The Paper Men by William Golding Read Free Book Online Page B

roads. No one to talk to. Just booze and the papers of the next day’s cases. Cheers.”
    “Wilf—”
    I thought of judges and how little I knew about them. Lucky me. A long life of undiscovered crime. Those who didn’t get away with it were exported to Australia. The criminals that stayed behind bred the likes of us. Take your pick.
    I became aware that Rick had gone on talking. I interrupted him.
    “I get drunk so easily nowadays. It’s the altitude.”
    “Wilf, please!”
    “Professor?”
    “It means a whole lot to me. I can do no more than plead—”
    “You wanna be a full professor? Emeritus?”
    “Wilf. I want you to appoint me your official biographer.”

Chapter V
     
     
    I looked up at him and then a long way past him. My life, that life, that long and lengthening trail of—of what? Foot prints in the sands of. Snail trail. The evidence for the prosecution and, let us not forget, the evidence for the defence, if any, and the prisoner is not about to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Let him plead guilty, the social worker will come forward and testify in his behalf that he was kind to his old mum and horses, threw money about, often in the direction of his friends, had slipped many a bank note into this collecting box and that; all this, m’lud, I offer as a counterbalance to the prisoner’s habit of scrawling lies on paper into a shape that the weak-minded have taken as guide, comforter and friend, allegedly, often to their cost. I would remind you, m’lud, that the principal witness for the prosecution, the man Plato, is a foreigner. Mr Smith, the case for the prosecution has been made. You will confine yourself to giving evidence as to the moral stature of the prisoner. Well, m’lud, if the truth is to be told he has been a real bastard. …
    Those memories, how they sting, scald, burn!
    At nineteen I was a bank clerk, allowed to take in savings, register cheques. I was supposed to be reading for banking exams in my spare time, ha et cetera, so that I might—who knows?—become a cashier and end up as a bank manager. I was just out of school—school for farmers’ sons mostly, lads who couldn’t pass the common entrance. Mum’s shoestring riding stables sort of edged me in. She must have had some kind of pull, God knows what. So I could stand behind the counter with my old school tie well to the fore, smile brightly, as they used to say, while giving service without servility. The manager began by liking me because I could think of nothing better to do with my Wednesday and Saturday afternoons than play rugger. I was in a daze, I remember at the speed with which mum’s death—she’d thought I might go into the Church because I liked reading so much—had projected me into this world of figures. Even the rugger club consisted of old men by my standards. After the game on Saturday there’d be mild high jinks in a pub somewhere. Christ, I was naive!
    Almost the first game, or after it, there was a corner snigger—
    “Where’s young Wilf? He ought to try one!”
    “One” was a pill. No, it wasn’t a drug, as it might be today. It was a commonly advertised aphrodisiac. Well, at least I am able to offer some personal evidence in a sphere where the claims are contradictory and few men appear willing to put their own evidence on paper. The pill worked. Perhaps it contained a mite of Spanish fly. Perhaps it was a placebo. But it worked.
    Yes, of course, they assured me, we’d all be going on to the girls, where else? So, watched carefully and roundly applauded, I took it—nineteen, just nineteen! Well. I told my ex-chum, did I not, that Padre Pio’s stigmata must be nothing but suggestion? Experientia docet stultos, as Zonkers used to tell us when he gave us lines. I looked forward fearfully and libidinously. Of course, beyond the, shall we say, physiological plane nothing happened at all. The evening dwindled to half-pints drunk slowly, rugger songs, dirty talk and the odd remark