The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes Read Free Book Online

lifted him clear of the floor. At the same time a blonde secretary writhed her vivid lips and slapped at his face and head with her bony hands, screaming: ‘Little beast! Little beast!’
    He got a glimpse of Lucy’s legs whirling in the air, and a group of figures wrestling around her.
    But whoever touched either Lucy or Hogarth had to deal with the blast of cries – the roar of screams and groans, as if loudspeakers had been clamped over their ears and the tortured cries of the creatures were colliding  in the middle of their brains. Even the woman’s slaps hit her with bangs of scream.
    So it was not just a simple matter of throwing out a girl and a boy who were neither of them very heavy.
    In the end, they were thrown out. But not before everybody in the office block had come crowding to see the cause of the uproar, and had tried to get into the action. And whoever touched any of those who had fought with Lucy and Hogarth was hit by the same explosion of screams. It was exactly what Hogarth had called it – instant contagion. Everybody was utterly bewildered. Secretaries who had only been pushed aside staggered away, stunned by what they had heard and glimpsed. And now when they touched each other, there it was again. Nobody knew where the screams were coming from or how they came or why.
    The whole shouting mob burst out through the glass doors at the front of the office block, where Lucy and Hogarth managed to stumble clear. Now Lucy turned, and shouted again:
    ‘Now you know what it’s like. That noise is the creatures screaming with your poison. Now you’ll never get away from it.’
    ‘Get out of here!’ roared the Manager. His collar was burst. His tie was gone. Somehow his jacket sleeve was almost ripped off. All this had happened in his efforts to escape from the screams.
    ‘The police are on their way. They’ll settle you people.’
    The effect on those office workers was shocking. Secretaries sat sobbing. Men wandered from office to office with staring eyes. Nobody could explain it, and nobody could think of anything else. None of them could escape the fact that when they touched each other both were stunned by the screams. It was as if they had all become high-voltage scream batteries.
    And some of them, some more vividly than others, saw things in the screams. As they heard that dreadful outcry, they saw tiny creatures with wide mouths and terrible eyes, clinging to grass or weed or pebbles. They glimpsed the massed faces of fish, as if they were seeing the streaming leaves of a lit-up tree in a big wind at night, with every leaf the face of a fish, trembling as it screamed.
    Nothing could explain it. But there it was. They all felt they might be going mad.
    In the Manager’s office the important people had assembled. The Chief Chemist, the Head of Accounts, the Sales Manager, the Chief Engineer, the Public Relations Officer. They were like people after a mass accident. They simply stared, in a numbed sort of way, or watched the Manager. And he knew he ought to do something. But what could he do?
    ‘Idiots going on about poisons,’ he raged. ‘What is all this? We follow good industrial practice. We stick to therules. We spend our lives cleaning up other people’s muck and –’
    He threw up his hands. But they all knew that this was not just an ordinary protest. What they were all thinking about, and what kept them all so silent, was the thought: If we touch each other again, the screams are there. Those horrible, horrible screams. What are they? And what do they mean?
    And two or three were thinking: How long will it last? Will it wear off? What about when I get home and my wife gives me a kiss? What happens when the dog jumps up at me?
    They had no idea, of course, that the truly dreadful things had hardly begun.
     *
    Lucy and Hogarth walked home in a daze. Her plan had worked too well in a way. But in another way it hadn’t worked at all.
    ‘They’ve all caught it!’ cried Hogarth.