Pincher Martin (20 page)

Sensations. Coffee. Hock. Gin. Wood. Velvet. Nylon. Mouth. Warm, wet nakedness. Caves, slack like a crevice or tight like the mouth of a red anemone. Full of stings. Domination, identity.

“You are the intersections of all the currents. You do not exist apart from me. If I have gone mad then you have gone mad. You are speaking, in there, you and I are one and mad.”

The rock shook and shook again. A sudden coldness struck his face and washed under him.

To be expected.

“Nathaniel!”

Black centre, trying to stir itself like a pudding.

The darkness was shredded by white. He tumbled over among the sensations of the crevice. There was water everywhere and noise and his mouth welcomed both. It spat and coughed. He heaved himself out amid water that swirled to his knees and the wind knocked him down. The trench was like a little sea, like the known and now remembered extravagances of a returning tide among rocks. What had been a dry trench was half-full of moving water on which streaks of foam were circling and interlacing. The wind was like an express in a tunnel and everywhere there was a trickling and washing and pouring. He scrambled up in the trench, without hearing what his mouth said and suddenly he and his mouth were one.

“You bloody great bully!”

He got his face above the level of the wall and the wind pulled the cheeks in like an airman’s. Bird-shot slashed. Then the sky above the old woman jumped. It went white. An instant later the light was switched off and the sky fell on him. He collapsed under the enormous pressure and went down in the water of the trench. The weight withdrew and left him struggling. He got up and the sky fell on him again. This time he was able to lurch along the trench because the weight of water was just not sufficient to break him and the sea in the trench was no higher than his knees. The world came back, storm-grey and torn with flying streamers, and he gave it storm-music, crash of timpany, brass blared and a dazzle of strings. He fought a hero’s way from trench to trench through water and music, his clothes shaking and plucked, tattered like the end of a windsock, hands clawing. He and his mouth shouted through the uproar.

“Ajax! Prometheus!”

The old woman was looking down at him as he struggled through bouts of white and dark. Then her head with its silver mask was taken by a whiteness and she hunched against the sky with her headless shoulders. He fell in the white trench over the book with his face against the engraving and the insoluble muck filled his mouth. There came a sudden pressure and silence. He was lifted up and thrown down again, struck against rock. For a moment as the water passed away he saw the look-out against the sky now empty of the old woman but changed in outline by scattered stones.

“She is loose on the rock. Now she is out of the cellar and in daylight. Hunt her down!”

And the knife was there among all the other sensations, jammed against his ribs. He got it in his hands and pulled the blade open. He began to crawl and hunt and swim from trench to trench. She was leaning over the rail but vanished and he stole after her into the green room. But she was out by the footlights and when he crouched in the wings he saw that he was not dressed properly for the part. His mouth and he were one.

“Change your clothes! Be a naked madman on a rock in the middle of a storm!”

His claws plucked at the tatters and pulled them away. He saw a glimpse of gold braid and an empty seaboot stocking floating away like a handful of waste. He saw a leg, scarred, scaly and stick thin and the music mourned for it.

He remembered the old woman and crawled after her down the High Street to the Red Lion. The back wash of the waves was making a welcome confusion round the three rocks and the confusion hid the place where the red lobster had been. He shouted at the rocks but the old woman would not appear among them. She had slipped away down to the cellar. Then he glimpsed her lying huddled in the crevice and he struggled up to her. He fell on her and began to slash with his knife while his mouth went on shouting.

“That’ll teach you to chase me! That’ll teach you to chase me out of the cellar through cars and beds and pubs, you at the back and me running, running after my identity disc all the days of my life! Bleed and die.”

But he and his voice were one. They knew the blood was sea water and the cold, crumpling flesh that was ripped and torn nothing but oilskin.

Now the voice became a babble, sang, swore made, meaningless syllables, coughed and spat. It filled every tick of time with noise, jammed the sound so that it choked; but the centre began to know itself as other because every instant was not occupied by noise. The mouth spat and deviated into part sense.

“And last of all, hallucination, vision, dream, delusion will haunt you. What else can a madman expect? They will appear to you on the solid rock, the real rock, they will fetter your attention to them and you will be nothing worse than mad.”

And immediately the hallucination was there. He knew this before he saw it because there was an awe in the trench, framed by the silent spray that flew over. The hallucination sat on the rock at the end of the trench and at last he faced it through his blurred window. He saw the rest of the trench and crawled along through water that was gravely still unless a gust struck down with a long twitch and shudder of the foamy scum. When he was near, he looked up from the boots, past the knees, to the face and engaged himself to the mouth.

“You are a projection of my mind. But you are a point of attention for me. Stay there.”

The lips hardly moved in answer.

“You are a projection of my mind.”

He made a snorting sound.

“Infinite regression or better still, round and round the mulberry bush. We could go on like that for ever.”

“Have you had enough, Christopher?”

He looked at the lips. They were clear as the words. A tiny shred of spittle joined them near the right corner.

“I could never have invented that.”

The eye nearest the look-out was bloodshot at the outer corner. Behind it or beside it a red strip of sunset ran down out of sight behind the rock. The spray still flew over. You could look at the sunset or the eye but you could not do both. You could not look at the eye and the mouth together. He saw the nose was shiny and leathery brown and full of pores. The left cheek would need a shave soon, for he could see the individual bristles. But he could not look at the whole face together. It was a face that perhaps could be remembered later. It did not move. It merely had this quality of refusing overall inspection. One feature at a time.

“Enough of what?”

“Surviving. Hanging on.”

The clothing was difficult to pin down too so that he had to examine each piece. There was an oilskin—belted, because the buttons had fetched away. There was a woollen pullover inside it, with a roll-neck. The sou’wester was back a little. The hands were resting one on either knee, above the seaboot stockings. Then there were seaboots, good and shiny and wet and solid. They made the rock behind them seem like cardboard, like a painted flat. He bent forward until his bleared window was just above the right instep. There was no background music now and no wind, nothing but black, shiny rubber.

