Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh Read Free Book Online

it, and so exquisitely drawn up that the Lord Chancellor himself couldn’t find a loop hole.
    But Godbolt had to come running, crying, “I’ve been robbed, I’ve been robbed!” Not once but a dozen times Sam Yudenow had, with the forbearance of a saint, patiently begged Godbolt to stop worrying him. And when at last he had, with all the delicacy in the world, warned the little rotter that if he didn’t stop pestering him he, Sam Yudenow, would personally kick his arse from Godbolt’s Corner to the tram stop, what did Godbolt do? Brought a summons out against him for uttering threats, or something. Actually, the shoe was on the other foot—it was Godbolt who had done all the threatening.Sam Yudenow politely, even piously, merely begged the Lord God Almighty to commit an unnat ural offense against this pestilential man. And what did Godbolt do? Threatened to give him in charge for foul language and blasphemy! Anything to make trouble. And all the time Godbolt and his wife were writing anonymous letters to the police, to the inspectors, to the sanitary inspectors, to everybody you could think of, complaining. No, Fowlers End was not big enough to hold Sam Yudenow and the reptilian Godbolt. If that black beetle crossed my path I was, without fail, to stamp him flat, the same as a rattlesnake. If I was not too busy, while I was about it, I might tear out his liver and stuff it down his throat.... In the meantime I was to use my imagination and devise little bloodless ways of making his life a misery, such as: leaving newborn babies on his doorstep (you could get one for five bob in Fowlers End, blanket and basket thrown in, Sam Yudenow surmised); strewing the contents of his dustbin all over the pavement and ringing up the local authorities in a disguised voice; bribing methylated-spirits drinkers to defecate in his doorway; and breaking all his windows....
    “But don’t do nothing beneath your dignity. Little Tommy’s all right for the dirty work. Keep in miv that one. He’s growing up to be a proper little Al Capone. Cross that little bastard an’ it’s better you should smear your arse miv honey an’ stick it into a wasps’ nest; it’d be soothing compared to crossing little Tommy. His own mother ‘e ‘alf killed miv a rusty stair rod when she tried to chastise ‘im miv a copper stick for pinching ‘er false teef an’ selling ‘em for eighteenpence to buy ginger beer for ‘is girl. Yes, less than thirteen years old, an’ a proper little womanizer ‘e is already. An’ ‘is girl, she’s another one—thirteen an’ a half, an’ already on the bash, already, at from sixpence a go an’ upwards. She’s already keeping ‘im in cigarettes an’ comics. ‘E may ‘ave ‘is faults but ‘e worships the ground I tread on.
    “And while we’re on these unpleasant topics I want you should keep an eye out for an Irishman called Darby O’Kelly O’Toole. ‘E ought to be out in about three months now—’e won’t get no time off for good behavior—and when ‘e does get out, well, ‘e’s declared war on Sam Yudenow. An’ that’s another little thing I got against that sod Godbolt.”
    Now it appeared that this Darby O’Kelly O’Toole was distantly related to Mrs. Godbolt, the wayward son of some cousin by marriage—he came from the north. Even among the Liverpool Irish he was regarded as quite a lad. Egged on by the Godbolts, who put him up to it, Darby O’Kelly O’Toole applied to Sam Yudenow for a job as manager. “I got a manager.” Darby O’Kelly O’Toole replied, easily, “That’s all right, me boy, you won’t have no blerdy manager for blerdy long. Where is he? Show me him, and you’ll be needing a new manager in three minutes.” A man called Left-Handed Hopkinswas manager of the Pantheon at that time—sixteen stone of bone and muscle, and onetime heavyweight champion boxer of one of the Guards’ Regiments. He had been a policeman in Greenock but had been dismissed from the