The Song of the Flea by Gerald Kersh Read Free Book Online Page A

forefinger of his left and said: “Hah?”
    “Eh? Oh! Oh yes, yes, of course—the rent, the rent—I clean forgot. It slipped out of my mind.”
    “Sure—it slip out of your mind, and you slip out of my house. Well? You gonna lolly?”
    “Let me see,” said Pym. “I owe you eleven shillings, I think. Rent payable in advance, if I remember rightly. Here it is.”
    Busto’s curved thumb and forefinger snapped like the beak of a parrot; in their grip Pym’s two ten-shilling notes resembled a bedraggled paper tulip. “I got no change,” he said.
    “Hold it for me,” said Pym, “and then I’ll only owe you two shillings for the next week.”
    “Well, okay,” said Busto, gloomily. He dragged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, led the way upstairs, and unlocked Pym’s door.
    Without pausing to take off his hat Pym uncovered the sleek, gleaming black typewriter and played with it for a little while. He worked the tabular key, the back-spacer, and the shift lock: voluptuously inserted a sheet of paper and typed The quick brown fox jumped right over the sly lazy dog and made a row of figures and punctuation marks. A cracked saucer in the cupboard was still greasy with the rancid traces of a bit of butter. Pym gathered them on a forefinger and anointed the groove along which the platen ran. Now, when he touched the space-bar, the machine seemed to purr like a well-fed black cat.
    Then, as he stood back smiling and looking down at it, automatically licking his finger, he tasted the butter and remembered that he was very hungry. Pym smiled again: now he could smile at hunger, for he had five shillings and sixpencein silver. Half a crown of this he hid under one of the stacks of typescript, and then he went out again, locking the door and testing it twice—not before he had dusted the enamelled surfaces of the typewriter with one of the ends of his necktie.
    *
    The publicans, butchers, milkmen and grocers of the neighbourhood seldom gave credit to Busto’s tenants, who were sure to be gone to-morrow. Even the newsagents waited to see the colour of a penny before parting with a daily paper.
    Pym stopped at the shop of Dai Davies, a dairyman who carried attractive sidelines of wrapped bread, canned food, tea and little cakes. Dai Davies, who went to bed at midnight and got up at three, looked like an old horse in a homespun jacket and a tweed cap; but his wife and daughters were scoured and starched, white from hairline to hem—quick women with lidless black eyes, who crackled with cleanliness. Pym ordered half a pint of milk, a two-ounce packet of tea at two-and-eight a pound, a soft white two-pound loaf of bread in a wax envelope, and half a pound of Cheddar cheese at eightpence a pound. While Mrs. Davies darted from shelf to shelf, Pym gnawed a thumbnail and stood vacillating, rocking from heels to toes, reading the labels on the tin cans. One label attracted him more than all the rest put together—a coloured photograph of strawberries.
    “How much are these strawberries?”
    “One-and-ten.”
    Pym turned on his heel and looked at the peaches, the pineapple , the loganberries and the pears. He wanted strawberries now, more than anything in the world. Two or three minutes passed: Dai looked at Blodwen, Blodwen exchanged glances with Gwen, and they all watched Pym. He knew that strawberries were not to be thought of. For the price of one tin of strawberries he could buy two pounds of cheese and still have fivepence for bread and twopence for gas. A hot wetness, which he had to swallow, came up from under his tongue. One- and-tenpence would buy him cooked meat, liver sausage, brawn, veal-and-ham pie, herrings, salami—anything he liked in thedelicatessen shop two streets away. He could buy a fillet steak, or seven pounds of potatoes; or some cigarettes and an inexhaustible quantity of lentils, split peas, or rice. He could buy cabbages, carrots, onions, and Saturday night trimmings of meat, and make a magnificent