I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) by Anna Kavan Read Free Book Online Page B

aware, just then, of danger skirmishing all about in the green-walled room, and lying there on the couch his eyes were still down where they seemed safe on the pink ends of the tie, his hands clenched now and his neck and shoulders gone tense; and he not knowing if it were through his words or his silence that the danger would strike.
    Why did a church bell keep ringing in the tunnel like that? It was a very deep tunnel into which he was being forced. He did not want to go down in the tunnel again. He was afraid. But because of the unknown thing whose immediate agent was the casual, near friendly voice nothing could save him from that black exploration split by the doleful and ugly clang of a distant bell.
    ‘As if someone had died,’ he said out loud.
    ‘Who do you think might have died?’
    No, no. Not that. Don't let it come, the boy thought, fighting desperately against what had all the time been waiting there behind every word; the worst thing, the intolerable pain, the fear not to be borne. And at once his nerves started to twitch and tears sprang in his eyes in case she might not have been sleeping but dead in the silent room at the top of the steep stairs, investigated or not by him he was, agonizingly, somehow unable to know.
    Running in panic along the tunnel he remembered the alley-way, like something in a film he'd seen once, blank walls leaning nearer and nearer to suffocation, and, at the bend, a lamp-bracket sticking out with a dangling noose; only no corpse was at the end of the rope. And always the hurrying army boots and the bell ringing, till he did not know if it was the noise of his own steps or the church bell clanging inside his head. The noise was part of his hunger, and he remembered, further along the tunnel, scrounging about at night where a street market had been and finding, finally, in the gutter, a piece of sausage, grey, slimy, like the wrist of a dead baby, and the terrible thirst that came on him afterwards, and how he drank out of a horse-trough, scooping the water up with his hands, and it seemed all wrong because they killed animals painlessly. Then therewas that open space, a heath or a common, where he had vomited and lain on the ground, his hair in the rough grass. He felt weak and stiff from the vomiting and clouds of insects were round him, settling on his face and hands and crawling over his mouth because he was too weak to flap at them, but in the end it got dark and the insects went away then and left him in peace.
    Faster and faster he ran to escape from the tunnel and the tolling noise of the bell. And at last he was outside, the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it vanished, and there was respite from the tolling, nothing left now but the room with the doctor quietly smoking, sunshine outside the window, the calendar on the wall.
    The boy was not lying on the couch any more but bending over with hunched shoulders as if hiding from something, his head on his raised knees in the posture a person might take crouching under a table: and though he was crying he was no longer thinking of the tunnel or of the dangerous secret thing which had scared him so terribly, or about anything he could have put into any words.
    ‘It was like a blackout. A blackout. I can't remember,’ he kept on hopelessly mumbling, amongst the tears.

GLORIOUS BOYS
     
    W HY do I do this? she thought, walking with Mia in the cold London dark vibrant with the resonance of out-going bombers. Why do I ever go to a party, not knowing what to say or what to do with myself? Hands were easy with glasses and cigarettes, but the rest of the body, embarrassingly material, intractable, and absolutely unwilling to dissolve itself into a dew; how did one cope with it? How did one recognize the correct moment for putting it into a chair, opening its mouth and emitting appropriate sounds, propping it against the end of a sofa, getting it up and moving it across the room to confront some stranger's alarmingly