Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

Gonger the barman had mixed Asta’s usual Tom Collins. She swallowed a mouthful of it and then what Catchy had said seemed to tick in her head like a time-bomb. She remembered all that Detective-Inspector Turpin had said to her one morning: ‘_Somebody who gets a thrill out of suffering: it might be a woman, it might be a man. Up comes the willing victim, which is all that this shy torturer, as you might call him, this murderer who is afraid to commit his murder — this willing victim is all that he needs to make him feel powerful_.’

And then Asta knew that the submissive Catchy, who said that she only wanted to make men happy, made happy only those men that needed victims, willing victims. She gave strength and confidence and comfort only to Evil. She was a back to be beaten, a backside to be lashed, a pair of wrists and a pair of ankles to be tied up — she was a training depot for murderers.

Asta Thundersley’s big red face grew larger and redder. She got off her stool, drew herself up, and shouted: ‘Damn you! Take that!’ — and, bringing up her right hand, slapped Catchy’s face, adding: ‘You destroy the world! You are filth! You are the devil! I hate you!’

Then Asta walked out of the Bar Bacchus.

It was regarded as really extraordinary that, for the first time in living memory, Asta Thundersley had left a drink unfinished.

Catchy went into hysterics.

44

And so it comes to pass that Asta Thundersley is the one human being in the whole world of whom Catchy speaks with acrimony, even after all these years — all these dreary and terrible years, during which so many good men have died, so many strong men have got tired, so many soft hearts have hardened, and so many beloved ones have been blown to dust.

Catchy could easily have forgotten that slap in the face, in spite of the fact that a slap in the face from Asta was something not easily forgotten. But, somehow, the words that had gone before the blow stuck in her mind. They touched a spring in her head, and somewhere a little door opened. Between Catchy and her pleasures, thereafter, there intruded nasty little visions of dead children.

All the same, she has not fundamentally changed. Not fundamentally. Now, if and when she is required to assist in the reinforcement of someone’s dirty self-esteem, she collaborates willingly. But she cries afterwards.

There is, she feels, a great deal to cry for. She feels, especially in the dim hours before half-past eleven in the morning, that nobody loves her, everybody hates her, and life is not what it used to be in the good old gay days when the Bar Bacchus was full of life and everyone was sweet and kind to her.

From time to time she says, with a look of wild incredulity, that she simply cannot believe that so many people can have changed so much in such a little time. It is true that things have happened. The Sonia Sabbatani affair became a bore. Franco jostled it away into the lower right-hand corners of the newspapers when he began to poke his Moorish spear-head into the guts of Spain. Hitler, to whose name we still prefixed a polite Herr, was getting ready to take Czechoslovakia. Things were happening in the world, and things — very terrible things — have happened, compared with which the murder of the Sabbatani girl is nothing but a flea bite.

Yet, as Mr Pink never tires of reiterating: ‘It is all the same sort of thing. Maidanek, Belsen, Auschwitz, Sonia Sabbatani — the difference is only a matter of scale and legality.’

He is still around. God knows what has happened to most of the rest. Gonger has retired. Mrs Sabbatani, living in misery with her sisterin-law Sarah, is drifting to bankruptcy. Sam is dead, and is prayed for every year on the anniversary of his death. The Tiger Fitzpatrick and Mrs Kipling are going downhill as fast as they can possibly go; Turpin has become chief inspector; Schiff has made money by marketing a mixture of cheap gin and horse-radish which is called Ish ; Shocket the Bloodsucker fell dead of a stroke, and nobody mourns him; Titch Whitbread, having lost the sight of one eye, makes a good living whistling for taxis outside a West End restaurant; Hemmeridge, to everyone’s astonishment, died like a proper man in the Western Desert; Goggs the butcher went to jail for black market operations and then seemed to evaporate. All the others have simply gone away, and no one even thinks of them. Thea Olivia continues to visit members of her family. Generally, she is received with hypocritical shrieks of false delight: she has fifty thousand pounds to leave when she dies. Her patchwork quilt is six feet long and five feet wide, and still unfinished; she wants to add and add and add to it — she will see to it that the work lasts as long as her eyesight. She is an exquisite needlewoman and her quilt keeps her happy. God knows what she thinks of as the fine, goldeyed needle goes in and out. She has washed Tobit Osbert out of her mind.

45

He has got into Public Relations and is doing tolerably well.

There is no doubt about it — the man has charm. He still takes his nieces to the circus, and the joke still holds good — that he does not take the children, but they take him. Now, as ever, he gasps at the whip-crack and laughs until he cries at the clowns, the Joeys and the Aiphonses as they tumble in.

It was always the same with Uncle Toby. He always sucked in an anxious breath while the lion-tamers cowed the tawny, snarling big cats. When the wire-walker who pretended to be drunk climbed up the pylon to the high wire and, reeling and stumbling, seemed about to fall, he half-rose with sweat on his face. The little girls laughed at their silly uncle. Did he not realize that it was all an act? Didn’t he know that in a circus such things were done every day, year in and year out? Silly uncle, nice uncle! Simple-minded uncle!

The children could not be expected to know that he went to the circus, as he went to musical reviews, half hoping that something unexpected might happen.

The Equestrienne might fall off the great white horse. The leopard that watched, crouching, lashing its tail, might spring and rend. There was one chance in a million that the intoxicated-looking man on the high wire might just for that once really be drunk, and fall; and oh, the soft wicked thud of the body in the sawdust!

There was the Woman who hung by the chin on the edge of a sabre; and there were the Flying Foxes, three men and a girl. One of them always pretended, on the high trapeze, to miss his cue. There was a moment of frightful tension. Say, just say, that he had been up a little too late the night before and for one split second lost confidence? The Murderer knew how easily, in a split second, a man can lose confidence. Or say that the girl, who fascinated and terrified the whole world with her triple somersaults, under-estimated or over-estimated her take-off by the merest mote of time, so that the big man missed? He could see the madly clutching fingers grasping nothing; hear the screams of the spectators. … The big man swung himself back to his platform, but before he reached it the girl was bouncing on the sawdust, while everyone stood up, stretched taut with horror.

Meanwhile, to the left and the right of him, his nieces squealed with delight.

Then there were the side-shows. There were midgets, bearded ladies, living skeletons, ‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’, and the ‘Limbless Wonder’. This last-named freak had a beautiful head, and an indeterminate torso without arms or legs. She painted in water-colour, holding the brush between her teeth. He could watch her for hours.

Also he liked the Midgets that lived in dolls’ houses — men and women of mature age; the biggest was no taller than a four-year-old child. How nice to be with such people, the strongest of whom he could pick up with one hand!