Madness Read online

  VIII

  The packing-house was a big four-storey brick building, and the air around it smelled sweet and heavy, like musk. At the main entrance gates, there was a large notice which said VISITORS WELCOME AT ANY TIME, and thus encouraged, Lexington walked through the gates and entered a cobbled yard which surrounded the building itself. He then followed a series of signposts (THIS WAY FOR THE GUIDED TOURS), and came eventually to a small corrugated-iron shed set well apart from the main building (VISITORS WAITING-ROOM). After knocking politely on the door, he went in.

  There were six other people ahead of him in the waiting-room. There was a fat mother with her two little boys aged about nine and eleven. There was a bright-eyed young couple who looked as though they might be on their honeymoon. And there was a pale woman with long white gloves, who sat very upright, looking straight ahead with her hands folded on her lap. Nobody spoke. Lexington wondered whether they were all writing cooking-books, like himself, but when he put this question to them aloud, he got no answer. The grown-ups merely smiled mysteriously to themselves and shook their heads, and the two children stared at him as though they were seeing a lunatic.

  Soon, the door opened and a man with a merry pink face popped his head into the room and said, ‘Next, please.’ The mother and the two boys got up and went out.

  About ten minutes later, the same man returned. ‘Next, please,’ he said again, and the honeymoon couple jumped up and followed him outside.

  Two new visitors came in and sat down – a middle-aged husband and a middle-aged wife, the wife carrying a wicker shopping-basket containing groceries.

  ‘Next, please,’ said the guide, and the woman with the long white gloves got up and left.

  Several more people came in and took their places on the stiff-backed wooden chairs.

  Soon the guide returned for the third time, and now it was Lexington’s turn to go outside.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ the guide said, leading the youth across the yard towards the main building.

  ‘How exciting this is!’ Lexington cried, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘I only wish that my dear Aunt Glosspan could be with me now to see what I am going to see.’

  ‘I myself only do the preliminaries,’ the guide said. ‘Then I shall hand you over to someone else.’

  ‘Anything you say,’ cried the ecstatic youth.

  First they visited a large penned-in area at the back of the building where several hundred pigs were wandering around. ‘Here’s where they start,’ the guide said. ‘And over there’s where they go in.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right there.’ The guide pointed to a long wooden shed that stood against the outside wall of the factory. ‘We call it the shackling-pen. This way, please.’

  Three men wearing long rubber boots were driving a dozen pigs into the shackling-pen just as Lexington and the guide approached, so they all went in together.

  ‘Now,’ the guide said, ‘watch how they shackle them.’

  Inside, the shed was simply a bare wooden room with no roof, but there was a steel cable with hooks on it that kept moving slowly along the length of one wall, parallel with the ground, about three feet up. When it reached the end of the shed, this cable suddenly changed direction and climbed vertically upwards through the open roof towards the top floor of the main building.

  The twelve pigs were huddled together at the far end of the pen, standing quietly, looking apprehensive. One of the men in rubber boots pulled a length of metal chain down from the wall and advanced upon the nearest animal, approaching it from the rear. Then he bent down and quickly looped one end of the chain around one of the animal’s hind legs. The other end he attached to a hook on the moving cable as it went by. The cable kept moving. The chain tightened. The pig’s leg was pulled up and back, and then the pig itself began to be dragged backwards. But it didn’t fall down. It was rather a nimble pig, and somehow it managed to keep its balance on three legs, hopping from foot to foot and struggling against the pull of the chain, but going back and back all the time until at the end of the pen where the cable changed direction and went vertically upwards, the creature was suddenly jerked off its feet and borne aloft. Shrill protests filled the air.

  ‘Truly a fascinating process,’ Lexington said. ‘But what was that funny cracking noise it made as it went up?’

  ‘Probably the leg,’ the guide answered. ‘Either that or the pelvis.’

  ‘But doesn’t that matter?’

  ‘Why should it matter?’ the guide asked. ‘You don’t eat the bones.’

  The rubber-booted men were busy shackling the rest of the pigs, and one after another they were hooked to the moving cable and hoisted up through the roof, protesting loudly as they went.

  ‘There’s a good deal more to this recipe than just picking herbs,’ Lexington said. ‘Aunt Glosspan would never have made it.’

  At this point, while Lexington was gazing skyward at the last pig to go up, a man in rubber boots approached him quietly from behind and looped one end of a chain round the youth’s own left ankle, hooking the other end to the moving belt. The next moment, before he had time to realize what was happening, our hero was jerked off his feet and dragged backwards along the concrete floor of the shackling-pen.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘Hold everything! My leg is caught!’

  But nobody seemed to hear him, and five seconds later, the unhappy young man was jerked off the floor and hoisted vertically upwards through the open roof of the pen, dangling upside down by one ankle, and wriggling like a fish.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘Help! There’s been a frightful mistake! Stop the engines! Let me down!’

  The guide removed a cigar from his mouth and looked up serenely at the rapidly ascending youth, but he said nothing. The men in rubber boots were already on their way out to collect the next batch of pigs.

