Walking thus on bare crimped feet, in a kind of uneasy glide, held up by the chair’s noiseless bumping over every crack between the tiles, Besson found the going progressively more difficult, with sudden swoops and twists of the body, like some boxer filmed in slow-motion. At every metallic bang on the floor he felt a kind of electric shock surge up his spinal column, through the marrow, dilating each vertebra as it went, spreading little clusters of thread-like matter through both sides of his body. This matter moved in a series of spasms up to his neck, where it formed a vast imbedded knot, a starved and avid glandular growth, round which the electric current spun in a vortex, rotating ever faster, crushing cartilage walls, desperately seeking some way out, fighting to resist invasion by other shock-waves; then hardened, petrified to a point at which it was no more than a kind of hoarse, intensely shrill cry at the bottom of an echoing, shadow-filled cavern, and at last exploded, one final red-and-white set-piece, a kind of floral illumination. Then, without warning, it would disappear, until the next time the chair struck a tile-edge. But meanwhile something else was happening: the last remaining electricity-charged fibres, doubtless in a final flare-up of energy, instead of disintegrating were transformed into fissures, which radiated out from the base of the neck over the entire length of the skull, thus capping Besson’s head as though with a hand, an insidious, hurtful hand, each time thrusting its bony fingers a little deeper into bone, flesh and meninges. Besson stopped; he waited there for a few moments, trying to erase the memory from his mind.
As one way of accomplishing this end he began to whistle softly between his teeth. Then he resumed his tangential advance, a consciously preoccupied expression showing on his face. He sat down at the table, placed the drawer on his knees, and began to ransack it once more. But almost at once he stopped, and returned the drawer to its place.
Outside, in the street below, some car was sounding its horn furiously. Besson looked at his watch, which lay on the table beside him, and then at the spirit-lamp for heating coffee, with its little tin saucepan on top. He put out his hand, almost touched the stand of the lamp, changed his mind, and instead picked up a coffee-spoon with his fingertips, planting it upright in the middle of the empty cup, and morosely stirring the mixture of coffee and glued-up sugar. Next he took the ashtray (a proprietory brand) and emptied it into the cup. He pushed the coffee-spoon round until ashes, cigarette-ends, sugar, coffee and matchsticks formed a kind of unified compost.
The sound of the horn interrupted him. He got up, opened a shutter, and looked down. He saw wet pavements, as though it had been raining, and a large number of stationary cars. The air was cold, and the sounds came from some distance off — the other side of the town, probably. It was like being shut at the bottom of an elbow-shaped cave, vaguely conscious, in the distance, of this white, confused mass of sound, light, scent and movement, Besson took it all in for a moment; then, very naturally, (insofar as having one forearm placed on the windowsill, his head resting against the open shutter, and his body bent forward in such a way as to throw weight on the pectoral muscles impelled him to take some sort of action), he settled into the pose; he also took a cigarette from the breast-pocket of his pyjama jacket, a box of matches from one side-pocket, and lit up.
When he had finished smoking, he stubbed his cigarette out against the window-sash and flipped it into the street. He remained there a moment longer, staring at the small black mark burnt into the wood, like a tiny extinguished brazier; then he quit his post, closed shutters and window once more, and returned to the middle of the room.
This time he made for a kind of commode, or chest of drawers, which stood in the left-hand corner of the room. On top of this commode stood a tape-recorder. Besson switched it on.
He waited without doing anything further until the greenish control light flickered on, shedding the faintest suspicion of brightness amid the yellowish gloom which had hitherto dominated the place. Then Besson pressed a button, and the spools of the tape-recorder began to revolve at top speed, clattering as they did so. Besson kept one eye on the revolution-counter, spelling out the figures as they flicked past: 145, 140, 135, 130, 125, 120,115, 110, 105, and so on. When the dial of the counter showed 45, he pressed another button, and the spools stopped. Then he switched over to ‘Playback’, hesitated a moment, and jabbed his finger down on the starter. Almost instantly the sound of a woman’s voice, a young girl’s voice pitched to something like F sharp, filled the room. With one swift movement he lay down on the bed and began to listen. At first there was a very soft hissing noise, like the resonances of some long and barely pronouncable word, such as parallelopiped or Ishikawa Goyemon, a sighing note shaped to an H or a J. Then for several seconds there was purring silence again, pullulating with words and gestures. Finally the green light at the far side of the room shivered; someone began to speak and breathe, mouth held close to the microphone, in a most fresh, delicate voice, a living, pulsing body encircling the warm machine. Though her words were barely audible, they seemed to quiver with power. They were murmured, breathed out with a husky catch in the throat, but vastly magnified by the loud-speaker. Now each syllable was a shout, consonants crashed against one another, the least indrawing of breath became a fearful death-rattle. A sort of spurious fury permeated every corner of the room, settling on the furniture and the odds and ends, gathering in each stratum of shadowy air.
…’cause I had no idea what to do. I tried writing to him, sent him a letter for Christmas. He’d written me once, a postcard from Coventry, without his name on it or anything. He’d even disguised his handwriting. That was silly of him, he knew very well it couldn’t be from anyone else. Even supposing, even supposing he didn’t think of that on the spur of the moment, when he printed the letters in capitals and the rest of it, all the same he can’t have helped realizing the truth when it came to signing the thing. It was a view of Coventry Cathedral, you know, something like that anyhow, and he’d sketched in a cowboy on top of the photograph, taking pot-shots at the passers-by with a revolver, and on the other side of the card he’d written, in English, Wish you were here. And he’d signed it with an imaginary name — scratched it out afterwards, but you could still read it, he couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper job of an erasure, and anyway he did it on purpose so that I’d try to decipher it. I looked through a magnifying-glass, and there under the ink-scratches was written John Wallon, or John Warren, something like that. It was so silly. If I—
Besson jumped off the bed and stopped the tape-recorder. Then he went through the whole rigmarole over again, except that this time he checked the spool when the dial showed 15. He pressed the button, and turned his head a fraction to one side, as though someone were on the point of entering the room. At the same moment, his eyes concentrated on a particular part of the wall, at the far end of the room. The tape played through in an uneasy silence, with tiny murmurs and whirring sounds from the motor, and the tense, quick note of his breathing. Something oppressive and conspicuous had dropped in on the scene, some single object as solid as a meteorite. The night was stifling, it must be like a tight band round people’s temples. The penetrating sound of the girl’s voice seemed held back in time for ten or a dozen minutes; and yet the genuine quality of this voice, the echo-presumptive of those preceding remarks, had already filled the whole place, was vibrating in every corner of it, spiralling out towards the kitchen door and the hall, exploring keyholes, sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not, disruptive of all ties, inimical to real life.