Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl Read Free Book Online Page B

ever, stared back at her with a peculiar,
fixed intensity.
      
“How are you, dear?” she said.
      
The plastic capsule was transparent all the way round so
that the whole of the eyeball was visible. The optic nerve
connecting the underside of it to the brain looked like a short
length of grey spaghetti.
      
“Are you feeling all right, William?”
      
It was a queer sensation peering into her husband’s eye
when there was no face to go with it. All she had to look at
was the eye, and she kept staring at it, and gradually it grew
bigger and bigger, and in the end it was the only thing that
she could see—a sort of face in itself. There was a network of
tiny red veins running over the white surface of the eyeball,
and in the ice-blue of the iris there were three or four rather
pretty darkish streaks radiating from the pupil in the centre.
The pupil was large and black, with a little spark of light
reflecting from one side of it.
      
“I got your letter, dear, and came over at once to see how
you were. Dr Landy says you are doing wonderfully well.
Perhaps if I talk slowly you can understand a little of what I
am saying by reading my lips.”
      
There was no doubt that the eye was watching her.
      
“They are doing everything possible to take care of you,
dear. This marvellous machine thing here is pumping away all
the time and I’m sure it’s a lot better than those silly old hearts
all the rest of us have. Ours are liable to break down at any
moment, but yours will go on for ever.”
      
She was studying the eye closely, trying to discover what
there was about it that gave it such an unusual appearance.
      
“You seem fine, dear, simply fine. Really you do.”
      
It looked ever so much nicer, this eye, than either of his
eyes used to look, she told herself. There was a softness about
it somewhere, a calm, kindly quality that she had never seen
before. Maybe it had to do with the dot in the very centre,
the pupil. William’s pupils used always to be tiny black
pinheads. They used to glint at you, stabbing into your brain,
seeing right through you, and they always knew at once what
you were up to and even what you were thinking. But this
one she was looking at now was large and soft and gentle,
almost cowlike.
      
“Are you quite sure he’s conscious?” she asked, not looking
up.
      
“Oh yes, completely,” Landy said.
      
“And he can see me?”
      
“Perfectly.”
      
“Isn’t that marvellous? I expect he’s wondering what
happened.”
      
“Not at all. He knows perfectly well where he is and why
he’s there. He can’t possibly have forgotten that.”
      
“You mean he knows he’s in this basin?”
      
“Of course. And if only he had the power of speech, he
would probably be able to carry on a perfectly normal

conversation with you this very minute. So far as I can see, there
should be absolutely no difference mentally between this
William here and the one you used to know back home.”
      
“Good gracious me,” Mrs Pearl said, and she paused to consider
this intriguing aspect.
      
You know what, she told herself, looking behind the eye
now and staring hard at the great grey pulpy walnut that lay
so placidly under the water. I’m not at all sure that I don’t
prefer him as he is at present. In fact, I believe that I could
live very comfortably with this kind of a William. I could
cope with this one.
      
“Quiet, isn’t he?” she said.
      
“Naturally he’s quiet.”
      
No arguments and criticisms, she thought, no constant
admonitions, no rules to obey, no ban on smoking cigarettes,
no pair of cold disapproving eyes watching me over the top
of a book in the evenings, no shirts to wash and iron, no meals
to cook—nothing but the throb of the heart machine, which
was rather a soothing