  ‘Oh save me!’ our hero cried. ‘Let me down! Please let me down!’ But he was now approaching the top floor of the building where the moving belt curled over like a snake and entered a large hole in the wall, a kind of doorway without a door; and there, on the threshold, waiting to greet him, clothed in a dark-stained yellow rubber apron, and looking for all the world like Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven, the sticker stood.

  Lexington saw him only from upside down, and very briefly at that, but even so he noticed at once the expression of absolute peace and benevolence on the man’s face, the cheerful twinkle in the eyes, the little wistful smile, and the dimples in his cheeks – and all this gave him hope.

  ‘Hi there,’ the sticker said, smiling.

  ‘Quick! Save me!’ our hero cried.

  ‘With pleasure,’ the sticker said, and taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, he raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife.

  The belt moved on. Lexington went with it. Everything was still upside down and the blood was pouring out of his throat and getting into his eyes, but he could still see after a fashion, and he had a blurred impression of being in an enormously long room, and at the far end of the room there was a great smoking cauldron of water, and there were dark figures, half hidden in the steam, dancing round the edge of it, brandishing long poles. The conveyor-belt seemed to be travelling right over the top of the cauldron, and the pigs seemed to be dropping down one by one into the boiling water, and one of the pigs seemed to be wearing long white gloves on its front feet.

  Suddenly our hero started to feel very sleepy, but it wasn’t until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood from his body that he passed on out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next.

  The Boy Who Talked with Animals

  First published in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977)

  Not so long ago, I decided to spend a few days in the West Indies. I was to go there for a short holiday. Friends had told me it was marvellous. I would laze around all day, they said, sunning myself on the silver beaches and swimming in
the warm green sea.

  I chose Jamaica, and flew direct from London to Kingston. The drive from Kingston airport to my hotel on the north shore took two hours. The island was full of mountains and the mountains were covered all over with dark tangled forests. The big Jamaican who drove the taxi told me that up in those forests lived whole communities of diabolical people who still practised voodoo and witch-doctory and other magic rites. ‘Don’t ever go up into those mountain forests,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘There’s things happening up there that’d make your hair turn white in a minute!’

  ‘What sort of things?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s better you don’t ask,’ he said. ‘It don’t pay even to talk about it.’ And that was all he would say on the subject.

  My hotel lay upon the edge of a pearly beach, and the setting was even more beautiful than I had imagined. But the moment I walked in through those big open front doors, I began to feel uneasy. There was no reason for this. I couldn’t see anything wrong. But the feeling was there and I couldn’t shake it off. There was something weird and sinister about the place. Despite all the loveliness and the luxury, there was a whiff of danger that hung and drifted in the air like poisonous gas.

  And I wasn’t sure it was just the hotel. The whole island, the mountains and the forests, the black rocks along the coastline and the trees cascading with brilliant scarlet flowers, all these and many other things made me feel uncomfortable in my skin. There was something malignant crouching underneath the surface of this island. I could sense it in my bones.

  My room in the hotel had a little balcony, and from there I could step straight down on to the beach. There were tall coconut palms growing all around, and every so often an enormous green nut the size of a football would fall out of the sky and drop with a thud on the sand. It was considered foolish to linger underneath a coconut palm because if one of those things landed on your head, it would smash your skull.

  The Jamaican girl who came in to tidy my room told me that a wealthy American called Mr Wasserman had met his end in precisely this manner only two months before.

  ‘You’re joking,’ I said to her.

  ‘Not joking!’ she cried. ‘No suh! I sees it happening with my very own eyes!’

  ‘But wasn’t there a terrific fuss about it?’ I asked.

  ‘They hush it up,’ she answered darkly. ‘The hotel folks hush it up and so do the newspaper folks because things like that are very bad for the tourist business.’

  ‘And you say you actually saw it happen?’

  ‘I actually saw it happen,’ she said. ‘Mr Wasserman, he’s standing right under that very tree over there on the beach. He’s got his camera out and he’s pointing it at the sunset. It’s a red sunset that evening, and very pretty. Then all at once, down comes a big green nut right smack on to the top of his bald head. Wham! And that,’ she added with a touch of relish, ‘is the very last sunset Mr Wasserman ever did see.’

  ‘You mean it killed him instantly?’

  ‘I don’t know about instantly,’ she said. ‘I remember the next thing that happens is the camera falls out of his hands on to the sand. Then his arms drop down to his sides and hang there. Then he starts swaying. He sways backwards and forwards several times ever so gentle, and I’m standing there watching him, and I says to myself the poor man’s gone all dizzy and maybe he’s going to faint any moment. Then very very slowly he keels right over and down he goes.’

  ‘Was he dead?’

  ‘Dead as a doornail,’ she said.

