Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories Read Online Free PDF

true identity and I perceived a glimmer of hope.
    “Jason, my knee.”
    He knelt at once and began to massage her knee. The bones clicked under his long fingers. A candle flame flickered, casting a momentary shadow over the lower part of her face resembling a small black moustache and imperial.
    “ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I am so shy.’ It was the first remark I remember addressing to her in my whole life. ‘Mother,’ I repeated; the word tasted wholesome as bread and milk in my mouth.
    “She gazed at me thoughtfully, rolling a corner of her apron into a probe and cleaning wax from her ear with it. Then she gave me the formula, irradiating my life.
    “ ‘If you picture them all on the lavatory, constipated, straining, then all the toffee-nosed bastards will seem defenceless and pathetic,’ she said.
    “ ‘THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.’
    “It was a revelation. I rushed out into the world, never to return, repeating those words, living by them.
    “Jason, the world was my OYSTER!”
    Her voice rang like a sudden, brass-throated trumpet. The full-blown rose at last allowed itself to collapse, almost with the quality of muffled applause. The woman’s beauty was so intense that it seemed to have the quality of a deformity, so far was it from the human norm. The bones in her knees jostled one another with a faint mumbling.
    As if recollecting vague, soft, fragrant, long-ago things, she murmured (more to herself than to the boy): “Ah, Jason, the childish thighs and baby buttocks of great men. You can stop massaging.”
    He drew away. She lit another cigarette at the candle flame. Blinking, he drew a hand through his hair. The candle light shone along the brace in his teeth, made blinding pools in the steel-rimmed spectacles over his eyes. He backed, bumping against the mahogany table where the petals pooled redly.
    “Jason,” she asked sharply, “why are you staring at me? Jason?”
    He coughed. He fidgeted, the toes of his bare feet curling and uncurling in the thick carpet.
    “Jason?” more urgently.
    “And do you look pathetic on the lavatory, mother?”
    The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers; she opened and closed her mouth but not a sound came out. She crashed forward on to the carpet and lay there, a tree felled, motionless.
    The boy went to the door and vanished, laughing, into the night.

A Victorian Fable
(with Glossary)
    The Village, take a fright.
In the rookeries.
    Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneters cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums.
    In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.
    A Hopping Giles gets a bloody Jemmy on the cross of a cut-throat; the snotters crib belchers, bird’s eye wipes, blue billies and Randal’s men.
    In a boozing ken in the Holy Land, a dunk-horned cutter—a cock-eyed clack box in flashy benjamin and blood red fancy—shed a tear by the I desire.
    But when he got the water of life down the common sewer, he bullyragged so antiscripturally that the barney hipped and nabbed the rust.
    “This shove in the mouth makes me shoot the cat! Me dumpling depot is fair all-overish!”
    He certainly had his hump up. He absquatulated. The bung cried: “Square the omee for the cream of the valley!” But the splodger had mizzled with his half-a-grunter.
    At his ruggy carser, his poll—a killing, ginger-hackled skull-thatcher—kept on the nose for her jomer.
    She had faked the rubber for her mendozy and got him up an out and out glorious sinner. There was an alderman in chains, a Ben Flake, a neddy of Sharp’s Alley blood worms, with Irish apricots, Joe Savace and storrac.
    “Pray God,” she said, “that he be neither beargeared, bleary, blued, primed, lumpy, top-heavy, moony, scammered, on the ran-tan, ploughed, muddled, obfuscated, swipy,