looked about her while he was busy with the sweetbreads, despairingly. There was nothing in this beastly shop, nothing except the hook, that she could take. And now that he had seen her with it in her hands, the hook was out of the question. Nothing whatever. Unless … That was it! A shudder ran through her. But she frowned, she set her teeth. She was determined to go through with it.

‘And now,’ when he had packed up the sweetbreads, ‘now,’ she said, ‘I must have some of those!’ She indicated the packets of pale sausages piled on a shelf at the other end of the shop.

‘I’ll do it while his back is turned,’ she thought. But the girl at the cash desk had emerged from her accounts and was looking round the shop. ‘Oh, damn her, damn her!’ Helen fairly screamed in her imagination, and then, ‘Thank goodness!’ the girl had turned away. A hand shot out; but the averted glance returned, ‘ Damn her!’ The hand dropped back. And now it was too late. Mr Baldwin had got the sausages, had turned, was coming back towards her.

‘Will that be all, Miss?’

‘Well, I wonder?’ Helen frowned uncertainly, playing for time. ‘I can’t help thinking there was something else … something else … ’ The seconds passed; it was terrible; she was making a fool of herself, an absolute idiot. But she refused to give up. She refused to acknowledge defeat.

‘We’ve some beautiful Welsh mutton in this morning,’ said the butcher in that artist’s voice of his, as though he were talking of the Georgics.

Helen shook her head: she really couldn’t start buying mutton now.

Suddenly the girl at the cash desk began to write again. The moment had come. ‘No,’ she said with decision, ‘I’ll take another pound of sausages.’

‘Another?’ Mr Baldwin looked surprised.

No wonder! she thought. They’d be surprised at home too.

‘Yes, just one more,’ she said, and smiled ingratiatingly, as though she were asking a favour. He walked back towards the shelf. The girl at the cash desk was still writing, the old woman who looked like a bull–dog had never stopped talking to the assistant. Quickly—there was not a second to lose—Helen turned towards the marble shelf beside her. It was for one of those kidneys that she had decided. The thing slithered obscenely between her gloved fingers—a slug, a squid. In the end she had to grab it with her whole hand. Thank heaven, she thought, for gloves! As she dropped it into the basket, the idea came to her that for some reason she might have to take the horrible thing in her mouth, raw as it was and oozy with some unspeakable slime, take it in her mouth, bite, taste, swallow. Another shudder of disgust ran through her, so violent this time that it seemed to tear something at the centre of her body.

Tired of acting the meteorologist, Joyce was standing under her umbrella looking at the chrysanthemums in the florist’s window next door. She had prepared something particularly offensive to say to Helen when she came out. But at the sight of her sister’s white unhappy face she forgot even her legitimate grievances.

‘Why, Helen, what is the matter?’

For all answer Helen suddenly began to cry.

‘What is it?’

She shook her head and, turning away, raised her hand to her face to brush away the tears.

‘Tell me … ’

‘Oh!’ Helen started and cried out as though she had been stung by a wasp. An expression of agonized repugnance wrinkled up her face. ‘Oh, too filthy, too filthy,’ she repeated, looking at her fingers. And setting her basket down on the pavement, she unbuttoned the glove, stripped it off her hand, and, with a violent gesture, flung it away from her into the gutter.