  ‘Good heavens.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It never pays to be standing under a coconut palm when there’s a breeze blowing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  On the evening of my second day, I was sitting on my little balcony with a book on my lap and a tall glass of rum punch in my hand. I wasn’t reading the book. I was watching a small green lizard stalking another small green lizard on the balcony floor about six feet away. The stalking lizard was coming up on the other one from behind, moving forwards very slowly and very cautiously, and when he came within reach, he flicked out a long tongue and touched the other one’s tail. The other one jumped round, and the two of them faced each other, motionless, glued to the floor, crouching, staring and very tense. Then suddenly, they started doing a funny little hopping dance together. They hopped up in the air. They hopped backwards. They hopped forwards. They hopped sideways. They circled one another like two boxers, hopping and prancing and dancing all the time. It was a queer thing to watch, and I guessed it was some sort of a courtship ritual they were going through. I kept very still, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

  But I never saw what happened next because at that moment I became aware of a great commotion on the beach below. I glanced over and saw a crowd of people clustering around something at the water’s edge. There was a narrow canoe-type fisherman’s boat pulled up on the sand nearby, and all I could think of was that the fisherman had come in with a lot of fish and that the crowd was looking at it.

  A haul of fish is something that has always fascinated me. I put my book aside and stood up. More people were trooping down from the hotel veranda and hurrying over the beach to join the crowd on the edge of the water. The men were wearing those frightful Bermuda shorts that came down to the knees, and their shirts were bilious with pinks and oranges and every other clashing colour you could think of. The women had better taste, and were dressed for the most part in pretty cotton dresses. Nearly everyone carried a drink in one hand.

  I picked up my own drink and stepped down from the balcony on to the beach. I made a little detour around the coconut palm under which Mr Wasserman had supposedly met his end, and strode across the beautiful silvery sand to join the crowd.

  But it wasn’t a haul of fish they were staring at. It was a turtle, an upside-down turtle lying on its back in the sand. But what a turtle it was! It was a giant, a mammoth. I had not thought it possible for a turtle to be as enormous as this. How can I describe its size? Had it been the right way up, I think a tall man could have sat on its back without his feet touching the ground. It was perhaps five feet long and four feet across, with a high domed shell of great beauty.

  The fisherman who had caught it had tipped it on to its back to stop it from getting away. There was also a thick rope tied around the middle of its shell, and one proud fisherman, slim and black and naked except for a small loincloth, stood a short way off holding the end of the rope with both hands.

  Upside down it lay, this magnificent creature, with its four thick flippers waving frantically in the air, and its long wrinkled neck stretching far out of its shell. The flippers had large sharp claws on them.

  ‘Stand back, ladies and gentlemen, please!’ cried the fisherman. ‘Stand well back! Them claws is dangerous, man! They’ll rip your arm clear away from your body!’

  The crowd of hotel guests was thrilled and delighted by this spectacle. A dozen cameras were out and clicking away. Many of the women were squealing with pleasure clutching on to the arms of their men, and the men were demonstrating their lack of fear and their masculinity by making foolish remarks in loud voices.

  ‘Make yourself a nice pair of horn-rimmed spectacles out of that shell, hey Al?’

  ‘Darn thing must weigh over a ton!’

  ‘You mean to say it can actually float?’

  ‘Sure it floats. Powerful swimmer, too. Pull a boat easy.’

  ‘He’s a snapper, is he?’

  ‘That’s no snapper. Snapper turtles don’t grow as big as that. But I’ll tell you what. He’ll snap your hand off quick enough if you get too close to him.’

  ‘Is that true?’ one of the women asked the fisherman. ‘Would he snap off a person’s hand?’

  ‘He would right now,’ the fisherman said, smiling with brilliant white teeth. ‘He won’t ever hurt you when he’s in the ocean, but you catch him and pull him ashore and tip him up like this, then man alive, y
ou’d better watch out! He’ll snap at anything that comes in reach!’

  ‘I guess I’d get a bit snappish myself,’ the woman said, ‘if I was in his situation.’

  One idiotic man had found a plank of driftwood on the sand, and he was carrying it towards the turtle. It was a fair-sized plank, about five feet long and maybe an inch thick. He started poking one end of it at the turtle’s head.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ the fisherman said. ‘You’ll only make him madder than ever.’

  When the end of the plank touched the turtle’s neck, the great head whipped round and the mouth opened wide and snap, it took the plank in its mouth and bit through it as if it were made of cheese.

  ‘Wow!’ they shouted. ‘Did you see that! I’m glad it wasn’t my arm!’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ the fisherman said. ‘It don’t help to get him all stirred up.’

  A paunchy man with wide hips and very short legs came up to the fisherman and said, ‘Listen, feller. I want that shell. I’ll buy it from you.’ And to his plump wife, he said, ‘You know what I’m going to do, Mildred? I’m going to take that shell home and have it polished up by an expert. Then I’m going to place it smack in the centre of our living-room! Won’t that be something?’

  ‘Fantastic,’ the plump wife said. ‘Go ahead and buy it, baby.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s mine already.’ And to the fisherman, he said, ‘How much for the shell?’

  ‘I already sold him,’ the fisherman said. ‘I sold him shell and all.’

  ‘Not so fast, feller,’ the paunchy man said. ‘I’ll bid you higher. Come on. What’d he offer you?’

  ‘No can do,’ the fisherman said. ‘I already sold him.’

  ‘Who to?’ the paunchy man said.

  ‘To the manager.’

  ‘What manager?’

  ‘The manager of the hotel.’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ shouted another man. ‘He’s sold it to the manager of our hotel! And you know what that means? It means turtle soup, that’s what it means!’