Free The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small by Gerald Kersh Page A

frequented. It had no right to call itself a thoroughfare. There was no earthly reason why any human being should ever set foot in it. Noblett Street was an unnecessary street, a sort of dried-up fjord, ominously quiet. The motor horns in Oxford Street sounded half a mile and a hundred years away. It was the sort of street to which a misanthropic Londoner might retire in the twilight of his life, to brood in woolly silence, out of the sight of mankind. There he could walk up and down of an afternoon, and be certain that he would not encounter any living creature, except cats. To borrow an image of James Thurber’s, Noblett Street had cats as other places have mice—the cats knew that no one would disturb them here. They wooed their mates in the open road and had honeymoons in the doorways, while bloated, verminous pigeons cooed and strutted in the gutters with such smug self-satisfaction that you wanted to cuff their heads. Noblett Street was full of empty peace. It had had enough of life, and settled down to a well-earned rest—it could never have amounted to anything in any case. Once in a while an old beggar-woman who picked rags out of the dustbins and lived on potato peelings, kipper bones, the residual juice in salmon tins, and orange peel went there to relieve herself. In Noblett Street, even at high noon, she was assured of privacy. If there had been any people worth mentioning living in it, even if they had had nothing better to do than loaf on their thresholds, it would not have been so bad. But when Charles Small visited Noblett Street it was dead and derelict. There were only eight shops and outside seven of them hung agents’ boards saying To Let or For Sale. The only open shop was described as a “Pets’ Beauty Parlour”. He glanced inside and saw a lumpy-faced woman parting the hair of a petulant Yorkshire terrier—probablyher first customer in weeks, and a discontented one at that, to judge by the sound of its voice.
    The houses on the other side of the street were being demolished to make room for a block of flats. Work was finished for the day, but a miasmatic haze of dirty dust still hung in the foul air over the ruins. The standing brickwork looked so rotten that Charles Small would not have been much surprised if someone told him that the workmen were pushing the houses down with their shoulders. Trust his mother to pick on a street like this—oh, trust her! Mayfair! He spat, partly in anger, and partly because his mouth was full of dust.
    There was a gloomy little pub, “The Noblett Arms”, on the far corner. Charles Small’s curiosity was something like the gnawing hunger of a dyspeptic who must indulge his craving for sour pickles although he knows that there will be the devil to pay. He went into The Private Bar, where an aged man looked up from last Sunday’s newspaper and stared, round-eyed with hope, until Charles Small ordered a shandy—a mixture of ginger-beer and mild ale that used to cost threepence. Obviously, the landlord, seeing a well-dressed gentleman, expected to get rid of at least tenpennyworth of brandy. Mowing and gibbering, and looking as if he was about to bite him, he squirted a little ale from a beer engine that creaked and groaned at being awakened out of a long sleep; wrung the neck of a ginger-beer bottle; filled the glass and pushed it across the bar with a snarl. Charles Small said: “Will you take something yourself?”
    “Drop of brandy.”
    Putting down a ten-shilling note he said: “Help yourself.”
    “Haven’t you got nothing smaller? Where d’you suppose I’m going to get change? It’s one-and-four. Haven’t you got one- and-four ?”
    “Here’s one-and-four…. Is your clock right?”
    “It wouldn’t be ’ere if it was,” said the publican.
    “Have you been here long?”
    “A bloody sight too long.”
    “May I ask how long?”
    “Thirty years. Thirty years too long.”
    “Business good?”
    “It looks like it, don’t it?”
    “Well,