The Pornographer Read Online Free PDF Page A

escaped all that crack?”
    “It’s just as bad without it,” I had time to tell him as Moran pushed towards us at the end of the bar, a large florid man in thornproof tweeds.
    “I see you’re inflaming the people again. You better not get them too riz or they’ll turn wicked on yez,” it sounded so well polished that it was hardly the first time it had been put to use. “I was just on my way,” I said, and with apologetic clasps on arms I left before there was time for protest. “I’ll finish that for you in a few days.”
    I stood and breathed freely a few moments in the rainwashed air outside, and then moved towards the lighted dancehall. As I drew near I saw three girls with overcoats and long dresses get out of a taxi and go in ahead of me through the swing doors.
    The womb and the grave.… The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat. They say that it is the religious instinct that makes us seek the relationships and laws in things. And in between there is time and work, as passing time, and killing time, and lessening time that’d lessen anyhow, such as this going to the dance.
       
    There was a small queue in front of the ticket window when I went through the doors, the three girls in long dresses who had just got out of the taxi at its end. An even longer queue had formed by the time I was able to buy a ticket and a porter brought out a small easel and a pale red House Full placard, and left the placard one side of the easel, ready for putting up.
    With the ticket I climbed the heavily carpeted stairs, running into another queue half-way up, which only moved every minute or so at a time, four or five steps, like disembarking from a ship. A man at the head of the stairs in full evening dress was the cause of this last queue, his black hair slicked back from handsome, regular features that had all the marks of an ex-boxer. As he tore each ticket in two, handing a half back, stabbing the half he kept on to a piece of wire, he stared into the faces like the plainclothes policeman beyond the barriers stare when a watch is being kept on the ports.
    In the cloakroom a man was carefully hiding a bald patch with a comb and side of the hand. He was concentrating so hard that he did not even notice when I excused myself to get past him to the towels.
    The band was playing to an empty floor, slowly, a foxtrot, the brushes caressing the drums. The four steps up from the bar left the dance floor just below eye-level. I sat in the bar, watched its pale maple on which some silver dust was scattered lie empty in the low light. After a while a blue dress swung past, followed by a steel-like trouser leg, the first couple started to dance.
    None of the tables were completely free. I sat by the windows across from a young man with dark red hair and a winning smile who had already several empty glasses in front of him.
    “You’re enjoying yourself,” I said to the red-headed man who was little more than a boy but looked more aged because of a weathered face. The hands were scarred and the nails broken.
    “Just getting up some old courage,” he was too involved with his anxiety or fear to want to talk and we just smiled and nodded back into our separate silences. Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. I saw the boxer in evening dress leave the head of the stairs. The House Full notice must have gone up on the easel below. It was no longer possible to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse, the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh, though who were the hunters and who the prey was never clear, in an opening or closing