The Itinerant Lodger by David Nobbs & David Nobbs

Author:David Nobbs & David Nobbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1965-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

WHEN HE AWOKE THE SITE WAS BOMBED. THE STARS, even the moon, shone brightly on the rubble. The tins and old whistles, the dockets and packets and lids, the labels and old food, the dead messages and the slag were all covered in a soft coat of furry snow and the tracing of the wind on its surface gave it an impression of great depth. A cruel frost was penetrating his clothes, a cold wind was blowing round his legs, and he huddled inside his coat like a doormouse inside a winter. His head ached, but his brain was music-clear. Above his neck lay arctic wastes, and across his forehead jagged blocks of pack-ice slowly floated.

His first thought was that this was the top of the world. He looked around. Not a soul in sight. He stood up, and immediately felt ill. He leant unsteadily against a wall, and on an old tin, sheltered from the snow by a ruined corner-stone, there was a brief intermezzo in E-flat, and then silence. A rat stirred uneasily against its mate, and a touch of dawn appeared in the eastern sky. He began to see where he was. He was above the city, on the top of one of the hills, and far below him the spires of the churches were becoming visible in the increasing light.

Where had he been? He had difficulty in remembering. Drinking, of that he was sure. He recalled awakening in a strange room, fully clothed upon a bed, and feeling cold and ill. He remembered wondering where he was, and creeping stealthily out, in case it was somewhere unpleasant.

Every time he moved impressions ran through his head like butterflies impaled on pins in the pages of an album. He saw a woman, a comfortable woman. He saw a girl, a young girl seated in a train. The woman piled more fuel on the range, and the girl stirred in her sleep. Then both scenes faded before a wave of nausea, and he clung to something, anything, it was an old railing, where a garden had once been. The wind caught him, his coat swirled around his shoulders, and his body seemed to be stampeding past him in panic. He was sick.

He began to walk. The pain of cleaving the cold air soothed his nausea. He could see that the hill on which he was walking took the form of a ridge, and in front of him all signs of ruined buildings ceased and there was only barren earth, where perhaps there had been open-cast mining.

He stumbled into the submerged path that ran round the outside of an air-raid shelter. He sat against the wall where he had fallen and let his head fall back until he felt the pressure of the wall upon it. For a moment he slept, but then the light awoke him.

He groped his way into the hut, out of the reach of the wind, and gazed out at the growing dawn. It was angry, and patches of fierce cloud were approaching swiftly from the west.

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