The Green Man by Kingsley Amis Read Free Book Online

there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now.
These bombs really knock you out.’
    We said
good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side,
towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was
still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour.
My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed
itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beating heavily
and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into
the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for
it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier
and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned
this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently,
but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart
was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to
beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than
normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the
bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting,
there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me
draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I
told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had,
I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was
natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more
comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …
    What
was before my closed eyes was the usual shifting pall of dark purple, dark grey
and other dark that was never quite different enough to be given the name of
any other colour. It had been there all along, of course, but now I started
looking at it, knowing what would happen when I did, but unable not to, because
it was simply the next thing. Almost at once a dim orange-yellow light came up.
It illuminated something that had the smooth, rounded and tapering qualities of
a part of the human body, but without any guide to scale it was impossible to
tell whether I was looking at leg or nose, forearm or finger, breast or chin.
Soon a greyish male profile, nearly complete, its expression puzzled or
brooding, drifted diagonally in front of this and blotted most of it out. The
upper lip twitched, grew suddenly in size and began drifting slowly outwards,
swelling at a reduced rate until it was like a thick rope of intestine. Another
orange light flared up irregularly in the lower part of my field of vision and
played on the intestine-like form from underneath, showing it to be veined and
glistening. The face had tilted away out of existence. When the orange glow had
faded, there was a kind of new start: shivering veils of brown and yellow
appeared and vanished quickly, to reveal a gloomy cavern of which the walls and
roof were human, but in a distant sense. No component was identifiable, only
that unique surface quality, half matt, half sheen, that belongs to naked skin.
    These
apparitions grew, swirled and evolved for a time I could not measure, perhaps
five minutes, probably not more than thirty. Some of them were surprising, but
this was always part of their nature, and none, so far, was surprising in a
surprising way. They were even beginning to slacken, become constricted and
hard to discern. Then a rumpled sheet of brown flesh shook itself convulsively
and started to concertina in towards the middle. Longitudinal shreds ‘became
distinguishable, turned olive-green in colour and could be seen as the trunk
and branches of a young tree, the sort that has many stems growing more or less
vertically and parallel. This was a novelty in a hitherto exclusively
anthropoid universe, a comparatively soothing one. The tree-shape