The Whole Story and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Doesn’t sound much like Death. Sounds like a spy making sure for head office that the kiosk workers are doing everything the way head office requires.
    No, no, he’s looking at other people too, I said, it’s not just the kiosk he’s looking at. He’s looking at all sorts of people, he’s –.
    Look again, you said. It’s not Death. It’s just a person.
    I looked again. Sure enough, the man I had thought was Death was an ordinary man, a man behaving a little oddly, but just a man.
    You’re right, I said. It’s just a man in a cream-coloured suit.
    How stylish, you said. How springlike. Listen. Call me when you’re twenty minutes away and I’ll order supper and then you can pick it up and you won’t have to wait. Is your bike at the station?
    I can’t call you when I’m twenty minutes away, I said.
    Why not? you said.
    My phone’s not working, I said.
    Oh, I forgot, you said. Okay, how about I phone them when I think you’re twenty minutes away? When’s your train leaving?
    The tinny digital clock ticking over my head said 19:10:53. Then it said 19:10:54. Then it said 19:10:55.
    About four minutes, I said.
    Good, you said. Run, or you won’t get a seat. See you soon.
    Your voice was reassuring. 19:11:00, the clock said. I put the phone back on its hook and I ran.
    The seat I got, almost the last one in the carriage, was opposite a girl who started coughing as soon as there weren’t any other free seats I could move to. She looked pale and the cough rattled deep in her chest as she punched numbers into her mobile. Hi, she said (cough). I’m on the train. No, I’ve got a cold. A cold (cough). Yeah, really bad. Yeah, awful actually. Hello? (cough) Hello?
    She looked at her phone as the train went through a tunnel. So did all the other people who had been in the middles of conversations up and down the train, which was packed with people behind me and ahead of me shouting their hellos forlornly, like lost or blind people. The stray hellos reached nobody. They hung unanswered above our heads in the air and cancelled out everybody they weren’t for, then as soon as we were out of the tunnel the phones began again by themselves in a high-pitched spiralling, the signature tunes of TV shows, the simplified Beethoven symphonies.
    The woman sitting next to me was sleeping through it, her back attentive and straight, a book closed on her knees and her hands arranged round it. The coughing girl had closed her eyes too. The man opposite me was asleep; he had fallen asleep as soon as the train started to move and was now slumped against the window, his mouth open in a toothless O. I stared over his head at the lightly dusked outskirts of London, at its weeds, its graffiti, its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others. I thought how funny it was of me to have imagined that the man who nearly bumped into me was Death. I laughed. The coughing girl opened her eyes and looked at me accusingly. I looked away and smiled to myself, thinking how you and I would joke about it later. I began to think of funny things I could say afterwards, weeks from now, when it had become a running joke. He looked like Death. I thought how the man hadn’t looked anything like Death was supposed to look, hooded in black, faceless, with a scythe, standing at the edge of a pond filled with rubbish like on the public information advert on TV when I was small. Then I began to worry in case it was some kind of omen. I told myself not to be so stupid. I drummed my fingers on my leg. They felt numb, anaesthetized, and I knew for the first time as I sat staring blankly out and the realization of it broke cold on my skull, for all the world as if someone above me had cracked an egg with a knife and let its cool contents slide out of the shell on to the top of my head and down the back of my neck, that I hadn’t ever cared at any point in my life about anything other than myself and that I had no