“I hadn’t considered.”

“Consider now.”

“What’s the good? I’m mad.”

“Even that crevice will crumble.”

He tried to laugh up at the bloodshot eye but heard barking noises. He threw words in the face.

“On the sixth day he created God. Therefore I permit you to use nothing but my own vocabulary. In his own image created he Him.”

“Consider now.”

He saw the eye and the sunset merge. He brought his arms across his face.

“I won’t. I can’t.”

“What do you believe in?”

Down to the black boot, coal black, darkness of the cellar, but now down to a forced answer.

“The thread of my life.”

“At all costs.”

Repeat after me:

“At all costs.”

“So you survived.”

“That was luck.”

“Inevitability.”

“Didn’t the others want to live then?”

“There are degrees.”

He dropped the curtains of flesh and hair and blotted out the boots. He snarled.

“I have a right to live if I can!”

“Where is that written?”

“Then nothing is written.”

“Consider.”

He raged on the cardboard rock before the immovable, black feet.

“I will not consider! I have created you and I can create my own heaven.”

“You have created it.”

He glanced sideways along the twitching water, down at his skeleton legs and knees, felt the rain and spray and the savage cold on his flesh.

He began to mutter.

“I prefer it. You gave me the power to choose and all my life you led me carefully to this suffering because my choice was my own. Oh yes! I understand the pattern. All my life, whatever I had done I should have found myself in the end on that same bridge, at that same time, giving that same order—the right order, the wrong order. Yet, suppose I climbed away from the cellar over the bodies of used and defeated people, broke them to make steps on the road away from you, why should you torture me? If I ate them, who gave me a mouth?”

“There is no answer in your vocabulary.”

He squatted back and glared up at the face. He shouted.

“I have considered. I prefer it, pain and all.”

“To what?”

He began to rage weakly and strike out at the boots.

“To the black lightning! Go back! Go back!”

He was bruising skin off his hands against the streaming rock. His mouth quacked and he went with it into the last crevice of all.

“Poor mad sailor on a rock!”

He clambered up the High Street.              

He ran about on the look-out, stumbling over scattered stones.

There was a half-light, a storm-light. The light was ruled in lines and the sea in ridges and valleys. The monstrous waves were making their way from east to west in an interminable procession and the rock was a trifle among them. But it was charging forward, searing a white way through them, careless of sinking, it was thrusting the Safety Rock forward to burst the ridges like the prow of a ship. It would strike a ridge with the stone prow and burst water into a smother that washed over the fo’c’sle and struck beneath the bridge. Then a storm of shot would sweep over the bridge and strike sense and breath away from his body. He flung himself on a square stone that lay where the old woman had stood with her masked head. He rode it astride, facing into the wind and waves. And again there was background music and a mouth quacking.

“Faster! Faster!”

His rock bored on. He beat it with his heels as if he wore spurs.

“Faster!”

The waves were each an event in itself. A wave would come weltering and swinging in with a storm-light running and flickering along the top like the flicker in a brain. The shallow water beyond the safety rock would occur, so that the nearer part of the wave would rise up, tripped and angry, would roar, swell forward. The Safety Rock would become a pock in a whirlpool of water that spun itself into foam and chewed like a mouth. The whole top of the wave for a hundred yards would move forward and fall into acres of lathering uproar that was launched like an army at the rock.

“Faster!”

His hand found the identity disc and held it out.

The mouth screamed out away from the centre.

“I spit on your compassion!”

There was a recognizable noise away beyond the waves and in the clouds. The noise was not as loud as the sea or the music or the voice but the centre understood. The centre took the body off the slab of rock and bundled it into a trench. As it fell the eye glimpsed a black tendril of lightning that lay across the western sky and the centre screwed down the flaps of flesh and hair. Again there came the sound of the spade against the tin box.

“Hard a-starboard! I’ll kill us both, I’ll hit the tree with that side and you’ll be burst and bitched! There was nothing in writing!”

The centre knew what to do. It was wiser than the mouth. It sent the body scrambling over the rock to the water-hole. It burrowed in among the slime and circling scum. It thrust the hands forward, tore at the water and fell flat in the pool. It wriggled like a seal on a rock with the fresh water streaming out of its mouth. It got at the tamping at the farther end and heaved at the stones. There was a scraping and breaking sound and then the cascade of falling stones and water. There was a wide space of storm-light, waves. There was a body lying in the slimy hollow where the fresh water had been.

“Mad! Proof of madness!”

It made the body wriggle back out of the hole, sent it up to the place where the Look-out had been.

There were branches of the black lightning over the sky, there were noises. One branch ran down into the sea, through the great waves, petered out. It remained there. The sea stopped moving, froze, became paper, painted paper that was torn by a black line. The rock was painted on the same paper. The whole of the painted sea was tilted but nothing ran downhill into the black crack which had opened in it. The crack was utter, was absolute, was three times real.

The centre did not know if it had flung the body down or if it had turned the world over. There was rock before its face and it struck with lobster claws that sank in. It watched the rock between the claws.

The absolute lightning spread. There was no noise now because noise had become irrelevant. There was no music, no sound from the tilted, motionless sea.

The mouth quacked on for a while then dribbled into silence.

There was no mouth.

Still the centre resisted. It made the lightning do its work according to the laws of this heaven. It perceived in some mode of sight without eyes that pieces of the sky between the branches of black lightning were replaced by pits of nothing. This made the fear of the centre, the rage of the centre vomit in a mode that required no mouth. It screamed into the pit of nothing voicelessly, wordlessly.