'Pulling that silly face. What's that in aid of?'
'I just remembered something.'
'You better do a lot of remembering very fast Harold, before I charge you with driving an unroadworthy vehicle, resisting arrest, obscene language, and obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.'
'Phone the circus, 'Harry said, 'they'll tell you.'
Hastings put down his pad and walked across the room to Harry. He put his hand on Harry's chest and twisted his shirt and skin together. When he had twisted it tight enough for his satisfaction he picked him up and forced him against the wall.
'Now,' he said, 'don't tell me what to do. Second, don't muck me about.'
Harry burped.
'You filthy bastard.'
Harry, pinned against the wall, raised a questioning eyebrow.
'You've been eating garlic. You fucking stink.' And he slammed Harry against the wall.
'I'm sorry,' Harry said. He was frightened. He waited. He would not be punished for stinking. He would be punished for the real offence.
Hastings walked to the other side of the room. Harry undid a shirt button and looked at the scar on his chest. It was bleeding. He felt he was getting hives. He felt them massing inside him. He stood still, trying not to attract attention to himself.
Senior Constable Box entered the room. He was no longer wearing his raincoat. His belly bulged out over his belt. He had combed his black curling hair and washed his face roughly. There were still two little drops of water clinging to his small moustache.
'Still telling funny stories?' he asked.
'Not very funny stories,' Hastings said. 'Very old stories.'
Box pulled in his belly and hooked his thumbs over his belt. 'Maybe it could think of something original.'
Hastings shifted a chair around. 'Don't know if it’s capable of it.' He looked up at Harry and his freckles were almost invisible in his red face. He gripped the chair and placed it an inch further to the right. 'Maybe all it can do is tell old stories. Maybe I better pass him over to you.'
Box nodded in the manner of someone receiving a specific instruction. Harry watched. It was like a dance. Box retreated, Hastings approached. Hastings pulled Harry out from the wall and then stood behind him.
'Now,' Hastings said, 'I'll pass him over to you, Constable.'
He pushed hard. The sharp edge of the table-jabbed Harry between the legs.
He backed away from the table as Box moved behind him. 'No,' said Box, 'I might just pass him over to you.'
Harry hit the table again and Hastings pulled him back then shoved him forward, shoving him hard into the table with his boot. The corner of the table hit him in the balls. He tried to vomit. A boy stood on the tricycle, looking in.
'No, I think I'll pass him over to you.'
'No, I don't deal with drowned rats.'
Harry started to howl. He could not stand. They picked him up and sat him on a chair. His hives raged within him. He put his head back and howled to the heavens. He howled like someone locked in a dream. This, at last, was where he was sent to. Actors would punish him for all eternity while a child gazed through glass.
They were sitting down. They waited for him. He could not stand waiting for it to get worse. He had vertigo. He had to jump. He pulled the packet of marihuana out of his pocket and threw it on the table.
'There,' he yelled, 'there. That's the truth. That's the truth.'
There was a long silence while Hastings picked up the bag and Box leaned over his shoulder. Hastings had lost all his red colour. He tried not to smile. He sniffed the marihuana (a pitiful little packet, he thought, maybe half an ounce) and handed it to Box who looked like he was going to get the giggles.
'Alright,' Hastings said, only keeping a straight face with some difficulty. 'See if you can tell us something original this ,time.'
'Don't give us that old shit about elephants, Harold.'
'Something new.'
'A story.'
'Something interesting.'
'Something we haven't heard before.'
'We heard such a lot of stories, Harold,' Box said, sitting back-to-front on a chair, putting his arms on the table.
The man in the filthy white suit brushed his hair out of his eyes.
'About marihuana?' he said. 'About this marihuana?'
'About anything, Harold,' Box said, 'anything at all.'
'Alright,' the prisoner said, and shifted in his chair.
'But it must be totally original,' Box said.
'Come on…' Hastings said to Box. 'Let's just get his statement and…'
'No,' Box winked. 'You tell a story, Harold.'
The prisoner's face was showing huge red weals and Hastings looked at the tortured face with embarrassment. He stood up.
'I'll be back in a moment,' he told Box. He was going to walk out because he knew something nasty was going to happen, one of Box's degrading little tricks. Box didn't have a temper. (A temper, at least, was something clean and hot and fast.) Box liked tricks, slow, drawn-out entertainments.
'Alright,' the poor bunny was saying, 'I will tell you a completely original story.' Hastings had his hand on the door-knob as the man started his story; but that brown voice held him, like a cello on a grey afternoon, and he found himself releasing the door-knob and leaning against the wall.
He did not realize, for an instant, could not have guessed, that Harry was extemporizing the only original story he would ever tell. In fear of punishment, in hope of release, glimpsing the true nature of his sin, he told a story he had never heard about people he had never met in a place he had never visited.
There he is, a tightrope walker in the dark.
'He was very short,' Harry Joy began, 'and also shortsighted, although no one knew that then, not in the beginning, and that was why he always got into trouble for being late to school because he couldn't see the hands of the town hall clock.
'The town hall,' he decided, 'was across the road from the school.
'He did badly at school. He was not good at anything. Not sums, not writing, and not games.
'His mother was short too. She was a Cockney from Bow in London and she was only four foot seven tall; almost, but not quite, a midget. This story is set long ago, and one year there was a competition on the beach – the beaches were different then, with bathing boxes and competitions – the people were more easily amused – a competition,' he said, 'for the shortest woman.
'Now Daniel, or Little Titch as he was usually called, per-suaded his mother to go into the competition. The women were all lined up, ready to be judged, eyeing each other up, bending their knees, digging their feet down into the sand and so on, and everything was calm enough. But when they saw Little Titch's mother walk towards them a great cry of despair went up.
'Oh, no.'
And half the line of women just walked away. And Little Titch's mother took her place at one end of the line, very modestly, with that serious look she always wore on her face, and, naturally, she won.
'When they went home on the tram that night Little Titch carried the silver cup his mother had won. Although it tar-nished quickly you could still read the inscription years later. It read:
'Little Titch was both proud and puzzled by the cup. He was proud that the people had smiled at his mother and given her the cup. He was proud that the cup was silver and there, where it was engraved (and he traced the words with his grubby finger), it was gold. But he could not understand, as much as he might think about it, either then or in the months that followed, that his mother should be rewarded for the very thing he, her son, was punished for. People did not kick his mother because she was small, or pull her ears (let them try!) or her nose.
