The Green Man by Kingsley Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

continued
the shaking, twitching motion of the fleshy mass that had given birth to it.
Slowly, its limbs and minor appendages coalesced into what— by the lax
standards of verisimilitude at present in force—were good approximations to a
man’s thighs, genitals and torso up about as far as the breast-bone. Higher
than this, there was nothing identifiable for the moment. The various members
retained their vegetable individuality, continuing as closely-packed amalgams
of bough, twig, stem and leaf. I was trying to remember what drawing or
painting this structure resembled when I heard a noise, distant but not
unrecognizable: it sounded like the snapping of greenery and minor branches
made by a man or large animal moving through dense woods. At the same time, a
shift of illumination began to reveal an upper chest, a throat and neck, the
point of a wooden chin.
    I
clapped my fingers over my eyes and rubbed them fiercely: I had no desire to
see the face that topped such a body. In a flash, literally in a flash,
everything was gone, noise and all. I pretended to myself that I had heard
something from outside; but I knew that that snapping sound had come from
inside, again in the most literal sense. Just as I was never in any doubt that
what I ‘saw’ with my eyes shut was not really there, so I knew that what I had
just ‘heard’ was not real either. Tomorrow I might feel appalled at the
prospect of a regular, or sporadic, aural addition to these nightly appearances;
at the moment I was too tired. When I closed my eyes again, I saw at once that
the show was over: all intensity, all potential had departed from the messages
of my optic nerves, and the dark curtain before me stirred more feebly with
every breath.
    I had
now come to the outer edge of sleep. As I had known it would, jactitation set
in. My right foot, my whole right leg, jerked with a local violence, my head, my
mouth and chin, my upper lip, what felt like the whole top half of my body, my
left wrist, my left wrist again, moved of their own accord, once or twice with
the prelude of a disembodied, watery feeling that advertised their intention,
more often quite unexpectedly. I was returned to momentary wakefulness several
times by what I assumed to be similar convulsions, though I could not locate
them, and once by a triple shaking of the shoulder so like the intervention of
one arousing a sleeper that, if I had not quickly remembered disturbances as
acute in the past, I might have been alarmed. Finally, images and thoughts and
words came from nowhere in particular and were all mingled in some other thing
that gradually had less and less to do with me: pretty dress, excuse me you’re
wanted on the, you ought to realize, very good soup, if there’s anything I can,
long time ago, be all very dusty, not to agree on the way he, moment she was
there and the next, water with it, over by the, darling, tree, spoon, window, shoulders,
stairs, hot, sorry, man …

 
     
     
    2: Dr Thomas Underhill
     
     
     
    At ten o’clock the next
morning I was in the office finishing the day’s arrangements with David Palmer.
    ‘What
about Ramón?’ I asked.
    ‘Well,
he’s done the vegetable dishes—quite good, really, in parts—and I’ve put him on
the coffee-pots. No complaints so far. From him, that is.’
    ‘Watch
him over the chef’s stuff, won’t you? And the ice-cream coupes. Explain
to him that they’ve got to look as good as new even though the guests never see
them.’
    ‘I
have, Mr Allington.’
    ‘Well,
explain it to him again, using threats if necessary. Tell him he’s to bring
them to me personally before lunch. Oh yes —two extra upstairs for that. My son
and his wife are driving down. Is that the lot?’
    ‘Just
about. There’s a bath-towel gone, that Birmingham couple, and an ash-tray, Fred
says, one of the heavy glass ones.’
    ‘You
know, David, I feel like driving up to Birmingham and finding those people’s
bloody house and burgling it to get