Essential Stories by V.S. Pritchett Page B

worse than others, but it kills them,” he said.
    “I thought you meant
you’d
kill him,” I said.
    “Kill him?” he said. “Me kill him?” He smiled scornfully at me: I was an outsider in this. “He tried to kill
me,
” he said.
    “Yeah,” he said, wiping his hands on a towel. “Tried to poison me. Whisky. It didn’t work. Back OK?” he said, holding up a mirror. “I don’t drink.”
    “I went to his room,” he said. “I was his best friend. He was lying on the bed. Thin! All bones and blue veins and red patches as if he’d been scalded and eyes as bright as that bottle of bath salts. Not like he is now. There was a bottle of whisky and a glass by the side of the bed. He wanted me to have a drop. He knew I didn’t drink.
    “ ‘I don’t want one,’ I said. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘You know I never touch it,’ I said. ‘Well, touch it now,’ he said. ‘I tell you what,’ he said; ‘you’re afraid.’ ‘Afraid of what?’ I said. ‘Afraid of catching what I’ve got.’ ‘Touch your lips to it if you’re not afraid. Just have a sip to show.’
    “I told him not to be a fool. I took the bottle from him. He had no right to have whisky in his state. He was wild when I took it. ‘It’ll do some people a bit of good,’ I said, ‘but it’s poison to you.’
    “ ‘It
is
poison,’ he said.
    “I took the bottle away. I gave it to a chap in the town. It nearly finished him. We found out it
was
poison. He’d put something in it.”
    I said I’d have a singe. The barber lit the taper. I felt the flame warm against my head. “Seals up the ends,” the barber said. He lifted up the hair with the comb and ran the flame along. “See the idea?” he said.
    “What did you do?”
    “Nothing,” he said. “Just married my girl that week,” the barber said. “When she told him we were going to get married he said, ‘I’ll give you something Fred won’t give you.’ We wondered what it would be. ‘Something big,’ he said. ‘Best man’s present,’ he said. He winked at her. ‘All I’ve got. I’m the best man.’ That night he cut his throat.” The barber made a grimace in the mirror, passed the scissors over his throat and gave a grin.
    “Then he opened the window and called out to a kid in the street to fetch
her.
The kid came to me instead. Funny present,” he said. He combed, he patted, he brushed. He pulled the wool out of the back of my neck. He went round it with the soft brush. Coming round to the front he adroitly drew off the sheet. I stood up.
    “He got over it,” he said. “Comes round and plays with my kids on Sundays. Comes in every Friday, gets himself up. See him with a different one every week at the Pictures. It’s a dead place this, all right in the summer on the river. You make your own life. The only thing is he don’t like shaving himself now, I have to go over every morning and do it for him.”
    He stood with his small grin, his steady eyes amused and resolute. “I never charge him,” he said. He brushed my coat, he brought my hat.

THE SAILOR
    He was lifting his knees high and putting his hand up, when I first saw him, as if, crossing the road through that stinging rain, he were breaking through the bead curtain of a Pernambuco bar. I knew he was going to stop me. This part of the Euston Road is a beat of the men who want a cup of tea or their fare to a job in Luton or some outlying town.
    “Beg pardon, chum,” he said in an anxious hot-potato voice. “Is that Whitechapel?”
    He pointed to the traffic clogged in the rain farther down where the electric signs were printing off the advertisements and daubing them on the wet road. Coatless, with a smudged trilby hat on the back of his head so that a curl of boot polish black hair glistered with raindrops over his forehead, he stood there squeezing the water in his boots and looking at me, from his bilious eyes, like a man drowning and screaming for help in two feet of water and wondering why