All One Horse

a chain for his watch

This is what I want to tell you about Xmas. Down my street there lives a woman with bleeding legs and a beard. The beard doesn’t bleed. Her husband is handicapped. Only one half of his body, taken down the middle, is alive. He drags the dead part after him. The two of them are the caretakers of an apartment block where people eat geese and listen to Brahms. One night the cripple is woken by yells coming from the stair-well. The man hobbles up the stairs to the fourth floor where he finds a lady lodger having a fit through clenched fists because a tipsy hobo is lying tipped over holding tight to her door-mat so that she cannot enter the flat. Our man stoops to finger the bum’s shoulder with a hey-hey now and the snorer rises, pulls a knife on him and gouges out an eye. There is much blood and confusion and henceforth our man will have on his forehead a livid scar in the shape of a cross and one live eye only, but that is another story. The couple are given two orphans from the Depot of Abandoned Children to bring up. One will be a fat boy with no bones who has to be pushed in a pram. The other is a little girl, perfectly formed, as high as two apples. This is what I want to tell you about the girl. She lives for many years in the one room with the bearded woman of the bleeding legs, the one-eye hobbler, the pramridden fat boy. But she never gets any taller than four apples. Her name is Four Apples. F.A. marries a Squatter boy who must have been prowling the streets stealing apples to survive. The boy is dark and that probably permits him to sneak into our city by night. He goes into hiding in the same room in the house down my Street where the bloody lady, her lame husband, the fat boy and F.A. live. Sometimes when evening has swirled its moth-eaten cloak over the town the young couple will rush out on the pavement where they kiss passionately. He has to bend his black countenance low and she has to stand on tip-toe hanging onto his buttocks. The street lamp shines on her glistening upturned forehead. Perhaps he is breathing down her to help her grow up. But F.A. rather starts putting on girth. She gets fatter and fatter and after a time she goes thin again. This is the story about my imagination, give me a kiss to build a dream on. Is it my imagination or do I hear a thin mewing as from a small kitten coming from the one room in the building down my street? The Squatter disappears for a while and then he re-appears with a new hair-do. We are living in the White City during the eighties where policemen club or stomp or burn people to death only if they are Squatters or Foreigners. It is a story about dismembering and sometimes of re-membering. Maybe the boy with the hair-do is a sanspapiers or a fin-de-droits, but these are the niceties of a legal categorization best to be taken in hand by another story. The boy shows his black face ever more rarely in our street. Now is the time of passing time. My imagination imagines for me that the kitten has started to talk. When the lady with the bleeding legs pushes her fat boy in the pram to market, she points to a second smaller wrapped bundle, strokes her beard and says: ‘The Depot has done well by us and my better half no longer sees double.’

Now I want to tell you about Xmas. It is night and the streets are dark as they always are on Xmas night. I find the young couple embracing with locked breaths on the pavement outside the building where the hysterical lodger tried to pick up a drunken hobo. When they see me they must take me for a snooper, a voyeur or a life-sucker. F.A. scurries off into the room where the kitten promptly starts blubbering like a scalded cat. The boy furtively takes to his heels, rounds the corner, out of sight, never to return. Squatters run fast.

Now I wish to tell you this story which you already know, because it has been told on many a Xmas night. A poor couple go window-shopping during the festive season. People carrying plucked geese and Brahms recordings pass them by. The only possession of value he has is an old pocket-watch left to him by his grandfather. Her only wealth is the lovely long hair inherited from her grandmother. They look and look again at the riches in the jeweller’s window. For Xmas night each carefully prepares a surprise gift for the other. He has sold his watch to buy her a comb for her hair, she has sold her hair to buy him a chain for his watch.